I Followed Him Only in His Way of Translating

I ask whether you can produce anything I have written by which you can convict me of having fallen into heresy, even in my youth: anything like the heresies of which, though you will not confess it, you now stand convicted. I said that I had followed or imitated you in your method of translating, in that alone and in nothing else. Yet you say that by this I have done you all the injury you complain of. I followed you in the things I saw you had done in the Homilies on the Gospel according to Luke. Take the passage, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.” When you found that the Greek commentary had something about the Son of God that was not right, you passed it over. But the words about the Spirit, which, as you may remember, are expressed in the ordinary way, you not only did not pass over, but added a few words of your own to make the meaning clearer. So too in the note on the words, “See, when the voice of your greeting came into my ears, the baby leaped in my womb,” you render, “Because this was not the beginning of his substance,” and you add of your own the words “and nature.” Yet both these and a thousand other things in your translations, of these homilies or of those on Isaiah or Jeremiah, but most of all of those on Ezekiel, you have now withdrawn. And in certain places where you found things about the faith, that is, about the Trinity, expressed in a strange way, you left out words at your own discretion. [a]

This way of translating we have both of us kept. If anyone finds fault with it, it is you who ought to answer, since you used it before me. But now the practice you blame is undoubtedly one for which you may be blamed yourself. You formerly declared that translating word for word was both foolish and harmful. In this I followed you. You can hardly mean that I am to repent of this because you have now changed your opinion, and say that you have translated the present work with literal exactness. In earlier cases you took out what was unedifying in matters of faith, though you did not cut it out entirely or in every case. For instance, in the Homilies on Isaiah, at the vision of God, Origen applies the words to the Son and the Holy Spirit; and so you translated it, but added words of your own to give the passage a more acceptable sense. It stands thus: “Who, then, are these two seraphim? My Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.” But you add of your own, “And do not think that there is any difference of nature in the Trinity, when the functions marked out by the several persons are kept.” I have done the same thing in a great many cases, either cutting out words or bending them to a sounder meaning. For this you bid me do penance. I do not think you are of this opinion where you yourself are concerned. If, then, on this ground no penitence is owed by either of us, what other things are there of which you invite me to repent?