'Thus says the Most High, who dwells on high, the Holy One in the holy places forever, whose name is the Lord Most High, resting in the holy ones, and giving equity to the faint-hearted soul, and giving vindication to those broken in heart. I will not be angry with you forever, nor will I forever exact vengeance upon you.' But to whom does He say this? Surely to those who have turned themselves, by making satisfaction, to blotting out their offenses. Hence too: 'Not such a fast have I chosen, says the Lord, but loose every knot of iniquity, loose the bonds of the violent contracts; release the crushed into remission, and break asunder every unjust bond. Break your bread to the hungry, and bring the poor who are without shelter into your house.'
'If you see the naked, cover him, and do not despise the members of your own seed. Then shall your morning light rise, and your health shall soon arise, and righteousness shall go before you, and the majesty of God shall encompass you. Then shall you cry out, and God shall hear you, and while you are yet speaking He shall say: Behold, I am present.' God will be present to you—if first you believe in Him, and if next you turn yourself to those things which He also declares below must be fulfilled: 'If you take away from you the bond of iniquity and of obligation, and the word of murmuring, and give your bread from the heart to the hungry, and satisfy the humbled soul, then shall light rise for you in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as noonday for you.'
'And your God shall be with you always, and you shall be filled as your soul desires, and all your bones shall grow fat, and they shall be like a watered garden, and like a fountain whose water does not fail.' These things, as has already been said, you will be able to obtain, if you betake yourself to the Church, if you shun your fellow-Arians, if you deign to hate that congregation of the wicked which is yours. Then will God be with you always, then in the darkness light shall rise for you, then your darkness shall be as noonday for you, then your way shall be directed unto good things. But if you remain in this obstinacy, in this cruelty, so as to torture His servants, then God will not be with you, but rather he who even today is found to be present in your assembly of Arians—that is, the devil.
For these things which you deign to do are not of God but of the devil. If it is a work of God to proscribe certain men, then—why did they not condemn Athanasius, the innocent prelate of God, or why did they not commune with your fellow-heretic George, or why do they call themselves Christians, why do they refuse to be made your fellow-apostates?—we may indeed judge whether it is a work pleasing to God; likewise whether this is alms which you give out of others' tears, out of the goods of those who chose rather to be deported, killed, and proscribed by you than either to condemn an innocent man or to deny the only Son of God, in whom they knew, by believing, that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, apostles, and martyrs had been glorified.
That I desire you to become their companion and a partaker with them all in every way—that these are my prayers concerning you—He is my witness who alone has the power to grant this. Do you dare, Constantius, to stretch out your hands against those dedicated to God, to harass those whose felicity the apostle declares, saying: 'Now we know that for those who love the Lord all things work together unto good, for those who according to His purpose are called, whom He foreknew and predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.' Your persecutions do indeed work together unto good for us; but mark what God promises to you persecutors through Jeremiah, saying: 'Israel is holy to the Lord, the firstfruits of His generations; all who devour him shall do penance. I will bring evils upon them, says the Lord.'
Evils shall come upon you, the evils which God promises you, Constantius, unless you correct yourself, just as they came upon that carnal, blaspheming people, your fellow, to whom it is said: 'You have acted wickedly to defile your ways, and in your hands has been found the blood of innocent souls.' You shall be forever among the enemies of God, unless you hearken, giving ear to His holy admonition, when He says: 'If, amending, you amend your ways and your thoughts, and, doing, you do judgment between a man and his neighbor, and do not oppress the proselyte and the poor and the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and do not go after strange gods'—then you shall amend your ways.
If you now cease to persecute the servants of God, if you confess yourself a Christian and deny that you are an Arian, if you believe the Son of God to be the true Son of God, if you pronounce anathema upon those who say: 'There was a time when He was not, and He was made out of nothing'—then you will change your ways, if you do penance for your murders and for your sacrilege; otherwise you will be, as you now are, of that number in whose reproach it is said by God: 'Is my house a den of robbers, wherein my name has been invoked?' Which do you wish to be the house of God—you Arians, or we Christians? For if your wicked congregation is the house of God, then a den of robbers is the house of God. For you, by shedding the blood of God's servants, as the Jews then shed it, are seen to be robbers.
By your fruits, emperor Constantius, you are recognized to be not a Christian, but plainly a broker for robbers. Indeed you command that innocent men be slain, dwelling, of course, not in the church of the Lord, but in a den of robbers. You do not cease to kill those whom you see ready to be killed for the glory of the only Son of God, for His eternal majesty. We were unwilling to give sentence against a righteous man at your false suggestions, lest this rebuke of the Lord should strike us too, together with you and with the Jews: 'They have bent their tongue like a bow, in falsehood; and faith has not prevailed upon the earth, for out of evils have evils gone forth, and they have not known me.'
You, who are both a contriver and a lover of false accusations, you who do not know the Lord—unless you correct yourself, being as you are—you will be one of those of whom you have read it written: 'They speak not the truth; their tongue has learned to speak a lie. They have refused to return, and have not left off usury upon usury, deceit upon deceit. They have refused to know me, says the Lord. Therefore thus says the Lord: Behold, I will burn them and try them, for so will I do because of the malignity of the daughter of my people. Their tongue is a wounding arrow, the malicious words of their mouth. To his neighbor he speaks peaceable things, and within himself he harbors enmity. Shall I not visit for these things, says the Lord, or shall not my soul take vengeance on such a nation?'
Snatch yourself, Constantius, from the pit of Arian madness, lest you pay eternal penalties together with your fellow-sacrilegers. Do not glory in your perishable dignity; consider that you are mortal, for you cannot otherwise obtain immortality unless you acknowledge God and do His will, as it is written: 'Thus says the Lord: Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, and let not the strong man glory in his strength, nor let the rich man glory in his riches; but in this let him glory who glories, to seek me out and to understand and to know how to glory in God, for I am the Lord who works mercy and judgment and righteousness upon the earth, for in these is my will, says the Lord.'
Since, then, you see that in these things is the will of the Lord, how do you deign to hold in loathing the very things which the Lord says He loves? 'In this,' He says, 'let him glory who glories: to seek me out, and to understand, and to know how to glory in the Lord.' How will you be able to say that you now glory in God? How will you be able to seek to build Him up, when you are provoking all the worshippers of His majesty to forsake the faith of the apostles, to take up the blasphemy of your dogma? 'In this let him glory who glories: to seek me out, and to understand, and to know how to glory in the Lord, for I am the Lord who works mercy and judgment and righteousness upon the earth, for in these is my will, says the Lord.'
Since, then, you wish an unjust judgment to be pronounced by the priests of God, since you are a shedder of innocent blood, you are not a servant of Him who deigned to speak these words by the mouth of the prophet, but plainly you are a servant of him who filled the heart of Cain, so that he slew the righteous boy, the first worshipper of the Lord. Hence it is that, although you are set in such high place, you are nevertheless found to be one of those of whom you have read that the Lord spoke in the Gospel: 'You are born of the devil, your father, and you wish to do the lusts of your father; for he was a murderer from the beginning, and stood not in the truth.'
You are a liar and a murderer: a liar, because you have brought false charges against God's servant Athanasius; a liar, because you call the heretical faith catholic and the catholic faith heretical; a murderer, because you both persecute the blood of Athanasius and have already killed a definite number of God's worshippers. Without doubt you have not stood in the truth, because you are doing these things, but you are set wholly in falsehood, because your father too is a liar, who compels you to deny the only Son of God, who impels you to pour out the blood of His servants.
We were unwilling to condemn an absent man, unwilling to pass sentence on the guiltless, unwilling to take up your heresy, lest, having been made like to you, we should deserve to hear what your fellow-erring Jews hear, in whose reproach we gather what is said through Jeremiah: 'All the nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are uncircumcised in heart.' You are and will be—unless you deliver yourself up to us—among those against whom the Holy Spirit cries out in the person of our people, saying to God: 'I know, Lord, that man's ways are not his own, neither shall a man walk and direct his own thought. Teach us, Lord, but in judgment and not in wrath, lest you make us few.'
'Pour out your wrath upon the nations that know you not, and upon the kingdoms that have not invoked your name; for they have devoured Jacob and consumed him, and laid waste his pastures.' You perceive that you are one of those against whom God's Spirit speaks in the person of our people. You see—unless you convert yourself—that the Lord's wrath is coming upon you, a stranger, upon you, a king, because you have not only failed to invoke the name of the Lord, but have gone further and persecuted it. For also when He says:
'because they have devoured Jacob and consumed him, and made his pastures desolate'—who among your fellow-tyrants can be found to be the chief exterminator of this pasture, if not you—you who indeed have neither ceased from mangling the servants of God nor from sowing your blasphemies throughout your whole kingdom? For it cannot be doubted that you have attempted to exterminate the pasture of God's people, since you have carried off its shepherds, concerning whom, as we have often said, God has spoken through Jeremiah:
'And I will give you shepherds after my own heart, and they shall feed you, feeding with discipline'—and yet you have set up heretics, and have caused a limitation to be imposed on the other catholics, so that, even if it were their wish to sit in their own sees, they should not dare to preach the apostolic faith, nor attempt—while you, the defender of the Arian heresy, live on in the body—to impart the evangelical tradition to the peoples. This is the ground that proves you to have attempted to exterminate the pasture of God's people. For the whole fattening of Christian souls is nothing else than to believe, as the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs believed, and then to do all righteousness.
You, on the contrary, since you have wished both to take away the faith from the hearts of God's peoples and to insert your perfidy, since—where there should be righteousness in the church of God—you wish it to come to pass that an absent and innocent man be condemned, and that, by the followers of righteousness, through the priests, their catholic fellow-priest be punished at the prompting of you a heretic: how will you be able to seem not to be an exterminator of the pasture of the Lord's flock, since our pasture is nothing else than heavenly doctrine? 'If you wish,' says the Lord, 'to come to life, keep the commandments'; and again: 'If you do the things I command you, I no longer call you servants, but friends.'
Since these things are so, you ought, in order to clear yourself, to produce the divine precepts which enjoin that an innocent catholic bishop must be put to death by his fellow-priests, while meanwhile you, a heretical emperor, are the accuser. For perhaps at this point you will attempt to say that you have not attempted to exterminate the pasture of the Lord's flock. If you can produce no precept of the Lord of the kind that has been alleged by you, it remains that those eyes of your heart, blinded by the blasphemy of Arius, laid open through this rebuke of God's servant, should see that you have done all the things we have charged against you.
You will not be able to deny that you show yourself toward us such as that Herod showed himself—Herod, whose colleague you are found to be, both in the fury of butchery, and in sacrilege, and in royal dignity—toward those little ones whom we read in the Gospel to have been killed on account of God, the Son of God. You have certainly found the cruelty of Herod, which you now deign to display, written down in Matthew the evangelist: 'Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked by the Magi, was exceedingly angry, and sent to slay all the infants in Bethlehem and in all its borders, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the Magi.' Perhaps you do not yet at all perceive that you have been stirred as unjustly against us, the worshippers of God, as Herod was stirred against those little ones.
Why do you deign to be hostile to us? Surely because we confess ourselves Christians, we who have not condemned a righteous man weighed down by your false charges. By these matters, who you are you will be able to weigh from the answers of the blessed baptist John, and to reconcile yourself to God through penance: 'Brood of vipers, who has shown you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruit worthy of penance, and do not presume to say: We have Abraham for our father. For I say to you, that God is able of these stones to raise up sons to Abraham. For even now the axe is laid to the roots of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bring forth good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire.' What do you think of these things?
Ought we to have condemned an innocent man, ought we to have given sentence against one absent and unheard? And how, when we had done this, could we have been found to be Christians, when the most blessed John exhorted those men—that they might be able to be Christians—to bring forth fruit worthy of penance? They, who had not yet laid hold of the way of righteousness, were being compelled to lay hold of it; while we who already hold it were being pressed, and are pressed, by you to seize that path of iniquity in which the Jews are known to be set. What, then, could befall us, if we had fed upon your viperous counsels—except that from Christians we should have been made a brood of vipers? Why did you command these things to be done, unless because you desired us to be made your fellow-serpents?
You who, though you know that the Lord said in the Gospel: 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied; blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy'—yet have said that an innocent man must be slain. For how can I be blessed, if I condemn a righteous man? If, rejecting the thirst for righteousness, I conceive the ardor of unrighteousness? How shall I be satisfied by God for the fruits of righteousness, when this unjust deed makes me a fratricide like Cain? How, again, shall I be able, among the merciful enriched with the fruits of mercy, to obtain the heavenly kingdom? When, if I slay a servant of God according to your desires, I shall be found not merciful, but cruel and wicked—yes, a murderer;
since, just as I would have been unmerciful toward my brother, so also toward me will that lover of mercy, that exactor of righteousness, be in time to come—He who says: 'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied; blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Whosoever,' says the Lord, 'shall loose one of these least commandments and shall so teach men, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.' And do you say, Constantius, that whosoever has not shed innocent blood cannot obtain the kingdom of heaven? Tell me, most holy one.
In what could the righteousness of Christians be able to abound more than that of the scribes and Pharisees, if we were to kill the very man whom you persecute—because he calls himself a Christian, because he refuses to become an Arian? In what would we be better than the scribes and Pharisees, if we had stood forth with you as deniers of the only Son of God—if, as they reject Him, we together with you were to reject the evangelical faith and had destroyed the apostolic tradition? Had you not remembered that the Lord said: 'You have heard that it was said to the men of old: You shall not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be liable to judgment. But I say to you, that everyone who is angry with his brother without cause shall be liable to judgment'—that you should command these things to be done?
If I am angry without cause at my brother, if I call him a fool, the only Son of God declares that I shall be liable to hell-fire; and yet, emperor Constantius, if I shed innocent blood, you say that I shall possess eternal rest? Nor could you have retained, when you were plotting that Athanasius ought to be killed, under what condition the Lord commanded gifts to be offered. 'If therefore you offer your gift at the altar, and there remember that you have something against your brother, leave your gift before the altar and go first to be reconciled to your brother, and then, returning, offer your gift.' What evil had Athanasius wrought, that, transgressing these precepts, you should command him to be killed? Surely only this—that he has called himself, or calls himself, a Christian.
For there is nothing else that you loathe and are eager to punish in Athanasius. Had you not remembered that the Lord commanded that even enemies be loved, that you should so most fiercely have persecuted him whom you knew to have sinned neither against you nor against God? 'You have heard that it was said: You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy. But I say to you: Love your enemies, and bless those who curse you, and do good to those who persecute you, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, who makes his sun to rise upon the good and the evil, and rains upon the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward shall you have? Do not even the publicans do so?'
'And if you salute only your friends, what do you do more than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore shall also be perfect, as your Father who is in heaven is perfect.' The Lord commands that even enemies be loved; and yet you persecute us, because we did not together with you shed the blood of the Lord's innocent priest. The divine voice cries out, saying: 'With what judgement you have judged, you also shall be judged, and with what measure you have measured, it shall be measured again to you'; and yet you say: Slay the man whom you do not know to have transgressed. Although you remember that you yourself are the fountain of evils, you have nevertheless dared to say of the one whom you knew to have been falsely accused by you: He is guilty of death.
You are so bereft of sense, Constantius Augustus, that not even that saying of the Lord could you recall when you commanded these things to be done: 'Why do you see the mote in your brother's eye, but the beam in your own eye you do not see? Or how do you say to your brother: Let me cast the mote out of your eye, and behold, a beam is in your own eye? and then you shall see to cast the mote out of your brother's eye.' The Lord says that there is a beam in your eye, and you dare to say to Athanasius, a most just man: You have a mote in your eye? For he committed none of those things which you deign to charge against him; whereas you have perpetrated whatever we have named, condemned as often as you have called an innocent man guilty. What other way did you wish us to enter upon than your own, which the Lord describes, saying:
'How broad and spacious is the way that leads to destruction, and many there are who enter by it!' Since therefore you are set in this broad and spacious way, you commanded an innocent man to be condemned, desiring indeed that it be revealed to all how widely your perdition holds sway. At the time when you came to Italy, you had so disguised yourself as a wolf into a sheep, as though we were not going to detect you by your works, as though the Lord's warning had escaped us where he says: 'Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly are ravening wolves; by their fruits you shall know them.' Did not your bitterest fruits, sown in you by the devil's poisons, straightway shine forth, grievous as they were, when you attempted to say that a man unheard ought to be condemned?
Did not the snares of you, a ravening wolf, at once lie open? — for you had built a most mighty engine against the sheepfold of God. As therefore by your fruits you were recognized to be a wolf and not a sheep, so also — what sort of thing you are, unless you take counsel for yourself, namely a tree destined for the fire — the holy Gospels prove. 'Do men gather a grape from thorns, or figs from thistles? So every good tree brings forth good fruits, but a bad tree brings forth bad fruits. A good tree cannot bring forth bad fruits, neither can a bad tree bring forth good fruits. Every tree that does not bring forth good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire; for by their fruits you shall know them.'
'Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.' Is this how you do the will of the Father of the one and only Son of God — that you deny his Son to be the only-begotten, that you say the Father himself is not the true Father, that you strive to overthrow the foundations laid by the apostles, that you slew and go on slaying his worshippers, that you drove his bishops out from the peoples entrusted to them, that you ordered an absent man, unheard, to be condemned, that you brought into the Church your heresy which blasphemes the one Godhead of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit? If all these things, as we have said, are pleasing to God the Father, you will be able to enter into the kingdom of heaven. For you hear his only Son say:
'Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.' You order an innocent man to be condemned; do you not recall that God said in Exodus: 'If two men quarrel and strike a woman with child, and she miscarries a child not yet formed, he shall suffer a penalty. Whatever the woman's husband shall assess, he shall give in accordance with what is fitting. But if it be formed, he shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.' I believe that nothing of the sacred Scriptures escapes you; for you could not give us such excellent commandments unless you were skilled in the law. You have surely read these things also:
'Everyone who hears these my words and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house upon the rock. The rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it did not fall; for it was founded upon the rock. And everyone who hears my words and does them not, I will liken him to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. The rain descended, the floods came, the winds blew and dashed against that house, and it fell, and great was its ruin.' Which of these do you say you are, Constantius — wise or foolish? If you say wise, why do your works show you to be foolish? Why is your house found set upon the sand?
For you will not be able to say that you built your house upon the rock, since every wise man sees the fabric of your folly, since every servant of God beholds this great ruin of your salvation which the Lord foretold. For in what is a Christian found to stand, except in this, that he obey the commandments of the Lord, except in this, that though he be harassed by every persecution for the name of the Son of God, he yet endure unmoved? In what will a Christian be perfect, unless he even be slain for the one whom you deign to deny to be the true Son of God? You, on the contrary, since you are not in the Church, but among the Arians, God's enemies —
since you deny the one and only Son of God, since you are not fulfilling the commandments of his clemency but rather strive to destroy them, since you are a transgressor of the law, a deserter of the oath of the heavenly warfare, a persecutor of the religion of God, since you show yourself an executioner toward his worshippers — how will you be able to be found a wise man, like to him of whom the Lord said that he built his house upon the rock? But you say against these things: I am not foolish, I know myself to be wise. If you are wise, why did you do, and go on doing, those things which the foolish alone can do? If you are wise, why did you command an unheard, absent man to be condemned? Why did you order an innocent man to be slain? Why did you desire that the priests of God become enemies of God?
For they could not be made friends of God by this deed, since you know that the Lord said to the apostles: 'If you do what I command you, I will no longer call you servants, but friends.' If you are wise, why, when you condemn Athanasius, ought I, a priest of God, to be heard? You would by no means allow him to present the grounds of his defence. If you are wise, if you are a worshipper of God, why do you persecute us because we confess that we are Christians? Why do you vehemently love those who say they are not Christians but confess that they are Arians? If you are wise, why did you often send an armed soldier to the house of God? If you are prudent and know yourself to be a servant of God, why have you persecuted, and do you persecute, his people with arms?
Why, finally, do you call the apostolic and evangelical faith heretical, and pronounce the heretical faith catholic? You call yourself wise; but on the contrary we perceive that no one who does these things can be wise. For what sacrilegious man can be called prudent, save by those more imprudent than himself? If you are wise, Constantius, I shall not be able to find who could be more foolish than you. Do you still seem to yourself to be wise, you who have supposed that the prophets, apostles, and martyrs were slain on behalf of a creature? For you will not dare to deny that all these were slain on behalf of the one and only Son of God.