His Doubt That Pamphilus Wrote the Apology for Origen

It seems needless to make any answer to that part of his indictment in which he says that the works of the martyr Pamphilus, written as they are with so much faithfulness and devotion, are either not to be thought genuine or, if genuine, are to be treated with contempt. Is there anyone whose authority he will bow to? Is there anyone he will refrain from abusing? All the old Greek writers of the church, according to him, have erred. As for the Latins, how he disparages them, how he attacks them one by one, both old and modern, anyone who reads his various works knows well. Now even the martyrs fail to win any respect from him. “I do not believe,” he says, “that this is really the work of the martyr.” If such an argument were allowed for the works of any writer, how could we prove that any of them is genuine? If I were to say, “It is not true that the books of Miscellanies are Origen’s, as you maintain,” how can they be proved to be his? His answer is, “From their likeness to the rest.” But just as a man who wants to forge someone’s signature imitates his handwriting, so the man who wants to bring in his own thoughts under another man’s name is sure to imitate the style of the one whose name he has taken. [a]

But to pass over, for the sake of brevity, all that might very justly be said on this point: if you were determined to be so bold as to question the works of the martyr, you ought to have brought out publicly the actual statements that seemed to you open to question. Then every reader could have seen what in them was absurd and what was reasonable, what was unsuited to the teaching of the apostles or against it; and above all, the great impiety, whatever it may have been, in atonement for which, you tell us, the martyr shed his blood. A man who read those actual words would be able to say, not on your judgment, as now, but on his own, either that the martyr had gone wrong, or that a treatise so full of absurdity and unbelief had been composed by someone else. But as it is, you know well that if anyone reads the writings you attack, the blame will be turned back on the one who has found fault unjustly. So you do not quote the passages you attack. Instead, with that censor’s rod of yours, and by your own arrogant authority, you make your decrees in this style:

“Let this book be thrown out of the libraries; let that book be kept. And again, if a book is accepted today, and tomorrow anyone but myself has praised it, let it be thrown out, and the man who praised it with it. Let this man be counted a catholic, even though he seems at times to have gone wrong; let that man have no pardon for his error, even though he has said the same things as I have, and let no one translate him or read him, for fear he should recognize my plagiarisms. This man was indeed a heretic, but he was my master. And this other man, though he is a Jew, of the synagogue of Satan, and hired to sell words for gain, is still my master, who must be preferred to all others, because it is among the Jews alone that the truth of the Scriptures lives.”

If the universal church had with one voice given you this authority, and had demanded that you be the judge of each and every one, would it not have been your duty to refuse to let so heavy and dangerous a burden be laid on you? But now we have made such progress in the daily habit of disparaging others that we no longer spare even the martyrs. But let us suppose that the work is not that of the martyr Pamphilus but of some other, unknown member of the church. Did he, whoever he may have been, use his own words, I ask, so that we are called on to defer to the merits of the writer? No. He sets out quotations from the works of Origen himself, and shows his opinion on each question not in the words of the defender but in those of the accused himself. And just as in this present treatise what I have quoted from your writings carries much more force than what I have said myself, so too the defense of Origen rests not on the authority of his defender but on his own words. The question of authorship is beside the point when the defense is conducted in such a way that it can do without the author’s help.