Rufinus Defends Himself to Anastasius

Sent to Anastasius, bishop of the city of Rome. This letter was prompted by accusations against Rufinus that were made to Anastasius soon after he took office. Anastasius held the see of Rome from the year 399 to 401. The authority of the popes of Rome at this time was not what it later became. It is unlikely that Anastasius summoned Rufinus, as some suppose he did, from Aquileia, where Rufinus was living on close terms with its bishop, Chromatius, to come to Rome and answer a formal accusation or be judged by him. But since Rome was the center of news, a Christian would not want its bishop to think badly of him. Those who accused Rufinus were Jerome’s friends at Rome, especially the noble widow Marcella and the senator Pammachius. They had tried to obtain some condemnation of Rufinus from Siricius before Siricius died in November of the year 398. But Siricius befriended Rufinus; according to Jerome, “his simplicity was taken advantage of.” When Anastasius was elected in the year 399, however, they accused Rufinus of having brought heresy into the Roman church through his translation of Origen’s On First Principles. In his Letter 127, Jerome speaks of Marcella this way: “She was the cause of the heretics’ condemnation. She brought forward witnesses who had once been taught by them and so had been steeped in error and heresy. She showed how many people had been deceived. She had the volumes of On First Principles brought in and pointed out the changes the Scorpion had made in them. At last letters were written, and more than once, summoning the heretics to come and defend themselves; but they did not dare to come. So strong was the proof brought against them that, rather than have their heresy exposed to their faces, they chose to stay away and be condemned.” From the letter of Anastasius to John of Jerusalem about Rufinus we gather that, although he strongly disapproved of the translation of Origen, he left Rufinus himself to his own conscience and did not care to know what had become of him. Rufinus’s letter, though it is called an Apology, shows no sign of being an answer to a summons or a judgment from the pope. It is simply a reply to reports that were likely to turn the pope’s opinion against him. The Apology was written in the year 400.

I have been told that certain people, in the course of a dispute they have been raising within Your Holiness’s jurisdiction on matters of faith or on other points, have mentioned my name. I venture to believe that Your Holiness, trained from infancy in the strict principles of the church, has refused to listen to any slanders that may have been aimed at a man who is absent, and one whom you have known favorably as united with you in faith and in the love of God. Still, since I hear it reported that my reputation has been attacked, I have thought it right to make my position clear to Your Holiness in writing. I could not do this in person. I have just come back to my family after an absence of nearly thirty years, and it would have been harsh, almost inhuman, to leave again so soon the people I have come back to see so late. The strain of my long journey has also left me too weak to set out again. My purpose in this letter is not to remove some stain of suspicion from your mind, which I regard as a holy place, a kind of divine sanctuary that lets in nothing evil. Rather, I want the confession I am about to make to you to be like a stick placed in your hands, to drive off any envious people who may be barking at me like dogs. [e]

My faith, in fact, was proved well enough when the heretics persecuted me. I was living at that time in the church of Alexandria, and I suffered imprisonment and exile, which was then the penalty for faithfulness. Yet for the sake of anyone who may wish to test my faith, or to hear and learn what it is, I will declare it. I believe that the Trinity is of one nature and one Godhead, of one and the same power and substance, so that between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit there is no difference at all, except that the first is the Father, the second the Son, and the third the Holy Spirit. There is a Trinity of real and living Persons, a unity of nature and substance. [f] I also confess that the Son of God has in these last days been born of the Virgin and the Holy Spirit; that he took on himself our natural human flesh and soul; that in this he suffered, was buried, and rose again from the dead; that the flesh in which he rose was the same flesh that had been laid in the tomb; and that in this same flesh, together with the soul, he ascended into heaven after his resurrection. From there we look for his coming to judge the living and the dead.

Further, as to the resurrection of our own flesh, I believe that it will be whole and complete. It will be this very flesh in which we now live. We do not hold, as some people slanderously report, that another flesh will rise in place of this one. It will be this very flesh, without the loss of a single limb, without the cutting off of any single part of the body. None of its properties whatever will be missing, except its corruptibility. This is what the holy apostle promises about the body: “It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.” This is the teaching handed down to me by those from whom I received holy baptism in the church of Aquileia; and I think it is the same teaching that the Apostolic See has handed down and taught by long custom. [g] I also affirm a judgment to come, in which every person is to receive the due reward of his life in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or evil. And if the reward of human beings is to be according to their works, how much more will this be true of the devil, who is the cause of all sin? About the devil himself, we believe what is written in the Gospel: that he and all his angels will receive the eternal fire as their portion, and with him those who do his works, that is, those who become accusers of their brothers. If anyone, then, denies that the devil is to be handed over to the eternal fires, may he have his share with the devil in the eternal fire, so that he may learn by experience the fact he now denies. [h]

I am next told that some stir has been raised over the question of the nature of the soul. Whether complaints on a matter of this kind should be heard or set aside, you must decide for yourself. But if you want to know my opinion on the subject, I will state it frankly. I have read a great many writers on this question, and I find that they hold differing opinions. Some of those I have read hold that the soul is imparted together with the material body through the channel of the human seed, and they offer such proofs of this as they can. I think this was the opinion of Tertullian or Lactantius among the Latin writers, and perhaps of a few others. Others assert that God is making new souls every day and putting them into the bodies that have been formed in the womb. Others again believe that all souls were made long ago, when God made all things out of nothing, and that all he does now is to plant each soul in its body as seems good to him. This is the opinion of Origen and of some others among the Greeks. For my part, I declare before God that, after reading each of these opinions, I am still unable, up to this moment, to hold any of them as certain and settled. I leave the deciding of the truth in this question to God, and to anyone to whom it may please him to reveal it. So my profession on this point is, first, that these several opinions are the ones I have found in books; and second, that I still remain ignorant on the subject, except for this: the church teaches it as an article of faith that God is the creator of souls as well as of bodies. [i]

Now to another matter. I am told that objections have been raised against me because, of all things, at the request of some of my brothers I translated certain works of Origen from Greek into Latin. I suppose everyone sees that it is only ill will that makes this a matter of blame. For if there is anything offensive in the author, why should it be twisted into a fault of the translator? I was asked to set out in Latin what stands written in the Greek text, and I did nothing more than fit Latin words to the Greek ideas. So if there is anything to praise in these ideas, the praise does not belong to me; and the same holds for anything that deserves blame. I admit that I put something of my own into the work. As I said in my preface, I used my own judgment in cutting out a good many passages. But I cut out only those that I had come to suspect Origen himself had not written that way. In these cases the statement seemed to me to have been inserted by others, because elsewhere I had found the author stating the matter in a catholic sense. So I beg you, holy, venerable and saintly father, not to allow a storm of ill will to be raised against me over this, and not to approve the use of partisanship and slander, weapons that should never be used in the church of God. Where can simple faith and innocence be safe if they are not protected in the church? I am not Origen’s defender or his champion, nor am I the first to have translated his works. Others before me did the very same thing, and I did it, the last of many, at the request of my brothers. If an order is to be given that such translations must not be made, that order holds for the future, not for the past. But if those who made these translations before any such order was given are to be blamed, the blame must begin with those who took the first step. As for me, I declare in Christ’s name that I never held, and never will hold, any faith other than the one I have set out above: the faith held by the church of Rome, by the church of Alexandria, and by my own church of Aquileia, and preached also at Jerusalem. If anyone believes otherwise, whoever he may be, let him be anathema. But those who, out of mere ill will and malice, stir up quarrels and offenses among their brothers and make them stumble will give an account of it on the day of judgment. [j]