It would indeed have been fitting, Constantius, emperor, no longer to dispute anything with you concerning the divine Scriptures, since we have found you to be a corrupter of the truth, and have caught you out over those very deeds of yours on account of which such men are called 'wise in their own eyes' — for in fact they are men who hold to the road of foolishness. It would have been fitting, as I said, after all the great charges we have already heaped up, to keep silence, especially since we remember it is written: 'Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you become like him,' and again: 'Do not speak in the ears of a fool, lest, when he hears, he mock your wise words.'
But because up to now I have gathered that you applaud yourself over the power of your arms and the empty dominion of your rule — namely, that you are able to do violence to those whom by reason you ought to have established in what you had decreed — in all these matters, in which you think yourself great, I have willed, especially in this book, to make you wretched and to make known to your mind, defiled by sacrilege, that I despise all the frenzy of your butchery, wielded by God's servants. For we wish you to hold it fixed and manifest that you, together with your temporal, fleeting, frail, and corruptible kingdom, will pass away and come to eternal punishment, unless you provide for yourself while there is yet place; whereas the Christians will come to eternal rest and will attain an incorruptible kingdom.
Or will you attempt to argue that through this heresy of yours you are about to lay hold of the kingdom of heaven — you who, together with your plague-ridden Arians, being afraid lest, refuted by us Christians when the truth itself cries out, you might one day be forced to surrender, rejected disputation and judged that you must take refuge in the strength of your frail arms? As though, an enemy of the divine religion, you could by your frail forces overcome men who will attain immortal gifts! You, a forerunner of Antichrist, oppose the religious servants of Christ, the soldiers of God, whom the only-begotten Son of God has deigned to invite to enjoy the eternal friendships of his divinity, saying:
'Blessed are you when men hate you and persecute you with curses, and reproach you and speak all evil against you. Rejoice and exult, for your reward is great in heaven; for so they persecuted the prophets also who were before you.' You supposed that you, powerless in all things, could drive these men from their standing, and lay low those whom you see to be ready to be slain for the sole-begotten Son of God, precisely because they have chosen not to be tortured with you deniers among the dead below, but to obtain the heavenly kingdom;
these men, who by the very confession of their faith shine forth as being temples of God, you had judged that you would overcome by the empty authority of your kingdom. For just as you Arians, by denying the Son of God, are designated by the voices of the prophets, the apostles, and the sacred Gospels as being houses of the unclean spirit, so we who confess the Son of God show ourselves to be temples of God. Your cruel and sacrilegious mind, favoring the promptings of your fellow-heretics, had presumed that the soldiers of God could succumb to your butchery — we whom God calls his own temples thus: 'For I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God and they shall be my people.'
You had judged that you could conquer these whom the Apostle exhorts to bear God and to carry him in their bodies; you had indeed supposed that you could subdue by the futile years of your kingdom those whom the Apostle so exhorts. But you perceive — even as you stand within the veil in your palace — that you have received an answer from me, that, trampling underfoot your worthless authority, all God's servants agree with mind, will, zeal, courage, and voice to preserve their salvation. You notice how your fleeting dominion, however greatly it deigns to rage against us, is thereby judged the more to be weak, contemptible, empty, feeble, and abject; for as often as your hand, stirred by fury and crime, has prevailed to destroy us, so often we remember that we have grown and have stood forth ever more and more as victors.
You slaughtered very many in Alexandria, you butchered certain ones throughout the whole world, you destroyed those who resisted you in various places; but all these — what you least wish to hear — are martyrs; all those most blessed men, slain by your sword, we believe to be assuredly in paradise. Believe me, that we would count it better to be killed by you — because we have seen it is better to have God as a lover for all ages than to be punished with you, an imitator of Judas Iscariot and of the Jews. Hence at last, Constantius, we are prepared, not fearing them, to undergo the gnashings of the viper inflicted through you and every destruction. It can never repent us of our counsels, if, slain through you, we who up to now are seen to have resisted your cruel hands should perish.
For the death that you threaten to inflict upon us is prepared for all men; but so great a blessedness as the holy martyrs have attained, no one, as we see, has obtained except those who by dying have conquered death for the sake of the sole-begotten Son of God. You torture, kill, and destroy men consecrated to God, and why you do these things you are unable to give the causes of your hatreds. Because you go astray, you are angry even with us because we hold the true way; and though by our wholesome admonition you could correct yourself, you heap up your errors moreover with cruel deeds, wrenching out the disemboweled bodies of minds consecrated to God — of those who have resolved to keep faith with God even to the last stretches of life.
You perceive that these things are so, and indeed not without the greatest grief to yourself, since you notice that you have no power to turn us aside from this which is the only religion, nor to draw us back from that course in which we press on toward the prize of the upward calling — neither when you openly make yourself an enemy, nor when you feign yourself a friend (for it is evident that there is in you the one who deceived Eve), nor when you compose your word, through which you creep like a cancer with a false, painted swelling of knowledge — proving yourself, by your rescinding edict stained with all your outrages, to be the harvest of all errors; since you are yourself the fount of all error, you affirm that you are the bearer of light, though you are beset by all darkness.
You are able at last to see, most savage Emperor Constantius, that by no means can we be turned aside from the way of truth, and that — though you are wholly devoid of understanding — you are nevertheless, at least in part, despised, as you observe. For we Christians have learned that this is the first business of faith: to be moved from our standing neither by prosperity nor by adversity, and never to be drawn from our purpose once vigorously undertaken. We discern that by this one religious utterance — 'I am a Christian; I do not wish to be as you are, Constantius, an apostate' — every crime is shut out; that by this one utterance the protection of salvation, the bond of liberty and honor, is granted; we behold that by this confession there is granted to you all the shield of protection, the weapon against the devil who rages against us through you. And you say: 'Deny that you are Christians.'
That we may endure steadfast against the opposing peril, and not shudder at your tormenting savagery but be encouraged rather than grieved — this that conscience effects which recalls that the sole-begotten Son of God grants the presence of his divinity to protect his own and make them victorious; hence it comes about that we are brought to life by the very penalty by which you believe us to be extinguished. For that which you, punisher, hoped would avail for torment, this we take up for the increase of virtue, we who believe that he for whose sake we suffer is with us; hence it is that we are not broken by your evils that shake us, and the more we are variously vexed by continual cruelty, the more firmly are we strengthened. For with us is he who guarded in the furnace of fire the Hebrew youths who believed in him;
he himself steadies our minds, he himself rules our understanding, he himself kindles our hearts with his divine love and animates them to the endurance of holy suffering, whence not one of us thinks upon the death that you threaten to inflict, but upon immortality — not upon the temporary penalty inflicted through you, but upon everlasting glory. For the sacred Scriptures make plain that God's martyrs are consecrated by torments and are crowned by the very proof of their suffering: 'Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints'; and: 'If in the sight of men they suffered torments, their hope is full of immortality. And having been afflicted in few things, in many they shall be well rewarded, because God tried them and found them worthy of himself.'
'He tried them as gold in the furnace, and as a whole burnt-offering he received them, and in the time of their visitation they shall shine. They shall judge nations and shall have dominion over peoples, and their Lord shall reign forever.' Those, therefore, who presume from the greatness of God that they shall attain so great a felicity — it is necessary both that they exult and that, pondering the joys to come, they trample underfoot your present evils. Divine is the utterance of the sole-begotten Son of God: 'He who loves his soul in this world shall lose it, and he who hates his soul for my sake shall preserve it unto life eternal.' To this divine precept the Christians cleave.
Though your claw, Constantius, rebounding, should run back into the wounds in our members, we stand and shall stand unmoved, stronger than you the torturer and than all your penalties, revolving in our minds this one thing: that this butchery of your cruelty is useful to us for everlasting glory. By barbarians the conquered are often spared, and there is room for clemency even amid arms, and indeed among those who pass their life in a bestial manner. But this thing that is done against us by you is unspeakable — you against whom we have wished well, and whom we long to be well with us, and whom we do not cease ceaselessly to entreat God for;
you plunder, you proscribe, you slay with the sword, you punish in various ways, you do not permit the bodies that you have decreed to be mangled to be buried, you forbid almsgiving; you have filled all the mines and all the places — thought worthy to be called places of exile — with our number, the number of those who resist your cunning; you do not cease to vex the innocent by banishment, by hunger, thirst, and nakedness. These evils you heap upon us who desire to attain everlasting blessedness. And yet, most cruel emperor, whatever your savagery has inflicted upon us and will yet inflict, mark that it is a lie — since neither is the death inflicted through you upon the holy martyrs who have gone before us a death, nor a loss, nor a damage, but a profitable investment of faith.
Always we Christians are tortured by our tyrants with a perverse interrogation in persecution. For by that same kind by which the guilty are compelled to confess, by that manner we are driven to deny Christ, the sole-begotten, most true Son of God. But as those, according to their deserts, are condemned when they confess, so we, because we do not deny the Son of God, are crowned — for whom the condemnation inflicted by you is a victory; we are taken by you from your midst, we before whom you dare not blaspheme. For by the one voice of Christ's soldier there is laid low the one who speaks against our religious confession while abiding within you — the one who through you thirsts for our blood, the one who has besieged your mind;
he trembles at the presence of God's worshippers and cannot bear it, when we dissent from you who say that the Son of God is from nothing, when we stand against your threats and, aided and protected by his power, trample all the cruelty of your butchery. You truly feel yourself chastised by the steadfastness and endurance of his servants, of him who says: 'Do not fear him who can kill the body; but rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.' We are animated also by the exhortations of his most blessed apostle Paul, to trample you down, tyrant of all tyrants: 'We are the sons of God. But if sons of God, then heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ — if indeed we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified together with him.' And again:
'I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come, which shall be revealed in us.' Pondering the glory of that brightness, it is fitting that we, the servants of Christ, endure all pressures and persecutions — not only those inflicted through you by the devil, but also those inflicted through all his men — because, though they be many, yet from all of them we are set free, we who believe that the Son of God is the true Son; and though we remember that there are two persons, the Father and the Son, yet we claim one divinity for the Father and for his sole-begotten Son.
Hearing these just and unconquerable arguments of ours, because he who has besieged your mind cannot bear the truth, he goads your bestial spirit to vex us as bitterly as possible, to torture us with exquisite kinds of penalties, because we are unwilling to abandon the road of salvation. Hence it is that your excessive cruelty mocks our bodies, because we highly esteem the faith and do not deny that we are worshippers of God. You bear down upon us with all the strength of your butchery, judging that you will harm us, ignorant that we rejoice in the occasions of our proving — we, namely, who esteem this our felicity to be the greatest: if in this contest of righteousness it should befall us to be slaughtered by your executioner's hand for the sake of the Son of God.
We persist steadfast with religious mind against your madness — for he for whose sake we suffer conquers in us whatever you, profane one, hurl against the very divine Majesty under the person of us, with empty speech and vain converse, with depraved will; all of which your hard mind and the obstinate ferocity of your breast beget unto the death of your own salvation. While, with dementia leading you, fury seizing you, and every monstrosity vexing you — by which you are alike goaded and borne along — you dissent from the religion of God, we, protected by him whom you deny, resist your monstrosity, beast, as masses set against the sea are wont to resist the hostile deep.
Though the diabolical waves strike through you, and the widely-wandering whirlwinds of the world beat upon us, our courage will be, as it is, more and more immovable; nor shall we, overwhelmed, succumb to the foaming waves of your assaults, but against all perils we shall always be erect — since a Christian spirit is not abject, to be laid low and cast down to vices, but is so noble and high-born that it remains immovable and victorious against all temptations. We are not Christians who think to enjoy the sweetness of this present frail life, but we are men desiring to attain the glory of eternal security and felicity, the possession of perpetual blessedness.
Religious is the voice of the blessed apostle John, exhorting us to spurn earthly things and to desire to follow the heavenly: 'And the world passes away, and its lust; but he who does the will of God abides forever, even as God abides forever.' Since these things are so, I long for you to know that you, together with all your tricks and frauds and with the most vast cruelty of your savagery, lie beneath the feet of God's servants; that all the glory of your vain dominion is accounted by us and held as nothing; and that, with all the vigor and authority of your empire, you are felt by us to be nothing other than a worthless little breath of gold. That we boast of these things, some one, perchance, of your flatterers may say.
Do you not recall, Constantius, that I said to your judges, while you listened with the curtain drawn, that even if you had decreed to hurl all your soldiery, all the darts of your kingdom, against us — against us, who execrate your blasphemy, as against contemners of your sacrilegious decree — that they should dash all their arms against us, not even so could we withdraw from our purpose? But you, according to that prudence of yours, judged that your soldiers ought to die in every war for you, while you decreed that the Christians ought to prove themselves deniers of God. And to be sure, your men feel the pain of their wounds, they grieve that they have perished, they grieve to lose this light. But we, first of all, cannot feel the torments of the penalties in which Christ suffers, in which Christ works out eternal salvation;
and next, because we count present things as nothing and shall ever be in the future in that everlasting light — how can it be that we would not rather be killed for Christ the Son of God, the bestower of eternal life, by your sacrilege-defiled hands, we who discern that we cannot otherwise please God the Father, unless, when summoned by you to deny the sole-begotten Son of God, we confess through death itself that he is the true Son of God? Your detestable mind takes it ill that we say Christ the Son of God is the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Power of God, true God from true God, born of the Father — that is, of the substance of the Father — light from light, born not made.
that he is of one substance with the Father, which in Greek they call homoousion; through whom all things were made, without whom the Father never was. You take it ill, worm of Arius, that we defend that the brightness, power, greatness, eternity, and divinity of the Father and of his sole-begotten Son is one; that it is nothing new which we, as legates, asserted in your palace and do not cease to confirm — that it was always so believed and is believed by Christians, just as at Nicaea against your Arian heresy and against all errors the holy faith is seen to be written down. If at last you would open the eyes of your heart, pierced through by the bites of the serpent, you would find that the Church holds and defends this faith which it knows was handed down to it through the blessed apostles.
If you could in a moment traverse all the nations, you would have found, most stupid emperor, that everywhere the Christians believe just as we do, standing firm in this our defense on behalf of the Son of God, and desiring, like us, to die for him. But your novel preaching and recent religion — a blasphemy brought forth through you under the pretext of faith, unto the ruin of your own salvation — has not only, up to now, been unable to traverse the Roman frontier, though you strive hard enough for it, but even wherever it had attempted to fix its roots, it has withered — since, of course, all God's servants withdraw from you, and only your few remain with you, whom the Lord foretold to be the tares sown over the wheat.
All these things has furnished, and is furnishing, to you that craftsman of fraud and death, who through you allures and deceives very many by his oblique blandishments, who, though he is guilty of every crime, suggests to that most bitter heart of yours that you should punish us as though we were guilty of some crime. But look at last, open the eyes of your heart — in which there is for you no light, but all is fog and vast darkness stirring — and you will find that your death, inflicted by your frail power, restores a more whole life; that this rather leads us to glory through fires, through swords, through chains and wild beasts, through whatever, in short, your rage — the rage of a 'most pious emperor' — should decree to bring upon our slaughter.
With God protecting us, not only are we not extinguished, but we are more and more brought to life, we who remember that there is nothing above us except God; wherefore a soul devoted and given over to God blushes to succumb to you, dead through your own blasphemy — to a dog barking against the truth, teeming with the worms of Arius. As often as the souls of Christ's servants diligently examine the true force of torments, they consider that there is no greater torment than for a servant of Christ to be conquered by you, our adversary, the servant. We recall that the Lord said: 'If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his soul shall lose it; but whoever loses his soul for my sake shall find it.'
'For what does it profit a man, if he should gain the whole world, but suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?' The dignity of martyrdom compels us, as Christians, to condemn life by death, since through the Son of God a new kind of salvation has been bestowed: to perish, that I may not perish. We know that this discipline has been divinely handed down to us: that without any terror we should guard the force of the warfare of so great a Name, seeing that the desire of eternal remembrance long ago drew us away from the longing for this light, and the fellowship of Christ set us apart to trample all earthly things underfoot. The battle of your cruelty grows, Constantius;
but mark that the glory of Christ's soldiers grows too, nor are we in the end held back from the battle-line by fear of torments, but rather are we summoned to the line by your very torments. That these things are so you will not be able to deny, when you behold the Christians throughout the whole world animated with an equal and like ardor of courage to wage the contest — when you see the incorrupt firmness of the faith of Christ's soldiers, so that neither do your detestable blandishments deceive them, nor do the threats of your fury terrify them, nor do the tortures of your butchery and the torments of your cruelty overcome them — since, of course, he abides in us and is ever established with us, who said to the blessed apostles: 'I am with you all the days, even unto the consummation of the age.'
He is everywhere present, because, being the Son of the Almighty, he is all-powerful, whose eternity and divine power is one with the Father. But how great a fog of unbelief has beset you, and how great a cloud of shadows and errors has overspread your breast, cannot be told — you who, though you feign yourself a Christian, nevertheless strive to remove the Christian name from the midst. Amid these things, you ought to see that our readers will grant pardon for this: that, in proportion to the merit of your impiety, the eloquence of my mediocre talent was not able to describe you fully so as to execrate you; for they saw that I had given a model to all who fear God and had furnished matter to those who will treat of it, by what order they might cut you down, set as you are without the roots of eternal life.
Nor should you say that you are being reviled by us with abusive words, if you hear what you deserve from men who, though rustic, are nevertheless Christians. We know that we must not curse, but rather pray for our enemies; for the Son of God, though he is Lord of all things, yet when he was reviled, did not revile in return. But indeed, if the Lord of all things were to curse, all things would surely fall to pieces at the onset of so great a Majesty. You say to this, no doubt: 'The Lord willed you to be meek, seeing you are his priest, and you show yourself obstinate toward me.' The prophets, the apostles, and the choir of the Gospels teach that we must not kill; you, on the contrary, deign to slay men consecrated to God. We Christians know that, to placate him whom we worship, we have need of those things by which we know he is delighted and rejoices.
If, therefore, it is to be judged that what you do can please God, then all of us ought to be murderers, sacrilegious men, and blasphemers. O Constantius, of how vast a dementia you appear to be! That subtle old schemer, the circumventer of the innocent, is seen to have placed his seat in your mind, and do you suppose that you are not yet made public? Still do you feign yourself a sheep, though you are a wolf — you who by the most holy prophets are named a beast, by the most blessed apostles a dog and a ravening wolf, disguised, though you are a worker of iniquity, as a minister of righteousness; and do you count yourself to be a man, though you bear nothing of a man except the outlines and the outward figure? You grieve to be called a monstrous beast, bearing nothing of a man except the lineaments and the outward figure.
Tell me, I pray, if you can, slayer of the innocent — can you deservedly be called a Christian, and not rather an insane, dull, and senseless enemy of God's religion — that religion in which piety, humanity, and all justice dwell, in which we are taught not even to render evil for evil, in which we are taught not to kill, but to be killed for the sake of the Son of God? You, considering your dominion despised and vain, in your sacrilegious attempt apply torments; but there is a protector of the faith, a helmsman of salvation, a ruler of souls — whom you impel us to deny — ever with us, ever present to our contest, who raises up the warriors and champions of his divine Name.
Hence it is that we stand stronger than the servants of your injustice and its ministers — that is, your fellow-butchers who torture us — and are given courage, so that our joints, though struck and torn, overcome your claw. For how shall a plague, raging long and repeated, be able to overcome an unconquerable faith, when every soldier of Christ knows that he himself, for whose sake he suffers, is present with him and rejoices at the endurance of his servants? We stand, then, as servants of Christ, strengthened by his Majesty, with free voice, with uncorrupt mind, naked indeed of your frail weapons, but clothed in those arms which the blessed apostle prayed that we might put on, saying: 'Finally, be strengthened in the Lord and in the might of his power.' And:
'Put on the armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil, because our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.'
'Therefore take up the armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day and, having accomplished all things, to stand — having girded your loins with truth, and put on the breastplate of righteousness, and shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; in all things taking up the shield of faith, with which you may be able to quench all the flaming darts of the most wicked one; and the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God — through all prayer and supplication praying at all times in the Spirit, and watching unto it.'
Therefore, because your cruelty and your father's cannot overcome men armed in such a manner, fortified with such power — as has often been said — we have stood, and we stand, and, until you consume our bodies, we shall stand, fortified by the saving shield of Christ, surrounded by the breastplate of his piety, steered by the Holy Spirit, immovable and more and more in all things authors, driving off every voice of servitude.
For we are certain and confident that by no snares of yours, by no craftiness of yours, by no cavil, by no frauds of yours, can we be drawn from our purposed vigor — since we know that the end of transgressions is death, and thereafter follows a life that is ever-abiding; and we embrace the counsels of his blessed apostle, and desire to be found imitators and partakers of him who declares that, though our old man is corrupted, the man who is within is renewed; and that, though the earthly house of our body is dissolved, a heavenly one is built; and that, placed in the body, we are pilgrims away from the Lord;