The Kiss of Epiphanius

As for our reverend friend Epiphanius, this is a strange dodge of yours, when you say that it was impossible for him to have written against you after giving you the kiss and joining with you in prayer. It is as if you argued that he could not be dead because a little while before he had been alive; as if it were not equally certain that he first rebuked you and then, after the kiss of peace, excommunicated you. “They went out from us,” it is said, “but they were not of us; otherwise they would no doubt have remained with us.” The apostle tells us to avoid a heretic after a first and second warning; this of course implies that he was a member of the church’s flock before he was avoided or condemned. I confess I cannot keep from laughing when, at the prompting of some clever person, you strike up a hymn in honor of Epiphanius. Why, this is the “silly old man,” the “anthropomorphite”; this is the man who boasted in your presence of the six thousand books of Origen he had read, who “thinks himself entrusted with preaching the gospel against Origen among all nations in their own tongue,” who “will not let others read Origen for fear they discover what he has stolen from him.” Read what he has written, the letter, or rather letters, one of which I will bring forward as a testimonial to your orthodoxy, so that it may be seen how deserving he is of your present praise: “May God set you free, my brother, and the holy people of Christ entrusted to you, and all the brothers who are with you, and especially the presbyter Rufinus, from the heresy of Origen and all other heresies, and from the destruction they bring. For if many heresies have been condemned by the church on account of one word or two that are contrary to the faith, how much more must that man be counted a heretic who has invented so many perverse things, so many false doctrines! He stands out as the enemy of God and of the church.” [a]

This is the testimony this saintly man gives you. This is the garland of praise he gives you to parade in. So runs the letter which your gold coins pried out of the room of our brother Eusebius, so that you could slander its translator and fasten on me the guilt of a most glaring crime: rendering a Greek word as “dearest” that should have been “honorable”! But what is all this to you, who can steer every event by your prudent methods and pick your way between different possibilities? First you say, if you can find anyone to believe you, that neither Anastasius nor Epiphanius ever wrote a line against you. Then, when their actual letters cry out against you and break down your bold impudence, you despise the judgment of them both and say that it does not matter to you whether they wrote or not, since it was impossible for them to write against an innocent and absent man.

Then again, you have no right to speak evil of that saintly man, as you do when you say, “so that it may be seen that he gave me peace with his words and his kiss, but kept evil and deceit in his heart.” For this is your reasoning, and this is how you defend yourself. That this letter is Epiphanius’s and that it is hostile to you, the whole world knows; and that it came into your hands in its genuine form, we can prove. It is therefore an astounding shame, or rather utter shamelessness, in you to deny what you cannot doubt is true. What! Is Epiphanius to be smeared with the charge that he gave you the sign of peace while he had deceit in his heart? Is it not far truer to believe that he first warned you because he wanted to save you from error and bring you back to the right way; that he therefore did not refuse your Judas kiss, wishing to break down the betrayer of the faith by his patience; but that afterward, when he found all his labor was fruitless, and that the leopard could not change its spots nor the Ethiopian his skin, he declared in his letter what had before been only a suspicion in his mind?