The Charge About Origen’s Teaching

But on this point, he says, I convict you: you have translated the work of Origen in which he says that there is to be a restoration of all things. In it, he says, we must believe that not only sinners but the devil himself and his angels will at last be released from their punishment, if we are to think through consistently what is meant by the restoration of all things. And Origen, he says, teaches further that souls were made before their bodies, and have been brought down from heaven and put into their bodies. I am not now acting on Origen’s behalf, nor writing a defense of him. Whether he stands accepted before God or has been cast away is not mine to judge: to his own master he stands or falls. But I am compelled to mention him in a few words, since our great rhetorician, while seeming to argue against him, is really striking at me. And he does this no longer indirectly; he ends by attacking me openly with his sword drawn, and turns his whole fury on me. It is saying too little to say that he attacks me. For in order to vent his rage on me he does not even spare his old teacher. He thinks that in the books I have translated he can find something that will let him hurl his slanders at me. And on top of the other things he finds to blame in me, he adds this spiteful remark: that I chose for translation a work that neither he nor any of the earlier translators had chosen. So, since it is here that I am chiefly attacked, I will begin by stating how it came about that I undertook the translation of this work rather than any other, and I will do it in the fewest and truest words. This is no doubt unnecessary for you, my dearly loved son, since you know the whole affair as it happened. Yet it is right that those who do not know it should know the truth. Besides, he and all his followers make it a triumphant accusation against me that I promised in my preface to follow one method of translation and then followed a different one in the work itself. So I will make an answer that will serve not only for them, but for many others besides, whose judgment is twisted either by their own malice or by the accusations others make against me. [a]