HistoricalChristian.Faith

Rufinus of Aquileia in the Origenist Controversy

Dates: c. 344/345–411 · Wikipedia
Summary: Tyrannius Rufinus, monk, priest, and translator, was Jerome's closest friend of youth and later his bitterest opponent. His long formation in the Greek East — above all his years in Egypt under Didymus the Blind — gave him the lifelong devotion to Origen that would set the two men against each other after 393. This page covers the friendship's origins and the first open breach — his rebuff of the heresy-hunter Atarbius, his siding with Bishop John of Jerusalem against Epiphanius, and the tense reconciliation of Easter 397 — and then the spark that reopened it all: his Latin translation of Origen's On First Principles and its preface naming Jerome as his precedent (397–399); and finally the open literary war — his Apology to Anastasius, his Apology against Jerome turning the heresy-charge back on his accuser, and the silence a bishop's plea won from him while Jerome fought on (399–403); and finally his last years as a prolific translator of the Greek fathers, his flight before Alaric, and his death in Sicily about 411, still unreconciled with Jerome — and the warm portrait a contemporary who knew him left of him a decade after (401–420).

Origins and formation (c. 344–386)

Birth near Aquileia and baptism there

Rufinus was born about the year 344 or 345 at Concordia, in the north-Italian territory between Aquileia and Altinum, and was baptized about his twenty-eighth year while living in the monastic community at Aquileia.¹ Jerome, writing in 374 of the newly-baptized Rufinus, set his friend's purity against his own sense of sin:

He has but now washed himself and is clean, yea, is made white as snow; whilst I, stained with every sin, wait day and night with trembling to pay the uttermost farthing.

— Jerome, Letter 4 (to Florentius), §2, source.

The Aquileia ascetic circle

At Aquileia, about 370–373, Rufinus belonged to the ascetic brotherhood that also gathered Jerome, Bonosus, Hylas, and Heliodorus — the friendship's high point.² When the company scattered, Rufinus “joined the noble Roman lady, Melania, in her pilgrimage to the East” about 372.³

Egypt: Didymus the Blind and the desert

In Egypt Rufinus studied for some six years at Alexandria — a pupil of Didymus the Blind (and later of Theophilus) — and lived among the desert hermits, drinking in the love of Origen that would mark him for life; he suffered imprisonment and banishment under Lucius, the Arian bishop of Alexandria.⁴

The Mount of Olives and ordination at Jerusalem

About 379–380 Melania settled on the Mount of Olives, where Rufinus gathered a community of monks that he would lead for some eighteen years; he was ordained priest at Jerusalem about 386, around the time John succeeded Cyril in that see.⁵ When Jerome arrived at Bethlehem, a few miles off, that same year, the old friendship was renewed — “though not apparently with all its former warmth.”⁶

The rift opens (392–397)

Atarbius rebuffed; siding with Bishop John

About 392, when the monk Atarbius came to Jerusalem demanding that both he and Jerome subscribe a repudiation of Origen, Rufinus — unlike Jerome, who complied — refused him an interview and “treated him with merited scorn.” When Epiphanius of Salamis then preached against Origen in Bishop John's church (393–394), Rufinus stood with John, appearing, in Fremantle's account, “as the chief of a chorus of presbyters who applauded their own bishop and derided Epiphanius as a ‘silly old man.’”⁷

The reconciliation of Easter 397

Reconciled to Jerome at the Church of the Resurrection at Easter 397, Rufinus set out for Italy with Melania, Jerome accompanying him part of the way. The peace did not last: within a few years Rufinus's Latin translation of Origen's On First Principles — and its preface, which appealed to Jerome's own past praise of Origen — would reopen the quarrel in earnest. Rufinus afterwards treated the peace as a settled one that Jerome had betrayed — “You gave us all the signs of peace at our departure, and then threw missiles charged with venom from behind our backs” — but that the reconciliation was conditional and short-lived from the start is weighed on its own page.⁸

The spark: Rufinus's Latin Origen (397–399)

Italy, Pinetum, and Macarius

Late in 397 Rufinus reached Italy with Melania and was welcomed by Paulinus of Nola. Settling for a time at Pinetum, near Terracina, he was pressed by the monk Macarius, whose “persistence” was so great that “even want of ability cannot resist it,” to give Origen to Latin readers. There he translated the martyr Pamphilus's Apology for Origen and “supplemented” it “by a short treatise” of his own, On the Falsification of the Works of Origen, arguing that heretics had corrupted Origen's genuine text.⁹

The preface to the Peri Archon that named Jerome

At Macarius's urging Rufinus then translated Origen's Peri Archon (On First Principles), openly smoothing away what he took to be heretical interpolations. His preface to Macarius pointed — without naming him — to Jerome as the precedent who had done the same:

He has rendered into Latin more than seventy of Origen's homiletical treatises and a few also of his commentaries upon the apostle; and in these wherever the Greek text presents a stumbling block, he has smoothed it down in his version and has so emended the language used that a Latin writer can find no word that is at variance with our faith.

— Rufinus, Preface to the Translation of Origen's Peri Archon (Jerome, Letter 80), source. Rufinus was throwing back at Jerome his own past enthusiasm — the glowing preface in which Jerome had said that, “while in his other books Origen surpasses all former writers, in dealing with the Song of Songs he surpasses himself.” This public reminder of Jerome's Origenism was the spark of the open war.¹⁰

The uncorrected papers, and Eusebius of Cremona

Rufinus's own account of how the storm broke is not that his book was read and answered, but that his unfinished draft was taken and doctored. The translation, he says, was still uncorrected and in very few hands when Eusebius of Cremona — a monk of Jerome's house, “sent from their monastery to Rome” — obtained a copy in which a sentence about the Trinity had been replaced, and recited it publicly at Milan; challenged, he said the copy had come from a woman named Marcella. What galled Rufinus was that the two were living as neighbours in Rome at the time, seeing each other often and joining “together in prayer,” and yet:

he did not bring to me as their author the documents which he was determined to incriminate, but carried them round to private houses, to ladies, to monasteries, to Christian men one by one, wherever he might make trouble by his ex parte statements. And he did this just when he was about to leave Rome, so that he might not be arraigned. … Afterwards, by the directions, as I am told, of his master, he went about all through Italy, accusing me, stirring up the people, throwing confusion into the churches, poisoning even the minds of the bishops.

— Rufinus, Apology against Jerome, I.21, source. He met the substance of the charge head-on, anathematizing the opinion the interpolated line ascribed to him, and argued that a single sentence could not outweigh the hundreds of orthodox Trinitarian passages in the same four books. Later he added that Jerome's friends had bought the draft from his secretary. Jerome denied the bribe, said he had not approved of the accusing, and defended Eusebius on the ground that a man who knew only Latin could not have tampered with a version made from the Greek — and countered that it was Rufinus's side that had stolen a document from Eusebius's cell years before. The papers on both sides are lost. Rufinus's grievance is a real one, but the criminal charge he built on it overreaches: the sentence he disowned was the most-quoted line ever fathered on that chapter of Origen and had been circulating in Latin since 395, so an unrevised draft rendering the Greek would have looked much as the recited copy did — and Rufinus himself allows, a page later, that the words may have “stood so in the Greek” and that changing them was only what his preface had promised. The charge is weighed on its own page.¹¹

Withdrawal to Aquileia

When Jerome answered furiously from Bethlehem and his friends at Rome suppressed the private letter of peace Jerome had meant for him, Rufinus withdrew from Rome to Aquileia, where he was welcomed by its bishop, Chromatius.¹²

The open war (399–403)

The Apology to Anastasius (400)

When the friendly Pope Siricius died in 399 and Anastasius I — closer to Jerome's Roman circle — succeeded him, Rufinus's accusers pressed their case at Rome. Rather than travel there (“It was impossible for me to do this in person,” he wrote, newly home after thirty years abroad), Rufinus sent Anastasius a written profession of faith. He confessed the resurrection of “this very flesh in which we now live,” a coming judgment reaching even the devil, and — on the soul's origin, where he was most suspected — owned that after reading every opinion he was “up to the present moment unable to hold any of them as certain and absolute.” As for Origen he claimed only the translator's part:

I am not a defender or a champion of Origen; nor am I the first who has translated his works. Others before me had done the very same thing, and I did it, the last of many, at the request of my brethren.

— Rufinus, Apology to Anastasius, §7, source. His faith, he closed, was that “held by the Church of Rome, by that of Alexandria, and by my own church of Aquileia; and which is also preached at Jerusalem.”¹³

The Apology against Jerome (400/401)

From Aquileia, at the end of 400, Rufinus answered Jerome directly in two books of an Apology addressed to his patron Apronianus. He turned the heresy-charge back on his accuser: Jerome had pointed to his own Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians as proof that he opposed Origen — and it was exactly there, Rufinus retorted, that Jerome had taught Origen's own doctrines of pre-existent souls and universal restoration:

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, source.¹⁴

Anastasius's coldness, and the silence Chromatius asked

Rome gave Rufinus no comfort. Writing to John of Jerusalem, who had interceded for him, Anastasius condemned the translation and washed his hands of the translator — “I neither know nor wish to know either what he is doing or where he is living” — leaving Rufinus, as he put it, to “consider where he may obtain absolution.” When Jerome answered his Apology with three books of invective, Bishop Chromatius of Aquileia begged both men to let the quarrel die. Rufinus heeded him and made no public reply; Jerome did not, and had the last word. The two never reconciled.¹⁵

The last years: translator to the end, and death (401–411)

The great Latin translator of the Greek fathers

The quarrel with Jerome cost Rufinus his reputation but not his industry. In his last decade at Aquileia he did the work for which the Latin Middle Ages would most owe him: he rendered Eusebius's Church History into Latin for Bishop Chromatius (about 401, as a consolation amid the Gothic terror), adding two books of his own to bring the story down to his day; he translated Origen's Commentary on Romans (c. 405–406) for Heraclius, and Origen's homilies on the Pentateuch and Joshua, again for Chromatius; he put into Latin works of Basil and of Gregory of Nazianzus; and for Gaudentius of Brescia he translated the Clementine Recognitions. Through these versions — and above all through his Latin Peri Archon, the reason Origen's most daring work survives at all — the man Jerome had branded a heretic became one of the chief bridges between the Greek and Latin churches.¹⁶

Flight before Alaric, and death in Sicily

After some nine years at Aquileia, and after the death of his patron Chromatius (c. 405), Rufinus went to Rome as Alaric's Goths moved into northern Italy, joining the religious household of Melania the Younger — granddaughter of the elder Melania who had first led him to the East — as the party prepared to leave for Palestine. When Rome was sacked in August 410 he fled south with them toward Sicily, watching from across the strait as the Goths burned Rhegium; even then he did not stop working, finishing his version of Origen's homilies on Numbers on the island. He died in Sicily soon after, about 411. He and Jerome never reconciled — and Jerome, even over his grave, would not let the quarrel rest.¹⁷

The other portrait: how Palladius remembered him (c. 419–420)

Rufinus lost the literary war and most of the surviving record is his opponent's, so it is worth setting beside it the judgment of a contemporary who knew the Palestinian houses at first hand. Palladius of Galatia, writing his Lausiac History about 419–420, describes the twenty-seven years Rufinus and Melania the Elder spent receiving pilgrims on the Mount of Olives — bishops, monks, and virgins “at their own charges” — and says of him:

With her lived also the most noble Rufinus, from Italy, of the city of Aquileia, a man similar to her in character and very stedfast, who was afterwards judged worthy of the priesthood. A more learned man or a kinder than he was not to be found among men.

— Palladius, Lausiac History XLVI.5, source. Palladius is a partisan — a disciple of Evagrius, close to the Origenist monks Theophilus drove from Nitria, and Chrysostom's defender in exile — and his translator notes that he “takes Rufinus' part unhesitatingly in the famous quarrel.” His portrait is therefore no more neutral than Jerome's. But it is evidence that the verdict Jerome pronounced was not the only one his own century reached.¹⁸

Notes

• The Aquileia-circle Bonosus — Jerome's boyhood friend, later a hermit on an Adriatic island — is a different man from Bonosus of Sardica, the later Helvidian bishop.
• Rufinus's Egyptian formation under Didymus is the seed of the whole controversy: it is the source of the Origenism that Jerome, once an admirer of Origen himself, would later attack.
• Rufinus's counter-charge from Jerome's Commentary on Ephesians — that Jerome had himself taught Origen's pre-existence of souls and universal restoration — lands its modest form (the early Jerome really did relay those doctrines with sympathy) but overreaches in its forensic form: Rufinus presses that Jerome's anonymous “another” is always secretly himself and that reporting a reading equals professing it, a certainty a commentary's give-and-take will not quite bear. The reading is weighed on its own page (assessment: contested).
• The premise of Rufinus's “restoring” translation — his De Adulteratione thesis that Origen's heterodox passages are heretical interpolations, so a translator may prune them — overreaches in the same way. Its foundations are real (ancient texts were interpolated, Rufinus adduced genuine cases, Origen himself complained of being falsified), but as a general account of Origen's errors it fails: the pre-existence of souls, the subordination of the Son, and the apokatastasis are integral to Origen's system and present in his undisputed Greek, and Rufinus's own preface admits he not only omitted but rewrote passages “in terms agreeing with the rule of faith” — softening his author rather than removing intruders. The thesis is weighed on its own page (assessment: weak). Jerome's opposite excess — that Rufinus therefore falsified everything — is itself overstated; modern scholarship finds Rufinus a more faithful translator than that charge allows.
• The interpolation thesis was the premise; the method Rufinus built on it — silently correcting Origen's doctrine so “the Latin reader will find nothing … which jars with our faith” — is a separate question. In his favour, he disclosed the policy in his preface, believed the passages corrupt, and worked within an accepted fourth-century convention of edifying, sense-for-sense translation. Against him, a version of a disputed dogmatic work that has already sanitized the doctrine in question cannot serve the purpose for which it was made — letting Latin readers judge Origen's orthodoxy — so as scholarship the method fails, whatever its pastoral intent. The competing claim (his smoothing vs. Jerome's exposing literalism) is weighed on its own page (assessment: contested).
• See the controversy timeline and Jerome's parallel page.

Sources