That One Must Die for the Son of God 7–13

What could take us away from these saving commands, I cannot see at all. For though you do not cease, in your impious office, to raise up those who agree with your depravity to entice us, such as Epictetus and the others whom, from servants of God, you have made attendants of yourself and your father, yet far be from us this madness, that we should put the false before the true, or that any happiness of your reign offered through you should entice us. Keep your empty glory for yourself, and keep all the prudence of your most stupid heart for yourself and your equals, to whom likeness of character has joined you; leave us our folly, when we confess that Christ the Son of God is the true Son, when we maintain that he is of one substance with the Father, when we profess that we long to be killed for his sake rather than deny his divinity: leave us folly of this kind. Why do you labour to make us lose it? Why do you think the truth can be assailed by you, not knowing that it prevails by its own strength? For how is it that you see the people of God resisting with unconquered strength your fierce roaring and harsh tortures, unless this faith we defend is the apostolic and evangelical faith? These resist your cruelty, these trample your rage, whose hope is eternal immortality and heavenly life, whose ardour is kindled with longing for everlasting light, and whose salvation rejoices in the promised blessedness. So secure are we, knowing that we shall come to enjoy eternal life, that we endure all things gladly, since we profess that we think not of our own torments but of the punishments awaiting you, the torturer; we Christians offset the losses of our bodies with the gains of the soul, we count the crown in our wounds, and, most joyful in Christ, we triumph over the torments and pains you inflict.

Remember, Constantius, the fresh memory of the crimes you branded on yourself in the city of the Alexandrians: how many a single stroke of your signature threw down precipices, how many it had cut down by the sword, how many it had consumed by hunger and thirst or killed in prisons, how many it had strangled by cutting off their breath. And yet, though you raged with all these cruelties against the holy martyrs whom your gladiator's spirit killed, against us you rage more cruelly, while you hold back the sword, while you take pains that the quicker issue of death may not come to our relief. We endure being torn and burned in our whole body, proving that nothing befits the gravity and constancy of the wise more than not to be driven from one's judgment and purpose by any terrors, but that it is most useful to be tortured for God, and that those bound over to God cannot die, cannot be conquered by everlasting torments, but rather that you are laid low and brought to nothing. Hear what is set down in the twenty-sixth psalm: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the defender of my life; of whom shall I tremble? While the wicked draw near against me to eat my flesh, my enemies who afflict me, they themselves have been weakened and have fallen. If a camp should stand against me, my heart will not fear. If war should rise against me, in this will I hope. One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek: that I may dwell in the house of God all the days of my life.” Since, then, the strength of righteousness is perfected in these sufferings, since, because Christ suffers in us, we do not even feel the punishment, because where there is no guilt there is no punishment either, how did you think you could conquer those dedicated and devoted to God by things through which unconquered faith gives increases of strength? I believe indeed, and the truth does not deceive me, that though you still bear down with all the strength of your butchery to tear our limbs apart and, a torturer raging long in our blood, to plough our torn limbs, you can never conquer God's household, never prevail to overcome Christ's army, nor subject it by pains, nor bend it by crushing punishments. We Christians refuse no tortures and no death; we cannot tremble at your tyrannical orders or the swords of your judges, because, armed with God's sword, we resist you. The blessed apostle says to the Ephesians: “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.” Since you, through whom all the demons rage for our death, cannot overcome those clothed in the arms of God, we exhort you at last to give yourself up to us, so that you may not be tormented for all ages with those whom the apostle describes. So the sons of light cannot be conquered in the darkness of your prison by the son of darkness, as if those in whom the maker of light deigns to dwell could feel darkness. Strength must bear what mortal nature has taught must be borne; for if you try to consume our limbs with fire, we shall feel that you rather are being burned in our bodies than we, who, while we run willingly and readily to death for the faith, trust that we cannot lose life but rather gain it, and indeed an eternal life after a fragile one. The edge of your sword stands always drawn, ready for the death of Christians, and yet that point of your sword seems to us blunter than any lead, as does the edge of your soul. We bear all things secure in suffering, as though we were inflicting the punishments we suffer, since he who rages against us through you is laid low by our faith. For we know that we cannot be destroyed by a death inflicted into everlasting malice, we who have believed in Christ, the giver of eternal life, the only true Son of God; but we believe and rightly trust that the bodies you now burn, torture, and tear will rise again to light and everlasting life. For if we knew that after we are killed by you we should be nothing, we would surely be most foolish not to take care for this life, that it might be as long as possible and full of every comfort; which could have befallen us if we had thought we should yield to you rather than to God's decrees. But now, since, if the present life is taken away by you, an immortal one is received, his servants must despise this present life, with its goods, for the Son of God, since every such loss is repaid by immortality.

Notice, Constantius, how great was the strength, how great the vigour of mind, what the firmness of faith of those you have killed, and how great is that of those who still resist your sacrilege: that both those blessed martyrs whom we see already placed by God's power in the heavenly kingdom and these whom you have not yet been able to kill have stood against you, savage beast, who do not cease threatening us with things speakable and unspeakable, since you were and are always more willing to hear that rival princes were rising against you than that those who confess Christ the Son of God were victorious. For it had pleased your heart, besieged by the darkness of all errors, and your mind, blinded with deep fog, to turn us all from God by your heresy, first to make us your clients, then your fellow attendants. But the truth has conquered you, and him in you who tried to contrive these things; for it prevails by its own strength. We wait, finally, at every moment for you to add to the torments you have already inflicted, by appointing more savage executioners and fiercer avengers, who can either attack with the sword, or crucify, or roast with fire, or tear our entrails and limbs with any unheard-of kind of punishment, the soldiers devoted to God who resist your deadly edicts, so that by the vigour of faith, through God's mercy, we may trample threats and tortures and torments. As we stand until now, through the Lord, we shall always stand immovable, since it is not we who conquer your roaring, but he himself in us, by whose help we are guided, by whose strength we are kept. For how great or what are you, that you could despoil us of the goods conferred on us by God? You plunder us, make us needy, condemn us, conquer us, burn us, kill us even in wretched ways, and yet you cannot conquer the unconquered faith of Christians. By this you ought to have understood that you too will receive the punishments of your error and cruelty, and that we, on the other hand, because through this difficulty set before us the narrowest path leads loftily to the reward of immortality, cannot yield to your cruelty, since we know that martyrdom is a singular imitation of the Lord's fortitude. The way of the martyrs is indeed so full of toil and difficulty and so steep that no one can accomplish it by human strength; but we, who are aided by the help of divine support, must always trample you, as we now trample you. This is why it has pleased us not only not to fear you, the adversary of God's religion, but even to challenge you of our own accord. You are challenged, since you are always expected, being merciless, not to show mercy but to kill. This is why our happiness cannot admit division, because even when we are killed for the Son of God he lives in us by love, he who is in affliction our arousal, in the battles of persecution our fortitude. For in whatever ways you wish to put yourself forth against the worshippers of God, you can never empty out the strength that has been sealed, since worldly things do not entice it and torments do not terrify it.

Since this is so, what else shall I call you, persecutor of God's house, but wretched, you who obey the instigations of your robber demons, driven by whose goads you contrived to do these things, through whom, with your sacrilegious persuasion clinging to your heart, you gladly go astray? Indulge the folly that is born in you; and would that you were willing to go astray and be foolish only with the Arians, your fellow blasphemers! You try to drag us too into the fellowship of your evils; you proscribe, you plunder; but we know that poverty sought for Christ's sake is the greatest kind of happiness. You inflict death, executioner; but we not only do not withdraw our neck but offer it, that we may be slaughtered for the only Son of God. Why have I said this? So that you may know that your punishments have no strength against Christ's servants, and that we cannot dread what we always expect to come. You take it ill that you are called a heretic, and yet you dare to say that the Son cannot be compared or made equal to the Father. We, who maintain one Godhead of the Father and the Son, say that the Son is equal to the Father; we believe as the blessed apostle Paul believed, who says of the Son: “Who, being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal to God.” What is “being in the form of God”? Only that the Son is, as God the Father is, unchangeable, unalterable, beyond reckoning, beyond telling, eternal, perfect. What is “being in the form of God”? Only that the Son dwells in that very inaccessible light in which the Father dwells; only that the divine loftiness of the Father and the Son is one. The Holy Spirit, abiding in the blessed apostle, seeing even then all your heretical hearts, added an interpretation of what it is for the Son to be in the form of God: “Who, being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal to God.” The blessed apostle says the Son is equal to the Father, showing one Godhead of the Father and the Son; and you dare to say, with the attendants of your sacrilegious audacity and the sharers of your sacrilege: “We cannot make the Son equal or compare him to the Father.” Or why do you think the Lord said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father too,” and, “I and the Father are one,” except that the power of the Father and the Son is one? You say that the Son has a beginning; but we say he is without beginning, since everything that has a beginning must be able to have an end. So, since we believe that the only Son of God is eternal, that is, coeternal with the Father, and you enemies of God deny it, do we not most rightly call you mad, sons of pestilence fattened with every senselessness? Of you the blessed apostle cries out, as then of the Jews: “And as they did not see fit to have God in knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do what is not fitting”; and to the Philippians: “Be imitators together of me, brothers, and observe those who walk so, as you have us for a pattern. For many walk, of whom I often told you, and now tell you even weeping, as enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things”; and to Timothy, of you, Constantius, and of your dearest fellow lost ones: “But the Spirit says expressly that in the last times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of liars, having their conscience seared.” The Holy Spirit strikes you still and kills you by the mouth of the same blessed apostle Paul: “In the last days perilous times will come. Men will be lovers of themselves, covetous, proud, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked, without affection, without faith, slanderers, incontinent, fierce, without kindness, traitors, headstrong, puffed up, lovers of pleasure rather than of God, having the appearance of godliness but denying its truth; and avoid these.” And below: “But as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so these also resist the truth, men corrupt in mind and reprobate concerning the faith; but they will make no further progress; their folly will be plain to all, as theirs also was.” And below: “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires they will heap up for themselves teachers, having itching ears, and will turn away their hearing from the truth and be turned aside to fables.”

Deserting the apostolic faith, you have turned to fables. Since the Holy Spirit foretold by the apostle's mouth that your word can creep like a cancer, you call the catholics erring, and a little later you call blasphemy the very faith you called catholic and were compelling us to accept. Likewise, a little later, that which you had just declared to be blasphemy at Antioch, acting against Adoxius, you now confirm again as catholic; whence you have decided that Adoxius should be at Constantinople, since you have approved him as catholic. Know from this very fact how much difference there is between true and false: though you are, as you think, learned and have a designated number of dictators, yet we notice that you have been able to persuade no one except those who feared your butchery; while we, whose nature is barely sufficient for speaking, strangers to all knowledge of pagan letters, are able to destroy every heresy, because the matter itself and the truth speak. You and your helpers have increased the full art of pagan letters; we know only the sacred letters. Our speech is common; yours, on the contrary, is polished and ornate, and might even deserve to be called eloquent; and yet your sweet speech, sought out by art, can persuade no Christian except one who is not a Christian but is only called one, like you, who, though you are a wolf, are judged by the ignorant to be one of the sheep. Who is so senseless, unless it be you, who have drunk in every madness? Who of God's servants would not want to be honoured with death in the service of devotion? Who would not desire to shed the blood of his veins for Christ, since such a death makes life more whole and finds eternal glory? We stand, as you notice, protected by God's strength, shod with the precepts of the gospel, with fixed and immovable step, so that our footsteps cannot be carried away by you in a headlong fall. We stand holding the shield of faith, so that the smoking darts of the enemy hurled by you cannot stick at all, since they always rebound on you. Our heads are fortified with the helmet of salvation; the word of the Lord is in our mouth, so that the enemy lodged in you may be struck down by the spiritual sword, laid low and scattered. You will notice that the holy faith you were compelling us to cast off is the shield of our soul, a strong, impenetrable, and close-woven breastplate, which none of the devil's darts thrown through you can pierce. Seeing such perseverance of Christians, you say, “I too must defend the Arian dogma I have once taken up”; you say such things, going astray with an honourable intention. For you feel that nothing in human affairs is more excellent than religion and that it must be defended with the utmost force; you defend it with the sword, but we know that religion must be defended not by killing but by dying for God and by enduring all these evils you heap on us. When we defend religion in such a way, what can your cruelty conquer? For if any of your soldiers in this fragile warfare of your rule keeps faith, a mortal to a mortal, in some outstanding deed, he becomes more acceptable and dearer; if he perishes, in the eyes of you, an empty man, he gains the highest glory because he fell in death for you, his commander. How much more must faith be kept by us, the soldiers of his mercy, to God, the eternal emperor! While the office of devotion we have taken up compels us to act so, you, because you are blind in not believing Christ to be true God, Son of the true God, because you are simply unhappy in that you have not escaped the darkness of eternal death, wanted us too to return to our old blindness, so that we should seem not simply but detestably to have lost prudence along with the light. For we know that for you there is one damnation of death, because you will not believe, and that for us the evil would be doubled if, rejecting our belief, we chose to return to destruction. How had you presumed that we could be separated from the love of God, either by your false favours, which kill the more while they entice, or by all kinds of cruel torments? Who would reject such happiness offered to him, except one more unhappy than you, when he sees that by confessing the one word, “I am a Christian,” adversities give way, joys come, kingdoms are opened, eternal empires prepared? You say: “Deny the Son of God, or the power of my reign will kill you.” How much better to be killed by the enemy of Christ than by Christ! How much the best to be slaughtered by you, the friend of Antichrist, and given life by Christ! Who would not rather be found a partner and companion of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and all the righteous than of Judas, whose imitator you have become? John the Baptist was punished in prison by Herod, your fellow pestilence; Herod's savagery killed James; the apostle John was banished to an island; blessed Peter was crucified; the blessed apostle Paul was bound, shut in prisons, scourged and often stoned, and finally killed. But all these, by bearing those things most gladly, became friends of God, as we notice; and we too would rather be slaughtered by your cruel hand than yield to your butchery. Why do you hate us, why do you persecute us with such savagery? Surely because we confess ourselves Christians; and those blessed men we have mentioned were killed by your fellow tyrants for the only Son of God, because they called themselves his servants. The Holy Spirit says by the mouth of devout David, in the person of our people: “If we have forgotten the name of our God, and if we have spread out our hands to a strange god, will not God search this out? For he knows the secrets of the heart; for your sake we are put to death all the day long, we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.” And you, Constantius, bound over to Arian idolatry, emperor for the time being, say: “Fear the roaring of my madness breaking out afresh for your death, and be apostates with me.”

Hearing this, you do not want to heal your wounds, but rather go on raging at the blind and irrational prompting of those who insinuate themselves into your mind and incite you, unknowing, with fury. These are the spirits to whom you are known to sacrifice by denying the only Son of God; who, because they can do us no harm by themselves (for we are protected by God's greatness), persecute through you, their attendant, us whom they feel to be their bitterest enemies, and exercise through you, their lover, savagery as violently as they can, thinking that by your intervention as executioner they will violate our faith. It is the teaching of all the holy Scriptures that to believe in the Son of God is the first and the complete righteousness. This is why, when you, the inquisitor, are conquered, those demons are conquered in you, because it is not the strength of our fragile bodies that gives us victory but his mercy. He supplies the strength that we may remain immovable amid every instrument of your butchery, that we may not be broken by the pains of wounds or the blows of interrogation but rather be raised up; hence is the true worship of God, in which the minds of the worshippers present themselves to God as spotless victims. And do you think that any of God's worshippers is so sluggish and stupid that the ardour of so great a longing does not rouse, arm, incite, and spur him, does not inflame him with those torches of love with which the holy prophets, apostles, and martyrs were inflamed? Whom of ours, I say, does his spirit not drive to be killed for Christ between your cruel hands? Whom does it not urge to come to the glory and summit of martyrdom, not only through the things you administer but even through crueller ones? For your punishments are easily overcome if the glory of those very punishments is set before the eyes. Nor is what tears considered, where so great a reward for the penalty is offered. Your torments, Constantius, are conquered by incorruptible rewards; torture is crushed, death subdued, which, when it is inflicted, rather restores life. The wounds you inflict would hurt, emperor, if they did not at once make men friends of God; and since we trust that we shall then truly live if we are struck by you for the Son of God, and shall then lose nothing of salvation, how can it be that we should yield to your empty roaring? You thought that we could be, and can be, subdued by your strength, and I believe you still think so in vain. How long, then, Constantius, will you abuse God's patience? Rather, I exhort you: driving these thoughts out of your darkened senses, let your foolish mind receive those meditations that can set you on the way, that lead to the kingdom of God. Lay hold gladly of what may lead you to the banquet of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the friends of God. You, who have dared, a man of every injustice, to think yourself just, setting yourself above all the bishops placed in the holy church by God's judgment and rejecting the holy faith which the church has always held and holds, have striven to preach the blasphemy uttered by the mouth of your fellow in sacrilege, Arius, now through your attendants, now by your edict, now with your mouth stuffed with unclean spirits; and you want to be called a perfect worshipper of God, doing everything in holiness, when no one of those kings who are called tyrants is ever found to have been crueller or more detestable or greater in blasphemies than you. I have already laid this bare to your imprudence in the book entitled On Apostate Kings; now I want you to know this: that unless you turn soon, unless you believe, as we do, that the only Son of God has always reigned with the Father and that the Father was never without the Son, that the kingdom of the Father and of his only Son is one and that the Father and the Son possess one Godhead, you will perish for ever, since Arius your teacher called the Son of God a creature and you have praised his blasphemy to the skies. We urge, ask, and press you to become most beloved of God, and you complain that you suffer wrong from us. So you guard the empty censorship of your dignity, as if it would snatch you from everlasting tortures; you raise your proud head over the Lord's priests, not noticing that it is written: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” The apostle says of the only Son of God, whom you persecute in us: “Who, being in the form of God, did not think it robbery to be equal to God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, found in fashion as a man; he humbled himself unto death, even the death of the cross.” He who always was, is, and will be in the form of the Father, being the true Son, being unchangeable and unalterable, because the Son of the Almighty is God all-powerful, yet deigned to humble himself for our salvation, so that he might make us, who lay cast down, raised up and exalted. This holy humility of his has made you, a rabid dog, bark against his divine majesty, seeing only those passages of the holy Scriptures that were written because of the humility he took on, and passing over those that tell of his eternal divinity.

What do you answer to this, Constantius, you whom the bishops of your Arian dogma often acclaim as bishop of bishops: do you believe or not believe that those who die for God's only Son will possess the kingdom of heaven? If you believe it, why do you drive us to deny his eternity? Why do you not stop persecuting, not leave in peace those who believe in him? Why are you always restless toward us and always hostile, showing yourself a violent persecutor, but under the title of peace a crafty enemy? I grieve that you have acquired such great evils for yourself; I mourn for you because you are placed on every side without hope of eternal life. For the rest, though you not only cut us with swords but also chew us with your teeth, hold it for certain that, protected by God, we shall overcome your rage; and do not deign to despise us because you see that our bodies are fragile; for, what is most important, we are strong, raised up and fortified by wisdom, having adornment and fortifications in our hearts and senses. Whence do we now see ourselves adorned? Whence do we feel ourselves fortified and safe? Whence do we know ourselves wise? Only because we both avoid your blasphemy and gladly hand over our mortal bodies to your sword for the Son of God, knowing that when you have been able to kill our earthly dwelling, you cannot kill the heavenly one we have. For this is why we know that good and evil have been set before us: so that the whole force of our prudence might be engaged in distinguishing good from evil. What is more foolish than to fear you and deny God? What is wiser than to trample your abominable head and so to please God? This is why you see us standing ready with all our strength in the contest of righteousness, with whole faith, devoted strength, unspoiled mind, to stand on the battle line you have declared, soldiers of the living God, undaunted. We also carry bravely the shield of faith, by which, under God's protection, whatever the devil hurls by your hands is quenched, because our feet are shod with the teaching of the gospel and armed with spurs. Though you are Augustus, yet in you the serpent roaring for the death of us innocents is crushed, since he does not prevail to bite and trip us through you, his executioner. For God wants us to be pressed by you, certainly not so that we may desert the faith and road of the patriarchs, apostles, and martyrs, but so that, compelled by you to deny the only Son of God, we may not refuse even to undergo death. We are not, like you, so foolish and perverse as to prefer to shake off what saves and take up what is deadly; we do not flee the protection of heavenly medicine. We see that, though a physician cuts with iron, burns with the cautery, and brings the patient to every pain with the burning of mustard, yet being cut, burned, eaten away, and stung is not hostile; for it is good for this reason, that it removes useless pains by pains applied for the sake of health. God wants us to undo death by death, to dispel eternal torments by temporary torments, to make void future everlasting punishments by your punishments; we who trust that, when you have taken life from us, more can be bestowed, and indeed eternal life for temporary, incorruptible and everlasting for fragile and perishable. You do not think it enough that those who confess themselves Christians be struck only with the sword, unless you inflict every kind of punishment on their bodies. It makes no difference by what kind of death you deign to punish us, so long as by it we are admitted to enjoy eternal life, so long as by it your rage is put to death while we are given life. For if you think it wretched that I would rather be killed by any cruel punishment for the Son of God, then, to pass over the eternal glory of the blessed martyrs, I know that one must die by some kind of death. I will give you, in short, many who perish more cruelly in their beds, whom some inner suppuration has swollen and the pain of sinews struggling with themselves has contracted. What matters is the cause, not the stake from which I hang.