If Origen Is Not Pardoned, Neither Is Jerome

You do all this, as you know well enough, laughing up your sleeve at us; and you profess penitence only to deceive those you write to. Even if your penitence is sincere, as it should be, what is to become of all those souls who for so many years have been led astray by this doctrine, poisonous as you call it, which you then professed? Besides, who will ever mend his ways because of your penitence, when that very document in which you are at once the penitent, the accuser and the judge sends your readers back to those same doctrines as the ones they are to read and to hold? [a]

Lastly, even if these things were not so, you yourself, after your penitence, have blocked every road to forgiveness. You say that Origen himself repented of these doctrines, and that he sent a document saying so to Fabian, who was then bishop of the city of Rome. And yet after this repentance of his, and when he has been dead a hundred and fifty years, you drag him into court and call for his condemnation. How then can you receive forgiveness, even though you repent, when he who repented earlier of putting out those doctrines gains no forgiveness? He wrote just as you have written; he repented as you have repented. So either both of you ought to be absolved for your repentance, or, if you refuse forgiveness to a penitent (which I have no wish to see you insist on), both of you ought to be condemned alike.

There is a parable of the Gospel that illustrates this. A woman taken in adultery was brought before our Lord by the Jews, so that they might see what judgment he would give according to the law. He, the merciful and compassionate Lord, said: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” And then, we are told, they all went away. The Jews, ungodly and unbelieving though they were, still blushed from their own sense of guilt; since they were sinners, they would not appear in public as carrying out vengeance on sinners. And the robber on the cross said to the other robber, who was hanging on a cross like him and was blaspheming, “Do you not fear God, since we are under the same sentence?” But we condemn in others the things we know ourselves guilty of; and yet we neither blush like the Jews nor soften like the robber.