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| Preface to Didymus on the Holy Spirit.
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24. 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 rod2970
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 Lupercal2971
| 2971 These games took place at Rome each February in honour of Lupercus
the god of fertility. Two noble youths, after a sacrifice of goats and
dogs, ran almost naked about the city with thongs cut from the skins, a
stroke from which was believed to impart fertility to women. | 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.2972
| 2972 Romulus, the founder of Rome who slew his brother
Remus. | 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,2973
| 2973 Eun. Prol. The sentiment, not the words, are quoted
above. | 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,2974
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;2975
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.”E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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