He Turns on One Christian Writer After Another

You see how he treats Ambrose. First he calls him a crow and says he is black all over. Then he calls him a jackdaw who decks himself out in other birds’ showy feathers. And then he tears at him with his foul abuse, and declares that there is nothing manly in a man whom God singled out to be the glory of the churches of Christ, a man who has spoken of the testimonies of the Lord even before persecuting kings and has not been afraid. The saintly Ambrose wrote his book on the Holy Spirit not with words only but with his own blood. For he offered his lifeblood to his persecutors, and shed it within himself, although God preserved his life for further labors. [a]

Suppose he did follow some of the Greek writers of our catholic communion, and borrowed something from their writings. Even so, it should hardly have been the first thought in your mind to broadcast what you call his plagiarisms, which were very possibly forced on him as a writer when he had to answer at once some ravings of the heretics. Still less should it have been the object of such zealous efforts that you set to work to translate the treatise of Didymus on the Holy Spirit for the purpose. Is this the fairness of a Christian? Is this how we are to keep the apostle’s command, “Do nothing through faction or through empty glory”? But I might turn the tables on you and ask, “You who say that a man should not steal, do you steal?” I might point to a fact I have already mentioned. A little before you wrote your commentary on Micah, you had been accused of plagiarizing from Origen. And you did not deny it, but said, “What they hurl at me as violent abuse I accept as the highest praise; for I wish to imitate the man whom we and all the wise admire.” Your own plagiarisms turn to your highest praise; those of others make them crows and jackdaws in your eyes. If you do right in imitating Origen, whom you call second only to the apostles, why do you sharply attack another man for following Didymus, whom you yourself point to by name as a prophet and an apostolic man?

For my part, I must not complain, since you abuse us all alike. First, you do not spare Ambrose, great and highly honored as he was. Then there is the man of whom you write that he was second only to the apostles and that all the wise admire him, whom you have praised to the skies a thousand times over, not in two places, as you say, but in countless places. This man, who was once an apostle, you now turn around and make a heretic. Thirdly, this very Didymus, whom you name the Seer Prophet, who has the eye of the bride in the Song of Songs, and whom you call an apostolic man in keeping with the meaning of his name, you now on the other hand accuse as a perverse teacher, and with what you call your censor’s rod you cut him off and place him in the communion of heretics. I do not know where you got this rod. I know that Christ once gave the keys to Peter; but what spirit it is that now hands out these censors’ rods, it is for you to say. However, if you condemn all those I have mentioned with the same mouth with which you once praised them, then I, who next to them am no more than a flea, must not complain, I repeat, if you now tear me to pieces, though you once praised me, and in your Chronicle set me side by side with Florentius and Bonosus for what you called the nobility of my life.