HistoricalChristian.Faith

Jerome in the Origenist Controversy

Dates: c. 347–420 · Wikipedia
Summary: Jerome of Stridon — monk, scholar, and translator of the Vulgate — was in his youth Rufinus's dearest friend and himself an ardent student of Origen. The letters he sent from the Syrian desert in 374, aching for Rufinus to join him, are the warmest record of that friendship. This page covers those origins and the first open breach — his siding with Epiphanius against Bishop John of Jerusalem, his tract Against John, and the tense reconciliation of Easter 397 — and then the spark that reopened the war: Rufinus's Latin Origen throwing Jerome's own Origenism back at him, and Jerome's furious two-front answer (397–399); and finally the open literary war — Rome's condemnation of Origen, his service as the Latin voice of Theophilus of Alexandria's campaign, and his three-book Apology against Rufinus, which not even a bishop's plea for peace could stop before the two old friends died estranged (399–405); and, last, the cold contempt that outlived his rival — the “scorpion” and “Grunnius” with which Jerome jeered over the dead Rufinus — set against the very different portrait a contemporary on the other side left of him (c. 411–420).

Origins and friendship (c. 370–386)

The Aquileia circle and its breakup

At Aquileia, about 370–373, Jerome shared the ascetic life with Rufinus, Bonosus, Hylas, and Heliodorus.¹ When the brotherhood was scattered and Jerome driven east, he wrote to Rufinus of the wrench with characteristic feeling:

After that sudden whirlwind dragged me from your side, severing with its impious wrench the bonds of affection in which we were knit together, “The dark blue raincloud lowered o'er my head: On all sides were the seas, on all the sky.”

— Jerome, Letter 3 (to Rufinus the Monk), §3, source. In the same letter, learning that Rufinus had reached the monks of Egypt, he wrote that he longed to see him “more than the storm-tossed mariner looks for his haven.”

The letters from Syria (374): urging Rufinus east

From Antioch and the desert of Chalcis, Jerome pressed Rufinus — then in Egypt — to come to Syria, and commended him to Florentius at Jerusalem, praising the newly-baptized Rufinus as one made “white as snow.”² A few months later, still hoping for a reunion, he asked Florentius to have copied for him the works of Hilary of Poitiers — the treatise On Synods and the commentary on the Psalms, which Jerome had once transcribed with his own hand at Trier — and noted that Rufinus held a borrowed copy of Tertullian:

I entreat you, therefore, to ask him to allow you to have the commentaries of the reverend Rhetitius, bishop of Augustodunum, copied, in which he has so eloquently explained the Song of Songs. A countryman of the aforesaid brother Rufinus, the old man Paul, writes that Rufinus has his copy of Tertullian, and urgently requests that this may be returned.

— Jerome, Letter 5 (to Florentius), §2, source.

Bethlehem, 386: neighbours again

After his own years in the East and at Rome, Jerome settled at Bethlehem with Paula in 386, a few miles from Rufinus's community on the Mount of Olives; the old friendship was renewed — “though not apparently with all its former warmth” — for some seven years of quiet before Origen divided them.³

The rift opens (392–397)

Epiphanius, and the ordination of Jerome's brother

When Epiphanius of Salamis came to Jerusalem and preached against Origen in Bishop John's own church (393–394), Jerome took Epiphanius's side against John and Rufinus. To place the Bethlehem monastery beyond John's reach, Epiphanius uncanonically ordained Jerome's brother Paulinian a priest within John's diocese — an act that enraged the bishop and broke Jerome openly with him. Epiphanius's half-apologetic letter to John, which Jerome himself turned into Latin (his Letter 51), names the friend who would become Jerome's great opponent:

But may God free you, my brother, and the holy people of Christ which is intrusted to you, and all the brothers who are with you, and especially the presbyter Rufinus, from the heresy of Origen, and other heresies, and from the perdition to which they lead.

— Epiphanius to John, in Jerome, Letter 51, §6, source.⁴

The stolen translation, and the manifesto on translating (395)

Epiphanius's letter was so admired that “all Palestine fought for copies of it,” and a monk of Jerome's own Bethlehem house, Eusebius of Cremona, who knew no Greek, asked him for a Latin version to read privately. Jerome dictated one, asking that it be kept private; eighteen months later it was stolen from Eusebius's desk and carried to Jerusalem, and Jerome found himself publicly accused of falsifying his original — of writing “dear friend” where the Greek had “honourable sir,” and of dropping a title. He answered with the letter that became his manifesto on translation, On the Best Method of Translating (Letter 57), which is at once a protest against the theft and a defence of free rendering:

What place of safety will be left us if we cannot conceal our secrets even within our own walls and our own writing-desks? … In translating from the Greek (except in the case of the holy scriptures where even the order of the words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word.

— Jerome, Letter 57 (to Pammachius), §§3, 5, source. Jerome believed Rufinus had put the accuser up to it. Two things in this episode return with a vengeance a few years later: the pilfered manuscript, and the principle. It is on this very letter that Rufinus would rest his own claim to have translated Origen freely — so the standard of fidelity Jerome pressed against him after 398 was one he had argued against in 395, when he was the accused party.⁵

Against John of Jerusalem (c. 396)

About 396 Jerome answered John's complaints to Rome with a fierce tract, To Pammachius Against John of Jerusalem, which scorned the bishop and, in a phrase he turned again and again against Rufinus, derided “your friends, who grin like dogs and turn up their noses.” The treatise was so bitter that, when the quarrel was patched up, Jerome broke it off and left it unpublished.⁶

The reconciliation of Easter 397

Before Rufinus left for Italy at Easter 397, the two were formally reconciled at the Church of the Resurrection, joining hands at a solemn eucharist; Jerome walked his old friend part of the way on his journey before their final parting. The peace would not hold — and whether it was ever a real healing of the friendship or only a conditional truce is a question in its own right. Jerome later insisted (in his Apology III.24) that he had parted in good faith and that the presbyters who followed Rufinus to Rome bore him no ill will — a self-exculpation Rufinus disputed, and which the timing strains.⁷

The spark, and Jerome's answer (397–399)

Rufinus's preface throws Jerome's Origenism back at him

In Italy, Rufinus translated Origen's Peri Archon (On First Principles), smoothing away what he judged heretical, and prefaced it with a pointed appeal to Jerome as the man who had done the same before him — the translator who had “rendered into Latin more than seventy of Origen's homiletical treatises” and, wherever the Greek “presents a stumbling block,” had “smoothed it down … so … that a Latin writer can find no word that is at variance with our faith.” The reminder was pointed because it was true: Jerome had once praised Origen lavishly, saying that “in dealing with the Song of Songs he surpasses himself.”⁸

A literal Peri Archon and a suppressed letter of peace

Stung, Jerome answered on two fronts. He made his own strictly literal Latin Peri Archon — to lay bare the very heresies Rufinus had softened — and sent it to Rome with a furious open letter to Pammachius and Oceanus (Letter 84), insisting his old praise had been for Origen the exegete, never the theologian:

I have praised the commentator but not the theologian, the man of intellect but not the believer, the philosopher but not the apostle.

— Jerome, Letter 84 (to Pammachius and Oceanus), §2, source.⁹ At the same time he wrote Rufinus a private, conciliatory letter (Letter 81), protesting that when reconciled to a man he did not “while offering him bread with one hand, hold a stone in the other.” But he sent it by way of Pammachius, who “treacherously suppressed it” — so the olive branch never reached Rufinus, and the breach became open and permanent.¹⁰ Jerome's literal translation itself is lost; it survives only in the fragments he later quoted in his Letter 124 to Avitus (c. 409/410).¹¹

The open war (399–403)

Rome turns; Origen is condemned

The ground shifted in Jerome's favour. In November 399 Pope Siricius, who had shielded Rufinus, died; his successor Anastasius I stood closer to Jerome's Roman friends Marcella and Pammachius. Prompted by a letter from Theophilus of Alexandria — now the fiercest of the anti-Origenists — a Roman synod under Anastasius condemned Origen's errors, as did synods at Alexandria and, in 401, on Cyprus. What had been Jerome's private crusade was becoming the verdict of the churches.¹²

Theophilus's Latin voice (400–405)

What turned the tide was not Jerome's pen but Alexandria's. Theophilus — who had once protected the Origenist monks — expelled them from Nitria in 400 and wrote to Bethlehem to enlist Jerome: “we have cut down with the prophet's sickle certain wicked fanatics … Do you therefore on your part … make haste to bring back with scriptural discourses those who have been deceived.” Jerome answered with undisguised triumph — “The old serpent hisses no longer, but, writhing and disembowelled, lurks in dark caverns” — asked for the synod's decrees to strengthen his hand, and passed on a Roman priest's report that “Rome and almost the whole of Italy owe their deliverance after Christ to your letters.”¹³ From then on Jerome was the campaign's translator into Latin: Theophilus's synodical letter of 400 and his paschal letters of 401, 402, and 404 all reached the West in Jerome's version.¹⁴ When the campaign consumed John Chrysostom — deposed by Theophilus's synod at the Oak in 403, exiled in 404 — Theophilus sent Jerome his violent invective against the fallen bishop to be Latinized for Western readers, and Jerome did it, apologizing only for the delay: an Isaurian raid, a hard winter, famine, and an illness that brought him “to the threshold of death.” His covering note describes the method he used — in the same season he was arraigning Rufinus for it:

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.

— Jerome, Letter 114 (to Theophilus), §3, source.¹⁵

The Apology against Rufinus (Books I–II, 402)

At the beginning of Spring 402 Pammachius and Marcella sent Jerome the chief heads of Rufinus's Apology — they could not lay hands on a full copy — and urged him to answer. He did, from Bethlehem, with two books of his own Apology against Rufinus, addressed to those same friends. Book II worked methodically through Rufinus's Apology to Anastasius, treating the translator's-plea and the professions of faith as so much evasion, and pressing the charge of Origenism back onto his old friend.¹⁶

Book III, Chromatius's plea, and the unhealed breach

A third book followed in 402/403, answering a private letter of Rufinus that has not survived — one that, by Jerome's account, renewed the accusations and hinted its writer could produce facts to destroy him. Bishop Chromatius of Aquileia begged both men to stop; Rufinus obeyed and fell silent, but Jerome insisted he could not leave a “capital charge” unanswered, and fired the last shot — though he framed it as a call to lay down arms together:

We once were zealous in our praise of Origen; let us be equally zealous in condemning him now that he is condemned by the whole world. Let us join hands and hearts …

— Jerome, Apology against Rufinus, III.9, source. Even Augustine wrote urging peace. It never came: the two friends of Aquileia died unreconciled.¹⁷

The cold epitaph (c. 411–414)

The scorpion “crushed by the Trinacrian soil”

Rufinus died in Sicily about 411; Jerome outlived him by nine years, and did not let the quarrel die with his rival. In the preface to his Commentary on Ezekiel — begun amid the news of Rome's fall and the deaths of Pammachius and Marcella — he greeted the passing of his old friend as the crushing of a venomous beast: Rufinus the “scorpion,” now lying dead under the soil of Sicily (Trinacria), pinned like the buried giants of myth between Enceladus and Porphyrion:

… a scar gradually covers a great wound: and Scorpius is pressed between Enceladus and Porphyrion and crushed by the Trinacrian soil, and the Hydra with many heads has at last ceased to hiss against us …

— Jerome, Commentary on Ezekiel, preface (book I), source.¹⁸

“Grunnius” the grunting pig

The scorpion was not the only nickname Jerome kept for Rufinus. For years he had caricatured him as “Grunnius” — the grunting hog of a burlesque popular in the schools, the Testament of the Piglet, whose hero is styled Marcus Grunnius Corocotta (“Mark Grunter Hog”). Even in a letter of spiritual counsel to a young monk, Letter 125 to Rusticus (411), he could not resist sketching his dead adversary as a pompous windbag:

When the grunter wished to speak he used to come forward at a snail's pace and to utter a word now and again with such long pauses between that he seemed less making a speech than gasping for breath. … At home he was a monster like Nero, abroad a paragon like Cato.

— Jerome, Letter 125 (to Rusticus), §18, source. He flung the same jibe in the Commentary on Ezekiel itself — the “heirs of the Grunnian faction” who “bark against” his Hebrew learning — and in the Commentary on Isaiah. It is an ugly coda to a friendship that had once been the warmest thing in his letters.¹⁹

How he looked from the other side (Palladius, c. 419–420)

Jerome wrote most of the surviving record of this quarrel, and the portrait it leaves is largely his own. One contemporary who knew both households drew a very different one. Palladius of Galatia, in the Lausiac History he composed about 419–420, praised Rufinus as a man than whom “a more learned … or a kinder … was not to be found among men,” and of Jerome recorded a monk's verdict and a prophecy:

A certain Jerome, a priest, distinguished Latin writer and cultivated scholar as he was, showed qualities of temper so disastrous that they threw into the shade his splendid achievements. … “The noble Paula, who looks after him, will die first and be freed from his bad temper, so I think. And because of this man no holy man will dwell in these parts, but his envy will include even his own brother.”

— Palladius, Lausiac History XXXVI.6–7 (Posidonius), source. Elsewhere he says Paula “was hindered by a certain Jerome from Dalmatia … he hindered her by his jealousy, having induced her to serve his own plan.” Palladius is no neutral witness — he was a disciple of Evagrius, tied to the Origenist monks Theophilus expelled, and Chrysostom's defender — and his translator notes that he “takes Rufinus' part unhesitatingly.” But that is the point: on the other side of this quarrel Jerome's temper, not his learning, was what men remembered.²⁰

Notes

• Jerome's Lives of Illustrious Men (De Viris Illustribus, c. 393), which closes with a chapter on Jerome himself and names many living contemporaries, gives Rufinus — by then a well-known scholar — no entry of his own. Written at the very opening of the rift, the omission is at least a suggestive silence.
• Jerome's early enthusiasm for Origen matters for what follows: his later attack on Origenism, and on Rufinus for translating Origen, is a reversal a critic could — and Rufinus later would — throw back at him.
• Jerome's self-exculpation — that he had praised only “the commentator but not the theologian” and had merely reported Origen's views in his Commentary on Ephesians, never held them — is weaker than he lets on. His own early commentary (c. 386) relays the pre-existence of souls and the restitution of all things with a sympathy his later account conceals, and his dissociations there are thin. The genre-defence (a commentator enumerates many views) has real force, but the claim that he was never himself drawn to these doctrines overstates the case: whether his Ephesians commentary convicts him of Origenism, or only of exegetical reporting, is weighed on its own page (assessment: contested).
• Jerome had the better of the argument over Rufinus's interpolation thesis — Origen's heresies really were Origen's own, not heretics' insertions — but he pressed his advantage too far. From Rufinus's admission that he had smoothed and omitted, Jerome concluded that Rufinus had falsified everything, and that nothing in the Latin Peri Archon could be trusted. That wholesale distrust, inherited by later critical editors, has itself been rolled back: modern scholarship finds Rufinus a more careful translator than Jerome allowed. The interpolation question is weighed on its own page (assessment: weak) — where Jerome's core point stands but his blanket charge is flagged as overreach.
• On translation method Jerome held the sounder principle — a disputed dogmatic work should be rendered as it stands, “without the patronage of the translator,” so the reader can judge it — but he did not hold it cleanly. His own Latin versions of Origen's homilies had smoothed away doctrinal stumbling-blocks (Rufinus quoted him to that effect), and his manifesto On the Best Method of Translating (Letter 57) champions sense-for-sense freedom. Nor was that an early position he had outgrown: in 405, with the Apology against Rufinus only three years behind him, he handed Theophilus a Latin version of his invective against Chrysostom with the frank note that he had “not indeed given a word-for-word rendering … Some words may be missing but none of the sense is lost” — and a complaint had already been lodged that his rendering of the previous year's paschal letter was inaccurate. So the “fidelity” he pressed over the Peri Archon was a principle he raised selectively, as a weapon. Whether his exposing literalism or Rufinus's edifying smoothing was the responsible method is weighed on its own page (assessment: contested).
• Jerome was right to doubt that Rufinus's draft Peri Archon had been criminally doctored, but his defence of the friend who circulated it — Eusebius of Cremona — was poorly made. “How could a man who only knows Latin change anything in a translation from the Greek?” answers a charge nobody brought: the papers in question were Latin, and the substitution alleged was of one Latin clause for another. Nor did Eusebius need Greek to know the sentence; it stood almost word for word in the Latin version of Epiphanius's letter that Jerome had made for him, at his own request, in 395. The rest of the defence rests on Eusebius's good character and on the claim that an insertion would show “like a patch on a garment” — which is just what a one-clause substitution would not do. Jerome's genuinely telling point lies elsewhere, in the dilemma that an unrevised draft explains the divergence without any forger at all. The charge is weighed on its own page (assessment: weak).
• See the controversy timeline and Rufinus's parallel page.

Sources