Apology for himself against the Books of Rufinus

⁶ His followers object to me, (and

Weary of work
They ply the arms of Ceres,)

that I have translated into the Latin tongue the books of Origen Περὶ ᾿Αρχῶν, which are pernicious and repugnant to the faith of the Church. My answer to them is brief and succinct: Your letters, my brother Pammachius, and those of your friends, have compelled me. You declared that these books had been falsely translated by another, and that not a few things had been interpolated or added or altered. And, lest your letters should fail to carry conviction, you sent a copy of this translation, together with the Preface in which I was praised. As soon as I had run my eye over these documents, I at once noticed that the impious doctrine enunciated by Origen about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, to which the ears of Romans could not bear to listen, had been changed by the translator so as to give a more orthodox meaning. His other doctrines, on the fall of the angels, the lapse of human souls, his prevarications about the resurrection, his ideas about the world, or rather Epicurus's middle-spaces, on the restitution of all to a state of equality, and others much worse than these, which it would take too long to recount, I found that he had either translated as they stood in the Greek, or had stated them in a stronger and exaggerated manner in words taken from the books of Didymus, who is the most open champion of Origen. The effect of all this is that the reader, finding that the book expressed the catholic doctrine on the Trinity, would take in these heretical views without warning.