Oration I Against the Arians 1–11

1. The heresies that have departed from the truth, having devised a madness for themselves, are manifest, and their impiety has long been plain to all. For it is clear that those who invented these things “went out from us,” as the blessed John wrote, since the mind of such people neither was nor now is “with us.” Therefore also, as the Savior said, “not gathering with us, they scatter” with the devil, watching for those who sleep, so that by sowing their own poison of destruction they may have others to die with them. But one heresy, the last of the heresies, which has now gone out as the forerunner of the Antichrist, the one called Arian, is deceitful and crafty. Seeing its elder sisters, the other heresies, openly pilloried, it puts on a mask, clothing itself in the words of the Scriptures, as its father the devil does, and forces its way back into the paradise of the church, so that by pretending to be Christian it may deceive some, through the plausibility of its fallacies (for there is nothing reasonable in it), into thinking against Christ. And it has already led astray some of the foolish, so that they have not only been corrupted in their hearing but, like Eve, have taken and tasted, and now in their ignorance think “bitter sweet” and “call” the abominable heresy “good.” Therefore I have thought it necessary, at your urging, to rip open “the fold of the breastplate” of this foul heresy and to show the stench of its folly, so that those who are still far from it may flee it, and those deceived by it may repent, and, with the eyes of their heart opened, may understand that just as darkness is not light, nor falsehood truth, so neither is the Arian heresy good. And those who call these people “Christians” are greatly and utterly mistaken, as people who have neither read the Scriptures nor know at all what Christianity is and the faith that is in it.

2. For what likeness have they seen between the heresy and the godly faith, that they babble as though those people say nothing bad? This is truly to call even Caiaphas a Christian, still to count the traitor Judas among the apostles, to say that those who asked for Barabbas instead of the Savior did nothing wrong, to commend Hymenaeus and Alexander as right-minded, and to say that the apostle lied about them. But a Christian would not bear to hear these things, nor would anyone suppose that the man who dares to say this is of sound mind. For with them Arius stands in the place of Christ, as Mani does with the Manichaeans; and in place of Moses and the other saints they have found a certain Sotades, who is laughed at even among the Greeks, and the daughter of Herodias. For Arius has imitated the broken and effeminate style of the one, himself writing a “Thalia”; and he has emulated the dancing of the other, dancing and making sport in his blasphemies against the Savior. So those who fall into the heresy are perverted in mind and become senseless, and they “change” the name of “the Lord of glory” “into the likeness of the image of corruptible man,” and are now called “Arians” instead of “Christians,” and have this as the mark of their impiety. Let them not make excuses, nor, when reproached, lie against those who are not what they are, by calling Christians too after their teachers, so that they themselves may seem to be called Christians in the same way. Nor let them make a joke of it because they are ashamed of their own disgraceful name. If they are ashamed, let them hide their faces, or let them leap away from their own impiety. For never has a people taken its name from its own bishops, but from the Lord, in whom we have our faith. Thus, although the blessed apostles became our teachers and ministered the Savior's gospel, we were not named after them; rather from Christ we both are and are named “Christians.” But those who have from others the origin of what they regard as faith rightly also have their name from them, having become their property.

3. Of course, since all of us are and are called Christians from Christ, Marcion was long ago cast out for inventing a heresy; those who remained with the one who cast him out remained Christians, but those who followed Marcion were no longer called Christians but thereafter “Marcionites.” So too Valentinus, Basilides, Mani, and Simon the magician have given their own names to their followers; some are called “Valentinians,” others “Basilidians,” others “Manichaeans,” others “Simonians,” others “Phrygians” from Phrygia, and from Novatus “Novatians.” So too Meletius, cast out by Peter, the bishop and martyr, no longer called his followers Christians but “Meletians.” In the same way, when Alexander of blessed memory cast out Arius, those who remained with Alexander remained Christians; but those who went out with Arius left the Savior's name to us who are with Alexander, and were thereafter called “Arians.” See, then: after Alexander's death too, those in communion with Athanasius, his successor, and those with whom this same Athanasius is in communion, keep the same pattern. None of them bears his name, nor is he named after them, but all are again, as usual, called Christians. For even though we have successors of teachers and become their disciples, yet because we are taught by them the things of Christ, we are and are called Christians none the less. But those who follow heretics, even if they have countless successors, still bear without fail the name of the one who invented the heresy. Of course, though Arius has died and many of his own people have succeeded him, those who hold his views are nevertheless known by Arius and called “Arians.” And there is a remarkable proof of this: those from the Greeks who even now come into the church, abandoning the superstition of idols, take the name not of their catechists but of the Savior, and begin to be called “Christians” instead of “Greeks”; but those who go off to the Arians, or whoever change from the church to the heresy, abandon the name of Christ and are thereafter called “Arians,” as no longer holding the faith of Christ but having become successors of Arius's madness.

4. How then are they Christians who are not Christians but Ariomaniacs? Or how are they of the catholic church who have shaken off the apostolic faith and become “inventors of” new “evils,” who have abandoned the oracles of the divine Scriptures and call Arius's “Thalia” a new wisdom? They say this with reason, for they are proclaiming a new heresy. So one might well be astonished. Many have written many treatises and a great many homilies on the Old and the New Testaments, and a “Thalia” is found with none of them, not even among the serious writers of the Greeks, but only among those who sing such songs over their wine, with clapping and jokes, in their amusements, to make others laugh. Yet the admirable Arius, imitating nothing dignified and not even knowing what serious writers do, stole most of his ideas from the other heresies and emulated the buffoonery of Sotades alone. For what else was fitting for him, when he wished to dance against the Savior, than to set out his miserable little phrases of impiety in loose and slack meters? So that, as Wisdom says, “A man will be known from the utterance of his word,” so from these the unmanliness of the writer's soul and the corruption of his mind may be known. Indeed the crafty man did not escape notice; though he often twisted himself up and down like the serpent, he nevertheless fell into the error of the Pharisees. For they, wishing to break the law, pretended to study the words of the law; and wishing to deny the Lord who had been expected and was present, they pretended to name God, but were convicted of blasphemy when they said, “Why do you, being a man, make yourself God, and say, ‘I and the Father are one’?” So also the counterfeit and Sotadean Arius pretends to speak about God, inserting the words of the Scriptures, but he is convicted on every side as godless Arius, who denies the Son and counts him among the works.

5. The beginning, then, of Arius's “Thalia” and frivolity, with its effeminate style and meter, is this: “According to the faith of God's elect, God's wise ones, holy children, rightly dividing, who received God's Holy Spirit, these things I have learned from those who share in wisdom, the refined, taught by God, and wise in all things. In their footsteps I have come, walking with like opinion, I, the renowned, who have suffered much for God's glory; and having learned wisdom from God, I have come to know knowledge.” And the jests he rattles off in it, to be shunned and full of impiety, are of this kind: “God was not always Father; but there was a time when God was alone and was not yet Father; later he became Father. The Son was not always; for since all things came to be from nothing, and all things are creatures and works that have come to be, the Word of God himself also came to be from nothing, and ‘there was once when he was not’; and ‘he was not before he came to be,’ but he too had a beginning of being created.” “For God,” he says, “was alone, and the Word and Wisdom did not yet exist. Then, wishing to fashion us, he then made a certain one and named him Word and Wisdom and Son, so that he might fashion us through him.” So he says that there are two wisdoms: “one God's own, existing with God; and the Son came to be in this wisdom, and because he shares in it he was named only Wisdom and Word. For Wisdom,” he says, “came to exist by wisdom, by the will of the wise God.” So too he says that “there is another Word in God besides the Son, and because the Son shares in this, he in turn has been named Word and Son by grace.” This too is a view peculiar to their heresy, shown in other writings of theirs, that “there are many powers; one is God's own by nature and eternal; but Christ, again, is not the true power of God, but he too is one of the so-called powers, one of which, ‘the locust and the caterpillar,’ is called not only ‘power’ but ‘great’; and the others are many and like the Son, about which David also sings, saying, ‘The Lord of the powers.’ And by nature, like all things, the Word himself is changeable, but by his own free will, as long as he wishes, he remains good; when he wishes, however, he too can change, just as we can, being of a changeable nature. For this reason,” he says, “God, foreknowing that he would be good, gave him in advance this glory, which he would afterwards have as man, from his virtue; so that from his works, which God foreknew, God has made him to have become such as he now is.”

6. Again, he dared to say that “the Word is not even true God. Even if he is called God, he is not true God; but by participation in grace, like all the others, so he too is called God in name only. And as all things are foreign to God and unlike him in substance, so the Word too is alien to and unlike the Father's substance and property in every respect, but belongs to the things that are originated and created and is one of them.” After this, as if he had become heir to the devil's recklessness, he set down in the “Thalia” that “even to the Son the Father is invisible, and the Word can neither see nor know his own Father perfectly and exactly; but what he knows and what he sees, he knows and sees in proportion to his own measures, just as we too know according to our own capacity. For the Son,” he says, “not only does not know the Father exactly, for he falls short of comprehending him, but the Son does not even know his own substance; and the substances of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit are by nature divided, estranged, cut off, alien, and without share in one another”; and, as he himself put it, “they are utterly unlike one another in substances and glories, to infinity. So the Word,” he says, “as regards likeness of glory and substance, is entirely alien to both, the Father and the Holy Spirit.” For in these words the impious man spoke; and he said that the Son is divided off by himself and in every respect without share in the Father. These are parts of the fables of Arius set down in that ridiculous composition.

7. Who, then, hearing such things and the meter of the “Thalia,” would not rightly hate Arius, jesting about such matters as if on a stage? Who does not see him, by seeming to name God and speak about God, as the serpent counselling the woman? Who, reading what follows, does not see his impiety, as also the error into which the serpent afterwards led the woman by his cunning? Who is not astounded at such blasphemies? “Heaven,” as the prophet says, “was astonished, and the earth shuddered” at the transgression of the law; and the sun, more indignant still, not bearing the bodily outrages then done to the common Master of us all, which he willingly endured for us, turned away, drew in its rays, and made that day sunless. Then at the blasphemies of Arius, how will not all human nature be struck dumb, stop its ears and shut its eyes, so as to be able neither to hear such things nor to see the one who wrote them? And how will not the Lord himself cry out more justly against these men, as impious and ungrateful too, what he foretold through the prophet Hosea: “Woe to them, for they have leapt away from me; they are wretched, for they have acted impiously toward me; I redeemed them, but they spoke lies against me”; and a little later, “And they devised evil things against me; they turned away to nothing”? For having turned away from the Word of God who is, and fashioning for themselves one who is not, they have fallen into nothing. It was for this reason that the ecumenical council cast Arius out of the church for saying these things and anathematized him, not enduring his impiety; and from then on Arius's error was reckoned a heresy with something more than the other heresies, in that it was called Christ-fighting and was reckoned a forerunner of the Antichrist. Although, then, as I said before, so great a judgment is of itself fully sufficient to persuade all to flee from the impious heresy, yet since some of those called Christians, either from ignorance or from pretense, as was said before, consider the heresy no different from the truth and call those who hold these views Christians, come, let us question them as far as we can and uncover the heresy's craftiness. Perhaps, tied up in this way, they will be muzzled and flee from it “as from the face of a serpent.”

8. If, then, because he wrote certain words of divine Scripture in the “Thalia,” they think that his blasphemies are words of praise, then surely, when they see the Jews of today reading the law and the prophets, they too will for that reason deny Christ with them; and perhaps, when they hear the Manichaeans quoting some parts of the Gospels, they will deny the law and the prophets with them. But if they are so tossed about and babble such things out of ignorance, let them learn from the Scriptures that the devil too, the inventor of the heresies, because of the stench of his own wickedness, borrows the words of the Scriptures, so that, having them as a covering and sowing his own poison, he may deceive the simple. So he deceived Eve; so he fashioned the other heresies; so now too he persuaded Arius to speak and to make a show, supposedly, of opposing the heresies, so that he might introduce his own heresy unnoticed. Yet not even so did the crafty one escape notice. For having acted impiously toward the Word of God, he at once fell away from everything, and it has been shown to all that he was ignorant about the other things too and, holding nothing true at all, only pretends. For how could one who denies the Son, who reveals the Father, speak truly about the Father? Or how will he think rightly about the Spirit, when he speaks evil of the Word who supplies the Spirit? Who will believe him when he speaks about the resurrection, when he denies Christ, who became for us “the firstborn from the dead”? And how, being plainly ignorant of the Son's genuine and true begetting from the Father, will he not also go astray about his coming in the flesh? For so the Jews of that time too, denying the Word and saying, “We have no king but Caesar,” were all at once deprived of everything and became bereft of the light of the lamp, the fragrance of ointment, the knowledge of prophecy, and truth itself; and now, understanding nothing, they are like those walking in darkness. For who ever heard such things? Or from where, or from whom, did the flatterers and bribe-takers of the heresy hear such things? Who spoke such things to them when they were being catechized? Who told them, “Having abandoned the worship of the creation, come now again to worship a creature and a work”? But if they themselves admit that they are hearing such things now for the first time, let them not deny that this heresy is alien and not from the fathers. And what is not from the fathers but has been invented now, what else would it be but what the blessed Paul foretold: “In later times some will depart from the sound faith, giving heed to spirits of error and teachings of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars, seared in their own conscience,” and “turning away from the truth”?

9. For see: we speak boldly from the divine Scriptures about the godly faith, and set it like a lamp on the lampstand, saying: He is the true Son of the Father by nature and genuine, proper to his substance, the only-begotten Wisdom, and the true and only Word of God. He is not a creature nor a work, but an offspring proper to the Father's substance. Therefore he is true God, being “of one substance” with the true Father. But other beings, to whom he said, “I said, you are gods,” have this grace from the Father only by participation in the Word through the Spirit. For he is “the exact imprint of the Father's hypostasis,” and “light from light,” and the power and true image of the Father's substance. For this too the Lord said: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” He always was and is, and never was not. For since the Father is eternal, his Word and Wisdom too must be eternal. But what, then, do they bring forward to us from the utterly blameworthy “Thalia”? Or rather, let them first read it aloud, imitating the style of the writer, so that, being mocked by others, they may learn into what a fall they lie; and then let them speak. What could they say from it, except that “God was not always Father, but became so later; the Son was not always, for he was not before he was begotten; he is not from the Father, but he too came to subsist from nothing; he is not proper to the Father's substance, for he is a creature and a work; and Christ is not true God, but he too was made God by participation; the Son does not know the Father exactly, nor does the Word see the Father perfectly, and the Word neither understands nor knows the Father exactly; he is not the true and only Word of the Father himself, but is called word and wisdom in name only, and is called son and power by grace; he is not unchangeable, like the Father, but changeable by nature, like the creatures, and he falls short of comprehending so as to know the Father perfectly”? A wonderful heresy indeed, which has not even plausibility, but imagines against him who is that he is not, and puts forward blasphemies instead of praises throughout! If anyone, then, having examined what both sides say, were asked whose faith he would choose, or whose words he would say are fitting for God, or rather, let these flatterers of impiety themselves say what one ought to answer when asked about God (for “the Word was God”). For from this the whole question about both positions will be settled, what it is fitting to say: “he was” or “he was not”; “always” or “before he came to be”; “eternal” or “from which time and since when”; “true” or “by adoption, participation, and in thought only”; to call him one of the things originated, or to join him to the Father; that he is unlike the Father in substance, or like and proper to the Father; that he is a creature, or that through him the creatures came to be; that he is the Father's very Word, or that there is another besides him, and that he came to be through that one and through another wisdom, and is called wisdom and word in name only, and has come to be a sharer in that wisdom and second to it.

10. Whose words, then, speak of God rightly and show that our Lord Jesus Christ is God and Son of the Father: those which you have vomited up, or those which we have spoken and speak from the Scriptures? If the Savior is neither God nor Word nor Son, you may say what you please, like the Greeks and the Jews of today. But if he is the Word of the Father and true Son, and “God from God,” and “blessed over all forever,” is it not right to obliterate and wipe out both their other phrases and the Arian “Thalia,” as an image of evils, full of all impiety? Whoever falls into it “does not know that the earthborn perish with her, and he meets the trap of Hades.” And they know this themselves, and like the crafty men they are, they hide it, not daring to speak these things out, but uttering other things instead. For if they say them, they will be condemned; and if they are suspected, they will be struck by all with the proofs from the Scriptures. For this reason, then, as “sons of this age,” having craftily lit what they suppose is their lamp with oil from the wild olive, and fearing that it may quickly be put out (for “the light of the ungodly,” it says, “is put out”), they “hide it under the bushel” of hypocrisy, and utter other things, and hold out the patronage of friends and the fear of Constantius, so that those who come to them may not, because of the hypocrisy and the promises, see the filth of the heresy. How then is the heresy not worthy of hatred on this count too, since it is hidden even by its own adherents as having no boldness, and is nursed like a snake? For where did they collect these little phrases for themselves? Or from whom did they receive them, that they have dared to say such things? They could not name any human being who supplied them. For who among humans, Greek or barbarian, dares to say that the one whom he confesses to be God is one of the creatures, and “he was not before he was made”? Or who is there who disbelieves the God in whom he has believed when he says, “This is my beloved Son,” and says that he is not a Son but a work? All would rather be the more indignant at those who rave in this way. Nor do they have their pretexts from the Scriptures; for it has often been shown, and will be shown now as well, that these things are foreign to the divine oracles. Since, then, it remains to say that they received this madness from the devil (for he alone is the sower of such things), come, let us stand against him; for it is with him that “our struggle” is, through these men. So that, with the Lord's help, when he falls as usual under refutation, they may be put to shame, seeing that the one who sowed the heresy in them is at a loss, and may learn, even at last, that being Arians they are not Christians.

11. You have said and you think, at his prompting, that (1.) “there was once when the Son was not.” This is the first garment of your notion that must be stripped off. Tell us, then, you slanderous and impious men: what was there once when the Son was not? If you mean the Father, your blasphemy is greater; for it is not right to say that he “once” was, or to signify him with the word “once.” For he always is, and now is; and as the Son is, so he is, and he is himself “he who is,” and Father of the Son. But if you say that the Son was once when he himself was not, the answer is foolish and senseless; for how could he both be and not be? So, being at a loss in this, you are compelled to say, “there was once a time when the Word was not”; for your very adverb “once” by its nature signifies this. And what you have further said in writing, “the Son was not before he was begotten,” is the same as your saying, “there was once when he was not”; for both the one and the other signify that there is time before the Word. Where, then, did you find these things? “Why have you too raged like the nations, and meditated vain” little phrases “against the Lord and against his Christ”? For none of the holy Scriptures has said anything of the kind about the Savior, but rather “always,” “eternal,” and “being always with the Father.” For “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And in the Revelation it says this: “He who is and who was and who is to come.” Who could take away eternity from “he who is” and “who was”? This is what Paul too, in his letter to the Romans, used to refute the Jews, writing: “from whom is the Christ according to the flesh, who is God over all, blessed forever”; and to shame the Greeks he said: “For his invisible things from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made, both his eternal power and divinity.” And what the power of God is, he himself teaches again, saying, “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” For in saying this he certainly does not mean the Father, as you have often whispered to one another, saying, “The Father is his eternal power.” It is not so; for he did not say, “God himself is the power,” but “his” is the power. And it is plain to all that “his” is not “he,” yet not something foreign either, but rather proper to him. Read also the sequence of the words, and “turn to the Lord” (“now the Lord is the Spirit”), and you will see that what is meant is the Son.