講道與書信 第 176 章

Chapter I. If we should desire to follow with as much praise the glorious purpose of your piety in the defense of the faith as the greatness of the matters themselves demands, we shall be found unequal in the rendering of thanks if we celebrate the joys of the universal Church merely by the narrowness of our own mouth. But more worthily is the recompense reserved for your acts and merits by Him in whose cause you both excel in a singular spirit and triumph by the wished-for outcome of clear glory.

Let your clemency therefore know that all the Churches of God, with praise of you, exult and rejoice alike, that the wicked parricide has been driven from the yoke of the Alexandrian Church; and that the people of God, upon whom the nefarious robber had brooded, brought back to the ancient liberty of the faith, can now be recalled into the way of salvation by the preaching of faithful priests, since it sees the whole seedbed of poisons cast out in its very author. Now therefore, since you have accomplished this with steadfast purpose and great mind, to the completed work of faith add this: that concerning the catholic prelate of that city you decree what may please God—one who is infected with no sprinkling of the so-often-condemned impiety:

lest perhaps a hidden wound break out again under the appearance of a scar drawn over, and the Christian people, which by your action was openly freed from the perversity of the heretics, be again subject to lethal poisons. Chapter II. But you see, venerable emperor, and evidently recognize, that in the person about whose removal it is treated, not only the integrity of the faith is to be considered; which, even if it could be purged by any corrections and professions, and could be restored to its whole state on any condition, yet by no means can those things which were criminally and bloodily committed be abolished by the protestations of plausible words:

because in a pontiff of God, and especially in the priest of so great a Church, the sound of the tongue and the speech of the lips do not suffice, and it profits nothing if God is preached by the voice while the mind is convicted of impiety. For concerning such the Holy Spirit speaks through the Apostle: 'Having the appearance of piety, but denying the power thereof' (2 Tim. 3:5); and again elsewhere: 'They profess that they know God, but by their deeds deny him' (Titus 1:16). Hence, since in every member of the Church both the truth of an entire faith and the fullness of good works are sought, how much more in the supreme pontiff ought both to excel, because the one without the other cannot have a joining with the body of Christ! Chapter III.

Nor is it necessary now to narrate all the things which make Timothy execrable, since abundantly and manifestly the things done through him and on his account have gone forth into the notice of the whole world; and if anything was perpetrated against justice by the disorderly mob, all these things flow together upon the head of this man, to whose desires the hands of the raging served. Hence, even if here he neglect nothing and deceive in nothing in the profession of faith, it is most fitting for your glory to exclude him utterly from this ambition, because it befits the whole Church to rejoice with holy exultation in the bishop of so great a city, so that the true peace of the Lord may be made illustrious not only by the preaching of faith but also by the example of morals. Given the fifteenth of the Kalends of July, Magnus and Apollonius being consuls.

By Philoxenus, agent in affairs (agens in rebus).