That One Must Die for the Son of God 1–6

It would have been fitting indeed, emperor Constantius, to discuss nothing more with you from the divine Scriptures, with you whom we have found to be a corrupter of the truth, whom we have caught by those deeds of yours being one of those who are called wise in their own eyes because they hold to the road of folly; it would have been fitting, as we said, after all we have pressed upon you, to keep silent now, especially since we remember that it is written: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you become like him,” and again: “Say nothing in the ears of a fool, lest when he hears he mock your sensible words.” But because I have gathered that you still applaud yourself for the power of your arms and the empty dominion of your rule, since you can do violence to those whom you ought by reason to have brought to what you had decided, I have wanted, especially in this book, to make known to your mind, defiled by sacrilege, that in all the things in which you think yourself great you are wretched, and that all the rage of your butchery is despised by the servants of God. For we want you to hold it fixed and plain that you will pass away with your temporal, perishable, fragile, corruptible kingdom, and, unless you provide for yourself while there is room, will come to eternal punishment, while Christians will come to eternal rest and obtain an incorruptible kingdom. Or will you try to maintain that through this heresy of yours you will gain the kingdom of heaven, you who, together with your fellow pestilences the Arians, afraid that, refuted by us Christians, you would some day be forced by the outcry of truth itself to give in, rejected debate and decided you must take refuge in the strength of your fragile arms? As if you could overcome with fragile arms those who will obtain immortal gifts: you, an enemy of the divine religion, the devout servants of Christ; you, the forerunner of Antichrist, the soldiers of God, those whom the only Son of God deigned to invite to enjoy the eternal friendship of his divinity, saying: “Blessed are you when men hate you and persecute you, cursing you, and reproach you and say all evil against you. Rejoice and exult, for your reward is great in heaven; for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Powerless in everything, you thought to drive us from our position, to lay low these whom you see ready to be killed for the only Son of God because they have chosen not to be tormented in hell with you deniers but to gain the heavenly kingdom. By the empty authority of your reign you had thought to overcome those who shine out by the very confession of their faith as being temples of God. For as you Arians, by denying the Son of God, are marked out by the words of the prophets, the apostles, and the holy Gospels as houses of an unclean spirit, so we who confess the Son of God show that we are temples of God. Your cruel and sacrilegious mind, yielding to the suggestions of your fellow heretics, had presumed that the soldiers of God could give way to your butchery: us, whom God calls his temples in this way: “For I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God and they shall be my people.” You had judged that you could conquer those whom the apostle exhorts to take up God and carry him in their bodies; you had indeed thought that you could subdue them with the futile arms of your reign. But you see: even standing in your palace behind the curtain, you received my answer, that all the servants of God, trampling your frivolous authority, agree in mind, will, zeal, strength, and voice to keep their salvation.

You notice how your perishable dominion, the more it deigns to rage against us, the more it is judged weak, contemptible, empty, feeble, and abject; for as often as your hand, roused by fury and crime, has prevailed to destroy us, so often, we remember, we have grown and come out more and more as victors. You slaughtered a great many in Alexandria, you tore certain men to pieces in the whole world, you destroyed those who resisted you in various places; but all these, which you least want to hear, are martyrs; we believe that all those most blessed men slaughtered by your sword are surely in paradise. Believe me that we have resolved to be killed by you, because we have seen that it is better to have God as our lover for all ages than to be punished with you, the imitator of Judas Iscariot and of the Jews. This is why, in the end, Constantius, not fearing the hissing of the serpent brought on through you, we are ready to undergo every destruction. We can never repent of our resolve if we, who are seen so far to have resisted your cruel hands, are slaughtered by you. For the death that you threaten to inflict on us is prepared for all; but no one, as we see, has obtained such blessedness as the holy martyrs have obtained, except those who by dying conquered death for the only Son of God. You torture, kill, and banish men dedicated to God, and you cannot give reasons for your hatred in doing so. Because you go astray, you are also angry with us for holding the true way; and when you could correct yourself by our wholesome warning, you heap up your errors besides with cruel deeds, wresting minds dedicated to God out of disembowelled bodies, the bodies of us who have resolved to keep faith with God to the last laps of life. You see that this is so, and not without the greatest pain to you, since you notice that you cannot turn us from this which alone is religion, nor draw us back from this course in which we press on toward the prize of the upward call: not when you make yourself an open enemy, nor when you pretend to be a friend (for it is seen that he who deceived Eve is in you), nor when you compose your word, by which you creep like a cancer, with the false, painted swelling of knowledge, asserting in your edict, stained with all your crimes, that you are the cutter-back, the harvest of all errors, when you yourself are the fountain of all error; you affirm that you are a bearer of light, when you are besieged by every darkness. So you can at last see, cruellest emperor Constantius, though you lack all understanding, at least from your being despised, that we can by no means be turned from the way of truth. For we Christians know that this is the first business of faith: not to be moved from our place by prosperity or adversity, not to be drawn from a purpose once taken in strength. We see that by this one devout word, “I am a Christian; I will not be as you are, Constantius, an apostate,” every crime is shut out; that by this one word the protection of salvation is given, the bond of freedom and honour; we see that by this confession the shield of protection is given us, a weapon against the devil who rages against us through you; and you say: “Deny that you are Christians.” That we endure firm against the hostile danger and do not shudder at the savagery of you, the torturer, that we are encouraged rather than grieved, this comes from the conscience which remembers that the only Son of God gives the presence of his divinity to protect his own and make them victors; hence it comes about that by the punishment by which you believe we are destroyed we are given life. For what you, the punisher, hoped would serve for torment, we, who believe that he for whose sake we suffer is with us, take as an increase of strength; this is why we are not broken when your evils shake us, and the more variously we are harassed with unceasing cruelty, the more firmly we are strengthened. For he is with us who protected the Hebrew youths believing in him in the furnace of fire; he strengthens our minds, he guides our understanding, he kindles our hearts with his divine love and encourages us to endure holy suffering; hence none of us thinks of the death you threaten to inflict, but of immortality, not of the temporary punishment brought on by you, but of everlasting glory. For that God's martyrs are consecrated by torments and crowned by the very testing of suffering, the holy Scriptures reveal thus: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints,” and: “Though in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality. And having been troubled a little, they will be greatly blessed, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself. Like gold in the furnace he tried them, and like a whole burnt offering he accepted them; in time there will be a regard for them. They will judge nations and rule over peoples, and their Lord will reign for ever.”

Those, then, who trust by the greatness of God that they will obtain such happiness must exult and, thinking on the joys to come, trample your present evils. The divine voice of God's only Son is: “He who loves his life in this world will lose it, and he who hates his life for my sake will keep it for eternal life.” Clinging to this divine command, we Christians, though your hook, Constantius, rebounding in our limbs, runs back into the wounds, stand and will stand immovable, stronger than you the torturer and all your punishments, turning over this alone among ourselves: that this butchery of your cruelty is useful to us for everlasting glory. The vanquished are often spared by barbarians, and there is room for mercy among arms, even among those who live by savage custom. But what you do against us is beyond telling, though we have wished you no ill and desire good to befall you and never cease beseeching God continually: you plunder, proscribe, slaughter with the sword, punish in various ways, and do not allow the bodies you have ordered torn apart to be buried; you forbid alms to be given; you have filled all the mines and all the places thought fit to be called places of exile with the number of us who resist your cunning; you do not cease banishing the innocent and tormenting them with hunger, thirst, and nakedness. These evils you heap on us who long to obtain eternal blessedness. And yet, cruellest emperor, whatever your savagery has brought on us and will inflict, notice that it is a lie; since not even death, inflicted by you on the holy martyrs who went before us, is death, nor loss, nor damage, but an investment of faith. We Christians are always tortured by you tyrants in persecution with a perverse inquisition. For by the means by which the guilty are compelled to confess, by that means we are driven to deny Christ, the only and most true Son of God. But as they, having confessed, are condemned for their deserts, so we, because we do not deny the Son of God, are crowned, for whom the condemnation you inflict is victory; we are taken from the midst by you, before whom you do not dare to blaspheme. For by one word of a soldier of Christ he is laid low who, dwelling in you, speaks against our devout confession, he who through you thirsts for our blood, he who has besieged your mind; he trembles at the presence of the worshippers of God and cannot bear it when we dissent from you, who say that the Son of God is from nothing, when we stand against your threats and, aided and protected by his power, trample all the cruelty of your butchery. You surely feel yourself chastised by the constancy and endurance of the servants of him who says: “Do not fear him who can kill the body; rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.” We are encouraged also by the exhortations of Paul, his most blessed apostle, to trample you, the tyrant of all tyrants: “We are sons of God; and if sons of God, also heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him, so that we may also be glorified with him”; and again: “I consider that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come that will be revealed in us.” Thinking of the glory of that splendour, it befits us, servants of Christ, to endure all the pressures and persecutions brought by the devil, not only through you but through all his men; because, though they are many, yet we are freed from all of them, we who believe that the Son of God is the true Son and who, while we remember that the Father and the Son are two persons, still claim one divinity for the Father and his only Son. Hearing these just and invincible pleas of ours, because he who has besieged your mind cannot bear the truth, he incites your beastly spirit to harass us as fiercely as possible, to torment us with exquisite kinds of punishment, because we will not desert the road of salvation. This is why your excessive cruelty mocks our bodies, because we value the faith highly and do not deny that we are worshippers of God. You bear down on us with all the strength of your butchery, thinking to harm us, not knowing that we rejoice in the occasions of our testing, since we think this our greatest happiness, if in this contest of righteousness it befalls us to be slaughtered by your butcher's hand for the Son of God. We stand firm with devout mind against your madness, since he for whom we suffer conquers in us whatever you, a profane man, boast against his divine majesty in our persons with empty speech and idle talk and perverse will; all of which your hard mind and the stubborn savagery of your breast bring forth for the death of your own salvation, while you dissent from the religion of God, led by madness, carried off by fury, harassed, in short, by all the savagery by which you are driven and borne. While he whom you deny protects us, we struggle against your savagery, you beast, as moles set against the hostile sea are wont to do. Though the devil's waves strike through you and the whirlwinds of the world, wandering far and wide, beat upon us, our strength will be ever more immovable, as it is; nor shall we sink, covered by the foaming waves of your attacks, but shall always stand upright against all dangers, since a Christian spirit is not abject, to be thrown down and tossed into vices, but so generous and noble that it remains immovable and victorious against all temptations. We are not Christians who think of enjoying the sweetness of this present fragile life, but who long to gain the glory of eternal security and happiness, the possession of everlasting blessedness. The devout voice of the blessed apostle John, exhorting us to despise earthly things and desire to follow heavenly ones, is: “And the world passes away, and its lust; but he who does the will of God abides for ever, as God also abides for ever.”

Since this is so, I want you to know that you, with all your tricks and frauds and with the vast cruelty of your savagery, lie beneath the feet of God's servants; that all the glory of your empty dominion is reckoned and held by us as nothing; and that you, with all the vigour and authority of your rule, are felt by us to be nothing other than an empty puff of air. Perhaps one of your flatterers may say that we boast of this. Do you not remember, Constantius, that I said to the judges, while you listened behind the drawn curtain, that even if you had decided to hurl all your soldiery, the weapons of your reign, against us, so that they would dash all their arms against us who curse your blasphemy, as against despisers of your sacrilegious decree, even so we could not withdraw from our purpose? But you, with that prudence of yours, decided that your soldiers must die for you in every war, while you decreed that Christians must become deniers of God. And of course your men feel the pain of their wounds; they grieve that they have perished; they grieve to lose this light. But we, first, cannot feel the torments of punishments in which Christ suffers, in which Christ works eternal salvation; then, since we count present things as nothing and shall always be in that everlasting light, how can it be that we would not rather be killed by your hands, defiled with sacrilege, for Christ the Son of God, the giver of eternal life, we who see that we cannot please God the Father otherwise than, when summoned by you to deny his only Son, by confessing even by death itself that he is the true Son of God? Your detestable mind takes it ill that we say that Christ the Son of God is the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Power of God, true God from true God, born of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, light from light, born not made, of one substance with the Father, which in Greek they call homoousion, through whom all things were made, without whom the Father never was. You take it ill, worm of Arius, that we maintain that there is one splendour, power, greatness, eternity, and divinity of the Father and his only Son; that what we legates asserted in your palace, and do not cease to affirm, is nothing new; that it has always been and is believed so by Christians, as the holy faith is seen to have been written down at Nicaea against your Arian heresy and against all errors. If at last you would open the eyes of your heart, pierced by the serpent's bites, you would find that the church holds this, defends this faith, which it knows was handed down to it through the blessed apostles. If you could travel through all the nations in a moment, you would have found, most stupid emperor, that Christians everywhere believe as we do, persisting in this defence of ours and longing, as we do, to die for the Son of God. But your newfangled preaching and recent religion, a blasphemy put forward by you under the pretext of faith to the ruin of your salvation, has not only not yet been able to travel across the Roman frontier, though you surely have busied yourself about it, but wherever it had tried to fix its roots it has withered, as all God's servants have withdrawn from you and only your few have remained with you, whom the Lord foretold would be sown as darnel over the wheat. All this the craftsman of fraud and death has furnished you and is furnishing you, who through you entices and deceives very many with crooked flatteries, who, though he is guilty of every crime, suggests to that most bitter heart of yours that you punish us as though guilty of some crime. But look ahead at last, open the eyes of your heart, in which there is no light for you, but all fog and vast darkness dwell, and you will find that the death you inflict with fragile power restores a more perfect life; that it leads us rather to glory through fires, through swords, through chains and beasts, through whatever, in short, the rage of you, most pious emperor, decides to heap on us for our death. With God protecting us, we are not only not destroyed but are more and more given life, we who remember that there is nothing above us but God; whence a spirit devoted and bound over to God blushes to yield to you, dead through your blasphemy, a dog barking against the truth, swarming with the worms of Arius. As often as the souls of Christ's servants carefully weigh the true force of torments, they consider that no torment is greater than for a servant of Christ to be conquered by you, the servant of our adversary. We remember that the Lord said: “If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but suffers the loss of his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” The dignity of martyrdom compels us Christians to condemn life by death, since a new kind of salvation has been given through the Son of God: to perish so that I may not perish. We know that this discipline has been handed down to us by God, that we should guard the force of so great a name without any terror of warfare, since the desire of eternal remembrance has long since drawn us away from longing for this light, and fellowship with Christ has set us apart to trample all earthly things. The battle of your cruelty grows, Constantius; but notice that glory grows too for Christ's soldiers, and we are not held back from the battle line by fear of torments, but rather are challenged to the battle line by your very torments. You cannot deny that this is so, when you see Christians in the whole world fired with equal and like warmth of strength to wage the contest, when you see the unbroken firmness of faith of Christ's soldiers, that your detestable flatteries do not deceive them, the threats of your fury do not terrify them, the tortures of your butchery and the torments of your cruelty do not overcome them, since he remains in us and is always set with us who said to the blessed apostles: “I am with you all days, to the end of the age.” He is present everywhere, because he is the all-powerful Son of the Almighty, who has with the Father one eternity and divine power.

But how great a fog of unbelief has besieged you, how great a cloud of darkness and errors has covered your breast, cannot be told, since, while you pretend to be a Christian, you strive to take the Christian name out of the way. Meanwhile you ought to see that readers will pardon me because the eloquence of my modest talent has not been able to describe you as your impiety deserves, to curse you; for they saw that I had given a model to all who fear God and provided material to those who will treat the subject, by which they could cut you down, set as you are without the roots of eternal life. Nor should you say that you are rebuked by us with abusive words, if you hear what you deserve from men who are rustic, yet Christians. We know that we must not curse, but rather pray for our enemies; for the Son of God, though he is Lord of all things, did not curse back when he was cursed. For the rest, if the Lord of all things cursed, everything would surely collapse under the onset of so great a majesty. You will say to this, of course: “The Lord wanted you to be gentle, being his bishop, and you show yourself stubborn toward me. The prophets, the apostles, and the chorus of the Gospels teach that one must not kill; you, on the contrary, deign to kill those dedicated to God.” We Christians know that to please him whom we worship we need the things in which we know he delights and rejoices. If, then, it is to be thought that what you do can please God, we must all be murderers, sacrilegious, and blasphemers. O Constantius, how great your madness is seen to be! That subtle old trickster, the cheater of the innocent, is seen to have set his seat in your mind, and do you think you are not yet exposed? Do you still put on the coolness of a sheep, though you are a wolf, you who are named a beast by the most holy prophets, a dog and a ravening wolf by the most blessed apostles, dressed up as a minister of righteousness though you are a worker of iniquity, and do you think you are a man, when you bear nothing of a man but the features and outward shape? You grieve at being called a savage beast, at bearing nothing of a man but the features and outward shape. Tell me, I beg you, can you, slayer of the innocent, rightly be called a Christian, and not rather an insane, dull, and senseless enemy of God's religion, in which godliness, humanity, and all righteousness dwell, in which we learn not to return evil for evil, in which we are taught not to kill but to be killed for the Son of God? Seeing your empty dominion despised in your sacrilegious attempt, you apply torments; but he whom you drive us to deny, the protector of faith, the pilot of salvation, the ruler of souls, is always with us, always present at our contest, to raise up the champions and defenders of his divine name. This is why we stand stronger while the servants and ministers of your injustice, that is, your fellow butchers, torture us; we are encouraged so that our limbs, beaten and torn, overcome your hook. For how can a blow raging long and repeated overcome an unconquerable faith, when every soldier of Christ knows that he for whom he suffers is present with him and rejoices in the endurance of his servants? We servants of Christ stand firm, strengthened by his majesty, with free voice and unspoiled mind, naked indeed of your fragile weapons, but clothed in those arms which the blessed apostle besought us to put on, saying: “For the rest, be strengthened in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the arms of God, so that you may stand against the stratagems of the devil; for your struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the arms of God, so that you may resist in the evil day and, being perfect in all things, stand, your loins girded with truth, putting on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace, in all things taking up the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the fiery darts of the evil one, and the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication, and keeping watch for it.” Therefore, since your cruelty and your father's cannot overcome men so armed, fortified with such power, we have stood, as has often been said, and we stand, and until you consume our bodies we shall stand, fortified with Christ's saving shield, surrounded with the breastplate of his goodness, guided by the Holy Spirit, immovable and ever more increased in all things, driving off every voice of servitude. For we are sure and confident that we cannot be drawn from our resolute purpose by any of your plots, any cunning, any quibbling, any of your frauds, since we know that death is the end of sins, and then follows life that is for ever; and we embrace the counsels of his blessed apostle and desire to be found his imitators and sharers, who declares that while our old man is corrupted, the inner man is renewed; and that if the earthly house of our body is dissolved, a heavenly one is built; and that while we are in the body we are away from the Lord. With that apostle we shall not be able to offer rich praises to God in the heavenly kingdom unless we first conquer death and come to receive the immortal rewards.

So when our bodies have been scattered and utterly dissolved by you, then let us trust that we are most whole; when death has been inflicted by you, then we believe that we can live the more. How do you still presume, Constantius, emperor for the time being, ever most foolish, to heap on us things that destroy you and on the contrary give us life? You rise up with evil and crooked counsel to destroy us; you have been made quick to shed the blood of the servants of the only Son of God, not knowing that by our blood heaven is opened, by our blood the burning of Gehenna is quenched. Worldly ambition warns you; the greatness of heaven warns us, who fear to lose eternal salvation. We know that we must die for God; for as fire in Tartarus will hold you for ever, unless you pass over from the camp of the devil to the army stationed in the camp of heaven, so we, if, despising your threats and torments, we choose to be slaughtered for the Son of God by you, a most savage wild beast and monstrous brute, shall rejoice in heaven. For “blessed are those who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”; and he did not say, “Blessed are those who make persecution.” We Christians know that we were made soldiers of Christ for this: that on the field of war unjustly declared by you, having confessed our commander, we may die under arms, so as to win the triumphs of victory. Hence, the more you rage, the more merciful you seem to us, when you deign to kill one who confesses himself a Christian. But in this you are judged most wicked: that under the appearance of love and of one who wishes to take thought for us you flatter us to throw us down, as though it were useful for us, driven from our place, to be preserved by you but condemned by God. We know that you are afraid that we may die in this perseverance of faith amid all these punishments devised by your detestableness, and yet you apply various and hard tortures. So you want us, whom you persecute so fiercely, to be butchered in various ways, and indeed at every moment; but you have decided that we are not to be killed, as though only death made the soldiers of Christ blessed, and not also torments, which, the heavier they are, produce the greater glory of strength. For we who know that the life of righteousness is more abundant and longer do not turn our backs on this field of war, do not pass over to your camp, enemy of God, but rather, set amid these destructions brought on by you, long to present ourselves to God's sheepfold, from which the devil has snatched you and holds you. And yet I say this not so that you may spare us; for you will find that we are Christians, as you have found those you have already killed firm in faith, patient in pain, victorious under interrogation, through him, that is, who does not desert his confessors, whose soldiers we acknowledge ourselves, and so, as you notice, we engage bravely and fight constantly. For we know that it is great splendour, immeasurable loftiness, and singular holiness to adorn the life of eternal salvation with the honour of suffering; that it is the greatest nobility to despise and not to shudder at the torments of your power, to trample you and not to fear your rage, you who rage so madly against the innocent, who, though you are a teacher of blasphemy, injustice, and all cruelty, yet think you can seem a Christian, godly, prudent, and just, blind and dull and ignorant of the truth as you are. Notice, devourer of the innocent, that the man in whom Christ keeps watch cannot be conquered by your torments. He conquers hunger, despises thirst, subdues by the vigour of his strength the squalor of the prison and the horror of the penal cell, tramples every punishment, crushes all tortures, and does not fear the death you threaten with great effort to inflict. Do you think you overcome one who remembers that it is written: “What shall I render to the Lord for all that he has rendered to me? I will take the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints”; and: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written: For your sake we are put to death all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter. But in all these things we overcome because of him who loved us.”