with which apostle we shall not be able to render abundant praises to God in the heavenly kingdoms, unless first, death being vanquished, we come to take up the immortal rewards. Therefore, when through you our bodies shall have been scattered and utterly dissolved, then let us presume that we are most whole; when through you death shall have been inflicted, then we believe that we are the more able to live. How do you still presume, Constantius, emperor meanwhile most tasteless of all, to heap up those things which would extinguish you, but on the contrary bring us to life? You are roused by evil and depraved counsel to extinguish us, you are made swift to pour out the blood of the servants of God's sole-begotten Son, ignorant that by our blood heaven is opened, by our blood the fire of Gehenna is extinguished.
Worldly ambition drives you, but heavenly greatness admonishes us, who fear to lose eternal salvation. We know that we ought to die for God; for just as everlasting fire will hold you fast in Tartarus, unless you make your passage from the camp of the devil to the army set in the heavenly camp, so we, if scorning your threats and your torments we choose rather to be butchered by you, that most savage beast and monstrous brute, for the sake of the Son of God, shall be rejoicing in heaven. For 'blessed are they who suffer persecution for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven'; and He did not say: 'Blessed are they who inflict persecution.'
We Christians know that we were made soldiers of Christ for this end: that on the battlefield of the unjust war you have declared, having confessed our Commander, we might die in arms so as to seize the triumphs of victory. Hence the more savage you appear to us, the more merciful you seem, when you deign to slay one who confesses himself a Christian. But in this very thing you are judged most wicked: that under the guise of affection and of one desiring to give counsel you flatter us in order to cast us down, as though it were profitable for us to be spared by you once thrust from our rank, yet be condemned by God. We know that you are afraid lest, amid all these punishments devised by your abominableness, we should die in this perseverance of the faith; and yet you apply your varied and cruel torments.
Thus us, whom you persecute so hatefully, you desire to have mangled in various ways, and indeed at every moment; yet you have determined that we are not to be put to death, as though death alone made the soldiers of Christ blessed, and not rather the torments too, which the graver they are, bring forth the greater glory of virtue. For we who know that the life of righteousness is more abundant and more enduring do not turn our backs on this battlefield, we make no passage over to your camp, O enemy of God; but rather, set amid these destructions brought upon us by you, we long to be presented to the sheepfold of God, from which the devil possesses you as one snatched away. And yet I say these things not that you should spare us;
for you will find that we are Christians, just as those whom you have already slain you found steadfast in the faith, patient in pain, victorious under interrogation, through Him, that is, who does not forsake His confessors; and we, acknowledging ourselves His soldiers, as you perceive, engage bravely and contend steadfastly. For we know it to be a great splendour, an immense sublimity, and a truly singular thing...
...to adorn the life of eternal salvation with the honour of suffering. It is the greatest nobility to despise the torments of your power and not to honour it, to trample upon you and not to dread your fury—you who rage so ravenously against the innocent, who, though you are a teacher of blasphemy and injustice and every cruelty, yet suppose that you can be seen as a Christian, godly, prudent, and just, being blind and dull and ignorant of the truth. Take note, devourer of the innocent: he in whom Christ keeps watch cannot be overcome by your torments. He conquers hunger, spurns thirst, subdues by the vigour of his own strength the squalor of the prison and the horror of the place of punishment, tramples on every penalty, crushes all tortures, and does not fear the death which you threaten with great effort to inflict.
Do you imagine that you overcome him who remembers what is written: 'What shall I render to the Lord for all that He has rendered to me? I will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints'; and: 'Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written: For Thy sake we are put to death all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter. But in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.' I simply cannot see what of yours could tear us away from these saving precepts.
For although you do not cease, in your impious way, to promote by every office of yours those who consent to your depravity in order to allure us—such as Epictetus and the rest, whom out of servants of God you have made your own and satellites of your father—yet far be it from us to fall into this madness of preferring the false to the true, or of being enticed by any felicity of your kingdom offered through you. Keep your empty glory to yourself, and retain to yourself all the prudence of your most stupid heart, and to your peers whom likeness of morals has joined to you; leave us our folly, since we confess Christ the Son of God to be the true Son, since we maintain that He is of one substance with the Father, since we profess that we desire to be slain for His sake, that we may not deny His divinity.
leave us folly of this kind. Why do you take pains that we should lose it? Why do you think that the truth can be assailed by you, not knowing that it prevails by its own power? For whence do you behold the people of God resisting with unconquered virtue against your fierce roarings and your harsh tortures, save because this is the apostolic and evangelical faith which we defend? These resist your cruelty, these trample your fury, whose hope is of eternal immortality and heavenly life, whose ardour is kindled into a longing for perpetual light, and whose salvation rejoices in the promised blessedness.
So confidently indeed do we, knowing that we shall come to the enjoyment of eternal life, endure all things gladly, since we declare that we think not on our own torments but on your executioner's cruelties. We Christians balance the losses of our bodies against the gains of the soul; we reckon a crown in our wounds; from the torments and pains inflicted by you we, most joyful, triumph in Christ. Recall, Constantius, from the recent memory of your crimes, what you branded upon yourself in the city of the Alexandrians: how many the single stroke of your signature cast headlong over the precipices, how many you caused to be mown down by the sword, how many to be consumed by hunger and thirst or killed in prison, how many, their breath cut off, you caused to be strangled;
and yet, when you have raged with all these cruelties against the holy martyrs whom your gladiatorial spirit has slain, you rage more cruelly against us, in that you hold back the sword, in that you take pains lest the swifter issue of death should come to our relief. We suffer to be torn in our whole body and to be burned, proving that nothing befits the gravity and constancy of the wise so well as to be driven from one's judgment and purpose by no terrors, but that it is most useful to be tortured for God, and that those consecrated to God cannot be made to die, cannot be overcome by perpetual torments, but that rather you are laid low and brought to nothing. Receive what is set down in the twenty-sixth psalm: 'The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the defender of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?'
'When the wicked draw near against me to eat my flesh, my enemies who trouble me, they themselves are weakened and have fallen. Though a camp should stand against me, my heart shall not fear; though a battle should rise up against me, in this will I hope. One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of God all the days of my life.' Since, therefore, the virtue of righteousness is perfected in these sufferings, since—because Christ suffers in us—we do not even feel the torment (for the reason that where guilt is absent there is no penalty either), how did you suppose that by these means you could overcome men dedicated and devoted to God, to whom faith supplies unconquered increases of virtue?
I believe indeed—nor does the truth deceive me—that although you still bend to your butchery with all your might, so as to tear apart our limbs and, raging, for a long time to plough up our mangled joints into our blood, you can nevertheless never overcome the family of God, never can you prevail to conquer the army of Christ, nor subject it to pains, nor bend it by anguishing punishments. We Christians refuse no tortures, no death; we cannot tremble at your tyrannical commands, nor at the swords of your judges, because, armed with the sword of God, we resist you. The blessed apostle says, moreover, to the Ephesians: 'Be strengthened in the Lord and in the might of His power.'
'Put on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil; for our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness.' Since you, through whom all the demons rage for our destruction, cannot overcome those clad in the armour of God, we at last exhort you: surrender yourself to us, lest with those whom the apostle describes you be tortured for all ages. Thus the sons of the darkness of your prison cannot be overcome by the son of darkness from the light, as though those in whom He who is the Author of light deigns to dwell could feel darkness. Virtue must of necessity bear what mortal nature has taught must be borne;
for if you attempt to consume our limbs with fire, we shall feel that you rather are burned into our bodies than we, who, since we run to death for the faith willingly and readily, presume that we do not lose our life but rather gain it, and indeed, after this frail one, an eternal one. The edge of your sword ever stands drawn, ready for the slaughter of Christians; and yet this point of your sword seems to us harsher than any lead, just as does the edge of your soul. We endure all things secure in our suffering, as though we heaped up the punishments we suffer, since he who through you rages against us is laid low by our faith.
For we know that we cannot be destroyed by death, inflicted for everlasting malignity, we who have believed in Christ, the bestower of eternal life, the only true Son of God; but, believing, we are also rightly presuming that even our bodies shall rise again unto the light and unto eternal life—those bodies which you now burn, torture, and tear. For if, after we are slain by you, we knew that we should be nothing in the future, surely we should be most foolish in not taking counsel for this present life, that it might be as long as possible and full of all comforts; which could have befallen us, had we thought it right to yield to you rather than to the decrees of God.
And now, since—if the present life be taken away by you—an immortal one is received, it is necessary that His servants despise this present life together with its goods for the sake of the Son of God, seeing that every loss of this kind is compensated by immortality. Take note, Constantius, of how great was the virtue, how great the strength of soul, of what kind was the firmness of faith, of those whom you have slain, and is the firmness of these who still resist your sacrilege: that those blessed martyrs, whom we now behold established by the power of God in the heavenly kingdom, stood firm,
or these whom you have not yet been able to slay, against you, the monstrous beast, who do not cease threatening us with things speakable and unspeakable, since you have ever been, and are, one who far more readily desires to hear that rival princes rise up against you than that those confessing Christ the Son of God stand forth as victors. For it had pleased your heart, besieged by the darkness of all errors, and your mind, blinded by deep gloom, to convert us all away from God through your heresy—first to make us your clients, then your fellow-satellites. But the truth, which He who contrived to devise these things had labored against, has conquered both you and that very one in you; for it prevails by its own power. We are, in short, waiting at every moment for these torments which you have already inflicted;
you may still add, by appointing them, more savage executioners, more ferocious avengers, who might be able—against the soldiers devoted to God who resist your deadly edicts, that by the vigour of faith through God's mercy we may trample down threats and tortures and torments—either to attack us with the sword, or to crucify, or to roast with fire, or by any unheard-of kind of punishment to tear our entrails and limbs; yet even now we stand immovable through the Lord, and shall stand forever, since it is not we who conquer your gnashings, but He Himself in us, by whose aid we are governed, by whose power we are preserved. For how great are you, or of what sort, that you could despoil us of these goods which have been conferred on us from heaven?
You seize us, make us destitute, condemn us, bind us, burn us, and slay us even in wretched ways, and yet you cannot conquer the unconquered faith of Christians. By this you ought to have understood the deed done: that both you shall receive the punishments of your error and cruelty, and, on the other hand, that we—because through this difficulty set before us the narrowest path leads loftily to the reward of immortality—shall not be able to yield to your cruelty, we who know that martyrdom is a singular imitation of the Lord's fortitude. Full enough of labour and difficulty, and steep, is the martyrs' way, so that no one could accomplish it by human strength; but we who are helped by the aid of divine support must trample you down always, as we trample you now.
Hence it is that it has pleased us not only not to fear you, the adversary of the religion of God, but even of our own accord to provoke you. You are provoked, since you are always looked to, unmerciful one, not that you may show mercy, but that you may kill. Hence it is that our felicity cannot admit division, because, even when we are killed for the Son of God, He Himself lives in love within us—He who in oppression is our incitement, and in the battles of persecutions our fortitude. For by whatever means you may exert yourself against the worshippers of God, you can never empty out the virtue that is sealed within them, seeing that worldly things do not entice them, nor do torments terrify them.
Since these things are so, what else shall I call you, the persecutor of God's house, than wretched—you who obey the instigations of your plundering demons, by whose goadings, being driven, you have contrived to perpetrate these things, through whom, with sacrilegious persuasion clinging to your heart, you gladly stray? Indulge the folly innate in you. And would that you were willing to err and rave in company only with your fellow-blasphemers the Arians! But you attempt to seize us too into the fellowship of your evils; you proscribe us, you despoil us; yet we know that poverty sought for Christ's sake is a kind of the greatest felicity. You inflict death, O executioner; but we not only do not draw back our neck, but even offer it, that we may be slain for the sake of God's only Son. To what end have I recounted these things?
That you might know your punishments have no power against the servants of Christ, and that we cannot be terrified by that which we always expect to come. You take it ill that you should be called a heretic, and yet you dare to say that the Son cannot be compared or made equal to the Father; whereas we who defend one deity of the Father and the Son say the Son is equal to the Father, we believe it, as the blessed apostle Paul believed, who says of the Son: 'Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.' What is 'who, being in the form of God'? Nothing other than that He is the Son, just as God the Father is: unchangeable, unconvertible, inestimable, ineffable, eternal, perfect. What is 'who, being in the form of God'?
Nothing other than that the Son inhabits that very inaccessible light which the Father also inhabits, than that there is one divine sublimity of the Father and the Son. The Holy Spirit, remaining in the blessed apostle, beholding already then all your hearts, you heretics, added an interpretation of what it is for the Son to be in the form of God: 'Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God.' The blessed apostle says the Son is equal to the Father, making manifest one deity of the Father and the Son; and you dare, with the satellites of your sacrilegious audacity and the partners of your sacrilege, to say: 'For we cannot equate or compare the Son to the Father.' Or why do you suppose the Lord said: 'He who has seen me has seen the Father also,' and:
'I and the Father are one,' if not because there is one power of the Father and the Son? You say the Son has a beginning; but we say He is without beginning, since everything that has a beginning must of necessity be able to have an end also. Therefore, since we believe the only Son of God to be eternal, that is, coeternal with the Father, and you enemies of God deny it, do we not most rightly call you madmen, and, glutted with all senselessness, sons of pestilence? Concerning whom the blessed apostle cries out, as then concerning the Jews: 'And as they did not approve of having God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting'; and to the Philippians: 'Be imitators of me, brethren, and observe those who so walk, as you have our example.'
'For many walk, of whom I have often told you, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things'; and to Timothy, concerning you, Constantius, and your dearly beloved fellow-perishers: 'Now the Spirit manifestly says that in the last times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons, in the hypocrisy of those speaking lies, having their conscience seared.' The Holy Spirit still strikes and slays you through the mouth of the same blessed apostle Paul: 'In the last days perilous times shall come.'
'For men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, proud, disdainful, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked, without affection, without faith, slanderers, incontinent, unmerciful, without kindness, traitors, insolent, puffed up, lovers of pleasures more than of God, having a form of godliness but denying the truth thereof; and these avoid'; and further on: 'And as Jannes and Mambres resisted Moses, so these also resist the truth, men corrupt in mind, reprobate concerning the faith; but they shall proceed no further, for their folly shall be manifest to all, as also theirs was'; and further on:
'The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but, itching in their ears, will heap to themselves teachers according to their own desires, and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.' You, deserting the apostolic faith and turned to fables—your word is such that it can creep like a cancer—although the Holy Spirit has foretold it through the mouth of the apostle, you call catholics 'erratics,' and a little later you call blasphemy that very thing which you were calling catholic, and which you were compelling us to accept. Likewise, a little later, that which you had just established at Antioch, acting against Adoxius, to have been blasphemy, you now again confirm as catholic: whence you decreed that Adoxius should be at Constantinople, because you approved him as catholic.
Know therefore from this very thing how great is the difference between the true and the false, when you yourself, though you are—as it seems to you—skilled, and possess an appointed number of orators, can nevertheless persuade none, we observe, except those who feared your butchery; whereas we, for whom nature suffices for speaking, strangers to all knowledge of pagan letters, are able to destroy every heresy, because the matter itself and the truth speak. You and your helpers have increased the full art of pagan letters; we only know the sacred letters. Our speech is common, yours by contrast polished and adorned, such as may even be called eloquent; and yet: your speech, sweet in persuading, sought out through art, can persuade no one!
It can persuade no one of the Christians, except him who is not, but is only called, a Christian—like you, who, though you are a wolf, may be judged by the ignorant to be one of the sheep. Who is so witless, save you who have drained all madness? Who among God's servants is there who would not wish to be honoured by death in the obedience of devotion? Who is there who is not desirous to shed the gore of his own blood for Christ, since a death of this kind makes life more whole and finds eternal glory? We stand, as you perceive, protected by the virtue of God, shod with the precepts of the Gospel, our step fixed and immovable, so that our footprints cannot be swept away by you into headlong ruin. We stand holding the shield of faith, so that the smoking darts hurled by you from the enemy cannot at all take hold, seeing that they are ever driven back against you.
Our heads are fortified with the helmet of salvation; the word of the Lord is in our mouth, so that the enemy lodged in you may be struck down by the spiritual sword, laid low, and likewise scattered. You will perceive that the holy faith which you were compelling us to cast away is our soul's buckler, strong and impenetrable, and a woven breastplate, which no darts of the devil brought by you can pierce through. Beholding so great a perseverance of Christians, you say: 'The Arian dogma, once undertaken by me, must be defended even by me'; you say such things, erring with an upright will. For you feel that there is nothing among human affairs more excellent than religion, and that it ought to be defended with the utmost force;
you defend it with the sword, but we know that religion is to be defended not by killing, but by dying for God and by enduring all these evils which you inflict. Defending religion by such a kind, what shall your cruelty be able to conquer? For if any of your soldiers, in this frail service of your rule, being mortal, keeps faith with you, a mortal, in some notable deed, he becomes both more acceptable and more dear; if he perishes in your service, an empty man, he attains the highest glory, because he died for you, his commander. How much more must faith be kept by us, the soldiers of His clemency, for God, the eternal Emperor. Since the undertaken office of devotion compels us to do these things, you, because you are blind, refuse to believe the true Christ
to be God, the Son of the true God, by not believing so; because you are simply unhappy, in that you have by no means escaped the darkness of eternal death, you wished us also to return to the old blindness, so that we might seem to have lost prudence together with the light, not simply but detestably. For while we recognize that there is one condemnation of death for you, because you refuse to believe, and that the evil would be doubled for us, if, having cast off our belief, we should choose to return to destruction—how did you presume that we could be separated from the love of God by your false compliances (which the more they entice, the more they slay), or by all kinds of cruel torments? Who would spurn so great a felicity offered to him, save one who is more unhappy than you?
when he sees that by the confession of one voice, 'I am a Christian,' adversities succumb, joyful things come forth, kingdoms are laid open, eternal empires are prepared? You say: 'Deny the Son of God, or the power of my kingdom will slay you.' How much better it is to be slain by the enemy of Christ than by Christ! How best it is to be slaughtered by you, the friend of antichrist, and to be given life by Christ! Who would not wish to be found a partaker and companion of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and all the just, rather than of Judas, whose imitator you have shown yourself to be? John the Baptist was punished in prison through your pestilential Herod; the savagery of Herod slew James; the apostle John was banished to an island; the blessed Peter was crucified; the blessed apostle Paul was bound.
He was shut up in prisons, he was scourged and often stoned, and at last he was slain. But all these, by sustaining those things most gratefully, were made friends of God; we who take note of this prefer even to be slaughtered by your cruel hand rather than to yield to your butchery. Why do you hold us hateful, why do you persecute us with so great savagery? Surely because we confess ourselves Christians; and those blessed ones of whom we made mention were slain for the only Son of God by your fellow-tyrants, because they said they were His servants. Through the mouth of the religious David the Holy Spirit says, in the person of our people: 'If we have forgotten the name of our God, and if we have stretched out our hands to a strange god, shall not God require these things? For He knows the hidden things of the heart;'
'for Thy sake we are put to death all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter.' And you, Constantius, meanwhile emperor, enslaved to Arian idolatry, say: 'Fear the gnashings of my madness, renewing itself against your destruction, and be apostates along with me.' Hearing these things, you are unwilling to heal your wounds, but rather press on to rage, blind and irrational, at the instigation of those who insinuate themselves into your mind and goad you, unwitting, into fury.
These are the spirits to whom you are known to sacrifice, in that you deny the only Son of God—who, because through themselves they can do us no harm (for we are protected by the greatness of God), persecute us through you, their satellite, us whom they perceive to be their most hostile enemies; and they exercise through you, their lover, the savagery which they can most violently, supposing that by the intervention of you, the executioner, they will violate our faith. The doctrine of all the sacred Scriptures is to believe in the Son of God as the first and consummate righteousness. Hence it is that, once you the interrogator are conquered, those demons are conquered in you, because it is not the strength of our frail bodies that grants us the victory, but His clemency.
He supplies strength, so that amid all the instruments of your butchery we may endure immovable, so that we may be broken neither by the pains of wounds nor by the blows of interrogation, but rather be lifted up; hence is the true worship of God, in which the minds of the worshippers present themselves to God as unspotted victims. And do you suppose there is any of God's worshippers so sluggish and stupid that the ardour of so great a longing does not rouse him and does not arm, does not incite, does not goad, does not finally inflame him with those torches of love with which the holy prophets, apostles, and martyrs were inflamed? Which of us, I say, does not the spirit press to be slain for Christ amid your cruel hands?