Catherine Chin: Short Words on Earth: Theological Geography in Rufinus of Aquileia's Commentary on the Apostles' Creed

Rufinus of Aquileia’s Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed is often noted as an early source for the story of the apostolic composition, clause by clause, of a creedal statement.  In Rufinus’s preface, however, his emphasis is less upon the apostles as authors and more upon the creedal statement as a mechanism for the geographic diffusion of apostolic teaching:  Rufinus suggests that the reason for the creed’s composition was the apostles’ imminent missionary activity.  Thus he sets the creed not merely into the context of theological dispute or definition but into the context of geographic change and the effect of location on theological language.  The importance of geography in the Commentary is reinforced first by Rufinus’ care to distinguish the creed of Aquileia from the creed of Rome, and indeed the creed of Rome from all other local creeds.  The second reinforcement of a geographical principle in the Commentary is the unspoken reliance of Rufinus on the catechetical sermons of Cyril of Jerusalem, and thus on the creed of Jerusalem, with which Rufinus would naturally have been familiar.  In this paper, I argue that these three creedal locations—Rome, Aquileia, and Jerusalem—structure Rufinus’ thought on the creed and, what is more, structure his thought on the diffusion of Christian language more generally, the issue that dominated Rufinus’s career as a translator.  Rufinus’s exploration of the problem of diffusion and of the appropriate “places” of theological language, I suggest, represents a development in Latin Origenist thought toward the incorporation of ecclesial centers into what is imagined to be the verbal life of the logos, and more generally toward an incorporation of material places into Christian cognition.

This paper contributes to the workshop on Origenist Textualities by examining the role of creedal statements and their locations in Latin Origenist thought; although Origen is generally taken to have anti-materialist, and hence anti-geographic, inclinations, the material and geographic importance of language is evident in his later Latin followers.