Jerome Has Confessed These Views as His Own

But let this pass, for what follows matters more. I thank God that he has relieved me of a very heavy burden of suspicion. Perhaps I seemed to some people to be acting in a quarrelsome and slanderous way when I hinted that, by a figure of rhetoric, he meant himself when he spoke of ‘another.’ But to keep any further doubt from lingering in the minds of his hearers, he has declared himself that it is so. Like a truly good teacher, who would not want any uncertainty about his sayings to remain in his pupils’ minds, he has been kind enough to show quite clearly who that ‘other’ was of whom he had spoken before. For he says, “But as it stands, the added preposition ‘before’ leads us to explain it by the ideas which we argued in an earlier place were needed.” [a]

You see: he means that it was we, and not some other, nobody knows who, as you may have thought, who argued this way in the earlier place, when we were explaining the words, “Who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.” There were less intelligent people who might think that what was said there was spoken by someone else. So, for their sake, and to keep any mistake on the point from lingering in the minds of those he had begged to read these books so that they might see what his opinion of Origen was, he now owns this opinion as his own. No longer speaking of ‘another,’ he says what we have quoted above: that just as God had blessed us beforehand with every spiritual blessing in Christ in the heavenly places, and had chosen us before the foundation of the world, so we are also said to have trusted in Christ at that earlier time when we were chosen and predestined and blessed in heaven. So, as it seems to me, he himself, by his own testimony, has cleared me of all suspicion of slander when I say that that ‘other’ is no ‘other’ than himself.