On Saint Athanasius (two books) 1.38–2.1

What fear and honour, then, were we going to give God, if we had done what you ordered to be done? For those commands of yours strive to take both the fear and the honour of God away from those dedicated to his mercy. And further on, showing your work in particular, he says: “You have provoked God with your words, and you said, In what have we provoked him? In that you say: Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of God, and he will bless them; and where is the God of justice?” The prophet says “Where is the God of justice?” against those who say, “He who does evil is good in the sight of God, and he will bless them”; and you give orders for the blood of the righteous to be shed, and still call yourself a servant of God, when you are the squanderer of his law. Is it just to condemn an absent man, and an innocent one at that, or unjust? If it is not just, why do you compel us to do the thing for which we would deserve to be punished by God? “All the days of your life, my son,” says Tobit, “keep God in mind, and do not wish to sin or to transgress his commandments. Do righteousness all the days of your life, and do not walk in the way of iniquity; for if you act in truth, there will be regard for your works and for all who do righteousness.” Tell me, Constantius: does he do righteousness who kills the innocent, who sheds the blood of the servants of God? If he does not do righteousness but rather iniquity, it remains for you to see that you are a lover of iniquity and a fabricator of every wicked work. For since the sacred law urges us to do righteousness at all times and you compel us to do injustice, what else would you have me take you for but a lover and perpetrator of injustice? “All the days of your life,” he says, “keep God in mind”; when you have abandoned him by clinging to the Arians. For we who hold the apostolic faith do not abandon him. How do you not transgress his commandments, you who kill his servants dedicated to his name and majesty, compelling them to abandon him and become your fellow serpents and fellow apostates? We suffer hatred from you because we tell you the truth, because we want you to live with us for ever; but you love those who have gone over to you, those who at first contradicted you but afterwards preferred to serve your wicked designs rather than obey the commands of God. You rejoice that you have enticed them by your cunning and brought them to accept your heresy, that you have them subject to you in everything, men whom you had long seen treating you as nothing, whom you saw trampling the authority of your reign underfoot by the truth. But we want you to know that this deed is not new, but has often been done so by the faithless and thoughtless, by those whom, knowing the future, he foreshowed by the most holy mouth of the prophet Malachi: “You have made your counsels heavy against me, says the Lord almighty, and you said, In what have we spoken against you? Because you said: Everyone who serves God is vain; and what more have we gained by keeping his commandments and walking as suppliants before the Lord almighty? And now we call strangers blessed, and all who do wicked things are renewed, and they have resisted God and been saved. So those who fear God spoke against him, each to his neighbour. And the Lord gave heed and heard, and wrote a book of remembrance before him for those who fear the Lord and reverence his name. And they shall be mine, says the Lord almighty, on the day when I make them my possession; and I will choose them as a man chooses his son who serves him well. And you shall return and see how great the difference is between the righteous and the unrighteous, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him. For behold, the day of the Lord comes, burning like an oven, and it will burn them; and all the foreigners and all who commit crimes shall be as stubble, and the day of the Lord that comes will set them on fire, says the Lord almighty, and neither root nor vine shall be left of them.”

Hearing God say these things, and since you are still pleased to remain in your evils, I suppose you rejoice even in this, that you will receive those things from him together with the transgressors, with those who forsake God. Woe to you, murderer and man of sacrilege, for unless you repent of your deeds you will be, as you are now, among those whom he rebukes by the mouth of Isaiah, saying: “Woe, sinful nation, a people full of sins, an evil seed, lawless sons; you have forsaken the Lord and provoked the Holy One of Israel.” You will always be one of those who, for the wickedness of their pursuits, are compared to the rulers of Sodom and the peoples of Gomorrah, when it is said: “Hear the word of the Lord, rulers of Sodom; give heed to the law of God, people of Gomorrah.” You will be with them, unless you correct yourself, of whom you have read it written: “If you multiply prayers, I will not hear you, for your hands are full of blood.” Woe to you, Constantius, who have incurred such great offence from God that you could not see what you should have guarded against. For when he says by the mouth of Isaiah to those killers of the holy prophets and of all the righteous, “Wash yourselves, be clean, take away the evils from your enemies before my eyes; cease from your evils, learn to do good, seek judgment, rescue the one who suffers wrong, give judgment for the orphan and justify the widow,” and you, on the contrary, ordered the worshippers of God to be slaughtered, God himself to be deserted and idolatry to be taken up, was this to have heard God's warnings and to have been corrected? Why do you compel us to do this, except that you long for us to be consumed by the sword with you? “And if you are willing,” says God, “and listen to me, you shall eat the good things of the land; but if you are not willing and do not listen to me, the sword shall devour you; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things.” Whom shall we obey, God who says this, or you, his enemy? God tells the Jews to abandon their errors now, to cast their evils out of their hearts, to learn to do good, to judge just judgment. You say: “Condemn unjustly.” Why do you urge me to do this, except that you want me made such a man as those to whom God said: “But you, says God, why do you set fire to my vineyard, and the plunder of the poor is in your houses? Why do you do wrong to the people and shame the face of the needy?” And you do these things, you carry out all of them, for doing which he is angry with those who do them, as though you knew that you could not please unless you had set fire to the Lord's vineyard, stored the plunder of the poor in your house, and inflicted wrongs in many ways on the servants of God. Or will you try to say that you have done none of these things? Did you not set fire to the Lord's vineyard when you compelled it no longer to know the Lord of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the apostles, the God of the prophets and martyrs, but the idolatry brought in by Arius and exalted by you? Is not this plunder of the poor in your house, the plunder of the servants of God, the Christians, on whose account you have read it written, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” since you know that you have proscribed those who resisted your sacrilege? Will you dare to say, “I have not done and do not do wrong to the people of God”? And who ever did so great a wrong as you, who do not cease inflicting every kind of torture and punishing in various ways?

We refused to punish an innocent man as guilty, lest the sentence still prophesied by the mouth of Isaiah strike us too: “Woe to those who write wickedness; for those who write write wickedness, turning aside the judgment of the poor and seizing the judgment of the needy of my people, so that the widow may be their plunder and the orphan their spoil. And what will they do on the day of visitation? For tribulation will come upon you from afar; and to whom will you flee?” We did not yield to your poisoned counsel, desiring to flee in all our tribulations and anxieties to him to whom that lover of justice Job fled in all his trials; we did not obey your cruel command, because we wished to be found imitators of that servant of God, Job, who says: “I delivered the poor from the hand of the mighty, and I was a helper to the orphan who had no helper; and the mouth of the widow always blessed me. For I was clothed with righteousness and covered with judgment; and I was an eye to the blind and a father to the weak, and I broke the jaws of the wicked and took the plunder out of their teeth”; and further on: “I have been set in the balance of justice, and the Lord knows my simplicity, for my foot never strayed from the right way, nor did my eye look on evil.” What is the right way from which the glorious Job says he did not depart? Surely this: the way that neither killed the innocent nor knows another God, because it knows only the God of angels and archangels, the God whom you think cannot rescue us from your power. For when you say of the faith of the blessed church, “If the faith written at Nicaea is catholic, let him in whom they have believed rescue them from my power,” you are saying that God has no strength to rescue us from your hands, that he cannot stand against you; you assert that the God of the apostolic church has no such power as could shut out your might. For what else does the faith of the blessed church confess but that it believes in God the Father unbegotten and in his only Son, begotten from the unbegotten and true Father, and in the Holy Spirit the Paraclete? What else does the faith of the catholic church confess but that the Trinity is perfect and that the Godhead of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is one? What else does the faith of the blessed church confess but that neither the Father took up man nor the Holy Spirit the Paraclete, but the only Son of God? What else does the faith of the glorious church assert but that the only Son of God is unchangeable, unalterable, beyond reckoning, immeasurable, eternal, as is he whose Son he is? The holy church has believed that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have one power and one sole dominion. This faith, I say, you call heretical, and you assert that yours is catholic, the faith that says God has no true Son, that says there was when he was not, that says he was made from nothing; with the very thoughts with which Rabshakeh, the commander of the king of the Assyrians, reproached the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, saying: “Let not Hezekiah deceive you, that your God can deliver you from the hands of the king of the Assyrians.” So you too, the commander of the Antichrist, say through your men: “Do not let the words of your bishops, who contradict me, deceive you, that the faith they preach can deliver you.” For though you vary the words, the matter comes to this, that it is plain you reproach God before us as being powerless to rescue us, as the king of the Assyrians reproached him: “Thus says the king of the Assyrians: If you wish to be blessed, come out to me instead, and you shall each eat the fruit of your vine and fig tree, and drink water from your own cisterns, until I come and take you into a land like your own land, a land of wheat and wine and bread and vineyards. Do not, then, let Hezekiah deceive you, saying, God will deliver you”; and further on: “Who will deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?” But that you have been shown to be such, God says, on the contrary, by the mouth of Isaiah to Hezekiah: “You have no reason to fear these words which you have heard, with which the envoys of the Assyrians reproached me. Behold, I am sending my spirit, and when he hears a report he will return to his own country and fall by the sword in his own land.” We see, Constantius, the same dangers now standing about you, unless you take thought for yourself, that stood about him who said: “Thus you shall say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let your God in whom you trust deceive you, saying, Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of the Assyrians.” So you, blasphemer, are in danger like him, and do not see it; we worshippers of God, on the contrary, see ourselves standing safe, defended and unharmed. And why are we safe and defended, except that we hold the holy faith which the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs held, the faith you have judged heretical?

But to return again to Athanasius, in whom you persecute this sacred faith: did you not fear, I beg you, the indignation of the Lord brought against those who tried to reproach the most righteous Job, that you assailed a bishop of God with false charges? Do you not fear even now that God may say to you what he said to that king who spoke against the most holy Job: “You have sinned, you and your two friends; for you have spoken nothing true before me”? Meanwhile you Arians will be able to be found superior to Athanasius before God now just as those who reproached Job were found then. It is to your advantage, Constantius, to make supplication to God for your crimes through Athanasius, the priest of the Lord, to direct your prayers through him, as they did through Job; to take care to obtain saving baptism through Athanasius or through his fellow bishops. For the rest, however you torment yourselves against Athanasius, you are found to be among the sons, being heretics, of that serpent, the snake, the runaway deserter; but Athanasius is of God's household, as Job was; he is of the sons of light and holds that very way of righteousness which Job, the servant of God, held; he possesses the faith, and so Athanasius is of the sons of Abraham. Athanasius confesses the Son of God as Job confessed him. And how is Job one of the sons of Abraham, except that he believed as Abraham believed? If you do not know that this is so, read through the blessed apostle Paul, not only to the Romans but to the Galatians, and you will find that what I am defending is true. Or, because the blessed apostle made no special mention of the name of the righteous Job, will it be denied that Job is of the sons of Abraham? If it cannot be denied that Job is of the sons of Israel, it cannot be doubted that he became so great and such a man only because he believed in God as blessed Abraham believed. For the apostle reveals that believers are justified not by the works of the law but through faith; nor would the victory in those temptations have been reckoned to him as righteousness, had he not believed in God as Abraham believed. Or how would he have overcome the devil, unless he had believed in God the Father unbegotten and in his only Son, begotten from the unbegotten and true Father, and in the Holy Spirit the Paraclete? Or if you think that men have not always believed as we believe today, prove that the blessed apostles and martyrs could have overcome your fellow butchers and, having defeated your friend the devil, attained the heavenly kingdoms, except by believing in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy Spirit. If, then, those who believed after the coming of the Lord, the only Son of God, conquered by believing thus, believe that those too who conquered the devil before his coming believed no otherwise than as we believe today. For neither would Daniel have overcome the lions, nor the three young men the fire, unless they had believed as the church believes today. That, in short, is why the apostle appeals to the faith of Abraham, proving by the authority of the sacred writings that Abraham believed as Paul now believed, and that he himself was a son of wrath, in error, at the time when with the Jews he denied the only Son of God.

Since this is so, I beseech you to stop now waging war against the house of God, and to accept the heavenly exhortations that can lead you to obtain everlasting salvation. Hear what God says to you by the mouth of Isaiah: “Hear me, you who have lost your heart, who are far from righteousness.” Or if your heart is with you, if you are not far from righteousness, why do you say to us, the priests of God, “Condemn an absent man, punish an innocent one”? For if you have not lost your heart and you keep the way of righteousness, why do you not remember what is written: “Keep judgment, do righteousness; for my salvation is near to come and my mercy to be revealed. Blessed is the man who does this, and the man who holds fast to it, not profaning my sabbaths, keeping his hands from doing injustice”; and again: “There is no rejoicing for the ungodly, says the Lord. Cry out with strength, do not spare; lift up your voice like a trumpet and declare to my people their sins and to the house of Jacob their iniquities. They seek me day by day and want to know my ways, as a people that had done righteousness and had not forsaken the judgment of God. They ask of me now just judgment and desire to draw near to God.” What hope, unhappy man, can you have, unless you repent of your evil deeds, when you hear God say, “There is no rejoicing for the ungodly”? Or will you deny that you are ungodly towards the worshipper of God, when you do not deny that you shed blood? Then, if God uttered such rebukes against those who, at the time of fasting, struck their subjects with their fists and hurt them with other kinds of injuries, what would he have uttered against us, if, against the commands of his divine greatness, we had condemned a man unheard, absent and innocent? “Not even if you bend your neck like a hoop and spread sackcloth and ashes beneath you, not even so will you call it an acceptable fast.” We see through this threat how great God's anger against us could be, if we condemned an innocent man. For if the Lord is so angry if we strike those subject to us with our fists at the time of fasting, how much more if we slaughter his worshippers! If I may not strike my subjects with my fists at the time of fasting, could I be allowed at any time to strike my fellow priest with the sword? “This is not the fast I have chosen, says the Lord; but loose the bonds of violent contracts; let the broken go free, and tear up every unjust bond; break your bread for the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house. If you see the naked, cover him, and do not despise those of your own seed.” What hope do you hold, most prudent king, when you have turned all these things into their opposite? For how have you loosed every knot of iniquity, when you remain such, in your unbelief, as you have set yourself against us, and grow more and more in your ill will to destroy us; when in your blasphemy you, the author of sacrilege, have grown still more, asserting even by edict that your blasphemy is the catholic faith, after the manner, that is, of harlots, who at first commit fornication in secret but afterwards become so shameless, so lose the grace of modesty, that they wish to commit fornication in the open? How have you loosed every knot of iniquity, when you still keep the fury you took up years ago against blessed Athanasius so firmly that you want his blood shed? How have you let the broken go to rest, when you do not cease torturing the servants of God in various ways? And how have you let the broken go to rest, when you see that prisons, mines and places of exile can hardly hold the number of Christians condemned by you? How, even if you break your bread for the hungry, will the Lord accept it, when you kill with hunger the servants dedicated to his eternity? How, if you bring the homeless poor into your house, will God deign to look on your work, when he sees the servants of his glory thrown out of their private houses and made exiles because they refused to accept your idolatry instituted through Arius? How, if you cover the naked, will you be able to please God, when you have taken away the inheritances of his servants and said, “If you condemn the apostolic faith and accept the Arian one, you will recover all your property”?

Indeed, of all these sacred commands of the Lord you are found to fulfil one: that you do not despise those of your own seed. Truly you do not despise your fellow vipers the Arians, born, that is, of your shameless father the devil; you love your brothers, because you see that they are nearer to you; you love them with singular affection, you lavish on them all the glory of your reign, you have them as partners and sharers in destroying God's inheritance in your realm; you have made them rich, you have raised them above all who are placed in high office, that is, those who have decided to mingle with your darkness. Since, then, you are doing what God hates, how do you think you can be heard by God, or that if you give alms it can be counted acceptable to you, when you hear him say: “Then your morning light will rise, and your health will spring up quickly, and righteousness will go before you, and the majesty of God will surround you. Then you will cry, and God will hear you; while you are still speaking he will say to you, Here I am”? Do you think you can obtain any of these things, since the morning light has not risen for you, but inextricable darkness has besieged your mind and the fogs of error have woven it over? What health has arisen for you, when you are placed in every wound of death, when every day you bring forth increase to your wounds, when you are taking pains to destroy yourself utterly? For we have health from nowhere else than, first of all, from believing as the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs believed. How can righteousness go before you, when you remain wholly in injustice, when you are the bilge of the Arian doctrine, the shedder of Christian blood? How will the majesty of God surround you, when you are attacking that very majesty, having forsaken it and decided to take up the idolatry of the Arian doctrine? How then will you cry, and God hear you, and while you are still speaking say to you, Here I am, when you deny God the Father, deny his only Son, deny the Holy Spirit the Paraclete? How can he either hear you or say to you, Here I am, when you overturn his religion as far as lies in you, when you have removed his catholic bishops and installed heretics? How will he hear you, whom you thought should be trampled in every way, unless you repent of your evil deeds, unless, leaving your wicked ways, you take hold of the just road of the holy church? Then indeed you will be able to obtain these promises of God. For it is written for those who have turned to God with their whole heart: “Thus says the Most High, who dwells on high, holy for ever among the holy, whose name is the Lord Most High, resting among the holy, and giving fairness of soul to the faint-hearted and giving vindication to the broken in heart: I will not be angry with you for ever, nor will I always exact vengeance from you.” But to whom does he say this? Surely to those who have turned to blot out their sins by satisfaction. Hence too: “This is not the fast I have chosen, says the Lord; but loose every knot of iniquity, loose the bonds of violent contracts; let the broken go free, and tear up every unjust bond. Break your bread for the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house. If you see the naked, cover him, and do not despise those of your own seed. Then your morning light will rise, and your health will spring up quickly, and righteousness will go before you, and the majesty of God will surround you. Then you will cry, and God will hear you; and while you are still speaking he will say to you, Here I am.”

God will be present with you, if first you believe in him, and then turn yourself to the things he says further on must be fulfilled: “If you take away from yourself the chain of iniquity and of bondage and the word of murmuring, and give your bread to the hungry from your heart and satisfy the humbled soul, then light will rise for you in the darkness, and your darkness will be as midday. And your God will be with you always, and you will be filled as your soul desires, and all your bones will grow fat, and they will be like a well-watered garden and like a spring whose water does not fail.” These things, as has been said already, you will be able to obtain if you betake yourself to the church, if you avoid your fellow Arians, if you deign to hate that congregation of yours, the congregation of the malignant. Then God will be with you always; then light will rise for you in the darkness; then your darkness will be as midday; then your road will be directed in good things. But if you remain in this stubbornness, if in this cruelty, so as to torture his servants, God will not be with you, but the one who even today is found to be in your Arian assembly, that is, the devil. For the things you are pleased to do are not God's but the devil's. Whether it is a work of God that you proscribe certain men because they did not condemn Athanasius, the innocent bishop of God, or because they did not communicate with your fellow heretic George, or because they call themselves Christians, because they refuse to become your fellow apostates, we can well judge, if it is a work pleasing to God; likewise whether that is almsgiving which you give from the tears of others, from the goods of those who preferred to be deported, killed and proscribed by you rather than either condemn an innocent man or deny the only Son of God, believing in whom they knew Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets, apostles and martyrs were glorified. He who is able to grant this to us is witness that I desire you to become their companion and a sharer with them all, and that these are my prayers for you.

Do you dare, Constantius, to stretch out your hands against those dedicated to God, to harass those whose happiness the apostle declares, saying: “But we know that all things work together for good for those who love the Lord, for those who are called according to his purpose, whom he foreknew and predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son”? Your persecutions do indeed work together for our good; but observe what God promises to you persecutors through Jeremiah, saying: “Israel is holy to the Lord, the first of his harvest; all who eat of it will repent; I will bring evils upon them, says the Lord.” The evils that God promises you will come upon you, Constantius, unless you correct yourself, as they came upon that carnal people, your fellow blasphemers, to whom it is said: “You have done evil to defile your ways, and in your hands has been found the blood of innocent souls.” You will be among God's enemies for ever, unless you listen, hearing his holy warning saying: “If you truly amend your ways and your thoughts, and truly execute judgment between a man and his neighbour, and do not oppress the proselyte and the poor and the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and do not go after other gods.” You will amend your ways if you now cease persecuting the servants of God, if you confess that you are a Christian and deny that you are an Arian, if you believe that the Son of God is the true Son of God, if you anathematize those who say, “There was when he was not,” and “He was made from nothing.” You will change your ways if you repent of your murders and your sacrilege; otherwise you will be, as you are now, one of those to whom God says in reproach: “Is my house, in which my name is called, a den of robbers?” Whom do you want to be the house of God, you Arians or us Christians? For if your malignant congregation is the house of God, then a congregation of robbers is the house of God. For in shedding the blood of the servants of God, as the Jews shed it then, you are seen to be robbers. By your fruits, emperor Constantius, you are recognized to be not a Christian but plainly a chief of robbers. In short, you order the innocent to be put to death, dwelling, that is, not in the church of the Lord but in a den of robbers. You do not cease to kill those whom you see ready to be killed for the glory of the only Son of God, for his eternal majesty. We refused, at your false suggestions, to give sentence against a righteous man, lest that rebuke of the Lord strike us too, with you and with the Jews: “He has bent his tongue like a bow; in falsehood, and faith has not prevailed on the earth; for they have gone from evil to evil, and they have not known me.” You, the contriver and lover of false charges, you who do not know the Lord, will, unless you correct yourself, be as you are, one of those of whom you have read it written: “They do not speak the truth; their tongue has learned to speak falsehood. They would not turn back, and they did not leave off usury upon usury, deceit upon deceit. They would not know me, says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord: Behold, I will refine them and try them, for so I will do because of the wickedness of the daughter of my people. Their tongue is a wounding arrow; the words of their mouth are evil. One speaks peaceably to his neighbour, and within himself he holds enmity. Shall I not punish them for these things, says the Lord, or shall not my soul take vengeance on such a nation?”