論戰文集 第 6 章 第 3/3 段

Whom does it not urge to come to the glory and heights of martyrdom, not only through these things which you administer, but even through crueller ones? Since your punishments are easily overcome, if the glory of those very punishments is set before the eyes. For that which lacerates is not considered, where so great a reward of the penalty is bestowed. By incorruptible rewards your torments, Constantius, are conquered, and the torture is worn down, death is subdued—which, when it is inflicted, life is rather restored. The wounds inflicted by you, O emperor, would pain us, if they did not at once make us friends of God; and since we then presume that we shall truly live, if we are struck down by you for the sake of the Son of God, and shall then lose nothing of salvation, how can it be that we should yield to your empty gnashings?

You have supposed that we could be, and can be, subdued by your force, and I believe you still suppose so in vain. How long, at last, Constantius, will you abuse the patience of God? Nay rather, I exhort you: driving these things out from your dark senses, let your foolish mind receive those meditations which can set you upon the way, which lead to the kingdom of God. Lay hold pleasantly on that which may lead you to the banquet of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the friends of God.

You who, a man of all injustice, have dared to esteem yourself just, setting yourself before all who have been established by the judgment of God as bishops of the holy Church, and reproving the holy faith which the Church has always held and holds, have striven to preach the blasphemy uttered by the mouth of your fellow-sacrilegist Arius—now through your satellites, now by your edict, now by your mouth stuffed full of unclean spirits—and you wish yourself to be called a perfect worshipper of God and one doing all things in a holy manner, whereas up to now no one is found to have been either crueller, or more detestable, or greater in blasphemies, of all those kings who are called tyrants, than you.

That these things are so I have already laid open to your folly in the book which is entitled 'On the Apostate Kings'; now I wish you to know this, that unless you are converted in good time, unless you believe, as we do, that the only-begotten Son of God has always reigned together with the Father and that there never was a Father without the Son, and that there is one kingdom of the Father and of his only Son, and that the Father and the Son possess one Godhead, you shall perish for all eternity, seeing that Arius your master has called the Son of God a creature, and you have exalted that man's blasphemy to the very heavens with your praises. We press you, we beg you, we urge you to become most beloved of God, and you complain that you suffer injury at our hands.

Thus you guard the empty censure of your dignity, as though it could snatch you away from perpetual torments; you lift up your proud head above the priests of the Lord, not heeding what is written: Everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted. The Apostle, speaking of that only Son of God whom you persecute in us, says: Though he was in the form of God, he did not think it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being found in fashion as a man; he humbled himself even unto death, even the death of the cross.

He who in the form of the Father always was and is and shall be, being indeed the true Son, being unchangeable and unconvertible, since as God the Son is wholly powerful, being the Son of the Almighty, nevertheless for the sake of our salvation deigned to humble himself, that he might make us who lay prostrate and cast down to be raised up and exalted;

his holy humility it is that has made you, a rabid dog, bark against his divine majesty, since out of the sacred Scriptures you see only those things that were written on account of the humility he assumed, and pass over those that proclaim his eternal divinity. What do you answer to this, Constantius, to whom your Arian bishops, adherents of that dogma, constantly acclaim that you are the bishop of bishops? Do you believe, or not, that those who die for God's only Son shall possess the kingdom of heaven? If you believe it, why do you drive us to deny his eternity? Why do you not cease persecuting, why do you not leave in peace those who believe in him? Why are you always restless and always hostile toward us, showing yourself a violent persecutor, but under the title of peace a treacherous enemy?

I grieve that you have acquired for yourself so great evils; I mourn over you because you are set in every respect without hope of eternal life. But although you rend us not only with swords but also gnaw us with your teeth, yet hold it for certain that we, protected by God, shall overcome your fury, and do not deign to despise us on that account. For though you see our bodies frail, that which is most powerful, we are strong, upright and fortified by wisdom, having our adornments and defenses in our hearts and minds. Whence now do we see ourselves adorned? Whence do we perceive ourselves fortified and safe? Whence do we know ourselves to be wise?

Only because we both shun your blasphemy and gladly hand over our mortal bodies to your sword for the sake of the Son of God, knowing that, when you have been able to slay our earthly dwelling, the heavenly one which we possess you cannot slay. For to this end we know that good things and evil things have been set before us, that the whole force of our prudence might be exercised in discerning between good and evil. What is more foolish than to fear you and to deny God? What is wiser than to trample upon your abominable head and thereby to please God by that deed? Hence it is that you perceive us standing ready with all our strength in the contest of righteousness, with faith entire, with devoted courage, with mind uncorrupted, to stand in the battle-line which has been declared by you, undismayed soldiers of the living God.

Bravely too is the shield of faith borne by us, whereby, with God protecting, whatever the devil hurls by your hands is quenched, for our feet are shod with the teaching of the Gospel and armed with cleats. Though you be Augustus, yet in you is crushed the serpent that roars for the slaughter of us innocent ones, since through you, his executioner, he cannot prevail to bite and supplant. For God wills that we be pressed through you, yet not to this end, that we abandon the faith and the way of the patriarchs, apostles, and martyrs, but that, though compelled by you to deny the only Son of God, we may not refuse even to undergo death. We are not, like you, so foolish and perverse as to prefer to cast away what is salutary and to take up what is mortal;

we are not those who flee the safeguard of heavenly medicine. We foresee that, although the physician cuts with the knife, burns with the cautery, and by the burning of mustard-plaster brings the sick man to every pain, yet to be cut, cauterized, consumed, and stung is not to have an enemy; since it is good for this very reason, that it takes away useless pains through pains applied for the sake of health. God wills us to dissolve death by death, to shatter eternal torments by temporary torments, to empty out the perpetual punishments to come by your punishments; we, namely, who, when you have taken life from us, presume that far more can be conferred upon us—indeed, the eternal in place of the temporary, the incorruptible and perpetual in place of the frail and fleeting.

You judge it not enough that those who confess themselves Christians be smitten only with the sword, unless you have inflicted all kinds of tortures upon their bodies. It matters nothing by what kind of death you deign to punish us, provided that through these we are admitted to the enjoyment of eternal life, provided that through these your fury be mortified while we, on the contrary, are made to live. For if you think it wretched that I should prefer to be killed by any cruel torture whatsoever for the Son of God, then, to pass over the eternal glory of the blessed martyrs, I know that by some kind of death one must die anyway. In short, I will grant you many who perish more cruelly in their beds, whom some inner suppuration has swelled and the pain of struggling sinews has contracted. It matters from what cause, not from what stake I hang.

What do you say, most foolish king? Am I sent by you to these tortures, to this kind of punishment, unjustly or justly? If unjustly, the cross will be yours who fasten it, not mine whom you fasten upon it; if justly, the guilt of my own crime, not your penalty, will begin to torment me.

Moreover, as regards the outcome it makes no difference whether I die by a nail at your hand or by a lance, with my hands bound behind my back or stretched out and spread wide, whether bent forward and stooping or upright and lifted high; it matters not whether you slay me resting on my bed, or cut my neck with a sword while I stand, or take off my head with an axe, or bind me to a stake or to a cross, or roast me with fire or bury me alive in the earth, or hurl me down from a rock or plunge me into the seas, or, striving with a sliding heave of great force, strike my head far from me at one vast blow, or, more subtly than all subtlety, sport with an arrow fixed ever so long in my body—though your cruelty devise a hundred thousand shapes of punishments, out of all these there will come to me, through that death you have brought upon me, immortality alone.

I cannot but rejoice when you heap up such things, since through these punishments I know for certain that every punishment can be ended. For those things too which are external and which I judge can befall through your savagery, I reckon as pertaining to me not at all—whether birds or dogs tear my body, whether they cling to my corpse, whether the beasts leap upon those cruel eyes while you look on, whether, lying on the ground, I am reduced by claws and teeth down to the very bones—since after all these things I am safe with God. For when you have consumed my body by such and so great forces of your beastly monstrousness, the Maker of all things will remake and restore it, and indeed from corruption into eternal incorruptibility.

But you, our most unjust persecutor, ought to know that punishment without end is coming to you, and do not think you will go unpunished, you who have judged that the name of the only Son of God should be subjected beneath your feet and impiously and wickedly trampled. It is the word of the blessed Apostle: The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come—which glory, namely, we shall possess if we choose to be killed by you rather than to deny the Son of God. And when that revelation and brightness shall have shone upon all of us who believe, we shall be his blessed servants, set forever in his kingdom;

you, on the contrary, if you resolve to persist in your perfidy, shall be in the outer darkness, being indeed a deserter of the warfare and an assailant of the truth, one who has done the will of the devil, whence it must needs be that, unless you draw yourself out of his snares, you be tormented together with him in inextinguishable fire, as it is written. We say these things not anything out of ourselves; for concerning you transgressors, concerning you blasphemers who deny that the only Son of God is that true Son, and concerning all who refuse to believe in him, we read set down in the most holy prophet: Their worm shall not die and their fire shall not be quenched. You shall be forever, if you remain in this madness, in inextricable darkness.

For just as we who confess the Son of God, having attained the rewards of immortality, shall enjoy perennial light, so you, his denier, must needs be carried down to the setting and to eternal darkness; you shall be led down that way which you hold—not, as the Arians lie to you, to heaven, but to the hateful citadel of the world, to the left hand of the wicked and to impious Tartarus; for it belongs to that apostate whose every will you, his henchman, are found to fulfill, it belongs, I say, to that serpent who turned you aside from the heavenly journey to hold this way of injustice. This is that broad and spacious road of which the Lord speaks in the Gospel, saying: How broad and spacious is the way that leads to destruction.

If therefore you are unwilling to take counsel for yourself, it cannot be doubted that you are among those whom the blessed John strikes, saying: And now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; if any tree does not bring forth good fruit, it shall be cut down and cast into the fire. You therefore, and all your fellow-partakers, since you are most bitter trees bearing the fruit of death, indeed sinning against God, unless you make the passage to the heavenly journey, shall be cut down and, cast headlong, shall come quicker than word into the deep abyss, whence you shall doubtless see those whom you now unjustly persecute, just as of old that rich man saw Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the friends of God, and of all the prophets, apostles, and martyrs.

You shall not escape those torments, Constantius, unless first of all you believe that the only Son of God is the true Son of God, and then, as has been said again and again, unless you confess that he has always reigned with the Father and is reigning—that is, without beginning and without end—and unless you transfer yourself from the abominable assembly of the Arians to the Catholic Church, that is, from death to life, and confess, as we Catholics confess, that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are a perfect Trinity and have one Godhead. Thus you hate the Christians and persecute them in every way,

as though your malevolence could conquer those who, having entered upon the hard and rough road, though they be an object of contempt, mockery, and hatred in your sight, nevertheless in the whole of this present life are willing to be poor, humble, ignoble, and subject to your injuries, believing that by patiently enduring for God's sake all things that are known to be bitter, they will come to those surpassing rewards which the Apostle declares are to be obtained—those things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man, which the Lord has prepared for those who love him. Therefore, since God will manifest those things to those who love him, we who love God, when we displease you, when we are smitten by you, presume that we please God.

For your deadly sentence can have no authority to punish us eternally, since you who condemn are yourself to be condemned, and indeed to this end, that you may pay perpetual penalties. But we whom you torture, tear, and kill, eternal joys shall receive, and vast and immense felicity shall possess us, and perpetual blessedness shall welcome us. Know therefore that greater power has been divinely given to us, so that, while you think you condemn us, we condemn you; while you presume you can punish us, we punish you, Constantius the sacrilegious, since he whom you deny deigned to give us, his bishops, the authority that whatsoever we bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven. We endure temporal evils for God's sake, that we may attain eternal goods.

We flee the temporal things which are offered to us by you as though they were goods, for the reason that those goods of yours are followed by eternal evils. For this reason we have chosen to endure the present things which you think harmful to us, so that, while our illustrious confession perseveres in us, we may deserve to attain eternal and immortal goods—just as you too, together with those who, fearing you, are found to have obeyed your will and forsaken the commandments of God, since indeed they deigned to choose the present goods rather and to despise the goods to come, shall fall into immortal evils. For they are more desirable than gold and much precious stone, and sweeter than honey and the honeycomb. For your servant keeps them; in keeping them there is great reward.

We know that this life, which you labor so greatly to take away, is very brief; we know too that the goods and evils of this life are brief, but that the goods of that eternal life, which we long to attain, are everlasting; for we know that in place of these brief goods in which you delight and revel, eternal evils shall succeed for you, and for us Christians, whom you despise and never cease to rend with all the powers of your empire, that in place of these brief evils eternal goods shall succeed. That these things are so you have read in the 125th psalm: The Lord has done great things for them; and lower down: They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. Going they went and wept, casting their seeds;

but coming they shall come with exultation, bearing their sheaves; and in the 128th: Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways. You shall eat the labors of your fruits; blessed are you, and it shall be well with you. It shall assuredly be well forever with those who have not denied the Son of God, who by the labor of their holy confession shall gain possession of it; but for you, if you resolve that one must always remain in this madness in which you now live, it shall be perpetually ill, receiving those things which Judas Iscariot now receives. Then we shall see you a suppliant, and yet every lamentation of your penitence shall be ineffectual, since indeed here is either gained perpetual life or death.

We wish you to know that these things we always turn over in our heart, that these things we ponder day and night: your perpetual torments, and the eternal rewards and merits of God's servants; what he threatens as punishment to you, the denier and persecutor of his name, and on the contrary what he promises to those who confess, unto eternal glory.