Against Constantius 25–27

Whose hand among the bishops have you since left innocent? What tongue have you not forced into false speech? What heart have you not changed to condemn its former judgment? You decree that homoousion be condemned, the faith of antiquity and the security of piety. You have ordained that homoeusion be anathematized by the very men who had taken it up: and though it is of no use to us for the faith, yet for those who cut it away it is the condemnation of their own faith. You condemn also the name of substance, by which you lied to the Westerners that you were devout, both at the synod of Serdica and at Sirmium; which, taken up on prophetic authority, contained the understanding of the faith. Everything, then, that was approved before you order to be condemned; what was always disapproved you compel to be hallowed. O wicked one, who make a mockery of the church! Only dogs return to their vomit; you have compelled the priests of Christ to swallow again what they had spat out. You command them to approve in their confessions what they had before condemned: in denying, they acquit those they had found guilty, and make themselves guilty. You have thrust everything into impiety and guilt, since all either establish from the present, or confess from the past, that they are guilty and impious. Truth does not admit a lie, nor does religion suffer impiety.

You call yourself a Christian, but you yourself testify how far you are from being one, and your deeds do not agree with your profession. For you have laid the Eastern bishops under your will, and not only under your will but under your violence. You order that the signatures of the Africans, by which they had condemned the blasphemy of Ursacius and Valens, be returned to you. You threaten those who resist, and finally you send men to seize them. What? Do you think that Christ judges only by the letter, and that God needs a scrap of paper to convict the will? Or that what was once written, and violently snatched away by you, can be abolished from the knowledge of divine power? The papers will indeed follow you into ashes, but the condemnations of the guilty will live before God. You gain only one thing: that posterity is taught, by its fear, what it ought to decree against them.

And O, with what increases you advance toward impiety! Other mortals have always waged war with the living, since one man has no quarrel with another beyond death; but for you there is no end of enmities. For you attack our fathers, already received into eternal rest, and burst perversely into their decrees. The Apostle taught us to share in the memorials of the saints; you have compelled us to condemn them. Is there anyone today, living or dead, whose words you have not cut away? You have wholly destroyed the very episcopates that now seem to exist, because there is no one now who has not been condemned by himself and has not himself condemned the one from whom he received the priesthood. With whose memory among the saints will there now be communion? The three hundred and eighteen bishops who met at Nicaea are anathema to you; anathema then all who were present at the various expositions since. Your father too, long since dead, is anathema to you, who cared for the synod of Nicaea, which you, having defamed it with false opinions, disturb and attack with a few profane satellites of yours against human and divine judgment. But you are not permitted, now that you are powerful in rule, to prejudge the future as well. For letters exist by which it is shown that what you think criminal was then devoutly accepted. Hear the holy understanding of the words, hear the undisturbed ordinance of the church, hear the faith professed by your father, hear the confident security of human hope, hear the public sense of the condemnation of heresy; and understand that you are the enemy of the divine religion, the foe of the memorials of the saints, and the rebellious heir of your father's piety. Appendix from the books On the Trinity.