Orations (other than the Theological Orations) 3.1–4.27

How slow you are to hear our discourse, my friends and brothers, though you were quick to tyrannize over us and to tear us away from our citadel of solitude, which I embraced above all things, and which I admired exceedingly as the fellow worker and mother of the divine ascent and as making men god, and set over my whole life! How is it that what you longed to receive you despise now that you have received it, and have proved better at longing for us when we were absent than at enjoying us when present, as if you had wished to master our philosophy rather than to profit from it? Or is it right for me to say this too: we have become a surfeit to you before you have tasted us or we have given proof of ourselves, which is the strangest thing of all.

You did not even gather us in as strangers, or gather with us (to say it more sympathetically), out of respect for this commandment, if nothing else; you did not lead us by the hand as beginners, nor encourage us as timid, nor comfort us as men under constraint; but you have made our feast no feast (I hesitate to say it, but let it be said), and greeted us with no good beginning, and mingled dejection with the festival, which lacked the greatest thing for its pleasure: you, my conquerors (for it would not be true to call you my lovers). So contemptible is everything that is easily conquered: what is lofty is courted, and what humbles itself for God is dishonoured. [3] What shall I do? Shall I be judged before you, or become your judge? Shall I give sentence or receive it? For I hope to win if I am judged, and to condemn you justly if I give judgment. The charge is that you do not repay our love in equal measure, nor return honour for our obedience, nor pledge the future by your present eagerness, which can hardly be trusted even when it is there, since every beginner is warmer. Each of you puts something else before both the old shepherd and the new, neither revering grey hairs nor encouraging youth.

There is in the Gospels a splendid supper, and a gracious host, and friends, and the banquet most delightful, for it is a son’s wedding. He invites, but they do not come; he is angry, and (I pass over what comes in between, because of its ill omen, but to speak moderately) he fills the banquet with others. This we pray may not happen; but you have become, how shall I say it gently, so much loftier or bolder than those men: they were invited to the supper and rose against it and insulted the one who had invited them; but you, who are not outsiders, nor among those invited to the wedding, but have yourselves invited us, bound us to this holy table, and shown us the splendour of the bridal chamber, have then left us (this is your noble deed!), one for his own field, one for his newly bought yoke of oxen, one for his newly married wife, another for some other petty thing; you scattered and leapt away, caring little for the bridal chamber and the bridegroom.

For this reason I was filled with discouragement and perplexity (for I will not keep silent about what I felt); and I nearly withheld the discourse which I had meant to bring as a gift to the wedding, the finest and most precious thing I had; and I very nearly let it loose against you, my longed-for ones, since once I had been forced; for I had got hold of so brilliant a subject, and love was sharpening my tongue, love, which is hottest and most resourceful in accusation when it turns to jealousy and takes on an unexpected grief from being slighted. If any of you, stung by such a passion, has been slighted, he knows the feeling and will pardon those who have suffered it and come near to this madness.

But you, if you would do me a favour, my tilled field, my vine, my own heart, or rather the heart of our common Father, who begot you in Christ through the gospel: respect us too (for it is just, since we preferred you to everything; you are witnesses, and so are those who entrusted us with this, whether one should call it a leadership or a ministry; and if more is owed to one who has loved more, how shall I measure the love which, through my own, I have taken as owed to me by you?); but respect yourselves still more, and the image entrusted to you, and the One who entrusted it, and the sufferings of Christ, and the hopes that come from them. Hold the faith which you received and in which you were brought up, by which you are saved and are trusted to save others; for not many, you well know, have your boast. Place piety not in speaking often about God, but rather in keeping silence for the most part; for the tongue is a slippery thing for men when it is not steered by reason. Think hearing always less dangerous than speaking, so as to learn something about God more gladly than to teach it; leave the more precise examination of these things to the stewards of the word, and yourselves be pious in word a little, but in deed more, showing your love for the lawgiver by keeping the laws rather than by admiring him; fleeing vice, pursuing virtue, living by the Spirit, walking by the Spirit, drawing knowledge from him; building on the foundation of faith not wood, nor hay, nor stubble, weak material easily consumed when our works are judged or purified by fire, but gold, silver, precious stones, things that remain and stand. [8] May you do these things, and so glorify us, whether we are present or absent, whether you lay claim to our words or prefer something else; and may you become children of God, pure and blameless in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation; may the cords of the ungodly who walk round about not entangle you, nor the chains of your own sins bind you tight, nor the word be choked in you by the cares of life so that you become unfruitful; but may you walk on the royal road, turning aside neither to the right nor to the left, guided by the Spirit through the narrow way as through a broad one; and our affairs too will be well, both now and at the examination there, in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory for ever. Amen.

Hear this, all you nations; give ear, all who dwell in the world; for I call all, as from some lofty and most central watchtower, with a great and high proclamation. Hear, peoples, tribes, tongues, every race of men and every age, all who are now and all who shall be; and, that my proclamation may be greater, every power of the heavens, all you angels, whose work was the overthrow of the tyrant: who have brought down not Sihon king of the Amorites, nor Og king of Bashan, petty rulers who harmed a small part of the world, Israel, but the dragon, the apostate, the great mind, the Assyrian, the common enemy and foe of all, who raged and threatened much upon earth, and spoke and devised much unrighteousness on high. [2] “Hear, O heaven, and give ear,” for it is time for me to cry out the same words with Isaiah, the loudest-voiced of the prophets; except that he calls and testifies about Israel, which had rejected God, and I about a tyrant who both rejected him and has fallen a fall worthy of his impiety. [3] Hear also, O soul of the great Constantius, if you have any perception, and all you souls of the Christ-loving emperors before him; but his above all, inasmuch as he grew up with the inheritance of Christ, increased it in power, and confirmed it with time, so that for this reason he became the most renowned of all emperors that ever were, and yet (O the spite of it!) he made a mistake most unworthy of his own piety: he unwittingly reared the enemy of Christ for Christians; and in this one thing alone of all he showed kindness badly, in saving and making emperor one who was saved and made emperor to no good end. And for this reason he would be especially pleased, as with the overthrow of impiety and the return of Christian affairs to their former state, so also with this discourse. For I will dedicate a discourse to God as a thank-offering, holier and purer than any irrational sacrifice: not like that man’s accursed discourses and drivel and his more accursed sacrifices, whose abundance and power was a power of impiety, and an unwise wisdom, if I may so name it; since all the power and learning of this age walks in darkness and falls far from the light of the truth. That wisdom, then, is of this kind, and among such men, and with such fruits: withering quickly like grass, falling quickly like green herbs, departing with its fathers who perish with a noise, and more conspicuous in their fall … the impiety … to be punished for his lawlessness against letters; for letters, which are common to all rational beings, he begrudged Christians as though they were his own, reasoning most irrationally about reason, he who was, as he thought, the most rational of all.

First, that he wickedly transferred the name to suit his purpose, as though Greek speech belonged to the religion and not to the language; and for this reason he drove us away from letters as thieves of another’s good; as if he had also barred us from the arts that were invented among the Greeks, thinking that these too were his because of the shared name. Second, that he supposed we would not notice that he was not going to deprive us of any of the chief goods (we who greatly despise these letters), but was afraid of the refutations of his impiety, as though they had their strength in elegance of diction and not in the knowledge of the truth and in arguments; and it is more impossible to restrain us from these than from confessing God while we have a tongue. For we offer this too, our speech, along with everything else, as we do our bodies, whenever we must contend with these also for the truth. So the man who ordered this stopped our Atticizing, but did not stop our telling the truth; he exposed his own rottenness, but did not escape our refutations; except that, without knowing it, he gave us more cause to use them. [6] For it was not the act of one confident either in the just claims of his religion or in his own letters to restrain our letters; as if someone, thinking himself the strongest of athletes and claiming to be proclaimed victor over all, were to order that none of the brave should compete or come down into the stadium, or were to cut off one of their limbs: a sign of cowardice rather than of strength. For crowns are won against those who compete, not against those who sit above; against those who use all their strength, not against those deprived of most of their power. If you were afraid to meet us and come to blows at all, by that very fact you showed your defeat, and it is mine to conquer without even having fought, since you contended not to contend. Such were the measures of our wise emperor and lawgiver, as if no part of him might be without a share in his tyranny, and he would proclaim his unreason at the beginning of his reign by tyrannizing over letters before other things. But it is good for us to give thanks to God for letters themselves, having recovered our freedom; and above all to honour him with other offerings too, sparing nothing, neither money nor possessions, which, though they had become the prey of the time and of the tyranny, the love of God for mankind preserved; but to honour him before all else with letters, a just offering of fruit, common to all who have shared in the grace. But let this be enough of our discourse on behalf of letters, so that by drawing it out further we may not fall out of season, and seem to be busy with something other than that for which we have assembled. [7] Now my discourse leaps and rushes to celebration, and shines with what it sees, and calls all to a spiritual dance: those who devoted themselves to fasting and weeping and prayer, asking night and day for deliverance from the sorrows that held us, and making the hope that does not put to shame their good remedy in their evils; those who, enduring great struggles and contests and struck by many and hard assaults of the time, became a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men, in the Apostle’s words, weary in body but remaining unconquered in soul, and able to do all things in Christ who strengthened them; and those who, putting off the worldly matter and power of vice, either accepted with joy the plundering of their property, or were unjustly exiled, as the saying is, from their own land, or were parted for a little while from husbands or wives or parents or children, or whatever other names of our small kinship hold us, and offered their sufferings for Christ as fruit to the blood of Christ: these might now say and sing in season, “You set men over our heads; we went through fire and water; and you brought us out into refreshment.” [8] I call to the festival also the other part: those who confess the God of the universe and are sound in their reasonings so far, but do not enter into the reasons of providence, which often orders the better through its opposites and calls to correction by kindness; but through poverty and lightness of soul, when the ungodly is proud, they are inflamed and burned up in their thoughts and cannot bear the peace of sinners, as the psalm says, nor wait for God’s counsel and be patient until the end; but being always slaves of what is present and visible, they are confirmed in the truth by such wonders as these.

I call also the souls fluttering about the stage of this world and the great theatre; and I call them with the words of Isaiah: “Women coming from the spectacle, come”; and, turning the eye of the soul back from its wandering outside, “be still and know that he is God,” exalted among the nations, exalted in the earth, always and in all the wonders and signs that he has done, and more clearly in those of the present.

Would that that company too were part of my chorus, which until now sang with us to God a song neither counterfeit nor false, and was once even deemed worthy of the station on the right, and will, I believe, soon be deemed worthy of it again; but, I know not what has happened to it, it suddenly changes its tune and its place, and does not come together with us even under the common gladness, which surprises me more; but it sets up a dance of its own, neither well-measured nor harmonious (so much perhaps they themselves will allow me to say); but of what kind, and what? Though zeal moves me to speak, faith prevails, and I will hold back what is unpleasant in my word out of respect for hope. I still cherish my members; I still give more to the former love than to the present disdain; and for this reason I am more patient, so as not to reproach them more hotly.

One part, one kind of souls, I bar from the festival, groaning and grieving, mourning those who perhaps do not even understand, lamenting those who do not perceive their own destruction (for this is the most pitiable thing in their wound); yet I bar them: those who were sown not upon the firm and unshaken rock but upon the dry and barren ground. These are those who approached the word superficially and with little faith, and because they had no depth of earth sprang up at once and peeped out to please their neighbours, then under a brief assault of the evil one and a little heat of temptations withered and died. And still worse than these, and more to be barred from the festival, are those who did not resist the time even a little, and joined those who take us captive with the evil captivity away from him who ascended on high and took us captive for good; but they showed themselves wicked and cheap to excess, not holding out even a little, not even made to stumble by some affliction or temptation on account of the Word, but selling their own salvation, the wretches, for temporary gain, or court favour, or a little power. … who puts courage into feeble knees, and breaks the arms of the sinner and the wicked (for I take this too from divine Scripture, and this from another song, as each comes to my memory, many filling up my song for me and contributing to the thank-offering); who gives us to see both the ungodly lifted above the cedars and his overthrow so that he is no more, when we could pass by his impiety with swiftness and safety of foot. Who will sing these things worthily, and tell them, of those who tell divine things? “Who shall speak the mighty acts of the Lord, and make all his praises heard?” What voice or what power of speech will match the wonder? Who broke bow and sword and war? Who crushed the heads of the dragons upon the water? Who gave him as food to the peoples to whom he also handed him over? Who made the storm a breeze? Who said to the sea, “Be silent, be muzzled,” and, “In you your waves shall be broken,” and indeed broke them when they had not been lifted up for long and had foamed? Who gave us to tread upon serpents and scorpions, which no longer secretly watch for the heel, as the sentence was, but openly rise up and lift the head that they were condemned to have trodden on? Who executed judgment and unexpected righteousness? Who did not leave the rod of sinners altogether upon (dare I say?) the lot of the righteous, or, to put it more moderately, the lot of those who know him?

For we were not handed over as righteous men (this happens to few and seldom), so that, like noble athletes, they might put the tempter to shame; but we were condemned as sinners, and then shown mercy with care and like a father, struck only enough to be chastened, and admonished only enough to turn to him. For he reproved us, but not in wrath; he disciplined us, but not in anger; showing his love for mankind through both, the reminder and the relief. Who is it that executed vengeance among the nations and reproofs among the peoples? “The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.” I find one voice, one song, somehow worthy of the present, which Isaiah uttered before us, very fitting for the present time and vying with the greatness of the benefit: “Let the heaven rejoice from above, and let the clouds sprinkle righteousness; let the mountains break forth into gladness, and the hills into exultation.” For the whole creation too, and the heavenly powers, share, as I hold, in perceiving such things; for not only does it groan and travail together, being in bondage to corruption (I mean to the things below that come to be and pass away), eagerly awaiting their end and the revelation, so that then it too may obtain the freedom it hopes for, being now bound to these against its will through the power of the One who made it; but it also shares the glory and exults with the children of God when they rejoice.

Therefore (for I will not refrain from divine words in expounding divine power), let the desert rejoice and blossom like the lily: the church that only yesterday and the day before was, as it seemed, a widow without a husband, and everyone who until now was shrivelled by the envious and joyless winter of impiety; for the Lord has had mercy on his people and has not forsaken his inheritance; for he has done wonderful things, an ancient and true counsel, which was to take pleasure in those who fear him and hope in his mercy; for he has broken gates of bronze and shattered bars of iron; for we were humbled because of our iniquities, but were called back, and when the snare was broken we were strengthened by the grace of God who called us and comforts the lowly in heart.

Do you see how I weave my song from divine words and thoughts? And somehow I am elated and adorned with the words of others, and become as if inspired with pleasure; I disdain everything lowly and human, fitting and joining different passages together and bringing the words of the same Spirit into one.

In earlier times the wonders of God were shown by Enoch translated, Elijah taken up, Noah preserved and preserving the seeds of the races, the world in a small wooden ark, when they escaped the flooding of the inhabited earth, so that the earth might be adorned again with more pious inhabitants; by Abraham called, and honoured with a child beyond his age, so as to believe in another seed that had been promised, and offering his only son as a willing sacrifice, and receiving a strange victim in place of the child; by the astonishing destruction of the ungodly, deluged with fire and brimstone, and the more astonishing rescue of the godly, and the pillar of salt that makes a show of the turning back toward evil; by Joseph sold and loved and chaste, made wise by God, set free, ruling, and supplying grain for a greater dispensation; by Moses deemed worthy of visions of God, receiving the law and giving it, becoming a god to Pharaoh, and leading Israel to the land of promise; by the plagues of Egypt counted out, and the safety of those who toiled in the midst of the Egyptians; by the sea retreating at a rod and closing again at a word, letting some pass as on dry land and flowing over the others according to its nature.

And the other things that followed these: a pillar of cloud overshadowing by day and a pillar of fire giving light by night, both of them guiding; bread rained in the desert and meat sent from heaven, the one measured to need, the other even beyond need; water from the rock, the one given forth, the other made sweet; Amalek defeated by prayer and by the secret and mystical shape of the hands; the sun standing still and the moon held back, and the Jordan cut off; walls shaken by a circuit of priests, the sound of trumpets, and a number that had power; the ground and the fleece, alternately rained on and remaining dry; strength in hair, a match for a whole army; a few picked men who lapped, trusted to conquer, and conquering, as they hoped, a small number against many thousands. Why must I count up each of the wonders worked through Christ himself in his saving coming and incarnation, and those worked after him and through him by his holy apostles and the ministers of the word? How many books and records contain them?

But as for the things of the present, “come, hear, and I will tell you, all you who fear God,” so that another generation and the successions of generations may know the wonders of God’s power. But since it is not possible to make these known without setting out the greatness of the danger, and this is not possible without exposing the malice of his character, and from what beginnings and seeds of vice he fell into such great misery, increasing his impiety little by little like the venom of the bitterest reptiles and beasts, we will leave it to books and histories to recount all his doings in tragic style, for we have no leisure to string together a tale longer than our present subject; but going through a few things out of many, we will leave a kind of inscribed monument for those after us, proceeding in our discourse to the chief and most conspicuous of his doings.

[21] First of all, he was saved by the great Constantius, who had just succeeded his father in power (when the army took up arms against those in office, innovating for fear of innovation, and the palace was being settled under new leaders); and though he was saved with his brother by an incredible and unexpected rescue, he felt no gratitude for his salvation either to God or to the emperor through whom he was saved, but proved bad to both, being in travail with apostasy against the one and insurrection against the other. [22] But what I must say before this: they were thought worthy of royal maintenance and care in one of the imperial estates by the most humane emperor, as remnants of the family kept for the empire. He was at once devising a defence of the revolutionary deeds at the beginning of his reign, as not having been dared by his will; at once seeking to show his magnanimity by sharing the rule; and third, to make the government more secure by additions: which was the intention of one more kind than wise.

And since they were at leisure from everything, the empire being still in the future and in preparation, and their age and their hopes not yet bringing them even to the second ranks of office, they had teachers in the other branches of learning, their kinsman and emperor having them educated in the whole circle of general education; and they made still more use of our philosophy, not only the part that concerns words, but all that sounds forth piety through character, associating with the most earnest men and with the most gracious deeds, which give a great display of virtue. They even enrolled themselves in the clergy, so as to read the divine books to the people, thinking this no less a glory for them, and considering piety a greater ornament than anything.

[24] By most costly shrines of martyrs, by lavish offerings, and by all the things by which the fear of God is marked, they displayed their love of wisdom and of Christ: the one truly in piety (for he was, though rather hot by nature, genuine in his piety), the other buying up the opportunity and hiding his malice under a pretence of decency. Here is proof; for I cannot pass over the wonder that happened, which is most worthy of memory and able to instruct many of the ungodly. [25] Both were labouring, as I said, for the martyrs, and vying splendidly with each other, raising the building with many hands and great expense; but since it was not from the same intention, their labour did not come to a like end for both. The work of the one, I mean the elder of the brothers, advanced and went according to plan, since God readily accepted the gift, as he did Abel’s sacrifice, rightly offered and rightly divided; and the gift was like the consecration of a firstborn. But the other’s (alas for the dishonour of the ungodly, already bearing witness here to what awaits them there, and proclaiming great things by small signs!) the God of the martyrs rejected like Cain’s sacrifice. [26] The one laboured, and the earth shook off what he had laboured on; he strove the harder, and it refused to receive the foundations of one rotten toward piety, as though crying out the earthquake that was to come from him, and honouring the martyrs by the dishonour done to the most impious. This work was a kind of prophecy of the man’s later arrogance and madness, of his dishonour toward martyrs and his lawlessness toward holy shrines: unnoticed by others, but pursuing the persecutor from afar and signifying beforehand the wages of impiety.

O soul wise to do evil, yet not escaping its own torment! O God proclaiming the future, to check impiety or to show his foreknowledge! O wonder, strange, but more true than strange! O brotherly love of the martyrs! They did not accept honour from one who would dishonour many martyrs; they did not admit a gift from one who would make many athletes, and begrudge them even their contest; or, to say it more truly, they alone of the martyrs could not bear to be insulted, while the others would be laid to rest and tended by holy hands; nor would they allow the sophist of vice to boast of his insults, so that by the same hand some martyrs’ shrines would be raised and others pulled down, some martyrs honoured and others dishonoured, the honour in appearance coming a little before the real dishonour; nor that, besides the greatness of the insult, he should think himself wise in his own eyes, escaping the notice, as of men, so of God, the sharpest and wisest of all, who catches the wise in their craftiness, by the screen of his outward show; but that he should know that he was understood, and not be exalted when he was found out.