Your Preface Is What Condemns You

Now I ask you this: who has blamed you for adding, changing, or taking away certain things in Origen’s books? The question that put you on the rack, like a man stretched on the torture horse, was this: are the things you put down in your translation bad or good? It is useless for you to pretend innocence and to parry the force of the real question with some silly one. I have never accused you of translating Origen for your own satisfaction. I have done the same, and so have Victorinus, Hilary, and Ambrose. What I have accused you of is fortifying your translation of a heretical work by writing a preface that approves it. You force me to go over the same ground and to walk in the tracks I have already made. [a]

For you say in that prologue that you cut away what the heretics had added and replaced it with what is good. If you took out the heretics’ false statements, then what you left or added must be either Origen’s or yours, and presumably you set it down as good. But you cannot deny that much of it is bad. “What is that to me?” you will say. “You must lay it to Origen’s account, for I did no more than alter what the heretics had added.” Tell us, then, why you took out the bad things written by the heretics and left those written by Origen untouched. Is it not clear that some of Origen’s false doctrines you condemned under the label of heretics’ doctrines, and others you accepted because you judged them not false but true and in keeping with your faith? It was about these last that I asked whether the things you praised in your preface were good or bad. It was these you confessed you had left as perfectly good when you cut out all that was worst. And so I have put you, as I said, on the rack: if you say they are good, you will be proved a heretic; if you say they are bad, you will at once be asked, “Then why did you praise these bad things in your preface?” And I did not add the question you craftily pretend I asked: “Why did you bring evil doctrines to Latin ears by your translation?” For to bring what is bad to light may sometimes be done not to teach it but to warn people against it, so that the reader may be on guard not to follow the error, and may think little of evils he knows, which, if they were unknown, might become objects of wonder to him.

Yet after this you dare to say that I am the author of writings of this kind, while you, as a mere translator, would have gone beyond a translator’s role if you had chosen to correct anything, and, if you corrected nothing, acted only as a translator. You would be quite right to say this if your translation of On First Principles had no preface, just as Hilary, when he translated Origen’s homilies, took care to do it so that both the good and the bad in them would be laid not to the translator but to their own author. If you had not boasted that you cut out the worst and left the best, you would somehow or other have escaped from the mud. But it is this that brings your clever invention to nothing, and binds you on every side so that you cannot get out. And I must ask you not to think too poorly of your readers’ intelligence, nor to suppose that everyone who reads your writings is so dull as not to laugh at you, when they see you let real wounds fester while you put bandages on a healthy body.