HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Jerome himself once hold Origen's doctrines of pre-existent souls and universal restoration?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — that the young Jerome relayed Origen's pre-existence of souls and universal restoration (apokatastasis) with real sympathy, not the cool neutrality of a mere cataloguer, and that his later anti-Origenism understates a genuine change of mind, is well-grounded in the text and in modern scholarship; the stronger charge — that he dogmatically professed those doctrines as settled belief — overreaches what a commentary's give-and-take will bear · the charge is pressed by Rufinus.

The claim

You made an exception in favour of the Commentaries on the Ephesians, in which you imagined that you had written more correctly. But even you must have seen … how like they are all through to Origen's views; and, indeed, how they contain something more extreme than the views of which you demand the condemnation.

— Rufinus, Apology against Jerome, II.28, link.¹ The heart of Rufinus's counter-attack: Jerome had held up his own Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians (written c. 386) as proof that he opposed Origen — “read my Commentaries on the Ephesians, and you will acknowledge that I have opposed the doctrines of Origen” — and Rufinus answered that the very book Jerome pointed to was shot through with Origen's own teaching of the pre-existence and fall of souls and the restitution of all things. The question here is whether that reading holds: was Jerome once himself an Origenist — not merely an admirer of Origen the exegete — or was he only reporting Origen's readings, as a commentator must?

Who advances it

The charge is Rufinus's, laid out at length in Book I of his Apology against Jerome (400/401), where he quotes Jerome's Ephesians commentary passage by passage and argues that the anonymous “another” (alius) in whose mouth Jerome places the Origenist readings is, repeatedly, Jerome himself.² The interpretation is not merely a polemicist's stratagem, however: modern scholarship reaches a kindred verdict on the text. Elizabeth A. Clark, in the standard study of the controversy, judges that in the Ephesians commentary Jerome “so weakly” dissociates himself from Origen's positions that one “would be hard-pressed to decide if he considered Origen's views mistaken at all,” and that his later, vehement rejection of the apokatastasis reflects a hardening after 393 — when the controversy erupted and he “wished to extricate himself from any connection with Origen's theology.”³

The evidence for

Jerome's Ephesians commentary does relay Origen's most notorious speculations. On “chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), after giving his own reading — that the election belongs to God's foreknowledge — Jerome sets out, in the voice of “another,” the doctrine of pre-existent souls:

Another, who wishes to vindicate the justice of God, and to shew that he does not choose men according to a prejudgment and foreknowledge of his own but according to the deserts of the elect, thinks that before the visible creation of sky, earth, sea and all that is in them, there existed the invisible creation, part of which consisted of souls, which, for certain causes known to God alone, were cast down into this valley of tears, this scene of our affliction and our pilgrimage.

— Jerome, Commentary on Ephesians (on 1:4), as quoted and owned by Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, I.22.⁴ On the resurrection body (on Eph. 5:28–29, “he that loveth his own wife loveth himself”), the commentary presses toward the dissolution of the flesh and of sex that the apokatastasis implies:

Let us men then cherish our wives and let our souls cherish our bodies in such a way as that the wives may be turned into men and the bodies into spirits … so we who are to be like the angels may begin here to be what it is promised that we shall be in heaven.

— Jerome, Commentary on Ephesians (on 5:28–29), as quoted by Rufinus, Apology against Jerome, I.23.² And in expounding “the restitution of all things” Jerome describes the restoring of every rational creature to its first estate — “the apostate angel shall begin to be that which he was by his creation, and that man who had been cast out of paradise shall be restored again to the cultivation of paradise.”⁴

Rufinus's sharpest thrust is textual. Where the “another” screen might excuse the earlier passages, at Eph. 1:12 (“we who had before hoped in Christ,” Greek proêlpikotas) Jerome, Rufinus argues, drops the mask — explaining the word “according to the same ideas which we argued in a former place to be necessary,” that is, adopting the pre-existence reading in his own voice — and then introduces “another, who does not admit” that we existed before the body, forcing the dilemma: if the “another” who teaches pre-existence is a heretic, Jerome has condemned himself; if a catholic, then pre-existence is catholic doctrine. On Rufinus's reading the anonymous voice that vindicates God's justice by pre-existent merit is, throughout, Jerome's own.²

Adversarial assessment

What holds. That Jerome's early Ephesians commentary carries real Origenist content, relayed with unmistakable warmth, is not seriously in doubt — the passages are in the text, and the modern consensus (Clark) is that Jerome's dissociation from them is so faint that it is hard to say he then thought Origen wrong at all. The chronology sharpens the point in Rufinus's favour: the commentary belongs to c. 386, “when the name of Origen was highly esteemed in the world, and when as yet his work the Peri Archon had not reached the ears of the Latins” — and Jerome's ferocious anti-Origenism is a later posture. So the modest form of the charge — that the young Jerome was far more sympathetic to Origen's pre-existence and restoration than his later self-portrait admits, and that his reversal is genuine — stands, and Jerome's retrospective “I always opposed these doctrines” is special pleading.³

What is overstated. Rufinus drives the charge past what the evidence carries when he makes it mean that Jerome dogmatically held and professed Origen's doctrines as settled belief. Three things qualify it.

The genre relays rival readings. A commentary's task, as Jerome answers, “is to interpret another man's words … it enumerates the opinions of many persons, and says, Some interpret the passage in this sense, some in that … Is the commentator to be held responsible for all these different interpretations … because he puts down the expositions given by many?” He had said as much in his preface, promising to cull from Origen, Didymus, and Apollinarius and to mark “how far the work is due to me, how far to others.” Reporting a reading is not the same act as confessing it.⁵

Jerome did append his own contrary conclusions. He is not simply silent after voicing the Origenist view. On Eph. 1:4 he closes against pre-existence — “the Apostle does not say ‘He chose us … because we were then holy,’ but ‘that we might be holy’” — and points out that he wrote “another who wishes to vindicate” God's justice, “I did not say who succeeds in vindicating” it; and on the restitution passage he expressly frames the restoration of all things as “another heresy,” comparing two heresies rather than professing one. These are thin dissociations, but they are not nothing, and they cut against reading every “another” as a confession.⁵

The forensic “the ‘other’ is always you” is a rhetorician's inference, not a proof. Rufinus's strongest single move — the Eph. 1:12 unmasking — is genuinely telling, and Jerome, notably, never answers it: his own five-passage defence covers only the charges his brother Paulinian had relayed from memory, and the Eph. 1:12 passage, where his screen slips worst, is not among them. But an unanswered passage is not the same as a professed creed. That the young Jerome found Origen's justice-of-God argument attractive is probable; that he laid it down as his fixed teaching, the way he later condemned it, the text does not establish.

Assessment

Contested. By the historical and text-critical lights the charge is strong: Jerome's early Ephesians commentary really does relay the pre-existence of souls and the restitution of all things, with a sympathy his later self-defence conceals, and his anti-Origenism is a genuine reversal, not a lifelong constancy. As the categorical claim Rufinus's polemic drives at — that Jerome was an Origenist who dogmatically professed these doctrines — it is weaker: the commentary's genre, Jerome's appended counter-readings, and his explicit labelling of the apokatastasis as “another heresy” all leave room between relaying a view with interest and holding it as settled belief. Two distinctions keep the question honest and should not be collapsed: reported versus held, and early versus mature Jerome. The likeliest reading honours both — the young Jerome was warmly, perhaps half-persuadedly, drawn to Origen's speculations and relayed them as more than a neutral cataloguer would; he is not shown to have professed them as fixed doctrine; and his mature “I only ever praised the exegete, never the theologian” downplays how deep the early sympathy ran. Jerome's self-exculpation is flagged on his page; Rufinus's overreach — pressing a real observation into a forensic certainty — on his.

Sources