But let us raise a more penetrating
question to him. Tell us what it means to speak against the Son of man and what
to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. For I claim that by his interpretation,
those who denied Christ in the persecution spoke against the Son of man, but
did not blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. For the one who is asked whether he
is a Christian and answers that he is not a Christian certainly denies Christ,
that is, the Son of man; but he has not harmed the Holy Spirit. But if, by denying
Christ, he also denied the Spirit, let the heretic explain how the one who
denies Christ does not sin against the Spirit. Or, if he thinks that in this
passage by “Holy Spirit” the Father must be understood, no mention of the
Father was made by the denier when he denied. At that time when the apostle
Peter was terrified by the maidservant’s question and denied the Lord, against
whom does Novatian imagine that he committed his son: against the Son of man or
against the Holy Spirit? Now, then, if he wants to put a ridiculous
interpretation on Peter’s words: “I do not know the man,” and take it in the
sense that he did not deny “Christ,” but “the man,” he makes a liar out of the
Savior who had predicted that Peter was to deny him, that is, the Son of God.
But if he denied the Son of God, and for this he wept bitterly and later on,
with a triple confession, erased the triple denial, it is evident that only the
sin against the Hoy Spirit that carries blasphemy with it is unforgivable, that
is, when you see God in miracles, and misrepresent the deeds as those of Belzebub.
Prove, then, that some apostate called Christ Belzebub, and I will grant
you that the apostate cannot obtain forgiveness. It is one thing to surrender
to torments and deny that one is a Christian; it is something else to call
Christ the devil, as Scripture, read carefully enough in context, could have
shown you. (Jerome, “Epistle 42 to Marcella,” A.D. 385, in St. Jerome:
Exegetical Epistles, 2 vols. [trans. Thomas P. Scheck; The Fathers of the Church
147; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023], 1:193-)
