Annotation CCXCI

”May he give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him.” — Ephesians 1:17

Whether the knowledge of souls is from reminiscence.

Origen, in the commentaries, elucidating this passage, said that the knowledge by which they [souls] now know God is a certain reminiscence of the divine knowledge which they of old had in heaven, before they descended into bodies. This opinion Jerome, the name of Origen being suppressed, brought forth in his commentaries in these words: “[THAT] which Paul says, ‘in the knowledge [agnitione] of him,’ that is, ἐπιγνώσει αὐτοῦ [epignṓsei autoû], some understand thus: that between γνῶσις [gnôsis] and ἐπίγνωσις [epígnōsis] — that is, between ‘notion’ and ‘recognition’ — there is this difference: that ‘notion’ is of [things] which we did not before know, and afterward began to know; but ‘recognition’ [is] of [things] which, having before known, we then ceased to know, and afterward remember them — and suspect a certain former life in the heavenly [places]: after [that], being cast down into these bodies, and having forgotten God the Father, we have now come to know him through revelation, according to that [text]: ‘All the ends of the earth shall remember, and shall be converted to the Lord,’ and [they] repeat other [things] similar to these.” These [things] Jerome [says]: whom Rufinus reprehends, because this Origenist opinion

—he inserted in his commentaries without any confutation of it [himself].