Church History Books 1–9 (trans.) 10 part 5/6

Meanwhile he sees a certain poor little woman bursting out of her house in such haste and speed that she could neither shut her door nor cover herself, as befits the dress of women, more carefully, dragging along with her also a very small infant, and hastening in her rapid course, having broken even into the line of his own escort. Then he, no longer bearing it, said: 「Seize the woman and bring her here.」 And when she had been brought, he said: 「Where, O unhappy woman, are you hurrying so hastily?」 「To the field,」 she said, 「where the people of the catholics gather.」 「And have you not heard,」 he said, 「that the prefect is going there to kill all whom he finds?」 「I have heard, and therefore I hasten, that I may be found there.」 「And why,」 he said, 「do you drag this little child?」 「That he too,」 she said, 「may be worthy to obtain martyrdom.」

When the most temperate man had heard these things, he ordered the escort to return and the carriage to be turned back to the palace, and entering he said: 「Emperor, if you should command me to undergo death, I am ready; but the work which you enjoin I cannot fulfil.」 And when he had informed him fully about the woman, he restrained the madness of the emperor. At that same time the church, as if refined by the fire of persecution, shone brighter than the metal of gold. For the faith of each one was proved not in words, but in exiles and prisons, because to be a catholic was not for honour but for punishment—especially at Alexandria, where the faithful had not even free liberty to bury the bodies of their dead.

While Lucius was carrying on these things with all arrogance and savagery, Mauvia, queen of the nation of the Saracens, began with a vehement war to shake the towns and cities of the Palestinian and Arabian frontier and at the same time to lay waste the neighbouring provinces; and when by frequent battles she had worn down the Roman army and, having slain very many, had put the rest to flight, she promised that she would embrace peace on no other terms than that a certain monk named Moses should be ordained bishop for her nation. He had become gloriously famous for the powers and signs which God worked through him. His request, being made known to the Roman emperor, is ordered to be fulfilled without any delay by our commanders, who had there fought unsuccessfully.

Moses, being captured, is led to Alexandria to receive the priesthood, according to custom. Lucius is present, to whom the office of ordaining was assigned. When he saw this, Moses, in the presence of the commanders who were pressing him and of the people, said: 「I indeed judge myself not to be worthy of so great a priesthood; yet nevertheless, if any divine dispensation is thought to be fulfilled in me, unworthy though I am, I call to witness our God, the Lord of heaven and earth, that Lucius shall not lay upon me hands polluted and bloodied with the blood of the saints.」 And when Lucius saw himself branded with so grave a mark in the eyes of very many, he said: 「Why, O Moses, do you so easily condemn one whose faith you do not know? Or if anyone has told you otherwise about me, hear my faith, and trust yourself rather than others.」

Then he said: 「Cease, O Lucius, to assail me too with your deceitful pretences; your faith is well known to me, which the servants of God condemned to the mines bear witness to, and the bishops thrust into exile, the presbyters and deacons banished outside the dwellings of the Christian name, some given over to the beasts, others even to the fires. Can a faith that is grasped by the ears be truer than one that is seen through with the eyes? With me it is certain that those who rightly believe in Christ do not do such things.」 And so, disfigured with the greater dishonour, since the necessity of consulting for the commonwealth pressed hard, he was compelled to consent that Moses should receive the priesthood from the bishops whom he had thrust into exile.

Having received it, he both kept the peace of the most ferocious nation and guarded the catholic faith undefiled. But when at Alexandria the foul mist of the treachery of a benighted teacher was overspreading the peoples and the city, the Lord kindled Didymus, like a certain lamp shining with divine light. Concerning his life and training, since he is believed to have been granted to the glory of the church by God's gift, it seems necessary to us that a few things be recorded, even if in passing. For he, at a tender age, while as yet he was ignorant even of the first elements of letters, having been deprived of his eyes, was inflamed with a greater desire for the knowledge of the true light; nor did he suffer despair of attaining what he longed for, since he had heard it written in the Gospel:

「What is impossible with men is possible with God.」 Trusting therefore in this divine promise, he prayed unceasingly to the Lord, not that he might receive the sight of his fleshly eyes, but that he might receive the illumination of his heart. Yet he mingled with his prayers zeal and labour, and applied continual and unbroken vigils, not to reading, but to hearing, so that what sight conferred on others, hearing might confer on him.

But when, after the labour of study by lamplight, sleep, as usually happens, came upon those who were reading, Didymus, not reckoning that silence to be given for rest or leisure, like a clean animal ruminating, recalled anew the food that he had taken, and re-wove in memory and mind those things which he had a little before learned from the reading of books as others hurried through them, so that he seemed not so much to have heard what had been read as to have written it upon the pages of his mind.

Thus in a short time, under God's teaching, he came to so great a learning and knowledge of things divine and human that he stood forth as a teacher of the ecclesiastical school, highly approved by bishop Athanasius and the other men wise in the church of God; but also in the other disciplines, whether of dialectic or of geometry, of astronomy too or of arithmetic, he was so well prepared that no philosopher ever, propounding anything from these arts, was able to prevail over him or to corner him; rather, as soon as they received his answers, they believed him to be a master even of that discipline about which they had propounded.

Some of his sayings, whether disputed in common or given as answers to those who propounded questions, they wrote down with the aid of shorthand-writers who were employed, which even now are held in great admiration. Yet we, who were in some part hearers of his living voice, and have read those things which were written down by certain persons as he spoke, recognised a far greater grace and something divine, I know not what, sounding above the human voice, rather in those discourses which were uttered from his own mouth. This man also, when the Arians had come down from the Thebaid to Alexandria, [Athanasius] consoled with magnificent words:

「Let nothing offend you, O Didymus, that you seem to be bereft of your fleshly eyes; for you lack those eyes which mice and flies and lizards have; but rejoice, because you have eyes such as the angels have, by which God is seen, through which a great light of knowledge is kindled for you.」 Egypt therefore flourished at that season not only with men learned in the Christian philosophy, but also with those who, dwelling throughout the vast desert, wrought signs and prodigies with apostolic simplicity of life and sincerity of heart. Of these, meanwhile, those whom we ourselves saw and by whose blessing hands we were counted worthy [to be blessed], are these: Macarius of the upper desert; Macarius, and the rest:

(See concerning the monks and their dwellings what Tillemont has collected, and the Lausiac history of Palladius, Cambridge 1898, and the things there praised) and another Macarius of the lower [desert]; Isidore in the Scete; Pambo in the Cells; Moses and Benjamin in Nitria; Scyrion and Elias and Paul in Apeliotes; another Paul in Phocis; Poemen and Joseph in Pispir, which was called the mountain of Antony; but we also learned by faithful hearing that very many others of this kind of men dwelt in the parts of Egypt, so that the saying of the apostle was truly fulfilled: 「Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.」 Moreover at that same time Mesopotamia too had noble men excelling in the same pursuits.

Some of these we ourselves saw with our own eyes at Edessa and in the parts of Carrhae, but of more we learned by hearing. But neither of these two [regions] was Cappadocia less fruitful; nay, it germinated for us something more joyful in Gregory together with Basil. It too therefore bore a very joyful harvest of many saints, produced an abundant vineyard of the pious, and germinated also a young shoot of the Lord's olive-trees. But these two especially, standing like two sons of fatness at the right and left of the lampstand, shone like two luminaries of heaven; whence I think it worthy to repeat above a few things about them. Both were noble, both educated at Athens, both fellow-students, both, having departed from the lecture-hall, were asked to profess rhetoric.

This work Basil indeed fulfilled magnificently, but Gregory more magnificently despised. And Gregory, when he had wholly devoted himself to the service of God, presumed so much upon the love of his colleague that he took Basil down as he sat from the teacher's chair and, laying hand upon him, led him with himself to the monastery; and there for thirteen years, as they say, having put away all the books of the secular Greeks, they devoted their labour solely to the volumes of divine Scripture, and pursued the understanding of them not from their own presumption, but from the writings and authority of their elders, whom it was agreed had themselves received the rule of understanding from the apostolic succession.

Especially discussing the commentaries on the prophets, they searched out the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden in earthen vessels. But when now, being sufficiently instructed, they were by divine dispensation called to imbue the peoples, and each was drawn by a different road, yet both to the same work, Basil, going about the cities and country of Pontus, began to stir up by words and to kindle by preaching the sluggish minds of that people, so little anxious about future hope, and to abolish from them the callus of long neglect; and, casting away the cares of empty and secular things, he brought them to recover the knowledge of themselves.

He taught them to come together into one, to build monasteries, to give themselves to psalms and hymns and prayers, to take care of the poor and to provide for them honourable dwellings and what is necessary for sustenance, to instruct virgins, and to make a chaste and pure life desirable to almost all. Thus in a short time the face of the whole province was so changed that in a dry and squalid field there seemed to have arisen a fertile crop and a joyful vineyard. But Gregory did not suffer the good seed either to lie upon thorns or to be scattered among rocks, but cultivated the good soil of his own heart with constant tillage and unceasing exercises, and profited far more in himself than the other in the rest.

The one took care to receive the things which those renouncing the world laid at his feet, and to distribute them as each had need; the other, content with the sacrament of having nothing and possessing all things, clung greedy and very desirous only toward the riches of divine wisdom. The one taught that many should come together into one and have care for one another in their necessities; the other, by his own example, being free and unbound, preached to all in the apostolic word: 「But I would have you to be without care; and the Lord is at hand; be anxious for nothing, but as servants of Christ, be anxious for this alone, when the Lord returns from the wedding.」

The one, to have mercy and to grieve with those who fell, and to call them back from their fault; the other, through the grace of the divine eloquence, to forestall the incitements of sinning and not to allow him who once dashed down was hard to raise up to slip. The one pure in faith, the other freer in preaching. The one humble to God, the other even to men. The one overcame the arrogant by contempt, the other by reason. Thus in each of them a diverse grace fulfilled one work of perfection. Therefore Basil, not long after being made bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, when he was being forced into exile by Valens for the faith, was brought before the tribunal of the prefect and began to be dealt with by terrors, as is the manner of that power, and by the greatest threats, and, unless he obeyed the emperor's commands, to expect destruction hanging over him at any moment.

Then he, undaunted and without any perturbation of mind, is reported to have answered the prefect who was threatening him these things: 「Would that I had something of a worthy gift, which I might offer!」 And when the night, which was midway [i.e. the middle of the night], was granted to him for a space of deliberating, he is again reported to have answered: 「I shall be tomorrow the very same as I am now; would that you were not changed!」 And on that night indeed the emperor's wife was tortured as though handed over to torturers, while his son, who was their only one, being cut off, is believed to have paid the penalties of his father's impiety. So before dawn men were sent to beg Basil to intercede with his prayers for them, lest they too—and indeed much more justly—should likewise perish.

So it came to pass that, though Valens expelled all the catholics, Basil endured in the church until the end of his life with the sacrament of communion undefiled. But Gregory, appointed bishop at the town of Nazianzus in place of his father, faithfully bore the whirlwind of the heretics. When peace had been restored, being entreated to come to Constantinople to teach the church, he did not refuse. There in a short time he so profited toward amending the people, infected with the ancient poisons of the heretics, that then for the first time they seemed to themselves to become Christians and to behold the new light of truth, since the teacher of religion taught much indeed by words, but more by examples, nor did his disciples see anything commanded by him which he had not first done himself.

But when envy followed upon his glory, certain men began to resist and to use less wholesome pretexts, so that, upon his returning to his own [see], another should be ordained bishop. He, perceiving that this was only being whispered and, as it were, chewed over under the teeth, himself brought forth what no one dared say to him: 「Far be it,」 he said, 「that on my account any strife should arise among the priests of God. If this storm is on account of me, take me up and cast me into the sea, and the tossing will cease from you.」 Then, having returned to his own church, he spent what remained of the time of his life; and since he was now worn with age and weak in body, he himself chose a successor for himself, so that, with him governing the church, he might enjoy the leisure of infirmity and old age.

There survive also magnificent monuments of the genius of both men in the treatises which they used to deliver extempore in the churches. From these we have rendered into Latin roughly ten short discourses of each, and besides these the Rule of the Monks by Basil, hoping, if we are able and if God's favour assists us, to translate more of their works. Basil had moreover two brothers, Gregory and Peter, of whom the one in the word of doctrine, the other in the works of faith so equalled their brother that each of them reproduced either Basil or Gregory. There survive also several brilliant little works of Gregory the younger himself. But of these enough has been said.

In the western regions Valentinian, unimpaired in the faith of religion, governed the commonwealth with the ancient discipline of the Roman empire. Damasus, after Liberius, had by succession received the priesthood in the city of Rome. A certain Ursinus, a deacon of that same church, unable to bear that Damasus was preferred before him, broke out into such a frenzy that, having won over a certain quite unskilled and boorish bishop and gathered a band of troublemakers and seditious men, in the basilica which is called Sicininus he extorted his own ordination as bishop, in defiance of law, order, and tradition. From this deed so great a sedition, nay rather so great warfare arose, with the populace defending one side or the other, that the places of prayer were filled with human blood.

This affair, through the faction of Maximinus the prefect, a savage man, was turned into malice against the good and innocent bishop, so that the case was carried even to the torturing of clerics. But God, the champion of innocence, was present, and turned it back upon the heads of those who had aimed at it. Meanwhile, upon the death at Milan of Auxentius, bishop of the heretics, the people of both parties were carried along by opposing zeal. A grave dissension and dangerous sedition was preparing an early destruction for the city itself, if each party, since it desired something different, should in no way obtain what it had proposed. Ambrose at that time, as consular, governed the fasces of that province. When he saw ruin threatening the city, in accordance with his station and office he at once entered the church to calm the sedition of the people.

And when he had there discoursed at length, according to the laws and public discipline, for quiet and tranquillity, suddenly from the people fighting among themselves and at variance a single shout and voice arose, demanding Ambrose as bishop: they cried out that he should be baptized at once—for he was a catechumen—and given to them as bishop, and that there would be no one people and one faith otherwise, unless Ambrose were given them as priest. Though he struggled and resisted with all his might, the people's desire, having been reported to the emperor, was ordered to be fulfilled with all speed. For it was of God, he said, that a sudden conversion should recall the people's discordant faith and dissident spirits back into one accord and one mind.

And soon, having obtained the grace of God and been initiated into the sacred rites, he was made priest. Meanwhile, when Valentinian had come from the parts of Gaul into Illyricum for the Sarmatian war, there, the war scarcely begun, overcome by a sudden illness he met his end, leaving as heirs in the empire his sons Gratian Augustus and Valentinian, quite a small child and not yet invested with the royal insignia. Yet the necessity imposed by those who were attempting to seize the seemingly vacant place of empire compelled him, even in his brother's absence, to be clothed in the purple, Probus at that time [being present]. About the same time in the eastern realm the nation of the Goths, driven from their own abodes, poured itself through all the provinces of Thrace, and began savagely with arms to lay waste the cities and fields.

Then indeed the wars which Valens was waging against the churches began to be turned against the enemy, and with belated penitence he ordered bishops and presbyters to be released from exile and monks to be freed from the mines. Yet he himself, surrounded by the enemy, in an estate to which in terror he had fled from the battle, paid the penalty for his impiety, burnt up by fire, having reigned fourteen years in all—first with his brother, and afterwards with his brother's sons. That battle was the beginning of evil for the Roman empire then and thereafter. So then Gratian, together with his quite young brother, after the killing of his uncle took up also the empire of the East. In piety and religion he surpassed almost all the princes who had been before him.

He was vigorous in the use of arms, swift of body and of good disposition, but by youthful exuberance he was somewhat more cheerful than was fitting, and more modest than was expedient for the commonwealth. And seeing that it was useful to have as partner in the so great cares of the realm a man mature in years, and because, as the divine word admonishes, two are better than one, he took Theodosius as his colleague, and, having entrusted to him the administration of the East, reserved for himself and his brother the western parts.

But he, after he had accomplished many things devoutly and bravely, was slain—by the tyrant Maximus, who had risen up in Britain, through his general Andragathius at Lyons—more by the treachery of his own men than by force. But Valentinian, dwelling in Italy, terrified by his brother's murder and by fear of the enemy, feigning to accept the peace offered by Maximus, himself also, a nursling of heresy, confidently opened up to his easily deceived son the poisons of his impiety, which while her husband lived she had suppressed. And so, established at Milan, [she began] to throw the state of the churches into confusion, to threaten the priests with the exile of banishment, unless they should recall the decrees of the Council of Ariminum, by which the faith of the fathers had been violated.

In this war she battered the wall and most valiant tower of the church, namely Ambrose, and wearying him with threats, terrors, and every kind of assault, she first sought a way to overthrow the church. But although that Jezebel fought armed with her spirit, Ambrose nevertheless resisted, filled with the virtue and grace of Elijah. She herself, meanwhile, in the churches would chatter, make an uproar, rouse and inflame the peoples to discord; but because the matter fell out less according to her wish, she reckoned it an injury and complained of it to her son. Whence the young lad, inflamed on account of the resentment at an insult which his mother had falsely forged, sent a band of armed men to the church, and ordered the doors to be broken down, the holy things assaulted, the priest dragged off and immediately driven into exile.

But so great was the perseverance of the faithful peoples that they would sooner give up their lives. Then [the command] was given to Benivolus, who at that time presided over the record-office of the memoranda. But he, to whom the sacred faith had been holy and venerable from the cradle, refused that he could utter impious words and speak against God. Then indeed, lest the queen's undertaking should seem to be in vain, a loftier honour was promised him if he should fulfil what was enjoined. He, who desired to be nobler in faith than in honours, said: 'What loftier rank do you promise me as the reward of impiety?'

'Take away even this very rank which I hold, only let the conscience of my faith remain to me unimpaired.' Saying this, he cast his belt down before the feet of those who impiously commanded him. Ambrose, however, defended himself against the queen's fury neither by hand nor by weapon, but, placed beneath the altar in fastings and continual vigils, he prepared for himself and for the church, through supplications, God as his defender. And when Justina had for a long time and to no purpose contrived these things by diverse engines and assaults, Maximus, who longed to strip off the infamy of a tyrant and to show himself a lawful prince, by a letter that he sent protested against the impious undertaking, [declaring] that the faith of God was being assailed and the statutes of the catholic church subverted; and meanwhile he began to approach Italy.

When Justina had learned of this, with the enemy at hand and the consciousness of her impiety pressing hard upon her, she was turned to flight with her son—the first to suffer those exiles which she was preparing for the priests of God. Yet Theodosius was at hand, mindful, for the sake of the loyalty of the realm, of the goodness and benefits of Gratian, and rising up with all the forces of the East for vengeance, he avenged the just blood; and, the impious mother Valentinian having died meanwhile, he restored the catholic faith which she herself had violated, and, the tyranny being cast down, the kingdom. And he himself, after he had been carried into Rome in an illustrious triumph, returned again to his own realms. About the same time, through a certain stealthy suggestion of the demon, a foul stain was burnt into the religious prince.

For when at Thessalonica a sedition had broken out and a certain man of the soldiery had been killed by the onrush of the raging populace, [the emperor,] inflamed by the atrocity of the sudden news, ordered the people to be invited to the games of the circus, and the soldiers to be suddenly poured around them and to cut down indiscriminately with the sword whoever met them, and to give vengeance not to justice but to fury. On this account, when he was reproved by the priests of Italy, he acknowledged the crime, and confessing his guilt with tears, he performed public penance in the sight of the whole church, and the time appointed for him in this he patiently fulfilled, without royal disdain. To all these things he added also this marvellously:

he sanctioned by law that thereafter the sentences of princes concerning capital punishment should not take effect for [thirty days], so that room might be left for mercy or, if the case should warrant it, for penitence. Then, having returned to the East, there, as from the beginning of his reign, with the utmost care and utmost zeal he set about, the heretics being expelled, to hand over the churches to the catholics, and to do this with such moderation that, vengeance being scorned, he took thought only for the catholics regarding the restoration of the churches, in order that the right faith might advance without hindrance to its preaching; and he showed himself common toward the priests of God, exhibiting toward all a royal spirit in faith, religion, and munificence.

Easy of access and without imperial pomp, he offered himself to converse with the humble. At his exhortation and by his largesses churches were adorned in very many places and built quite magnificently; he granted much to those who asked, but more often offered it unbidden. The worship of idols, which from Constantine's institution and thereafter had begun to be neglected and destroyed, collapsed under his reign. For these things he was so dear to God that divine providence conferred on him a special gift. [It happened that] there was a count, an illustrious man, by name Butterichus, for whose ill-starred murder the whole city conspired, so that his death should be avenged by the ruin of the city; for this deed was committed on account of a charioteer who had violated his servant.

[Divine providence,] indeed, in the regions of the Thebaid filled with a prophetic spirit a certain monk named John, by whose admonitions and answers [the emperor] would inquire whether it were better to keep peace or to wage war. Meanwhile at Laodicea in Syria, before that time, Apollinaris the bishop—a man indeed well instructed in other respects, but while he was carried too far by the vice of contentiousness and delighted to go in opposition to everything that anyone had said, and, in the boasting of his own talent, ill-strong—begot a heresy out of contention, asserting that only the body, and not also the soul, had been assumed by the Lord in the dispensation.

And when he was pressed on this by the evident testimonies of the Gospel, in which the Lord and Saviour himself professes that he has a soul and lays it down when he wills and again takes it up, and which he says is troubled and sorrowful even unto death, he then shifted his ground, and lest he should seem to be wholly vanquished, he said that Christ had indeed had a soul, but not in that part in which it is rational, but only in that part in which it gives life to the body. And for the supplement of the rational part he alleged that the very Word of God had been [present].

This assertion was first repelled in the city of Rome by Damasus and Peter, bishop of Alexandria, in an assembled council, with this decree: that if anyone should say that the Son of God—who, just as he was truly God, so also was truly man—had had anything less either of humanity or of deity, he should be judged an alien from the church. This sentence was also confirmed at Alexandria and at Constantinople by decree of a council. From that time the Apollinarians, turning aside from the church, defend for themselves both bishops of their own party and their own dogmas and churches. So then in the city of Rome, after Damasus, Siricius received the priesthood of the church.

At Alexandria, after the death of Peter, Timothy, and after him Theophilus; and in Jerusalem, after Cyril, John, restored the apostolic sees. At Antioch, after the death of Meletius, Flavian was substituted; but because Paulinus still survived, who had always remained in the fellowship of the catholics, many quarrels and many controversies were often stirred up there, and yet, though some strained with the utmost force and others resisted, and though the very elements of earth and sea were wearied in this, no measure of peace could ever be obtained—though indeed there now seemed to be no discord underlying the faith. This same thing occurred at Tyre.