The Preface to Didymus on the Holy Spirit

The preface is the one to the treatise of Didymus on the Holy Spirit. It is addressed to Paulinian, and reads as follows: [a]

“While I was living in Babylon, a settler in the land of the prostitute dressed in purple, and lived under the law of the Quirites, I attempted to write some poor stuff about the Holy Spirit, and dedicated the work to the pontiff of that city. Then all of a sudden the pot that Jeremiah saw after the almond rod began to boil from the face of the north. The whole senate of the Pharisees raised an outcry, and not some imaginary scribe but the whole faction of the ignorant put their heads together against me, as if I had declared war on them. “So I returned with all speed to Jerusalem, like a man going back to his home. After living in sight of the hut of Romulus and the Lupercal with its naked games, I am now in sight of Mary’s inn and the Savior’s cave. And so, Paulinian, my dear brother, since the pontiff Damasus whom I have named, who had urged me to undertake this work, now sleeps in the Lord, it is here in Judea that I sing the song I could not sing in a strange land. You have provoked me to it, together with Paula and Eustochium, those handmaids of Christ whom I revere, and your prayers have helped me; for this land that bore the Savior is more august to me than the one that bore the man who killed his brother. “In the title I have assigned the work to its true authors. I preferred to be known as the translator of another man’s work rather than to imitate certain people and, like the clumsy jackdaw, deck myself out in another bird’s feathers. Some time ago I read a certain person’s treatise on the Holy Spirit, and I recognized in it, in the words of Terence, bad things in Latin taken from good things in Greek. There is nothing in it of close reasoning, nothing straightforward and manly that draws us to agree even against our will. All is limp and soft, sleek and pretty, picked out in the rarest colors. “But Didymus, my own Didymus, who has the eyes of the bride in the Song of Songs, those eyes that Jesus told us to lift up to the fields white for harvest, looks far off into the depths, and has given us cause once more to call him, as we always do, the Seer Prophet. Whoever reads this work will recognize the plagiarisms of the Latins, and will despise the borrowed streams as soon as he begins to drink at the fountainhead. He is unskilled in speech, but not in knowledge; his very style shows him to be like the apostle, as much by the grandeur of the sense as by the simplicity of the words.”