On Saint Athanasius (two books) 1.1–1.8

You compel us, Constantius, to condemn in his absence our fellow priest, the religious Athanasius; but we are forbidden to do it by the divine law. With your royal authority you press the priests of the Lord far and wide to shed blood, not knowing that you have tried to take from our minds the laws of justice handed down to us from God. Or will you be able to assert that God has permitted a man to be condemned absent, unheard, and, what is most important, innocent? For how do you think God has permitted the unheard to be punished, when you see that Adam and Eve, the first of our race, were heard and then struck by the sentence of God? “And God called Adam and said to him: Adam, where are you? And he said: I heard your voice, Lord, in paradise, and I was afraid, because I am naked, and I hid myself. And God said to him: Who told you that you are naked, unless you have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you that of this alone you should not eat? And Adam said: The woman whom you gave, she gave me from the tree, and I ate. And God said to the woman: Why have you done this? And the woman said: The serpent persuaded me, and I ate.” Since, then, you observe that God gave this pattern of judging, since you gather from the sacred springs of the Scriptures that God, having called them out of their hiding and heard their confession, gave his sentence, what effrontery possessed and possesses you to give the servants of God a pattern of judging which did not come from the law of the Lord? Nor did you fear that we might say of you to God what was said of that fugitive angel, “The serpent persuaded me”: “The emperor Constantius led us astray; we believed him, thinking he was a man.” Could you not see that you can be struck by the same sentence of the angry God by which the serpent is seen to have been struck? To him it is said: “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all cattle and above all the beasts of the earth that are upon the earth; on your breast and belly you shall crawl, and you shall eat earth all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall watch your head, and you shall watch his heel.” Ought you not to have remembered from this one sentence of the Lord that you too could incur God's offence as that angel incurred it, especially when you knew that your work too was the serpent's? Or, since that serpent was made from among the angels, did you think that you could not become a serpent from among men? Not at all. But I should like you to tell me what difference there is between your deed and that of this fugitive, apostate angel. If he led astray simple people by a lie, so do you, and you not simple people; if he enticed their minds to eat the fruit of the tree for the sake of advantage, so do you, since you claim that you do it for the sake of peace.

And since you have said that you undertook this work for the good of all Christians, from an inspection of your works it is given us to understand that you have imitated that serpent. Desiring that we become transgressors of God's commandments, you gave orders that a man absent and unheard must be condemned, and that a hearing must be refused to one who cries out that he can clear himself of the charge brought against him. Abel, a righteous man, is killed, and Cain receives sentence after being questioned; and you want a priest of the Lord punished unheard? “Abel,” it says, “became a shepherd of sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the earth. And it came about after some days that Cain offered from the fruit of the earth a sacrifice to the Lord, and Abel too offered from the firstlings of his sheep; and God looked upon Abel and his gifts, but upon Cain and his sacrifices he did not look. And Cain was very sad, and his face fell. And the Lord God said to Cain: Why have you become sad, and why has your face fallen? Why did you not offer rightly? You have sinned; be still,” and so on; and further on: “Cain said to Abel his brother: Let us go into the field. And it came about, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him. And God said to Cain: Where is your brother? And he said: I do not know; am I my brother's keeper? And God said: Why have you done this? The voice of your brother's blood cries to me from the earth.” Was it not open to God to punish before he called Cain and questioned him? But he would not, giving us a pattern of how we should judge those entrusted to us, to us, I say, of whom he says through the prophet Jeremiah to the peoples dedicated to his majesty: “And I will give you shepherds after my heart, and they will feed you, feeding with discipline.” “Condemn,” you say, “a man whom you do not know to have sinned.” Why? So that we might deserve to be called no longer bishops but madmen and butchers. Do you not fear, I pray, when you command these things, the voice of the Lord saying to the most holy Noah: “As the green plants, I have given you all things. Only flesh with the blood of its life you shall not eat. For I will require your blood, the blood of your lives, from the hands of all the beasts; I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, for the blood of man his own shall be shed, for in the image of God I made man.” Do you not fear, I pray, when you see that you have become the killer of so many servants of God, that you still slaughter the innocent and force us to become partners in your murders? When his father-in-law Jethro asked Moses why he kept the people the whole day, he said: “The people come to me seeking judgment from God.” If, then, the judgment of the bishops of God must be so just that it may be said to be decided by the judgment of God, how did you order us to condemn a man unheard, when you have found that Moses said, “The people come to me seeking judgment from the Lord”? If the people flock to us in order to be judged according to God's law, why do you say, “Condemn an innocent man”? Since, then, this command you have issued does not come from the law of God but has plainly been established by the will of the devil, understand at last who you are.

Lot's wife was turned into salt because she failed to carry out what was commanded; and would no evil befall us, I suppose by your intervention, because you are king of the Roman empire, if we condemned a man weighed down with false charges? Holy Scripture says in Exodus: “Moses went up into the mountain of God, and God called him from the mountain, saying: Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and announce to the children of Israel: You yourselves have seen how much I did to the Egyptians, and I took you up as on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. And now, if you indeed hear my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be to me a people abundant above all nations; for all the earth is mine. And you shall be to me a most sacred kingdom and a holy nation.” How a holy nation, if we became killers of the innocent? How a kingdom most sacred to God, if we passed over his commands? Again God says: “You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.” You say, on the contrary: “Believe me when I tell falsehoods, and slaughter an innocent man.” God, warning us, says in Exodus: “You shall not believe an empty report; you shall not agree with the wicked to become an unjust witness; you shall not be with the many in malice. You shall not join with the many to turn aside with the crowd so as to pervert judgment, and you shall not pity the poor man in his judgment”; and further on: “You shall not pervert the judgment of the poor in his cause; you shall keep away from every wicked word; you shall not kill the innocent and the righteous; you shall not justify the ungodly for gifts; for gifts blind the eyes of those who see and corrupt righteous words.” To shut out these commands you compel the servants of God to pervert his judgment, trying even with gifts to corrupt our righteous conscience dedicated to God. “If you indeed hear my voice,” God says, “and do all that I tell you, I will be an enemy to your enemies and will oppose your adversaries.” It is now for you to prove that God has commanded that the innocent be struck down, that the apostolic faith be abandoned and your faithlessness taken up. Why did you think that these things, which oppose the commands of the Lord, should be ordered done? For you remember that in Leviticus the Lord said to Moses: “Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: I am the Lord your God. According to the practices of the land of Egypt, in which you dwelt, you shall not do; and according to the practices of the land of the Canaanites, into which I will bring you, you shall not do there, and you shall not walk in their statutes. You shall do my judgments and keep my precepts and walk in them; I am the Lord your God. Keep all my precepts and all my judgments and do them; the man who does them shall live in them. I am the Lord your God.” If you can show that it is written in the commandments of the Lord that the righteous are to be punished at the instigation of the unrighteous, you will be able to see that you have acted and are acting rightly in everything. Show that it is written in the commandments of God that his worshippers, assailed by slanders, are to be put to death by us bishops at your bidding, you, the persecutor of his house.

Why were you led by your fellow Arians to carry out this malice? What cause compelled you, an emperor, to assail a man of God with slanders? Had you not read in Leviticus that God said: “Do not assail with a lie, nor slander each his neighbour”? And further on: “You shall not lie, nor slander your neighbour, and you shall not profane the name of the Lord your God; I am the Lord your God. You shall not harm your neighbour, and you shall fear the Lord your God; I am the Lord your God. You shall not do injustice in judgment; you shall not favour the person of the poor, nor shall you be awed by the person of the mighty; in righteousness you shall judge your neighbour. You shall not walk in deceit among your people. You shall not consent to the blood of your neighbour; I am the Lord your God. You shall not hate your brother in your mind; you shall surely rebuke your neighbour, and you shall love your neighbour as yourself; I am the Lord your God. Keep my law.” Remembering that these things are written, do you suppose that we will be respecters of your person? You asked for the death of an innocent man, and when you saw yourself despised, you set yourself to inflict every kind of punishment. God says: “Do not fear the face of the rich, and you shall honour the face of the elder, and you shall fear the Lord your God; I am the Lord your God.” And you thought that you could be feared and Athanasius dishonoured, whom God has commanded to be honoured? Had you not read that God said: “You shall do no injustice in judgment, in measure, in weight, and in scales; you shall weigh with a just balance”? Is it a just measure that you decided that an absent man should be put to death by us? If it is a just judgment that one who cries out to be heard should not be heard, that an absent man should be punished, then your charges against us before God will also be just, we who have rejected the commands of your rashness. In Deuteronomy the glorious Moses is found saying to the judges he had given the people: “Hear between your brothers, and judge justly between a man and his brother and his proselyte. You shall not respect persons in judgment; you shall judge the small and the great alike; you shall not take the person of a man into account, for the judgment is God's.” And you want your person to be respected, Constantius, I suppose because you live in royal loftiness; you desire greatly that the man whose blood you thirst for be slaughtered by us, the priests of the Lord. That is why we are detestable to you, because we pronounce judgment according to the will of God; that is why you thought you should stretch your butcher's right hand to the sword, as though you could overcome by the sword those whom you saw not hesitating to lose this present life for the sake of the Son of God, nor shuddering at death. The most holy Moses tells the children of Israel by the command of God: “See, the Lord your God has handed the land over before you; go up and possess it, as the Lord God of our fathers said to us. Do not fear nor be afraid.” If they were commanded to fear no one but God, they who bore the image of our calling, how much more is it fitting that we fear no one but God, we who long to obtain not the lands of the Canaanites, Jebusites, Girgashites and Amorites, but the heavenly kingdoms, the everlasting love of God? How could or can the strength of your empty dignity turn us from this purpose, when we have determined that no one is to be feared but God?

We are not Christians of the sort who said: “Because the Lord hated us he brought us out of the land of Egypt, to hand us over into the hands of the Amorites and destroy us”; but we are of those who have said and say to God: “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are reckoned as sheep for the slaughter; but in all these things we overcome because of him who loved us.” We did not fear and do not fear your threats, we who know that nothing can resist God, lest we perish like those who hear from Moses: “Your brothers have turned away your heart, saying: The nation is great and very hard and stronger than you, and the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and we even saw the sons of the giants there.” We Christians do not fear your sword, we who are confident that, when you enemies of God's religion have been laid low, we will come to the banquet of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs. We, soldiers of God, do not fear the strength of your perishing kingdom. We are not of those sons of distrust who thought their enemies could do more than God, that we should be in awe of your fragile power. For if the Jews had not believed that the Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites and their other enemies could do more than God, they would surely never have despised the voice of Moses saying: “Do not speak, nor be afraid of them. The Lord your God, who goes before your face, he will fight them together with you, according to all that he did for you in the land of Egypt and in this desert which you see, how the Lord your God cherished you, as a man cherishes his son, in all the way that you walk, until you came to this place, leading you in fire by night, showing you the road, so that you might walk in it, and in the cloud by day.” If after these saving warnings the children of Israel had not believed that those against whom they were waging war could do more than God, they would surely never have come to utter destruction. We know, then, that God is mighty to rescue us from your hands, as we make our way to the heavenly kingdom promised us. We cannot fear your cruelty, we above all who have chosen to be punished by you rather than by God.

You said: “Condemn Athanasius.” Whom were we to condemn, Constantius? Him, whom we see confessing the Son of God, as the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and martyrs confessed him? Or you, who deny him, as your teacher Arius denied him, as Judas Iscariot and all the Jews denied him? God says to Moses: “You shall have no other gods besides me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them, for I am the Lord your God, a jealous God, repaying the sins of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, and showing mercy to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” And you, trampling on these divine commands, say: “Accept my idolatry, forsake God, kill Athanasius, my enemy, not God's, so that you may be found among those who hate God, on whom he has promised to repay to the third and fourth generation; take care not to be loved by God together with those for whose sake he says: showing mercy to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.” You see, most prudent emperor, that what is evil seems good to you, and what is good, evil. Or will you deny the good, or will you deny that you take good things for evil and evil for good? If you deny it, answer: is it good or evil to condemn an innocent man? Is it good or evil to forsake God and go after idolatry? If you say evil, we will say to you: Why then do you do these things? Again Moses cries out in Deuteronomy, saying: “Keep the commandments of the Lord your God and the testimonies and ordinances, whatever he has commanded you, and you shall do what is pleasing and good before the Lord your God, that it may go well with you; and you shall enter and possess as an inheritance the good land which the Lord swore to your fathers.” And you have chosen these things as good, as pleasing to God: that idolatry be established, to the insult of his majesty, by the strength of your reign, and that those who have confessed themselves his worshippers be slaughtered. “Behold,” says Moses, “I have set before your sight today a blessing and a curse: a blessing, if you hear the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you today.” Since, then, those are blessed who do not punish the innocent, and those keep the Lord's commandments who refuse to condemn a man unheard, how do you think yourself blessed, when by your work you prove that you are placed among the cursed? Or if you are not among the cursed, why do you spurn Moses when he says: “If there is found among you, in one of your cities which the Lord your God will give you, a man or a woman who has done evil before the Lord your God, so as to transgress his covenant, and they go and serve other gods and worship them, or the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven”; and further on: “you shall bring out that man or that woman, and you shall stone them with stones, and they shall die. On the evidence of two or three witnesses he shall die; he shall not die on the evidence of one witness. And the hand of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And you shall remove the evil one from among yourselves.” If you are not running with the cursed, Constantius, why have you not obeyed Moses, the servant of God? Why, when he says that even an idolater dies only on two or three witnesses, did you not even want a hearing given to a man dedicated to God, and caused a hearing to be refused to the one to whom you have been entrusted by God, and whom, if you resist him when he defends what is just, you are ordered by the mouth of Moses to die the death? For so that the judgments of the priest may remain inviolate, he says: “Arise and go up to whatever place the Lord your God chooses to have his name called upon there. And speak to the priests, the Levites, or to the judge who is in office in those days, and they will inquire and declare the judgment to you, and you shall do according to every precept they declare to you, those who are in that place where the Lord your God has chosen to have his name called upon; and take great care. You shall do according to all that they have laid down for you; according to the law and according to the judgment they pronounce you shall do; you shall not turn aside from the word they declare to you; you shall do whatever they indicate to you; you shall not turn aside to the right or to the left. And any man who acts in pride, so as not to listen to the priests who stand to minister in the name of the Lord God, or to the judge who is in those days, that man shall die, and you shall remove the evil from Israel. And all the people shall hear and fear and act ungodly no more.”

But you say: “In this place Moses, most devoted to God, mentioned the judge as well as the priests.” Prove that you have been made judge over us; prove that you were appointed emperor for this, to lead us by your arms to carry out every wish of your friend the devil. Since you cannot prove it, because you have been commanded not only not to lord it over bishops but to obey their decisions so far that, if you try to overturn their decrees, if you are caught in pride, you are ordered to die the death, how will you be able to say that you can judge bishops, when, unless you obey them, you have already, as far as God is concerned, been fined with the penalty of death? Since this is so, why do you, a profane man, take to yourself this authority of God's priests over God's household, when he allowed even the Jews of that time, while they remained in the law of God, to have judges only from their own race? “If you say,” says Moses, “I will set a ruler over me, like the other nations around me, you shall set over yourself as ruler whomever the Lord your God chooses. You shall set him over you from among your brothers; you may not set over you a foreigner, because he is not your brother.” And it goes on to say why he did not want a foreigner made ruler: lest he draw others to his sect. Therefore he says: “Lest you take us back to Egypt,” that is, to the worship of idols; like you, I say, who have usurped for yourself this authority which God did not give you. And even if he gave it and allowed it to be in your hands, in the first place you would have had to be a Christian, because it would be a crime for a foreigner to judge the servants of God, for an enemy of religion to judge the household of God. Then, if you had been a Christian and God had judged that you should become a partner of the priests in ruling his people, hear what he commanded you to be: “And when he sits in his rule, he shall write for himself this Deuteronomy in a book before the priests and the Levites, and it shall be with him, and you shall read it to him all the days of his life, so that they may learn to fear the Lord your God, to keep all these commandments and to do these ordinances, so that his heart may not be lifted up above his brothers and he may not turn aside from the commandments to the right or to the left, so that he may continue long in his rule, he and his sons with him, among the children of Israel.” What do you have of this kind except everything contrary, except everything that attacks the house of God? First, you are a heretic; next, a persecutor of God's household; you have tried and are trying to slaughter Athanasius, like a man who does not remember that it is written: “If there is a man who hates his neighbour and lies in wait for him and rises against him and strikes him mortally so that he dies, and flees to one of these cities, the elders of that city shall send and take him from there and hand him over into the hands of those who seek the blood, and he shall die. Your eye shall not spare him, and you shall purge the blood of the innocent from among them, and it will go well with you”; and again: “One witness shall not stand to testify against a man for any iniquity or for any sin that is committed. At the mouth of two witnesses or of three every word shall stand. But if an unjust witness stands against a man, accusing him of iniquity, the two men between whom the dispute is shall stand before the Lord and before the priest and in the sight of the judge who is in those days; and the judges shall inquire diligently, and behold, if the unjust witness has testified wickedly, rising up against his brother, do to him as he wickedly meant to do to his brother, and you shall remove the wicked from among yourselves. And the rest shall hear and fear, and shall not again do this evil thing among you. Your eyes shall not spare him: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” Since you see that God has decreed these things about you, a murderer, tell me, I beg you, what else is it to say, “Condemn the man you know to be innocent, act against the commands of God,” than: “Tear out your hearts, take away your senses, slaughter your souls of your own accord; though you see that it is a pit, pretend that you are blind and throw yourselves headlong into the eternal abyss; plunge into that pit from which you see you cannot be rescued; take away life from yourselves, take up everlasting death”? What else is it to say, “Do what God has forbidden to be done,” than: “Be enemies to God, get the devil as your friend, take care not to attain paradise, nor indeed the kingdom of heaven which God has promised you if you keep his commandments; love the underworld, cherish the burning lake, long to be with all who are ever paying penalties, long to be called men of the devil”?

These are the rewards that your excellent counsels win; these are those fine things that bring forth everlasting death; these are what plunge a man already close to heaven down to the underworld. Did you not yet know what is written, that you asked us to do these evils? “There shall not be in your bag weight and weight, a greater and a less. There shall not be in your house measure and measure, a greater and a less. You shall have a true and just weight, and you shall have a true and just measure, that you may live many days and it may go well with you on the land which the Lord your God will give you as your lot; for everyone who does these things, everyone who does injustice, is an abomination to the Lord your God.” Since the sacred writings report that whoever does not keep whole weights and just measures is abominable, I suppose you thought we would be most acceptable if we pronounced judgment against him unjustly. Moses says: “Cursed is he who moves his neighbour's boundary marks.” We are forbidden to pull up our neighbour's boundary marks and move them from place to place, and you say, “Go beyond the boundaries of justice, you priests of God.” “Cursed,” says the Holy Spirit by the mouth of Moses, “is whoever perverts the judgment of the stranger, the orphan and the widow”; and you, making sport for yourself of our blood, said: “Punish a man whom you do not know to have sinned.” We have refused, Constantius, to be cursed with you; we rather long for you to be found blessed with us in the holy church. We do not listen to your voice, which provokes us to incur God's offence, but we listen to Moses, the servant of the Lord, who says: “And if you do not listen to the voice of the Lord your God, to keep and do all his commandments which I shall command you today, all these curses will come upon you and overtake you. Cursed are you in the city, cursed are you in the field; cursed are your storehouses and what is left over; and cursed are the children of your womb and the fruit of your land, the herds of your oxen and the flocks of your sheep; cursed are you in your going. The Lord will send upon you weariness and affliction and anxiety in everything to which you put your hand, whatever you do, until he destroys you quickly because of the wickedness of your pursuits.” If it is not an evil pursuit to bring false charges, to persecute the worshippers of God, to bring idolatry into God's church, to slaughter with armed force those who believe in the only Son of God, then these curses will be able not to overtake you and those who run with you.