On Saint Athanasius (two books) 2.2–2.7

Rescue yourself, Constantius, from the pit of the Arian madness, so that you may not pay eternal penalties with your fellows in sacrilege. Do not boast to yourself of your perishing dignity; consider that you are mortal, because you cannot obtain immortality otherwise than by acknowledging God and doing his will, as it is written: “Thus says the Lord: Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, and let not the strong man glory in his strength, nor the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, to seek me and understand and know how to glory in God, for I am the Lord who does mercy and judgment and righteousness on the earth, for in these things is my will, says the Lord.” Since, then, you see that the Lord's will is in these things, how are you pleased to hate the things the Lord says he loves? “Let him who glories,” he says, “glory in this, to seek me and understand and know how to glory in the Lord.” How will you be able to say that you now glory in God? How will you be able to claim that you seek him, when you are provoking all the worshippers of his majesty to abandon the faith of the apostles and to accept the blasphemy of your doctrine? “Let him who glories glory in this, to seek me and understand and know how to glory in the Lord, for I am the Lord who does mercy and judgment and righteousness on the earth, for in these things is my will, says the Lord.” Since, then, you want unjust judgment pronounced by the priests of God, since you are a shedder of innocent blood, you are not the servant of him who deigned to speak these things by the mouth of the prophet, but plainly the servant of him who filled the heart of Cain, so that he killed the righteous young man, the first worshipper of the Lord. That is why, though you are placed in such loftiness, you are nevertheless found to be one of those of whom you have read that the Lord spoke in the Gospel: “You are born of your father the devil, and you want to do your father's desire; for he was a murderer from the beginning and did not stand in the truth.” You are a liar and a murderer: a liar, because you have brought false charges against Athanasius, the servant of God; a liar, because you call the heretical faith catholic and the catholic faith heretical; a murderer, because you both pursue the blood of Athanasius and have already killed a certain number of the worshippers of God. You have certainly not stood in the truth, since you do these things, but you are wholly set in falsehood, because your father too is a liar, he who compels you to deny the only Son of God, who drives you to shed the blood of his servants. We refused to condemn an absent man, we refused to pronounce a guilty sentence, we refused to accept your heresy, lest, made like you, we should deserve to hear what your fellow wanderers the Jews hear, to whose reproach we gather that it was said through Jeremiah: “All the nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel is uncircumcised in heart.” You are, and will be, unless you hand yourself over to us, among those against whom the Holy Spirit cries out to God in the person of our people: “I know, Lord, that a man's way is not his own, nor will a man walk and direct his thought. Correct us, Lord, but in judgment and not in anger, lest you make us few. Pour out your wrath on the nations that do not know you and on the kingdoms that have not called on your name, for they have devoured Jacob and consumed him and laid waste his pasture.”

You see that you are one of those against whom the Spirit of God speaks in the person of our people. You see, unless you turn, that the wrath of the Lord will come upon you, a foreigner, upon you, a king, because you have not only not called on the name of the Lord but have even persecuted. For when he says, “for they have devoured Jacob and consumed him and laid waste his pasture,” who can be found among your fellow tyrants to be the chief destroyer of this pasture but you, who have neither ceased tearing the servants of God nor sowing your blasphemies through your whole realm? For it cannot be doubted that you have tried to destroy the pasture of the people of God, since you have taken away its shepherds, of whom, as we have often said, God said through Jeremiah, “And I will give you shepherds after my heart, and they will feed you, feeding with discipline,” and have installed heretics, and have had a limit imposed on other catholics, so that, if they wished to remain in their sees, they should not dare to preach the apostolic faith, nor attempt, while you, the defender of the Arian heresy, live in the body, to instil the evangelical tradition in the peoples. This is the matter that proves you tried to destroy the pasture of the people of God. For all the nourishment of Christian souls is nothing but to believe as the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs believed, and then to do all righteousness. You, on the contrary, since you have wanted to take the faith from the hearts of God's peoples and to plant your faithlessness, since you want justice done in the church of God in such a way that an absent and innocent man is condemned, and a catholic is punished by the followers of justice, by priests his fellows, at the suggestion of you, a heretic, how can you seem not to be a destroyer of the pasture of the Lord's flock, when our pasture is nothing but heavenly teaching? “If you would come to life,” says the Lord, “keep the commandments”; and again: “If you do what I command you, I no longer call you servants but friends.” Since this is so, you ought, to clear yourself, to produce the Lord's commands that have ordered that an innocent catholic bishop, accused meanwhile by you, a heretic emperor, must be killed by his fellow priests. For perhaps at this point you will try to say that you have not tried to destroy the pasture of the Lord's flock. If you can produce no command of the Lord such as the one you issued, it remains that the eyes of your heart, blinded by the blasphemy of Arius, opened by this rebuke of the servant of God, should see that you have done all that we have charged against you. You cannot deny that you show yourself towards us such as that Herod showed himself, whose colleague you are found to be in the rage of butchery, in sacrilege and in royal dignity, towards those little children whom we read in the Gospel were killed on account of God, the Son of God. You have surely found the cruelty of Herod, which you are now pleased to display, written in the evangelist Matthew: “Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the magi, was very angry, and sent and killed all the infants in Bethlehem and in all its region, from two years old and under, according to the time he had ascertained from the magi.” Perhaps you do not yet see that you have been moved against us, the worshippers of God, as unjustly as Herod was moved against those little ones. Why are you pleased to be hostile to us? Surely because we confess ourselves Christians, who did not condemn a righteous man weighed down by false charges from you. From these things you can weigh who you are by the answers of the blessed John the Baptist, and reconcile yourself to God through repentance: “Brood of vipers, who showed you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear, then, fruit worthy of repentance, and do not put yourselves forward, saying, We have Abraham as our father. For I tell you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. For already the axe is laid to the roots of the trees; for every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

What do you think of this? Ought we to have condemned an innocent man, ought we to have given sentence against an absent man unheard? And how, if we had done it, could we have been found Christians, when the most blessed John urged those people, so that they might be Christians, to bear fruit worthy of repentance? They, who had not yet taken hold of the way of righteousness, were urged to take hold of it; we, who already hold it, were and are pressed by you to occupy that road of iniquity on which the Jews are known to stand. What, then, could have befallen us, if we had fed on your viperous counsels, except that from Christians we should have become a brood of vipers? Why did you command these things to be done, except that you desired us to become your fellow serpents? You know that the Lord said in the Gospel, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy,” and yet you said that an innocent man must be killed. For how shall I be able to be blessed if I condemn a righteous man, if, rejecting the thirst for righteousness, I conceive a burning for injustice? How shall I be satisfied by God for the fruits of righteousness, when this unjust work would make me a fratricide like Cain? How again shall I be able to attain the heavenly kingdom among the merciful, enriched with the fruits of mercy, when, if I kill the servant of God as you desire, I shall be found not merciful but cruel and wicked, a murderer in fact; since, as I was merciless towards my brother, so will that lover of mercy, that exactor of righteousness, be towards me, who says: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”? “Whoever,” says the Lord, “breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven”; and do you say, Constantius, that whoever does not shed innocent blood cannot attain the kingdom of heaven? Tell me, most holy man, in what could the righteousness of Christians exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, if we had killed the man whom you persecute because he calls himself a Christian, because he refuses to become an Arian? In what would we be better than the scribes and Pharisees, if we had become deniers of the only Son of God with you, if, as they reject it, we had rejected the evangelical faith with you and destroyed the apostolic tradition? Did you not remember that the Lord said, “You have heard that it was said to the ancients, You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother without cause shall be liable to judgment,” that you ordered these things to be done? If I am angry with my brother without cause, if I call him a fool, the only Son of God says that I shall be liable to Gehenna; and you, emperor Constantius, say that if I shed the blood of the innocent I shall possess eternal rest? Nor could you keep in mind, when you planned that Athanasius must be killed, on what condition the Lord commanded gifts to be offered: “If, then, you offer your gift at the altar and there remember that you have something against your brother, leave your gift before the altar and go first to be reconciled to your brother, and then come back and offer your gift.” What evil had Athanasius done, that you transgressed these commands and ordered him to be killed? Surely this, that he has said and says that he is a Christian; for there is nothing else that you curse and long to punish in Athanasius. Did you not remember that the Lord commanded us to love even our enemies, that you persecuted so fiercely a man you knew had sinned neither against you nor against God? “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you: Love your enemies, and bless those who curse you, and do good to those who persecute you, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, who makes his sunrise appear on the good and the evil and rains on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your friends, what more are you doing? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, shall be perfect, as your Father who is in heaven is perfect.” The Lord commands us to love even our enemies; and you persecute us because we did not shed with you the blood of an innocent priest of the Lord. The divine voice cries out, saying, “With the judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with the measure you measure, it will be measured back to you”; and you say, “Slaughter a man whom you do not know to have sinned.” Though you remember that you are a fountain of evils, you nevertheless dared to say of a man you knew had been falsely accused by you, “He is guilty of death.” You are so senseless, Constantius Augustus, that when you commanded these things you could not even remember that saying of the Lord: “Why do you see the speck in your brother's eye, but do not see the beam in your own eye? Or how do you say to your brother, Let me take the speck out of your eye, and behold, there is a beam in your own eye? And then you will see to take the speck out of your brother's eye.” The Lord says the beam is in your eye, and do you dare to say to Athanasius, a most righteous man, “You have a speck in your eye”? For he has committed none of the things you are pleased to charge against him; you, on the contrary, have perpetrated all that we have said, condemning an innocent man as often as you have said it.

What other way did you want us to take but your own, which the Lord describes, saying: “How broad and spacious is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it”? Because you are set on this broad and spacious way, you ordered an innocent man to be condemned, surely wanting it revealed to all that your perdition reigns far and wide. At the time when you came to Italy, you had disguised yourself, a wolf, as a sheep, as though we would not find you out by your works, as though the Lord's warning had escaped us: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves; by their fruits you will know them.” Did not your most bitter fruits, sown in you by the devil's poisons, at once shine out sadly when you tried to say that an unheard man must be condemned? Were not the snares of you, a ravening wolf, at once laid open, in that you had built a mighty engine against God's sheepfold? As, then, you have been recognized by your fruits as a wolf and not a sheep, so too the holy Gospels prove what you are, unless you take thought for yourself: a tree destined for the fire. “Do they gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor a bad tree good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. By their fruits, then, you will know them. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.” Is this how you do the will of the Father of the only Son of God: that you deny his only-begotten Son, that you say the Father himself is not a true Father, that you try to destroy the foundations laid through the apostles, that you killed and are killing his worshippers, that you drove his bishops from the peoples entrusted to them, that you ordered an absent and unheard man to be condemned, that you brought into the church your heresy, which blasphemes the one divinity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? If all these things, as we have said, are pleasing to God the Father, you will be able to enter the kingdom of heaven. For you hear his only Son say: “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.” You order an innocent man to be condemned; do you not recall that God said in Exodus: “If two men quarrel and strike a woman with child, and she miscarries a child not yet formed, he shall suffer a penalty; whatever the woman's husband assesses, he shall give, with consideration. But if it was formed, he shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise”? I suppose nothing of the sacred Scriptures escapes you; for you could not give us your excellent commands unless you were learned in the law. You have surely read this too: “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them I will liken to a wise man who built his house upon the rock. The rain came down, and the floods came, the winds blew and beat on that house, and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. And everyone who hears my words and does not do them I will liken to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, the winds blew and dashed against that house, and it fell, and great was its fall.” Which of these do you say you are, Constantius, the wise or the foolish? If you say the wise, why do your works show you foolish? Why is your house found set upon sand? For you will not be able to say that you have built your house upon the rock, when every wise man sees the structure of your folly, when every servant of God sees this great ruin of your salvation which the Lord foretold. For in what is a Christian found to stand, except in obeying the Lord's commands, except in remaining unmoved, though he be harassed with all persecutions for the name of the Son of God? In what will a Christian be perfect, except if he is even killed for him whom you are pleased to deny to be the true Son of God? You, on the contrary, since you are not in the church but among the Arians, God's enemies; since you deny the only Son of God; since you do not fulfil the commands of his mercy but rather try to destroy them; since you are a transgressor of the law, a deserter of the oath of the heavenly army, a persecutor of God's religion; since you show yourself a butcher towards his worshippers, how will you be found a wise man, like him whom the Lord said built his house upon the rock?

But you say against this: “I am not foolish; I know that I am wise.” If you are wise, why have you done and are you doing things that only the foolish can do? If you are wise, why did you order an unheard, absent man to be condemned? Why did you command an innocent man to be killed? Why did you desire the priests of God to become enemies of God? For they could not become friends of God by this deed, since you know that the Lord said to the apostles, “If you do what I command you, I will no longer call you servants but friends.” If you are wise, why must I, a priest of God, listen to you when you condemn Athanasius? You did not even allow him to set out the grounds of his pleas. If you are wise, if you are a worshipper of God, why do you persecute us because we confess ourselves Christians? Why do you love so warmly those who do not say they are Christians but confess they are Arians? If you are wise, why have you often sent armed soldiers to the house of God? If you are prudent and know yourself to be a servant of God, why have you persecuted, and do you persecute, his people with arms? Why, finally, do you call the apostolic and evangelical faith heretical and pronounce the heretical one catholic? You call yourself wise; but we, on the contrary, see that no one who does these things can be wise. For what man of sacrilege can be called prudent, except by those more imprudent than himself? If you are wise, Constantius, I shall not be able to find anyone more foolish than you. Do you still seem to yourself wise, you who have supposed that the prophets, apostles and martyrs were killed for a creature? For you will not dare to deny that all these were killed for the only Son of God. How can you be called wise, who not only did not try to resist the falling rains, the overflowing floods, the blowing winds, lest they should ruin you, who are found to be the house, but have yourself turned into rains, floods and winds, so that you, a devilish whirlwind and storm, might drag us with you into the outer darkness? “Now the works of the flesh are plain,” says the apostle, “which are adulteries, sexual immorality, uncleanness, indecency, debauchery, idolatry, sorceries, enmities, strife, jealousies, anger, quarrels, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, carousing and the like, which I warn you of, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” And does your mind, vigorous with wisdom, rage for the death of an innocent man? The apostle cries out that murderers will not possess the kingdom of heaven; and you, Constantius, the most prudent emperor, say: “Slaughter the absent, butcher the unheard, kill the innocent, and the kingdom of God will be yours.” From this one may understand how wise you are, if indeed you are the one who built his house upon the rock. For you will not be able to deny that you said: “I want to condemn Athanasius because I desire to please God.” So you desired us too to please God as you have already pleased him, ever since you were pleased to plan to destroy Athanasius with the knowledge of all of us, the priests of the Lord. So in the beginning Cain pleased God, as soon as he planned to kill his brother! In this way it is seen, Constantius, where your root is, from what stock you have descended. Can you deny after this that you are in that company which the apostle describes to the Romans: “And as they did not see fit to have God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do what is not fitting, filled with all iniquity, malice, indecency, covetousness, wickedness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil ways; whisperers, slanderers, hateful to God, insolent, proud, self-pleasing, boastful, inventors of evils, disobedient to parents, foolish, disorderly, without affection, without mercy; who, though they knew the righteousness of God, did not understand that those who do such things are worthy of death; not only those who do them, but also those who consent to those who do them.” See what that excessive love for us, suddenly arisen in you, would have brought us, if we had dared to yield to you: we would have drunk everlasting death. Likewise he says further on: “Repaying no one evil for evil, providing good things not only before God but also before men; if it is possible, as far as it depends on you, having peace with all men.” Thirsting for these saving warnings to be trampled on, you urged us to punish an innocent man. For how would we have been found to have provided good things not only before God but also among men, if we had condemned an innocent man, we who would have given a pattern for shedding the blood of the righteous? How would I be found desiring to have peace with all men, if, roused by your false suggestion, a heretic's, I had destroyed the peace of my fellow priest?

Tell me, Constantius: did you bring a true charge against Athanasius to the church of God, or a false one? If you hold it certain that you brought a true one, prove it to me, who already know you to be the bearer of a false charge. Do you think you have done nothing evil in the sight of God? What reason compelled you to become a false witness? Why did you, an emperor, become a liar? Why did you not fear being destroyed after the example of Ananias and Sapphira? Scripture says in the Acts of the Apostles that the blessed Peter said to Ananias: “Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit, so as to keep back part of the price of the land? While it remained, did it not remain yours, and when it was sold, was it not in your power? Why have you set this thing in your heart? You have not lied to men but to God. And Ananias, hearing these words, fell down and breathed his last. And great fear came upon all who heard. And the young men rose and carried him out and went and buried him. And after an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened, and Peter said to her: Tell me whether you sold the land for so much. And she said: For so much. Why have you agreed together to test the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, the feet of those who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out. And immediately she fell down at his feet and breathed her last.” I suppose you have read this, and yet you did not fear to concoct a lie in the sight of the Lord. Why did you do it, unless because you are wise? What do you think will happen to you, who are not only a liar but a murderer, not only a murderer but a heretic? Do you believe that such great things will go unpunished for you? Do you believe that you can escape eternal punishments? It is said to Ananias, “Why has Satan filled your heart, so that you lied to the Holy Spirit?” and will you say, emperor Constantius, that Satan has not filled the heart of you Arians, so that you have lied to the Holy Spirit abiding in the church of God? For you came to the church saying, “Athanasius has sinned against God”; and the Holy Spirit saw your lying souls, as he saw Ananias and Sapphira. He saw, I say, the Holy Spirit, when you were inventing these things, that you had devised such things about Athanasius in order to bring your heresy into the church, in order to destroy the apostolic tradition. Ananias and Sapphira, because in selling their field they defrauded part of the price, because they dared not to speak honestly before the apostle of God, deserved to be judged thus. You, who have not only brought false charges against a servant of God but have persecuted the whole house of God, who have shed the blood of his worshippers, who have sent his priests to the mines and into exile and ordained heretics in their places, who have called the evangelical faith heretical and your blasphemy catholic, who have brought idolatry into the church, who have deserted the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob and of all the prophets, apostles and martyrs and followed the idolatry of Arius, do you think that, if you persist in this blasphemy and cruelty, the greatest vengeance will not fall on you? Then, if God deigned to take such vengeance on Susanna's adversaries, do you think a heavier vengeance will not proceed against you? It will proceed, believe me, if you do not turn in time. For if they, because they had tried to violate Susanna's chastity, deserved to receive what I have set down below, how much more you, who have set about violating the chastity of the church? They assailed Susanna with a false charge, and you have assailed in the same way not only Athanasius but all who resist you. Or can you name one of those who resisted to whom a charge has not been attached? So you were armed to violate the chastity of the church as they were to violate Susanna's, they who said: “The doors of the garden are shut, no one sees us, and we are in desire for you; so consent to us and be with us; otherwise we will bear false witness against you, that a young man was with you, and that is why you sent the maids away from you.” Or will you try to deny that it was said: “We Arians desire that we and you Christians be made one body; abandon the faith which you hold, written at Nicaea against us; agree to the doctrine of Arius; otherwise, because we have great power and the empire is ours, we will oppress you in whatever ways we please, and you will all be removed from your sees”? You will not be able to deny that this is so, since your designs, hateful to God, have been revealed by events. For why were we compelled, even if we did not condemn Athanasius, nevertheless to be mixed in the communion of the Arians, unless because you, the pimp of the Arian heresy, desired us all to become your fellows in sacrilege by any means?