Orations (other than the Theological Orations) 25.1–25.13

I will praise the philosopher, even though I am ill in body; for he is a philosopher; and I will praise him with very good reason. For he is a philosopher, and I am a servant of wisdom, so that praise is fitting for me, so that, if nothing else, I may practise this philosophy at least: to admire a philosopher. For, in my view, one must either practise philosophy or honour philosophy, unless we are to fall altogether outside the good and be condemned for unreason, we who have been made rational and hasten through reason to the Word. Let the man practise this philosophy too, among his others, of being praised, and let him endure the praise. For we will not praise him to gratify him (we know the philosopher’s freedom from ambition, and besides, the discourse would add nothing to the facts, except to fall short of their worth through its own weakness), but to benefit ourselves. This philosophy will not despise, since its work and study is to do some good to our life. The first of benefits is that fine things be praised. For praise procures zeal; zeal, virtue; virtue, blessedness; and this is the summit of what is desired, toward which every movement of the earnest tends. [2] Come then, best and most perfect of philosophers, and, I will add, of witnesses to the truth. Come, refuter of bastard wisdom, which lies in words and bewitches by eloquence, but can neither rise above this nor wishes to; you who are skilled with both hands in virtue, both in contemplation and in action; who practise our philosophy in a foreign garb, or perhaps not foreign, if bright clothing and radiance belong to the angels when they are portrayed in bodily form, a symbol, I think, of the purity of their nature. Come, philosopher and wise man (for how long is one to love wisdom, and nowhere attain wisdom?), and dog, not in shamelessness but in frankness; not in gluttony but in living from day to day; not in barking but in guarding the good and keeping watch for souls, fawning on whatever is akin in virtue and barking at whatever is alien. Come, stand near the holy things and this mystic table, and near me, who through them initiate into deification, to which your word and life bring you, and your purification through suffering. Come, let me crown you with our crowns and proclaim you with a loud voice, not in the midst of Olympia, nor in some small theatre of Greece, nor as having competed in the pancration, or boxing, or the double race, or any of the small contests for small prizes, nor in honour of some hero or demon honoured for misfortune and in myth (for such are their solemn and honoured things, which have gained time as an ally of their folly and custom as law); but before God and the angels and the whole fullness of the Church, as having conquered the falsehood of the heresies, in honour of the living God, who teaches suffering by his own sufferings, and whose prize is the kingdom of heaven and becoming god, which is higher than suffering.

But what is the proclamation? If you want the shorter and better known: This is the most truthful contender for the truth, the champion of the Triad even to blood, and persecutor of the persecutors: they by doing evil, he by eagerly suffering; for nothing so conquers the persecutor as the eagerness of the one who suffers. If you want the fuller and more complete: This man is the best born of the best, the most noble of the noble. By nobility I do not mean what most people mean; far from it! It is not our way, nor a philosopher’s, to admire the nobility that comes from myths and tombs and long-rotted pride, nor that which is added by blood and documents, which nights bestow, and the hands of kings, perhaps not noble themselves, who command nobility like anything else; but the nobility marked by piety and character, and by the ascent to the first good, from which we came. Of this nobility there is one proof: our noble man is not only an athlete himself, but also descended from martyrs, so that he has the example of virtue at home. He is a citizen, by wisdom, of the whole world (for the Cynic way does not endure being bounded by small limits); by body, of the city of the Alexandrians, which is reckoned with yours and next after yours; a city which, while it surpasses all in all things, has fervour as its most distinctive mark, and the finest form of this, Christianity and its devotion to it, which begins in choice but is confirmed by nature. For fervour joined to piety became zeal; and zeal is the safeguard of faith.

Brought up and trained in this way, as was fitting for one born of such parents and destined to be such a man, when the time came to choose a way of life (which I regard as the foundation of doing well or badly), he saw something great, youthful, and loftier than most. He despises luxury, wealth, and power more than others prize them, and spurns and sends away the first as the chief misery, the second as the utmost poverty, the third as the greatest weakness. For nothing is good, he held, which neither makes its possessors better (indeed it often makes them worse) nor remains with them to the end. He sets before himself philosophy, the mistress of the passions, approaches the good with youthful vigour, and, before he is separated from matter, he rises up against visible things, attaching himself to what stands firm by greatness of nature and nobility of choice. When he had so resolved, he did not even think it worth deliberating which of the philosophies he should choose, the outside one, which plays with shadows of the truth in the dress and pretext of philosophy, or ours, lowly in appearance but lofty in what is hidden, and leading to God; but by every vote he chooses ours, not turned aside at all in mind toward the worse, nor swept away by the elegance of words on which those who practise the philosophy of the Greeks pride themselves. But this he made the first object of his philosophy: to know which of our ways is preferable and more profitable, equally for himself and for all Christians. For he thought it the mark of a most perfect and philosophic soul to serve the common good everywhere together with one’s own. For each of us is born not for himself alone, but for all who share the same nature and came into being from the same source and for the same ends. [5] He saw that the solitary and private life, alien and foreign to most people, is great and lofty and beyond what is human, but stops with those who achieve it, and denies the communal and humane character of love, which he knew to be among the first of praised things; and, besides, is untested, being neither exercised in affairs nor measured against others. The communal and mixed life, on the other hand, besides testing virtue, also reaches out to the many and is close to the divine economy, which made the universe and bound it together in friendship, and called back our race, fallen from the good through the evil that entered, by mingling and converse with us. Having thought and decided this, and at the same time thinking it right to chastise the pride of the Greeks, who put on solemnity with the cloak and the beard, what does he do, and how does he handle philosophy? He takes a middle course between their arrogance and our wisdom: of theirs he adopts the dress and the stage, of ours the truth and the height. [6] For this reason, crowning with wool the Peripatetics and the Academies and the solemn Stoa, and Epicurus’s chance with its atoms and pleasure, as one of them did the poet, he sends them as far off as possible and repels them. Of the Cynic way, he spat out its godlessness and praised its simplicity; and so he is what you now see: a dog against those who are truly dogs, a philosopher against the unwise, a Christian on behalf of all; conquering their arrogance by the likeness of his dress, and the bad taste of some among us by the novelty of his clothing; showing that piety does not lie in small things, nor philosophy in gloominess, but in firmness of soul, purity of mind, and genuine inclination toward the good, whatever our dress and whomever we associate with; whether withdrawing the mind from the senses into ourselves alone, or keeping ourselves apart in common life among the many of our own kind, practising philosophy among those who do not (like Noah’s ark in the flood, lighter than the flood, and the bush on the mountain which the fire burned but did not consume, the great sight of Moses), neither suffering anything from the many, any more than adamant from those who strike it, and making others better through ourselves as far as we can. The fruit of this philosophy is not cities fashioned in words (some “skindapsoi” and goat-stags, as they themselves say, which only the tongue puts together), nor categories, analyses, and mixtures, nor predicates and quasi-predicates and technical wisdom, nor lines that lie nowhere, nor interweavings and figures of the stars devised against Providence. These are secondary and incidental to him, and played with only so far as not to be played with by those who pretend to know them.

What, then, is first and pursued in earnest? Pleading before rulers, frankness before emperors, after the divine David, who spoke before kings and was not ashamed; checking the unreason of surging crowds, the power of savage potentates, the sickness of households in faction, the boorishness of the uneducated, the arrogance of the educated, wealth that exalts itself, insolent satiety, mischievous poverty, anger that is carried away and carries away reason, immoderate pleasure, unrestrained laughter; and putting a stop to the distress of grief, the instability of youth, the small-mindedness of old age, the desolation of widowhood, the despair of orphans. Will not anyone of sound mind prefer these by far to syllogisms and lines and gaping at the stars, considering that if everyone were drawing conclusions or doing geometry or astronomy, our life would gain nothing from it, except that everything would fall apart; whereas if the things I have named were done away with, all would be disorder and confusion? How much better and loftier are these than the arrogance of Antisthenes, the gourmandise of Diogenes, and the community of wives of Crates, need I say? But we spare these too, out of respect for the name, so that they may profit something from the man. And we, to sum up what lies between (his temperance, his self-control, his freedom from pride, his graciousness, his sociability, his humanity, and the rest in which the man surpasses all), will turn to what is last in order but first in power.

There was a time when we had calm from the heresies, when the Simons and Marcions, the Valentinuses, Basilideses, Cerdons, Cerinthuses, and Carpocrateses, and all their nonsense and marvel-mongering, which cut up the God of all to the utmost and warred on behalf of the Good against the Creator, were afterwards swallowed up in their own Depth and given over to Silence, as they deserved. The evil spirit of Montanus, the darkness of Mani, the rashness, or purity, of Novatus, and Sabellius’s evil advocacy of the monarchy gave way and withdrew, the one separated off into an opposing party, the other altogether despised and cast aside for its weakness; and nothing else grieved the Church. For the persecutions even made her more brilliant through her sufferings. Not much time passed, and a second storm rose against the Church: the typhoon of injustice, the fullness of impiety, the legion of spirits, the antichrist tongue, the mind that spoke injustice on high, the dismemberment of the Godhead; whose attempt was dreadful, and his end more dreadful, worthy of the betrayal that Judas dared against our Saviour: Arius, well named for his madness. He began from the city of the Alexandrians and practised the evil there; then, like a wild flame from a small spark, running over most of the world, he is overthrown by our Fathers, the pious number that assembled at Nicaea and set theology within defined boundaries and words. … Persia judged the wretch well for us, destroying him and exacting the penalty for much blood by one man’s blood. But just now the unseemly one begins, and, using the defence of Christians as a pretext for his impiety, he fastens on the true Christians; and he becomes as much harsher than that one, as then the contest was more conspicuous and brilliant, whereas now even suffering brings no honour, at least with those who reckon sufferings unjustly. Do you want me to move the theatre to tears, and perhaps even this most enduring man himself, superior to suffering, by recalling one of the things that happened then? There are many witnesses of the story, for the tragedy of that suffering reached many; and I think future time too will take up the account of these days. A ship carrying as its cargo one of the presbyters, and he in danger not for any wrong but for the faith, is set adrift on the sea, not to save its passenger but to destroy him. And the cargo was willing, for it was pious. And fire sailed with the cargo as a fellow merchant; and the persecutor delights in the novelty of the punishment. Alas for the spectacle! Alas for the drama! The ship was on the open sea; the theatre on the shores, some rejoicing, others lamenting. How can I present so much in a few words? The fire is kindled, the ship consumed, the cargo consumed with it; fire mingles with water, opposites run together for the punishment of a pious man, two elements divide one body, and a strange beacon is raised over the sea. Someone perhaps approached it, as though it were gentle and kindly; approaching, he found a pitiable and incredible sight: a voyage without a pilot, a shipwreck without a storm, and the presbyter turned to dust, and not even dust, scattered on the waters. And the priesthood did not avail him even so far as to obtain a more seemly death; or if not death, at least burial, which is owed even to the impious. Such was the fleet of the impious; such the end of the pious; and nowhere was there fire from above, more holy, to punish the one who kindled such beacons.

But why do I speak of outside matters? I must now go to your own contest and your struggles for piety, which you set on all that went before like a fine seal. The evil of this heresy was flourishing in your city, where it had also begun. When the most holy eye of the world, the high priest of priests, the guide and teacher of your confession by his own contests for piety, the great voice, the prop of the faith, the second lamp and forerunner of Christ, if it is lawful to say so, had fallen asleep in a good old age and full of days lived according to God, after the slanders, after the contests, after the famous hand, after the living dead man, the Triad took him to itself, with whom he had lived and for whom he had run risks (Athanasius, I know, you have all recognized in my words). Then a second plague and scourge of Egypt brought himself into the Church: the betrayer of the truth, the shepherd of wolves, the robber who climbs over the fold, the second Arius, the muddy and undrinkable overflow, the river more abundant than its godless source. I hesitate to tell the lawlessness and bloodshed of that time, with which the beast seized the holy throne, and the preliminary rites of his evil entry; yet I will lament a few things out of many (which you too lament and lamented before), using the words of the divine David: “O God, the nations have come into your inheritance; they have defiled your holy temple,” and what follows: “They have given the dead bodies of your servants as food to the birds,” and to be torn by beasts. I will add from him those words of another lament and another song: “How much evil the enemy has done in your holy place, and those who hate you have boasted in the midst of your feast.” For how did they not boast? How did they not defile your holy temple with disasters of every kind and evils of every sort?

A godless and lawless man was in command, who did not even bear the name of Christian (this was the most dreadful part of the outrage), but hastened from the idols to the temple of God, from unclean blood to things more abominable and loathsome, perhaps offering his outrage against us as a sacrifice to the demons; and a force boiling with anger was drawn up, an outlandish and savage army against the unarmed and unwarlike. The priest who was the holy man’s successor, anointed by the law and order of the Spirit and honoured for grey hair and wisdom, was driven out; and Tabeel reigned, the heir of what belonged to others. Arms against the holy, polluted hands against the inviolable, trumpets against hymns. Consider what followed: men falling in the holy places; women trampled, some even with the burden of nature, births premature or, to speak more properly, stillborn; virgins dragged off and outraged pitifully and more shamefully still (I am ashamed, both before the women and the men, to tell the manner, and to lay bare in words the hidden things of shame, which then, when they were bared, made me ashamed); some thrown into the wells inside the church, others hurling themselves from the upper floors at the outrage of what they saw, others heaped on those already lying there; murders upon murders, corpses upon corpses; holy things trampled by profane feet; altars outraged by licentious postures and songs, and, as I hear (what will my bold tongue utter?), even by dances and contortions on top of them; blasphemous tongues haranguing from the sacred thrones; mysteries mocked; psalmody silenced; wailing raised in its place; streams of blood, fountains of tears; priests led away; monks torn apart; the whole picture of the Assyrian invasion that once overran holy Jerusalem, which no word can worthily present nor any hearing contain, but only the soul and voice of Jeremiah can worthily lament, who seeks fountains of tears, calls forth lament from the walls at such sufferings, and lays mourning on the roads of Zion, which no longer bring the festival crowds. [13] This drama the East saw, and the West lamented, where the priest in flight displayed the tokens of their madness. How? He set before the church of the Romans, in place of the dead, the bloodstained garment, and moved the whole people to tears by that silent accusation, so as both to present the suffering and to gain a helper against the terrors, as indeed we know he did; for the stronger is especially inclined to bend toward the weak and to attach itself by voluntary goodwill to the one who suffers loss. None of the other pious could bear this; but it moved you all the more, as you are more perfect in word and more fervent in zeal. For this reason you fight for the Word and are fought against by impiety; and besides many other things in which you contended for the good in deed and word, teaching, admonishing, rescuing, refuting, rebuking, confounding, private persons and rulers, in private and in public, at every time and place, at last, seized by the madness of an impious authority (O noble misfortune! O your sacred wounds!), you are torn in your fair body by scourges, as though you were the spectator of another’s suffering; what is seen is bent, but what is understood is not cast down; you display your courage before the eyes of all; and even in silence you become a teacher of endurance, since your tongue has given up speaking. [14] Then what? You are banished from your homeland, you who know no land as your own or foreign, so it seems to me, so that others too might be taught piety through you. Oasis is your place of exile, the inhuman desert, a place now holy because of you. Share with us the good things of your exile, since you have shared those of your return. Make your return a spectacle for us. Whom did you teach philosophy there? Whom did you cleanse of impious opinions? Whom did you bring to piety? I seem to see the school there, the rite and the festival around you. Tell us this too: did you have some consolation for the remnants of your body? Did you practise philosophy in your poverty? Did you have companions in your contest, or did you bear this too alone in your want? Did you long for your sisters, your companions in chastity and endurance, or were you above even your attachment to them? Did the desolation of your aged mother bend you, or were you full of confidence, having left them piety as their greatest safety? But since you have happily returned to us, and he has given you back, longing, to those who long for you, he who glorifies those who glorify him and provokes to jealousy those who provoke him, who does the will of those who fear him and breathes resurrection into the dead; who gave life to Lazarus after four days, and to you, beyond hope, after four years; who joins bone to bone and joint to joint, the vision of Ezekiel, most wonderful and loftiest of the prophets: hold to the same work again and the same frankness, so that you may not seem to have been checked by your sufferings, nor to betray philosophy through cowardice. [15] Confound, as before, the superstition of the Greeks and their polytheistic godlessness, the old gods and the new, the shameful myths, and the more shameful sacrifices of those who cleanse mud with mud, as I heard one of them say, I mean bodies with bodies, their own with those of irrational animals; and their solemn images and their unseemly monstrosities. If they define the Divine by these, it is wretchedness; if they only hint at it, it is folly. Let them teach what the reason is, and what the mystery of the shamefulness in these things; for not even the representations of fine things should have anything shameful. If they say that there is something else besides these, let them show us what it is, and from what words or theologians. Confound also the uprisings of the heresies, and the more warmly the more you have suffered. For philosophy becomes nobler through suffering, tempered by dangers as red-hot iron by cold water. And define our piety, teaching us to know one unbegotten God, the Father, and one begotten Lord, the Son, called God when spoken of by himself, and Lord when named together with the Father, the one because of his nature, the other because of the monarchy; and one Holy Spirit, who proceeded and proceeds from the Father, God to those who understand intelligently what lies before them; fought against by the impious, understood by those above them, and openly spoken of by the more spiritual. Neither place the Father under a principle, lest we bring in something prior to the First, by which his being first would be overturned; nor make the Son or the Holy Spirit without principle, lest we take away what is proper to the Father. For they are not without principle, and yet in a way they are without beginning, paradoxical as it is: they are not without principle as regards cause, for they are from God, even if not after him, as light is from the sun; but they are without beginning as regards time. For they are not under time, lest what flows be older than what stands, and the non-substantial than substances. [16] Neither three principles, lest the doctrine be Greek and polytheistic; nor one, but a Jewish one, narrow, envious, and impotent, either by absorbing the Godhead into itself, as pleased those who bring the Son forth from the Father and then resolve him back into him again, or by casting down the natures and estranging them from the Godhead, as pleases the wise men of today, as though it feared they might be set up against it, or could do nothing beyond creatures. Neither the Son unbegotten, for the Father is one; nor the Spirit a Son, for the Only-begotten is one; so that they too may have this divine singularity, the one of sonship, the other of procession, not sonship. The Father truly Father, and much more truly than those among us: because uniquely, in his own manner, and not as bodies are; and alone, for without a consort; and of one alone, for of the Only-begotten; and only Father, for he was not first a son; and wholly Father, and of one who is whole, for ours is uncertain; and from the beginning, for not later. The Son truly Son, because he alone is Son, of one alone, uniquely, and only Son, for he is not also a father; and wholly Son, and of one who is whole, and from the beginning, never having begun to be Son; for the Godhead does not come from a change of mind, nor the deification from progress, so that there was ever a time when the one was not Father and the other not Son. The Holy Spirit truly holy, for there is no other such, nor in such a way; nor is his sanctification by addition, but he is holiness itself; nor is he more or less holy, nor did he begin in time, nor will he cease. For common to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not having come into being and the Godhead; to the Son and the Holy Spirit, being from the Father; proper to the Father, unbegottenness; to the Son, generation; to the Spirit, sending forth. If you seek the manner, what will you leave to those who alone are attested to know one another and be known by one another, or to those of us who will later be illumined from there? [17] God, if he came into being? Do not, by defending God in vain, destroy God, making him who shares the Godhead a fellow servant, he who frees you too from servitude, if you genuinely confess his lordship. Do not fear the procession; for God, who is rich in all things, is under no necessity either not to produce or to produce alike; but fear estrangement, and the threat laid down not for those who confess the Holy Spirit as God but for those who blaspheme him. [18] Neither honour the monarchy wrongly, contracting or cutting off the Godhead, nor be ashamed of the charge of tritheism, while another runs the risk of ditheism. For either you solved the problem together or shared the perplexity; or he made shipwreck of the Godhead along with his reasonings, while the Godhead remained yours. And if the argument proved weak, it is better to labour in reasoning with the Spirit’s guidance than readily to be impious in pursuit of ease. Spit on the objections and antitheses, the new piety and the petty wisdom; spit on them more than on spiders’ threads, which hold flies but are broken by wasps, not to speak of fingers or any other heavier body. Teach men to fear one thing only, to dissolve the faith in sophistries. It is not dreadful to be defeated in argument, for argument is not for everyone; but it is dreadful to suffer the loss of the Godhead, for hope belongs to everyone. These things, I know, you will set forth by yourself more eagerly and perfectly; your wounds assure me of it, and your body that laboured for piety; and we too will join in this philosophy as far as we can.

And when you depart on your fair departure, remember me, and the Triad dwelling in tents, if God dwells at all in things made with hands, and this small harvest, sown from no small seeds of piety, yet still small and poor and gathered little by little. For we have become like those gathering straw at harvest, if I may use the prophet’s word in season, and like …