Orations (other than the Theological Orations) 6.17–7.17

[17] Was it not that, as long as they had peace with one another and with God, oppressed in Egypt, the iron furnace, and drawn together by the common affliction (for sometimes affliction too is a good medicine for salvation), they were called a holy people, the portion of the Lord, and a royal priesthood? And not so in name only and otherwise in deed; but they were led by generals who were led by God, and guided by a pillar of fire and of cloud by night and by day; the sea parted for them as they fled, heaven supplied food when they were hungry, the rock gushed water when they thirsted, and when they fought, the stretching out of hands stood in the place of myriads, raising trophies by prayer and making a way for what lay ahead; rivers gave way, imitating the sea, their kin, and the elements stood still, and walls were shaken by trumpets. And why need I speak of the plagues that served their good, the voices of God heard from the mountain, the double legislation, the one in the letter and the other in the spirit, and the other things by which Israel was honoured of old beyond its worth? But when they began to be sick, and raged against one another and split into many parts (as the cross drove them to final destruction, together with the madness with which they raved against our God and Saviour, not recognizing God in man), and drew upon themselves the iron rod threatened from afar, I mean the rule and kingdom that now prevails over them, what happens? And what … [18] Jeremiah laments them for their former sufferings and bewails the captivity to Babylon; for those things too were truly worthy of laments and mourning; and how not of the greatest? Walls razed, a city levelled, a sanctuary pulled down, offerings plundered, profane feet and hands, the feet trampling the inaccessible places, the hands revelling in the things not to be touched; prophets silent, priests led away, old men not pitied, virgins outraged, youth falling, an alien and hostile fire, rivers of blood instead of the holy fire and blood; Nazirites dragged off, laments raised against the hymns; and, to say something from Jeremiah’s Lamentations themselves: the sons of Zion, precious and valued as gold, delicate and untouched by evils, travelling a strange road; and the roads of Zion mourning because there are none to keep the feasts; and a little before these, the hands of compassionate women, as the siege prevailed, not offering food to their children but tearing them apart for food, and making their dearest a remedy for hunger. How are these things not terrible, and beyond terrible, not only for those who suffered then but also for those who hear now? I at least, whenever I take up this book and keep company with the Lamentations (and I do so whenever I wish to chasten prosperity by the reading), my voice is cut off, I am overwhelmed with tears, the suffering comes as it were before my eyes, and I lament with the one who lamented. But their last blow and removal, the yoke of slavery now lying on them, and their famous humiliation under the Romans, of which nothing is so much the cause as faction: who of those who know how to write laments and match speech to suffering will lament this worthily? What books will contain it? One monument of their misfortune is the whole world, over which they were scattered, and the cessation of their worship, and the very site of Jerusalem, scarcely recognizable, of which only so much is accessible to them, and they enjoy so much of their former glory, as to appear there on one day to lament its desolation. [19] … those who remain in some evil; but those who are easily carried both ways and change, like shifting breezes, or the changes and reversals of the straits of Euripus, or the unstable waves of the sea. I consider this too: that those who remain in faction are at least made easier by the hope of concord, and this lightens most of their misfortune; for the greatest help to the unfortunate is the hope of change and the better thing lying before their eyes; but those who have often agreed and always run back to vice are deprived, with everything else, of the hope of the better too, always fearing concord no less than faction, and trusting neither, because of their mobility and instability in both. [20] And let no one suppose that I am saying that every peace is to be loved; for I know that as there is a faction that is best, so there is a concord that is most harmful; I mean the good peace, which joins us to the good and to God. If I must define these things briefly, this is my view: it is not good to be either more sluggish than is moderate or hotter, so as either to go along with everyone through easiness or to stand apart from all through disorderliness; for sluggishness is equally ineffective and restlessness unsociable. But where impiety is manifest, one must go to close quarters with fire and sword and times and rulers and all things, rather than share in the evil leaven and agree with those who are infected; and nothing of all things is to be feared so much as fearing something before God, and for this reason betraying the doctrines of faith and truth, when we are servants of the truth. But where what pains us is suspicion and unexamined fear, patience is better than haste, and condescension than self-will; and it is much better and more profitable, remaining in the common body, to set one another right as members of one another and to be set right, than, after condemning in advance by separation and destroying our credibility by the division, to legislate correction afterward by command, like tyrants and not brothers. [21] Knowing these things, brothers, let us embrace one another, let us cling to one another, let us become truly one; let us imitate him who broke down the middle wall of the partition and gathered all things together by his blood and made peace; and let us say to this common Father, to his venerable grey hairs, the meek and gentle shepherd: “Do you see the wages of your gentleness? Lift up your eyes round about and see your children gathered together, as you longed, and as you asked night and day that this alone might be added to you, that you might end your sojourning in a good old age. Behold, all have come to you, and rest under your wings, and encircle their own altar, having gone away with tears and running back with gladness. Rejoice and delight, best and most child-loving of fathers, because you have put them all on and clothed yourself with them as a bride with her ornament. Say to us too: Behold I and the children whom God has given me. And add another word too, the Master’s, and most fitting: Those whom you gave me I have kept, and none of them is lost.” [22] And may no one be lost, but may we all remain in one spirit, with one soul striving together for the faith of the gospel, of one soul, minding the one thing, armed with the shield of faith, our loins girded with truth, knowing only one war, against the evil one and those whom he commands; not fearing those who can kill the body but cannot take hold of the soul, but fearing the Lord of both soul and body; guarding the good deposit which we have received from the Fathers, worshipping Father and Son and Holy Spirit; knowing the Father in the Son and the Son in the Spirit, into whom we were baptized, in whom we have believed, with whom we have been enrolled; dividing before we join and joining before we divide; neither taking the three as one (for they are not without hypostasis, nor within one hypostasis, as though our wealth lay in names and not in realities), and yet the three are one. For they are one not in hypostasis but in Godhead: a Monad worshipped in a Triad, and a Triad summed up into a Monad, all worshipful, all royal, of one throne, all-glorious, above the world, above time, uncreated, invisible, untouchable, uncircumscribed; its order within itself known to itself alone, but to us equally venerable and to be worshipped, and alone entering the Holy of Holies, leaving the whole creation outside, the one part separated by the first veil and the other by the second: by the first the heavenly and angelic creation from the Godhead, by the second our creation from the heavenly. Let us act so and be so disposed, brothers; and those who think otherwise, to the ruin of the truth, let us receive and heal as long as possible; but those who are incurable let us turn away from, lest we share their disease before giving them our health; and the God of peace will be with us, of the peace that surpasses all understanding, in Christ Jesus our Lord.

[2] Caesarius’s parents (to begin from where it is most fitting for us) are those whom you all know, whose virtue you emulate as you see and hear it, and admire, and tell to those who do not know it, if there are any such people, each of you having taken up some part of it (since one person cannot do everything, nor is it the work of one tongue, however diligent and ambitious one may be). Though there are many great things in them to praise (if I do not seem superfluous in admiring my own), one is greatest of all and stands out above the rest: piety. I mean these venerable and grey-haired parents, venerable no less for their virtue than for their age, whose bodies are worn by time, but whose souls are young for God. … to God, and handing down piety not only to herself as a necessary inheritance but also to those born of her, truly a holy lump from a holy first-fruit; and she increased and multiplied it so much that some have believed and said (I will say it, even if the word is bold) that even her husband’s perfection was the work of none but her; and (O the wonder!) that a greater and more perfect piety was given to him as the prize of piety. Both of them loved their children and loved Christ, which is most strange; or rather they loved Christ more than their children; for their one enjoyment of their children was that they should be known and named from Christ, and their one measure of good children was virtue and nearness to what is better. They were merciful and sympathetic, snatching most of their goods from moths and robbers and the ruler of this world, moving from their sojourning to their true dwelling, and storing up for their children the brightness there as their greatest inheritance. So too they reached a rich old age, equal in honour both in virtue and in years, and full of days, both of those that remain and of those that pass away; each lacking the first place among those on earth only so far as each was kept from it by the other. And they filled up the measure of all happiness, except this last thing, as one might suppose, whether one should call it a testing or a dispensation: which, in my view, is that, having sent ahead the one of their children who was less safe because of his age, they might now end their life in safety and be taken up above with their whole household.

[5] I have gone through these things, not wishing to praise them, nor unaware that one would scarcely reach their worth even by making their praise the whole subject of a discourse, but to show that virtue was owed to Caesarius from his parents, so that you may not wonder or disbelieve if, having had such parents, he showed himself worthy of such praises; but rather the opposite would be surprising, if he had looked to others and neglected the examples of his own family close at hand. His first years, then, were such as befit those who are truly well born and who are to live well. And to cut short what lies between (his beauty and stature and the man’s grace in all things, and, as it were, a harmony as in musical tones; for it is not for us to admire such things, even if they seem no small matter to others), I will proceed to the next part of my discourse, which it is not easy to leave out even if one wished.

[6] Brought up and educated in such ways, and sufficiently trained in the learning to be had here, in which he surpassed the many by more than one could say in quickness and greatness of nature (how can I pass over the memory of those days without tears, and not have my emotion convict me of being unphilosophical, against my promise!), when the time seemed to have come to go abroad, then for the first time we were separated from each other: I remained in the schools of Palestine, which were then flourishing in rhetoric, while he reached the city of Alexander, which was then and is now, in fact and in repute, the workshop of every kind of learning. What shall I mention first, or what as greatest, of his good qualities? What shall I omit without defrauding my discourse of what is greatest? Who was more faithful to his teachers than he? Who dearer to his fellow students? Who more avoided the company and conversation of the wicked? Who attached himself more to the best, especially to the most distinguished and best known of those from his homeland, knowing that this too, the company one keeps, contributes no small amount to virtue or to vice? As a result, who was more honoured by the authorities than he? Who in the whole city (though because of its greatness everyone is hidden in it) was better known for his temperance or more conspicuous for his intelligence? … carrying off the first prize among those in the second rank. And this is not a word without witness; but the East and the West, and all the places to which he went later, are notable monuments of his education. [8] But when, having gathered every virtue and every kind of learning into his one soul, like a great merchant ship laden with varied merchandise, he was setting out for his own city, to share with others too the fair cargo of his education, then a wonderful thing happened, which it is fine to tell briefly, for to recall it gladdens me most of all, and would make you happier too. Our mother prayed a mother’s child-loving prayer, that as she had sent us both off, so she might see us return together. For we seemed to be a pair worthy of prayer and of sight, if not to others, at least to our mother, when we were seen together; a pair now wickedly broken up by envy. And God so moving things, who hears a just prayer and honours the love of parents for dutiful children, without any design or arrangement, the one from Alexandria and the other from Greece, at the same time and to the same city, the one by land and the other by sea, we arrived. The city was Byzantium, the city that now presides over Europe, in which Caesarius, after no long time, gained such fame that public honours, a marriage with a lady of distinguished family, and a seat in the senate were offered him, and an embassy was sent by common decree to the emperor, the great one, asking that the first city might be adorned and honoured by the first of the learned (if it cared to be truly first and worthy of its name), and that this might be added to all the tales told about it, that it prided itself on Caesarius as its physician and inhabitant; although, besides its other brilliance, it flourished with many great men in philosophy and in other learning. But enough of this. What happened then seemed to others a chance without reason or cause, such as chance brings about often in our affairs; but to those who love God it was very clear that it was nothing else than the work of God-loving parents, gathering their sons from land and sea into one fulfilment of their prayer. [9] Come, let me not pass over this either among Caesarius’s good qualities, which perhaps seems small to others and not worth remembering, but seemed to me then and seems now very great, if brotherly love is among the things to be praised; and I will never cease setting it among the first whenever I tell of him. The city held him with the honours I mentioned, and declared that it would not let him go whatever happened; but I, pulling the other way, prevailed, I who was everything to Caesarius, great and honoured, and so fulfilled our parents’ prayer, our homeland’s due, and my own longing, taking him as my companion and fellow traveller on the road, and being preferred by him not only to cities and peoples, to honours and revenues, which flowed to him in abundance from many sides or were hoped for, but almost to the emperor himself and his commands. From then on I resolved to philosophize and to be conformed to the life above, shaking off all ambition like a heavy master or a grievous disease; or rather, the longing was older and the life came later. But as for him, who had dedicated the first-fruits of his learning to his homeland and been admired as his labours deserved, after this the desire for glory and for being a protector of his city, as he persuaded me, gave him to the palace. This was not at all to our liking or according to our judgment (for I will confess to you that to be ranked last with God seems to me better and loftier than to hold the first place with the king below); yet he does not deserve blame. For philosophy is as hard as it is great, and the undertaking is not for many, nor for any but those called by the divine magnanimity, which gives its hand to those who choose well; but it is no small thing if one who has chosen the second life lays claim to goodness, and takes more account of God and of his own salvation than of brilliance here below, and treats that brilliance as a stage or a mask for the many and temporary things, playing the drama of this world while himself living for God with the image, which he knows he has received from him and owes to the Giver. And this, indeed, we know Caesarius intended. [10] … he was at once numbered among the emperor’s friends and reaps the greatest honours; but he offers the kindness of his art without fee to those in office, knowing that nothing advances a man so much as virtue and being known for the finest things. And those among whom he was second in rank he far surpassed in glory: lovable to all for his temperance, and for this reason trusted with precious things, and needing nothing of the oath of Hippocrates, so that even the simplicity of Crates was nothing compared with his; more venerable to all than his rank warranted, always thought worthy of great present honours and judged worthy of greater ones in hope, by the emperors themselves and by those who hold the first place after them. And, greatest of all, neither glory nor the luxury around him corrupted the nobility of his soul; but, though many great things belonged to him, the first in dignity was to be and to be called a Christian, and all the rest together was a toy and nonsense to him compared with this one thing. For the other things are played, as on a stage, by others and by oneself, set up very quickly and taken down, perhaps destroyed more easily than established, as one can see from the many changes of life and the prosperity that falls now up and now down; but piety alone is a good of one’s own and abiding … [11] These things Caesarius philosophized even in his court robe; with these thoughts he lived and departed, showing and presenting to God a piety greater than that visible to the public, according to the hidden man. And if I must, passing over everything else (his protection of relatives in misfortune, his disdain of pride, his generosity to his friends, his frankness toward the rulers, his contests and arguments for the truth, many and against many, not only with skill in argument but very piously and fervently), I will tell, instead of all, the best known of his deeds. The emperor of evil name was raging against us, having first raged against himself by denying Christ, and was by now unbearable to others too, not even, like the other enemies of Christ, registering himself for impiety with greatness of soul, but stealing the persecution under a pretence of gentleness; and, like the crooked serpent that held his soul, drawing the wretched down into his pit by all kinds of devices. His first trick and sophism was that we should not even obtain the honour of our contests (for the noble man begrudged Christians even this): that those suffering as Christians should be punished as evildoers. The second was that the name of persuasion, not of tyranny, should be attached to what was done, so that the shame might be greater than the danger for those who went voluntarily over to impiety. And, drawing some by money, others by dignities, others by promises, others by all kinds of honours, which he offered not royally but very slavishly in the sight of all, and all of them by the witchery of his words and by his own example, after many others he tries Caesarius too. Alas for the madness and folly, if he hoped to carry off Caesarius, my brother, the son of these parents! … [13] … it would be altogether out of season and out of place to tell the arguments. But when Caesarius, having undone all the twists of his arguments and pushed aside every trial, hidden and open, like a game, proclaimed with a great and clear voice that he was and remained a Christian, not even then was he altogether sent away; for a terrible longing held the emperor to enjoy Caesarius’s learning and pride himself on it. It was then that he uttered that famous saying in everyone’s hearing: “O happy father, O unhappy sons!”, since he thought fit to honour me too with a share in the dishonour, having known both our learning and our piety at Athens. Kept back for a second hearing (since justice nobly armed the emperor against the Persians), Caesarius returns to us a blessed exile and a bloodless victor, more conspicuous in his dishonour than in his brilliance.

This victory I judge far loftier and more honourable than that man’s great power, his lofty purple, and his costly diadem; I am more elated by this tale than if Caesarius had received from him a share in his whole empire. He withdraws for the present, in those evil times, and this according to our legislation, which bids us, when the moment comes, to face danger for the truth and not betray piety through cowardice, but, as long as it is allowed, not to provoke dangers, whether out of fear for our own souls or to spare those who bring the danger upon us. But when the darkness was dispelled, and the foreign land had judged well, and the gleaming sword had struck down the impious, and affairs returned to the Christians, why need I say with what glory and honour, with what and how great testimonies, and as one bestowing a favour rather than receiving it, he is taken back into the palace, and his second honour succeeds the first? Time changed the emperors, but Caesarius’s good repute and first place with them remained unbroken; and there was a contest among the emperors as to which of them should attach Caesarius more closely, and whose friend and acquaintance he should rather be called. Such were Caesarius’s piety and its rewards. Let young men and grown men hear it, and press on through the same virtue to the same distinction (“for glorious is the fruit of good labours”), all who think this worth pursuing and a part of happiness.

But of this kind too is one of the wonders about him, which gives the greatest proof both of his parents’ godliness and of his own. He was living in Bithynia, holding an office not much below the emperor: this was to keep the emperor’s money and to have charge of the treasuries; for by this the emperor was preparing greater offices for him. And when the recent earthquake at Nicaea occurred, said to have been the most severe ever recorded, which overtook almost everyone and destroyed them together with the beauty of the city, he alone of the notable men, or with very few, is saved from the danger, sheltered by the falling ruins in a safety beyond belief, and bearing small marks of the danger, enough to take his fear as tutor toward the greater salvation and to become wholly of the portion above, transferring his service from the things that are shaken and exchanging his palace. This he intended, and prayed earnestly for himself, as he assured me in writing, when I had seized the occasion for admonition; which I never ceased doing at other times either, jealous that his great nature was turning about among lesser things, and that so philosophical a soul was rolling in public affairs and covered like the sun by a cloud. But though he overcame the earthquake, he did not overcome disease; for he was a man. The one was his own, the other common to him with others; the one belonged to piety, the other to nature. And the consolation came before the suffering, so that, shaken by his death, we might boast of the strangeness of his safety then. And now our great Caesarius has been restored to us, precious dust, a praised corpse, escorted with hymn upon hymn, carried in procession to the shrines of the martyrs, honoured by the holy hands of his parents, by his mother in bright garments setting piety against grief, by tears overcome by philosophy, by psalmody quieting the laments; receiving honours worthy of his newly created soul, which the Spirit refashioned through water.

This is my funeral gift to you, Caesarius; these are the first-fruits of my words, which you often blamed me for keeping hidden, and which you were to be the first to see laid bare, over yourself. This is the adornment I give you, dearer to you, I know well, than all adornment: not flowing silks and soft threads, in which even in your lifetime you did not delight as most people do, adorned as you were by virtue alone; nor fabrics of transparent linen, nor pourings of costly perfumes, which you used to send off to the women’s quarters even before, and whose fragrance one day dissolves; nor any other of the small things precious to small minds, all of which this bitter stone would have hidden today along with your fair body. Away with Greek contests and myths, by which unhappy youths were honoured, who set small prizes for small contests; and with all the libations and first-fruits, the garlands and freshly plucked flowers, by which they pay their dues to departed men, serving ancestral custom and the unreason of grief rather than reason. My gift is a discourse, which perhaps future time too will receive, always in motion, and not allowing the one who has moved from here to depart altogether, but always keeping the one it honours in ears and in souls, and setting forth an image of the beloved clearer than paintings. Such, then, are our offerings; and if they are small and less than his worth, what is offered according to one’s power is dear to God. Some we have paid, others we shall pay, offering honours and remembrances year by year, we who are left in this life. But may you ascend the heavens, O divine and holy head, and rest in the bosom of Abraham, whatever that is, and behold the dance of the angels and the glories and splendours of the blessed; or rather join in the dance and exult with them, laughing from on high at all things here: the so-called riches, the dignities cast aside, the false honours, the error of the senses, the whirl of this life, and the confusion and ignorance as in a battle by night; standing by the great King and filled with the light there. May we too, who have now received a small effluence of that light, as far as it appears in mirrors and riddles, hereafter meet the very source of the good, beholding the pure truth with a pure mind, and finding this reward for our diligence about the good here: a more perfect share and vision of the good there; which is the end of our initiation, as the books and the souls of the theologians declare.