Tyrannius Rufinus

Rufinus was born about 345 at Concordia, near Aquileia in northeastern Italy. He studied at Rome, where he formed a close friendship with a fellow student from the same region named Jerome. The two of them entered the ascetic life together in the monastic circle at Aquileia. That friendship, and its collapse, shaped both their lives.

About 373 Rufinus went east. He spent years in Egypt, sitting under Didymus the Blind at Alexandria and visiting the monks of Nitria. Around 380 he settled at Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, in a monastery founded and funded by Melania the Elder, a Roman noblewoman who had given away an enormous fortune. He stayed about eighteen years.

Jerome, meanwhile, had settled at Bethlehem, a few miles away.

What broke them was Origen. The great Alexandrian's speculative theology, the pre-existence of souls, the possible final restoration of all things, came under attack in the 390s, led by Epiphanius of Salamis. Jerome, who had translated and praised Origen for years, went over to the attack. Rufinus would not. In 397 he returned to Italy and published a Latin translation of Origen's On First Principles, with a preface saying that he was following the practice of Jerome, who had translated Origen before him, and that he had softened passages he believed heretics had inserted into the text.

Jerome took the preface as a public trap and answered with the Apology Against Rufinus, one of the most savage documents in Christian literature. Rufinus replied in kind. Friends on both sides tried to stop it. The two never reconciled, and when Rufinus died Jerome wrote about it with contempt.

Set the quarrel aside and the work stands. Rufinus translated an enormous body of Greek Christian writing into Latin at exactly the moment the West was losing its Greek: Origen's homilies on the Old Testament, of which the great majority survive only in his versions; Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, continued by Rufinus himself down to 395; the Clementine Recognitions; works of Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus; the History of the Monks in Egypt; the Sentences of Sextus. Without him the Latin Middle Ages would have known almost nothing of Origen at all.

His own Commentary on the Apostles' Creed is a small classic, the earliest full Latin exposition of the creed, and the source for much of what is known about the baptismal creed of Aquileia and Rome.

When Alaric's Goths came down into Italy in 408 Rufinus fled south, and he died in Sicily in 411.

Sources: Rufinus, Commentary on the Apostles' Creed and Church History (English translations by J. N. D. Kelly, Ancient Christian Writers 20, and Philip Amidon); Jerome, Apology Against Rufinus and Letters; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church.