On Not Sparing Those Who Sin against God 19–24

Surely, if you do not change, you will be one of those who were ordered to be slain. This is why I seem proud to you: because I long for you not to be slain, because I desire that you too be found within that sum entrusted to me, which I long to see multiplied. Because we wage the contest with you in this way, we seem enemies to you, we who, keeping the blessed apostle's command, pour out prayer unceasingly for your safety: “I urge, therefore, first of all that supplications, prayers, petitions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high position, that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in godliness and dignity. For this is good and acceptable before God our Saviour, who wills all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” We, who long for you to attain the knowledge of the truth, seem enemies to you; you call me insulting because I say what serves your salvation and mine. But this assertion of yours, which claims that I wrong you, also shows that you are imprudent. For if only you had been prudent! First, you would never have been found sacrilegious; then, when rebuked by the authority of the sacred writings, you would by now have shown yourself a man who restrains himself. But now, because you are imprudent, when a bishop says to you, “Emperor, provide for your salvation, for you are weighed down by the enormous burdens of your crimes,” you say, “You are insulting me.” “I charge you before God,” the apostle says to Timothy, “and Christ Jesus and the elect angels, to keep these things without partiality, doing nothing by favour,” but to keep equity. And you call insulting the man who now rebukes you, caught in such great crimes, for having committed them, and now entreats you to snatch yourself from your evils while you can, and to be such a man that God will not punish you among those whom he marks as worthless and faithless, saying: “I have begotten sons and exalted them, but they have despised me.” This is why I seem proud to you: because I long for you to be found among those whom the only Son of God invites to his kingdom, saying: “Come, blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” You think you suffer insult because what is true is said to you; the glorious apostle on the contrary commands, saying: “Rebuke those who sin before all, so that the rest also may have fear.” Whom ought I to heed? You, who say, “Let me destroy the religion of God, turn his servants to Antichrist, establish everyone in this sacrilege of mine,” or the blessed apostle, who commands me to rebuke you before all when you sin? But if you think I ought to have spared you because you are emperor, in this too you are found imprudent. For you hear the apostle say, “Rebuke those who sin before all, so that the rest also may have fear”; and you say, “You ought to have spared me especially, because I was king of the Roman empire.” And where would I put aside this charge: “I charge you before God and Christ Jesus and the elect angels to keep these things without partiality, doing nothing by turning aside to favour”? This is certainly why I seem insulting to you: because I have not put your commands before God's commands. In the Acts of the Apostles I read that the blessed apostles were seized by those whom you share not only in unbelief but in cruelty, and that they were commanded not to teach in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. But let us look together at that very part of sacred Scripture, whether the apostles gave way to the commands of the enemies of God's only Son, or most earnestly carried through what they had undertaken to fulfil. “Calling the apostles,” it says, “they beat them and let them go, commanding them not to speak in the name of Jesus to anyone. So they went out from the presence of the council rejoicing that they had been counted worthy to suffer dishonour for the name. And every day, in the temple and at home, they did not cease teaching and preaching our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Since sacred Scripture relates that the blessed apostles did this, are we, the overseers of God's churches, to keep silent while you invite the hearts of all to deny the Son of God and busy yourself to establish your heresy, so that, of course, we may not be found to have been insulting to you, a blasphemer, a murderer, a destroyer of God's religion? Sacred Scripture tells that the apostles feared neither the scourges nor the threats of the sons of pestilence but always taught; and was it fitting for us to be broken by the strength of your perishable reign, so that you might carry out all your wicked attempts? We are thought defiant by you because the truth is told you by us. So too your fellow blasphemers judged the most blessed Stephen, because he said to them: “Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit; as your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become, you who received the law by the ordinance of angels and did not keep it.” When the Jews heard this, were they rightly or wrongly roused against the most holy martyr Stephen? If wrongly, then see that you too are wrongly roused against those who want you saved. Notice that you stand against the church of God on the side where the Jews stood then and stand now; that you are as stiff-necked, as uncircumcised in heart and ears; hence, as they did not bear hearing the truth but leapt to kill a worshipper of God, you too leap to kill us who tell you what is sound and plain. “When they heard this,” says the divine Scripture, “they raged in their hearts and gnashed their teeth at him.” And below: “But crying out with a loud voice they stopped their ears and rushed upon him with one mind, and cast him out of the city and stoned him.” So you, raging in heart and gnashing your teeth, are against us for no other reason than that we call you the persecutor of God's house, the destroyer of God's religion, the shedder of the blood of Christ's servants; than that we justly call you sacrilegious, being a blaspheming heretic, being one who assails the apostolic and evangelical faith. We do nothing hateful to God if, in the contest I wage with you in this way, we tell you what we understand you to be. For we find that men such as you are acted in this way against the glorious saints. “And while they were serving the Lord and fasting,” says Scripture, “the Holy Spirit said: Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. Then, after fasting and praying, they laid hands on them and sent them off. And they, sent out by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia, and from there sailed to Cyprus. And when they came to Salamis, they preached the word of the Lord in the synagogues of the Jews. And they had John as their assistant. And when they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos, they found a certain man, a Jewish false prophet named Bar-Jesus, which is interpreted ‘Ready’, who was with the proconsul Sergius Paulus, a prudent man; who, having summoned Barnabas and Saul, sought to hear the word of God. But Elymas the magician (for so his name is said to be interpreted) opposed them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith. But Saul, who is also Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked intently at him and said: You who are full of all deceit and fraud, son of the devil, enemy of all righteousness, will you not stop perverting the straight ways of the Lord? And now behold, the hand of the Lord is upon you, and you will be blind, not seeing the sun for a time. And immediately mist and darkness fell upon him, and going about he sought someone to lead him by the hand. Then the proconsul, seeing what had happened, believed, astonished with wonder at the teaching of the Lord.” We believe that, taught by this testimony, you will not say: “Lucifer insults me, the emperor.”

What does it matter to me what you are, when I say to you what was heard from the apostle by that man who was recognized as a false prophet? For do I not hold you, the emperor Constantius, to be such as the glorious Paul and Barnabas held Bar-Jesus the Jew? For you are found to be as opposed to the name of the Lord as he was; you resist the truth as he resisted it; you do not want men to believe in the only Son of God, but in you, as he did not want them to believe except in himself, the Jewish false prophet; for you are driven by an adverse spirit, as he was driven. For when you hear that the proconsul was a prudent man, desiring to be instructed by the blessed apostles so as to grasp the way of truth, and that he whom you imitate resisted the apostles, so that they might not bring the proconsul to believe in the Son of God, it is plain that you are such as that Jewish false prophet was. Again, since holy Scripture says that Paul was filled with the Holy Spirit when he made that invective, you must understand that the Jewish false prophet was full of an unclean spirit. So, as he contradicted, driven by an adverse spirit, since you too are found to resist at the prompting of the adversary, you must judge yourself to be none other than Bar-Jesus, the Jewish false prophet. Therefore, since you understand that you are another Bar-Jesus, a Jewish false prophet, as often as your sacrilegious mouth has said, “God does not have a true Son,” do not take it ill if we say to you what the apostle said to your predecessor, the Jewish false prophet: “Full of all deceit and fraud, son of the devil, enemy of all righteousness, who do not cease perverting the straight ways of the Lord.” If you are moved because what was said to him is said to you, whose road of death you are following, you will show yourself very foolish, wanting to be what that son of the devil, the Jewish false prophet, was, and not wanting to be called by the names by which he too was called. Again I exhort and entreat, as I also warn, that you be willing to take thought for yourself, so that eternal punishment may not take you. For if he deserved to be blinded because he tried to resist, consider what evils can be laid up for you, a murderer, a sacrilegious man, a destroyer of God's religion, both in this life and for ever. Hear further what can convince you that we are not insulting but truthful. Those seven most glorious brothers resisted Antiochus, just as we now resist you. You have read what the fourth answered your fellow pestilence, you who deign to cry out that I am insulting because I tell you that unless you turn to God you will perish for ever. Surely he says: “It is better, when put to death by men, to wait for the hope from God of being raised again by him; for you there will be no resurrection to life.” If you, a tyrant, hear from us that you will not receive the resurrection to life if you remain in this unbelief, that you will rise not to rest but to everlasting punishment, what insult is that? Scripture tells that the fifth too, when he had been brought forward and tortured, said to the king: “You have power among men, though you are corruptible; you do what you will. But do not think that our race has been forsaken by God. Wait patiently and see how his great power will torment you and your seed.” What do you think of the constancy with which a servant of God inveighed against your fellow tyrant? Will you, a worshipper of the devil, judge a worshipper of God to have been offensive? You will deny that he was proud in speaking the truth; nor ought you to judge me insolent because I tell you that we are not forsaken by God, for whose sake I endure this, while you, on the contrary, unless you are corrected, will come to nothing with your corruptible glory. Look also at what the sixth said, and you will find that we push back against you, the whirlwind of the storm, in the same close rank in which they pushed back: “Do not be deceived in vain; for we suffer these things for our own sakes, having sinned against our God, and things worthy of warning have been done; but do not think that you will go unpunished, since you have tried to fight against God.” The letters of my humble self, and books written, though in rustic style, prove that I have often said that our sins indeed brought it about that we came into your hands, you forerunner of Antichrist, but that you are fighting against God, and therefore, unless you look ahead for yourself, you will go, like this Antiochus, to eternal punishment, while the Lord will be merciful to us.

You are grieved because we reveal to those entrusted to us both you and who you are, and that it is right that you, the shadow of Antichrist, be trampled by all the soldiers of Christ. “Who,” you say, “have been able to trample me?” Those whom you keep shut in prisons, deprive of their inheritance, drive into exile, torture, and kill because they confess themselves Christians. This is why you judge us insolent: because we entreat all who are entrusted to us to trample the devil's head, to bring your sacrilegious attempts to nothing by the power of the sufferings inflicted on them for Christ, the only Son of God. Let that most glorious mother of these seven sons also be insolent in your eyes, because she deigned to urge her sons on to conquer Antiochus, as mad as you, saying: “I do not know how you appeared in my womb; nor was it I who gave you breath and life, nor did I set in order the members of each of you; but the creator of the world, who formed the birth of man and searches out the origin of all things, will in his mercy give you back breath and life again, as you now despise yourselves for the sake of his laws.” The devout mother did not cease saying this to her sons, loving her sons bravely, until she saw them all killed. And was it fitting for us, whom he had foretold through the prophet's mouth as future shepherds for his flock, saying, “And I will give you shepherds after my heart, and they will feed you, feeding with discipline,” to keep silent, so as not to seem insolent to you, coming as a raging wolf to slaughter God's sheep? A woman so fired the hearts of her sons with the love of God that by their death by the sword she gained victories; and did you think it fitting for us to say to the soldiers of Christ: “Do not take up arms against Constantius, the devil's attendant; do not resist the temple of all demons; rather do whatever he commands to be done”? What is this defiance of ours, if we strive to fulfil the office delegated to us by God, if, in short, we are found imitators of this woman? You want to please the devil, whose work you are found to be celebrating; you do not at all want us, by doing these things against you, to become most acceptable to God. If it still moves you that you are called these names by us, hear also what was cried out against Antiochus by the seventh son of this woman: “But Antiochus, thinking himself despised and scorning the voice of her who reproached him, when the youngest was still left, not only exhorted him with words but even affirmed with an oath that he would make him rich and happy, would transfer him from his ancestral ways, would hold him as a friend, and entrust him with affairs. But when the youth paid no heed to this, he called the mother and urged her to advise the youth for his safety. And after he had urged her with many words, she undertook to persuade her son. So, bending toward him, she mocked the cruel tyrant and said in her native tongue: My son, have pity on me, who carried you ten months in my womb and gave you milk for three years and nourished you and brought you to this age. I beg you, child, look at heaven and earth, and seeing all that is in them, understand that God made them out of nothing, and so the race of men comes to be. Do not fear this executioner, but prove worthy of your brothers and accept death, so that in that mercy I may receive you back with your brothers. When she had said this, the youth said: Whom are you waiting for? I do not obey the king's command, but I obey the command of the law that was given to us through Moses. But you, who have become the inventor of all wickedness against the Hebrews, will not escape the hand of God. For if, for rebuke and correction, our Lord is briefly angry with us while we live, he will again be reconciled with his servants. But you, wicked man and most infamous of all men, do not be lifted up in vain, puffed up with empty hopes against his servants; for you have not yet escaped the judgment of the almighty God who sees all things. For our brothers, having endured a brief pain, have now fallen under God's covenant of eternal life; but you, by the judgment of God, will pay the just penalties of your pride. But I, like my brothers, give up both soul and body for our ancestral laws, calling on God to be merciful soon to our nation, and to make you confess, with torments and scourges, that he alone is God; and in me and in my brothers to stay the wrath of the Almighty, which has justly been brought upon our whole race.”

What more, Constantius, have you heard from us than what was said by this faithful servant of God? If he said to Antiochus's attendants, “Whom are you waiting for? I do not obey the king's command, but I obey the command of the law that was given to us through Moses,” we too say to yours: “Why do you think you can make us Arians at the will of Constantius, the forerunner of Antichrist? As we are Christians, so we shall always be.” If he said to Antiochus, “But you, who have become the inventor of all wickedness against the Hebrews, will not escape the hand of God,” we too have said and are saying to you that, since there has never been a worse persecutor of God's holy law than you, you will not escape the hand of God. If Antiochus heard that the Lord was then angry with his own for the sake of rebuke and would again be reconciled with his servants, you too hear us say this. If it was said to that king, “But you, wicked man and most infamous of all men, do not be lifted up in vain, puffed up with empty hope against his servants; for you have not yet escaped the judgment of the almighty God who sees all things,” you too hear this from us: that you are a wicked man, the most infamous of all men, who do these things to make us your fellow apostates, yet are lifted up in vain, puffed up with empty hope against us, God's servants, at the devil's prompting, because you can neither accomplish your malicious attempts nor escape the judgment of God, who sees all things and can do all things. You hear from us, as Antiochus heard through that illustrious youth, that our brothers, having suffered a little, have fallen under God's covenant of eternal life, while you will pay, by God's judgment, the just penalties of your pride. You hear also from us that we are ready to be killed by you, the executioner, for God, as you have already killed our brothers; that we are ready to give up our souls and bodies for Jesus Christ, the true only Son of God; that we trust moreover in his untiring goodness that he will soon snatch his whole flock from you, the ravening wolf, the rabid dog; but that you, unless you take thought for yourself, will go away for ever into torments. Whatever more I have said to you, whether in writing or in person, I want you to refute it, you tyrant of our time. If I called you an executioner, not only this most righteous youth but his mother too said it to Antiochus, as mad as you; if you were called by me the inventor of all wickedness, if I said that you will not escape the hand of God, that you are wicked and the most infamous of all men, because you will not escape the judgment of him who can do all things and sees all things, but will pay just penalties in God's judgment, all this had already been said by this devout youth to your colleague Antiochus. You cry out that I am insulting because you see names worthy of your deeds put on you, those which our predecessors, worshippers of the living God, already put on your fellow tyrants. The blessed apostle Peter says: “Be sober, be watchful; your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in the faith, knowing that your brotherhood throughout this whole world is suffering these same sufferings.” If you think I am insulting because you hear that what you do is evil, in what am I found to resist the devil according to the apostle's command? For see, this dragon, leading you with his wine into every drunkenness, has set you loose upon the whole flock of God, so that, using your royal support, you may make everyone drunk as he himself is, that is, insane, senseless, and mad. For has he not made you so drunk from the vine of Sodom, from the vineyard of Gomorrah, that you do not see that you have committed fornication, as the Jews committed fornication? In what, I say, shall we resist the devil, if we do not go to meet you, through whom he has armed himself to devour us? If it is not said to you, the drunk, by the sober; to you, the sick, by the healthy; to you, the wounded, by the whole; to you, the blind, by those who see; to you, the fallen, by those who stand; to you, the impious, by the pious; to you, the ravening wolf, by God's sheep; to you, the cruel executioner and savage murderer, by those most kind and loving mercy; to you, the blasphemer, by those who glorify God; to you, the sacrilegious, by the worshippers of God; to you, the heretic, a Haman, by Christians: if it is not said to you by us, “Depart, minister of our adversary; give honour to God”? In what shall we resist the devil, if we spare you, the net of his will; if your drunkenness, that is, your madness, is not declared to all; if, finally, through your raging against us you are not made manifest to the whole world, so that from what you are doing you can be perceived not as Christ's servant but plainly as the slave of him who is like a roaring lion against us? This is why we seem insolent to you: because we tell you that you have been made drunk with that wine by which they too were brought to all the madness of drunkenness, they to whom, or about whom, it is said: “His blemished sons have sinned, not his; a crooked and perverse generation, do you repay the Lord thus? So foolish a people and unwise?” And below: “Jacob drank wine and ate and was filled, and the beloved kicked; he grew fat and gross and broad, and forsook God who made him and departed from God his Saviour. They provoked me with strange gods, with their abominations they stirred me up, and they sacrificed to demons and not to God, to gods whom they did not know; new gods came lately whom their fathers did not know. You forsook the God who begot you and forgot God who nourished you.” So the faithlessness that you preach proves that, like the Jews, you have forsaken God and followed idolatry.

But for now I thought you need only be brought to see that we are not offensive, insolent, and proud because I tell you what you are, but truthful, and fearing no one but God. When the most blessed apostle John says, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out,” you seem to me plainly one of these false prophets, since by denying the only Son of God you declare that you have nothing but the spirit of Antichrist in your sacrilegious mouth. Hence it comes about that you cannot even listen to us when we speak of the divine eternity of the only Son of God, since that spirit of Antichrist which remains in you cannot bear it and does not want to be driven out of you, but desires to dwell in you until he sees you carried off to those places where he himself will be for ever; for it grieves him that you, his most faithful darling, obedient to all his desires, should be snatched from him. “Beloved,” he says, “do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that destroys Jesus is not from God, and this is that of Antichrist.” And below: “They are of the world; therefore they speak of the world, and the world hears them. But we are from God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not from God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” It is clear, Constantius, that you carry the spirit of Antichrist, that you are driven by the spirit of error. For as those who have said that the only Son of God did not take man from the womb of the blessed Virgin, who did not believe him to have become incarnate and become man, are shown to have the spirit of error and are called antichrists, so also you Arians, when you deny that the only Son of God was truly born of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father; when you spit on his being the true Son and having always reigned with the Father; when you refuse to believe that the Son was never without the Father nor the Father without the Son; when you deny that the Father and his only Son have one Godhead, whose spirit do you show yourselves full of but Antichrist's? For no one who has the Spirit of God can say of the only Son of God, “There was when he was not,” and “He was made from nothing,” since he believes that he has reigned with the Father without beginning and will reign without end. So when you say he is not the true Son of God, when, finally, you try to destroy his being homoousios, as the Greeks say, while we Romans say “of one substance with the Father,” you declare that you too are among those false prophets and antichrists.