On Not Agreeing with Heretics 1–8

When you noticed that all your ruinous attempts had been met and resisted, and when you found that all your schemes against the church of God had been laid bare to the whole people of God, you said that we were and are enemies of peace, foes of unity, adversaries even of brotherly love. If there ought to be nothing in common between the worshippers of God and the enemies of his religion, why did Moses, at the time when he saw that carnal Jewish people, whose wisdom you hold, fallen into the guilt of idolatry, after he had had certain men struck down with the sword, also wish his own station to be set apart? Hear how this is written: “And the Lord said to Moses: Say to the children of Israel: You are a stiff-necked people; see that I do not bring another plague upon you and destroy you. Now therefore lay aside the robes of your glory and your ornaments, and I will show what I am going to do to you. And the children of Israel took off their ornaments and robes from Mount Horeb. And Moses took the tabernacle and pitched it outside the camp, far from the camp, and it was called the tabernacle of testimony; and it came about that everyone who sought the Lord went out to the tabernacle of testimony outside the camp. And when Moses went out to the tabernacle, all the people stood watching, each at the door of his tent. They watched Moses going until he entered the tabernacle; and as soon as Moses had entered the tabernacle, the pillar of cloud came down and stood at the door of the tabernacle, and spoke with Moses; and all the people saw the pillar of cloud standing at the door of the tabernacle, and all the people stood and worshipped, each at the door of his tent. And the Lord spoke to Moses openly, openly, as a man speaks to his friend. But his minister, the young man Joshua the son of Nun, did not go out of the tabernacle.” By this deed it was shown that you who sin against God must be avoided and that we must withdraw from you. But, someone says, see: although Moses had the tabernacle in another place, he did not abandon the people but urged them to correct the ways of their errors, so that God might be favourable. Nor do those who have refused to be mixed up with your sacrilege fail in these duties; for you know that you are told that unless you correct your ways you will perish for ever.

To carry through, then, as fully as we can to proof what we had begun to set out: how often the people murmured against God and rose up against Moses, you have read that God said to Moses and Aaron: “Withdraw from the midst of this undisciplined, stubborn people, and I will destroy them.” What, then, does he want us to do, except to flee you, the undisciplined and stubborn, so that we may not perish together with you, as those did who had banded together with Korah, Dathan and Abiram? Or will you deny that you are undisciplined and stubborn? Look at your acts against the church of the Lord, and you will find how undisciplined and stubborn you are. In Deuteronomy Moses says: “You shall make no covenant with them, nor shall you have mercy on them; nor shall you give your daughters to them in marriage, nor shall you give his daughter to your son; for she will lead your son away from me, and he will serve strange gods; and the Lord will be angry with you in his wrath and will soon destroy you.” Since he commands this to be done, how can we come together with you, how can we have peace with you, who deny the only Son of God? How could we have fulfilled that wish of yours, when you see that God said through Moses about the Moabites and Ammonites: “You shall not greet them in peace all the days of your life, for ever”? How could we have been Arians and Christians at the same time, when you hear Moses say: “There shall be no adulteress among the daughters of Israel,” and when he warns in every place that every adulterer is to be brought out to the gate and put to death with stones: “and you shall remove the wicked one,” he says, “from among yourselves”? If he says that God so detests carnal adultery that he ordered all adulterers to be punished, how much more must the Lord detest your spiritual adultery; and that is why you had to be fled, and must be fled still. We Christians could not come together with apostates, when we find that the Holy Spirit said through Moses: “God will open to you his best heavenly treasure, to give you rain for your land; in season he will bless all the work of your hands; you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow; and you shall fight many nations, but they shall not conquer you. The Lord your God will make you the head and not the tail, and you shall be above and not beneath, if you hear the commandment of the Lord your God, whatever I command you today to keep and to do, and do not turn aside from any word that I command you today, to the right or to the left.” How could we have come together with the Arian false bishops of your sect, when you see that we could not have been blessed unless we had not gone after your idolatry, unless we had detested your heresy, that of the Arians, as we detest that of all heretics, unless we had judged and held you to be such as the heathen, that is, worshippers of all the demons, unless we had abhorred you as we do the Jews, who are found to be without God since they denied the only Son of God? In Joshua it says: “And when the people heard the sound of the trumpets, all the people shouted with a great shout, and all the walls of the city round about fell, and all the people went up into the city, each one in front of his adversaries, and they took the city and devoted it to destruction, and whatever was in the city, from man to woman, from youth to old man, down to the calf and the beast of burden, they killed with the edge of the sword. And Joshua said to the two young men who had spied out the land: Go into the woman's house and bring her out, and whatever is hers. And the two young men who had spied out the city went into the woman's house and brought out Rahab the harlot, and her father and mother and her brothers and whatever was hers, and all her kindred, and they brought her out outside the camp of Israel; and the city was burned with fire with all that was in it.” And further on: “Joshua kept alive Rahab the harlot and all her father's house, and she has dwelt in Israel to this day.” Since, then, you see that all who lived in the city of Jericho were punished with the edge of the sword and the whole city burned, how did you think we could come together with you, a heretic, when we perceived that you and yours deserve the ban more than they did? How could we have come together with the Arian false bishops of your sect, when you see that no one was kept alive in the city in which idolaters lived except Rahab alone, because she believed that our Lord is almighty, and that the idolatry in which the people settled in Jericho trusted had been invented by human error?

How could we have come together with you, when it is written in the third book of Kingdoms that your houses are not to be set foot in, nor meals taken with you, nor water accepted from you? Holy Scripture shows that this is so. “And it came about,” it says of that fellow apostate of yours, “the word of the man of God,” and further on: “And he stretched out his hand towards the altar, saying, ‘Seize him’; and the king's hand, which he stretched out against him, dried up, and he could not draw it back to himself; and the altar was broken, and its fat poured out from the altar, according to what the man of God had said by the word of the Lord. And the king answered and said to the man of God: ‘Entreat the face of the Lord your God, that my hand may be restored to me.’ And the man of God entreated the face of the Lord, and the king's hand was restored to him and became as it was before. And the king spoke to the man of God and said: ‘Come into the house with me and dine, and I will give you gifts.’ And the man of God said to the king: ‘Even if you gave me half your house, I will not go in with you, nor eat bread, nor drink water in this place; for so the Lord commanded me by his word, saying: You shall not eat bread and you shall not drink water, and you shall not return by the way you went.’” How could we have come together with you to worship God, when such heavy punishment fell upon this man of God, who had been sent by God to rebuke King Jeroboam, because he had been deceived by the one who was called a prophet? “And he went away,” Scripture says after this about that man of God, “by another way, and did not return by the way he had come to Bethel. And his sons came and told him all the works that the man of God had done that day in Bethel, and the words he had spoken to the king, and they turned their father's face. And their father spoke to them, saying: ‘Which way did he go?’ And his sons showed him the way by which the man of God who had come from Judah had gone. And he said to his sons: ‘Saddle the ass for me’; and they saddled it for him, and he mounted it and went after the man of God, and found him sitting under an oak tree, and said to him: ‘Are you the man of God who came from Judah?’ And he said: ‘I am.’ And he said to him: ‘Come with me and eat bread.’ And he said: ‘I cannot return with you, nor eat bread, nor drink water in this place; for so the Lord commanded me by his word, saying: You shall not eat bread there and you shall not drink water there, and you shall not return from there by the way you went.’ And he said to him: ‘I too am a prophet as you are, and an angel spoke to me by the word of the Lord, saying: Bring him back with you into your house, and let him eat bread and drink water.’ And he lied to him, and brought him back, and he ate bread in his house and drank water. And it came about, as they sat at table, that the word of the Lord came to the false prophet who had brought him back, and he said to the man of God who had come from Judah: ‘Thus says the Lord: Because you have provoked the word of the Lord and have not kept the commandment which the Lord your God commanded you, and have come back and eaten bread and drunk water in this place, of which he spoke to you, saying, You shall not eat bread nor drink water, therefore your body shall not enter the tomb of your fathers.’ And it came about, after he had eaten bread and drunk water, that they saddled the ass for him, and he turned and went away; and a lion met him on the road and killed him, and his body lay thrown in the road, and the ass stood beside it, and the lion stood beside his body. And men of that city came and spoke in the city where the old prophet lived; and when those who had brought him back from the road heard, he said: ‘This is the man of God who provoked the word of the Lord’; and he went and found his body thrown in the road, and the ass and the lion standing over the body; and the lion had not eaten his body nor sprung upon the ass.” If this was rendered to him because he had eaten bread and taken a drink of water in a profane place among foreign men, what would have been rendered to us, if we had formed friendship, as you desired, with you, whom we know to be a heretic, whom we know to deny the only Son of God; if we had poured out prayer with you Arians; if, in short, we had allowed ourselves, priests of the Lord, to celebrate with your Arian false bishops all that we celebrate? Meanwhile, going back over your acts, you must recognize them as most bitter: that you were sent in to deceive us as that false prophet was to the man of God. For as he, though a false prophet, said he was a prophet in order to ensnare an innocent man, so you too, though you are not a Christian but an Arian, have pretended to be a Christian in order to entangle us. Then, although the church of the Lord has always had peace and has cast you out, and the heretics of every sect, you said, “I want peace to be established in my empire,” wishing to violate in us the Lord's peace, desiring to divide the people of God, working for your heresy, to which you long to make us all go over. So you lied that you were a man of God when you said you were making this peace for the sake of our salvation, as did that false prophet who said, “Come back with me, for I too am a prophet of the Lord, and an angel spoke to me.” So, I say, you lied when you said that you had undertaken to do this in order to please God, since you were labouring to join the catholic bishops one by one to the communion of the Arians.

How could Christians have come together with you and your fellow Arians, when you see that God said this to King Jehoshaphat, because he had taken the idolater Ahab into friendship and had gone out to war with an enemy of the Lord? For after that Ahab, your fellow in sacrilege, had been struck in battle with a deadly wound according to the word of God, and Jehoshaphat, because he had cried to God with all his heart, had been restored to his house, holy Scripture says that Jehu the son of Hanani, who was a seer, went out before him and said this: “If you help that sinner and are a friend of those who hate the Lord, for this there is wrath upon you from the face of the Lord; yet good words have been found in you, because you have taken away the groves from the land and have prepared your heart to seek the Lord.” If these things are said to him, what would be said to us, if we had chosen to be friends with you, a heretic and an adversary of God? Or will you dare to say, “I am not an enemy of God, as Ahab king of Israel was”? How are you not an enemy, when you do the same things that Ahab did? For you attack the religion of God as he attacked it, you persecute his house as he persecuted it. How could we have come together with you and yours, when this king devoted to God was rebuked by God through a prophet because he had joined in friendship with Ahaziah king of Israel? “And Jehoshaphat king of Judah,” it says, “joined in friendship with Ahaziah king of Israel; he began to act wickedly, and he made him his partner in building ships to go to Tarshish. And he made the ships in Ezion-geber. And Eliezer the son of Dodavah of Mareshah prophesied against Jehoshaphat, saying: Because you have made partnership with Ahaziah, the Lord has shattered your work, and your ships have been broken and will not be able to go to Tarshish.” If those things are said to him by the Lord because he had as partner in building ships a king of the way of perdition, what could be said to us, if we priests of God held you as a friend, you, the destroyer of his house, you, the persecutor of the catholic faith? If he shattered that man's work because he had been joined to a wicked man, we, I believe, would already have been scattered by a thunderbolt for having joined ourselves to you, a blasphemer. How could we, who are servants of God, while you are servants of the devil, have come together into one, when God has willed that there be such a separation between us and you as between light and darkness, between life and death, between sweet and bitter, as between the holy angels of God, who ever magnify his mercy, and those apostates whom you will see tormented for ever with you, unless you snatch yourself away from them? How, I say, could we servants of God have been together with you, servants of the Antichrist, when it was said by God to King Amaziah in the second book of Chronicles: “The army of Israel shall not go with you, for God is not with Israel, with all the sons of Ephraim; for if you think to prevail with these, the Lord will turn you to flight before your enemies, for strength is from the Lord”? How would we resist the devil, if in so great a crime of yours we ran with you, with the enemies of God, with men found without knowledge of God, with men who do not have God, in whom we know there is a troop of demons? For you cannot deny the only Son of God without demons, since none makes you blaspheme except those who have blinded your hearts, so that the truth cannot be grasped by you.

Could we possibly have stayed on your side and consented to your most shameful designs, when the Holy Spirit says through the glorious David that none are blessed except those who have withdrawn from you who deny the only Son of God, and that only those will remain blessed who have not mingled with your serpentine thoughts? “Blessed is the man who has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, and has not stood in the way of sinners, and has not sat in the seat of pestilence.” How could there be one meeting place for you and us, when you hear David say also in the sixth psalm: “Depart from me, you who work iniquity”? Whether you Arians do not work iniquity, judge for yourself, you who are the chief in the sacrilege of the Arians, who persecute us with horrible animosity because we say we are Christians. Know, then, that we did right in withdrawing from you, who are hateful to God. For how would it have been fitting for us to remain in your assembly, stained with every crime, and not to flee you, plagues and pestilence that you are? For he says in the person of our people in the twenty-fifth psalm: “For your mercy is before my eyes, and I have taken pleasure in your truth. I have not sat in the council of vanity, and I will not go in with those who do wicked things; I have hated the church of evildoers, and I will not sit with the ungodly.” If your council is not one of vanity, refute me. Is it not a vain council, in which there is no counsel except that the Son of God be denied, that it be maintained that God the Father is not a true Father, that it be asserted that the Holy Spirit the Paraclete is not the true Spirit of God, that the apostolic and evangelical tradition be destroyed, that the tradition of Arius be confirmed? A council in which nothing else is confirmed except what can win great joy for all heretics and heathen and Jews: all who curse the religion of God rejoice to see you, the emperor, carrying out what they long for, to see that you have become a denier of the only Son of God and a persecutor of his servants. This is the council which you are accustomed to gather with all the strength of your empire, so that every authority of the holy Scriptures may be dissolved by the authority of your empire, so that all truth may be buried, so that the lies of your detestable invention may seem true. These are your designs in that excellent council gathered by your power. That is why you hate us, because we curse your council of evildoers; that is why we are in exile; that is why we are killed in prison; that is why the sight of others is forbidden to us alone; that is why we are shut up in darkness and kept under heavy guard. For this reason no human being is admitted to visit us: because we refused to have any partnership in your crimes with you ungodly men of sacrilege, you concerning whom a prayer was addressed to God in our person, that we might not perish together while living with you, but be separated from your wicked council, from your unjust conspiracy. For he says in the twenty-seventh psalm: “Hear, O Lord, the voice of my supplication, when I pray to you, when I lift up my hands to your holy temple. Do not drag my soul away with the sinners, and do not destroy me with those who work iniquity, with those who speak peace with their neighbour while evil is in their hearts. Give them according to their works and according to the wickedness of their pursuits; repay them according to the work of their hands; render them their reward.” That is why we are hated by you, Constantius: because we would not have said of us the things that are said by the mouth of the prophet of you and yours because of your wicked work, things that are said of the Jews, whose imitator you have become. Are you not the emperor Constantius, who pretended that you were making peace, when your evil thoughts were only that the Son of God should be denied, that the apostolic and evangelical faith should be destroyed and your Arian heresy built up, that all who would not agree with you should be deported, proscribed, tortured in various ways, and at last killed? And therefore the Holy Spirit, marking out you and yours and striking you at the same time, says in the person of our people: “Do not destroy me with those who work iniquity, with those who speak peace with their neighbour while evil is in their heart.” To us you said, “I want peace to be made,” and the adversary of our religion, abiding in your heart, was planning through you to make us idolaters. Therefore you will truly receive according to your work, according to the wickedness of your pursuits, unless you look out for yourself. We have avoided and are avoiding your counsel, which was and is formed against God, whose designs the Holy Spirit already saw when he said by the mouth of David in the thirty-second psalm: “The Lord has scattered the counsels of the nations; he rejects the thoughts of the peoples and rejects the counsels of princes.” God rejects your counsels brought against his church; for he cannot hate his people, his inheritance, and love you, sons of pestilence, you persecutors of his servants.

You said: “Make peace with the Arian bishops of my sect, and be at one.” And the Spirit of God says through Solomon in Proverbs: “Do not, do not follow the ways of the ungodly, nor envy the way of the wicked; in whatever place they have set their camp, do not come upon it. Turn aside from it and pass by; for they will not sleep unless they have done evil; their sleep has been taken from them, and they do not sleep. For they feed on the food of ungodliness and are drunk with the wine of iniquity. But the ways of the righteous shine like light; they go forward and give light until the day sets right. But the ways of the ungodly are dark; they do not know how they stumble.” How could we have had fellowship with you Arians, with spiritual adulterers? For we keep in mind what is written: “Do not give heed to a deceitful woman; for honey drips from the lips of a harlot woman, which for a time fattens your throat, but in the end you will find it more bitter than gall and sharper than a two-edged sword; and the feet of folly lead those who use her down with death to the underworld.” But what do you say? That this was said about adulteries of the flesh? If you insist that it was said about adulteries of the flesh, how much more must you, spiritual adulterers, be fled, lest what is said here come upon us through your spiritual harlot, the Arian heresy? For it seems sweet to some to be joined in friendship with you, the king, by accepting your heresy; but they will find it more bitter than gall when those who chose to be with you begin to feel themselves tormented with you for ever in everlasting Gehenna, and then they will say: “Woe to us, who put the emperor Constantius before God.” How could it have been possible for us and you to come together, when Solomon says still further on: “Cast pestilence out of the council, and strife will go out with it”; and: “Do not imitate evil men nor desire to be with them; for their heart devises falsehood, and their lips speak sorrows”; and: “Do not bring the ungodly near the pastures of the righteous, and do not be led astray by the fullness of the belly. For a righteous man falls seven times and rises again, but the ungodly will be weakened in evils.”

How can we be with the proud and the transgressors, with you who have chosen to be found with Judas Iscariot rather than with the most blessed prophets, apostles and martyrs? For I hear in the hundredth psalm: “I walked in the innocence of my heart in the midst of your house. I did not set before my eyes any evil thing; I hated those who commit transgressions; a perverse heart did not cleave to me; I did not know the wicked who turned aside from me. Whoever secretly slandered his neighbours, him I pursued; with the proud eye and the insatiable heart, with such a one I did not eat.” And in the hundred and eighteenth psalm: “I have held the wicked in hatred, and have loved your law.” Since you are wicked, being deniers of the only Son of God, and since you must be hated by us because, leaving the way of truth, you have taken hold of every error, because, leaving the light, you have chosen to go into the outer darkness, how could we have been dear to you, the abominable head, the destroyer of the house of God, the kindling of all who work iniquity? How could we have been your intimate friends, as Valens, Ursacius, Epictetus, Saturninus and the rest are? Of their number, even though they have seen into what pit they have fallen, they would surely choose to perish with you, provided they may enjoy with you the empty splendour of your reign. How could we have been with you, we who loathe the things they have chosen to enjoy with you, men who strive to obtain those things that will abide for ever? On what point do we and you not agree? Surely because we refused to accept your heresy, surely because we Christians refused to be made Arians. And who but one out of his mind, as you Arians are, would abandon the house of God and go to the tomb of the devil?

We suffer under your hatred, then, because we were and are afraid lest the things be said of us that were said of those deserters, that is, the Jews, whom Jeremiah accuses, saying: “Hear the word of the Lord, house of Jacob and all the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord: What stubbornness did your fathers find in me, that they withdrew far from me and went after empty things, and were frustrated, and did not say: Where is God, who freed us from the land of Egypt, who led us out, giving us guidance in the desert, in an untilled and unknown land, in a land without water and without fruit, in a land through which no man passed nor any son of man dwelt there? And he brought you into Carmel, to eat its fruit and its good things; and you entered and defiled the land and made my inheritance a desolation. The priests did not say, Where is the Lord? and the elders of my law did not know me, and the shepherds acted ungodly against me, and the prophets prophesied by Baal and went after useless things.” We did not want to hear these reproaches; that is why we said that you and yours must be fled. For the members of God's household could not come together with you foreigners, when we see that God said to that carnal people, your partner in faithlessness: “Turn your foot from the rough road and your throat from thirst. But she said: I will take courage, for she loved strangers and went after them.” Not only did we refuse to go after you strangers, after you foreigners, but we pronounced you anathema, sons of pestilence and of darkness; lest, if we withdrew from the apostolic and evangelical faith and abandoned the way which the most blessed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob held, and Abel, Enoch, Noah and all the prophets, apostles and martyrs, God should say of us too what was said of your fellow blasphemers the Jews: “As a thief is put to shame when he is caught, so the children of Israel will be put to shame, they and their kings and their princes and their priests and prophets.” We did not want to be among you, lest that rebuke of the divine voice should also convict us together with the Jews and with you heretics: “Why do you speak to me? You have all acted ungodly, and you have all sinned against me, says the Lord.”