De Principiis, Book III

De Principiis, Book III: free will and the contest between rational creatures and opposing spiritual powers, and the world's final consummation. Books III and IV survive with a genuine textual complication this site's edition preserves rather than resolves: the Greek original is otherwise lost except where later excerpted in the Philocalia, so Crombie prints Rufinus's Latin paraphrase and the Philocalia's surviving Greek side by side for comparison. Not scripture. Translated by Frederick Crombie (1869, Ante-Nicene Christian Library).