Do not, Constantius, still linger in these evils; do not abuse the patience of God. Hold the writing in Psalm 77: 'The Lord was roused as one sleeping, as a mighty man made drunk with wine, and He smote all His enemies in the hinder parts; He gave them everlasting reproach.' In the 81st Psalm, 'How long,' says the Holy Spirit, 'will you judge iniquity and accept the persons of sinners? Judge the orphan and the needy; justify the humble and the poor. Rescue the poor and the needy; deliver him from the hand of the sinner.' You say: kill with me the one consecrated to God—desiring us to be reckoned with you along with those of whom it is said: 'They knew not, nor understood; they walk in darkness.'
God commands that we pronounce no unjust judgment, that we not, out of reverence for your face as a sinner's, allow you to punish him whom you persecute unjustly. God commanded that the humble be justified by us, that the poor and needy be rescued from your hand, delivered from you the executioner. And you say: condemn him whom God willed to be rescued from my hand as a sinner's. No wonder; for you could not go against your execrable dispositions. The Holy Spirit says in Psalm 96: 'You who love the Lord, hate evil,' and your precepts show that you say: love what is evil. For if it seems evil to God for the innocent to be condemned, to give sentence against a man absent and indeed just, what else is it that you compel us to do but what God holds in hatred?
If, therefore, we do what God hates, surely we shall not be of those to whom it is said: 'You who love the Lord, hate evil.' Assuredly you, for this reason, do not hate evil: because you do not love the Lord; but we, for this reason, are unwilling to do what God hates: because we love Him. You do these things because you are not the servant of Him whose fear and love compels us to hate evil. For you are not found in the Church of the Lord as its persecutor, that you should think the prophet said to you in the Psalm: 'You who love the Lord, hate evil,' when in the hundredth Psalm he also says: 'He who works pride shall not dwell in the midst of my house; he who speaks iniquities has not prospered in the sight of my eyes.' Not to you, then, who are set outside, is it said, but to us:
'You who love the Lord, hate evil.' We hate, then, the evil which you for this reason love: because you are not in the Church of God. For how can you claim to be in the Church of God—a man who not only persecutes the Church, but also denies Him who founded the Church? Or are you not proud, and shall you be able to dwell in the house of the Lord, as long as you remain in this haughtiness? For who could deservedly be called proud, if you can be judged humble—you who say: condemn the innocent contrary to the divine commands, trample the precepts of God, keep mine?
But perhaps you do not speak iniquities, and you can be found among Christians—you, denier of the Father, denier of His only Son, denier of the Holy Spirit the Paraclete, founder of the Arian heresy, destroyer of the apostolic faith; you do not speak iniquities with your venomous lips, you utter nothing iniquitous with that sacrilegious mouth. Were you ignorant that in the hundred and second Psalm the Holy Spirit said of the Lord: 'The Lord doing mercy and judgment for all who suffer injury,' that you should command men to be judged unjustly? Whose commands is it fitting that we, priests of the Lord, obey? Yours, who have not yet been rescued from unclean spirits, or the prophet's, through whom the Holy Spirit admonishes that every portion of injustice be shunned by us worshipers of the true divinity?
Had you not read, Constantius, what was said by God to you kings: 'Touch not my anointed ones, and against my prophets do no malice,' that you should dare to stretch out your hands against the house of God? David, full of the Holy Spirit, says in the hundred and fifth Psalm: 'Blessed are they who keep judgment and do justice at all times'; and you say: do injustice with me. You persecute Athanasius—you, the impious, the pious; you, the heretic, the Christian; but I beg you, tell me, which of you can be acceptable to God? You, denier of the eternal majesty of the only Son of God, builder and founder of a false religion—or Athanasius? You have read in Psalm 118: 'Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.'
'Blessed are they who search out His testimonies, who seek Him with the whole heart'; and tell me, which of you seeks God, which faithfully renders service to His majesty? You, who make persecution against Athanasius because he confesses himself a Christian, or he who wishes you, his persecutor, to be rescued from the snares of the devil? You, who are a detractor of the catholic faith, or he, a preacher of the apostolic faith? If you are the one serving God, how does the Holy Spirit say below: 'For they who work iniquity have not walked in His ways'? You heretics, therefore, workers of iniquity, since you are not found in the ways of the Lord, surely you show by your works that you are in the way of the devil. You have read:
'Do not be zealous for death in the error of your life, nor procure destruction by the works of your hands, since God did not make death, nor does He rejoice in the destruction of the living.' Or not at all? If you read it, why did you command that we seek death for ourselves? If you did not read it, learn to what you have exhorted us—you who have chosen by lot to be of those whose crimes the Holy Spirit describes through the mouth of Solomon, saying: 'Neither did they hope for the reward of justice, nor did they judge the honor of holy souls; since God created man imperishable and made him to the image of His own likeness. But by the envy of the devil death entered into the world.' Those, therefore, who are of his part imitate him.
You perceive that you are an imitator of the devil, set in his part; you recognize that you procure death for yourself—you who were unwilling to remain in the image of God, as you were made by God, but have betaken yourself to him by whose envy death entered into the world. On the contrary, receive how great a felicity Athanasius desires to attain, wherefore he refuses to be what you are, an Arian apostate; receive how great a beatitude even those attained whom you have already deigned to kill because they called themselves Christians: 'But the souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to die, and their departure was reckoned as an affliction.'
'They went into destruction, but they are in peace. For even if in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality; and being vexed in a few things, in many they shall be well rewarded, since God tested them and found them worthy of Himself. As gold in the furnace He proved them, and as a holocaust victim He received them. And in the time of their visitation there shall be regard for them; they shall shine, they shall run to and fro like sparks in a reed-bed. They shall judge nations and have dominion over peoples, and their Lord shall reign forever.' You desire to kill Athanasius, thinking that if you slay him you can give him eternal evil—ignorant of the writing:
'The just man, though dead, condemns the living impious, and youth quickly consummated condemns the long life of the unjust. For they shall see the end of the wise man and shall not understand what the Lord purposed concerning him and why He fortified him. They shall see and shall despise, but the Lord shall mock them. And after these things they shall be falling without honor and in the reproach of death forever, since He shall burst them, puffed up and voiceless, and shall shake them from their foundations, and even to the uttermost they shall be forsaken, and shall be in grief, and their memory shall perish. They shall come, fearful, into the recognition of their sins, and their iniquities shall confront them from the opposite side.' You see among whom your portion is set; you see with what sort of men you have made yourself to stand against the house of God;
but Athanasius you shall see among those of whom receive what is written below: 'Then the just shall stand in great constancy against those who afflicted them and took away their labors. Seeing this they shall be troubled with horrible fear, and shall marvel at the suddenness of unexpected salvation. They shall say among themselves, repenting and groaning through anguish of spirit: These are they whom we once held for a laughingstock and for an object of reproach. We, senseless, esteemed their life madness and their end without honor. How are they reckoned among the sons of God, and their lot is among the saints?'
You shall say these things then, unless you take counsel for yourself, when you shall see yourself plunged into Tartarus; then you shall say the very things which holy Scripture says the persecutors of the soldiers of Christ shall say: 'Therefore we have erred from the way of truth, and the light of justice has not shone for us, and the sun has not risen for us; we were wearied in the way of iniquity and perdition, and we walked through difficult wildernesses, but the way of the Lord we knew not. What has pride profited us, or what have riches with boasting conferred upon us? All those things have passed like a shadow and like a messenger running past.' On the contrary, you shall see Athanasius among those whose glory the Holy Spirit relates, saying:
'But the just shall live forever, and their reward is with the Lord, and the care of them with the Most High. Therefore they shall receive the kingdom of glory and the diadem of beauty from the hand of the Lord, since with His right hand He shall protect them and with His arm defend them.' You, on the contrary, if you remain in this obstinacy of mind, if you resolve to end this frail life among the Arians, shall be among those to whom the Holy Spirit likewise speaks through the mouth of the prophet: 'Hear, therefore, O kings, and understand; learn, O judges of the ends of the earth; give ear, you who hold sway over the multitude and please yourselves in throngs of nations;'
'since power is given you by the Lord and strength from the Most High, who will examine your works and search out your thoughts, since, being ministers of His kingdom, you did not judge rightly, nor keep the law, nor walk according to the will of God. Horribly and swiftly will He appear to you, since a most severe judgment shall fall upon those who are in authority. For to the lowly mercy is granted, but the mighty shall suffer torments mightily. For the Lord will not except the person of any man, nor reverence the greatness of any, since He made both the little and the great, and equally His care is over all; but for the stronger a stronger torment is at hand.'
'To you, therefore, O wicked tyrants, are my words, that you may learn wisdom and not fall away.' Then, if you have not yet heard us, Constantius, you shall see the things which now, through your unbelief, you are by no means able to see; you shall see then, when you shall have been placed among your fellow-tyrants in those places of torment, not only that you loved unjust judgments, but also that you willed to destroy the house of God, that you stood forth a denier of the Son of God, that you sanctioned by your threatening power that the faith be preached otherwise than the prophets and apostles preached it. Nor shall you be able to say: I am not among those whom the Holy Spirit describes through Solomon, when you hear him say: 'To you, therefore, O wicked tyrants, are my words.'
You shall not, therefore, be able to deny that you are the chief of all your fellow-tyrants, if only you look thoroughly into your own doing. 'The keeping of the laws,' says the prophet, 'is the confirmation of incorruption, and incorruption makes you near to God.' To this you say: corrupt the law of God, as you have corrupted it, you our persecutors. Who is so senseless as to be unwilling, when corrupted by you, to perish forever? Who would be unwilling, by remaining in integrity, to become near to God? Why did you either do these things yourself, or dare to compel us to do them? Had you not read that Solomon said, in the book of Wisdom, to God:
'God of the fathers and Lord of mercies, who made all things by your word, and by your wisdom established man, that he should have dominion over the creature which was made by you, that he should order the world in justice and equity, and execute judgment in uprightness of soul,' and again: 'You taught your people by other works, that the just man ought to be just and humane, and you made your sons to be of good hope.' Had you not, I say, found these things written, that you should dare to provoke us to such great inhumanity? How shall we be sons of good hope? How shall we present ourselves before God as just and humane servants of His, when transgressors of the law are called neither just nor sons of God?
Know, therefore, from what good you would have wished to drag us to death—and indeed to eternal death—since everyone who ceases to be among those whom God has called into the adoption of sons is losing life and possessing perpetual death. Since, therefore, you are Arians—inhuman, impious, cruel, murderers—how shall you be able to be called Christians? Moreover, since you deny Christ the only Son of God and confess that you have believed in Antichrist, whence or how shall you be able to prove yourselves servants of Christ, when you have manifested by your own profession that you are servants of Antichrist?
For Antichrist indeed—in whom Arius believed—was truly Antichrist, since he was opposed to our Savior. The Lord and God, the only Son of God, is not, as you wish, Constantius, a creature, but is Lord of creation; He is eternal, inestimable, even as is He whose Son He is. He did indeed put on perfect man in the last days from the womb of the Virgin; yet even when He had assumed manhood, He is such—immutable, incorruptible, ineffable, and unchangeable—as is He whose Son He is. He could not, by reason of the man assumed, change into anything other than what He always was, since He is in the form of God His Father, since He is the Son equal to the Father, as the most blessed Apostle relates:
'who, though He was in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal to God, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant.' For not because he said 'He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant' could God the only Son of God become anything other than that which He is—incorruptible, ineffable, immutable—since He always remains in that state of eternal greatness in which His Father also remains. But surely we understand what 'He emptied Himself' means: that is, although the Son is like and equal to the Father, yet He willed also to become man for the sake of our salvation.
Since therefore you have received Antichrist in place of Christ, because in truth he was such (how could he not have been?), with what effrontery do you still resist Christians, save with that effrontery with which adulteresses too are wont to resist the chaste? You dared to attempt to wish to lord it over God's people, to wish to subject God's Church to your kingdom, and His divine majesty, which fears only its own paltry rule. And this indeed you did because, unknowing, you were unaware that it is written concerning you tyrants: 'For this cause souls without discipline went astray'; for while the wicked hold it as a settled thing that they can rule over the nation of the saints, they are bound with chains of darkness and fettered through the long night, shut in beneath their roofs, fugitives.
You now perceive yourself to be among those persecutors of God's people, of whom you have read that they are all bound together by a single chain of darkness; and again: 'Worthy indeed were they to be deprived of the light and to suffer the prison of darkness, who kept shut up your sons,' through whom the incorrupt light of the law was beginning to be given as the light of life to all. Or will you deny that you hold God's high priests in dungeons? And why do you detain them? Is it lest we should preach the truth to God's people? Why do you keep us in prison? Why do you send us into exile? Is it not because you fear lest we should make manifest, by the sacred Scriptures which reveal it, that you Arians are ravening wolves, rabid dogs, and the very Antichrists of our time?
For the sacred Scriptures prove, from your own deeds, that you are not the servants of God but plainly the sons of the devil. For if you are not one of those whom the sacred Scriptures cry aloud shall be such, then, when you find it written in the 131st psalm: 'Arise, O Lord, into thy rest, thou and the ark of thy sanctification; let thy priests be clothed with righteousness,' why did you wish us to condemn an absent man? Surely to this end, that we might lose the righteousness with which the Lord had clothed us. For since He says, 'Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness,' and you were pressing us to commit injustice, what else should we have been, had we done what your malevolence deemed fit, but your fellow criminals, but fountains of all iniquity?
These indeed we should have become, we who, laying aside the office of righteousness, would have taken up that of injustice in order to please you. You persecute the house of God, O Constantius, not knowing that you are persecuting God Himself in His house; for the house of God is the Church, in which the Lord dwells, as it is written in the same psalm: 'The Lord hath chosen Sion, he hath chosen her for a dwelling for himself. This is my rest for ever and ever; here will I dwell, for I have chosen her.' Since these things are so, behold that you punish yourself whenever you punish one of us, and that you persecute your own salvation whenever you set yourself against God—not us, in whom you may hear God say that He deigns to rest.
You therefore, who attempt to violate the temples of the Lord, unless you turn back, shall perish by that same kind of destruction as those of whom David speaks in the 135th psalm: 'Who smote Egypt with their firstborn, for his mercy endureth for ever; and brought out Israel from among them, for his mercy endureth for ever. Who divided the Red Sea into parts, for his mercy endureth for ever; and made Israel to pass through the midst thereof, for his mercy endureth for ever; and overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea.'
For what reason do I find these things written, save that I might believe that, when you attempted to crush me, my God—who was thus able—would, unless you turned back, extinguish you as He did Pharaoh, and that He would thus have snatched me out of your hands as He did those others out of Pharaoh's power? For this is why, at each of His mighty acts, He says, 'for his mercy endureth for ever,' that He might reveal to me that the Lord's mercy is with me, ever abiding, so long as I serve Him alone, but that it cannot be with you, seeing that you are His enemy, just as Pharaoh also was. We were unwilling to condemn an absent man; we were unwilling to pass sentence, according to your desire, upon one whom we know to be innocent and whom we recognize as a preacher of the catholic faith. Why?
Because we Christians have stretched out our hope toward God, not toward you and your perishable kingdom. We were unwilling to take pleasure in the glory of your kingdom, we who look to obtain glory from Him in whom alone, teaching that we must trust and hope, David says in the 145th psalm: 'Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation. His spirit shall go forth, and he shall return into his earth; in that day all their thoughts shall perish. Blessed is he whose God is the God of Jacob, and whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all things that are in them; who keepeth truth for ever, who executeth judgment for them that suffer wrong.'
We were unwilling to persecute unjustly, together with you, a man full of the fruits of righteousness, lest, while He began to exact vengeance from you, He should have exacted it from us as well; we did not do what you unjustly commanded us to carry out, lest we should come with you to that place which is described in Ecclesiasticus: 'And God will require him who suffers persecution'; and again: 'I saw under the sun the place of judgment—there was the wicked; and the place of the just—there was the godly.'
We were unwilling to join ourselves to heretics, we were unwilling to give our hands with you to assail the house of God, we were unwilling to take up idolatry with you to the insult of God, we were unwilling to be mingled in your sacrilege, lest we too should deserve to hear with you those things which, by the mouth of the prophet Hosea, the priests, the people, and the king of Israel shall hear—all of whom, having forsaken God, had betaken themselves to idolatry: 'Hear these things, O priests, and hearken, O house of Israel; and give ear, O house of the king; for judgment is toward you, because you are become a snare for an ambush, and as a net spread over a fowler's bird-trap.' In the prophet Amos too you surely knew it was written, when you gave the discipline—that is, the example—of condemning the innocent: 'Who executeth judgment on high, and hath set righteousness upon the earth.'
O violator of God's righteousness, were you perchance ignorant that the prophet Micah said concerning the princes of the Jews: 'They lifted not up their hands to God, and they coveted fields and plundered orphans, and his house, a man and his heritage. Therefore thus saith the Lord: Behold, I devise evils against this people, from which you shall not lift up your necks'? But to you, when you think fit to proscribe, to deport, to cast into prison, to torture, and finally to slay the worshippers of God—shall nothing of evils be brought before you? We were unwilling to be mingled in your abominable deeds, lest, condemned with you to eternal punishment, we should hear those things which are said by God in Micah:
Hear these things, therefore, O heads of the house of Jacob, and remnant of the house of Israel, who abhor judgment and pervert all that is right, who build up Sion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquities. Her judges judged for gifts, and her priests answered for hire, and her prophets divined for money, and yet they rested upon the Lord, saying: Is not the Lord among us? No evils shall come upon us.' Had you not yet read in that most holy prophet, that you should order to be condemned a man consecrated to God? 'Wherewith shall I lay hold of the Lord? I will take hold of my God most high. Shall I lay hold of him with holocausts, or with calves of a year old? Or will the Lord accept thousands of rams, or ten thousand of fat he-goats?'
'Or shall I give my firstborn for my impiety, the fruit of my womb for the sin of my soul? It has been shown to you, O man, what is good; and what else does the Lord require of you but to do judgment, and to love righteousness, and to love mercy, and to be ready to walk with the Lord your God?' Nor had you found it written in Habakkuk: 'The wicked man through his power oppressed the just'—that you should so have set yourself to a wicked work, which could make you impious before God? Again, had you not found it there set down: 'Why lookest thou upon the despisers? Wilt thou hold thy peace because the wicked devoureth the just?' And therefore we, seeing that you, a wicked man, had attempted to devour a just man, not only did not keep silent that you were acting evilly, but neither will we keep silent.
For you are none other than he concerning whom it is said: 'A pleasure-seeking and scornful man, a proud man shall accomplish nothing, who hath enlarged his soul like hell.' It cannot be said that this is unfitting to be said of you, if you deign to recall with me the crimes of your misdeeds, and if you be not slow to review your slaughters. For who else in our days—self-pleasing, a despiser, proud, accomplishing nothing, who has enlarged his soul like hell, and who might be reckoned to be like insatiable death—can be found, save you? But behold that it is said to you by God that you can accomplish nothing.
For though you be a despiser of God's commandments, though, desiring to persecute His religion, you have so enlarged your soul to slaughter the worshippers of God that in your whole realm you do not deign to cease from harassing the Lord's flock, nevertheless all your hostility accomplishes nothing. For all whom you persecute are and ever shall be the servants of God. But you, unless you make provision for yourself, shall perish for ever—self-pleasing, a despiser, proud, who are enlarging your soul like hell to devour and swallow us alike, because we resist you in your evildoing; made like insatiable death, you are driven by furies to our destruction. So wicked are you, O Constantius, that when I find the prophet saying: 'O thou that layest an evil foundation—'
—for his house, that he may set his nest on high,' you and the heritage of Antichrist, whom you favour, appear before my eyes, since I recognize those sacrilegious efforts of yours. For it cannot be doubted that you have attempted, and still attempt, that in your whole realm your heresy might be founded and the catholic faith destroyed. But when I hear also the prophet dedicated to God say: 'Woe to them that build a city with blood, and prepare a city with iniquities,' you seem to me to be one who is building a den of robbers by the shedding of blood, by the slaughter of God's servants. Or will you deny that your malignant council of Arians is a den of robbers? If you are not robbers, how is it that you are found slaying men consecrated to God?
'Woe,' say they, 'to those that build cities in blood'—O most prudent emperor, have you not seen that woe can be yours, because you thought your heresy was to be rebuilt through the shedding of the blood of God's men? The Holy Spirit says through the prophet Zephaniah: 'Seek the Lord, all ye humble of the earth; work judgment and seek righteousness, and make answer, that so you may be sheltered in the day of the Lord's wrath.' You say: 'Condemn the innocent; be with me murderers and sacrilegious men.' Are not these the very things you command us to do? Did you not command that the Lord's priest be condemned—or did you not? Did you not command that the Arian perfidy be held, but the faith drawn up at Nicaea be rejected?
If you cannot deny that you commanded these things to be fulfilled, behold that you also wished to make us murderers and sacrilegious men. God says: 'And it shall come to pass in that day: I will search Jerusalem with a lamp, and I will visit vengeance upon the men who are despisers, so that they keep not the commandments'; and you say that your own commands, and those of your fellow-blasphemers, are rather to be kept. How could we have unjustly condemned the Lord's priest, full of the fruits of righteousness, when we see what a threat arose against the leaders of the Jews and against all their accomplices, who are known to have done these very things which you do? 'O splendid and ransomed city, the dove! She hath not hearkened to the voice, she hath not received discipline, she hath not trusted in the Lord, and hath not drawn near to her God.'