On Not Sparing Those Who Sin against God 1–6

When you saw that you had been overcome on every side by the servants of God, you said, emperor, that you have suffered and are suffering insult from us, against the warnings of the holy Scriptures; you say that we have been insolent toward you, who ought to have been honoured. If any worshipper of God ever spared apostates, then let what you say about us be true. Where shall we begin, so that we can prove that, just as you are now rebuked by us, so all who strayed have been rebuked by the worshippers of God? Where but from the deeds of Moses, the servant of God? We read in Exodus that Moses went up the mountain after the covenant had been handed to him, and that he killed very many of them for the guilt of idolatry. “Moses stood,” it says, “at the gates of the camp and said: Who is ready for the Lord? Let him come to me. And all the sons of Levi gathered to him, and he said to them: Thus says the Lord God of Israel: Each of you put his sword on his thigh, and go through and return from gate to gate through the camp, and each of you kill his brother, and each his kinsman, and each his neighbour. And the sons of Levi did as Moses told them. And there fell of the people on that day about three thousand men. And Moses said to them: You have filled your hands today for the Lord, each against his son or his brother, so that a blessing may be given upon you.” We are insulting to you as Moses was to that foolish people. Nor did the things said or done by Moses please them, since they had already chosen not to serve God, who had rescued them from the power of Pharaoh, but the calf that the fire had cast for them. So you too, now enslaved not to God but to the idolatry of Arius, take it ill that you are shown to have gone astray; you cry out that we are defiant; you say that we have committed an unworthy outrage against you, in that we dared to say to the emperor of the Roman realm: “You do wrong, Constantius, to bring idolatry into the church.” Moses, the first of the prophets, that man most beloved by God, pursued with the sword those whose imitator you have made yourself; and am I branded by you as defiant because I said that God has forsaken you and that you have sold yourself to idolatry? Again, holy Scripture cries out that the children of Israel committed fornication with the daughters of the Moabites, and that when invited by them they ate food sacrificed to idols and worshipped those same idols. Because the priest Phinehas, fired by the zeal of devotion, blazed out against them, and above all because he killed the idolaters with the sword in the middle of the congregation, he so pleased God that it is written that at this deed the anger of the indignant Lord was quieted and that he himself became especially great before the Lord: “And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Phinehas the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, has checked my anger from the children of Israel, in that he was zealous with zeal among them, and I did not consume the children of Israel in my zeal. And behold, I will give him my covenant, a covenant of peace, to him and to his seed with him, as a covenant of everlasting priesthood, because he was zealous for his God and made intercession for the children of Israel.” And do you think us defiant because we tell the truth to you who are in error? Do you suppose that when we displease you we do not then please God? But tell me, I beg you, Constantius, by what authority you have wished us to desert the way of the righteous patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, and to take up this new way of yours, which the devil had established through Arius. Were you warned in a dream, and was it said to you that you should not allow us to hold to the way of Christ, which Abel, Enoch, Noah, Melchizedek, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob held, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua the son of Nun, Job, the judges and the kings besides, that is, David, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, Josiah; which all the prophets, apostles, and martyrs had held; which all who are found to have pleased God had held?

If this was told you by the prince of demons, hear what God has decreed should be done concerning you, through the glorious prophet Moses: “But if a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you, and gives a sign or a wonder, and comes doing signs or wonders, and speaks to you, saying: Let us go and serve strange gods whom you do not know, you shall not hear the word of that prophet or of the dreamer, for the Lord your God is testing you, to see whether you love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. You shall walk after the Lord your God and fear him, and keep his commandments and hear his voice, and cleave to him. And that prophet, or the dreamer of dreams, they shall die; for they have spoken to lead you astray from the Lord your God.” Do you see what you have been ordered to suffer? For whether you say you were warned in a dream or want to present yourself to us as a prophet, you are an enemy of God, since you want us to abandon the apostolic faith and take up the one that denies the only Son of God. For it is clear that all those whom I have listed became so great and so excellent because they believed in the only Son of God, since he who does not believe in the Son does not have the Father either, but he who believes in the Son has both the Father and the Son. Since this is the word of blessed John, and the chorus of the holy apostles acts in agreement with him, you surely ought to understand that all of them, as the apostles believed, so the patriarchs and prophets believed before, and so all who are known to have been honoured for the merit of faith. For you will not be able to prove to me that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob believed one way and John and all his fellow apostles another. For if the apostles did not believe as the patriarchs believed, why does blessed Paul call everyone to lay hold of the faith of Abraham? But you say: “I accuse you of being insolent, of having been insulting to the emperor, and you go back over the matter of faith.” Of faith, certainly, to prove that you are sacrilegious, to prove that you have turned off the way of truth. This is why I seem insulting to you: because I tell you that you have deserted the road of all the worshippers of God and taken up the one that those held and hold who have served, and are serving, not God but a phantasm. So, concerning yourself, who urge me to depart from God, hear what God has ordained should be done, through Moses: “But if your brother by your father or mother asks you, or your son or your daughter, or the wife who is in your bosom, or the friend who is equal to your soul, saying secretly: Let us go and serve strange gods, whom you do not know nor your fathers, of the gods of the nations that are around you, near or far, do not consent to go with him, and do not listen to him; your eye shall not spare him, nor shall you greet him or hide him. You shall surely denounce him. Your hands shall be first against him to put him to death, and the hands of your people last. And you shall stone him, and he shall die, because he sought to draw you away from the Lord your God.” Not knowing that you are ordered to be put to death, inviting me as you do to forsake God, you say: “Lucifer insults me.” Or will you deny that you invited us to take up idolatry? If you think you should deny it, you will be convicted by the statements of the bishops of your sect, your fellow blasphemers that is; you will be convicted by the documents read out by you and given to bishops at Rome, even catholic ones, for this purpose, plainly, that your blasphemy might be strengthened in every place.

Do you not feel what darkness of errors you have run into? Do you not see by what means you may perish? When you see why Achan, one of the people, acted against the divine commands, why he stole from Jericho a certain portion of clothing, silver and gold, and was punished with death for it, look at what is to happen to you, who deny the eternal divine majesty of the only Son of God. Hear what was done concerning Achan, and at last take thought for your salvation; return to the church of God, from which that renegade serpent who overturned Adam and Eve too has driven you away through the Arians. “And the Lord was with Joshua,” it says, “and his name was over all the earth. And the children of Israel were negligent with negligence and committed fraud concerning the devoted thing. And the Lord was angry with wrath against the children of Israel. And Joshua sent men to Ai, which is next to Bethel, saying: Spy out Ai. And the men went up and spied out Ai. And they returned to Joshua and said to him: Let not all the people go up, but let two or three thousand men go up and lay waste the city. Do not take all the people there, for they are few. And about three thousand men went up with him, and they fled before the men of Ai. And the men of Ai killed thirty-six men of them, and pursued them from the gate and crushed them on the slope; and the heart of the people was terrified and became like water. And Joshua tore his clothes, and Joshua fell on his face before God until evening, he and the elders of Israel, and they put dust on their heads. And Joshua said: I pray, Lord, why did your servant bring this people across the Jordan, to hand it over to the Amorite, to destroy us? If only we had stayed in the land, we would have lived by the Jordan. And what shall I say, since Israel has turned its back before its enemy? The Canaanite and all who live in the land will hear, and they will surround us and crush us from the land. And what will you do for your great name? And the Lord said to Joshua: Get up; why have you fallen on your face? The people have sinned and transgressed my covenant which I appointed for them, and they have stolen from the devoted thing and put it among their goods. The children of Israel will not be able to stand before their enemies; they will turn their backs before their enemies, because they have become a thing devoted. I will not be with you any longer unless you remove the devoted thing from among you. Get up, sanctify the people and say: Let them be sanctified for tomorrow. For thus says the Lord God of Israel: There is a devoted thing among you; you will not be able to stand against your enemies until you remove the devoted thing from among you. And assemble in the morning, all of you, by tribes; and the tribe that is shown by God in the morning, bring it forward by clans; the clan that the Lord shows, bring forward man by man; and whoever is shown by the Lord shall be burned with fire, and all that is his, because he has transgressed the covenant of the Lord and done iniquity in Israel. And Joshua rose early in the morning and brought the people forward by tribes, and the tribe of Judah was shown. And they were brought forward by clans, and the clan of Zerah was shown. And he brought forward the clan of Zerah by houses, and the house of Zimri was shown. And the house was brought forward man by man, and Achan the son of Carmi, the son of Zimri, was shown. And Joshua said to Achan: Give glory today to the Lord God of Israel, and make confession, and tell me what you have done, and do not hide it from me. And Achan answered Joshua and said: Truly I have sinned before the Lord God of Israel; thus and thus I did. I saw among the spoil a fine embroidered garment and two hundred didrachms of silver and one tongue of gold of fifty didrachms, and I coveted it and took it; and see, these are hidden in my tent, and the silver is hidden under them. And Joshua sent messengers, and they ran to the tent, and these things were hidden in the tent and the silver under them. And they took them out of the tent and brought them to Joshua and the elders of Israel and laid them before God. And they seized Achan the son of Carmi and led him into the valley of Achor, Achan and his sons and daughters and his calves and his beasts of burden and his sheep and his tent and all that was his. And all Israel was with him, and they led them to Emek-achor. And Joshua said to Achan: Why have you destroyed us? May the Lord destroy you as on this day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and they put over him a great heap of stones. And the Lord ceased from the indignation of his wrath.” Consider, Constantius, by what example you will perish, unless you take care for yourself, and what punishments you will pay for ever. Achan received such things for transgressing the commandments; what you deserve can be understood from this, since you are an apostate. For if he was punished with such destruction because he kept some of the devoted thing, how much more you! Without doubt you will be punished more severely, you who have become a thing devoted by denying the Son of God.

In this we are wicked in your eyes, in this proud and stubborn, in this insolent: that we say to you, “You have committed sacrilege by being a denier of the only Son of God”; that we say, “Take thought for yourself; snatch your soul from the snares of the devil.” What new thing are we bishops doing if we tell you what you deserve to hear? For we find that the most holy Samuel, priest of God, said to King Saul the things you are about to read: “Pains and groans will be brought upon you. Because you made the word of the Lord of no account, the Lord will make you of no account, so that you may not reign”; and again: “Because you made the word of the Lord of no account, God will also bring you to nothing, so that you may not be king over Israel”; and below: “The Lord will tear the kingdom from Israel out of your hand today, and will give it to your neighbour, who is better than you.” If he said these things to Saul because he passed over the Lord's commands, why do you think we ought not to say with a free voice that you are sacrilegious, and that unless you turn to God he will bring you to nothing? If we had not exhorted you, if we did not call you to make amends, you would rightly say that you are hated by us. But when you hear us say, “Repent, emperor, correct your ways, so that you may find room for mercy,” I think you ought to have considered that you are cherished by us, loved by us; and you curse us for this, that we remain in the apostolic faith; you return evil for good. We are not surprised if you, ever since you departed from the will of God and do not cease doing the desire of the devil, repay with evils those who ask God that good may come to you and who long for it, since doing evil is ingrained in you, as people who have passed over from good to evil, that is, to the devil. If you persecute us who love you and wish the highest things to come to you, it is nothing great or new, since Saul too persecuted this Samuel, prophet and priest of the Lord. He persecuted the man by whom he had been anointed king, and whose prayers were directed to the Lord in unceasing supplication for the safety of this very persecutor. If you do not believe us that we priests of God grieve for you, because you have drunk in such darkness of errors, because you are slaughtering yourself in this way, believe God, who says to Samuel concerning Saul: “How long will you mourn for Saul? Behold, I am rejecting him, so that he may not reign over Israel”; and above: “And the word of the Lord came to Samuel, saying: I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned away from me and has not established my words. And Samuel was grieved, and cried to the Lord all night and before dawn.” Although Samuel the priest did this for the safety of King Saul, Saul afterwards persecuted Samuel, the wretch not recognizing that he was persecuting a prophet and priest of the Lord. So you too, not knowing what you are doing, persecute us, who long for you to please God, and you love those who drag you with them to eternal death, to the everlasting displeasure of the Lord; you are indignant because you hear the truth, though you see that Samuel, the priest of the Lord, did not flatter the king. Or was it fitting for our predecessors to do one thing and us another? Because we tell you the truth, we seem proud to you. What have you heard from us? Only that you are a murderer. If we lie, then we are rightly called insulting and proud by you; but if we say what is true, we are not insulting, but people who imitate those who, by not flattering those entrusted to them but warning them for their good, deserved to become most beloved of God. When the king of Israel sent to kill the prophet Elisha, if you had not read that Elisha said to those with him, “Do you see that the son of that murderer has sent to take away my head?”, you might rightly have sued me as guilty of slander. The prophet, full of the Holy Spirit, called the king of Israel the son of a murderer, that is, the son of the devil; not because he called his fleshly father a murderer, but the devil, whose son he showed himself to be, as you now reveal yourself by your deeds, by persecuting the servants of God, by daring to kill the prophets of his mercy. The devil stirs up your hearts to do all these things. Hear the Lord saying to the Jews in the gospel that this is so: “You were born of the devil as your father, and you want to do the desires of your father; for he was a murderer from the beginning.” The prophet of the Lord, I say, full of the Holy Spirit, calls the king of Israel son of a murderer, that is, of the devil; and do you think we insult you because we say that you are a killer of the servants of God, the executioner of our bodies, a man whose whole thought is injustice, a destroyer of religion, a denier of the only Son of God? What we see you doing, that we say you are; what you are, that we proclaim you to be. You call us insolent because we tell you what you are.

Tell me, please, why the king of Israel deserved to hear from the Lord: “Because you have done well before me, and have done according to my heart and according to my soul to the house of Ahab, your sons to the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel.” Tell me, I say, why did he deserve to hear this from God? Because he spared the enemies of God? Or because he pursued them most fiercely, even with the sword, or because he killed the idolatrous son of Ahab and his forty sons, because he threw out Queen Jezebel, after she was killed, to the dogs, and destroyed all the servants of Baal with all the priests and prophets of shame by the edge of the sword, because he destroyed the images: is that what pleases God? What should we have done concerning you, so that you would not mark us as guilty of insult toward you, whom we see holding to the ways of Ahab and Jezebel? It is nothing new that you are doing, acting against God, attacking his house, persecuting his bishops, the men through whom he warns you to take thought for yourself, so that while there is room for repentance you may drag yourself away from evil. Before you there were men like you in sacrilege, who served idols in this way after forsaking the God of their fathers. In the second book of Chronicles we hear that Amaziah, king of Judah, was warned by God through a prophet not to let the men of the children of Israel, whom he had hired for a hundred thousand talents of silver, set out with him to war, plainly because God had forsaken Israel, since they had forsaken God and served idols. The king obeyed the prophet's words and believed that this was God's threat. But what does he do? After he subdues his adversaries, he thought their idols should be taken up and carried to his kingdom and worshipped; and because that man of God told him that he had not acted well in forsaking God and worshipping the idols of the nations, this king fiercely persecuted the prophet of the Lord. You see that you who have turned to apostasy have always had one mind: to persecute those who wish you well. “And it came about,” says holy Scripture, “after Amaziah came to strike Edom, that he brought from there the gods of Mount Seir and set them up for himself as gods, and worshipped before them and himself sacrificed to them. And the anger of the Lord came upon Amaziah, and he sent to him the prophet Baneas, and Baneas said to him: Why have you sought the gods of the people, which did not deliver their people from your hand? And it came about, as he was speaking to him, that he said to him: Have I made you the king's counsellor? Take care that you are not flogged.” You see, Constantius, how mad you become once it has pleased you to live as servants of the devil, once it has pleased you not to know God almighty, once you have chosen that you must set up idolatry as an insult to God. For as he said, “Have I made you the king's counsellor? Take care that you are not flogged,” so you too say, “Have I chosen you as my counsellors, so that I may not act as I please, so that I may not hold the way that Arius held?” And do you not see by what example Arius perished? How vengeance was taken on him from heaven? Meanwhile, since you say we are insulting to you, see that this man of God did not spare that king who shared your sacrilege, but after he was told, “Be silent, lest you be flogged,” he said to him: “I know that the Lord will destroy you, because you have done this and have not listened to my counsel.” In what do you find us insulting? Only in that we say to you: we know that unless you take care to turn to God, the Lord will condemn you to eternal punishment. This is the insult, this the whole injury: that you are told by the bishops of God that you will perish for ever unless you correct your ways. That king did not believe the man of God. What befell him at once, holy Scripture tells thus: “And from the time when Amaziah departed from the Lord, they rose up against him … and he fled from Jerusalem to Lachish, and they killed him … on horses.” So too the deeds of your evils will be able to keep, protect, and defend you, as they did him who said to the man of God when he spoke for his salvation, “Have I appointed you counsellor to the king? Be silent, lest you be flogged.” We are not the first to do this, if we say to you who are in error, who resist the ordinance of God, who labour to set up new ways: you do wrong not to walk on the way by which all the worshippers of God have come to the heavenly kingdom.

You have read that King Uzziah was rebuked by the priests of the Lord because he had dared to do what was not permitted: “And he entered,” says Scripture, “the temple of the Lord to put incense on the altar. And the priest Azariah went in after him, and with him thirty priests of the Lord, sons of strength; and they rose up against King Uzziah and said to him: It is not lawful for you, Uzziah, to burn incense to the Lord, but for the priests, the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated to burn incense. Go out of the sanctuary, for you have departed from the Lord, and this will not be to your honour from the Lord God.” Do you say those priests of the Lord were insulting to that king, or not? If they were not insulting, then let us not seem so to you either, since you hear from us things like those he heard: “It is not lawful for you, Constantius, an Arian, to assemble with the people of God; it is not lawful for you, the author of the idolatry of the Arian heresy, a denier of the only Son of God, to judge concerning the priests of God, a sacrilegious man pretending to be a Christian, when you are the forerunner of Antichrist. It will not be good for you to remove the priests of God and ordain his adversaries, your colleagues in sacrilege, that is.” When you hear this you are angry with us; King Uzziah too was angry then with those priests of the Lord. But notice that those men dedicated to God kept the honour of their station for ever, while Uzziah was at once stained with the blotches of leprosy, to his everlasting disgrace. “And Uzziah was angry,” it says, “and in his hand was the censer, to burn incense on his altar. And leprosy appeared on his forehead in the sight of the priests in the house of the Lord.” Since these things are so, do you think that you, a defiant transgressor, do not incur offence with him who commanded us to discharge for ever the offices of the priesthood for his glory? What is this pride of ours, Constantius, or what arrogance? Only that we see you are diseased, being a pestilent Arian; that we perceive in you the elephantiasis that Arius had; that we press you to withdraw from the people of God, as those priests of the Lord forced Uzziah to go out of the temple; that we compel you in this way to give honour to God. For if the priests of God drove Uzziah out of the court of God because they remembered that by divine command lepers were forbidden to enter the temple before purification, consider how much more right we have to drive you out of the church of Christ, out of the house of the Lord, since it is not lawful for a heretic to assemble with catholics, the sick with the sound, one full of unclean spirits with those in whom the Spirit of God dwells. What insult is this, if we priests of the Lord, fired by the zeal that always fired our predecessors, tell you what serves our salvation and yours? “Lucifer is insolent,” you say. Insolent in this, that I press you to cast off the elephantiasis of Arius, so that by this faith which the most blessed apostles preached, and which we hold, as you see, you may gain health for your mind and, wholly snatched from the snares of the devil, rejoice for ever that you have been won for God. You, who accuse us of enormous haughtiness, have you found written what Josiah, king of Judah, did to your fellows in sacrilege, to men such as you are seen to be today: how he persecuted a great many of them even after death, burning their bones with fire? But it was fitting for that king to pursue the enemies of God with such zeal, while for us bishops, us priests of God, it was unworthy to resist you when you bring idolatry into the church! He killed your fellows in sacrilege with the sword; he even pursued remains buried long before, desiring to be found a most faithful worshipper of God; we, on the other hand, ought not to resist you even with a word, you the friend of God's enemy, you the dearest of all to the angels who turned to apostasy, you who have become an enemy of God through this blasphemy of yours.