On Saint Athanasius (two books) 2.16–2.22

Nor ought you to doubt that your works are evil and those of Athanasius righteous. For you are a murderer, a destroyer of God's religion, a denier of the only Son of God, an assailant of the apostolic faith, a founder of the Arian idolatry; Athanasius, on the contrary, so remains in the fear of God that he is found, as far as can be seen, to have committed nothing that could separate him from those most dear to God. Since this is so, we exhort you to love yourself in Athanasius. You remember that it is written, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself,” and, “He who loves his neighbour has fulfilled the law.” For as you hate yourself in him, not knowing that it is evil to hate the righteous unjustly, so you will begin to love yourself in him, if this ill will of yours is turned into good will. Then you will be able to be rescued from the darkness in which the blessed apostle says you dwell. “Do not wonder, brothers,” he says, “if the world hates us. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love the brothers. He who does not love remains in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has life abiding in him.” Do not dare any longer to say, “Condemn an innocent man,” you, a man who do not have life abiding in you, a man who has not yet passed from death to life. For if you had passed, that is, if you had believed in the only Son of God as we do, you would not have chosen to be a murderer, lest you should begin to go back again to death. So, placed in a twofold way without hope of life, you have been pleased to command the priests to kill an innocent man. But perhaps you will try to say: “I love those who love God, and I hate those who hate him.” But you will not be able to say this of Athanasius, since it is plain rather that you hate God, because you have both abandoned him and gone over to idolatry. So, since you persecute no fault in the priest of God, but only righteousness, only the religion of God, it remains for you to see further how this blessed apostle John commanded us, whom you were urging to kill the innocent, to be towards our fellow servants: “He laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” I am commanded by the apostle to lay down my life for my brother, and by you, a slave of the Antichrist, I am ordered to kill my brother. And again he says: “Let us have confidence towards God, and whatever we ask we shall receive from him, because we keep the commandments and do what pleases him in his sight, in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment.” But how shall I be able to be heard by him in every prayer, if I do not keep his commandment? For he commanded me to love my brother, not to kill him. And further on: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God”; and again: “Whoever does not love his brother does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was made known among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we too ought to love one another.” And again: “If anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother cannot love God whom he has not seen.” And again: “This commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.” And again: “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and do his commandments. For this is the love of God, and his commandments are not burdensome.”

Look at these few out of many, and you will find into what darkness you have dragged us, you man of darkness. “By this we know,” he says, “that we love the children of God, when we love God and do his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments”; and you are pleased to push me to scatter these commandments and to set up others against them, put forward through you at the devil's prompting. How shall I be able to be found loving God, if through you I am found to have become the adversary of his commandments? From these deeds, who do you seem to me to be but one of those tares destined for the fire? Of them the Lord says: “As, then, the tares are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of stumbling and those who do iniquity, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” You see that, if I had condemned an innocent man at the busy urging of you, a heretic, I would have been with you in Gehenna. For we could not attain the kingdom of God, in which we might shine like the sun, if we had either committed murder or violated the apostolic faith. Go on rejoicing that you live in these evils; refuse to recognize the evils you do; and you will undoubtedly find that you are among those wicked men whom the Lord marks out as going to the fire, saying: “The angels will come out and separate the wicked from the company of the righteous, and throw them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” You are pleased to think it nothing to persecute the servants of the only Son of God, you limb of the devil, who supposed you could bring the whole holy church to stumbling. But see what God promises you and all your fellows in sacrilege: “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it is better for him that a donkey's millstone be hung round his neck and that he be drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to this world because of stumbling blocks! For stumbling blocks must come; but woe to the man through whom the stumbling block comes! If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away from you”; and further on: “See that you do not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.” Since, then, you not only despise those who believe in his divine majesty but kill them, what reward will he whom you deny repay you, he who said it would be better for you to hang a donkey's millstone round your neck and be thrown into the depth of the sea than to have brought one of those who believe in him to stumble, than to have despised one of those who will possess the kingdom of heaven? What will he repay you, who for this cause deserved to be cut off from the members of his holy church, because you are the one through whom the devil has sent stumbling blocks into the people of God in our days? Though you have stirred up stumbling blocks, you have deceived only those who did not know that you have dried up like a stream cut off from its spring, like a branch broken from the tree; but we, who know you are placed outside the church, who see you as the enemy of the only Son of God, knowing you are dead, see your efforts beneath our feet with God's help. For we know that the dead cannot rule over the living. But why do you say that you live in Christ? How are you able to prove it, when you deny him? For none can live but those who confess him to be true God, the true Son of God. How are you living, when you persecute us because we confess ourselves his servants?

Or do you perhaps persecute us for some other cause? Have you perhaps found that we sinned against you, and is that why you are so hostile to us? We do not recall having sinned against you. For how can we be proved to have sinned against you, when we urge you to come from death to life? And yet, if you feel that we have sinned against you, hear what the Lord commanded you to do towards us, saying: “If your brother sins against you, go and rebuke him between you and him alone; and if he listens, you will have gained your brother. But if he does not listen to you, take with you one or two more, so that every word may stand on the mouth of two or three witnesses. And if he does not listen to them, tell the church; and if he does not listen to the church, let him be to you as a heathen and a tax collector.” Since you have not done what the Lord commanded to be done; since you did not even admonish between yourself and us, so as to convict Athanasius, one of us, of guilt in our presence, but compelled him to be condemned unheard by us, his fellow priests; since you took away his hearing; how can you justly accuse us of having sinned against you, when you have fulfilled none of these commandments of the Lord? Why do you persecute us so fiercely, when it is rather you who are guilty of transgression, who did not act towards us as the only Son of God gave you commands, but did everything as pleased our enemy the devil? For such counsel is his, such will is his: that the unheard be condemned, that the absent be killed, that innocent blood be shed. Since, I say, you did not carry out the matter in the way the Lord commanded you, you dared to bring it to the blessed church, you dared to say: “Athanasius has sinned, and communion with him must be condemned by all.” But what will you try to say? That he sinned against God? And behold, it cannot be found that he sinned against God, since neither you nor your fellows in sacrilege, sons of the harlot, the Arian heresy, can be admitted as witnesses against a catholic bishop. For the Lord was speaking of three catholic witnesses, servants of his majesty, so that the blessed church might believe them, not you profane men, born of a harlot in adultery. Otherwise, if we did not take this command of the Lord so, the worshippers of Saturn and of all the idols could be admitted as witnesses against the household of God, and so could your fellow blasphemers the Jews, forsaken by God, set without light as you are. For if you heretics, and of every sect, are to be admitted as witnesses against Christians, so ought the heathen and the Jews to be, since, whether Jews or heathen or you heretics, placed outside the Lord's church, you are without God, as were all those who were not in the ark of the most holy Noah. For as they, placed outside the ark, could not be saved, so neither can you, but you will perish so, unless, believing in his only Son, you remain with us in the holy church. If, then, neither you nor your fellow blasphemers can be witnesses, how did you, most witless king, cause a man of complete innocence to be condemned, and that by his fellow priests? I add that you had already accused him of being a murderer at Serdica before a synod of catholics, and your iniquity could not prove it. I add that you yourself gave letters to the church of the Alexandrians declaring him a righteous man, a catholic bishop. Finally, even if he had sinned, Athanasius should have been removed from the people entrusted to him, and that so that the people might ask for another from its own body to be made its bishop; he was not to be assailed with the sword by you, the emperor. But since, in place of an innocent man against whom you have established nothing true, in place of a catholic, you sent your fellow in sacrilege George, and inflicted such outrages and such punishments on those unwilling to be stained by his sacrilege that you proscribed very many, banished them into exile and to the mines, killed very many, and do not cease even today to do to those who will not accept your blasphemy, which is also George's, what furious enemies, the most savage barbarians, would hardly do, how do you think you can be understood to be a Christian, you who are seen to be fiercer than the most savage wild beasts and more monstrous than all monsters? You dared to say that Athanasius must be struck down, not seeing that you Arians were then punished, and by the power of God, when you planned to bring idolatry into the Lord's church.

But perhaps you will still say: “Athanasius sinned against me.” To pass over the fact that you lie in this too, did you not know what is written, what the Lord commanded you to do towards those who sin against you, that you persecuted him with the sword? “Then Peter came to him and said to him: Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often shall I forgive him? Up to seven times? He said to him: I do not say to you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.” Or are you ashamed to hear Athanasius called your brother? If you profess yourself a Christian, you ought to call all Christians brothers, and not only Athanasius but also those you see begging for alms. For all who are set in the Lord's church are one before him with whom there is no respect of persons. And yet you would do well not to want him called your brother; for since you are a son of pestilence and he one of the sons of light, since you are a slave of our enemy and he a servant of God, it would be most unjust for the forerunner of the Antichrist to be called the brother of the man of God. If you saw that he had sinned against you in anything, you should have forgiven him at once, so that God might forgive you your own crimes. But now, since you could not forgive because of your obstinacy and ill will, hear what can be repaid to you, who have made the Lord's command void: “Then Peter came to him and said: Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often shall I forgive him? Up to seven times? He said to him: I do not say to you up to seven times, but seventy times seven. Therefore the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wished to settle accounts with his servants. And when he began to settle, one was brought to him who owed ten thousand talents. And since he had nothing to pay, the master ordered him to be sold, with his wife and children and all that he had, and the debt to be paid. So the servant fell down and begged him, saying: Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything. And the master, taking pity on that servant, released him and forgave him the debt. But that servant went out and found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him he choked him, saying: Pay what you owe. And that servant fell down and begged him, saying: Have patience with me, and I will pay you. But he refused, and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. When his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were grieved, and they went and told their master all that had happened. Then his master called him and said to him: Wicked servant, I forgave you all that debt because you begged me; should you not also have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you? And his master in anger handed him over to the torturers until he should pay the whole debt. So also my Father who is in heaven will do to you, if you do not each forgive your brother from your hearts.” What do you answer to this, you whose mind's eyes could not see what the Lord commanded to be done? Where do you put the fact that he has sinned neither against you nor against God, but suffers persecution because he holds the apostolic faith, because he will not become sacrilegious as you are? You resolved to kill a preacher of the truth, desiring to be placed in that rank in which are those whom the Lord marks out in the Gospel as killers of the prophets and shows would stretch out their ungodly hands even against himself, saying: “There was a householder who planted a vineyard and put a hedge around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went abroad. When the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to receive his fruit; and the tenants seized his servants and beat one, stoned another, and killed another. Again he sent more servants to them, and they did the same to them. Last of all he sent them his only son, saying: They will respect my son. But the tenants, seeing the son, said among themselves: This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and we shall have his inheritance. And they seized him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. When, then, the lord of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? They said to him: He will put those wicked men to a wicked death, and let out the vineyard to other tenants, who will give him the fruit in their seasons.”

Since you greatly desire to be one of these, you were also urging us to become partners in your crimes; for your counsels are no different from the wicked counsels of those who are found to have killed the prophets and who, in the end, stretched out their ungodly hands against the only Son of God; especially since you even bring to nothing the sufferings of those blessed men sent to the tenants, by asserting that they were killed for one who “was when he was not,” though the sacred Scriptures cry out that the only Son of God has always reigned and reigns with the Father. The Lord's writings reveal that the Father and his only Son have one Godhead; and you say that he for whom the glorious prophets were killed was made from nothing. For if what you say is true, it follows that the blessed prophets were killed for a creature. And where will be that the Lord is angry with great indignation at those who serve the creature rather than the Creator? If the blessed prophets were killed for a creature, how does God hold them most dear? How are the Jews, because they did not believe their words, God's enemies today? Why are the Jews God's enemies? Why are they found placed outside the Lord's vineyard? Is it not because they became the killers of the prophets, because the prophets preached the eternal God, the Son of the eternal God, and those fellow blasphemers of yours not only did not believe their prophecy but killed them? For whom do you think the Jews persecuted in the prophets but the only Son of God, as also in the apostles and martyrs? Learn from yourself at least that what I say is true, since you too persecute the true Son of God in Athanasius and in us. Since this is so, you had decided that we should be joined to the killers of the prophets, the shedders of the blood of the righteous, your fellows in sacrilege, that is, the Jews, whose imitator, of course, you are. For you said “Condemn Athanasius” and commanded us to accept also the faith of Arius for no other reason than that we might be equal to the Jews both in shedding the blood of the righteous and in denying the only Son of God, the Jews whose partner you already are in everything. For if they killed the prophets, those who spoke of the coming of the only Son of God, you too kill those who believe as the prophets believed. But how long shall I go on about these things with an unbeliever, when I have set out to show you that you are one of those to whom the Lord says: “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a nation producing its fruit”? For you are not in this nation which is found to bear the fruits of righteousness, so as not to be declared one of those whom you hear have been driven from the kingdom of God because of the slaughter of the righteous and their own unbelief. Observe that by doing these things you are among those whose wickedness the Lord reveals, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a king who made a wedding feast for his son and sent his servants to those invited to the wedding”; and further on: “and they would not come. Again he sent servants, saying: Tell those who are invited: See, I have prepared my dinner; my oxen and fatted cattle are killed and all is ready; come to the wedding. But they paid no attention and went off, some to their farm, others to their business; and the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully and killed them. When the king heard, he was angry, and sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their cities. Then he said to his servants: The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy; go, then, to the outlets of the roads and invite to the wedding whomever you find. And the servants went out into the roads and gathered all they found, bad and good, and the wedding was filled with guests. But the king came in to see the guests and saw there a man not clothed in a wedding garment, and said to him: Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment? And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants: Bind him hand and foot and throw him into the outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Since, then, you are without the wedding garment, Constantius, you will be for ever, unless you turn, such as the one to whom it is said, “Friend, how did you come in here without a wedding garment?” and so you will go into the outer darkness.

Nor should you doubt that you will come into the outer darkness, since you have already been wholly turned into darkness. For those who shed the blood of the righteous prophets, who denied the only Son of God, are called both darkness and sons of the devil. Since you are doing these things too, you will certainly continue to be a son both of darkness and of the devil, unless you take thought for yourself. “How,” you say, “shall I be able to take thought for myself?” By ceasing to persecute us and accepting the apostolic faith; and unless you do this, you will always be, as you are now, among those to whom it is said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who tithe mint and dill and cummin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.” If you do not rightly hear these things with them, where is the just judgment that proceeds from you, who try to kill a righteous man because he preaches the apostolic faith? Where is just judgment, when you persecute with all the forces of your empire those whom you see unwilling either to condemn a man unheard or to desert the catholic faith, and love those whom you know to have shed innocent blood with you and to have rejected the evangelical faith? What mercy is set in you and with you, which the holy law commands to be shown? Surely the mercy that tortures, proscribes, deports, sends to prison, leads into exile, sets in the mines; the mercy that kills by hunger, thirst, scourging and nakedness; and in the end the mercy that punishes with the sword. This is your mercy, Constantius, which comes not from the law of God but from the presumption of the devil. “Justice and mercy and faith,” he says, “these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” Where is your faith? You had condemned the faith which the most blessed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets, apostles and martyrs held, and decreed that all the worshippers of God must accept the faith which the devil vomited up through your teacher Arius against this catholic faith. From these things you are understood to be one of those who are known to hear: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who tithe mint and dill and cummin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. Blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.” Or will you deny that you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel, a man who, though you give alms not only when asked but sometimes of your own accord, yet, as has often been said, proscribe, deport, torture and finally kill those who confess themselves Christians? And therefore you ought to observe that you are with those to whom it is said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful to men, but within are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. So you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” You are one of those killers to whom it is said: “Serpents, brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna? Therefore, behold, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you will kill and crucify and persecute from city to city, so that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Truly I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.”

You are proved by your acts to be of that viperous race. For you are found to be one of those to whom these things were said that they would perpetrate. Or if you deny that you are one of those who hear from the mouth of the Lord, “Serpents, brood of vipers,” prove that it was not you but the Jews who sent soldiers to Alexandria, that soldiers of the Jews besieged the doors of the house of God, that Syrianus was the commander of soldiers of the Jews. Prove that Jews entered the basilica with arms and killed a certain number. If you cannot prove it, since it is established that it was you who sent them to attack the religion of God, we say most rightly that you are one of those to whom it was said: “Serpents, brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna?” You will undoubtedly not escape the judgment of Gehenna, but will always burn there with your fellow serpents, unless you look out for yourself. “Then,” he says, “they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for my name's sake. And then many will stumble and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because iniquity will abound, the love of many will grow cold.” If your sacrilegious mind does not know that I suffer persecution from you for the sake of the only Son of God, you may not be of that race, not under the sentence of those to whom it is said: “Serpents, brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna? Therefore, behold, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you will kill and crucify and persecute from city to city.” Since you are doing these things today, you will not dare to deny that you are of the brood of the viper. For you have killed very many Christians in many places; others you hold bound in prisons and in workhouses. From this too you will be able to see that you are one of those to whom it is said, “Serpents, brood of vipers,” and further on, “Behold, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, and some of them you will kill”: since you are not pleased to curse those whom you see to have departed from the apostolic faith through your abounding iniquity, those whose love has grown cold, but those whom you see remaining in that state of faith in which the blessed prophets, apostles and martyrs remained and deserved to obtain God's eternal friendship. For at Alexandria you do not curse Achetas and Didymus, among the presbyters, who are known to have become Arians instead of Christians, but those whom you know still stand with us. Or if it is not so, why do you not curse Didymus and Achetas now, whom you cursed before? Is it not because they were then held accursed by you, being still, of course, Christians, but now are very dear to you, because, that is, they have begun to be blasphemers, apostate like you? But now, after so many proofs shown you that you are one of those to whom it is said, “Serpents, brood of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna?” we believe that you will take pains to heal the wounds so grave inflicted on you by the devil, since you are both a murderer and a man of sacrilege; and if you will not be freed from these crimes, your blood will be required of you, and we shall be clean of your blood before God, since we have opened the truth to you in every way. From you will be required not only your own blood, but also that of those whom you have either led to accept the heresy or enticed to slaughter an innocent man.