On Apostate Kings 6–10

So that these things may not be said of you too, I beg you to rescue yourself from the abominable assembly of the Arians; I beg you to become a Christian again, as you were before, instead of an Arian; and do not be indignant with us for comparing your acts with Jeroboam's, but rather, I beseech you, see that all these things I press upon you for the good of your welfare should be called instructions rather than rebukes. For you are compared by us to Jeroboam because in our times you have tried to turn all away from God, as he tried to make the people of Israel apostate instead of worshippers of God. I would not have you promise yourself any hope from the fact that you do evil and still reign, when you see that Jeroboam reigned long in his crime, and also that Solomon's son reigned as many years and, practising idolatry, died in the same crime; likewise his son Abijam, of whom I find it written: “And he walked in the sins of his father, which he had done before him, and his heart was not perfect with the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father was”; and yet, though they served idols, they remained on the throne, died in that dignity, and handed on the authority of the kingdom to their sons. Do not applaud yourself, then, in this either, that your father handed the kingdom on to you all, saying: “Unless my father had done well to join the Arians, we his sons would never be reigning.” I would not have you say, “If I were a heretic, I would never rule so widely; God would never allow me still to be on the throne,” when you see that Baasha the son of Ahijah reigned twenty-four years over Israel, of whom you have found it written in the third book of Kingdoms: “And he did evil before the Lord and walked in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat and in his sins, with which he made Israel sin.” This king Baasha surely ought to have feared being struck down as Jeroboam was, if he withdrew from the ways of the Lord. But such are you who turn aside from God, that when it has pleased you to take up, to God's injury, the service of idolatry, you cannot be frightened even by the example of those who have already been judged into turning to God. It is also written of King Omri: “And he did evil in the sight of the Lord, and did more evil than all who were before him, and walked in all the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat in his sins”; and yet this man, who is said to have sinned more than all the kings before him, was not destroyed as soon as he forsook God, nor afflicted by any grave illness, so that he who is described as sinning more gravely might be killed by a heavier punishment. You see, Constantius, that even if it is your lot to spend this temporal life in the greatest prosperity, you ought all the more to fear that you are being reserved for God's judgment. And though even those who are destroyed at once, on whom some punishment is inflicted by God here, are always tormented after their descent, yet if you are snatched away from here while living in the greatest prosperity, consider how vengeance will proceed against you, who are found in so great a crime. So do not ascribe any happiness to yourself because, though you deny the only Son of God, though you persecute his household, your spirit still remains in that butchering body of yours, when you consider that the son of Asa too, though he was a man of sacrilege like you, reigned thirty-five years among the Jews; of whom you have read that it is written: “He walked in the ways of Asa his father and did not turn aside from them, so as to do what was right in the sight of the Lord; but they did not abstain from the high places, and they sacrificed on the high places and burned incense.” See, this king too is described as having slept in peace. Since, then, he practised idolatry for thirty-five years, do not ascribe it to your glory and say: “That is why I am not wounded by any plague, that is why I am not yet destroyed but still live, possessing the kingdom of the Roman empire: because I believe rightly, because the faith of Arius is right, because I did well to remove bishops and to install others such as Arius would have wished.” Do not boast of this, I say, that while you do these things you are still proud, when you see that this king held the kingdom thirty-five years and was taken away in peace. If, then, the crime of idolatry could pass unpunished for them because they were taken away thus, it could also for you, Constantius. Turn, therefore, to the Lord, so that you may not be found such as Ahab was found, of whom I find it written: “And Ahab did evil in the sight of the Lord, and did more evil than all who were before him. And it was not enough for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, but he also took as wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians. And he went and served Baal and worshipped him and set up an altar for Baal in the house of his religions, which he built in Samaria; and Ahab made a grove, to provoke, so as to provoke God and destroy his own soul; and he did more evil than all the kings of Israel who were before him.” Do not let yourself remain any longer among the Arians, but go over to us Christians, for whom all heresies are as Baal was. You heretics are to us now what those who sacrificed to idols were to the worshippers of God in those times; believe me, through this heresy of yours you are in our times what Ahab was.

Do not please yourself, then, that God has not repaid you at once, when you see that this Ahab and his wife Jezebel, who even killed the prophets of the Lord, who are found to have been engaged in so great a crime that they allowed no man confessing himself a man of God to remain in the land of Israel, were spared for a very long time. Do not look at this, that while doing evil you are still proud in your crimes; but see this, I beseech you, that unless you turn, just as the reward of their works was repaid to them, though late, so it can be repaid to you. Do not say: “That is why I have been long on the throne, that is why I am powerful: because I hold a good faith, because I do right in persecuting those who believe as that faith written at Nicaea holds.” Do not say this, I say, but see this, I pray you: that you are still proud after so many deaths of your doing for this purpose, that either, listening to us, the priests of God, you may turn to God, or at least you may receive what your deeds deserve at the time when you will not be able to say that you erred in ignorance. Observe that this is so, warned by the example of Ahab, the killer of the prophets of the Lord and worshipper of all the demons. Understand that this man, so wicked, was kept on the throne a long time after such great crimes so that at last he might turn if he would; and not only was the reward of his evil deeds not repaid to him, but he was even helped in his straits, doubtless so that he could infer that he had been avenged not by Baal and the other demons, whom the heathen call gods, but by the God of Israel, whose prophet he saw speaking with him and declaring to him how God would bring the enemies of the Israelites to nothing. For Ben-hadad the king had besieged Samaria with thirty-two other kings, boasting that he held the Israelites as nothing, as if one man of his would overcome the whole multitude of the Israelites. This foreigner God made nothing before Israel. For which king did God win the victory? For Ahab, of course, the man who had forsaken him, who had made Israel serve Baal and all the demons; and he helped him for this reason, namely that he might believe that he alone is God whose people Israel was, and no other besides him, who had won the victory for him, so that Ahab might see that it was right for him at last to correct his errors. As soon as the adversary began to build siegeworks against the city of the Israelites, “behold,” says holy Scripture, “a prophet came to the king of Israel and said: Thus says the Lord: Have you heard this great noise? Behold, today I will hand him over into your hands, and you shall know that I am the Lord. And the king said: By whom? And the prophet said: By the young men of the governors of the districts. And the king said: Who shall begin the battle? And the prophet said: You.” And further on: “And the young men of the governors of the districts came out of the city, and the army behind them, and each struck down the man he found beside him; and the Syrians fled, and Israel pursued them.” How do you say, Constantius, “If I were not serving God well, if I had not believed rightly, I would never have seen the kingdom of the Romans placed in my power, nor have lived so long on the throne,” when you see that to Ahab, king of Israel, who lived after the manner of the Gentiles and turned the people of God away from God, as you also turn them away, it was said by him against whom he sinned and whose commandments he taught men to count as nothing: “I hand him over into your hands, so that you may know that I am God”? As, then, he rescued him from the son of Hadad, king of Syria, so he has rescued and rescues you from all who long to destroy you, for this purpose surely, that you may know that he is the God of the patriarchs and martyrs; for this purpose, that you may infer that victory was granted to you not for the merits of your faith and life, since you are like Ahab the king in all things, but that mercy has been shown you, against your merits, by him whom you have forsaken, as it was shown to Ahab. For if you say that you defeat your adversaries because you believe rightly, Ahab too, the worshipper of idols and slayer of the holy prophets, could have said it. Do you not see that you have been kept for this, to correct your errors? As soon as you had taken possession of Italy, you tried to overturn its church; you said that God the Father is not the true God the Father, denying his only Son, asserting that he is not his true Son. You maintained too that the holy Spirit, the Paraclete, was fashioned from nothing; you tried to defend the claim that there was when the only Son of God was not; you gave your whole strength to the effort to take away the apostolic and evangelical tradition; you had bishops ordained by the judgment of God removed by your authority, and decided that heretics be installed in their places, who could preach your heresy; you fought with armed force against the church in Alexandria; you banished very many bishops into exile and to the mines, threw them into prison, and even killed a certain number of all the worshippers of God. Though you have done these things, you nevertheless say: “Unless I were doing well and believing soundly, God would never still allow me to reign”; as though God had been patient with Ahab and your other fellow idolaters because they kept to the right way. Because he is patient with your sins in his tireless kindness, as he was with King Ahab, you think that you do not sin but are spared for your merits; you imitate Ahab in this too, that you love those who urge evil on you and destroy those who tell you the truth for the sake of your salvation. For as those four hundred false prophets told Ahab that he would attain every success, while Micaiah, the prophet of God, said on the contrary that every evil would befall him, and Ahab loved those false prophets more than the true prophet of the Lord, so you love your fellow heretics the Arians and obey their words, and you curse all of us priests of the Lord: first of all, because we confess the Son of God to be the true Son of God; secondly, because we do not flatter you, because we assert that you are in danger and say that unless you turn to God you will come into eternal punishment.

And so that you may believe that the men of God have always been held in hatred by apostate men, while the enemies of God's religion, that is, the worshippers of the devil, have been loved, hear whom Ahab loved and whom he hated: “And Jehoshaphat king of Judah said to the king of Israel: Inquire now today of the Lord. And the king of Israel called together all the prophets, about four hundred men, and King Ahab said to them: Shall I go to Ramoth in Gilead to battle, or shall I refrain? And they said: Go up.” And further on: “And Jehoshaphat said to the king of Israel: Is there not a prophet of the Lord here, that we may inquire of the Lord? And Ahab king of Israel said to King Jehoshaphat: There is one by whom we may inquire of the Lord, but I hate him, for he does not speak good of me.” Likewise, after Micaiah the prophet of the Lord had told him not to go up, because if he went up he would not return: “The king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat king of Judah: Did I not tell you that this man prophesies no good for me, but rather evil?” To that senseless man, whom the devil had already besieged, the things said by God's servant seemed evil, and the things said by the devil's servants were judged good. It is no wonder, then, if Ahab listened to those whom the devil made him listen to, his own slaves, and if he refused to listen to those whom God showed to be his servants by their very endurance of sufferings and their very constancy of assertion. The false prophets were dismissed by the king enriched and honoured, but Micaiah the prophet of the Lord was shut up in prison, and it was said: “Let him eat the bread of affliction until I return”; and yet, as the servant of God had said, he did not return. So you too act, Constantius: you love those who drag you with them to everlasting death, who lead your soul to every ruin; you are pleased to hate those who long for you to become a friend of God. Do not boast that, though you do such things, you still possess this fragile life, strong in the glory of the throne, when the sacred writings relate that Jeroboam the son of Joash reigned in Israel forty-one years in Samaria, and that while serving idols, having forsaken God, and not departing from the wickedness of Ahab king of Israel and the sacrifices of Jeroboam. “If I had done evil,” you say, “God would already have removed me from the throne”; as though the son of Amaziah, because he did not depart from vain things, was not indeed filled with leprosy, but nevertheless reigned fifty-two years in Jerusalem. But you are worse off than King Uzziah in this, that you do not have the elephantiasis that can consume all your limbs, but the one that is able to stain the soul through and through. Grieve for yourself with us, and shed tears for yourself; see how this visible elephantiasis stains the body, how the poison of leprosy consumes the limbs. Understand that the Arian heresy, your elephantiasis, stains in the same way all your inner parts; observe that it makes your inner man like those whom you see seized and steeped in elephantiasis. Do not say, “Unless I acted well, I would never rule so long, I would never have been allowed to live until now,” when you see that Manasseh, the son of King Hezekiah, received the kingdom of Judah at sixteen and reigned fifty-seven years. When you have heard what is written of him, you will surely find that you are his imitator, and you will cease to wonder that, though you do evil, you are still spared, seeing that Manasseh, whom you do not fall short of in cruelty and sacrilege, held the kingdom fifty-seven years while doing such things. “And Hezekiah slept,” says Scripture, “with his fathers and was buried in the city of David, and Manasseh his son reigned in his place. Manasseh was a king of sixteen years when he began to reign, and he reigned fifty-seven years in Jerusalem, and his mother's name was Hephzibah. And he did what is evil in the sight of the Lord, according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the children of Israel. And he built the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed, and built an altar for Baal and made groves as Ahab king of Israel had made, and worshipped all the host of heaven and served them. And he built an altar in the two courts of the house of the Lord, and made his sons pass through the fire, and practised augury, and made many necromancers and diviners, to do what is evil in the eyes of his soul, to provoke the Lord God. And he made the carved images of the groves, which he set in the house of which the Lord had said to David and to Solomon his son: In this house and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, I will put my name for ever; and I will not again make the foot of Israel move from the land which I gave, if only they listen to me in all that I have commanded them, and according to the law which my servant Moses commanded them. And they did not listen. And Manasses greatly despised, and Manasses led them astray to do what is evil beyond all the nations which the Lord took away before Israel. And the Lord spoke by the hand of his servants the prophets of the images which Manasseh king of Judah made, according to all that the Amorite did who was before him, and he made Judah sin with his idols. Therefore thus says the Lord God of Israel: Behold, I am bringing evils upon Jerusalem and upon Judah; all who hear of them, both their ears shall ring. And I will stretch over Jerusalem the measuring line of Samaria and the weight of the house of Ahab, and I will wipe out Jerusalem as boxwood is wiped from the doorpost before his face. And I will give them into the hands of their enemies, and they shall be plunder and burning for all their enemies, because they have been cast out from behind me, and they were behind me and were provoking me from the day their fathers came out of the land of Egypt until this day. And the rest of the words of Manasseh and all that he did, how he made Israel sin, are they not written in the book of the words of the days of the kings of Judah? And how he shed very much innocent blood, until he filled Jerusalem from end to end, besides the sin with which he made Judah sin, to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord God. And Manasseh slept with his fathers, and his son Amon reigned in his place, being twenty-two years old.”

What do you say to this, Constantius? I believe you will now stop saying, “If I were not acting well, I would not be reigning so long,” when you see that this other Manasseh too reigned fifty-seven years while doing such things. And since we have said that you are another Manasseh, see that you have all his traits. He set up idolatry in the house of God; you yourself have done just as much in the temple and courts of the Lord. He had idols worshipped and claimed for himself what was called the Lord's, so that thereafter it could be called the idols'; all this you too have done, for you have brought the Arian heresy into the church and decreed that your blasphemy be received as the catholic faith, and ordered that the faith written at Nicaea, which we know to be apostolic and evangelical, be spat upon. As you have now desired this to be done, so Manasseh too commanded that all the idols be served and God be forsaken. It will not be surprising, then, that you have claimed for yourself the buildings in which we are accustomed to gather the people of God, and that you, an idolater, have called yourself catholic, when you see that Manasseh too did what you have now done. So, in short, the Lord will spare you too, as you hold to the way of Manasseh, as he spared him, and as long as he spared him, so that it is written that he slept with his fathers and was buried in Jerusalem and that his son received the kingdom in his place. Do you read that he perished in war, or was weighed down by some illness? Not at all. But what do you think? I believe that, with that prudence of yours, you say that all those things went unpunished for King Manasseh. You are such that you think of Manasseh that, because he reigned fifty-seven years, handed the kingdom on to his son and died in peace himself, so many crimes could have gone unpunished for him. Do not have pity on yourself so as to turn yourself to God; do not correct your wicked acts; and you will find yourself tormented with Manasseh, whom you are seen to surpass in this, that he shed the blood of the righteous only within the bounds of Jerusalem, while you have shed and are shedding it in the whole Roman realm. But, you say, he burned or consecrated his sons before the images of his gods. If you had sons, you would doubtless have made them accept the Arian blasphemy. Or do you not know that, as those who burned their sons pleased the devil then, since they had one mind, to forsake the Creator and serve the creature, so now the devil demands nothing of you except that you deny the only Son of God? This is the most acceptable sacrifice to him, that you believe as Arius believed; in our times it is more to him that you deny the Son of God than if you chose to burn yourself in the fire in honour of all the demons. For he sees that the worship of idols is despised by all, because it was an empty invention; now he desires through you, his servants the heretics, to deceive us, the servants of God. How, you say, deceive? As he has already deceived you, so he wants us to be deceived. Though you are an Arian, you pretend to be a Christian until you can wound the unarmed with the poison of your heresy, so that thereafter they may not be what we are, Christians, but what you are, Arians. This is the fattening fare of your services, offered to the demons through you. For who but the devil and his sons can say of the only Son of God, “He is a Son and is not a true Son; he is God and is not true God”? So when you say, “I am a Christian, but I do not believe that God has a true Son, I do not believe in one power of the Father and the Son,” when you say that the Son is a creature, made from nothing, when you say that there was when he was not, you sacrifice to the devil better than Manasses did then, when he consecrated his sons through fire to all the demons or burned them.

I grieve for you, emperor, that, though you are so foolish and are doing such evils, you are nevertheless pleased to say: “If I were not doing well, I would not still be on the throne; God would already have destroyed me.” Do you not see that this Manasseh, who is to be compared to you in sacrilege and cruelty, held the kingdom in Judaea fifty-seven years, as I have often said? He certainly was the one who made the people forsake God and serve idols; he certainly was the one who placed images in the temple of the Lord and in the courts of God, who made the house of God, the sanctuary of his majesty, a sanctuary of idols. So God bears with you too, so he endures you, until he tests his household, crowns the worthy, and, unless you correct yourself, punishes the unworthy with you with eternal punishment. For the rest, believe that he could destroy both Manasseh then and you now in the twinkling of an eye; but he spares you, not because he cannot, but because it is fitting that his worshippers, remaining unmoved against your cruelty, should be crowned, and that he should condemn you, the enemies of his mercy, to everlasting punishment, if you resolve to persist as you are. That you say, “If I were not acting well, I would never still be ruling,” is the work of those who not only do not want you corrected in your error but even push you to perish. No wonder; for it is written that both you and they would be such: “The sinner is praised in the desires of his soul, and he who does wicked things will be blessed. The sinner has provoked the Lord; according to the greatness of his wrath he will not seek; God is not before his eyes; his ways are defiled at all times; his judgments are taken away from his sight.” So when you say, “We do well to remove those bishops who confess that they hold the faith written at Nicaea and to install those who confess as Arius confessed,” and they say, “Certainly, you do rightly,” you are that sinner who is unjustly praised for the desires of his soul; and you are the wicked man who, though you have been forsaken by God for your blasphemies, nevertheless are not reproved by your flatterers for whatever wrong you do, but rather are told that you act well. When you say, “I did well to send soldiers to Alexandria to carry off Athanasius,” and they say, “Quite rightly,” to whom will you be compared, if not to the one marked out by the Holy Spirit through the psalmist, who, though he does wicked things, though he is most evil and accursed, nevertheless longs to be praised? You say, “Unless I were acting well, God would not still have spared me”; and I find it said to God: “Therefore you correct little by little those who go astray, and you speak to those who sin, warning them, so that, leaving their wickedness, they may believe in you, Lord. For those ancient inhabitants of your land you hated, because they did works hateful to you through sorceries and unjust rites, and you willed to destroy, by the hands of our fathers, those merciless murderers of children, so that the land most precious to you of all might receive a worthy colony of the children of God. But even these, as men, you spared, and sent wasps as forerunners of your army to destroy them little by little. Were you unable to subject the ungodly to the righteous in battle, or to destroy them at once by the fiercest beasts or by a harsh word? But judging them little by little you gave them room for repentance, not unaware that their nation was evil and their wickedness inborn, and that their way of thinking could never be changed; for they were a seed accursed from the beginning; and fearing no one, you granted pardon to their sins. For who will say to you, What have you done? Or who will stand against your judgment?”