HistoricalChristian.Faith

Was Rufinus's draft Peri Archon interpolated before it reached Rome?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — that the Trinitarian sentence read out against Rufinus at Milan in 398 was planted in his papers by a forger does not hold on its best case. A simpler reconstruction covers the same facts: the sentence was a long-notorious quotation of Peri Archon I.1 that had been circulating in Latin since 395, an unrevised draft that rendered the Greek at that point would have carried something very like it, and Rufinus's own Apology concedes both that he suppressed something at this very passage and that the words may have stood in the Greek. What does hold is the grievance underneath the charge — that uncorrected papers were taken and used against their author — and that Jerome's defence of the man who used them fails on its own terms.

Related arguments: Rufinus's translation of Origen — see also Were Origen's heterodox passages heretical interpolations rather than his own teaching? · Was Rufinus's doctrinal “smoothing” of Origen a defensible translation method?

The claim

Rufinus's Latin Peri Archon, at the place where Origen asks whether the divine nature is visible even to the Only-begotten, reads: “do not dismiss my answer as if it were impious or absurd, for I will at once give you my reason for it” — and then goes on to the distinction between seeing (a property of bodies) and knowing (proper to intellectual natures). What was recited against him in Italy read otherwise:

Well, in the place of the words which I had written, “I will at once give you my reason for it” they put the following words: “Do not dismiss my answer as if it were impious or absurd, for, as the Son does not see the Father, so the Holy Spirit also does not see the Son.”

— Rufinus, Apology against Jerome, I.19, link. The claim advanced here is that this divergence is a forgery: that the papers obtained from Rufinus — a translation still uncorrected and in very few hands — were deliberately doctored to plant a heresy on him before they were carried through Italy.¹

Who advances it

The charge is Rufinus's, laid in the first book of his Apology, addressed to his patron Apronianus at the end of 400. He does not name the culprit there, calling him only “the man who was sent from their monastery to Rome as the greatest expert in calumny”; it is Jerome, answering, who supplies the name — Eusebius of Cremona, a monk of Jerome's Bethlehem house — and defends him by name. Rufinus later added, in a private letter Jerome quotes back at him, that Jerome's friends had bribed his secretary to get the uncorrected papers in the first place.² Modern treatments largely leave the charge unadjudicated: Elizabeth Clark reports it as Rufinus's account without endorsing it, and Christa Gray's study of the translating quarrel does not take it up at all. Paul Koetschau, editing the Peri Archon, implicitly rejected it — he printed the disputed sentence as Origen's own and read the episode as Rufinus suppressing a genuine line rather than opponents inventing one.³

The evidence for

The charge is specific, public, and made to witnesses who could contradict it. Rufinus does not merely deny; he reproduces both readings, states where the substitution falls, and appeals to two living men who had the papers in hand — Apronianus, to whom the Apology is addressed, and Macarius, for whom the translation was made: “both of you read my papers themselves at the first, even before they had been completed, and you have by you the completely corrected copies. You can bear witness to what I say.” He then anathematizes the imputed opinion twice over, in the strongest terms available to him, and adds the internal-improbability argument: the same four books discuss the Trinity “almost as much as one in each page,” and a reader would be “mad or fatuous” to convict an author on one paragraph of a heresy he combats in the thousand others.¹

The means were trivially available — and Jerome's denial that they were is the weakest thing he wrote about the affair. Jerome's defence is that Eusebius could not have done it: “How could a man who only knows Latin change anything in a translation from the Greek?” But nobody alleged that the Greek was touched. The papers Eusebius had were Latin; the substitution alleged is of one Latin clause for another; no Greek is required for it. Worse for the defence, the sentence itself was already sitting on Eusebius's own desk in Latin. Three years earlier Eusebius — “altogether unacquainted with the Greek language,” as Jerome himself then wrote — had begged Jerome to render Epiphanius's letter to John of Jerusalem into Latin for his private use; and that translation, in Jerome's own hand, contains the formula almost word for word, with its address: “The Son, he tells us, cannot see the Father, and the Holy Spirit cannot see the Son. These words occur in his book On First Principles; thus we read, and thus Origen has spoken.” The one mechanism Jerome calls impossible needed nothing but a copy Eusebius had asked him for.⁴

The conduct fits the charge, and Jerome would not defend it. The two men were living as neighbours in Rome, Rufinus says, seeing each other often and joining “together in prayer”; a reader who found a blasphemy in a friend's unfinished draft had only to walk down the street with it. Instead the papers went “to private houses, to ladies, to monasteries, to Christian men one by one,” and were produced just as their bearer was leaving the city, “so that he might not be arraigned” — then carried the length of Italy. On this Jerome does not defend his friend at all: “I did not approve his accusing you, nor of any Christian accusing another Christian; for what need is there that matters which can be corrected or set right in private should be published abroad to the stumbling and fall of many?” And the milieu was one in which the accusation was not far-fetched: it was Jerome who, in 395, had described the theft of that same Epiphanius translation from Eusebius's desk as the work of “a second Judas” who had been “bribed.”⁵

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Two things, and they are not small. First, the underlying fact is not in dispute between the parties: what went round Italy in 398 was a pirated, unrevised draft, not a published book, and its author had not been consulted — Jerome's answer is that the fault for that lies with Rufinus's “sloth and delay in putting off their correction,” which concedes the circumstance while redistributing the blame. Second, Jerome's positive defence of Eusebius collapses under examination: the Greek-versus-Latin objection answers a charge nobody made, the appeal to “a man of saintly character” is character evidence, and the argument that an insertion into so tightly-knit a work “must at once show out like a patch on a garment” cuts the wrong way — the alleged substitution is one short clause for another of like length and function, which is precisely the kind of change that would not show.⁶

What does not hold. The forgery charge itself — that someone composed the sentence and planted it — fails on four counts.

The sentence needed no forger; it was the standard quotation of that very chapter. The formula was in circulation a quarter-century before Rufinus took up the Peri Archon. Epiphanius had quoted it in the Ancoratus (374) and again in the Panarion, where it heads his indictment: “Origen claims, and at once dares, if you please, to say first that the Only-begotten Son cannot see the Father, and neither can the Spirit behold the Son … And this is his first downfall.” It reached Latin in 395 in Jerome's version of Epiphanius's letter, expressly referred to On First Principles; Jerome put it first among the eight Origenist errors in his Against John of Jerusalem; Justinian quotes it in the sixth century; by Isidore it has become the definition of the sect. So a draft that rendered Origen's Greek at this passage before Rufinus smoothed it would have read something very like the disputed line, and any hostile reader could supply the line from memory. A charge of forgery has to explain a divergence no forgery is required to produce.⁷

Rufinus concedes, twice, what the innocent explanation needs. Defending the passage he insists it is harmless — and then adds that “there were some words in the Greek, which perhaps were somewhat incautiously used, and which I thought it well to avoid using.” He had already announced the policy in his preface: wherever he found “anything contrary to the truth concerning the Trinity … I have either omitted it as a foreign and not genuine expression or set it down in terms agreeing with the rule of faith.” And when an accuser answered him “that it was so in the Greek, but that I had, of purpose, changed it in the Latin,” Rufinus's reply was not a flat denial but a fallback: “even supposing that the words did stand so in the Greek, and I had changed them in the Latin, this is nothing more than I had said in my Preface that I should do.” A man certain that no state of his text ever carried the sentence does not need that sentence.⁸

The two pleas compete with each other. Jerome's sharpest point is not about Greek but about logic: “If the papers were uncorrected and had not undergone their final revision, the errors in them must be imputed not to Eusebius but to your sloth … But if, as you assert, Eusebius falsified them, why do you put forward the allegation that they were uncorrected? For papers whether corrected or uncorrected are equally susceptible of falsification.” The observation is fair. The unrevised state of the draft is doing all the explanatory work already; adding a forger to it is redundant. And the same pressure tells on the bribe: if, as Rufinus says, a few friends already had copies, no secretary needed buying — Jerome's demand for particulars (“Tell us the secretary's name, the amount of the bribe, the place, the intermediary, the recipient”) and his challenge to “produce the genuine papers which have not been falsified” went unanswered.⁶

Nothing survives to test the charge, and the wording of the “forgery” is unstable. The clause is in no manuscript of Rufinus's Latin Peri Archon: where a modern edition prints it at I.1.8 it is the editor's own insertion, taken from Jerome and marked as such. Nor do the witnesses agree on its wording — Rufinus reports it in one form, Jerome quotes it in another and Epiphanius in a third — which suits a slogan travelling in several Latin dresses better than a single doctored exemplar copied about. Set against that, Jerome's claim that the circulating copies “agree and coincide with one another so completely that there is not the difference of a single stroke” is a claim we cannot check either way.⁹

One further caution about the shape of the charge, rather than its substance: the year before, in the De Adulteratione, Rufinus had already told the story of Hilary of Poitiers's book being doctored into heresy — “whether, as some said, by bribing his secretary” — and had built a whole thesis on such cases. When the same script is applied to his own papers a year later, it is at least worth asking whether the template shaped the accusation. That is a suspicion, not a refutation.¹⁰

Assessment

Weak. On its best available case the interpolation charge does not stand. The sentence Rufinus disowned was not the kind of thing a forger had to invent: it was the most quoted line ever fathered on Peri Archon I.1, in Latin and in wide circulation for three years before the quarrel, so an unrevised draft rendering that passage literally would have looked much as the recited copy did. Rufinus's own Apology supplies the rest — his admission that he avoided some incautious Greek at this very place, his preface's declared licence to omit or rewrite exactly such a line, and his fallback that even if the Greek did read so his changing it was only what he had promised. Against that, the evidence he offers is his own denial, an anathema, and an appeal to two friends whose testimony never reached the record; the bribe he alleged came with no particulars and the unfalsified papers he was challenged to produce were never produced. None of this convicts him of lying: the milieu really did doctor texts, he really was accused behind his back, and the divergence he complained of really existed. But the divergence has an explanation that needs no forger, and it is the explanation his own words keep half-conceding. What deserves to survive from his complaint is the grievance rather than the accusation — that an unfinished draft was taken and read against its author in his absence. Rufinus's overstatement of it into a criminal charge is flagged on his page; Jerome's defence of Eusebius, which answers a charge nobody made and rests on the man's good character, is no better, and is flagged on his.

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