Let Us Condemn Origen Together

I call Jesus the Mediator to witness that it is against my will, and struggling against necessity, that I come down into the arena of this war of words. If you had not challenged me, I would never have broken my silence. Even now, let your charges against me stop, and my defense will stop. It is no edifying sight that we offer our readers: two old men fighting like gladiators on account of a heretic, especially when both of them want to be thought catholics. Let us give up all favor toward heretics, and there will be no dispute between us. Once we were zealous in praising Origen; let us be just as zealous in condemning him, now that he is condemned by the whole world. Let us join hands and hearts, and march with a ready step behind the two standard-bearers of the East and the West. We went wrong in our youth; let us mend our ways in our old age. [a]

If you are my brother, be glad that I have seen my errors; if I am your friend, I must congratulate you on your conversion. As long as we keep up our quarrel, people will think we hold the right faith not willingly but because we must. Our hostility keeps us from showing the world a true repentance. If our faith is one, if we both accept and reject the same things (and it is from this, as even Catiline testifies, that firm friendships arise), if we are alike in our hatred of heretics and equally condemn our former mistakes, why should we march out to battle against each other, when we have the same things to attack and the same things to defend? Pardon me for having praised Origen’s zeal in the study of Scripture in my youth, before I fully knew his heresies; and I will forgive you for having written an Apology for his works when your head was gray.