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SermonIndex.net : Christian Books : 23. You see by this what his opinions are about Origen and also about Ambrose. If he should deny that his strictures apply to Ambrose, which every one knows, he will be convicted in the first place by the fact that there is a Commentary of his on Luke whi

Life And Works Of Rufinus With Jeromes Apology Against Rufinus by Various

23. You see by this what his opinions are about Origen and also about Ambrose. If he should deny that his strictures apply to Ambrose, which every one knows, he will be convicted in the first place by the fact that there is a Commentary of his on Luke whi

23. You see by this what his opinions are about Origen and also about Ambrose. If he should deny that his strictures apply to Ambrose, which every one knows, he will be convicted in the first place by the fact that there is a Commentary of his on Luke which is current among the Latins, and none by any other hand. But secondly he knows that I possess a letter of his in which, while he discharges others, he makes his strictures fall upon Ambrose. But, since that letter contains certain more secret matters, I do not wish to see it published before the right time; and therefore I will corroborate what I say by other proofs similar to it. In the meantime let this be counted as demonstrated by what I have said above, that he extols Origen's writings as in every way admirable, and declares that if he translates them, the Roman tongue will then recognize what a store of good it had hitherto been ignorant of and now has begun to understand,' that is the twenty six books on Matthew, the five on Luke, and the thirty two on John. These are the books to which he gives the highest honour; and in these absolutely everything is to be found which is contained in the books on Peri 'Archon, the groundwork of his charges against me, only set forth with greater breadth and fulness. If then he promises that he will translate these, why does he condemn me for a similar course? But now I have undertaken to prove how violently he attacks a man who is worthy of all admiration, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who was not to that church alone but to all the churches like a column or an impregnable fortress. I will therefore set forth a Preface of his by which you may see in what foul and unworthy terms he assails even a man of such eminence, and also how he praises Didymus to the sky, though he has since cast him down even to the infernal region; and further how he speaks of the city of Rome, which now through the grace of God is reckoned by Christians as their capital, words which were only applicable when its inhabitants were a nation who were heathens and princes who were persecutors. c24. The Preface is that for the treatise of Didymus on the Holy Spirit. It is addressed to Paulinianus, and is as follows. |While I was an inhabitant of Babylon, a settler in the land of the purple harlot, and lived under the law of the Quirites, I attempted to write some poor stuff about the Holy Spirit and dedicated the work to the Pontiff of that city. When on a sudden that pot which Jeremiah saw after the almond rod began to seethe from the face of the North; and the whole senate of the Pharisees raised a clamour and no mere imaginary scribe but the whole faction of the ignorant as if I had declared war against them, laid their heads together against me. I therefore returned with all speed to Jerusalem, like a man going back to his home, and, after having lived in sight of the cottage of Romulus and the Lupercal with its naked games, I am now in sight of Mary's inn and the Saviour's cave. And so, Paulinianus my dear brother, since the aforenamed Pontiff Damasus, who had impelled me to undertake this work, now sleeps in the Lord, it is here in Judea that I warble the song which I could not sing in a strange land, provoked thereto by you and by Paula and Eustochium those handmaids of Christ whom I revere, and aided by your prayers; for this land which bore the Saviour is more august to me than that which bore the man who slew his brother. I have in the title ascribed the work to its true authors for I preferred to be known as the translator of another man's work than to imitate certain people and, like the ungainly jackdaw, deck myself in another bird's plumage. I read some time ago the treatise of a certain person on the Holy Spirit, and I recognized then, according to the sentence of Terence, bad things in Latin taken from good things in Greek. There is nothing in it of close reasoning, nothing downright and manly, such as draws us into assent even against our will, but all is flaccid and soft, sleek and pretty, picked out with the rarest colours. But Didymus, my own Didymus, who has the eyes of the bride in the Song of Songs, those eyes which Jesus bade us lift up upon the whitening fields, looks afar into the depths, and has once more given us cause to call him, as is our wont, the Seer Prophet. Whoever reads the work will recognize the plagiarisms of the Latins, and will despise the derivative streams, as soon as he begins to drink at the fountain head. He is rude in speech, yet not in knowledge; his very style marks him as one like the apostle as well by the grandeur of the sense as by the simplicity of the words.|
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