Jerome Teaches the Fall of Souls into Bodies

These are the doctrines to be found in these works of yours, which you single out from all you have written and which you want people to read over again, to the prejudice of all the rest. It is in these very Commentaries that these doctrines are written. There was, you say, an invisible world before this visible one came into being. You say that in that world, along with the other inhabitants, that is, the angels, there were also souls. You say that these souls, for reasons known to God alone, enter into bodies at the time of birth in this visible world. Those souls, you say, which in a former age lived in heaven, now dwell here on this earth, and not without reference to certain acts they had committed while they lived there. You say further that all the saints, such as Paul and others like him in each generation, were predestined by God for the purpose of calling these souls back by their preaching to the home from which they had fallen. And all this you support with a great many proofs from Scripture. [a]

But are not these the very statements for which you now arraign Origen, and for which alone you demand that he be condemned? What ‘other’ do you condemn in your writings but the one who says such things as these? And yet if these statements are to be condemned, as you now urge, you will first pass judgment on them and then find that you have condemned yourself in advance. No other refuge is left to you. There is no room for any of those twists and turns you blame in others. For it was just when you were doing penance and had been converted, when you had been corrected and set on the way to amendment, that you stamped these books with fresh authority, to prove to us by them what your opinion was about the doctrines that ought to be condemned. So what you wrote there must be taken as if we heard you now, plainly making the statements they contain. Yet in these very books you yourself make the statements you say are to be condemned.

But no, you will say: it is not I who make them. It is the ‘other’ who speaks this way, that is, of course, the man who, I now declare, ought to be condemned. Well, let us recall, if you please, the very line where you change the person of the speaker, so that we may see whom you represent as building up this strange theory. You say, then, that it is ‘another,’ who is trying to show that God is just, who says the things we set down just above. If you say that this ‘other,’ who by this assertion of his proves God to be just, is separate and different from yourself, then what, I ask, is your own opinion? Must we say that you deny that God is just?

Oh, great Master, you who see so sharply and are so hard on the moles that have no eyes, you seem to have got yourself into a quite impossible position, shut in on every side. Either you must deny that God is just, by declaring yourself different from and opposed to the man who says these things; or, if you confess that God is just, as the whole church does, then it is you yourself who make the statements in question. In that case the sentence you pass on another falls on you, and you are run through with your own spear. I think this is enough to convict you before the most righteous judges, whose judgment comes ahead of God’s. Not that they would condemn the man who sees the speck in his brother’s eye but does not see the log in his own; rather, they would try to bring him to a better mind and to true repentance.