Was Rufinus's doctrinal “smoothing” of Origen a defensible translation method, or Jerome's literal fidelity the responsible one?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the quarrel exposes a real and unresolved fourth-century tension between faithful and edifying translation, and neither man is consistent. By the standards of scholarship — ancient and modern — a version of a disputed dogmatic work that quietly corrects the author's doctrine defeats its own purpose: it hides from the reader the very thing in question, and here Jerome's ideal of a text laid bare “without the patronage of the translator” is the sounder principle. Yet Rufinus's method was not the fraud Jerome painted: he disclosed it in his preface, he sincerely held the passages to be interpolations, edifying/ad-sensum translation was an accepted norm, and Jerome himself had smoothed doctrinal “stumbling-blocks” out of Origen's homilies and preached sense-for-sense translation elsewhere — so his “fidelity” was a principle selectively raised as a weapon. Each was half-right; the question has no clear winner.

The claim

Beneath the personal feud lay a genuine dispute about the ethics of translation. When Rufinus put Origen's Peri Archon (On First Principles) into Latin, he did not render the Greek as it stood: wherever he met a passage he judged heretical he silently corrected it, and he said so openly in his preface — his rule was to follow his predecessors and

— Rufinus, Preface to the Translation of Origen's Peri Archon (Jerome, Letter 80).¹ He restated the principle in the preface to the later books: “not to set down in my translation things evidently contradictory to our belief and to the author's opinions as elsewhere expressed, but to pass them over as not genuine but inserted by others.”² Jerome answered with a strictly literal Latin Peri Archon made expressly to expose what Rufinus had softened, and charged that a translator owes his author's actual words: “If you had kept faith as a translator, it would not have been necessary for me to counteract your false translation by my true one.”³ The question here is not whether Origen's heresies were really interpolations (that premise is weighed separately, and found weak) but the narrower methodological one: granting that a translator sometimes meets a corrupt line, was Rufinus's practice of silently reconciling his author to orthodoxy a defensible way to translate — or was Jerome's exposing literalism the responsible method?

The case for Rufinus's method

He disclosed it; it was not a forgery. The sharpest thing said against Rufinus — that he “falsified” Origen — sits awkwardly with the fact that he announced his method on the first page. A reader of the preface knew he was getting an Origen with the doctrinal stumbling-blocks removed; Rufinus even adjured every copyist, “in the sight of God,” to add and alter nothing further. That is not the behaviour of a man passing off a counterfeit, but of one practising an openly-avowed editorial policy.¹

Edifying translation was an accepted norm. Fourth-century translators did not work to a modern canon of verbatim fidelity. Free, sense-for-sense rendering — abridging, clarifying, adapting idiom — was the ordinary practice for everything but Scripture, and the NPNF editor cautions that “the standard of literary exactness … was not the same in those days as in ours,” adding that the very licence Rufinus claimed to smooth an original was one Jerome had defended in principle. Presenting a revered but dangerous author “at his best,” to protect simple readers from what would only scandalize them, was a recognized pastoral good, not an eccentricity.⁴

Jerome had done the same, and preached it. Rufinus's preface needled a real inconsistency. He pointed out — truthfully — that Jerome, in Latinizing more than seventy of Origen's homilies, had himself smoothed the Greek so that “wherever the Greek text presents a stumbling block, he has smoothed it down … so … that a Latin writer can find no word that is at variance with our faith.” And in his own manifesto On the Best Method of Translating (Letter 57), Jerome had laid down that “in translating from the Greek — except in the case of the holy scriptures — I render sense for sense and not word for word.” Rufinus appealed to that very letter as his warrant. A man who smooths Origen's homilies and champions sense-for-sense translation is not well placed to indict another for smoothing Origen.⁵

The case for Jerome's fidelity

Method must fit the work's purpose. Jerome's answer is stronger than a bare charge of hypocrisy allows, because he draws a real distinction. He does not repent of smoothing the homilies, and he does not say a translator must always be literal; he says the kind of work governs the kind of translation. Practical, edifying homilies may be pruned to give the reader Origen's best; but a dogmatic treatise whose orthodoxy is the whole matter in dispute must be rendered as it stands, so that the reader can judge it:

— Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, II.⁶ On that view the two men were doing opposite things with the same text: to translate the Peri Archon and quietly make it orthodox is not to translate it at all but to answer the question it was cited to raise.

Smoothing a disputed text defeats its own purpose. This is the decisive point, and it is one of scholarship, not merely of polemic. The Peri Archon was being translated precisely so that the Latin church could weigh Origen's orthodoxy. A version that has already corrected the suspect doctrines cannot serve that end: it hides the evidence and pre-empts the verdict. Jerome's stated ideal — recalled a decade later to Avitus — was a rendering that gave “an unbiased picture of the merits and demerits of the work,” a text laid bare absque interpretis patrocinio, “without the patronage of the translator.” Whatever his motives, that is the responsible principle for a contested dogmatic text: let the reader see what the author wrote.⁷

Adversarial assessment

Where Jerome is right. As scholarship — as a way of putting a disputed author before readers who must judge him — fidelity wins, and Rufinus's method is indefensible. His Latin Peri Archon obscures exactly what was in question; to “set down” passages “in terms agreeing with the rule of faith” is to make Origen say what the translator wishes he had said. And the recent study of the controversy by Christa Gray confirms how much more than linguistic accuracy was at stake: translators of Jerome's and Rufinus's standing were valued as guarantors — their theological authority vouched for the text — so a translator who silently doctored his author abused the trust that made his version worth having.⁷

Where Jerome is not clean. But the verdict is not a simple win, for three reasons. First, Jerome's “fidelity” was a principle he raised when it suited him and had violated when it did not: his own homily-translations smoothed doctrinal stumbling-blocks, not mere idiom, and his sense-for-sense manifesto conceded wide latitude to alter an original — so the high ground he took over the Peri Archon was ground he did not consistently hold. Nor can the manifesto be set aside as a youthful position he later abandoned: in 405, three years after the Apology against Rufinus, Jerome sent Theophilus of Alexandria a Latin version of his invective against John Chrysostom with an unembarrassed statement of the same method — “I have not indeed given a word-for-word rendering, as skilled translators do, nor have I counted out the money you have given to me coin by coin; but I have given you full weight. Some words may be missing but none of the sense is lost” — and he had already had to enclose a Greek original with one of Theophilus's paschal letters because complaints of inaccuracy had been made about his rendering of the previous year's. Whatever the merits of the purpose-fit distinction, the man pressing it was, in the same years and on polemical texts of his own side, translating ad sensum.⁸ Second, his literal version was itself a weapon, not a disinterested edition: he made it to convict Rufinus, and he pressed his advantage into the opposite excess — the charge that Rufinus had therefore falsified everything, a wholesale distrust modern textual scholarship has had to roll back. Third, judged by the looser translational norms of his own century rather than ours, Rufinus's edifying method was a recognized option, openly declared, not the crime Jerome's rhetoric made it. The honest picture is of two men each holding half of a truth the age had not yet reconciled: a translation should be faithful to what the author wrote, and a translator bears a pastoral responsibility for what his rendering will do in the reader's hands — and these two duties, in the case of a heretic's masterwork, genuinely pull apart.

Assessment

Contested. The methodological quarrel has no clear winner. On the question actually in dispute — how to translate a revered author whose orthodoxy is on trial — Jerome's principle is the sounder: a corrected text cannot honestly serve as evidence of the doctrine it has corrected, and his ideal of a version “without the patronage of the translator” is the responsible one, endorsed by scholarship ancient and modern. But that principle indicts Jerome nearly as much as Rufinus, since he had smoothed Origen himself and deployed “fidelity” selectively as a polemical weapon; and Rufinus's method, far from being fraud, was disclosed, sincerely motivated, and within an accepted fourth-century convention of edifying translation. The dispute is strong by one discipline's lights and weak by another's — textual scholarship favours Jerome, the history of translation partly excuses Rufinus — and neither man is consistent enough to claim the field. It is best read not as a contest one side won but as an early, unresolved collision between faithful and edifying translation. Rufinus's overreach — presenting a doctored Peri Archon as Origen — is flagged on his page; Jerome's — the selectively-brandished fidelity and the wholesale falsification charge — on his.

Sources