The Arrogance of Jerome’s Teaching

These things you have said are read by everyone who knows Latin, and you yourself ask people to read them. I mean such sayings as these: that all rational creatures, as may be pictured by taking a single rational living being as an example, are to be formed anew into one body, just as if the members of a single man, after being torn apart, were to be formed anew by the art of Asclepius into the same solid body as before; that among them, as among the members of the body, there will be various offices, which you specify, but that the body will be one, that is, of one nature. This one body, made up of all things, you call the original church, and to it you give the name of the body of Christ. You say further that one member of this church will be the apostate angel, that is, of course, the devil, who is to be formed anew into what he was first created; and that man in the same way, who is another of the members, will be called back to tend the garden of Eden as its original gardener. [a]

You say all these things one after another without bringing in the person of that ‘other’ whom you usually introduce when you speak of such matters cautiously, like someone treading warily, so as to make people think you had some hesitation in deciding matters so secret and so hard to grasp. Origen, indeed, always did this, as we see, in dealing with such matters: the man whose disciple you do not deny you are, and whose betrayer you confess yourself to be. But you, as if you were the angel speaking by the mouth of Daniel, or Christ by the mouth of Paul, give a curt and distinct opinion on each point, and announce to mortal ears all the secrets of the ages to come. Then you speak to us like this:

“O multitude of the faithful, put no faith in any of the ancients. If Origen had some thoughts about the more secret facts of the divine purposes, let none of you accept them. And likewise if one of the Clements said any such things, whether the one who was a disciple of the apostle, or the one of the church of Alexandria who was the teacher of Origen himself; yes, even if they were said by the great Gregory of Pontus, a man of apostolic virtues, or by the other Gregory, of Nazianzus, and by Didymus the seeing prophet, both of them my teachers, than whom the world has had none more deeply taught in the faith of Christ: all these have erred as Origen has erred. “But let them be forgiven, for I too have erred at times, and I am now conducting myself as a penitent and ought to be forgiven. But Origen, since he said the same things I have said, will receive no forgiveness, though he has done penance. No, for saying the things we have all said, he alone will be condemned. “He is the one who has done all the harm. He is the one who betrayed to us the secret of all that we say or write, of everything that makes us seem to speak learnedly, of all that was good in Greek but that we have made bad in Latin. Of all these, let no one listen to a single one.

“Accept only the things you find in my Commentaries, and especially in those on the Letter to the Ephesians, in which I have refuted the doctrines of Origen with great pains. My researches have reached this result: you must believe and hold the resurrection of the flesh in this sense, that men’s bodies will be turned into spirits and their wives into men; that before the foundation of the world souls existed in heaven, and from there, for reasons known to God alone, were brought down into this valley of tears and put into this body of death; that at the end of the ages the whole of nature, being rational, will be fashioned again into one body as it was in the beginning; that man will be called back into paradise, and the apostate angel will be raised above Peter and Paul, since they, being only men, must be placed in the lower position of paradise, while he will be restored to be what he was originally created; and that all together will make up the church of the firstborn in heaven, and while each is placed in his separate office they will be equally members of Christ, but all of them taken together will be the perfect body of Christ. Hold to these things, then, my faithful and discerning disciples, and guard them as my unhesitating definitions of the truth; but for these same doctrines pronounce your condemnation on Origen. So you will do well. Farewell.”