Whoever you are, a guest seeking the Paschal feast, deigning to recline at our table, lay aside your haughty brow if you know yourself a friend, and do not look here for the work of a skilled scribe. But, content with the rites of a modest table, partake, more glad in spirit than sated with food. Or if you are captivated by the sweetness of great things and, more given to delicacies, love riches the more, dine at the bright banquets of the noble learned, whose manifold wealth is beyond counting. There you will find whatever the sea nourishes for eating, whatever the earth produces, whatever flies to the stars. Waxen honey grows golden in jeweled baskets, and golden vessels gleam with their own combs. But we have plucked a little from a poor garden—what a red earthen dish serves up when set before you—a pot-herb.
While the heathen poets strive to deck out their fictions with grandiloquent measures, and with tragic bellowing or with the ridiculous Geta or by whatever art of song renew the savage contagion of unspeakable deeds, and sing the monuments of crimes, and at their craft's bidding hand down many lies in books of the Nile: why should I, accustomed to make my songs resound with the ten strings of David's psalms and reverently to stand in the holy choir and chant heavenly things with gentle words, be silent about the bright miracles of Christ who brings salvation? Since I am able to speak of manifest things, and it delights me to confess with my senses and my whole heart the thundering Lord:
He who gave us senses and hearts, whom alone it befits that His own creation should serve, who by eternal right shares one power with the Father in the heavenly citadels, equal splendour, common summit, joint pinnacle, equal honour, the same might, a kingdom without time, ever the beginning, an unbroken sceptre, a shared glory, a like majesty. For this is the way of salvation; this leads our steps firmly to the paschal gifts. This shall be my song: hither turn your minds, all of you. Steadfastly apply this aid to your wounded inmost parts, you whom a deadly evil, you over whom—given to vain cares—the Attic doctrine of Cecropian poison creeps; and rather, following the fragrance of the Law that breathes out life, leave behind the squalor of the Athenian quarter.
Why, sons of Theseus, do you wander in the labyrinthine cave and traverse the blind thresholds of Daedalus' dwelling? Why do you still prefer the wild grape to gentle clusters, and, neglecting the roses, take up the worthless field-weed? What will it profit to worship stones and bronze, to honour profane shrines, and to condemn souls to dumb metals? Refrain from dwelling in the squalid acres of the dusty plain and in barren tracts, where the parched ground knows not how to bring forth fruit, nor pluck from the bloodstained earth the livid poisons with their death-bearing juices, condemned to the food of Tartarus:
but enter through the holy waters into the pleasant green places of ever-flowering groves and the blessed dwellings, where the seeds of life are quickened by divine waters, and the crop, made glad by the heavenly spring, is cleansed when its thorns are removed, that it may become the harvest of God and may heap up in its barns the very greatest, hundredfold fruit of the reward to come.
Almighty, eternal God, the one hope of the world, who art the Maker of heaven, the Founder of the globe, who when the swelling tide rises forbid the wave-resounding storms of the sea to overwhelm the borders of the neighbouring land, who fillest the sun with its rays and the moon with its horns, and measurest out both lights for day and for night, who numberest the stars, whose names, signs, powers, courses, places, and times Thou alone knowest, who didst shape the new earth into diverse bodies and gavest living limbs to the sluggish soil, who when man was perishing through the sweetness of the forbidden fruit dost restore him with a better food, and by the drink of the consecrated Blood dost drive out the poison instilled by the serpent, who, when the human race—save those whom the ark had shut in—lay buried by the swift mass of the foaming flood, again createst it from one stock, that the mystic power might show, by that wood as guardian, that what the stains of the flesh slay can be renewed through the clear waves, for cleansing the whole world with one baptism:
Disclose to me the way of salvation, the way that leads the few into the City by a narrow path, and grant the lamp of Thy word to give light to my feet, that the path of life may lead me to the folds of the countryside, where the Good Shepherd keeps His pleasant sheepfold, where the Virgin's Lamb goes before with His white fleece and the whole flock enters shining white. With Thee as guide the way is not hard; all nature submits to Thy commands, and at Thy sovereign bidding, the natural order loosed, passes into contrary forms. If Thou command the cornfields to ripen amid frosts, winter brings forth the reaper; if Thou wouldst have the new wine run under a spring sun, in the flowering fields the grimy vintner will tread the pressed grapes: and all the seasons will obey the divine words.
A witness to this is the ancient faith and the hoary origin of our forefathers as a testimony, and through no times to be abolished through the ages the signs of Thy mighty deeds stand fast. Of these I scarcely entrust to my own spirit to touch upon a few in a bold recital, and entering the open forest I strive to reach a few of the branches. For though an iron voice, moving a hundred mouths, should cry out and the human breast should pant with a hundred sounds, who could set forth them all, which neither the bright stars of heaven nor the thirsty sands are matched in number? First, from the very beginning of chaos, Enoch with his living merits has already reached many ages through countless years, while nature loses its measure: him the earth bore, begotten by the right of creation, but death marvels that he was taken away.
Now the wounded womb of aged Sarah was withering, consumed by the decay of great old age, and the cold blood, dying in her aged body, denied offspring: when, in company with her aged husband, the inmost parts of her chilled belly swelled for a new birth, and the trembling mother, her cold bosom laden, brought forth the hope of a wealthy nation and held up her late-born son to her breasts. And the father offered him to be sacrificed to God, but as a sacred thing a ram is sacrificed at the altar for the boy's throat. O holy mind of a just man! Possessing more piety because his piety was set aside, he scorned the wounding of his son in embracing the precepts of God, and by the help of the figural blood he teaches things to come—that by the blood of Christ the loving Lamb would die for the human race.
As Lot fled the chaos of Sodom, while his wife looked back, she was changed into a pillar of salt and remained there, turned to stone in amazement, turned to her own punishment: because no one, looking backward, shunning the harmful perils of the world he has despised, shall be saved, nor ought the ploughman, working a worthy task, turn his face back upon his own shoulders. Once a bush, burning with harmless fires, appeared burning yet not consumed, nor did the kindled matter give fuel to the heat, nor did the living, scorched shrub feel any loss, but with the glow of a friendly tinder the leafy timbers were licked by caressing flames. The gentle rod was given life as a savage serpent, coiled through bending loops, and swelling its scaly neck with triple-forked tongues, it swallowed the hostile water-snakes with its mouth and returned to the saplings of its own rigidity.
The passable blue waters of the divided sea lay open, rolled back into a twin wall, and the bared land was stripped of its kindred waters, and the multitude on foot entered into the sea of the absent deep, and through the abyss the dry marble pavements were astonished at the foreign footsteps. Nature changed its course, and the people, advancing through the midst of the deep, were already bearing a rough baptism, with Christ as their leader; for the reading cries out: 'The voice of the Lord is upon many waters'; and the voice, in short, is the Word. The Word, Christ, is present, who, ruling the harmonious testaments of the twofold law, laid open the ancient abyss, that the doctrine which followed might advance over level fields. Why should I recount that countless throngs took angelic foods from heavenly bread?
and that, by clouds of heavenly nectar, the people was fed with airy sweetness, and had banquets in the rains and food in the showers? Again, the thirsting army in the parched fields, where the places were too dry, where the land long lay sick with waters denied, where the hope of drinking and of living had been taken away, drew sudden waters from the parched rock, and the moisture flowed from a barren crag, and the fasting marble pavements vomited forth a new drink. Therefore, giving these sacred gifts already by these three things, Christ was the bread, Christ the rock, Christ in the waters. Trembling at angelic threats, the she-ass addressed her own rider in words, and with babbling tongue the beast of burden uttered human speech.
The sun stood still at Gibeon, and at the summit of mid-heaven fixed its panting light, the evening delayed, unaccustomed to rein in the day, nor did the moon run sluggish in its order, until the burning sword, with the heaven conspiring, in the plundering of arms consumed the mighty foe: even then the obedient stars beheld Jesus to come, His name sent before. Once the ravens, as ministers, fed Elijah, providing banquets out of their custom, and the bird given to plunder, sating its hollow throat with greedy beak, delivered the food unharmed to His fasting bites. Now good to Elijah, who was treacherous before as Noah's raven, he washes away on land whatever he had transgressed in the waters.
But when he, full of God, had given to the earth many miracles, and had made a friend a worthy heir to succeed to his own power by his own merits, he was carried up to the golden stars in fiery chariots, where the light wheel-track presses no airy furrows; he pierced the starry path, and seeking the right hand with his gleaming chariot, he led his triumph through a greater expanse and did not reach the limit of human age. How well the bright-shining path of the lightning heaven befitted Elijah! Both by merit and by name, gleaming, he was worthy of this aid: for if, in the Greek tongue, one letter be changed by an accent, it becomes 'sun'.
Pitying the last moments of his fading light, God once added thrice five years to the king, using His own right, and closing the gateways that had been opened, He turned his life back from the setting of death to its rising. Jonah, falling from the ship, swallowed by the devouring whale, in the deep did not feel the waters, possessing a living tomb that he might not die, and safe in the beast's belly was a deposit, not a prey, and across the vast sea he came to unknown lands with a hostile oarsman. When, at God's inspiration, three men with one mind refused the sacred rites of Babylon and underwent the harsh doom of the savage Chaldean tyrant's law, whose fury had kindled an Achaemenian wrath hotter than his own furnace:
they are thrust into the midst of the fire, the pyre daring nothing; and burning only with the ardour of their heart, by the fire of the soul they overcome the conflagrations of the imagined punishment. O how great is the glory of believers! By the flames of burning faith the flame of the furnace was quenched. But soon a worthy vengeance struck the savage king. For because he had, in his madness, departed from human piety, he became a rustic companion of cattle among the grass, exchanging his palace banquets for grazed-upon hay. Bowed down, he drank from the river, and for seven seasons he ranged, shaggy, wandering through all the woods and mountains. Nor did the commands of the tyrant Darius rage any less; for behold, the fury of the raging one added crime to crime, and Daniel, the glory of the Hebrews, guiltless, was decreed to be food for the fasting beasts:
but the wild beast, made gentle toward the just man, lest it should harm his holy limbs, began to love hunger; its rage, softened, laid aside its fury, and in its savage jaws its wrath was stilled, and the fierce lions learned to keep their prey unharmed. Tell me, Nature, where are your laws after such deeds? Who is it that has so often borne away your statutes?
He who commanded Tartarus not to know the man translated away, and made the barren old woman fruitful for her husband, who bade the beast come of its own accord to the sacred altar, who changed a woman's limbs into images of salt, who made branches that suffered fire not to burn, who loosed the shoot into a serpent, who dried up a path through the sea, who marvellously rained down manna from the clouds, who brought forth waters from the lowest rock, who compelled a quadruped to speak in plain discourse, who, the elements suspended, delayed the swift hours, who granted that a man should be fed by birds and bore him to heaven on gleaming horses, who added three lustres to a man already burdened by death, who founded help on the lips of a robber in his shipwreck, who in the blazing furnace preserved the godly under a dew, who fed a king through pastures like a shaggy beast, and who bade the gaping maws of lions, though goaded by hunger, to know no fury?
Indeed, for the Creator, whose word is the framework of things—whatever is seen or whatever lies hidden—every work of His serves Him and follows the command of Him who orders, wherever His will draws by its nod. Alas, the wretched, who worship vanities, who with perverse heart carve for themselves religious idols and flee from their own Maker and revere the things they have made! What madness is this? What so great folly mocks their souls, that suppliant man, full-grown, should adore a bird, a foul ox, a twisted serpent, and a half-man dog? But others, driven with blinded minds, affirm that the sun is the father of all things, because it duly seems to pour bright lights upon the cleared earth and to illumine the whole heaven:
although it is clear from these motions that the unstable fire performs a service with its swift coursings, and is not God, since in a fixed order now it rises, now, dismissed into the western shores, it shares its turns with night and is not ever everywhere. Nor was that one an abiding light at the world's origin, when the new globe had a twofold day without the sun. So too they offer vows to the moon, which they see wax and wane, and they sacrifice to the stars, which are put to flight by the light. This one worships water, that one the hearth-fire; but they dare not join to their rites things hostile to one another, lest in a neighbouring strife either the stronger pyre should dry up the scanty waters, or the feeble fires should die before mighty springs.
Another sets altars at the roots of trees, ordains feasts, and weeping prays to the boughs, that they may govern his children and his dear home and his beloved fields and the faith of marriage, his servants and his wealth. O wooden man, you beg of wood; you seem to cry out to deaf things; you seek answers from mute things, which on this principle govern the laws of houses—if, cut by the swung axes, they support the lofty roof-peaks of an overhanging dwelling, or, set beneath the hearths, serve for the cooking of meals. Some venerate the cabbage and through the soft gardens water their parched divinities, and by this art they truly seem to be cultivators of transplanted gods.
I am ashamed to recount more, and in a holy song it is wrong to spend long in condemning impiety, lest with brambles I scorch the tender lilies, or, through the violet-beds of the purple field, a thistle and a buckthorn rise up with their sharp thorns. Now we have laughed enough at the monstrosities added to human errors, or rather we have wept over such deeds. Now it is good to go the way begun and to make our steps firm as we climb the high mountain; let us hasten into the City, the help of liberty, where the radiant royal hall gleams with its tawny domes, where worthy things are given to the one who asks, a sure hope awaits the seeker, and, the bars removed, the passable thresholds are unlocked for the knocking heart. This is that Stone which the corner-angle bears on its summit as rejected, and which offers miracles to our eyes: whose burden is light, whose yoke is sweet to bear.
Through the things set forth before, the miracles of the old law, we have recounted what the Begetter, by the joined working of the Holy Spirit, accomplished with the partnering power of the Son. Through the miracles of the new law, set forth in order, we shall also tell what the Son, by the joined working of the Holy Spirit, accomplished with the partnering power of the Father, so that, ever remaining one, the everlasting form of the Godhead may make the simple threefold and make the triplicable single. This is the true faith; this saving faith the unhappy Arius scorned to hold, who, striving to bend the straight path through winding bypaths, slipping into a black pit, fell headlong and, sunk, sought the depths of the foul abyss: as empty of sense as, at the time of his just punishment, his bowels poured out, he was left empty also in his belly.
Madman, who likened the inimitable rights of the eternal Parent to the degrees of fleeting honours! For among men the law of the flesh holds the son to be less than his begetter, since the father himself was first the son of a parent, and presently he who is now a son is wont to become a father: thus through every line of descendants a new offspring comes on, and the grandfathers of grandfathers are counted. But the Lord, the Word, the Power, the Wisdom, Christ, and all that is common to the Father, Light from Light, alone from the Alone, to whom nothing is less than the Father, nor has He anything by which to grow, begotten, not indeed created: He Himself is the beginning. For just as He is held bright, abiding in the Begetter, so too the Begetter remains bright in Him, and God, one everywhere, is the head of all things.
Not because He who is the supreme Father is also the Son here, but because what the supreme Father is, that the Son also is. Thus He Himself says, teaching: 'I am in the Father and the Father in Me.' Again: 'I and the Father are one.' Arius ought to know the 'one', and Sabellius ought to confess the 'are'. The one does not embrace a faith of one; this one does not embrace a faith of three. Both are equal in error, though following diverse paths. Just as men accustomed to bring forth various sects assail their own sayings—men who display their bared arms with naked shoulders, taught to hand on nothing, but only clever to contend, whose prudence lies foolish, since the wisdom of the world is vanity to God: this one talks too much, that one is silent; this one walks, this one stands; one loves weeping, another loves to wrinkle his face in laughter:
and in their diverse ways the frenzy is equal in all of them. Meanwhile, while we duly lighten the road with discourse, and hope and faith accompany my step up the steeps, more pleasantly at last we arrive at the highest citadel. Lo, the banners hallowed with the sign of the Cross flash forth; lo, the King's holy camp glitters, the Lord's trumpet sounds, His own gate lies open to the soldiers: let him who serves as a soldier enter. The eternal Door calls you, which Door is Christ. You shall receive the golden rewards of perpetual life, you by whom the arms of the Lord are borne with all His might, and the adornment is fixed upon the brow. I bear the adornment and the arms of Thy soldiery, good King; let me remain the lowest part.
Here grant me proper dwellings, grant me within the walls of this city a tiny house, that, as Thy resident, I may be counted worthy to dwell in the holy places and to be enrolled forever, the last of the white order, as a blessed citizen. Great things indeed I ask, but Thou knowest how to give great things, Thou whom whoever grows lukewarm in hoping offends the more. Christ, favour my prayers, who, willing to give life to the world lying in death, once didst seek the earthly realms from heaven, deigning to take on human form, so bearing another's nature that Thou couldst not leave Thine own. This Matthew, treating the man, fulfils generically; Mark, as the deep voice of a lion roars through the deserts; Luke holds the rights of the priesthood by the mouth of an ox; flying after the manner of an eagle, John seeks the stars with his word.
These four chieftains, singing Thee with one voice, are scattered, like just as many seasons, into the wide world. So too the apostolic summit of the twelvefold honour ever shines in its number, imitating the months and the hours, that in all things the whole year may serve Thee as a soldier. Henceforth, therefore, recalling the beginnings of the old death, I shall hasten to the new life, and by sowing tears I shall reap long joys: for we who weep in Adam, scattering the seeds, shall soon all exult, bearing our sheaves at the coming of Christ.