To Pammachius Against John of Jerusalem

¹⁷ You believe that one God made all creatures, visible and invisible. Arius, who says that all things were created through the Son, would also confess this. If you had been accused of holding Marcion's heresy, which introduces two Gods, the one the God of goodness, the other of justice, and asserts that the former is the Creator of things invisible, the latter of things visible, your answer would have been well adapted to satisfy me on a question of that sort. You believe it is the Trinity which creates the universe.

Arians and Semi-Arians deny that, blasphemously maintaining that the Holy Spirit is not the Creator, but is Himself created. But who now lays it to your charge that you are an Arian? You say that the souls of men are not a part of the nature of God, as though you were now called a Manichæan by Epiphanius. You protest against those who assert that souls are made out of angels, and say that their nature, in its fall, becomes the substance of humanity. Don't conceal what you know, nor feign a simplicity which you do not possess.

Origen never said that souls are made out of angels, since he teaches that the term angels describes an office, not a nature. For in his book Περὶ ᾿Αρχῶν he says that angels, and thrones, and dominions, powers and rulers of the world, and of darkness, and every name which is named, not only in this world, but in that which is to come, become the souls of those bodies which they have taken on either through their own desire or for the sake of their appointed duties; that the sun also, himself, and the moon, and the company of all the stars, are the souls of what were once reasonable and incorporeal creatures; and that though now subject to vanity, that is to say, to fiery bodies which we, in our ignorance and inexperience, call luminaries of the world, they shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption and brought to the liberty of the glory of the sons of God.

Wherefore every creature groans and travails in pain together. And the Apostle laments, saying, “Wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” This is not the time to controvert this doctrine, which is partly heathen, and partly Platonic. About ten years ago in my “Commentary” on Ecclesiastes, and in my explanation of the Epistle to the Ephesians, I think my own views were made clear to thoughtful men.