Introduction to Rufinus’s Apology

Addressed to Apronianus, in reply to Jerome’s letter to Pammachius. Written at Aquileia in the year 400. [a] In two books.

To understand the quarrel between Jerome and Rufinus, we need to look back over their earlier relations. They had been close friends in early youth, and together they had belonged to a fellowship of young Christian ascetics at Aquileia in the years 370 to 373. Jerome’s letter to Rufinus in the year 374, his third letter, is full of affection. In 381 Jerome entered Rufinus in his Chronicle, under the year 378, as “a monk of great renown.” And some years later, when they were neighbors in Palestine, Rufinus with Melania on the Mount of Olives and Jerome with Paula at Bethlehem, they remained friends. In the disputes about Origenism that arose from the visits of Aterbius and of Epiphanius, they became estranged, Jerome siding with Epiphanius and Rufinus with John. They were reconciled before Rufinus left Palestine in the year 397. But when Rufinus came to Italy and, at the request of Macarius, translated Origen’s On First Principles, the preface he put at the front of the work set off a fresh and final outbreak of quarreling. Jerome’s friends, of whom Pammachius, Oceanus and Marcella were the most prominent, were scandalized by some of the book’s statements, and still more by Rufinus’s assumption that Jerome, by his earlier translations of some of Origen’s works, had shown himself an admirer of Origen. They also suspected that Rufinus’s translation had made Origen speak in an orthodox sense that was not genuinely his, and that unorthodox statements had been suppressed. So they wrote to Jerome at Bethlehem, begging for information on all these points. Their letter survives among Jerome’s letters as Letter 83. In reply Jerome made a literal translation of On First Principles and sent it with a letter, Letter 84, in which he declared that he had never been a partisan of Origen’s system of doctrine, though he admired him as a commentator. He seized on some of the most questionable of Origen’s speculations: his teaching on the resurrection, on the earlier existence of souls and their fall into human bodies, and on the final restoration of all spiritual beings; his allowing, in agreement with Plato, the use of falsehood in certain cases; and some expressions about the relation of the Persons of the Godhead that, at least to Western ears, seemed to deny their equality. He pointed to his own commentaries on Ecclesiastes and on Ephesians to show that he rejected these teachings. And he urged that, even if he had once admired Origen too indiscriminately, in later years he had judged more clearly. [b]

On the main points Jerome’s defense was sound. But it called for considerateness in his judges, and that quality was missing in himself. He judged Origen’s opinions harshly and called his views poisonous. When we set the mildness of his earlier judgments on the same points beside his present violence, it becomes clear that he cared more for his own reputation than for the truth. In chapters 23 to 44 of the first book of his Apology, Rufinus charges him with holding, in his Commentary on Ephesians, the very views he now denounced. Jerome had written that commentary twelve years earlier, in the year 388, and had appealed to it in his letter. The charge, though pressed too far, is substantially proved. The opinions of Origen that Jerome brought into this commentary, about the fall of souls out of an earlier state of bliss into human bodies, are set down with hardly a word of objection. Origen’s speculations on the powers and principalities of the world to come, on the rise of Lucifer and his angels to become subjects of Christ’s kingdom, and on their part in the final restoration of all things are adopted as Jerome’s own. This gives some justification for Rufinus’s attack. So Jerome’s defense of himself is hardly candid. And his remarks about his opponent are exasperating, as when he speaks of some people “who love me so well that they cannot be heretics without me,” and says: “I wonder that, while they speak against the flesh, they live by the flesh, and so cherish and pamper their enemy.” He hardly argues fairly about Rufinus’s claim that Origen’s works had suffered from tampering. And his hostility carries him so far that he denies that Pamphilus’s Apology for Origen is the work of Pamphilus, although he had himself credited it to him, and no one can doubt that it is his. [f]

Yet while writing in this way for his friends in general, Jerome at the same time wrote a friendly letter to Rufinus himself, in answer, it seems, to one from him. In it he speaks of their common friends and of the death of Rufinus’s mother, and says he has asked a friend he is sending to Italy to visit Rufinus and assure him of his high regard. And while he objects to Rufinus’s preface to On First Principles, he says only this: “I have begged my other friends to avoid a quarrel. I count on your sense of fairness not to give occasion to impatient people; for you will not find everyone able, as I am, to take pleasure in praises shaped to suit a purpose.” [j] Had this letter reached Rufinus, the controversy that followed would have been avoided. But it never reached him. It was sent by way of Pammachius, and he and Jerome’s other friends held it back, while they published the letter Jerome had sent them with his translation of On First Principles. Rufinus, who was now at Aquileia, having probably left Rome early in the year 399, wrote the Apology and addressed it to his friend and convert Apronianus at Rome.