Preface to Origen on Romans

Addressed to Heraclius at Aquileia, about the year 407.

My intention was to hug the shore of quiet land in the little boat I was sailing, and to draw a few little fish out of the pools of Greece. But you, brother Heraclius, have forced me to spread my sails to the wind and head out into the deep sea. You urge me to leave the work in front of me, the translation of the homilies the Man of Adamant wrote in his old age, and to open up for you the fifteen volumes in which he discussed Paul’s letter to the Romans. In these books, while he aims to set out the apostle’s thoughts, he is carried away into a sea so deep that anyone who follows him into it may well be afraid of drowning in the greatness of his thoughts as in the vastness of the waves. Then, too, you do not consider that my breath is too scant to fill so grand a trumpet of eloquence as his. And beyond all these difficulties, the books themselves have been tampered with. In almost all the libraries (no one, I admit, can say how it happened) some of the volumes are missing from the body of the work. To supply them, and to restore the continuity of the work in the Latin version, is beyond my talent; as you must know when you make your request, it would take a special gift of God. [a]

You add, moreover, so that nothing may be lacking to the labor I am taking on, that I had better shorten this whole body of fifteen volumes, which in the Greek runs to forty thousand lines or more, and bring it within a moderate length. Your orders are hard indeed, and might be thought to come from someone who did not care to consider what the burden of such a work must be. I will attempt it all the same, hoping that through your prayers and the Lord’s favor what seems impossible for man may become possible. But now, if you please, let us listen to the preface that Origen himself put at the head of the work he was beginning.