The Book of Hebrew Questions

In the preface to his book of Hebrew Questions, after many other remarks, he says: “I say nothing of Origen. His name, if I may compare small things with great, is even more an object of ill will than my own. For although in his Homilies, which were spoken to ordinary people, he follows the common version, yet in his Tomes, that is, in his fuller discussion of Scripture, he gives way to the Hebrew as the truth, and though surrounded by his own forces, he now and then calls in the foreign tongue as his ally. I will say only this about him: I would gladly have his knowledge of the Scriptures even with all the ill will that clings to his name. And I do not care a straw for these shadows and ghosts, whose nature, they say, is to chatter in dark corners and frighten babies.” [a]

I really can no longer wonder at his unfriendly treatment of me, or complain of it, since he has not spared “such men, men so great.” For another man he tears to pieces is Ambrose, that bishop of sacred memory. How he attacks him, and with what disparagement, I will show in the same way, from one of his prefaces in which, all the same, he praises Origen. It is the preface to Origen’s homilies on Luke, addressed to Paula and Eustochium: [b]

“A few days ago you told me you had read some commentaries on Matthew and Luke, one of which was equally dull in thought and expression, while the other was frivolous in expression and sleepy in sense. So you asked me to translate, without bothering about such trifles, the thirty-nine homilies of our Adamantius on Luke, just as they stand in the original Greek. I replied that it was a tiresome task and a torment of mind to write, as Cicero puts it, with another man’s heart and not one’s own. Still, I will undertake it, since your requests reach no higher than this. “The demand that the sainted Blesilla once made of me at Rome, that I should translate into our language his twenty-five volumes on Matthew, five on Luke, and thirty-two on John, is beyond my powers, my leisure and my energy. You see what weight your influence and your wishes have with me. I have laid aside my books of Hebrew Questions for a time, to spend my energies, which your judgment holds to be fruitful, on translating these commentaries. Good or bad, they are his work and not mine. “I do this all the more because I hear on my left the raven, that bird of ill omen, croaking and mocking in an extraordinary way at the colors of all the other birds, when he himself is black all over. And so, before he changes his note, I admit that these treatises are Origen’s recreation, no less than dice are a boy’s; very different are the serious works of his manhood and his old age. “If my proposal meets with your approval, if I am still able to undertake the task, and if the Lord grants me the chance to translate them into Latin, so that I may complete the work I have now put off, then you will be able to see, yes, and all who speak Latin will learn through you, the great store of valuable knowledge of which they have until now been ignorant, but which they have now begun to acquire. “Besides this, I have arranged to send you shortly the commentaries on Matthew of that eloquent man Hilary, and of the blessed martyr Victorinus. Different as their styles may be, one spirit enabled them to write. These will give you some idea of the study that our Latin writers too gave to the Holy Scriptures in former days.” [c]