That One Must Die for the Son of God

Contents

Reading pages: 1–6 · 7–13 · 14–15

1. 1Opening his work On Dying for the Son of God, Lucifer says that, though Scripture bids him not answer a fool, he writes to show Constantius that his armed power cannot conquer Christians, who are God's temples and are ready to die for the Son.
2. 2Lucifer declares that the martyrs Constantius has killed in Alexandria and elsewhere are in paradise, that the bishops have resolved to die rather than deny the Son, and that Christ, who protected the youths in the furnace, makes his martyrs stronger under torture.
3. 3Citing Christ's words on losing one's life and fearing God rather than the killer of the body, Lucifer describes Constantius's tortures, exiles and refusal of burial, and says Christians, who confess one divinity of Father and Son, gain glory from them.
4. 4Recalling his defiance before the emperor at Milan, Lucifer restates the Nicene faith in the Son as homoousios, claims that Christians everywhere hold it while Arianism has withered, and says that Christ present in his martyrs makes torture their glory.
5. 5Answering the charge that a bishop should be gentle, Lucifer says that Christians do not curse or kill but are killed, calls Constantius a wolf in sheep's guise, and describes the martyrs standing in the armour of God against his tortures.
6. 6Lucifer argues that the martyrs' blood opens heaven, that Constantius's policy of torturing rather than killing does not prevent their glory, and that one in whom Christ watches cannot be conquered, as the Psalm and Paul's words in Romans 8 declare.
7. 7Lucifer says no inducements of the emperor's agents, such as Epictetus, can draw the Nicene Christians from their faith in the Son of one substance with the Father, and that they triumph in their torments.
8. 8Lucifer recalls Constantius's killings at Alexandria, charges that he now tortures without killing to deny the bishops martyrdom, and answers with Psalm 27 and Paul's armour of God, trusting in the resurrection of the tortured body.
9. 9Lucifer tells Constantius that the martyrs and confessors have conquered him by Christ's strength, that he may add any torments he likes, and that martyrdom, a steep path no human strength could walk, imitates the Lord's fortitude.
10. 10Lucifer defends the equality of the Son with the Father from Philippians 2:6 and Jesus' sayings in John, says that whatever has a beginning can have an end, and applies Paul's warnings about apostates of the last times to the Arians.
11. 11Lucifer mocks Constantius's shifting creeds and his promotion of Eudoxius, contrasts the polished but unpersuasive speech of the Arians with the plain truth of the Scriptures, and says that religion is defended not by killing but by dying, as the apostles did.
12. 12Lucifer says the demons persecute the bishops through Constantius but are conquered in the martyrs, refers the emperor to his book On Apostate Kings, and argues from Philippians 2 that the Arians read only the texts of Christ's humiliation and ignore those of his eternal divinity.
13. 13Lucifer asks Constantius, acclaimed by his bishops as bishop of bishops, why he persecutes those who die for the Son, and argues that suffering is God's painful medicine and that what matters in death is its cause, not its manner.
14. 14Lucifer tells Constantius that whatever death he inflicts will bring the martyr immortality and bodily resurrection, while the emperor, unless he confesses the eternal Son and the one Godhead of the Trinity, faces the undying worm and outer darkness.
15. 15Closing his work, Lucifer says that those who love God gladly endure brief evils for eternal rewards, that the bishops' power to bind condemns the emperor rather than he them, and that Constantius's repentance after death will be in vain.