Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume III/Rufinus/Apology of Rufinus/Book I/Chapter 15

15. But let me

add what comes after. My Preface continued as follows:

‘The causes of these

discrepancies I have more fully set forth in the Apology which

Pamphilus expressly wrote for the works of Origen, to which I added a

very short paper in which I shewed by proofs which appear to me quite

clear, that his books have been in very many places tampered with by

heretics and ill disposed men, and especially the very books which you

ask me to translate, namely, the Περὶ

᾽Αρχῶν, which

may be rendered “Concerning Beginnings” or “Concerning

Principalities,” which are in any case most obscure and most

difficult. For in these books Origen discusses matters on which the

philosophers have spent their whole lives without finding out the

truth. In these matters, man’s belief in a creator and his

reasoning about the created world which had been made use of by the

philosophers for the purposes of their own profanity, the Christian

writer turns to the support of the true faith.’

Here also I beg you to mark my

words carefully, and to observe that I said ‘belief in a

Creator,’ but ‘reasoning about the created

world;’ since what is said about God belongs to the domain of

faith, but our discussions about created things to the domain of

reason. I continued:

‘Wherever, therefore, in

his works we find erroneous definitions of the Trinity as to which he

has in other places expressed his views in accordance with the true

faith, we have either left them out as passages which had been

falsified or inserted, or else have changed the expression in

accordance with the rule of faith which the writer again and again lays

down.’

Have I here, I ask, written

incautiously? Have I said that I expressed the matter according to the

rule of our faith, which would have been evidently going far beyond the

scope of a translator whose duty was merely to turn Greek into Latin? On the contrary I said that I expressed these passages according to the rule of faith which I found again and again laid down by Origen himself. Moreover I added:

‘I grant that, when he has

expressed a thing obscurely, as a man does when he is writing for those

who have technical knowledge of the subject and wishes to go over it

rapidly, I have made the sentence plainer by adding the fuller

expression which he had given of the same thing in some of his other

works which I had read. I did this simply in the interests of

clearness. But I have expressed nothing in my own words; I have only

restored to Origen what was really Origen’s though found in other

parts of his works.’

Footnotes