This is a threat and a warning; and, since but a little has come to pass, the greater and stronger things are held in reserve, so that he who smites may correct, but he who threatens may amend the more, making a way for his wrath; and out of his immense goodness he begins from the lesser things, lest we should have need of the greater and graver ones. He will surely apply even the greater, if we provoke them by despising these lesser ones. 7. I have known the brandished sword and the inebriated blade in heaven, slaying and despising and bereaving, which is commanded not to spare even unto flesh and marrow. I know him meeting us like a swift she-bear, him who is impassible, and like a leopard in the way of the Assyrians—not only to those who then were, but to everyone who is now an Assyrian in wickedness.
I know that no one can escape the might of his wrath and its swiftness, when he has awakened over our impieties, and when his zeal pursues his enemies—the zeal which consumes adversaries. I know the shaking and the recoil, and the fervour of the heart and the consternation of the mind, and the loosening of the knees, and very many other punishments of this kind for the impious. For I pass over speaking of those judgements, with which—much pardon being granted here—he sends and hands us over, so that it is better for us to be chastised and purged here than to be sent over to those punishments, where it is a time of penalties rather than of purgings.
For just as there is none in death who here is mindful of God, as the blessed David declares, so those who are in hell do not have the correction of confession; since indeed in the present life the power is granted to us of doing what we will, but there of rendering an account of our deeds. 8.
What then shall we do in that day, concerning which a certain one of the prophets most vehemently terrifies us, when he says that God will judge with us upon the mountains and hills, and will sit against us and contend, and set our sins before our face—the most bitter accusers, that is—and will also bring forward all his benefits which he has conferred upon us, and compare them with our crimes, comparing thoughts too with thoughts, and convicting acts by acts; when, requiring of us the dignity of the pure image, he shall have found it blotted out and obscured; when at the last each one, branded by his own sentence, shall be condemned? 9. Who then will be the advocate there? What intervention? What fictions? What arts?
What forensic cunning will be brought forward against the truth? With what bribes will the judgement be corrupted? All things will hang in the balance of justice—our deeds and words and thoughts—evil and good will be weighed against each other in opposite scales, that the side which weighs the heavier may prevail, and the sentence fall on whichever side the work inclines. Nor will any further will or other judgement or excuse through later works be sought; nor will there be time for borrowing oil from the prudent virgins or buying it from the sellers, when the lamps are going out. Nor is there place for the repentance of the rich man burning in the flame and seeking the amendment of his kinsmen.
There will then be no longer time for any delay, but only the final and terrible judgement—nay rather the just one, and therefore the more terrible because it is just. For then the thrones will be set and the Ancient of days will sit, and the books will be opened, and a fiery stream will run, and light will go before, and darkness will be prepared; and they who have done good will depart into the resurrection of life, which is now hidden in Christ and afterward shall be made manifest with him; but they who have done evil into the resurrection of judgement, in which they are already condemned, by the judging Word of God, who did not believe. Some then that ineffable and immense light will receive—that is, the brightness and recognition and clearer illumination of the holy and blessed Trinity.
When the pure and the immaculate is mingled with pure and immaculate minds—which alone, and chiefly, I reckon to be the kingdom of heaven; but for those who are unworthy, together with all the rest, there will also be this, the greatest punishment of all: that they are cast out from God, and the very shame and confusion of conscience, whose end and remedy is nowhere. But of these things later. 10. But now, what shall we do, brothers, contrite and humbled and inebriated not with wine nor with strong drink—by which men are but a little stirred and disturbed—but inebriated by the might of the plague which the Lord has brought, saying: 'And you, be stirred and be disturbed,' who has given the despisers to drink a spirit of sadness and compunction, to whom it is also said:
See, you despisers, and behold and wonder, and be destroyed? How should we endure his rebukes, or what answer shall we give, when to the multitude of his benefits, which we received ungratefully, he shall have begun to charge us also with his chastisements, and to enumerate the remedies and medicines, which, though applied, yet we were not healed? And he calls us indeed sons, but defiled ones; or sons, but estranged and limping from his paths, while they walk in alien and rough ways. He says therefore: 'What ought I to have done for you and did not do? Whence ought I to have amended you and did not amend? I used gentler remedies.
I withheld the scourges of the Egyptians—the blood drunk from the rivers and the springs, and all the waters turned to gore. That first plague of theirs I spared. I withheld also the frogs and the lice and the dog-fly and the rest of the scourges. I began from the oxen and the beasts of burden and the cattle, turning the fifth plague upon the dumb animals, sparing men. That affliction did not yet touch you, but you became to me more brutish even than the dumb animals. For nothing, as I see, avails toward amendment, this chastisement. I withheld the rains from you: one part received the shower, and the part on which I did not rain withered. And you said: We shall endure and we shall act manfully.
Therefore I brought upon you hail, and cut down your vineyards and your orchards and your standing crops; yet your malice I could not prune away, and now I have recognized that you are hard, and your neck is a sinew of iron.' 11. This I think the Lord says to us, if we are not amended by his scourges—since indeed both the despiser remains in his contempt and the unjust man persists in his iniquity. Nor does the chastisement brought from heaven work anything in us; the scourges avail nothing. The iron pipe has now failed in the furnace, the lead has failed, the silversmith labours in vain: your wickednesses are not consumed. 'Through Jeremiah I had already reckoned these things to you long ago; now then, do you provoke me?' says the Lord.
'Or is not my hand strong enough to bring still other plagues and other torments? There are with me yet the burnings of sores, which—when the ash and cinder were cast up into the air through Moses, who at that time of God's indignation had stood forth as a minister to chastise Egypt—were generated.'
There is yet the locust, there are also the palpable darknesses; there is even yet a last plague, the destruction of the firstborn, which no one escaped, nor could anyone evade the hand of the destroyer, save only he who anointed his doorposts with the blood of the lamb—that is, he who sealed his faith and works with the blood of Christ and with the institutions of the New Testament, who was crucified together with Christ, who was buried together with him and rose again with him, that he might also be glorified together with him, both now and in his final coming.' 12. But far be it from us that the good and merciful God should charge upon us, among the other chastisements, even that one, saying: Because you walked contrary to me, I also will walk contrary to you with perverse fury; or again:
I struck you with blight and with mildew and with hailstorm, and I profited nothing. The sword made you childless from without, and not even thus were you turned to me, says the Lord. But let it not befall that it be said of us that we became a vineyard to the Beloved, and were planted and trained up on reeds and surrounded with a wall and waited for, that we should yield a grape—but we yielded a thorn, and not righteousness but a cry; so that it became necessary that the wall be destroyed, and that we be made for treading down, and the tower overthrown, and that we become a plunder, that we be no longer tended nor dug about; and moreover—which is more wretched than all—that it be commanded to the clouds that they rain no rain upon us.
I myself, brethren, am driven by such thoughts amid adversities, and I console myself with these reminders. Thus have I learned to reflect upon the chastisements of the Lord; and when I turn over counsels of this kind within myself, I again turn to prayer and supplication of the Lord, and I add to what we have said above and say together with you: if you follow me and join your minds and thoughts with mine, let us say together:
We have sinned, we have dealt unjustly, we have committed impiety, because we have forgotten your commandments and have walked after the thoughts of our most wicked heart, and have not walked worthily of the calling with which you called us through the gospel of your Christ, nor have we fittingly received his holy sufferings, nor have we accepted his humiliation as it deserved, but we have become a reproach to your beloved. Priest and people, we have fallen away in mind; we have all alike turned aside, together we have become unprofitable; there is none that does judgment and justice, there is none, not even one. We have shut off your mercies and your clemency from ourselves, and have turned away the bowels of your compassion because of our malice and the wickedness of our most evil devising.
You, O Lord, have shown us goodness and mercy, but we have shown iniquity. You are patient and of much mercy, but we are hard and worthy of many scourges. We acknowledge your goodness, though we are unbelieving. According to that which we have sinned, we have yet been but lightly chastised. You are terrible, and who shall withstand you? Trembling shall seize the mountains from before you, and who shall resist the greatness of your arm? And if you loose the floodgates of heaven, who shall shut them? It is an easy thing in your eyes to make a man poor and rich, to bring to life and to deliver to death, to smite and to heal, since this very thing which you will is a finished work. You, says one of the ancient suppliants to you, are angry, and we have sinned.
But for us also, on the contrary, it is time to say: We have sinned, and you are angry. And therefore we have become a reproach to our neighbours. You have turned your face away from us, and our countenance is filled with shame. But spare, O Lord! Spare, O Lord! Be merciful, O Lord! Do not deliver us up to the end because of our iniquities, nor make us an example for the correction of others. Rather, O Lord, correct and amend us by the punishments of others — we mean those nations who have not known your name and are not subject to your power; but we are your people, and the rod of your inheritance, and the sheep of your pasture.
Therefore correct us, O Lord, yet in mercy and not in wrath, lest you make us few, O Lord, beyond all who dwell upon the earth. 13. With these words and these prayers I invoke and invite the mercy of the Lord. And if I could offer myself as a holocaust and a sacrifice, to soften the wrath of the Lord, I would not spare myself, I would not delay. But you also, O devout people, do you too imitate your fearful and timid priest. I beg you, my children, I beseech you, join your lamentation with mine, and mingle your weeping with my weeping; and let us provoke the clemency of the Lord through abundance of tears, and let us with our weeping quench the fire kindled by divine indignation.
Let us soften the wrath of the Lord by our conversion. Let us sanctify a fast, let us proclaim a healing. For these are the remedies which the holy prophets suggest to us. Let us gather the presbyters; let us tear the suckling infants from their very mothers' breasts and cast them before the presence of the Lord — an age worthy of all compassion, and which alone may deserve by its wailing to obtain the mercy of God.
We too, the priests and ministers of the Lord, are no less admonished by those same prophetic words to go forth in ashes and sackcloth, and to wail night and day between the porch and the altar in a pitiable habit, crying out with tearful voice and clamouring to the Lord, both for ourselves and for the people, omitting nothing whatever of labour or of word by which God may be believed to be again made favourable. We cry out therefore, we too together with you and for you: Spare, O Lord, your people, and give not your inheritance to reproach, for we have so much the more tribulation as we have honour.
From us therefore, little children, learn the compunction of the Lord, since we are afflicted for ourselves; and offer your amendment together with us, that we too may be worthy to obtain pardon from the threatening plague. 14. Come therefore, all of us, let us adore and fall down before him, and let us weep in the presence of the Lord who made us. Let us order a common mourning; let every age and sex, each in his own order, lift up the voice of wailing, and instead of those voices of injustice which we made before, let us now send forth the voice of weeping and wailing into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Let us forestall his wrath with confession. Who knows whether the Lord may perhaps turn back and repent and leave compassions behind him?
Yet I know that he will do so; I pledge it of the Lord's mercy, that as soon as we are converted he too will cease to be angry — which indeed he does against his nature — and will turn to compassions — which indeed he does according to his nature: for to the former he is compelled by us, whereas the latter is naturally in him. Let us only have mercy upon ourselves and open the way to his just compassions. Let us sow in tears, that we may reap in joy. Let us become like the Ninevites and not the Sodomites. Let us swiftly cure our evils, lest we be consumed in our evils. Let us hear the preaching of Jonah, lest we be consumed by fire and brimstone; or, if we must even flee from Sodom, let us ascend the mountain, or take refuge in Segor, and enter in when the sun is rising.
Let us not stand in all the country, nor look back behind us, lest we become a pillar of salt, the immortal memorial of sin. 15. Let us know that indeed never to sin at all is above man and belongs to God alone — for of the angels I say nothing, lest we open a way to vices and unbar a gateway to malicious contradictions. Therefore not to sin belongs to God; but incurable sin belongs to the devil and to all who serve under him. But for sinners to be converted from sin belongs to the men who believe in God and whose portion is among those who are saved.
For although this earth too involves with itself no little malice, and the earthly dwelling weighs down the mind that ponders many things and looks upward — nay, that was created for this, to seek the things which are above — yet the image of God may cleanse the stain of the bodily flood and may lift up upon wings the flesh that is joined to it, by the word of God. And although it would have been better not to need such cleansing at all, but to have remained in that first dignity to which we also hasten back after the present amendment, and although it would have been better not to fall from the tree of life by the most bitter taste of sin — yet in the second place it is expedient to be amended and corrected after a fall, rather than to remain in wickedness. For whom the Lord loves, he corrects;
and he scourges every son whom he receives. And again it says: The soul that is not corrected is incurable. It is a grievous thing, therefore, to be smitten by a plague; but it is far more grievous to be chastised and not be amended, as a certain one of the prophets says of Israel: O Lord, you have scourged them, and they have not grieved; you have corrected them, and they have refused to receive discipline; and again: And the people was not converted, until it should be smitten; and: Why is it that my people is turned away with a most wicked turning away? Wherefore unto the last it shall be ground down and destroyed. 16. But that too is a terrible thing, to fall into the hands of the living God; and what is said: The face of the Lord is upon those who do evil, to destroy their memory from the earth.
For nothing escapes the hearing of God, since he heard even the voice of the blood of Abel. For where could anyone be hidden from God, since God fills all things and is everywhere? Where shall anyone flee from the face of God? If one be borne up on wings to heaven, there he will be; if into hell, he will nowhere be lacking; if to the east, if he descend into the depth of the sea, nowhere shall he escape that great eye. That eye the prophet Nahum too dreads, when he brings forth the burden of the word of God against Nineveh and describes God as zealous, avenging with fury upon his adversaries and using such severity that there was not even room left for a second vengeance against the wicked. And so too when I hear Isaiah accusing the people of Sodom and the princes of Gomorrah, and saying:
Why will you yet be smitten, adding iniquity? I shudder all over and am bathed in tears. There is no longer, he says, anything that can be added to your sins, nor can any further means of vengeance now be sought out. So have all things been brought upon you, when ever some new kind of vengeance was devised against you, so that you have exhausted every species of plagues. There is therefore no longer a wound, nor a scar, nor a swelling plague: throughout the whole body there are plagues, and soundness is nowhere. For there is no way, he says, to apply a poultice, nor oil, nor bandages. But I omit the threatening that follows, lest perhaps I become more burdensome to you than is the very trouble of the present plague itself. 17.
Nevertheless we ought to recognize the causes of our evils — whence the crops have withered, whence the granaries are confounded, whence pastures have failed the flocks, whence its beauty has been taken from the lands, and why the fields have not been filled with abundance, but everywhere there is mourning and grief. Nowhere have the valleys been filled with grain, nor have the mountains dropped sweetness as for the righteous, but on the contrary devastation everywhere and overthrow everywhere, and everywhere they meet the cursed mountains of Gilboa. We have become as we were from the beginning, before the earth brought forth every green herb. And you indeed, O Lord, have visited your land and made it drunk, but with a most evil visitation and a drunkenness from the wine of compunction. A cruel and horrible spectacle!
All the hope of the year has remained for us in the stubble alone, and scarcely could anyone find ears to gather, that he might offer first-fruits to the Lord. Our harvests the mice will perhaps store away in their granaries; for no one will bind a sheaf. Such are the riches of the wicked, such is the crop of those who sow through injustice. Thus the prophets of old mark out the curses when they say: He will cast out much and bring in little; he will sow and not reap; he will plant a vineyard and not press out the wine, and where ten yoke of oxen labour, it will make one jar. Whence comes this cause of our evils, whence the occasion of devastation? Let us not wait to be accused by others; let us accuse ourselves, let us convict ourselves. The remedy of evil is confession of one's error.
I first, as I announced before to my people, have fulfilled the watchman's task and have not concealed nor kept silent about the sword that was coming, that I might save both my own soul and theirs who were willing to hear me. So now too I declare and bring forth the contempt and negligence of my people, making their wounds my own — if perhaps even in this way we may obtain something of the divine compassion and clemency. 18. Therefore one of us has oppressed the poor and has unjustly seized the portion of a small farm, or has overstepped its boundaries, whether by stealth or by violence, and has joined house to house and field to field, to take away something of his neighbour's, and has striven with the utmost zeal to have no neighbour, as though he alone were going to dwell upon the earth.
Another has defiled the land with usury and the multiplication of interest, gathering where he scattered not and reaping where he sowed not, cultivating not the land but his own greed. Another, having gathered most abundant crops and a most plentiful vintage, offered no first-fruits to God, who supplied the abundance of the produce, neither from the threshing-floors nor from the wine-presses, and showed himself at once ungrateful and foolish — that is, he neither rendered thanks for those things which he obtained, nor was found dutiful regarding those for which he hoped.
Another had no mercy on the widow and the orphan, nor broke his bread to the hungry — nay rather, he refreshed not the hungry Christ, who is fed in every one of the least; and another, who beyond hope stores up so much in his granaries — nay, who has no place to store and pulls down some granaries and builds others, to prepare for future crops, not knowing that perhaps before that they will require his soul of him, and there he will render an account of those things which, largely received, he shut up narrowly, having become an evil steward of the good God. Another shut off the way of the humble and turned aside the just man unjustly; another hated him who rebuked in the gates, and abhorred the holy word;
another sacrificed to his own net, which had enclosed many things, and kept the plunder of the poor in his houses, becoming forgetful of God, or at least evilly mindful, when he would say: Blessed be the Lord, for we are made rich — and surmised iniquity, namely that he held from God the things which he unjustly seized. For these things, therefore, the wrath of God has come upon us, sons of perdition. For these things heaven is shut, and will be shut yet much more, unless even after scourges we are converted and draw near to him who draws near to us. 19. What shall we say to these things — we who store up grain and traffic in another's famine, who watch for evil times that it may go well with us, who look that another's mourning may become our joy, who say:
When will the month pass, that we may heap up prices? When will the sabbath pass, that we may open our treasuries? You who set out double measures and deceitful weights, and yet heap up against your very selves measures of punishments and torments — what do you say to these things, you who acknowledge no limit of possession, who worship gold and silver as a god, nay adore them as Baal, who pursue all that is precious of gems and the soft and dainty things of clothing, and gather treasures for the moths and the robbers, lifted up with a multitude of slaves and a quantity of horses and other animals, spread out over whole expanses of plains and ridges of mountains?
Some things indeed you possess, others you invade, and the rest you hope for, after the manner of that horse-leech of Solomon, which can in no way be filled — like the grave, and water, and fire — you who seek another world for your possession, as though finding fault with the narrow spaces of possessions created for us by God. But what of those who sit on the lofty seats of tribunals and, holding the power of judging, lifted up with a proud brow, in no way consider that they too are to be judged by God, who is the true judge of all — that they too may temper their power toward fellow-servants, knowing that they too need the clemency of God? And what of these who lounge upon ivory couches?
of whom holy Amos worthily makes mention, saying that they are anointed with the choicest ointments, and clap their hands to the sound of instruments, and have reckoned these fleeting things as though they were permanent, and have suffered nothing in the affliction of Joseph — that is, they had no pity on the downfall of their neighbours. For it behoved them to be kind and merciful toward those who had been first corrected, and through mercy to provoke mercy. They ought to have wept for the pine because the cedar fell, and to be amended by a neighbour's amendment, and from others' evils to correct their own evils, when they saw that they had obtained this benefit, that they might gain salvation while others were scourged — since indeed it could have come to pass that, while these were scourged, others should be amended. 20.
Discourse on these things to the peoples together with me, O head most venerable and most gentle to me, since you possess much skill of long experience. Instruct the peoples and teach them to break their bread to the hungry, to bring the poor and homeless into their house, to cover the naked, not to despise their poor kinsmen — and now especially, that our good deed may be done not always out of abundance, but even out of want. For with such a sacrifice God is more pleased than with those things which are offered out of abundance.
Be for us today a Moses or a Phinehas; stand for us before God and make him favourable again, that the devastation may at length cease, whether by spiritual sacrifice or by prayers and supplications — only that you may meet the wrath of the Lord and, standing in the midst, make what remains of the plague to cease. Gladly does God embrace the grey hairs of a father poured out in intercession for his sons. Make supplication for past evils, intervene for those to come; offer to God a people now purged by plagues and fear, now amended by the scourges of devastation; obtain for them bodily food, but before it that angelic food descending from heaven; reconcile God to men, rejoin heavenly things to earthly; recall the early and the latter rains to the earth:
The Lord shall give a blessing, and our earth shall yield its fruit — this which is below shall yield the daily fruit, and our earth the everlasting, which it first brought forth in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom is glory and power unto the ages of ages. Amen. (Here ends the new little book translated by Rufinus from Gregory: on the faith, and on the Nicene faith, and in the tenth and last place the book on the Arians.) HERE ENDS THE BOOK OF SAINT GREGORY ON THE DEVASTATION BY HAIL, WHEN THE BISHOP FATHER WAS KEEPING SILENCE. (The book on the Arians does not exist in this codex, since only eight orations of Gregory are contained.) Against the Arians (a later hand). HERE ENDS BOOK VIII. HERE BEGINS BOOK IX OF THE SAME, ON THESE.