Short Words on Earth: Theological Geography in Rufinus’s Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed

This article examines Rufinus of Aquileia’s approach to local textual variations in the baptismal creed, as presented in his Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, which analyzes the creed very differently than other late-ancient Latin treatments of the creed. I argue that Rufinus sees local variations in the text of the creed as aspects of the divine mind that manifest differently in different places, following an Origenist framework in which geography is part of divine pedagogy for humans. Thus the creed, its reciters, and its local setting interact much like agents within a local ecosystem, which provides a specific environment to which its inhabitants must adapt, but which is also changed by its inhabitants as they live in it.