Preface to Book 3 of On First Principles

Reader, remember me in your sacred moments of prayer, that I may be a worthy follower of the Spirit. It was you, Macarius, at whose urging, I might even say under whose compulsion, I translated the first two books of On First Principles. I did it during Lent; and at that time your nearness, my Christian brother, and your greater leisure forced me, too, into greater diligence. But now that you are living at the opposite end of Rome from me, and my taskmaster visits me more seldom, I have taken longer in unfolding the sense of the last two books. You will remember that in my former preface I warned you that some people would be full of indignation when they found I had nothing bad to say of Origen; and this, as I think you have found, has not been long in coming to pass. But if those demons who stir up people’s tongues to evil speaking have already been set on fire by the first part of the work, though in it the author had not yet fully laid bare their schemes, what will be the effect of this second part, in which he is going to disclose all the secret labyrinths through which they creep into human hearts and deceive the hearts of the weak and frail? You will see disorder springing up on all sides. Party spirit will be stirred up, an outcry will spread all through the city, and Origen will be put on trial and condemned for trying to drive away the darkness of ignorance by the light of the Gospel’s lamp. But all this will matter very little to those who are striving to hold fast the sound form of the catholic faith while exercising their minds in the study of divine things. [a]

I think it necessary, however, to remind you of the principle I followed in the former books, and have kept in the present ones too: not to set down in my translation things plainly contrary to our belief and to the author’s opinions as he expresses them elsewhere, but to pass over them as not genuine, inserted by others. On the other hand, neither in the former books nor in these have I left out the novel opinions he has expressed about the forming of the rational creation. I considered that it is not in such things that the faith chiefly consists; that what he is aiming at is simply knowledge and the exercise of the mind; and that there may possibly be certain heresies that have to be answered in this way. Only, where he chose to repeat in these later books what he had said before in the earlier ones, I have thought it wise to cut out certain portions for the sake of brevity. [b]

Those who read these books to gain knowledge, not to disparage their author, would do well to look for help from people more skilled than themselves in interpreting them. For it is an absurd thing to have grammarians explain to us the fictions of the poets and the laughable stories of the comic writers, and yet to think that books which speak of God and the heavenly powers and the whole universe, and which discuss all the errors of pagan philosophy and of heretical perversity, are things anyone can understand without a teacher to explain them. In this way it comes about that people prefer to stay in ignorance, and to pass rash judgments on things that are difficult and obscure, rather than gain an understanding of them by diligent study. [c]