Your defence gains no support from Eusebius or Didymus, who, each for his own reason, defend the Περὶ ᾽Αρχῶν as it stands.

16. These are his own words, he cannot deny them. Now I do not want to be put off with such expressions as “since he p. 510 said above” but I want to have the name of the book in which he first spoke rightly and then wrongly: in which he first says that the Holy Spirit and the Son are of the substance of God, and in what immediately follows declares that they are creatures. Do you not know that I possess the whole of Origen’s works and have read a vast number of them?

“Your trappings to the mob! I know you well;

What lies within and on the skin I see.” ³¹¹⁷

Eusebius who was a very learned man, (observe I say learned not catholic: you must not, according to your wont make this a ground for calumniating me) takes up six volumes with nothing else but the attempt to shew that Origen is of his way of believing, that is of the Arian perfidy. He brings out many test-passages, and effectually proves his point. In what dream in an Alexandrian prison was the revelation given to you on the strength of which you make out these passages to be falsified which he accepts as true? But possibly he being an Arian, took in these additions of the heretics to support his own error, so that he should not be thought to be the only one who had held false opinions contrary to the Church. What answer will you make, then, as to Didymus, who certainly is catholic as regards the Trinity? You know that I translated his book on the Holy Spirit into Latin. He surely could not have assented to the passages in Origen’s works which were added by heretics; yet he wrote some short commentaries on the Περὶ ᾽Αρχῶν which you have translated; in these he never denies that what is there written was written by Origen, but only tries to persuade us simple people that we do not understand his meaning and how these passages ought to be taken in a good sense. So much on the Son and the Holy Spirit alone. But in reference to the rest of Origen’s doctrines, both Eusebius and Didymus adhere to his views, and defend, as said in a catholic and Christian sense, what all the churches reprobate.

Footnotes

510:3117

Persius, iii, 30.