Jerome Has Confessed These Views as His Own, Continued

But I undertook to show something of even more importance in what follows. After saying that we had hoped in Christ before, and that in the time before the foundation of the world and before we were born in our bodies we had been blessed and chosen in heaven, he brings in that ‘other’ of his again and says: “Another, who does not accept this doctrine that we existed before and had hope in Christ before we lived in this body, would have us understand the matter in his own way.” In this passage this ‘other,’ whoever he may be, has let out all his foul smell. [a]

Let him tell us, then, whom he means by this ‘other’ who does not accept the opinion that before we lived in this body we both existed and hoped in Christ, the very opinion for which he requires us to condemn Origen. Whom does he want us to understand by this ‘other’? Is it someone opposed to himself? What do you say, great master? You are caught in that two-horned dilemma you are so fond of talking about to your disciples. For if you say that by this ‘other,’ who does not accept that souls existed before they lived in the body, you mean yourself, then you have given away the secret that was hidden in the earlier passages. It is now found out that, by your own confession, you are that other who fashioned all the doctrines whose condemnation you now demand. But if we are not to believe that you are the ‘other’ of the earlier passage, so that the doctrines you now attack may not be laid to your charge, then we have no right to take you as the ‘other’ in this case either, the one who does not accept that our souls existed before we lived in bodies.

Choose whichever side you like as the ground of your acquittal. This ‘other,’ whom you bring in so often, are we to understand him as yourself or as someone else? Do you want us to think him a catholic or a heretic? Is he to be acquitted or condemned? If that ‘other’ of yours is a catholic, the man who said in the earlier passage that before this visible world our souls had their home among the angels and the other heavenly powers, in the heavenly places, in the Jerusalem which is above, and that there they took on the dispositions which caused the differences in their birth into the world and in the other conditions they are now subject to, then these must be regarded as catholic doctrines, and we know that it is impious to condemn what is catholic. But if you call this ‘other’ a heretic, you must also brand as a heretic the ‘other’ who will not accept that souls existed and hoped in Christ before they were born in the body.

Which way can you get out of this dilemma, my master? Where will you break out? Where will you escape to? Whichever way you turn, you will stick fast. Not only is there no road by which you can withdraw; there is not even the least breathing space left you. Is this all the profit you have gained from Alexander’s Commentaries on Aristotle and Porphyry’s Introduction? Is this the result of the training of all those great philosophers by whom, you tell us, you were educated, with all their learning, Greek and Latin, and Jewish into the bargain? Have they ended by bringing you into these hopeless straits, where you are so pitifully hemmed in that the very Alps could give you no refuge?