On Not Sparing Those Who Sin against God 32–35

But however much you rage, your times will pass, they will pass, and those times will come in which you will see yourself, unless you take thought for yourself, set in that fiery river; you will see then those whom you fiercely persecute because they do not want to perish with you, not in that place of torments where you will be, but with the holy angels, ever giving thanks and praise to God, while you are in that flaming stream. I do not want you to be surprised that the glorious Daniel marked you out as a beast, since blessed Paul too said of your fellows, the Cretans: “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy bellies”; and below: “Therefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not giving heed to Jewish fables and the commands of men who turn away from the truth.” This is why we bishops are offensive to you: because we rebuke and reprove you for having dared to turn yourself away from the truth, for having wanted, after forsaking God's commands, to cling to the blasphemies and commands of men, for having, in short, forsaken God and taken up idolatry. This is why I seem to you your enemy: because I want you to walk according to the apostle's command and not according to the commands of Arius and the Jews. Against these most just pleadings of ours, seeing yourself overcome by the truth, you are accustomed to say: “The holy Scriptures command that you must be subject to kings and all who live in high position; and do you dare, Lucifer, to heap such great and such insults on me?” You see these passages; you understand those of this kind that order you to be honoured; but you pretend not to know those that order you what to do, those that warn you to obey the priests of the Lord, those that press on you that you must show yourself one of all your fellow servants and not call yourself superior to anyone, if you want to be found a servant of God. “Speak these things,” says the blessed apostle to Titus, “and exhort and rebuke with all authority; let no one despise you.” If you are a Christian, since you too are one of those on whose account he said, “Speak these things and exhort and rebuke with all authority; let no one despise you,” then you surely ought to listen to me when I correct you with all authority, not despise me. You will be a Christian then, if you do not despise me when I exhort you to persevere as a Christian; but if you despise me, you are found to be no longer among the Christians, because if you had been a Christian you would not have despised him whom God ordained to instruct his people, him to whom the apostle said, “Speak these things and exhort and rebuke with all authority; let no one despise you.” For what do I exhort you to do? Only not to be a murderer, not to persecute the house of God, to stop torturing, proscribing, deporting, shutting in prison, butchering, destroying in various ways, and killing those whom you see to be Christians; to stop, in short, blaspheming the only Son of God; to accept the apostolic faith, which you call heretical, this faith of ours, that is, which the bishops wrote down at Nicaea against you and all heretics; to believe as we do and to deign to spit out the idolatry established by your teacher Arius, so that you may proclaim yourself a Christian, not an Arian; to stop bringing false charges against the priests of God. This is my correction, this my reproof. The apostle tells me to rebuke you with all authority, and you say, “Lucifer is wronging me,” and you do not say, “A priest of God is warning and exhorting me according to the commands given to priests, so that I may lead a life most acceptable to God.”

As for your saying that we owe you obedience, know that we recognize that we are debtors in rendering obedience not to you alone but to all who live in high position. For the apostle says: “Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, not to be quarrelsome but gentle, showing all meekness toward all men. For we too were once foolish, unbelieving, going astray, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the goodness and kindness of God our Saviour shone forth, he saved us, not by works of righteousness that we did, but according to his mercy, through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, so that, justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of life.” He reminds us, then, that we ought to be subject in good works, not in evil. If it is a good work to destroy a man in his absence, to put to death unheard a man crying out to clear himself, to join you in punishing one we know to be innocent, setting aside every regard for mercy; if it is a good work to deny the only Son of God, a work acceptable to God to desert the apostolic faith and take up the heretical, you would rightly say that I am acting against the warnings of the holy Scriptures. I add this, that the apostle mentioned those rulers and authorities who had not yet believed in the only Son of God, so that by our humility and meekness and long patience in adversities and the greatest obedience in fitting matters they might have been drawn to believe. But if you, because you are emperor, pretending to be one of us, compel us to forsake God and take up idolatry, must we give in to you, so that the apostle's commands may not seem to have been neglected? And yet you, who pretend to be a Christian, try to make Christians what you yourself are, that is, apostates; you who are still foolish and unbelieving, remaining in your malice, in which the apostle says we too were before we knew and received the holy faith. In what were we to give way to you, except in doing what is lawful? Or when you, a blaspheming murderer, say, “Kill those who believe in the only Son of God; be persecutors of his house with me; deny him with me; spit out the apostolic faith; take up my heresy, of which I have shown myself a lover with all the strength of my heart,” who is more unhappy than the man who does not avoid you, who does not flee you, recognizing you, as you urge these things, to be a temple of demons? Because you hear this, you say, “I suffer wrong from Lucifer, a wretched man, and I the emperor”; that blasphemous, defiled speech of yours does not go on to say, “I hear from Lucifer, a priest of the Lord, what I deserve.”

To the Galatians the chosen vessel says: “I marvel that you are so quickly turning away from him who called you in grace to another gospel, which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel other than that, let him be anathema. As we said before, so now I say again: if anyone preaches to you other than what you received, let him be anathema.” And do you think you can be judged by me as anything but anathema, when I find you preaching otherwise than the blessed apostles handed down? So when you hear from me that I hold you anathema for preaching otherwise than the apostles preached, if you call me offensive, you will be able to recognize that you are lying, if you carry anything of a man, since you see that I call you anathema because the blessed apostle has already anathematized you. You judge me offensive because I call you foolish; but how can I rightly be called offensive by you, when it is clear that I speak the truth, that you are foolish? For if the Galatians hear “O foolish Galatians” from the blessed apostle, why do you think you ought not to be called by the name “foolish”? For if they were called foolish because they had obeyed false brothers, because, heeding the suggestions of those fellow serpents of yours, they had decided that they ought to keep sabbaths and that circumcision should be observed, how much more rightly are you called foolish, who have come forward as a denier of God's only Son! Because I say to you, “Snatch yourself from the rabid Arian dogs; grieve that by clinging to their malignant council you have become a dog yourself,” you call me defiant. But perhaps you do not know that the deniers of God's only Son have been called dogs, called fat bulls, called sons of iniquity, seed of the adulterer and the harlot, sons of perdition and wicked seed. If it escapes you that you have been so called by God, hear him say through Isaiah to the Jews, your fellow blasphemers: “Come here, sons of iniquity, seed of the adulterer and the harlot. In whom have you delighted, and against whom have you opened your mouth, and against whom have you put out your tongue? Are you not sons of perdition, a wicked seed?” And in another place: “See that all are blinded; they have not known how to understand; all are dumb dogs that cannot bark, dreaming in their beds, loving to slumber; and they are shameless dogs, souls that know no fullness, and they are wicked, knowing no understanding; they have all followed their own ways.” Who are those to whom or about whom these things are said? Surely those whom the only Son of God accuses in the twenty-first psalm by the mouth of David, saying: “Many calves surrounded me, fat bulls besieged me; they opened their mouth against me like a lion ravening and roaring”; and below: “Many dogs surrounded me, a council of evildoers besieged me; they pierced my hands and feet.” So when you notice that your teachers in sacrilege were called calves, fat bulls, and dogs, you, one of the council of evildoers, cannot judge me insulting because I call you by the names by which your fellow pestilences were and are called; for you are not less in wickedness, you who dare to say, “There was when he was not, and he was made from nothing,” that you should not be called by those names that suit you. But if you want not to be called by these names, change your ways, correct your errors, as the most blessed Paul and others from that faithless people corrected theirs. Because I say to you, “Snatch yourself from the council of evildoers,” I seem insulting to you. Why? Surely because I profess myself a Christian, because I have refused to forsake God and go after your idolatry. We are not the first to be called insulting and proud by you sacrilegious men; for all those too were so called who resisted the deadly edicts of your fellow tyrants.

To pass over the rest at the close of my speech, I will turn once more to King Antiochus alone. Did he judge those who resisted him insulting and proud, or not? Without doubt, because they thought them insulting and proud, he persecuted those dedicated to God to the death with such cruelty. It remains, then, for you to see what Antiochus did beyond what you have already learned; and if you can rightly say that they were proud and insulting to Antiochus, you can say it of us too. For we suffer from you what they suffered from Antiochus; we cry out for the faith, for religion, as they cried out; we profess to serve the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, as they confessed. “The king,” says Scripture, “sent an old man of Athens to compel the Jews to depart from the laws of their fathers and of God and not to live by them, and also to pollute the temple in Jerusalem and call it the temple of Olympian Zeus, and that on Gerizim, as the inhabitants of the place were, the temple of Zeus the Friend of Strangers. And the onset of evils was most grievous and hard for all. For the temple was full of the revelling of the gentiles, who played the harlot with prostitutes and approached women in the holy precincts, and moreover brought in things that were not fitting; the altar too was full of unlawful things forbidden by the laws. And neither were sabbaths kept nor the ancestral feast days observed.” And below: “And they were led by bitter necessity every month to the king's birthday, a pitiable thing; and when the rites of Liber were celebrated, they were compelled to walk around for Liber wearing ivy. And a decree went out to the neighbouring Greek cities, at the suggestion of the Ptolemies, to follow the same practice against the Jews and to show them no mercy, but to kill those who would not go over to the customs of the Greeks. One could see, then, the misery. For two women were brought in for having circumcised their children; they hung their infants at their breasts, and when they had led them publicly around the city, they threw them down from the wall. Others, who had run together into caves nearby to keep the seventh day secretly, when this was reported, were burned together, because they feared to defend themselves, out of regard for the most glorious day.” What do you think the worshippers of God should have done then? Ought they to have pleased God or Antiochus? If you do not think they ought to have pleased Antiochus, then surely neither ought we to please you, because you too, though in another way, desire to take us from God and join us to the devil, as he wished to do with them. The same cruelty is carried on by you; so savage and unjust are you toward those who resist your deadly edict. It remains, then, as has often been said, that you grieve that you have gone astray, and, recognizing that you are a murderer and a blasphemer, that you, a deserter of God, present yourself again to his house; otherwise you will have yourself to blame, when you begin to see yourself there where all those fellow tyrants of yours now are.