Orations (other than the Theological Orations) 5.23–6.1

Hezekiah king of Judah, when a king of foreigners came against him with a great force and surrounded Jerusalem with his army, and bitterly hurled blasphemous and impious words against both the king and God himself, as though he would by no means save the city from his power, went to the temple, tore his garment, shed fountains of tears, and stretching his hands to heaven called God to witness the blasphemy of Sennacherib, and asked him to become the avenger of the arrogance of his threats: “You have seen, Lord,” he said, “how this foreigner has reproached you, the God of Israel; you have seen, Lord; do not keep silent.” And he was not disappointed of his request; but the God-fighter perceived his madness in deed, and went away with his threats unaccomplished, an invisible power falling suddenly upon him, having lost the greater part of his army, and moving off at a bitter message, which unexpectedly ended both the siege and his hopes. So it was with Hezekiah, who was surrounded by great power, the king of great Jerusalem, who perhaps could have repelled the enemy even by himself. But we, who had only hope in God left us as weapon and wall and every other defence, being wholly stripped and cut off from human help, what other hearer of our prayer or preventer of the threats were we to have, than the God who swears by the pride of Jacob? O incredible tales! O boldness of hopes! We were promised to the demons in place of some other victim; and the great inheritance of God, the holy nation, the royal priesthood, became the prize of a single hope and the trophy of a single war.

Are these the wages Christians get from you, in return for your being wickedly saved through them? Is this what you repaid to the Lord your God? Before, then, when God still held back and delayed his wrath on our behalf, and had not yet kindled all his zeal, but still kept his hand raised against the ungodly, and had bent and prepared his bow but held it back by force, and was waiting for all that man’s wickedness first to break out like some hidden and malignant disease (as is indeed the law of God’s judgment, that he may either save by repentance or punish more justly): then, vexed by what was happening and weary at what was coming (for we could not bear his kindness, hidden from his own), we sent up to God those cries, partly calling on him as master, partly beseeching him as a kind father, partly as it were reproaching him and pleading our case with him, as people in pain do: “Why, O God, have you cast us off for ever? Has your anger been kindled against the sheep of your pasture? Remember your congregation, which you acquired from the beginning,” which you purchased by the sufferings of your only-begotten Word, which you deemed worthy of your great covenant, which you drew up to heaven by the new mystery and the pledge of the Spirit; and, “Lift up your hands against their pride for ever,” reminding him of all the evil that the enemies had done against his saints and how they had boasted against his feasts; and we called on the sword and the plagues of Egypt, and asked him to judge his own cause, and bade him arise at last against the ungodly: “How long shall sinners, Lord,” we said, “how long shall sinners boast, humble your people and afflict your inheritance, and alike speak and do lawlessness?” And moreover those mournful cries, more fitting still: “You made us a contradiction and a reproach to our neighbours, a byword among the nations, and a laughing-stock to all men.” We spoke of a vine, brought out of Egypt, out of dark godlessness, and grown in beauty and greatness of faith, then stripped of its hedge, the oversight of God that had guarded us until then, and exposed to all the wicked rulers passing by, and ravaged by a wild boar, the evil one who was singular in vice and full of the mire of vice.

These things, then, I used to think and cry out to God before; but now what cries I take up in place of those! I now lament the destruction of the ungodly, and become kind to those who hate me, and say such things as these: “How have they become a desolation? Suddenly they failed; they perished because of their lawlessness,” like dust that a whirlwind carried off, like chaff scattered by the wind, like the morning dew, like the whizz of an arrow sent forth, like a clap of thunder, like darting lightning. If, then, they should now repent and, ceasing from their great error and drunkenness, pursue the truth, perhaps there might be some gain for them even from their fall, since being disciplined is often for the good of those who suffer; but if they remain in the same mind and still cling to their idols, not chastened by misfortune, which teaches even fools … Jeremiah laments Jerusalem so much that he even bids lifeless things lament and calls on the walls for tears. But what lament worthy of these men will be found? Or who would mourn the present, leaving aside weeping for the punishment to come, because they became foolish and went far away and served the creature rather than the Creator; and not only this, but rose up against those who serve God and stretched out an impious hand, worthy of such evils?

Let this be as is dear to God. Who knows whether God, who frees those who are fettered and brings up from the gates of death the one who is heavy and sinking down, who does not desire the death of the sinner but his return, who enlightened and gave understanding to us too as we sat in darkness and the shadow of death, will not one day take these men also and shepherd them with the shepherd’s rod, laying aside the heavy rod of iron? But my discourse will run back again to the same victory song: “Bel has fallen, Dagon is broken, Sharon has become a marsh, Lebanon is put to shame.” No longer will they say to the fool, “Rule,” to the motionless and senseless assembly of idols; nor will they seek the fly-god of Ekron, or anything more ridiculous than this; no longer will they seek out groves and high places and every leafy and shady mountain; no longer will they sacrifice their sons and daughters to demons, for which Israel was reproached of old by the prophets. But what are these things to me? I will turn to the present and to our own affairs. No longer will they look with an evil eye on our holy houses; no longer will they defile with foul blood the altars named after the purest and bloodless sacrifice; nor shame the sanctuaries with godless altars; no longer will they plunder and profane offerings, mixing greed with impiety; no longer will they outrage the grey hairs of priests, the dignity of deacons, the modesty of virgins; no longer will they let loose the filth of pigs upon the entrails of saints cut open, so as to glut them with the food and the entrails together; no longer will they bring fire to the shrines of martyrs, as if to put a stop to others’ contests by the dishonour done to these; no longer will they consume with fire the relics of saints, dishonouring them along with the most dishonoured bones, and give them to the winds, so as to deprive such men even of the honour due to them; no longer will they assemble a seat of pestilent men and revel in blasphemies against bishops and presbyters, and also prophets and apostles and Christ himself; no longer will they hold festival against us, shutting us out by their law of counterfeit learning, as though stopping our tongues with it too. [30] … and the music of your instruments, my prophet bids you; but let David sing again in freedom, who struck down the lofty Goliath with mystic stones, who conquered many by gentleness, and by spiritual harmony healed Saul when he was choked by the evil demon. Let the torch-bearer quench his fire; let the wise and holy virgins light their lamps for the bridegroom. Let the hierophant put off his harlot’s robe; you priests, put on righteousness, and a garment of glory in place of a spirit of heaviness, and the great and spotless tunic, Christ, our adornment.

Let your herald be silent about shameful things; let my herald proclaim things inspired by God. Stop your books of sorcery and divination; let the prophetic and apostolic books alone be unrolled. Put an end to your shameful nights full of darkness; I will raise up against them holy and bright vigils. Bar up your shrines and the roads that lead to Hades; I will explain the roads that are open and lead to heaven. How many preparations of arms and devices of engines, how many myriads of men and phalanxes, could have accomplished what we accomplished merely by praying and God by willing? By a word he dissolved the darkness, by a word he established light, founded the earth, rounded the heaven, ordered the stars, spread out the air, bounded the sea, drew out the rivers, gave souls to living things, fashioned man toward himself, and set the world as an adornment upon all; by a word too he dissolved the present dark night and brought all things back to light and to the same order and harmony. No longer do greedy and deceitful demons hold power; no longer is creation outraged, worshipped instead of God under the guise of honour. Cast down your Triptolemuses and Celeuses and mystic serpents; be ashamed at last of the books of your theologian Orpheus; accept the gift of the time, which covers up your indecency. But if these are myths and fictions, I will reveal your mysteries of the night.

No longer does the oak speak; no longer does the cauldron prophesy; no longer is the Pythia filled, with I know not what, unless with myths and nonsense. Again Castalia has been silenced and is silent, and is water that does not prophesy but is laughed at; again Apollo is a voiceless statue; again Daphne is a plant lamented in myth; again Dionysus is androgynous and attended by a chorus of drunkards, and your great mystery is the phallus, and a god in passion for the wicked Prosymnus; again Semele is struck by the thunderbolt; again Hephaestus is lame, but quick at finding adulterers, a god blackened with soot, though famed for his craft, an Olympian Thersites; again Ares is a prisoner for adultery, along with Terror and Fear and the Din of battle, and wounded for his rashness; again Aphrodite is a harlot, born shamefully and minister of shameful marriages; again Athena is a virgin and gives birth to a serpent; again Heracles is mad, or rather has stopped being mad; again Zeus becomes everything through licentiousness and impurity, he, the counsellor and highest of the gods, who alone draws up all the gods together with all that exists, but is not himself drawn down by them all. Again the tomb of Zeus is shown in Crete. If I see your god of Gain, and of Eloquence, and of Contests, I hide my eyes and pass by your god out of shame at the sight; but you, worship for me the vigour of his speech and his purse. One thing of yours alone is venerable: the honours paid by the Egyptians to the Nile through androgynous men, the Isises, the Mendesian gods, the Apises, and the other composite and strange beasts that you mould or paint. I laugh at your Pan and Priapus and Hermaphroditus, and at the gods mutilated or torn apart by madness. But these things I will leave to the stage and to the poets who adorn them; I will end my discourse with an exhortation. [33] Men and women alike, young and old, you who are initiated to this bema and you who are ranked in the place below, all whom the Lord has redeemed, formerly from error and godlessness, and now from the uprising of the nations and from the evils already present and expected, hear the word of a man not moderately instructed in such things, both from daily events and from the ancient histories and books and deeds. It is a great thing to experience none of the hardships; but perhaps not even great, if the saying is true that “whom the Lord loves he disciplines, and scourges every son whom he receives” and cares for. But it is a great thing not to fall into sin at all from the beginning, or not in the greatest things, since God placed complete sinlessness above human nature; and the second thing, as it seems to me, is, having stumbled somewhat and been disciplined, and then relieved, at least to remain mindful of the training, and to flee a second scourge for a second vice.

Therefore let us too perceive the divine discipline in deed. Let us show ourselves worthy not of what we suffered first, but of what we obtained afterward. Let us make some defence regarding the misfortune that held us: that we were not handed over to the nations as evildoers, but chastened as children. Let us not forget the storm in the calm, nor the sickness in the time of health, nor the captivity when we have been restored to Jerusalem, nor Egypt after Egypt; let us not make the time of affliction better than the time of relief. And we shall do so if we appear to have been humbled and moderate then, lifting all our hopes to heaven, but now elated and puffed up, running back to the same sins from which we fell into the misfortunes that befell us. “Not so, children, not so,” says Eli the priest somewhere, admonishing his sons who were sinning against God. But knowing that it is easier to recall a prosperity that has gone than to preserve it when it comes from God (for prudence brings back the one, and carelessness dissolves the other), and that sick bodies recover through treatment and abstinence, but once recovered, through little neglects and surfeits, slip again and return to the same illnesses: knowing these things and teaching one another, let us come to ourselves and manage the time prudently.

[35] First, brothers, let us keep festival, not with brightness of body, nor with changes and costliness of dress, nor with revels and drunkenness, whose fruit, as you have learned, is debauchery and licentiousness. Let us not crown the streets with flowers, nor shame the tables with perfumes, nor adorn our porches; let our houses not be lit with light that the senses perceive, nor resound with … and clapping. For this is the custom of the Greek holy days; but let us not honour God with these things, nor exalt the present time with things of which it is unworthy, but with purity of soul and brightness of mind, and with lamps that light up the whole body of the church, I mean divine contemplations and thoughts, raised upon the holy lampstand and enlightening the whole world. Small to me, beside this light, are all the lights that people kindle at their private and public festivals. I have perfume too, but the one with which only priests and kings are anointed, varied and costly, emptied out for us, compounded by the art of a great perfumer. Would that I might offer God the fragrance of this perfume! I have a table too, this spiritual and divine one, which the Lord prepared for me in the presence of those who afflict me, at which I rest and take my delight, and where I commit no insolence through surfeit, but rather lull to sleep every insurrection of the passions. I have flowers too, more blooming and more lasting than all those of spring, from the full field which the Lord has blessed: the holy and fragrant shepherds and teachers, and all that is pure and choice among the people. With these I wish to be crowned and to walk in procession, having fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith, as the holy Apostle says. Let us take up hymns instead of drums, psalmody instead of shameful writhings and songs, thankful applause instead of theatrical applause, and a harmonious action of the hands; thoughtfulness instead of laughter, sensible speech instead of drunkenness, dignity instead of luxury. If you must dance, as a festive man and lover of feasts, dance; but not the shameful dance of Herodias, whose work was the death of the Baptist, but the dance of David at the resting of the ark, which I consider a mystery of the agile and many-turning walk according to God. This, then, is the first and greatest point of my exhortation. [36] Second, I know that I shall say a hard word, hard for many to accept; for a man who has been badly treated and comes into power to retaliate, especially if his anger is just because of what he has suffered, is least inclined to obey reason when it checks his temper with its bridles; yet it deserves to be heard and accepted. Let us not use the time insatiably, let us not revel in our power, let us not be bitter to those who wronged us, let us not do what we condemned. But, enjoying the change so far as to escape the terrors, let us hate whatever goes as far as retaliation. Sufficient punishment, for the moderate at least, is the fear felt by those who caused us pain, and their expectation of suffering what they deserve, and being tortured by their own conscience; for what one fears one will suffer, one has suffered even if one does not suffer it, and perhaps one is punished more by oneself than by those who might do it. Let us not, then, wish our anger to be measured out, nor appear lesser punishers than is deserved; but since we cannot exact the whole, let us forgive the whole; let us by this become better and loftier than those who wronged us; let us show what the demons teach them, and what Christ teaches us, who, glorious in what he suffered, conquered no less by what he could have done and did not do. Let us render God a thank-offering; let us increase the mystery by kindness; let us use the time for this. [37] Let us conquer by gentleness those who tyrannized over us; and above all let kindness be what forgives, and the power of the commandment, which returns equal kindness to us in the things we ourselves need; for we know that with the measure with which we measure it will be measured back to us. And if anyone feels very bitterly, let us leave those who pained us to God and to the tribunal there; let us not lessen by our own hand any of the wrath to come. Let us not think of confiscation, let us not drag them before tribunals, let us not banish them from their country, let us not torture them with scourges, nor, to put it briefly, do any of the things that we suffered. Let us make them too more decent, if possible, by our example. If anyone has lost a son, or a father, or a wife, or a friend, or anyone else dear to him, let us make the suffering of all bring its reward, by persuading them to bear bravely what they have suffered; this will be a greater favour to them. Shall I tell the greatest of the good things we receive? The persecutors are shouted down by peoples and cities, in theatres, in markets, in assemblies; the old order is called blessed, the new is pilloried; and by their own fellow persecutors (what is most strange) the gods themselves are dragged down with every outcry, as having deceived them for a long time, and their deception exposed at last; and yesterday’s worshipper is today’s insulter. What greater thing than this do we seek? These things are now, and perhaps small for the wretches. There will be a time when I shall see those who insulted me, and their great leader, bewailing their own vice, when all wickedness is judged and tortured.

[38] I leave aside our divine teachings and the scourges laid up there for such men, as we hold; but come also to your own words and terrors, which please not only poets but philosophers too: your Pyriphlegethons and Cocytuses and Acherons, with which they punish injustice, Tantalus, Tityus, Ixion. Julian, the emperor of your clan, will be numbered with them, and before them, by my reckoning and definition; not punished with thirst in lakes up to his chin, nor fearing a stone that looms above his head, as tragedy has it, always pushed up and always rolling down; nor whirled round on a whirring wheel, nor having his liver torn by birds, never failing and always growing again (whether these things are truth, or myth showing the truth in fictions); but we shall see by what and what kind of punishments he will then be punished, and how much harsher than these, if indeed penalties and recompenses are measured to the sins. [39] This is your guest-gift in return for the foot, O wisest and most intelligent of men (to address you in your own words); this we give, we who were shut out from letters by your great and wonderful legislation. Do you see that we were not going to keep silent to the end, nor be condemned of unreason by your decrees, but to have a free voice, refuting your unreason? There is no device to stop the cataracts of the Nile falling from Ethiopia upon Egypt, nor the ray of the sun, even if it is covered by a cloud for a little while; nor to fetter the tongue of Christians that pillories your doings. This Basil and Gregory say to you, the opponents and counter-workers of your undertaking, as you yourself thought and made others think, magnifying us by your threats and sharpening us still more for piety. Knowing us to be distinguished in life and word and in our concord with one another, and known to you since Greece, you honoured us with the Cyclops’ honour and kept us for the last in your persecution; and perhaps you were devising some great and magnificent victory gift for the demons, if we had received you on your return from Persia; or you hoped to sweep us along with you to your pit, in your evil thinking. [40] For we are not more ignoble than those young men who were bedewed in the fire and conquered beasts by faith, and who readily shared danger with a noble mother and a nobler priest and showed that of all things faith alone cannot be captured; nor than these in your own time, of whom the one, having insulted the mother of your gods and scattered her altar, was brought in as one condemned but went in as a victor, and, much laughing at your purple and your words as calculating and ridiculous, came out with greater freedom, like someone returning from dinner and a brilliant feast; while the other, his whole body scraped deep with combs and scarcely breathing through his wounds, was so far from giving in to the tortures or thinking any of the present things terrible, that when he saw a part of his body unharmed by the blows, he even accused the torturers of insult, for not having honoured his whole body but having left some part unscraped and unconsecrated; and at the same time he pointed to his leg, as the only part that had escaped the claws, and bade them not spare this either.

This is the discourse for you, in place of the lies and drivel of Porphyry, in which you exult as in divine voices, or of your Misopogon, or Antiochicus (for you give the discourse both titles), than which nothing is more dishonourable to Christians; which then your purple made great, along with the flatterers who admired all your doings; but now it is a beard carried around and dragged about, laughed at even by those who toiled on it with you. In it you boast greatly of the frugality of your body and of never having had indigestion from greed, as though saying something wonderful; but that you drove out the Christians so bitterly, and destroyed so great and holy a nation, you willingly pass over. Yet if one man has indigestion or lets out natural belches, what harm is that to the commonwealth? But when so great a persecution was stirred up and so great a confusion devised, how was it not entirely necessary for the affairs of the Romans to fare badly, as indeed they have plainly fared?

This is the monument from us, higher and more conspicuous than the pillars of Heracles; for they are fixed in one place and are seen only by those who come there; but this cannot but be carried about, to be known everywhere and by all; and future time, I well know, will receive it, pillorying both you and your doings, and teaching the rest not to dare any such thing against God, lest, having done the like, they suffer the like.

Eagerness loosens my tongue, and I disregard the human law for the law of the Spirit, and I give my speech to peace, having granted it to no one before. For before, when the members were in revolt against us, and the great and precious body of Christ was divided and cut up, so that our bones were almost scattered at the edge of Hades, like the depth of the earth broken by the plough and scattered over the ground; and when the evil one, cutting the tunic that was uncut and undivided and woven throughout, had made the whole his own, achieving through us what he could not achieve through those who crucified Christ: then I set a guard on my lips, which were not eager to speak in any case, because I thought it to be the spiritual order first to purify myself by the philosophy of deeds, then to open the mouth of the mind and draw in the Spirit, then to utter a good word and to speak the perfect wisdom of God among the perfect; and as there is a time for every matter, small and great (for the saying of Solomon is right and very carefully considered), so I knew, as well as anyone, that there is a time for speech and for silence. … rebukes, a groan sent up from the depth, all-night standing, the departure of the mind to God, a fine lament in prayer, a medicine of compunction for those who hear; those who sing psalms, who glorify, who meditate on the law of the Lord day and night, who carry the high praises of God in their throats; and these fair proclamations and signs of the life according to God, the silent heralds: squalor and unkempt hair, bare feet following those of the apostles, carrying nothing dead; hair cut to measure, a garment that chastens pride, a girdle orderly for one without adornment, drawing up the tunic a little, and only so much as not to draw it up; a steady walk, an eye that does not wander, a gentle smile, or rather the beginning of a smile, chastening unrestrained laughter; speech moved by reason, silence more precious than speech; praise seasoned with salt, not for flattery but for guidance to what is better; rebuke more desirable than praise; measures of gravity and of relaxation, and the mixing and blending of both, the gentle with the noble, the severe blended with modesty, so that neither is harmed by the other, but each wins repute through the other; measures of mixing with the community and of withdrawal, the one training others, the other initiating into the mysteries of the Spirit; the one keeping apartness in the midst of community, the other brotherly love and kindness in solitude; and what is still greater and loftier than these: wealth in poverty, possession in sojourning, glory in dishonour, power in weakness, a fine offspring in celibacy (if indeed offspring according to God are better than those that begin from the flesh); those who delight by not delighting, humble for the sake of heavenly things, who are nothing in the world and above the world, outside the flesh while in the flesh, whose portion is the Lord, poor for the kingdom and reigning through poverty.