My Communion with Theophilus

I can tell you something that may make him still dearer to us, though more hateful to you. A short time ago the faction of heretics that had been scattered out of Egypt and Alexandria came to Jerusalem and wanted to make common cause with him, so that, as they suffered together, they might have the same heresy laid to their charge. But he repelled their advances; he scorned them and cast them off. He told them that he was no enemy of the faith and was not going to take up arms against the church; that what he had done before came from vexation, not from unsoundness in the faith; and that he had sought only to prove his own innocence, not to attack anyone else’s. You profess to think it impious for a ruling of the emperor to overturn a bishop’s decree. That is the responsibility of the man who obtained it. But what do you think of men who, after being condemned themselves, haunt the palaces of the great and, in a close-packed column, attack a single man who stands for the faith of Christ? [a]

However, as to my own communion with Pope Theophilus, I will call no other witness than the very man you pretend I wronged. His letters were always addressed to me, as you well know, even at the time when you kept them from being forwarded to me. In those days you sent letter carriers to him every day, insisting that his opponent was my closest friend and telling the same lies you now shamelessly write, so as to stir up his hatred against me, and so that his grief at the supposed wrong might turn into oppression of me in matters of faith. But he, a prudent man with an apostle’s wisdom, came through time and experience to understand both our loyalty to him and your plots against us. If, as you claim, my followers plotted against you at Rome and stole your uncorrected manuscripts while you were asleep, who was it that stirred up Pope Theophilus against the public enemy in Egypt? Who obtained the decrees of the emperors against them, and the agreement of this whole quarter of the world? Yet you boast that from your youth you were a hearer and disciple of Theophilus, although before he became a bishop he never taught in public, out of his natural modesty, and after he became a bishop you were never at Alexandria. Yet, to strike a blow at me, you dare to say, “I do not accuse my masters, or change them.” If that were true, it would in my opinion cast grave suspicion on your standing as a Christian. As for me, you have no right to charge me with condemning my former teachers. But I stand in awe of those words of Isaiah: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who call bitter sweet and sweet bitter.” It is you who drink your masters’ honeyed wine and their poisons alike, and who have fallen away from your true master, the apostle, who teaches that neither he himself nor an angel is to be followed if they err in matters of faith.