The Tampering with Origen’s Books

But let me add what comes next. My preface went on as follows: ‘The causes of these inconsistencies I have set out more fully in the Apology that Pamphilus wrote expressly for the works of Origen. To it I added a very short treatise, in which I showed, by proofs that seem to me quite clear, that his books have been tampered with in a great many places by heretics and ill-disposed people; and especially the very books you ask me to translate, the Peri Archon, which may be rendered “Concerning Beginnings” or “Concerning Principalities,” and which are in any case most obscure and most difficult. For in these books Origen discusses matters on which the philosophers have spent their whole lives without finding out the truth. In these matters the Christian writer takes human belief in a Creator and human reasoning about the created world, which the philosophers had used in the service of their own irreverence, and turns them to the support of the true faith.’ [a] Here too I beg you to mark my words carefully, and to notice that I said ‘belief in a Creator,’ but ‘reasoning about the created world’; for what is said about God belongs to the domain of faith, but our discussions about created things to the domain of reason. I went on: ‘Wherever, therefore, we find in his works mistaken definitions concerning the Trinity, on which he has elsewhere expressed his views in accordance with the true faith, we have either left them out as passages that had been falsified or inserted, or else have changed the expression in accordance with the rule of faith which the writer himself lays down again and again.’ Have I written carelessly here, I ask? Have I said that I expressed the matter according to the rule of our faith? That would plainly have gone far beyond the scope of a translator, whose duty was merely to turn Greek into Latin. On the contrary, I said that I expressed these passages according to the rule of faith which I found laid down again and again by Origen himself. Moreover, I added: ‘I grant that where he has said something obscurely, as a man does when he is writing for those with expert knowledge of the subject and wants to go over it quickly, I have made the sentence plainer by adding the fuller statement he had given of the same thing in some of his other works that I had read. I did this simply for the sake of clarity. But I have said nothing in my own words; I have only given back to Origen what was really Origen’s, though found in other parts of his works.’