On Saint Athanasius (two books) 2.23–2.31

But if you say, “I thought that the faith of those whom you call Arians was catholic”; if you wavered in the cause of the faith; if you did not know that those who say they believe in a creature are heretics, those who say that God has no true Son, did you not know this either, that it is not just to pursue an innocent man with the sword? Had it escaped you that the Lord said to blessed Peter, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword”? What, meanwhile, will you do, Constantius, you who have killed so great a multitude of the servants of Christ, the only Son of God? For you see that he whom you persecute in us says that all who take the sword will perish by the sword. What will you receive, you who, unless you obtain pardon for your crimes by believing in him whom you deny, will deserve to be struck, and that by the sword of God, as many times as you have struck those dedicated to his mercy? What man are you, that you said that the necessity of striking down an absent man, punishing an unheard man, shedding innocent blood, must be laid on the priests of God? Why did you refuse to let our fellow priest Athanasius be heard by us? Why did you want us to slaughter the man of God secretly, in the manner of robbers? Is it not because you are one of those to whose reproach these words were uttered: “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven. For as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not judged; but whoever does not believe in him is judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, for their works were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works be exposed. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his works may be made manifest, because they have been done in God.” If you knew yourself to be a servant of the only Son of God, you would certainly never deny his majesty, never order his servants to be slaughtered, now secretly, now publicly; but because you are a lover of darkness, being darkness yourself, because your works are evil, you would not let the matter you had reported be examined fully by the priests of God. Why would you not? Is it not because you feared your serpent's work would be exposed? “While we are in the body,” says the apostle, “we are away from the Lord; for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are bold and have the good will rather to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. And we strive, whether away or at home, to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.” And you, Constantius, a heretic, say: “Christians, condemn a Christian!” Why do you say it, unless because you have judged it best to shed the blood of the righteous, and also to forsake God and take up idolatry?

But again I beseech you, most pious emperor, to recognize, since you are both a denier of the only Son of God and a persecutor of those who believe in him, whether you are not found the equal of those whose wickedness is described in the Acts of the Apostles: “When there was great dissension among them, the tribune, fearing that Paul would be torn apart by them, ordered the soldiers to go down and take him away into the barracks. The following night the Lord stood by him and said: Take courage; for as you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must testify also in Rome. When day came, some of the Jews gathered and bound themselves by an oath, saying that they would neither eat nor drink until they had killed Paul. There were about forty who had made this conspiracy, and they went to the chief priests and told them, saying: We have bound ourselves by a solemn oath to taste nothing at all until we have killed Paul. Now, therefore, call a council and inform the tribune, so that he may bring him down to you, as though you were going to inquire about him more thoroughly; and we are ready to kill him before he comes near.” If you did not assail Athanasius, the priest of God, in this same way, if you did not pretend to be doing one thing while having arranged to accomplish another, you may deny that you too are driven by the same hostile spirit by which the Jews were and are driven. For unless you had been roused by that spirit against us who serve God, you would undoubtedly never have ordered an absent man, and an innocent one, to be condemned. But I repeat these things so often as though even you yourself, when at times you are free from the goads of fury, did not consider that you have so departed in every way from the rule of justice that you could not even see in the Acts of the Apostles that, when the Jews asked for the blessed man Paul to be killed, the Gentile governor Festus did not lend his assent to the assembly of the Jews, but promised that he would hear both them and Paul together. A Gentile kept the law of equity; you destroyed it. Or is it equity to condemn a man unheard, to kill a man absent, to deny a hearing to a righteous man, a man for whom the whole people of God is witness that he, a Christian, was falsely assailed by you and yours, you Arians? So, to tell, as I had begun, what was done by Festus between the Jews and the blessed Paul, hear: “Now Festus, when he had come into the province as governor, went up to Jerusalem … laying an ambush to kill him on the way. Festus answered that Paul was being kept at Caesarea and that he himself was going there shortly. So let those among you who are able go down and, if there is any crime in the man, accuse him. After staying among them not more than eight or ten days, he went down to Caesarea, and the next day he took his seat on the tribunal and ordered Paul to be brought. When he had been brought, the Jews who had come down from Jerusalem stood around him, bringing many serious charges which they could not prove, while Paul made his defence, that he had done no wrong either against the law of the Jews or against the temple or against Caesar.” A heathen kept the way of equity between the blessed Paul and your fellow murderers the Jews; and you, desiring to obey the wishes of your evil designs, had decided that equity and justice should be taken out of our minds.

But how could we have done what you were compelling us to do against justice, we who remembered that it is written, “Do not judge by appearance, but judge just judgment”? When you said, “Condemn the unheard,” why did you not remember that Nicodemus said, “Does our law judge a man unless it first hears from him and learns what he has done?” Why would you not let the man you called guilty of death be heard, unless because you had brought false charges? The Lord says to the Jews, “He who speaks a lie speaks from his own, for he is a liar and so is his father”; and you, since you have been shown to be a liar, do you think you are not the son of the liar, and do you dare, a son of the liar, to resist, a deceiver resisting the truthful, a man of sacrilege resisting the priests of the Lord? Do you dare, you whom we observe to be that robber and thief whom the Lord foreshowed, saying: “Truly, truly I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in another way, that man is a thief and a robber”? You did stretch out your hands to the sheep of Christ to claim them for the Antichrist; but since you were recognized as a thief and a robber, you have been avoided and rejected. Why have God's sheep not followed you or your fellow in sacrilege George? Why do they follow him whom you grieve so bitterly to see bishop of the Alexandrians? Is it not because God appointed him their bishop, while the devil sent you and George in, like robbers and thieves, to slaughter them? “He who enters by the door,” he says, “is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out; and when he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know his voice.” Since, then, you have not entered the church by the door, you are seen to be a robber and a thief; for you do not know the Son of God, so as to say that you entered by the door, since he called them thieves and robbers because then too they did not believe in his divine mercy, nor would believe afterwards, and would try to teach his sheep otherwise. Since, then, you are spreading mad teaching because you have not believed in him, you are proved most plainly from your blasphemies to be that thief and robber who was already foreshown then. That this is so the following words prove: “Jesus said to them: Truly, truly I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved, and will go in and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal.” O you thief, then, who are found to have entered God's sheepfold for this, to steal and to kill, with what voice can you still say, “Athanasius must not be bishop of the Alexandrians, but George,” when you see that you and George and all your fellows in sacrilege are nothing but thieves and robbers? God willed his servants to be shepherds over the flock, so that, recognizing you and yours as robbers and thieves, they might drive you away.

But you decided that you and yours should be set over the Lord's flock instead of us whom God ordained, so that you could ravage God's flock freely. Since you are such, we cannot wonder that you said that an absent worshipper of God must be punished. For you could not keep in mind that the Lord said: “If you love me, keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he abides with you and is in you.” But tell me, I beg you, how could the Holy Spirit the Paraclete dwell in us, if we had done your will or your father's? Further on he says: “He who hears my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and show myself to him. Judas, not Iscariot, said to him: Lord, how is it that you will show yourself to us and not to this world? Jesus answered and said to him: If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me does not keep my words.” From these sayings of the Lord one can infer how much of an enemy you have been to us: “He who hears my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.” How would we have shown that we loved him, if like you we had trampled on his commandments? For you are trampling on the Lord's commandments, since you not only order that what he decreed must be kept is not to be kept, but command that he himself be denied. Or how could his Father love me for keeping his Son's commandments, if I condemned an innocent man? The Son of God says, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him”; and you, food for the fire, an apostate, say: “Condemn an innocent man.” In what way would we have been found to love the Son of God, if against his commandments we slaughtered a righteous man? How could it have come about that the Father loved us and that the Father and the Son came and deigned to dwell in us, if we had torn up the Lord's commandments and kept the precepts of you, a man of sacrilege? See, Constantius, from what glory that envious lover of your will, the devil, tried to drive us through you, his client, had not the Lord's kindness come to our help, so that, considering you no longer a man, whom God made in his image and likeness, but the filth of all the sewers, we trampled on your sacrilegious orders. For who, unless more unhappy than you Arians, would not want to be loved by the only Son of God? Who is there who would not want to be loved by his Father? Who would refuse to be the temple of the Father and of his only Son? These things certainly cannot be obtained by one who, like you, has been both a murderer and a man of sacrilege; yet even you could obtain them, if you turned and truly repented. The Lord says further: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love than this no one has, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you servants, but friends”; and again: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should remain, and that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.”

How shall we be able to be friends of the only Son of God, if, against the prohibition of his kindness, we have condemned an absent man and killed an innocent one? How will our fruit be able to increase? How shall we receive from the Father whatever we ask in his name, if, as you were compelling us, we not only punished his worshipper but even denied him? Had you not found that the blessed apostle wrote to Titus, a man dedicated to God, about the blameless office of a bishop, what it is fitting to offer God, that you desired us to become murderers? “For this reason I left you in Crete, that you might correct what was lacking and appoint presbyters in the cities, as I directed you: if anyone is without crime, the husband of one wife, having faithful children, not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordinate. For a bishop must be without crime, as God's steward, not arrogant, not quick-tempered, not given to wine, not a striker, not greedy for gain, but hospitable, kind, sober, just, holy, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word according to the teaching, so that he may be able to exhort in sound teaching and to refute those who contradict it. For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, who must be refuted, who upset whole households, teaching what they ought not, for the sake of shameful gain.” Since, then, he wanted the bishop to be such a man as would live keeping this way of righteousness, by what authority did you deign to give new commands to shut out the commands of the blessed apostle? Those, namely, which are known to have arisen from the will of the devil. The apostle wants me to be not quick-tempered, not a striker, and you want me to become a murderer. From these things one can gather that the Holy Spirit spoke by the mouth of the blessed apostle, but a wicked spirit by the mouth of you Arians. You see meanwhile that the apostle commanded that you who resist the truth be refuted by the intervention of a bishop, so that by sound teaching your blasphemy might be punished. I have not put forward the blessed apostle's saying that a bishop must be without crime in order to deny that I am a sinner, since I know my conscience and hear that righteous man Job say: “For who is clean from filth? No one, even if his life on earth be but one day”; and since I observe that blessed John too says: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” I did not put forward the apostle's command, then, in order to proclaim that I, who remember that I am a sinner, am without stain, but so that you could see how evil it is that you commanded to be done. “Likewise,” he says, “urge the young men to be sober in all things, showing yourself in all respects a pattern of good works, in teaching, in integrity, in gravity, sound in speech, beyond reproach, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say of us.”

How would I have offered myself to others as a pattern of good works, if I had shed the blood of a servant of God? How would the peoples of God have known me as preaching the whole teaching which the apostles handed down, if I had accepted your heresy, if, in short, I had communicated, even in pretence, with your henchmen, the Arian false bishops? How could my speech be brought forth sound and beyond reproach, if I had deserted the evangelical and apostolic faith and accepted your blasphemy? How could the opponent have been put to shame? How could he have had nothing evil to say of me, when, if I had decided to give in to you, he would have caught me made a murderer and a man of sacrilege? Again, when he was urging that slaves should be subject to their masters, he says: “For the grace of God our Saviour has shone upon all men, correcting us, so that, renouncing ungodliness and worldly desires, we may live soberly and godly and justly in this age, awaiting the blessed hope, the coming of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to free us from all iniquity and to cleanse for himself an abundant people, zealous for good works.” Since he has commanded us to walk in these good works, what did you have in mind, that you strive to commit murder? For how could we have been seen renouncing ungodliness and living godly and justly, if we had shed innocent blood with you? And since he says that the Lord gave himself up for our sins to rescue us from the works of Satan and to set us to be zealous for good works, if we too had committed this work of yours with you, on what side would we be but on Cain's? “For the grace of God our Saviour has shone upon all men,” he says, “correcting us, so that, renouncing ungodliness and worldly desires, we may live soberly and justly and godly in this age.” And you, emperor Constantius, are pleased to say: “Let us be ungodly, wicked, lost, malignant, iniquitous, unjust.” Where shall I find this blessed hope which the blessed apostle teaches me I must await, if I not only kill the servants of him who is able to grant all blessedness, but even deny him? For you do both, Constantius: you persecute and kill his servants, and, deserting him, you have decided to enslave yourself to idols. Why do you do these things, unless because the grace of God our Saviour has not shone upon you? For if it had shone, you would remember the apostle's commands, when he says: “See, then, how you walk carefully, not as unwise but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not become imprudent, but understand what the will of the Lord is.” If it is the Lord's will to kill the innocent and to abandon the evangelical faith, not only this part but the whole body of the blessed apostle's letters will be able to give support to your rulings; but if no part of the sacred Scriptures favours your rulings, it is clearer than light that you live under the power of darkness; and so it has come about that you have drawn nothing from the springs of the sacred Scriptures that could have removed you from such great dangers. For if the power of darkness had not brought you under its rule, you would surely keep in mind what the Philippians hear: “Be my fellow imitators, brothers, and observe those who walk as you have us for a pattern. For many walk, of whom I often told you and now tell you even weeping, as enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.”

I want you to tell me, most prudent emperor, in what we ought to become fellow imitators of the apostle. Teach us, apostate: was the apostle a murderer, a blasphemer, a destroyer of the evangelical faith, a man of sacrilege? For he professes that he did all these things before he believed in the only Son of God. But you, who do today what he did before he knew the only Son of God, for what reason did you dare to order us, the priests of the Lord, to condemn an innocent man, to accept your heresy and spit on the apostolic faith? For what reason did you command these things, which are put forward against the pattern of the apostle, unless because you are one of the enemies of the cross of Christ, one of those who were already marked out then by the mouth of the holy apostle? Should we have listened to you and yours, whose end the apostle says is destruction? To those henchmen of yours, who, abandoning the pattern of discipline and the rule of faith handed down through the apostles, have handed themselves over to you for the sake of shameful gain; those who have made more of the abundance of your table than of what the Lord promises his own; those who have chosen to be your guests rather than the guests of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles or martyrs, to whom it is most rightly said, “Your god is the belly”? “Test all things,” says the apostle, “hold fast what is good, keep yourselves from every form of evil”; and because we have seen the accursed work of you Arians and avoided it, we suffer hatred. But how good and how pleasant it is to be hated by you and loved by God! You have driven us from the charge entrusted to us, thinking you could destroy what God has built. “But to each one of us,” he says, writing to the Ephesians, “grace was given according to the measure of Christ's gift. Therefore it says: Ascending on high he led captivity captive; he gave gifts to men. Now that he ascended, what does it mean but that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same who ascended above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. And he gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed about and carried around by every wind of doctrine, in the wickedness of men, in craftiness for the remedy of error. But doing the truth in love, let us grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint of supply, according to the measure of each part, makes the growth of the body for its own building up in love.”

Since you read that this is so, why did you dare to take away the shepherds whom God willed to be over his flock? Why, unless so that the shepherds of God over the Lord's flock might be carried around with you by every wind of doctrine? So that those coming to the faith might not be led like children by every wind of doctrine? So that, by the craftiness of you most wicked men, they might not withdraw from the apostolic and evangelical faith to the remedies of the devil, your prince? You took bishops away from the peoples over whom we preside by divine favour, for this purpose surely, that you might teach doctrine not apostolic but heretical. Woe to you, wretched man, through whom Satan does these things. You found, wise man that you are, a pretext fit for your deceit, by which you might claim God's sheep for your father, who, so that you might stay in these evils, has already pierced your heart with those darts with which he wounded the minds of Eve and Adam, so as to set you in this depravity. You found, I say, wise man, a pretext fit for your deceit, by which you might lay waste the Lord's flock, saying: “Athanasius has sinned, and therefore whoever destroys him with me shall be bishop; whoever decides to treat it as nothing shall not be”; and those who condemned Athanasius were joined to the false bishops of your Arian doctrine. If any did this out of fear of your anger, they incurred through you, a murderer and man of sacrilege, a threefold crime: in condemning an innocent man, in communicating as catholics with heretics, and in letting you wolves into the flock of God; although the apostle says that shepherds were given so that every doctrine of demons put forward through you heretics and all the adversaries of the church might be shut out, and the servants of God, running in the truth, might remain unmoved until they came to the highest perfection. And you, darkness, have deigned to take away the shepherds appointed by God's judgment, so that you, a wolf, might turn all into the prey of the devil, your lover. “So that we may no longer,” he says, “be children, tossed about and carried around by every wind of doctrine, in the wickedness of men, in craftiness for the remedy of error. But doing the truth in love, let us grow up in all things into him who is the head, Christ.” How could we grow up into him, if we had followed you, darkness that you are, since you deny that he is true God, since you say that he was not born of the substance of the Father, but assert that he was made from nothing? How could we have grown up into him, who would not have walked in the truth, once we had followed you, an apostate? Then, since he says, “Doing the truth, let us grow up in love,” and it is plain that Athanasius, the priest of God, has been assailed with false charges by you and yours, if we had done what you command, how would we have been seen running either in truth or in love, we who would have extinguished the love we hold with our fellow bishop Athanasius? And because we had yielded to a false charge, we ourselves, joined with you, a deceiver, in the death of an innocent man, would deserve to be struck with you by the divine indignation. Is it so, then, Constantius, that the house of God is built: by deceit, by the shedding of innocent blood, by blasphemous preaching? Woe to you, who live for this, that the devil may do all these evils through you.

You say to me: “Punish an innocent man, abandon the catholic faith and accept the poisons of my heresy”; and there is the apostle saying: “This, then, I say and testify in the Lord, that you no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” Which of you shall I obey? You, or the apostle? You, a sacrilegious apostate, or him who is found to have already shed his blood for the only Son of God? Which of you shall I follow? You, the temple of demons, or him, the temple of God? You, who declare by your works that you are either a Jew or a heathen, or him who has already attained the heavenly kingdoms through this faith which you curse? For if you do not show by your works that you are a Gentile, you will be able to maintain that these things are not rightly said against you. First, because you deny the Son of God, you are to us a Gentile or a Jew; then, since you proscribe, deport, torture, load the innocent with false charges and kill them, you cannot be found a Christian, one who by his way is known to be a man of God, but certainly one of those of whom the Spirit of God says through the apostle that they are in the vanity of their mind, senseless, alienated from the life of God through the blindness of their heart. Since, then, the voice of the apostle shows that those blinded in heart do the things you do, with what face do you dare, a deceiver to the truthful, to say to those sound in heart and mind, “You have erred; you are liars”? The apostle says: “As the truth is in Jesus, put off, according to your former way of life, the old man, who is corrupted according to the lust of error; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, who has been created according to God in righteousness and holiness and truth. Putting off falsehood, speak the truth each to his neighbour.” Where did you pass over these saving warnings which the apostle urges us to keep? For how could we have been found to have put off the old man and put on the new man who is according to God? How would we have been seen remaining in righteousness and holiness and truth, we who, doing unjust things with you, would have extinguished that new man who has been created according to God, and would have begun again to carry that old man who is corrupted according to the lust of error, as he was corrupted before he began to know God? For all those who do the things you do are not of God's household but henchmen of the Antichrist. “Putting off falsehood, speak the truth each to his neighbour, for we are members of one another.” If you had been one of the members of God's church, believe me, you would never have brought a lie to the church; it is only because you are the man of him who deceived Adam and Eve by deceit that you brought a lie, so that you might ensnare us as the devil ensnared the first-formed human beings. You said: “Condemn Athanasius, because he has sinned gravely; otherwise you will be in the greatest guilt before God. Accept the faith of Arius, and you will live for ever.”