Venerable Rufinus of Aquileia

Rufinus of Aquileia (Tyrannius Rufinus), born in Julia Concordia near Aquileia in northern Italy around 344/345, studied in Rome, where he became close to Jerome of Stridon — a friendship that later turned into one of the era's most famous and bitter theological quarrels. He took up monastic life and around 371 traveled east, spending several years among the ascetics of the Egyptian desert before settling on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem, where together with Melania the Elder he founded a monastic community and labored for many years, being ordained presbyter by Bishop John of Jerusalem. Rufinus's principal legacy is his Latin translations of the works of Origen, through which many of the Alexandrian theologian's writings — later condemned as heretical and lost in the original Greek — survive today; he also continued Eusebius of Caesarea's Church History in Latin down to the year 395, and translated a number of Eastern monastic lives. His sympathy for Origen's ideas led to a sharp break with Jerome, who accused him of heresy; the ensuing polemic between the former friends became one of the most famous theological controversies of the age. Returning to Italy around 397, Rufinus spent his final years in monastic labor and translation, dying in 411 in Sicily, where he had fled from the Gothic invasion under Alaric. Despite his substantial contribution to Christian letters, Rufinus of Aquileia was never formally canonized in either the Eastern or Western tradition, owing to his association with the later-condemned Origenist controversy — he has no fixed feast day or church-wide glorification.