On Saint Athanasius (two books) 2.8–2.15

But I suppose you still try to deny that you persecute us because we Christians refused to become Arians. How will you be able to deny it, when you sent into exile the most holy Dionysius, bishop of Milan, who, believing your false assertions, had already condemned Athanasius, because he refused to be an Arian? Or is Auxentius, whom you, rash and pestilent man, ordained in his place, not an Arian? If Auxentius holds the holy faith written at Nicaea, then you too may be no Arian, and you may have done none of the things I assert, and may not have brought a false charge against Athanasius. Perhaps you will say that you are catholics because Susanna was heard, but we have not been. As far as our conscience goes, we know that we have been vindicated, since you, the serpent, have been exposed, since all your poisons have been laid open, since all your machinery has been revealed; for this is the vengeance we desired on you enemies of God, that God should reveal to his people that you are heretics. Almost the whole world now knows that Athanasius was falsely assailed by you, and that you are the author of this iniquity; for you have been seen desiring to accomplish one thing and putting forward another. Susanna, groaning, says to the people: “I am hemmed in on every side; for if I do this, it is death to me; and if I do not, I shall not escape your hands. It is better for me not to do it and fall into your hands than to sin in the sight of the Lord.” And we too, as soon as we saw the charges laid on by you, would have put out our torches, since we would have been darkness, as you are. What Christian would not say that it is better for him to be killed by you, the forerunner of the Antichrist, than to go into the darkness of you Arians or of any heretics? You had charges brought not only against Athanasius but against us as well, because we Christians refused to become Arians. Particular charges that could be brought against particular men were not lacking, so that none of us should seem to have been sent into exile for God's sake, but as if for our crimes. Since, then, you are guilty of such great crimes, you said that Athanasius was guilty of death because he did not want to have God angry with him together with you; those elders, whose equals you are in this crime, did the same. For Scripture says: “And it came about on the next day, when the people assembled at the house of her husband Joakim, that the two elders came, full of wicked intent against Susanna, to put her to death. And they said before the people: Send for Susanna the daughter of Hilkiah, who is the wife of Joakim. And they sent, and she came, she and her parents and all her kindred. Now Susanna was very delicate and beautiful in form. And the wicked men ordered her to be unveiled (for she was veiled), so that they might be filled with her beauty. And all her family and the others who saw her wept. Then the two elders stood up in the midst of the people and laid their hands on her head; and she, weeping, looked up to heaven, for her heart trusted in the Lord. And the elders said: As we were walking in the garden alone, this woman came in with the maids, and she sent the maids away and shut the doors of the garden, and a young man who had been hidden came to her and lay with her. And we, being in a corner of the garden, seeing the wickedness, ran to them, and we saw them coming together. Him we could not catch, because he was stronger than we, and because he opened the doors and leapt out; but her we seized and asked who the young man was, and she would not tell us. To these things we testify. And the whole assembly believed them, as elders of the people and judges, and they condemned her to die.”

Consider closely, Constantius, whether the accursed inventions of you Arians are not such things as you have meanwhile done against Athanasius as those elders did against Susanna. For who would not have believed you, the emperor, when you said, “Athanasius has committed sacrilege”? But because in this you were more detestable than those fellow damned men of yours, the false elders, you were not believed by us; for you were told that an absent man could not be condemned. Those elders made their criminal charges against her in her presence, and the whole assembly gave sentence on her in her presence; you, on the contrary, when on the accusation of heretics you compelled a catholic to be condemned unheard and absent, already the machinery of your stage play had begun to be seen. But hear now what was granted to the chaste Susanna by the defender of the innocent, the avenger of the oppressed; hear what the book of Daniel tells of Susanna's vindication: “And Susanna cried out with a loud voice and said: Eternal God, who know what is hidden, who know all things before they come to be, you know that they have borne false witness against me; and behold, I am dying, though I have done none of the things these wicked men have invented against me. And the Lord heard her voice. And as she was being led away to die, God stirred up the holy spirit of a young boy named Daniel, and he cried out with a loud voice: I am innocent of the blood of this woman. And all the people turned to him and said: What is this word that you have spoken? And he, standing in their midst, said: So, foolish Israelites, without examining and without knowing the truth you have condemned a daughter of Israel! Return to the judgment; for they have borne false witness against her.” So now too, when Athanasius cried out to God, God made all his servants rise up for the truth against you, his adversaries. He has granted to his worshippers what he granted then to his most devoted Daniel, so that we might understand that you are a false witness, that you are one of the brood of vipers, that you invented these falsehoods with your fellows in sacrilege. All are now returning to judge just judgment, while you meanwhile twist the sentence of death, even those whom the devil, the master of your soul, had ensnared through you by his cunning when they were unaware. For apart from your fellow Arians there can be no one who does not want Athanasius's innocence vindicated by God, who does not favour the innocence of Athanasius, as now too that of Susanna, after it was established that she had been assailed with a false charge: the chaste woman by the unchaste, the pure by adulterers, the handmaid of God by the servants of the devil. So the standing of an innocent man faithfully serving God has been battered by you serpentine sons of Satan; but you have been laid low. For all your poisons lie dead, killed by the power of God, since every Christian soul is praying God that, as he rescued Susanna, he may deign to rescue Athanasius from a false charge, to rescue him from your sword, the sword of a butcher, from your savagery, the savagery of a murderer. Meanwhile I press you again and again to see what madness has seized you Arians, what insanity has gripped you, that you dared to contrive these things for the death of an innocent man, when you knew that God knows all things before they happen. But no wonder if this machinery was built against Athanasius by you and yours, since you did not hesitate to say of God the Father: “He is not a true Father, for he does not have a true Son.” For you who say that the Son of God is from nothing, what else do you say but that he is not a true Father? It is no wonder, I say, if you have so risen up against Athanasius, the servant of God, when you do not hesitate to lay your deadly hands on him whose servant Athanasius is. For a robber who has not spared the master of the house will not be able to spare his household when it resists him.

But let us now return to what you were ordering us to do. You said: “Condemn Athanasius.” What had happened that we should not see him face to face? What had been done that I should not examine every hinge of the matter? Why did you not allow him to be convicted by competent witnesses? Did even the most holy Daniel, or rather the Holy Spirit through Daniel, condemn these men unheard? For we read that the glorious Daniel said to the people: “Separate them from each other. And he called one of them and said to him: You who have grown old in evil days, now your sins have come which you committed before, judging unjust judgments, condemning the innocent and letting the guilty go, though the Lord says, You shall not kill the innocent and the righteous. Now then, if you saw this woman, say under what tree you saw them dealing together. And he said: Under a mastic tree. And Daniel said: You have lied well against your own head; for already the angel of the Lord, having received the command from God, will cut you in two. And when he had removed him, he ordered the other to be brought and said to him: Seed of Canaan and not of Judah, beauty has deceived you and lust has perverted your heart. This is how you used to treat the daughters of Israel, and they, out of fear, lay with you; but a daughter of Judah would not endure your wickedness. Now then tell me, under what tree did you catch them dealing together? He answered: Under an evergreen oak. And Daniel said to him: You too have lied well against your own head; for the angel of God waits with a sword to cut you in two, to destroy you both. And the whole assembly cried out with a loud voice and blessed God, who saves those who hope in him. And they rose up against the two elders, because Daniel had convicted them out of their own mouths of being false witnesses, and they did to them as they had wickedly meant to do to their neighbour, according to the law of Moses, and they put them to death; and innocent blood was saved that day.”

What can your imprudence answer to this, Constantius? You see that not even those guilty of so great a crime were condemned without everything being examined most carefully; and did you not hesitate to order the priests of God to pass sentence of death on a man you knew to be innocent? What should we have heard, if we had done it? Surely what those false elders, those rocks of lust, those false witnesses, hear: “You who have grown old in evil days, now your sins have come which you committed before, judging unjust judgments, condemning the innocent and letting the guilty go, though the Lord says, You shall not kill the innocent and the righteous.” Would we not rightly and deservedly have heard this, if we had been either enticed or terrified by you, the bilge of the Arian doctrine, into condemning an innocent man? And therefore all these evils have come upon you. You with yours will hear what they heard through Daniel, whether because you are guilty of bringing a false charge, or because you invite the whole choir of bishops to the slaughter of an innocent man, or because you wanted the whole people of God to accept your heresy; you will hear it, and more heavily, because your crimes are heavier: you have become a destroyer of God's religion, you have killed a vast multitude of those who called themselves Christians, you have brought your Arian heresy into the church, you have condemned the catholic faith, you have denied that God the Father is a true Father, you have said that his only Son is not a true Son, and you have asserted that the Holy Spirit the Paraclete is not the true Spirit of God. Against you and against all God's enemies the faith of the holy church cries out that it believes in God the true Father, unbegotten, and in his only Son, begotten from the unbegotten and true Father, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, which the Greeks call homoousion, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made; and in the Paraclete Spirit, the true Spirit of God. To you, then, a false witness, a spiritual adulterer, a murderer and man of sacrilege, heavier things will rightly be said, rightly, since by such great and such crimes you are greater than those false elders, the enemies of Susanna. For if it is said to those liars, “You have lied well against your own head; for already the angel of the Lord, having received the command from God, will cut you in two,” and, “You have lied well against your own head; the angel of God waits with a sword to cut you in two, to destroy you,” how much more will such things be said to you, unless you look out for yourself! Had it fallen out of that heart of yours, covered with the darkness of errors, that it is written, “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it,” that you ordered an innocent man to be condemned? For, unless I am mistaken, everywhere the sacred law says that the innocent and righteous are not to be condemned. And therefore, since you commanded these things to be done against God's command, we hold you to be one of those whom the Lord strikes in the Gospel: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, for you are tombs that do not appear, and men walking over them do not know it.” Those whom you enticed to love you, a man of sacrilege, did not know it; they had not perceived from your efforts that you are a tomb full of every uncleanness; they thought you a man. But we, as soon as you began to impose on the bishops the necessity of condemning an absent man, said at once that you were a worshipper of injustice and a persecutor of justice. Likewise, when we, the legates of the blessed church, pressed you to condemn the sect of Arius, and you said rather that it was catholic, we foretold that you were the forerunner of the Antichrist.

When you are pleased to persecute and kill Christians, Constantius, you make yourself like those to whom the Lord says: “Woe to you who build the tombs of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. So you bear witness, not agreeing with the works of your fathers, for they killed them, and you built their tombs? Therefore I send prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill and persecute, so that the blood of all the prophets shed from the foundation of the world may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. So I tell you, it will be required of this generation.” You are understood to be one of them from this: that while you restore the shrines of the blessed martyrs, you shed the blood of the servants of the only Son of God. Return, Constantius, to the house of God; be a Christian, lest, found outside the church, you be always, as you are today, among those whom the Lord says he will strike: “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for I tell you, many seek and will not be able. When the master of the house has risen and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us, he will answer, I do not know where you are from. Then you will begin to say, We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets. And he will say to you, I do not know where you are from; depart from me, all you workers of iniquity. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets entering the kingdom of God, but yourselves thrust out.” Do not so hate yourself as to let yourself hear these things among them, especially since you see that you have been more wicked than one to whom it is rightly said, “Depart from me, worker of iniquity.” You will be, Constantius, if you choose to remain in this ill will of yours, among that carnal people to whom it is said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you”; you will be among them, I say, because you persecute those who urge you to win God's favour, just as they persecuted the prophets and apostles.

Again the defence of the truth requires that you be asked why you ordered an absent man to be condemned. Tell me, I beg you, did you order it to be done well or badly? If you say well, I suppose you take refuge in the deed of blessed Paul, in that he wrote to the Corinthians that he had already punished the sinner whom he had learned had sinned gravely. Let us see now whether you, a beast with only the limbs and body of a man and the mind of a wild animal, have acted as the apostle acted, whether you have carried out the matter in the order in which he did who said: “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, such as is not even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father's wife. And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be removed from your midst. For I, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged, as if present, him who has done this: in the name of the Lord Jesus, when you and my spirit are gathered together, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to hand such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” You say, I suppose: “And I ordered you to condemn an absent man because the apostle too condemned one.” First of all, catholics had reported to the blessed apostle, men he knew to be faithful, whom he had proved devoted to God, and he knew that the whole holy church of the Corinthians was a witness. You, on the contrary, darkness that you are, pressed us to condemn an absent man on the accusation of yourself and your fellows in sacrilege, heretics hateful to God. Then, since you hear the apostle say, “When you and my spirit are gathered together, with the power of the Lord Jesus, to hand such a man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,” why, darkness that you are, when we said, “We will go to him at our own expense; we will hear him among the people over whom he was divinely set; only give us catholic accusers according to the command of the sacred law,” did you refuse? Why did you take pains, as though we were gladiators and not bishops, only that we might, as you wished, kill the man whose blood you had long been thirsting for? Meanwhile you ought to know that you, unhappy man, have been handed over to Satan for your murders and your sacrilege, as was the man found guilty among the Corinthians. For these deaths you have caused and are causing are not smaller, that if the Holy Spirit says by the mouth of the blessed apostle that he handed that man over to Satan for destruction, he should not have handed you over as soon as you committed such grave crimes. For if it were not so, you would surely have remembered that the apostle said, “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men”; you would never have dared to compel the priests of God to condemn a man unheard. For since I have been bought with a price, since, freed from the law of sin, I have been made a slave of righteousness, no burden ought to have been laid on me by you, now living under the law of righteousness, so that I should again become a slave of iniquity and injustice. The burden has been laid by you, then, because you have been handed over to Satan for destruction on account of murder and sacrilege. If you had not been handed over to Satan, you would remember that the apostle wrote to Timothy: “But we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, knowing this, that the law is not laid down for the righteous, but for the unjust and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the wicked and profane, for parricides and matricides, for the indecent, for men who lie with males, for kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God which was entrusted to me.” If you were not handed over to Satan for destruction from the moment you denied the Son of God, how did you pass over so many things that could have restrained you from so great a crime, and leap to doing things that could take away all that is known to be sound teaching?

You who do things contrary to sound teaching, who proscribe, torture, deport, imprison and kill, tell me, I beseech you, whether you are unlike that king Herod whose butchery holy Scripture describes thus: “At that time King Herod laid hands on some of the church to harm them. He killed James the brother of John with the sword; and when he saw that this pleased the Jews, he went on to seize Peter also. It was the days of unleavened bread. When he had seized him, he put him in prison, handing him over to four squads of four soldiers to guard, intending after the Passover to bring him out to the people. So Peter was kept in prison; but earnest prayer was made to the Lord for him by the church. And when Herod was about to bring him out, that night Peter was sleeping between soldiers, bound with two chains, and guards before the door were guarding the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood by, and a light shone from him in that place; and striking Peter on the side he woke him, saying, Get up quickly. And he got up, and the chains fell from his hands”; and further on: “And when they had passed the first and second guard, they came to the iron gate leading into the city, which opened for them of its own accord. And when they had gone out, they went on along one street, and immediately the angel left him. And Peter came to himself and said: Now I know that the Lord has truly sent his angel and rescued me from the hands of Herod and from all the expectation of the people of the Jews. Now when day came there was no small disturbance among the soldiers over what had become of Peter. And Herod, when he had searched for him and not found him, examined the guards and ordered them to be led away.” We see that you are like him in everything, whether in cruelty or in sacrilege. For as he killed the blessed apostle James, so you have killed a vast multitude of those who believe as the apostle James believed; as he persecuted the only Son of God in the apostle James, so you persecute him both in those you have already killed and in us. Again we both instruct and exhort you to return to the church of God and to cease now persecuting Athanasius, or us who act against your heresy, lest you begin to perish after the example of this Herod, whose end holy Scripture tells, saying: “He went down from Judea to Caesarea and stayed there. Now he was angry with the people of Tyre and Sidon; and they came to him with one accord, and having persuaded Blastus, the king's chamberlain, they asked for peace, because their country was fed by the king's country. On an appointed day Herod, clothed in royal robes, sat on the tribunal and made a speech to them. And the people cried out: The voice of a god and not of a man! And immediately an angel of the Lord struck him, because he did not give God the glory, and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last.” Did you, who want to seem learned in the law, not know that John the blessed apostle said, that you said, “Condemn an innocent man”: “By this we know that we have known him, if we keep his commandments. He who says, I have known him, and does not keep his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, in him truly the love of God is perfected”? You command things to be done against God's command; the apostle, on the contrary, says that whoever has not kept his precepts has not even known him: “If one says, I have known him, and does not keep his commandments, he is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” You want us to be liars, you want us to be found murderers, surely so that we may not be found Christians. For Christians are neither liars nor murderers. The apostle says, “Whoever keeps his word, in him the love of God is truly perfected”; and you, an apostate, forerunner of the Antichrist, say: “Whoever does not keep his commandments will live.” Further he says: “He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in darkness even now. He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause of stumbling in him. But he who hates his brother walks in darkness and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his heart.” What can be said by you, a man of darkness, to this? Why do you urge us who are set in the light: “Hate with me the man whom I unjustly hate; share my madness; be murderers like me”? Then, if he says that he who hates his brother walks in darkness, so that he does not know where he is going, because the darkness of violence has blinded his eyes, what if someone has killed his brother? What if he has been a murderer? But the crime of murder seems nothing to you, who are found to have shed the blood of so many servants of God. You dare to order the priests of God to do things that please only your father the devil and you Arians, his sons.

The most holy apostle likewise urges that, keeping the road of righteousness, we may deserve to be placed in everlasting rest; and you, a most wise man, compel us to come with you to eternal torments. “Little children, let no one deceive you. He who does righteousness is righteous; but he who commits sin is of the devil, for the devil sins from the beginning. For this the Son of God was revealed, to undo the works of the devil.” Since, then, the apostle says that sin is from the devil, and you compel us to commit capital crimes, what else can I call you but the devil's agent? You, whom I see so loving his cause, so cultivating his business, that you desire us all to be found on his side. For why do you compel every worshipper of God to go over to him, except because you have chosen to favour his party? You hear the blessed apostle say, “For this the Son of God was revealed, to undo the works of the devil”; and you press the worshippers of God to complete the devil's work. When you do this, do you not seem to have made yourself the assailant of him who undid the devil's work? But it is no wonder that you have chosen to have what the only Son of God undid rebuilt through you, the devil's henchman, since you did not hesitate to deny the very one who destroyed the devil's work. That is why it is nothing to you to shed innocent blood: because, denying the lover of the innocent and the defender of his worshippers, you have betaken yourself to the one to whom Judas Iscariot betook himself. If, then, you cannot deny that it is the devil's work to shed the blood of a righteous man, it is surely clear that you have done the devil's work and urged us to do it. Further, John, most dear to God, speaks so that brotherly love may be kept inviolate, saying: “By this the children of God and the children of the devil are made plain: everyone who is not righteous is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother. For this is the promise you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; and not as Cain, who was of the evil one and killed his brother. And why did he kill him? Because his own works were evil, but his brother's righteous. Do not wonder, brothers, if the world hates us. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brothers; he who does not love remains in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” Since, then, everyone who is found to hate his brother is called a son of the devil, a murderer, is compared to Cain the fratricide, is marked out as remaining in death, why were you compelling me to carry out this work, which would have made me a fratricide like Cain and a son of the devil, which would have made me remain in everlasting death? When you see that I have already passed from death to life, when God has already placed me among those whom he has deigned to call sons, for what reason did you want me to become Cain, darkness, and a son of the devil? In what have I harmed you, in what have I become an adversary of your salvation, that you desired that I be so injured? Why do we repeat these things, except so that at some time you may understand that you do not know what is good? For if you knew, you would never have committed so great a crime yourself, nor pressed us to commit it. Tell me in the midst of this, I pray, why you persecute the bishop of the house of God. For the apostle says that he who hates his brother is a murderer. If you do not want to bear the name of murderer, why do you hate your brother? Prove that Athanasius deserves hatred; show what evil he has done, so that he deserves to be hated even by all of us. You will certainly produce no unjust deed committed by him that makes him hateful. Since this is so, you must hate him because your work is evil and that of Athanasius righteous. For you want to kill him because he has not imitated you, a wicked, criminal and sacrilegious man. It is plain that this is so. For since the glorious apostle introduces the comparison of Cain and Abel, you seem to me to be Cain, and Athanasius Abel, when he says: “By this the children of God and the children of the devil are made plain: everyone who is not righteous is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother; for this is the promise you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; and not as Cain, who was of the evil one and killed his brother. And why did he kill him? Because his works were evil, but his brother's righteous.”