Rufinus of Aquileia and Alexandrian Afterlives: Translation as Origenism

Placing Rufinus of Aquileia's translation projects into the larger theological context of the Origenist controversy suggests a correspondence between Rufinus's methods of textual alteration and restoration and Origen's notion of the fall of souls and their ultimate return to God. This correspondence also parallels an emphasis in Rufinus's work on the idea of a Christian literary aggregate, or the idea of a Christian library, which contrasts with the idea of the Christian author as found in Rufinus's contemporaries, notably Jerome; for Rufinus, the library overshadows individual authors in the same way that God overshadows souls in the final reunification. Thus Rufinus's translations of Christian texts should be read both as contributions to the idea of a body of Christian literature, as this idea became established in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, and as material practices that participate in an Origenist cosmology of fall and return.