不列顛的毀滅 第 5 章 第 1/4 段

CHAPTER ONE. A rebuke against the clergy.—Britain has priests, but they are foolish; very many ministers, but imprudent; clergy, but crafty plunderers; pastors, so called, but wolves ready for the slaughter of souls—for they provide not the things profitable to the people, but seek the filling of their own belly; men who possess the houses of the church, but frequent them for the sake of filthy lucre; who teach the people, but by giving the worst examples—vices and evil manners; who seldom sacrifice, and never stand among the altars with a pure heart; who do not reprove the people for their sins, since they themselves do the same; who despise the precepts of Christ, and take care to fulfil their own lusts by every means;

who usurp the seat of the apostle Peter with unclean feet, but by the merit of their covetousness fall into the pestilent chair of Judas the betrayer; who hate the truth as an enemy, and favour lies as if they were dearest brothers; who look upon the just and needy as savage as serpents, with grim faces, and venerate wicked rich men without any regard for shame, as if they were heavenly angels; who proclaim with the tips of their lips that alms should be given to the poor, yet themselves give not so much as a farthing; who keep silent about the abominable crimes of the people, but magnify their own injuries as if they had been done to Christ;

who perhaps drive a devout mother or sisters from the house, and unbecomingly exalt strange women as if intimate in some more secret ministry, or rather (to speak the truth, though it is unseemly not so much to me as to those who do such things) humiliate them; who after this court ecclesiastical ranks more eagerly than the kingdoms of heaven, and defend in tyrannical fashion what they have received, yet do not adorn it with lawful conduct; who at the precepts of the saints (if indeed they have at any time heard what they ought most often to have heard from them) are yawning and stupid, but at the trifling and foolish fables of worldly men, as if these were the path which the ways of death lay open, are vigorous and intent; hoarse like bulls from their fatness, and unhappily prompt to unlawful things;

holding their faces arrogantly aloft, while their senses, gnawed by conscience, are plunged into the depths or even into hell; truly mournful over a single lost penny, yet glad over a single penny gained; in the apostolic ordinances, through ignorance or the weight of their sins (and even stopping the mouths of those who know), dull and dumb, yet most learned in the lying twists of worldly affairs;

and many of these, on account of their wicked manner of life, rush into the priesthood, or rather buy it at almost any price, instead of being drawn to it; and in that same old and ill-omened mire of intolerable sins, after the priestly seat of bishopric or presbytery (on which they have likewise nowhere sat), being plainly unworthy, they wallow like swine, having seized only the priestly name, yet not having received its tenor or apostolic dignity;

but they who are not yet fit, either as to perfect faith or as to repentance for their evils—how is it that they come to any ecclesiastical office (not to say the highest), and, having obtained a rank which only the holy and perfect and imitators of the apostles, and (to speak in the words of the teacher of the nations) the irreproachable, may lawfully receive without grave crime of sacrilege? CHAPTER TWO. On the same matter.—For what is so impious and so wicked as that anyone, after the likeness of Simon Magus (Acts 8:18)—though no promiscuous crimes meanwhile intervene—should wish to purchase for an earthly price the office of bishopric or presbytery, which is more becomingly acquired by holiness and upright manners?

But in this these men err the more eagerly, or rather the more desperately, in that they buy their sham and never profitable priesthoods not from the apostles or the successors of the apostles, but from tyrants and from their father the devil; nay rather, as a kind of crown and roof of all evils, by which the deeds they have committed, whether old or new, may not easily be reproached to them by anyone, and that the desires of their covetousness and gluttony—being set as it were over many—they may the more easily plunder, they set this upon the structure of their wicked life. For if such a bargain of purchase had been thrust by these shameless men upon—I will not say the apostle Peter, but any holy priest or godly king—they would have received the same answers which the author of these men, Simon Magus, received from the apostle, Peter saying:

Your money perish with you into destruction (Acts 8:20). But perhaps, alas! those who ordain these ambitious men—or rather humiliate them, and curse instead of blessing them, while out of sinners they make not penitents (which would have been more right) but sacrilegious and desperate men, and set up, as it were, a Judas the Lord's betrayer in Peter's chair, and a Nicholas the deviser of an unclean heresy in the place of Stephen the martyr—have themselves been admitted to the priesthood in the same way; and therefore they do not greatly detest in their sons—nay, rather they venerate—what it is most certain came to them likewise time and again from their fathers. For indeed, if in their parish, with the boon-companions who resist them and refuse so precious a gain, they cannot find such a pearl,

then, sending careful messengers on ahead, to sail across the seas and traverse spacious lands is no burden to them but a delight; that by all means such a singular and incomparable beauty—or, to speak more truly, a diabolical illusion—may be procured, even by selling all their resources.

Then, returning to their homeland with great pomp and great display, or rather madness, they paint an ever loftier gait upon their already lofty bearing, and, but lately gazing at the tops of the mountains, now they poise the half-drowsy edges of their eyes straight toward the heavens or toward the highest fleeces of the clouds, and thrust themselves as certain new figments—nay, diabolical instruments—upon their homeland, like Novatus of old at Rome, that black swine, defiler of the Lord's pearl; in such a posture about to stretch out hands worthy not so much of venerable altars as of the avenging flames of hell, from the most holy sacrifices of Christ. CHAPTER THREE. On the same matter: where examples are set forth from Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Melchizedek, Moses, Phinehas and Joshua son of Nun.

—What, O unhappy people, do you await from such men—from those bellies that are beasts, as the Apostle said (Titus 1:12)? Are you to be corrected by those who not only do not stir themselves up to good things, but, according to the prophet's reproach: They labour that they may do evil (Jeremiah 9:5)? Are you to be enlightened by such eyes, which gaze only eagerly upon those things which lead headlong to vices—that is, to the gates of hell? Or surely, according to the Saviour's saying (Matthew 15:14), unless you flee from these most rapacious wolves of Arabia, as Lot fled from the fiery rain of Sodom to the mountain, you, blind men led out by the blind, will fall into the pit of hell.

But perhaps someone may say that not all bishops or presbyters are evil as those described above, since they are not stained with the infamy of schism, of pride, of uncleanness: which we too do most strongly not deny. But although we know that some are chaste and good, we shall nevertheless briefly answer: What did it profit Eli the priest (1 Samuel 2:11-12; 3:12) that he alone did not violate the precepts of the Lord, snatching with the flesh-hooks, before the fat was offered to the Lord, the flesh out of the pots, while he was punished by the same wrath of death by which his sons were (1 Samuel 4:11)? Which of them, I ask, was slain through envy of a better sacrifice carried up to heaven by celestial fire, as Abel was (Genesis 4:8); they who scorn even the reproach of a moderate word?

Which of them hated the counsel of evildoers, and sat not with the ungodly (Psalm 26:5)—so that it might be truly said of him, as of Enoch: Enoch walked with God, and was not found (Genesis 5:24)—in the vanity, that is, of the world, which then was beginning to halt prone after idols, having forsaken God? Which of them, in the saving ark (which is now the Church), admitted no one who was hostile to God, as Noah did at the time of the flood (Genesis 7:7)—that it might plainly be shown that none but the harmless or eminent penitents ought to be in the Lord's house? Which of them, when the just man had been delivered by victories and in the number of three hundred (that is, the mystery of the Trinity) (Genesis 14), offering sacrifice to the deadly conquerors of the five kings and the routing armies of victorious troops,

and in no way coveting what was another's, as Melchizedek did, gave a blessing? Which of them, of his own accord, offered upon the altar his own son, to be slain by the head, as Abraham did at God's command (Genesis 22:1)—that he might fulfil something like this command of Christ, who says that the right eye that causes offence ought to be plucked out (Matthew 5:29), and might beware of the prophet's word, that he is cursed who withholds his sword and blood (Jeremiah 48:10)? Which of them tore out the memory of a wrong done from his heart by the very roots, as Joseph did (Genesis 50:15-21)? Who, having spoken with the Lord on the mountain, and being in no wise terrified by the blaring trumpets thereafter (Exodus 19:16), brought down two tablets and a horned face—in a figurative sense unfit and dreadful to the sight of unbelievers—as Moses did (Exodus

34:29)? Which of them, interceding for the sins of the people, cried out from his very breast, as he himself did, saying: O Lord, this people has sinned a great sin; yet if you forgive it, forgive; but if not, blot me out of your book (Exodus 32:31-32)? Which of them, kindled with a wondrous zeal for God unto the avenging of fornication, without delay, by the healing medicine of penitence, the lust of defilement being cured, that wrath might not be inflamed against the people, as Phinehas the priest did (Numbers 25:7; Psalm 106:31)—so that thereby righteousness might be reckoned to him for ever—rose up strenuously? And which of them, by moral understanding, either for the extirpation even to utter destruction of the seven nations from the land of promise, or for the establishment of the spiritual Israel in their stead (Joshua),

24:11) imitated Joshua son of Nun? CHAPTER FOUR. Joshua and Phinehas (or rather Eleazar), Jephthah, Gideon, Samson and Samuel are set forth.—Which of them shrewdly divided the final boundaries of the people of God beyond the Jordan, that it might be known what was fitting to be allotted to each, as the aforesaid did—namely Phinehas and Joshua (Joshua 19:51)—and showed it? Which of them, that he might lay low for the people of God the thousands of the nations exempt from adversaries, imitating in this his only daughter—who is understood as his own delight—and the Apostle saying: Not seeking what is profitable to me, but to the many, that they may be saved (1 Corinthians 10:33), meeting his conquerors with timbrels and dances (Judges

11:31)—that is, his carnal desires—into the sacrifice of votive propitiation, slew her, as Jephthah did? Which of them, for the throwing into confusion, the routing, and the laying low of the camps of the proud nations, by the mysteries of the Trinity (as we have said above), with the men holding the jars (Judges 7:6, 16, 20), wielded in their hands the excellent and sounding trumpets (that is, the prophetic and apostolic meanings, as the Lord said to the prophet: Lift up your voice like a trumpet [Isaiah 58:1], and the Psalmist concerning the apostles: Their sound has gone out into all the earth [Psalm 19:4]), and the jars flashing by night with the most splendid light of fire (which are taken to be in the bodies of the saints, joined with good works and burning with the fire of the Holy Spirit, as the Apostle says:

We have, he says [2 Corinthians 4:7], this treasure in earthen vessels)—after the cutting down of the grove of idolatry (which, morally interpreted, is the forest of dense and dark covetousness) (Judges 6:25), and after experiencing the evident signs of the heavenly rain upon the Jewish fleece (Judges 6:37) and, of the Gentiles, being wetted with the dew of the Holy Spirit—with undoubting faith, as Gideon did, went forth (Judges 7:1)? Which of them, longing to die to the world and to live to Christ (Philippians 1:23), the luxurious feasters of the nations praising their gods (Judges 16:23-25) (that is, the senses extolling riches, as the Apostle says [Colossians

3:5], which is the service of idols)—the two columns being shaken by the strength of his arms (which are understood to be in the wicked pleasures of the soul and the flesh, by which the whole house of human wickedness is in a manner framed and propped up)—laid low so innumerable a host, as Samson did (Judges 16:29-30)? Which of them, by prayers and the holocaust of a suckling lamb driving away fear (1 Samuel 7:9-10), stirring up unlooked-for voices of thunder and showers of clouds (1 Samuel 12:17), appointing a king without flattery (1 Samuel 10:1, 24), and casting off that same king when he displeased God, for a better one anointed in the kingdom in his place (1 Samuel 13:14; 15:28; 16:13), as Samuel did, will stand to bid farewell to the people, speaking in this wise: Behold, here I am;

speak before the Lord and before His Anointed, whether I have taken any man's ox, or his ass; if I have wronged any man, if I have oppressed anyone, if I have received a bribe from any man's hand (1 Samuel 12:2-3). To whom answer was made by the people, saying: You have not wronged us, nor oppressed us, nor have you taken anything from any man's hand (1 Samuel 12:4). CHAPTER FIVE. Examples of Elijah, Elisha and Isaiah are recounted.—Which of them, with heavenly fire burning up a hundred proud men, and sparing fifty humble ones (2 Kings

1:10-12)—and, without the grove of flattery, announcing to the wicked king his impending death, since he consulted not God through the prophets, but the idol of Ekron (2 Kings 1:16)—laid low all the prophets of the idol Baal (which are understood as the human senses of envy and avarice, as we have already said, ever bent on these things) with the flashing sword, that is, the word of God, as Elijah the eminent seer did (1 Kings 18:40)? And, moved with zeal for God, taking away the heavenly showers from the land of the wicked, as if shutting them up with the strongest bolt of dearth for three years and six months (1 Kings 17:1), dying of hunger and thirst in the desert, complained: O Lord, He said, they have slain your prophets and dug down your altars;

and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life (1 Kings 19:10)? Which of them punished his dearest disciple, burdened beyond his wont with earthly weights (2 Kings 5:23)—things which before this had been scorned by Elisha himself, though greatly entreated to receive them (2 Kings 5:16)—even if not with perpetual leprosy, as Elisha did, at least with expulsion (2 Kings 5:27)? And which of them, to a servant boiling over with despair of life, and suddenly struck with terror at the warlike apparatus of the enemy surrounding the city in which they were (2 Kings

6:15)—in our midst (as he did), by a fervent prayer made to God for the sight of his soul (so that he might be able to behold [2 Kings 6:17] the mountain full of the auxiliary host of the heavenly army, of armed chariots, and of horsemen shining with fiery countenance)—opened his eyes, and made him believe (2 Kings 6:16) that He who was stronger to save was greater than the enemies were to fight? And which of them, by the touch of his body (2 Kings 4:34)—of one dead to the world, but living to God—will be of profit to another lying low in a different death, doubtless dead to God but living to vices, as the aforesaid was; so that, leaping up at once, he renders thanks to Christ for a health despaired of by the mouths of almost all mortals?

Which of them had his lips cleansed, as Isaiah's were, by a burning coal carried from the altar by the cherubim's tongs (that his sins might be wiped away by the humility of confession) (Isaiah 6:6-7), and, the efficacious prayer of the godly king Hezekiah being joined to him (2 Kings 19:1, 14-15; Isaiah 37:1, 15), saw one hundred and eighty-five thousand of the Assyrian army laid low by the hand of an angel, with no trace of a wound appearing, as the aforesaid did (2 Kings 19:35; Isaiah 37:36)? Which of them, for the precepts of God and the threats given from heaven (Jeremiah 1:17), and for the truth that must be uttered even to those who would not hear, endured the filth and stench of prisons (Jeremiah 20:2; 32:2; 37:15; 38:6), and momentary deaths (Jeremiah

26:8, 14), as the blessed Jeremiah did? And, to be brief: Which of them, as the Teacher of the nations said (Hebrews 11:37-38), endured to wander in the mountains, and in caves and in the hollows of the earth, to be stoned, to be sawn asunder, to be tried by every kind of death for the name of the Lord, as the holy prophets did? CHAPTER SIX. Then from the New Testament: James the first, Peter and Paul.—But why do we linger over the examples of old, as if there were none in the New? Let them hear us, therefore, who think that without any labour they enter this narrow path of the Christian religion, putting forward only the priestly name, while they pluck a few flowers, as it were the choicest, from the wide and pleasant meadow of the recruits of the saints of the New Testament.

Which of you, who rather grow torpid than sit lawfully in the priestly seat, being cast out of the council of the impious, after the blows of various rods (Acts 16:23), as the holy apostles did—who were counted worthy (Acts 5:41) to suffer reproach for Christ the true God—gave thanks to the Trinity with his whole heart? Which of you, for the testimony to be borne to the true God, repeatedly struck with a fuller's club, as James, the first bishop in the New Testament at least, perished in the body? Which of you was beheaded with the sword by a wicked prince, as James the brother of John was (Acts 12:2)? Which of you, as the first minister and evangelical martyr, having this alone as his crime—that he had seen God, whom the faithless could not see—was stoned by impious hands (Acts

7:57)? Which of you, fastened to a cross with his feet inverted, out of reverence for Christ's gibbet, as that key-bearer worthy of the kingdom of heaven did, breathed out his last breath? Which of you, by the stroke of a truth-speaking sword, for the confession of Christ—after chains, prisons, shipwrecks, the bitter beating of rods; after the continual perils of rivers, robbers, Gentiles, Jews, false apostles; after the labours of hunger, fasting, watchings; after the perpetual care of all the churches; after the burning anguish for those who were caused to stumble; after the infirmity on behalf of the infirm; after the wonderful, well-nigh world-wide circuit in preaching the Gospel of Christ—as the Vessel of election and chosen master of the nations, was beheaded? CHAPTER SEVEN. The example of the holy martyr Ignatius.

—Which of you, as the holy martyr Ignatius, bishop of the city of Antioch, after his admirable deeds in Christ, was, for the testimony of Him, crushed by the mass of lions at Rome? Whose words, as he was being led to his passion, if you hear them (if ever your faces were suffused with a blush), you will not only not think yourselves priests in comparison with him, but not even ordinary Christians. For he says in the epistle which he sent to the Roman Church: 「From Syria all the way to Rome I fight with beasts by land and sea, day and night, bound and fettered to ten leopards—I mean the soldiers given to guard me, who become the fiercer for our kindnesses. But by their wickednesses I am the more instructed; yet not by this am I justified.」

「O the saving beasts which are prepared for me—when will they come? when will they be let loose? when will it be permitted them to feast on my flesh? I long for them to be made fiercer, and I will invite them to devour me, and I will beseech them lest perchance (as they have done with some) they fear to touch my body; nay rather, even if they should hesitate, I will use force, I will thrust myself upon them. Grant me, I pray, your pardon: I know what is expedient for me. Now I begin to be a disciple of Christ: let envy depart, whether of human affection or of spiritual wickedness, that I may be worthy to attain unto Jesus Christ—fires, crosses, beasts, scatterings of bones, and tearings of limbs.」

「and the pains of my whole body, and let all the torments devised by the devil's craft be fulfilled upon me alone, provided only that I may be worthy to attain unto Jesus Christ.」 What do you behold in answer to these things, with the drowsy eyes of your soul? Why do you give ear to such words with the deaf ears of your senses? Shake off, I pray, the dark and bitter gloom of your heart's present time, that you may be able to see the most resplendent light of truth and humility. A Christian, not ordinary but perfect; a priest, not base but supreme; a martyr, not sluggish but pre-eminent, says: Now I begin to be a disciple of Christ. And you, as if you were that Lucifer cast down from heaven (Isaiah 14:12), are lifted up by words and not by power, and in a manner chew under your teeth and display by your gestures the things which your author had before depicted:

I will ascend, he says, into heaven, and I will be like the Most High (Isaiah 14:13). And again: I have dug and drunk water, and with the sole of my feet I have dried up all the streams of the dykes (Isaiah 37:25). Far more rightly ought you to imitate and hear Him who is the truly unconquered exemplar of all goodness and humility, saying through the prophet: But I am a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people (Psalm 22:6). O wondrous thing, that He should have called Himself the reproach of men, when He has blotted out the reproaches of all the world! And again in the Gospel: I can do nothing of myself (John 5:30);

although He Himself, coeval with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and of the same substance common with them, made heaven and earth with all their inestimable adornment—not by another's, but by His own power; and you have arrogantly exalted your words, while the prophet says: Why is earth and ashes proud (Sirach 10:9)? CHAPTER EIGHT. The example of holy Polycarp: where also passages of the sacred Scriptures are brought forward.—But let me return to my purpose. Which, I say, of you, as Polycarp the eminent pastor and witness of Christ of the Church of Smyrna, set out a table kindly for his guests at the fire when they were eagerly dragging him to it, and, cast into the flames for the love of Christ, said: He who gave me to bear the punishment of fire will grant that, without the fastening of nails, I may endure the flames unmoved.

One thing more, besides the great forest of the saints over which I fly in words, I will set down by way of example—namely Basil, bishop of Caesarea, who, when threats of this kind were aimed at him by a wicked prince, that unless on the morrow he were defiled with the Arian mire like the rest, he should certainly die, is said to have replied: I, indeed, will be tomorrow what I am today; would that you would not change yourself! And again: Would that I had something of a worthy gift to offer to this man who would the sooner release me from the knot of this worthless bag of trifles! Which of you holds to the rule of the apostolic word, which by all the holy priests at all times existing, [restrained] human prompting that rushes headlong to wickedness...

...has been preserved as it hastens to those who strike back, and amid the turmoil of tyrants it keeps it unbroken, saying in this manner: 'We must obey God rather than men' (Acts 5:29). Therefore, fleeing as is our custom to the mercy of the Lord and to the voices of His holy prophets, that they may hurl on our behalf the darts of His oracles against imperfect shepherds, as formerly against tyrants, by which these men are pricked and chastened, let us see what the Lord, through the prophets, speaks by way of threats against slothful and dishonourable priests, who teach the people not well, by example as much as by word.

For even that priest Eli at Shiloh, because he had not avenged with worthy zeal for God and with severity his sons who despised God, but had admonished them softly and gently, as it were with a father's affection, is condemned with such a sentence, the prophet saying to him: 'I plainly revealed myself to the house of thy father, when they were in Egypt serving Pharaoh; and I chose the house of thy father out of all the tribes of Israel to be mine in the priesthood' (1 Samuel 2:27-28). And a little after: 'Why hast thou looked upon my incense and upon my sacrifice with a greedy eye? and hast honoured thy sons more than me, that thou shouldst bless them from the beginning in all the sacrifices before me? And now thus saith the Lord: Those who honour me, I will honour;'

'and those who despise me shall be brought to nothing. And this shall be a sign to thee, which shall come upon thy two sons Hophni and Phinehas; in one day they shall both die by the sword of men' (1 Samuel 2:30, 31, 34). If, then, those suffer these things who correct their subjects with words only, and not with worthy punishment, what shall happen to those very men who by sinning urge others to evil and drag them with them? What befell that true seer also is plain — after the fulfilment of the sign foretold by him, and the restoring of the withered hand to the impious king — who, sent from Judah to prophesy in Bethel and forbidden to taste any food there, and deceived by another (as it was said) prophet into taking a little bread and water, had this said to him by his host: 'Thus saith the Lord God:'

'Because thou hast been disobedient to the mouth of the Lord, and hast not kept the commandment which the Lord thy God commanded thee, and hast turned back, and hast eaten bread and drunk water in this place, in which I had commanded thee that thou shouldst eat no bread nor drink water, thy body shall not be laid in the sepulchre of thy fathers. And it came to pass,' he says, 'after he had eaten bread and drunk water, he saddled his ass for himself and departed: and a lion found him in the way, and slew him' (1 Kings 13:21-24). CHAPTER 9. From Isaiah. — Hear also the holy prophet Isaiah speaking thus concerning priests: 'Woe to the wicked unto evil; for the recompense of his hands shall be done to him. As for my people, their exactors have spoiled them, and women have ruled over them.'

'O my people, those who call thee blessed, they deceive thee, and destroy the way of thy steps. The Lord standeth up to judge, and standeth to judge the peoples. The Lord will come to judgment with the elders of his people and with its princes. Ye have eaten up my vineyard: the spoil of the poor is in your house. Why do ye wear away my people, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord of hosts' (Isaiah 3:11-15). And again: 'Woe to those who frame iniquitous laws, and who writing have written down injustice, to oppress the poor in judgment, and to do violence to the cause of the humble of my people, that widows might be their prey, and that they might plunder the fatherless. What will ye do in the day of visitation and of calamity coming from afar?' (Isaiah 10:1-3). And below: