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| Epiphanius, it is true, gave you the kiss of peace; but he showed afterwards that he had come to distrust you.
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23. As regards our
reverend friend Epiphanius, this is strange shuffling of yours, when you say that
it was impossible for him to have written against you after his giving
you the kiss and joining with you in prayer. It is as if you were to
contend that he would not be dead if a short time before he had been
alive, or as if it were not equally certain that he had first reproved
you and then, after the kiss of peace, excommunicated you. “They
went out from us,” it is said,3184
“but they were not of us; otherwise they would no doubt have
continued with us.” The apostle bids us avoid a heretic after
first and second admonition: of course this implies that he was a
member of the flock of the church before he was avoided or condemned. I
confess I cannot restrain my laughter when, at the prompting of some
clever person, you strike up a hymn in honour of Epiphanius. Why, this
is the ‘silly old man,’ the ‘anthropomorphite,’
this is the man who boasted in your presence of the six thousand books
of Origen that he had read, who ‘thinks himself entrusted with
the preaching of the Gospel against Origen among all nations in their
own tongue’ who ‘will not let others read Origen for fear
they should discover what he has stolen from him.’ Read what he
has written, and the letter, or rather letters, one of which I will
adduce as a testimonial to your orthodoxy, so that it may be seen how
worthy he is of your present praise.3185
| 3185 From Epiphanius’ letter to John, Bishop of Jerusalem,
translated by Jerome (Jer. Ep. 51 c. 6). |
“May God set you free, my brother, and the holy people of Christ
which is entrusted to you, and all the brethren who are with you, and
especially the Presbyter Rufinus, from the heresy of Origen, and all
other heresies, and from the perdition which they bring. For if many
heresies have been condemned by the Church on account of one word or of
two, which are contrary to the faith, how much more must that man be
counted a heretic who has invented so many perverse things, so many
false doctrines! He stands forth as the enemy of God and of the
church.” This is the testimony which this saintly man bears to
you. This is the garland of praise which he gives you to parade in.
Thus runs the letter which your golden coins extracted from the chamber
of our brother Eusebius, so that you might calumniate the translator of
it, and might fix upon me the guilt of a most manifest crime—that
of rendering a Greek word as ‘dearest’ which ought to have
been ‘honourable!’ But what is all this to you who can
control all events by your prudent methods, and can trim your path
between different possibilities, first saying, if you can find any one
to believe you, that neither Anastasius nor Epiphanius ever wrote a
line against you; and, secondly, when their actual letters cry out
against you, and break down your audacious effrontery, despising the
judgment of them both, and say it does not matter to you whether they
wrote or not, since it was impossible for them to write against an
innocent and an absent man.
Then again, you have no right to
speak evil of that saintly man, as you do when you say “that it
may be seen that he gave me peace with his words and his kiss, but kept
evil and deceit in his heart”—for this is your reasoning,
and it is thus that you defend yourself. That this is the letter of
Epiphanius and that it is hostile to you, all the world knows: and that
it came in its genuine form into your hands we can prove; and it is
therefore an astounding shame or rather utter shamelessness in you to
deny what you cannot doubt to be true. What! Is Epiphanius to be
befouled with the imputation that he gave you the sign of peace but had
deceit in his heart? Is it not much truer to believe that he first
admonished you because he wished to save you from error and bring you
back to the right way; and that therefore he did not reject your Judas
kiss, wishing to break down by his forbearance the betrayer of the
faith,—but that afterwards when he found that all his toil was
fruitless, and that the leopard could not change its spots nor the
Ethiopian his skin, he proclaimed in his letter what had before been
only a suspicion in his mind? E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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