The Letter of Pope Anastasius

In the matter of the letter of Pope Anastasius, you seem to have stepped onto slippery ground. You walk unsteadily and cannot see where to plant your feet. At one moment you say that it must have been written by me; at another, that the man it was sent to ought to have passed it on to you. Then again you charge its writer with injustice; or you protest that it makes no difference to you whether he wrote it or not, since you hold his predecessor’s letter of commendation, and since, when Rome was begging you to honor her with your presence, you turned her down out of love for your own little town. If you suspect that I forged the letter, why do you not ask for it in the archives of the Roman see? Then, when you find that the bishop did not write it, you could hold me plainly guilty of the crime. Instead of trying to bind me with cobwebs, you would have me fast in a net of strong cords. But if it was written by the bishop of Rome, it is foolish of you to ask for a copy of the letter from someone it was not sent to, and not from the man who sent it, and to send to the East for evidence whose source you have in your own country. [a]

You had better go to Rome and protest to him about the reproach he has aimed at you while you were both absent and innocent. You might first point out that he refused to accept your exposition of faith, which, as you say, all Italy has approved, and that he made no use of your literary cudgel against the dogs you spoke of. Next you might complain that he sent to the East a letter aimed at you, which branded you with the mark of heresy. It said that through your translation of Origen’s On First Principles the Roman church, which had received the work in its simplicity, was in danger of losing the purity of faith it had learned from the apostle. And he stirred up still more ill will against you by daring to condemn this very book, though it was fortified by the endorsement of your preface. It is no light thing that the pontiff of so great a city should have fastened this charge on you, or rashly taken it up when another made it. You should go about the streets shouting and crying out over and over: “It is not my book; or, if it is, Eusebius stole the uncorrected sheets. I published it differently; in fact I did not publish it at all. I gave it to nobody, or at any rate to few. And my enemy was so unscrupulous and my friends so careless that all the copies alike were falsified by him.” This, my dearest brother, is what you ought to have done, instead of turning your back on him and aiming the arrows of your abuse across the sea at me. For how can it heal your wounds that I should be wounded? Does it comfort a man struck down to die to see his friend dying with him?