Origen is a heretic. What does this have to do with me, since I do not deny that he is a heretic in many ways? He fell into error in the doctrine of the resurrection of bodies; he was mistaken in the teaching about the state of souls, about the repentance of the devil, and, what is even more important, in his commentaries on Isaiah, he proved that the Son of God and the Holy Spirit are Seraphim. I would be an accomplice in his error if I did not say that he was in error, and did not constantly anathematize all this. For we should not take the good of it in such a way that we are forced to accept the bad at the same time. But in many ways he has interpreted the Scriptures well, clarified the dark passages of the prophets, and revealed the greatest mysteries of both the New and Old Testaments. If, therefore, I have translated it as good, and cut it off, or corrected it, or omitted it, am I to be blamed for the fact that the Latins have his good through me, and do not know what is bad? If this is a crime, then Hilary the Confessor must also be accused, who translated from his books, that is, from Greek into Latin, the commentary on the Psalms and the discourses on Job. The confessor of Vercella, Eusebius, will be guilty of the same, for he translated into our language the commentaries on all the psalms of the heretic (Eusebius of Caesarea), although, leaving aside the heretical, he translated what was the best. I am silent about Victorinus of Pictavia and others who followed Origen and squeezed out of him only in the explanation of the Scriptures, so that it would not seem that I was not so much defending myself as looking for accomplices in the crime. I will turn to you personally: why do you keep his treatises on Job rewritten in your possession – treatises in which, discussing the devil, the stars and the heavens, he expressed something that the Church does not accept? Only you, the wisest head, can pronounce judgment on all writers, both Greek and Latin, and as if with a censor's baton throw some out of libraries, receive others, and when you please, declare me either Orthodox or a heretic; And we cannot reject the perverse and condemn what we have often condemned? Read the books on the Epistle to the Ephesians, read my other writings, especially the commentaries on Ecclesiastes; you will clearly see that from my youth I have never been afraid of anyone's authority, and have never accepted crooked heretical interpretations on faith.

It is not an empty thing to know what we do not know. It is the property of a prudent person to know his own measure, so that, aroused by the devil's jealousy, he will not testify to his ignorance before the whole world. Now, you want to show off, and you boast in your homeland that I am not able to measure your eloquence, and that I am afraid of your chrysippus taunts. Christian modesty restrains me, and I do not want to give refuge in my cell for sarcastic speech. Otherwise I would have exposed all your famous deeds and the pomp of your triumphs. Speaking as a Christian to a Christian, I beseech you, brother, not to try to reason more than you have, lest you discover by your style your inexperience, or simplicity, or even that of which I am silent, and which others will understand, though you yourself will understand, and do not provoke general laughter by your absurdities. It is not given to one and the same person to be an expert in gold coins and in the scriptures, to have a taste in wines and to understand the prophets or apostles. You reproach me; you accuse the holy brother Oksana of heresy; you do not like the way of thinking of the presbyters Vincentius and Paulinian and brother Eusebius. You alone are Cato, the most eloquent of the Romans, relying only on his own eye and wisdom! Remember, I beseech thee, the day when I preached on the resurrection and the reality of the body; You jumped up and down beside me, and applauded, and stamped your feet, and shouted that I was glorified. And when he began to swim and the rot from the bottom of the ship penetrated to your innermost brain, then you recognized us as heretics! What should I do with you? I believed the letter of the holy presbyter Paulinus and did not think that his opinion of your person was erroneous. True, I noticed your speech immediately after receiving the letter, but I assumed in you more shyness and simplicity than stupidity. Nor do I reproach the holy man for wanting to conceal from me what he knew rather than condemn the bearer of the letter in his letter. But I blame myself for trusting in someone else's judgment rather than my own, and when I saw one thing with my eyes, I believed in the note something other than what I saw.

Stop attacking me and overwhelming me with your books. Spare at least your own money, with which you hire scribes and booksellers, which you spend on writers and favorees, perhaps because they praise you because they see profit in your writing. If you want to exercise your mind, devote yourself to grammar and rhetoric, study dialectics, study philosophical systems; When you have studied everything, you will at least remain silent. However, I am foolish in looking for teachers for the universal teacher and trying to set boundaries for the one who does not know how to speak and cannot be silent. A well-known Greek proverb is true: a lyre to a donkey. I thought that the name was given to you. For you are slumbering with all your mind, and you have fallen into a deep sleep, not so much by simple sleep as by lethargy. Among the other blasphemies which your sacrilegious lips have uttered, you have dared to say that the mountain from which, according to Daniel, the stone was cut off without the help of hands, is the devil, and the stone is Christ, as having received a body from Adam, who through his sins entered into a union with the devil, and was born of a virgin, in order to separate man from the mountain, that is, from the devil. O tongue that deserves to be cut and torn to pieces and pieces! Does any Christian represent God the Father Almighty in the person of the devil, and by such a crime does he defile the ears of the whole world? If anyone, I will not say from among the Orthodox, but from heretics or pagans, ever admitted such an interpretation, what you said would be even more excusable. But if the Church has never heard such wickedness, and through your mouth for the first time the One Who said: "I will be like the Most High" (Isaiah 14:14), then do repentance, put on sackcloth and dust, wash away such an evil deed with unceasing tears, and (if only the wickedness is forgiven you in accordance with the error of Origen) then you will receive forgiveness when you have it received, and the devil, who was not caught in greater backbiting than through your mouth. I endured the offense inflicted on me patiently. I could not endure impiety in relation to God. For this reason at the end of the letter I resolved to write more sharply than I had promised, for it would be foolish if, after the repentance with which you would beg forgiveness from me, you should have to begin it another time. May Christ grant you to listen and be silent, to understand and, understanding, to speak.

To Magnus, the great orator of the city of Rome

We learned that our Sebesius had reformed not so much from your letter as from his repentance. [78] And it is surprising how much more pleasant the one who has reformed has become, than the one who has erred has become. The indulgence of the father and the good manners of the son competed with each other: while the one did not remember the past, the other made good promises for the future. Therefore, both you and I need to rejoice together: I have received a son again, and you have a disciple.

At the end of the letter you ask why in my writings I sometimes cite examples from secular sciences and defile the whiteness of the Church with the impurities of the pagans. Here is a short answer to this. You would never have asked this question if Cicero had not completely possessed you, if you had read the Holy Scriptures and, leaving Volcatius, had looked over its interpreters. For who does not know that both Moses and the writings of the prophets borrowed from pagan books, and that Solomon asked questions and answered the philosophers of Tyre? [80] Therefore, at the beginning of the book of Proverbs, he exhorts us to understand wisdom, the craftiness of words, parables and dark speeches, the sayings of the wise men and riddles, which are especially characteristic of dialecticians and philosophers. But the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to Titus also used a verse from the poet Epimenides: "The Cretans are always lying, evil beasts, idle belly" (Titus 1:12), a half-verse verse later used by Callimachus. In Latin, a literal translation does not preserve rhythm, but this is not surprising: even Homer is incoherent in translating into the prose of the same language. In another epistle he also quotes the six-foot verse of Menander: "Evil conversations corrupt good morals." And, speaking to the Athenians in the Areopagus, he cites the testimony of Aratus: "His own is the race of Esma," which in Greek reads: του γαρ και γενος εσμεν — and constitutes the half-verse of the hexameter. And, besides, the leader of the Christian army and an invincible orator, defending the cause of Christ before the court, even uses an accidental inscription as a proof of faith.

From the faithful David he learned to tear the sword from the hands of his enemies, and to cut off the head of the most haughty Goliath with his own sword. In Deuteronomy (ch. 21) he read the command of the Lord that a captive wife should shave her head and eyebrows, cut off all the hair and nails on her body, and then marry her. What wonder if I, too, for the charm of expression and the beauty of the limbs, want to make worldly wisdom out of a slave and captive of Israel, cut off or cut off all that is dead from her – idolatry, voluptuousness, error, debauchery – and, united with her purest body, bear children to the Lord of hosts?..

Celsus[82] and Porphyry[83] wrote against us; they were very courageously opposed by Origen[84], the second by Methodius[85], Eusebius[86] and Appolinarus[87]... Read them, and you will see that I know very little in comparison with them, and, having spent so much time in idleness, as if in a dream, I remember only what I learned in my childhood. Julian Augustus, during the Parthian campaign, vomited seven books against Christ, and, according to the fables of the poets, killed himself with his sword. If I try to write against him, will you forbid me to beat this mad dog with the stick of Hercules, the doctrine of the philosophers and the Stoics?.. Josephus, proving the antiquity of the Jewish people, wrote two books against Apion, the Alexandrian grammarian[89]; in them he presents so many testimonies from secular writers that it seems to me a miracle that a Jew, brought up from childhood on the Holy Scriptures, read the entire library of the Greeks. What is to be said of Philo, whom critics call the second or Jewish Plato? [90]..

I pass on to Latin writers. Who is more educated than him, who is wittier than Tertullian? [91] His "Apologetics" and the books "Against the Gentiles" include all pagan learning. Minucius Felix, a lawyer from the Roman Forum, in a book entitled "Octavius" and in another, "Against the Mathematicians" (unless the inscription is mistaken in naming the author), what did he leave untouched from the writings of the pagans? Arnobius93 published seven books against the pagans, and the same number was published by his disciple Lactantius,94 who wrote two more books: "On Wrath" and "On the Work of the Lord." If you want to read these books, you will find in them nothing more than an abbreviation of Cicero's dialogues...

Hilary, the confessor and bishop of my time, imitated the twelve books of Quintilian both in style and in the number of works, and in a short book against the physician Dioscorus showed that he was strong in the secular sciences. The presbyter Juvenk[95] under Constantine depicted the history of the Lord the Savior in verse: he was not afraid to subordinate the greatness of the Gospel to the laws of the meter. Silence about others, both living and dead, in whose writings both their knowledge and their aspirations are evident.

And do not be deceived by the false thought that this is permissible only in writings against the pagans, and that in other discourses secular learning should be avoided, because the books of all of them, except those who, like Epicurus, did not study the sciences, abound in information from secular sciences and philosophy. I give here only what comes to mind when dictating, and I am sure that you yourself know what has always been in use among learned people.

However, I think that through you this question is offered to me by another, which, perhaps—I remember Sallust's favorite stories—bears the name of Calpurnius, called Wool. Please tell him, toothless, not to envy the teeth of those who eat, and, being blind as a mole, not to degrade the sight of wild goats. On this score, as you see, we can talk for a long time, but, for lack of space for writing, it is time to finish.