De Sancto Athanasio, Liber I-II

For when He says through the mouth of Isaiah to those slayers of the holy prophets and of all the just: "Wash yourselves, be clean, remove the evils from your enemies before my eyes, cease from your wickednesses, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the one suffering injury, judge for the orphan and do justice for the widow,"—to these things, on the contrary, you order the worshippers of God to be slaughtered, God Himself to be abandoned, and idolatry to be embraced. Was this to have heard God's warnings and to have been corrected? Why do you force us to do this, unless because you desire us to be consumed with you by the sword? "And if you will," says God, "and if you will listen to me, you will eat the good things of the land. But if you will not, and if you will not listen to me, the sword will consume you." For the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things. To whom shall we yield—to God saying these things, or to you, His enemy? God says to the Jews that they should now abandon their errors, cast out their wickednesses from their hearts, learn to do good, and judge a just judgment. You say: "Condemn unjustly." Why do you urge me to do this? Unless because you wish me to become that kind of man. Such are those to whom God has said: "You, however," says God, "why do you set fire to my vineyard, and why is the plunder of the poor in your houses? Why do you do injury to the people and confound the face of the needy?" And you are doing these things, you are carrying out all these deeds.

Because you do these things, you are angry at those who do them, as if you knew you could not be pleasing unless you had also set fire to the Lord's vineyard and established the plunder of the poor within your own house and in many ways inflicted injuries upon the servants of God. Or will you attempt to say that you have done none of these things? Did you not set fire to the Lord's vineyard when you compelled it no longer to know the Lord of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the apostles, the God of the prophets and martyrs, but rather the idolatry introduced by Arius and exalted by you? Is it not plunder of the poor, this seizure of the servants of God, the Christians, in your house, concerning whom you have read the Scripture: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," when you know that you have proscribed those resisting your sacrilege? Will you dare to say: "I have not done and I do not do injury to the people of God"? And who has ever done so great an injury as you, who neither cease from inflicting every kind of torture nor from punishing in various ways?

We did not wish to punish an innocent man as if he were guilty, lest that sentence strike us as well, which is still proclaimed by the mouth of Isaiah the prophet: Woe to those who write iniquity; for they write iniquity, they write, turning aside the judgment of the poor and seizing the judgment of the needy of my people, so that for them the widow is for plunder and the orphan for despoiling. And what will they do on the day of visitation? For tribulation will come upon you from afar, and to whom will you flee? We did not temper ourselves by your poisoned counsel, desiring to flee in all our tribulations and anxieties to him to whom that lover of justice fled in all his trials, Job; we did not obey your cruel command, because we wished to be found imitators of that servant of God Job, who says: I freed the poor man from the hand of the powerful, and to the orphan who was without help I was a helper. But the mouth of the widow always blessed me. For I was clothed with justice and covered with judgment; and I was the eye of the blind and the father of the weak, but I broke the jaws of the unjust and snatched plunder from their teeth, and further: I was placed as the balance of justice, and the Lord knows my simplicity, because my foot never strayed from the straight path, nor did my eye behold it. What is the straight path from which the glorious Job declares he did not deviate? Surely this one, which neither killed an innocent man nor knew any other god, because it knows only the God of angels and archangels, from whose power you know we cannot be snatched away.

For when you speak of the faith of the blessed Church: if the faith described at Nicaea is catholic, let them be snatched away by the one in whom they believed from my power, you say that God has no strength at all to snatch us from your hands, that you cannot be resisted; you assert that the God of the apostolic Church does not have such great power as could exclude your might. For what else does the faith of the blessed Church confess but that it believes in God the Father, unbegotten, and in His only Son, born from the unbegotten and true Father, and in the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete? What else does the faith of the catholic Church confess but that the Trinity is perfect and that the divinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is one? What else does the faith of the blessed Church confess but that neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit Paraclete took on a man, but only the only Son of God? What else does the faith of the glorious Church establish but that the only Son of God is immutable, inconvertible, inestimable, immeasurable, eternal, just as is the one whose Son He is? The holy Church has believed that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have one power and sole dominion.

this faith, which you call heretical, and you set forth your own as catholic—that faith which says God does not have a true son, which says there was a time when he was not, which says he was made from nothing—you, in any case, with those sentiments, like Rabshakeh, the general of the Assyrian king, who reproached the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, saying: "Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, because your God can free you from the hands of the Assyrian king." So too you, general of Antichrist, say through your men: "Do not let the words of your bishops deceive you, who contradict me, because the faith they preach can free you." For although the wording varies, the matter is brought to this point, that it can be established that you reproach God to us in this way, that he is powerless to snatch us away, just as the king of the Assyrians reproached: "Thus says the king of Assyria: If you wish to be blessed, come out to me instead, and each of you will eat the fruit of your vine and fig tree, and you will drink water from your cisterns, until I come and take you into a land such as yours, a land of wheat and wine and bread and vineyards. Do not, therefore, let Hezekiah deceive you, saying: 'God will free you,'" and further: "Who will free Jerusalem from my hand?" But that you have been shown to be such an opponent, God says through Isaiah to Hezekiah: "You have no need to fear those words which you have heard, with which the envoys of the Assyrians reproached me.

Behold, I send my spirit, and when the news is heard, he will return to his own region and fall by the sword in his own land. Now, Constantius, we see those dangers standing around you, unless you take counsel for yourself, which stood around him who said: "Thus you shall say to Hezekiah king of Judah: Do not let your god, in whom you trust, deceive you, saying that Jerusalem will not be handed over into the hands of the king of Assyria." You are in the same dangers, blasphemer, as he was, and you do not see it; we, the worshippers of God, see ourselves standing safe, defended, and unharmed. Whence are we safe and defended, except because we hold the holy faith which the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs held—this faith which you have judged heretical? But to return again to Athanasius, in whom you persecute this sacred faith, did you not fear, I ask you, the indignation of the Lord proclaimed against those who attempted to reproach the most righteous Job, that you would attack the bishop of God with false charges? Do you not fear even now, lest God say to you what he said to that king speaking against the most holy Job: "You and your two friends have sinned; for you have spoken nothing true before me"? In the meantime, you Arians will be able to be found superior to Athanasius now before God only in the same way as those who reproached Job were found then.

it is beneficial for you, Constantius, that through Athanasius, the Lord’s priest, you be suppliant to God for your crimes, that through him you direct your vows, just as they did through Job; through Athanasius or through his fellow bishops, you should strive to obtain the salutary baptism. Moreover, however you may torment yourselves against Athanasius, you are found to be sons of that serpent, that fugitive and deserter viper, indeed heretics; Athanasius, however, is a domestic of God, as Job was; he is of the sons of light and holds the same path of justice that the servant of God Job held; he himself possesses the faith, whence Athanasius is also of the sons of Abraham. Athanasius confesses the Son of God as Job confessed him. Whence is Job of the sons of Abraham, except that he believed as Abraham believed? If you are ignorant that these things are so, run through the blessed apostle Paul not only to the Romans but to the Galatians, and you will find that what I defend is true. Or, because the blessed apostle did not specifically make mention of the name of the just Job, will Job be denied to be of the sons of Abraham? If it cannot be denied that Job is of the sons of Israel, it cannot be doubted that he became so great and such a man because he believed in God as the blessed Abraham believed. For the apostle reveals that believers are justified not by the works of the law but through faith; nor would the victory of those temptations have been reckoned to him for righteousness, had he not believed in God as Abraham believed.

or how would he have conquered the devil, unless he had been believing in God the Father unbegotten and His only Son, born from the unbegotten and true Father, and in the Holy Spirit the Paraclete? Or if you think it has not always been believed as we believe today, prove that the blessed apostles and martyrs could have overcome your fellow torturers and, having conquered your friend the devil, attained the heavenly kingdoms, unless they believed in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy Spirit. Therefore, if they conquered by believing in this way, those who believed after the advent of the Lord, the only Son of God, believe that even before His advent, those who conquered the devil believed in no other way than as we believe today. For neither would Daniel have overcome the lions, nor the three youths the fires, unless they had been believing as the Church believes today. Hence, finally, the apostle challenges Abraham’s faith, proving, by the authority of the sacred Scriptures, that Abraham believed just as Paul was then believing, but that he himself had been a son of wrath in error when, along with the Jews, he denied the only Son of God.

Since these things are so, I beseech you to cease waging war against the house of God and to accept the heavenly exhortations, which can lead you to attain eternal salvation. With your mouth receive what the God of Isaiah says to you: "Hear me, you who have lost your heart, you who are far from justice." Or if your heart is with you, if you are not far from justice, why do you say to us, the priests of God: "Condemn the absent, punish the innocent"? For if you have not lost your heart and you hold to the path of justice, why do you not keep the Scripture: "Guard judgment, do justice. For my salvation has drawn near to come and my mercy to be revealed. Blessed is the man who does it, and the man who embraces it, who does not violate my Sabbaths, keeping his hands from doing injustices." And again: "There is no rejoicing for the impious," says the Lord. Cry out with strength, spare not. Like a trumpet, raise your voice and announce to my people their sins and to the house of Jacob their iniquities. They seek me day by day and wish to know my ways, like a people who have done justice and have not abandoned the judgment of God. They ask of me now a just judgment and desire to draw near to God. What hope, wretch, can you have, unless you have done penance for your evil deeds, when you hear God say: "There is no rejoicing for the impious"? Or will you deny that you are an impious worshiper of God, when you do not deny that you are a shedder of blood?

Then, if during the time of fasts, because subordinates have struck with fists and harmed with other kinds of injuries, God has uttered reproaches of this kind against them, what kind would He have uttered against us, if we were to condemn an unheard, absent, and indeed innocent man contrary to the precepts of His divine majesty? Not even if you bend your neck like a hoop and spread sackcloth and ashes beneath you will you thus call the fast acceptable. We perceive through this threat how great God’s wrath against us could be, if we condemned an innocent man. For if, during the time of fasts, because we have struck subordinates with fists, the Lord is so indignant, how much more so if we have slain His worshippers! If it is not permitted for me to strike subordinates with fists during the time of fasts, will it be permitted at any time to strike my fellow priest with the sword? “I have not chosen such a fast,” says the Lord, “but dissolve the obligations of violent contracts; release those broken in remission and tear up every unjust bond; break your bread for the hungry and lead those without shelter into your house. If you see a naked man, clothe him, and do not despise the members of your own household. What hope do you hold, most prudent king, when you have turned all these things into their opposite?

How, then, have you untied every knot of iniquity, when, without your faithlessness, you have remained just as you set yourself against us, and have grown more and more in your malevolence toward destroying us, and have grown even more in your blasphemy as the author of sacrilege, even asserting by edict that your blasphemy is the Catholic faith, after the manner of prostitutes, who first fornicate in secret, but later become so shameless, so losing the grace of modesty, that they wish to fornicate in public? How have you dissolved every knot of iniquity, when you still retain the fury undertaken years ago against the blessed Athanasius, so that you wish to drink his blood? How have you released the broken into rest, when you do not cease to torture the servants of God in various ways? And how have you released the broken into rest, when you see that prisons, mines, and exiles can scarcely contain the number of Christians condemned by you? How, even if you break your bread for the hungry, will the Lord accept it, when you kill by famine servants dedicated to His eternity? How, if you bring the roofless poor into your house, will God deign to look upon your work, when He sees the servants of His glory cast out of private homes, made exiles because they refused to accept your idolatry instituted through Arius?

How, if you clothe the naked, will you be able to please God, when you have taken away the patrimonies of his servants and have said: if you condemn the apostolic faith and embrace the Arian, you will receive back all your possessions? Truly, you are found to fulfill one of all these sacred commands of the Lord, namely that you do not despise those of your own seed. Indeed, you do not despise your fellow Arian vipers, born, of course, from your unchaste father the devil; you love your brothers, because you see them as closer to you; you cherish them with singular affection, you display to them all the glory of your kingdom, you have them as allies and partners in destroying God’s inheritance in your realm; you have made those men wealthy, you have exalted them above all placed in high station, that is, those who have chosen to mingle with your darkness. Therefore, since you are doing these things which God abhors, how do you think you can be heard by God, or, if you give alms, that it can be accepted by him? When you hear him say: then your morning light will arise, and your health will quickly arise, and justice will go before you, and the majesty of God will surround you. Then you will cry out, and God will hear you. While you are still speaking, he will say to you: behold, I am here. Do you think you can obtain any of these things, when your morning light has not arisen, but inextricable darkness has beset your mind and woven through the mists of your errors?

What health has arisen for you, when you are placed in every wound of death, when daily you produce increases to your wounds, when you are striving to be able to extinguish yourself utterly? For health comes to us from no other source than first of all because we have believed, as the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs believed. How can justice precede you, when you remain wholly in injustice, when you are the bilge-water of the Arian dogma, when you are the shedder of Christian blood? How will the majesty of God surround you, when you are attacking that same majesty, when you have decided to abandon the idolatry of the Arian dogma and take it up? How then will you cry out, and God will hear you, and while you are still speaking He will say to you: I am here, when you are denying God the Father, denying His only Son, denying the Holy Spirit the Paraclete? How can He either hear you or say to you: Behold, I am here, when you are overturning, as far as it lies with you, His religion, when you are removing His Catholic bishops and appointing heretics? How will He hear you, whom you thought should be trampled upon in every way, unless you do penance for your evil deeds, unless, abandoning your nefarious ways, you seize the just path of the holy Church? Then indeed you will be able to obtain these promises of God.

For it is written concerning those who have turned with their whole heart to God: Thus says the Most High dwelling in the highest, eternally holy among the holy, whose name is Lord Most High resting among the holy, and giving equity of soul to the faint-hearted and giving vengeance to those troubled in heart. "I will not be angry with you forever, nor will I always exact vengeance from you." But to whom does He say this? Surely to those who have turned through satisfaction to have their sins blotted out. Whence also the Lord says: "I have not chosen such a fast, but loose every knot of iniquity, but loose the obligations of violent contracts; dismiss the broken for remission and tear up every unjust bond. Break your bread to the hungry and lead the poor who are roofless into your house. If you see someone naked, clothe him, and do not despise the household of your own seed. Then your morning light will arise and your health will quickly arise, and justice will go before you and the majesty of God will surround you. Then you will cry out, and God will hear you, and while you are still speaking He will say to you: 'Behold, I am here.'

God will be with you, if you first believe in him, if then you turn yourself to those things which are also said below to be fulfilled: if you remove from yourself the bond of iniquity and obligation and the word of murmuring, and give your bread to the hungry from the heart, and satisfy a humbled soul, then light will arise for you in the darkness, and darkness will be to you as midday. And your God will be with you always, and you will be filled as your soul desires, and all your bones will grow fat, and they will be like a drunken garden and like a spring whose water does not fail. These things, as has already been said, you will be able to attain if you betake yourself to the Church, if you avoid your fellow Arians, if you deign to hate that evil congregation of yours. Then God will be with you always, then light will arise for you in the darkness, then darkness will be to you as midday, then your path will be directed in good things. But if you persist in this obstinacy, if you persist in this cruelty, so that you torture his servants, God will not be with you, but rather that one who even today is found in your Arian assembly, that is, the devil. For these things which you deign to do are not of God, but of the devil.

If those are the works of God—that you proscribe certain persons—why then did they not condemn the innocent Athanasius, bishop 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 become your fellow apostates? We can surely judge, if the work is pleasing to God, and likewise if that alms is one which you give from others’ tears, from the goods of those who preferred to be deported, killed, and proscribed by you rather than condemn an innocent man or deny the only Son of God, in whom, believing, they knew that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets, apostles, and martyrs were glorified. That I desire you to become their companion and sharer in all things, and that these are my wishes concerning you, He who is able to grant us this is witness. BOOK II ON SAINT ATHANASIUS. Do you dare, Constantius, to stretch out your hands against those dedicated to God, to harass those whose blessedness the apostle declares, saying: “But we know that for those who love the Lord, all things turn out for good, for those who are called according to the purpose, whom he foreknew and predestined to be made conformable to the image of his Son.” Indeed, your persecutions turn out for our good, but note through Jeremiah what God promises to you persecutors, saying: “The holy one of Israel is the Lord’s beginning of his generations; all who eat him will repent. I will bring evils upon them,” says the Lord. The evils which God promises you will come upon you.

Constantius, unless you correct yourself, just as they came upon that carnal people, your blasphemer, to whom it is said: you have done evil to defile your ways, and in your hands the blood of innocent souls has been found. You will be among the enemies of God forever, unless you hear, listening to His holy admonition as He says: if you amend, you will amend your ways and your thoughts, and if you act, you will render judgment between a man and his neighbor, and you will not oppress the proselyte, the poor, and the widow, you will not shed the blood of an innocent in this place, and you will not go after foreign gods. You will amend your ways. If you now cease to persecute the servants of God, if you confess yourself to be a Christian and deny being an Arian, if you believe the Son of God, the true Son of God, if you anathematize those saying: there was a time when he was not and he was made from nothing. You will change your ways, if you repent for your murders and for your sacrilege; otherwise, you will be, as you now are, among those of whom it is said by God in reproach: is my house a den of thieves, in which my name has been invoked? Whom do you wish to be the house of God, you Arians or us Christians? For if your evil congregation is the house of God, then the congregation of thieves is the house of God. For you, by shedding the blood of the servants of God, as the Jews used to shed it then, are seen to be thieves. From your fruits, Emperor Constantius, you are known not to be a Christian, but plainly a leader of thieves.

You order, finally, that innocent men be killed, dwelling, of course, not in the Lord's church, but in a den of thieves. 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, at your false suggestions, to give a sentence against a just man, lest that rebuke of the Lord should strike us together with you and with the Jews: "He stretched out his tongue like a bow. In falsehood, and faith did not prevail upon the earth, because from evils evils came forth, and they did not know me." You, who are the contriver and likewise the lover of false crimes, you, not knowing the Lord, unless you correct yourself, as you are, will be one of those of whom you have read written: "They do not speak the truth; their tongue has learned to speak falsehood. They were unwilling to return, and they did not leave off usury upon usury, deceit upon deceit. They were unwilling to know me," says the Lord. "On account of these things, this says the Lord: Behold, I burn them and I will test them, because I will act thus from the face of the malice of the daughter of my people. Their tongue is a wounding arrow, the evil words of their mouth. He speaks peaceably to his neighbor, and within himself he harbors enmity. Shall I visit these things?" says the Lord. "Or will my soul not take vengeance on such a people?

Rescue yourself, Constantius, from the pit of Arian madness, lest you suffer eternal punishments along with your fellow-sacrilegious men. Do not boast to yourself about your fleeting dignity; consider that you are mortal, because you cannot otherwise attain immortality unless you have acknowledged God and done His will, as it is written: Thus says the Lord: Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, and let not the strong man boast in his strength, nor let the rich man boast in his riches, but let him who boasts boast in this: in seeking me and understanding and knowing how to glory in God, because I am the Lord who works mercy and judgment and justice upon earth, because in these things is my will, says the Lord. Since, therefore, you see that the Lord’s will lies in these things, how can you bring yourself to hate those things which the Lord says He loves? In this, He says, let him who boasts boast: in seeking me and understanding and knowing how to glory in the Lord. How can you now claim to glory in God? How can you assert that you seek Him, when you are provoking all worshippers of His majesty to abandon the faith of the apostles and to adopt the blasphemy of your doctrine? In this let him who boasts boast: in seeking me and understanding and knowing how to glory in the Lord, because I am the Lord who works mercy and judgment and justice upon earth, because in these things is my will, says the Lord.

Since, therefore, you wish an unjust judgment to be pronounced by God’s priests, since you are a shedder of the blood of the innocent, you are not a servant of Him who deigned to speak these words through the mouth of the prophet, but you are plainly the slave of him who filled the heart of Cain, so that he might kill the righteous youth, the first worshiper of the Lord. Hence it is that, although you are placed in such great eminence, you are nevertheless found to be one of those concerning whom you have read the Lord speaking in the Gospel: You are born from the devil as father, and you wish to do the desire of your father; for he was a murderer from the beginning and did not abide in the truth. You are a liar and a murderer: a liar, because you have falsely charged crimes against God’s servant Athanasius; a liar, because you call heretical faith Catholic and Catholic faith heretical; a murderer, because you both pursue the blood of Athanasius and have already killed a certain number of God’s worshipers. Without doubt you have not abided in the truth, since you are doing these things, but you are wholly established in falsehood, because your father is also a liar, who compels you to deny the only Son of God, who drives you to shed the blood of His servants. We did not wish to condemn an absent man, we did not wish to pass sentence against an innocent man, we did not wish to accept your heresy, lest, having become like you, we should deserve to hear what your fellow-heretics the Jews hear, in whose reproach we gather what was said through Jeremiah: All nations are without circumcision, and the whole house of Israel is without circumcision of the heart.

You are and will be, unless you surrender yourself to us, among those against whom the Holy Spirit cries out through the person of our people to God, saying: I know, Lord, that a man’s ways are not his own, nor will any man go and correct his thought. Teach us, Lord, but in judgment and not in wrath, lest you make us few. Pour out your wrath upon the nations that do not know you and upon the kingdoms that have not invoked your name, because they have devoured Jacob and consumed him and laid waste his pastures. You see that you are one of those against whom the Spirit of God speaks through the person of our people. You perceive, unless you convert, that the wrath of the Lord is about to come upon you, an alien, upon you, a king, because not only have you not invoked the name of the Lord, but you have even persecuted it. For when it says: because they have devoured Jacob and consumed him and laid waste his pastures, who can be found among your fellow tyrants to be the prince who is the destroyer of this pasture, if not you, who have indeed neither ceased to tear apart the servants of God nor ceased to sow your blasphemies throughout your entire kingdom?

It cannot be doubted, therefore, that you have attempted to destroy the pasture of the people of God, when you have removed their shepherds, concerning whom, as we have often said, God spoke through Jeremiah: "And I will give you shepherds according to my heart, and they will pasture you, pasturing with discipline," and you have set up heretics, and have imposed a limit on other Catholics, so that, if they were to desire to remain in their own sees, they would not dare to preach the apostolic faith, nor would they attempt, while you, the defender of the Arian heresy, are alive in the body, to impart the evangelical tradition to the peoples. This is the reason that proves you have attempted to destroy the pasture of the people of God. For all the nourishment of Christian souls consists only in believing as the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs believed, and then in doing all justice. You, on the contrary, since you wished both to remove the faith from the hearts of the people of God and to implant your own perfidy, and since you wish justice to be done in the church of God, so that an absent and innocent man is condemned, and, at the suggestion of you, a heretic, a Catholic fellow priest is punished by priests who are followers of justice, how can you appear not to be a destroyer of the pasture of the Lord's flock, when our pasture is nothing other than heavenly doctrine? "If you wish," says the Lord, "to come to life, keep the commandments," and again: "If you do what I command you, I no longer call you servants, but friends.

Since these things are so, you must, in order to clear yourself, produce the dominical precepts which have commanded that an innocent catholic bishop, accused by you, a heretical emperor in the meantime, ought to be put to death by his fellow priests. For perhaps you will attempt to say at this point that you have not tried to destroy the pasture of the Lord's flock. If you can produce no precept of the Lord of that kind which has been set forth by you, it remains that the eyes of your heart, blinded by the blasphemy of Arius, may, opened by this rebuke from the servants of God, see that you have done all that we have charged against you. You will not be able to deny that you show yourself towards us such as that Herod showed himself, whom you are found to be a colleague both in the frenzy of butchery and in sacrilege and in royal dignity, towards those little ones whom we read in the Gospel were killed for the sake of God the Son of God. You have certainly found the cruelty of Herod written, which you now deign to exhibit, in the evangelist Matthew: "Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked by the Magi, was vehemently angry and sent to kill 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 still do not perceive that you have been moved so unjustly against us, worshippers of God, as Herod was moved against those little ones. Why do you deign to be hostile to us? Surely because we confess ourselves to be Christians, who have not condemned a just man burdened by you with false charges.

By these things you will be able to judge who you are from the responses of the blessed John the Baptist and to reconcile yourself to God through penance: offspring of vipers, who showed you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore produce a worthy fruit of penance and do not exalt yourselves, saying: we have Abraham as our father. For I tell you, that God is able to raise up sons of Abraham from these stones. For already the axe is laid at the roots of the trees. For every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire. What do you think of these things? Were we bound to condemn an innocent man, were we bound to give sentence against an absent man unheard? And how, had we done this, could we have been found to be Christians, when the most blessed John exhorted those who might be able to be Christians to produce a worthy fruit of penance? Those who had not yet grasped the way of justice were compelled to grasp it; we who already hold it were urged and are urged by you to seize that path of iniquity, on which the Jews are known to be placed. What then could have befallen us, if we had been fed on your viperous counsels, except that from Christians we would have been made offspring of vipers? Why did you command these things to be done, unless because you desired that we, creeping together, should become yours? You who, knowing that the Lord said in the Gospel: blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, because they themselves will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they themselves will obtain mercy, and yet you would say that an innocent man must be killed. For how can I be blessed if I condemn a just man? If, rejecting the thirst for justice, I conceive the ardor of injustice? How will I be filled by God with the fruits of justice, when this unjust deed makes me a fratricidal Cain? How again will I be able, among the merciful enriched by the fruits of mercy, to obtain the heavenly kingdom? Since, if I kill the servant of God according to your desires, I will be found not merciful, but cruel and wicked—indeed, a murderer; since, just as I have been unmerciful toward my brother, so will that lover of mercy, that exactor of justice who says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they themselves will be filled," be toward me. "Blessed are the merciful, for they themselves will obtain mercy." "Whoever," says the Lord, "loosens one of these least commandments and teaches men thus, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven." And do you say, Constantius, that whoever does not shed the blood of an innocent man cannot obtain the kingdom of heaven? Tell me, most holy one, in what could the justice of Christians abound more than that of the scribes and Pharisees, if we persecute and kill him whom you pursue—him who calls himself a Christian, who refuses to become an Arian? In what would we be better than the scribes and Pharisees?

If we had stood with you as deniers of the only Son of God, if, as they reject it, we had rejected with you the evangelical faith and destroyed the apostolic tradition? Had you forgotten that the Lord said: “You have heard that it was said to the ancients: You shall not kill; but whoever kills will be guilty in judgment. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother without cause will be guilty in judgment,” so that you would command these things to be done? If I am angry with my brother without cause, if I call him a fool, the only Son of God says I will be guilty in gehenna; and, Emperor Constantius, if I shed the blood of an innocent man, you say I will possess eternal rest, and you could not restrain yourself when you were meditating that Athanasius ought to be killed, under what condition did the Lord order offerings to be made? Therefore, if you offer your gift at the altar and there you remember that you have something against your brother, place your gift before the altar and go first to be reconciled to your brother, and then return and offer your gift. What evil had Athanasius wrought, that you would command him to be killed, transgressing these precepts? Surely this, that he called or calls himself a Christian; for there is nothing else that you execrate and desire to punish in Athanasius. Had you not remembered that the Lord commanded even enemies to be loved, that you so bitterly persecuted him whom you knew had sinned neither against you nor against God? You have heard that it was said: “You shall love your neighbor 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, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, who shows the rising of the sun over both good and evil and rains upon the just and the unjust. For if you love only those who love you, what reward will you have? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your friends, what more do you do? Do not even pagans do the same? Therefore you too will be perfect, just as your Father who is in heaven is perfect. The Lord commands that even enemies be loved; and you persecute us because we did not shed with you the blood of the innocent priest of the Lord. The divine voice cries out, saying: “By whatever judgment you have judged, you yourselves will be judged, and by whatever measure you have measured, it will be measured back to you,” and you say: “Kill the one whose guilt you do not know.” Although you remember that you yourself are the source of evils, you nevertheless dared to say of one whom you knew to be falsely accused by you: “He is guilty of death.” You are so senseless, Augustus Constantius, that you could not even recall that saying of the Lord when you ordered these things done: “But why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, yet do not see the beam in your own eye?” Or how can you say to your brother: “Let me remove the speck from your eye,” when behold, there is a beam in your own eye, and then you will see to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

The Lord says there is a beam in your own eye, and do you dare say to Athanasius, a most just man: 'You have a speck in your eye'? For he committed none of those things which you deign to charge him with; on the contrary, you have perpetrated everything we have said, and you have condemned an innocent man as often as you have spoken. What other way did you wish us to take but your own, which the Lord describes, saying: 'How broad and spacious is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it'? Therefore, because you are set upon this broad and spacious way, you have commanded that an innocent man be condemned, desiring indeed that it be revealed to all that your widespread ruin holds sway. At the time when you came to Italy, you had so disguised yourself as a wolf in sheep's clothing, as if we would not discover you by your works, as if the Lord's warning had escaped us, saying: 'Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are rapacious wolves; you will know them by their fruits.' Did not your most bitter fruits, sown with the devil's poisons within you, immediately cause grief, so that you dared to say that the unheard-of man should have been condemned? Did not your snares as a rapacious wolf immediately become apparent, because you had constructed a great engine against the Lord's flock? Therefore, by your fruits, how were you not recognized as a wolf among sheep? And thus, how you are a tree destined for the fire, unless you have taken thought for yourself, the holy Gospels prove. Do they gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles?

Just as every good tree produces good fruit, but a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor a bad tree good fruit. Every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire; for by their fruits you will know them. Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father. Do you so do the will of the Father of the one and only Son of God that you deny His only-begotten Son, that you say the Father Himself is not the true Father, that you try to destroy the foundations laid by the apostles, that you kill and continue to kill His worshippers, that you drive His bishops from the peoples entrusted to them, that you order an absent and unheard man to be condemned, that you introduce your heresy, which blasphemes the single divinity of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, into the Church? If all these things, as we have said, are pleasing to God the Father, you will be able to enter the kingdom of heaven. For you hear His only Son saying: 'Not everyone who says to me "Lord, Lord" will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.' You order an innocent man to be condemned; you do not recall that in Exodus God said: 'If two men quarrel and strike a pregnant woman and she miscarries an unformed child, he shall suffer a penalty. Whatever the woman's husband assesses, he shall pay with dignity.

But if it has been disfigured, it will 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 commands unless you were skilled in the law. You have certainly also read these words: "Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them, I will consider him like a wise man who built his house upon rock. Rain came down, and rivers came, winds blew, they struck against that house, and it did not fall; for it was founded upon rock. And everyone who hears my words but does not do them, I will consider him like a foolish man who built his house upon sand. Rain came down, rivers arrived, winds blew, they dashed against that house, and it fell, and its ruin was great." Which of these do you say you are, Constantius, the wise man or the foolish? If you say the wise man, why do your works show you to be foolish? Why is your house found to be placed upon sand? For you cannot say that you have built your house upon rock, when every wise man sees the structure of your folly, when every servant of God beholds this great ruin of your salvation, which the Lord foretold.

In what then is a Christian found to stand firm, except in obeying the Lord's commands, except in remaining immovable even when harassed by all persecutions for the name of the Son of God? In what will a Christian be perfect, unless he is also killed for the one whom you deign to deny is the true Son of God? You, on the contrary, since you are not in the Church but among the Arians, the enemies of God, since you deny the only Son of God, since you do not fulfill His commands of mercy but rather strive to destroy, since you are a transgressor of the law, a deserter of the oath of heavenly service, a persecutor of God's religion, since you show yourself as an executioner toward His worshippers, how can you be found a wise man, like the one whom the Lord said built his house upon the rock? But you object to these things: "I am not foolish; I know myself to be wise." If you are wise, why have you done and are you doing things that only fools can do? If you are wise, why did you order an absent man to be condemned unheard? Why did you command an innocent man to be killed? Why did you desire that God's priests become enemies of God? For they cannot become friends of God through 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, must I, a priest of God, be heard? You have not allowed him to present the grounds of his allegations at all.

If you are wise, if you are a worshiper of God, why do you persecute us because we confess ourselves to be Christians? Why do you vehemently love those who do not declare themselves to be Christians, but confess themselves to be Arians? If you are wise, why have you often sent 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 we see that no one who does these things can be wise. For what sacrilegious man can be called prudent except by those more imprudent than himself? If you are wise, Constantius, I will not be able to find anyone more foolish than you. Do you still seem to yourself to be wise, you who have thought that the prophets, apostles, and martyrs were killed for the sake of a creature? For you will not dare to deny that all these were killed for the sake of the only Son of God. How can you be called wise, you who have not only refrained from resisting the descending rains, the flooding rivers, and the blowing winds, lest they, by which you are found to be a house, had destroyed you, but have even turned yourself into rains, rivers, and winds for this purpose, that we, your diabolical whirlwind and storm, you might drag with you into the outer darkness?

But the works of the flesh are manifest, says the Apostle: adultery, fornications, uncleanness, shamelessness, luxury, idolatry, sorceries, enmities, contentions, jealousies, angers, quarrels, dissensions, heresies, envies, homicides, drunkennesses, revelries, and things like these. And I tell you, as I have already said, that those who do such things will not obtain the kingdom of God. And does your mind, flourishing with wisdom, rage for the slaughter of the innocent? The Apostle cries out that murderers will not possess the kingdom of heaven, and you, Constantius, the most prudent emperor, say: "Cut the throats of the absent, slaughter the unheard, kill the innocent, and the kingdom of God will be yours." From this it is given to be understood how wise you are, if indeed you are the one who has built your house upon a rock. For you will not be able to deny that you have said: "I desire to condemn Athanasius for this reason, because I wish to please God." Thus, certainly, you have desired to please God in the same way that you have already pleased Him, from the time, that is, when you deigned to think of destroying Athanasius, in the conscience of all of us, the Lord's priests. Thus, in the beginning, Cain pleased God, as soon as he meditated killing his brother. As it seems, Constantius, what your root is, from what stock you have descended. Will you be able to deny, after this, that you are in that chorus of which the Apostle speaks to the Romans: "And just as they did not approve of having God in their knowledge"?

God delivered them into a reprobate mind, so that they do things which are not fitting, filled with every iniquity, malice, shamelessness, lust, wickedness, full of envy, murders, contention, deceit, evil habits, whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, insolent, proud, self-pleasing, boastful, inventors of evils, disobedient to parents, foolish, disorderly, without affection, without mercy, who, when they knew the justice of God, did not understand that those who do such things are worthy of death—not only those who do them, but also those who consent to those doing them. Behold, the excessive love suddenly arisen in you toward us—what would it have brought us, if we dared to yield to you? We would have drunk perpetual death. Likewise he says below: Returning no one evil for evil, providing for good not only before God but also before men. If it can be done, as far as it lies with you, having peace with all men. Thirsting to trample upon these salutary admonitions, you urged us to punish an innocent man. For how would we have been found to have provided for good not only before God but also among men, if we had condemned an innocent man, who would have given a pattern for shedding the blood of the just? How would I have been found desiring to have peace with all men, if, stirred up by your false suggestion of heresy, I had extinguished peace with my fellow priest?

Tell me, Constantius, did you bring a true accusation against Athanasius to the church of God, or a false one? If you are certain that you brought a true one, prove it to me, who have already recognized you as a bearer of a false charge. Do you think you have done nothing evil in the sight of God? What reason compelled you to become a false witness? Why did you, an emperor, turn out to be a liar? Why were you not afraid that you might have been destroyed by the example of Ananias and Sapphira? The scripture in the Acts of the Apostles speaks of the blessed Peter saying to Ananias: “Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit, to withhold from the price of the land? Did not the land remain yours, and was it not in your power when sold? What is this that you have put in your heart? You have not lied to men, but to God.” But Ananias, hearing these words, fell down and expired. And great fear came upon all who heard. Then the young men rose up, took him, and went and buried him. An interval of about three hours occurred, and his wife, not knowing what had happened, entered, and Peter said to her: “Tell me, did you sell the land for such a price?” She replied: “For such a price.” “What agreement did you make between you to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? Behold, the feet of those who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.” And immediately she fell at his feet and expired. I believe you have read these things, and yet you were not afraid to fabricate a lie before the face of the Lord. Why did you do this, unless because you are wise?

What do you think will become of you, who are not only a liar but also a murderer, not only a murderer but also a heretic? Do you believe such great crimes will go unpunished for you? Do you believe you can escape eternal torments? It is said to Ananias: Why did Satan fill your heart, so that you lied to the Holy Spirit? And will you say, Emperor Constantius, that Satan did not fill the hearts of you Arians, so that you lied to the Holy Spirit dwelling in the Church of God? For you assembled the Church, saying: Athanasius has sinned against God; and the Holy Spirit saw your lying souls, just as He saw Ananias and Sapphira. The Holy Spirit saw, I say, when you were fabricating these things, because you had devised such things concerning Athanasius for this reason: that you might be able to introduce your heresy into the Church, that you might be able to destroy the apostolic tradition. Ananias and Sapphira, because they sold their field and defrauded the price, because they dared not to speak honestly before the apostle of God, deserved to be judged in such a way.

you, who have not only brought false charges against the servant of God, but have also persecuted the entire house of God, who have shed the blood of its worshippers, who have sent its priests to the mines and into exile and have placed heretics in their positions, who have called the evangelical faith heretical and your own blasphemy catholic, who have introduced idolatry into the church, who have abandoned the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob and of all the prophets, apostles, and martyrs, and have followed the idolatry of Arius—do you think, if you persist in this blasphemy and cruelty, that the greatest vengeance will not befall you? Then, if God deigned to grant vengeance against the adversaries of Susanna in such a manner, do you suppose that a no more severe vengeance will proceed against you? It will proceed, believe me, if you do not change your ways in time. For if those who attempted to violate Susanna’s chastity deserved to receive what I have recounted, how much more so you, who have attempted to violate the chastity of the church? They falsely accused Susanna, and you have accused not only Athanasius but also all who resist you. Can you name a single one of those who resist you to whom a charge has not been attached?

Thus were you armed to violate the chastity of the Church, just as those who said to Susanna: "The doors of the garden are closed, no one sees us, we are in lust for you; therefore consent to us and be with us, otherwise we will bear false witness against you, that a young man was with you and for that reason you dismissed the girls from you." Or will you attempt to deny that it was said: "We Arians and you Christians desire to become one body; abandon the faith which you hold written against us at Nicaea, acquiesce to the doctrine of Arius; otherwise, because we can do nothing, our empire is ours, we will burden you in whatever ways we wish, and you will all be removed from your sees"? You cannot deny that these things are so, since your abominable designs have been revealed by deeds. For why were we compelled, even if we did not condemn Athanasius, yet to be mixed in communion with the Arians, unless because you, the pimp of the Arian heresy, desired all of us to become your fellow-sacrilegers in any way possible?

But I suppose you still try to deny that you persecute us for that reason, because we were unwilling to become Arian Christians. How will you be able to deny it, when you sent the most holy Dionysius, bishop of Milan, who, already believing you as you falsely asserted, had condemned Athanasius, into exile because he was unwilling to be an Arian? Or is not Auxentius, whom you rashly and pestilentially ordained an Arian in his place, an Arian? If Auxentius holds to the holy faith described at Nicaea, then you can neither be an Arian yourself, nor can you have done all these things as I assert, nor can you have brought a false charge against Athanasius. Perhaps you will say that you are Catholics for this reason, that Susanna was heard, but we were not. As far as our conscience is concerned, we know that we were avenged when you, the serpent, were exposed, when all your poisons became clear, when every device of yours was laid open; for thus we desired vengeance from you, the enemies of God, that God might reveal you as heretics to his people. Almost the whole world now knows that Athanasius was falsely attacked by you, and that you are the author of this iniquity; for you were seen to desire one thing to accomplish, and to have brought forth another. Groaning to the people, Susanna says: "Distress surrounds me on all sides; for if I do this, death will be mine; but if I do not, I will not escape your hands. It is better for me, not doing it, to fall into your hands than to sin before the Lord.

and as soon as we saw the crimes imposed upon us by you, we would have extinguished our torches, since we are, as you are, darkness. What Christian would not say that it is better for him to be killed by you, the forerunner of the Antichrist, than to go into your darkness, that of the Arians or any heretics? You caused crimes to be charged not only against Athanasius, but also against us, because we were unwilling to become Arian Christians. There was no lack of individual charges that could be brought against each of us, so that none of us would seem to have been sent into exile for the sake of God, but rather as if for our crimes. Since you, therefore, are guilty of such great crimes, because Athanasius did not wish to have an angry God with you, you declared him guilty of death; this also did those priests to whom you are equal in this wickedness. For Scripture says: And it happened on the next day, when the people gathered at the house of her husband Joakim, two priests full of wicked intent came against Susanna to put her to death. And they said before the people: Send for Susanna, daughter of Chelcias, who is the wife of Joakim. And they sent, and she came, and her parents and all her relatives. Susanna, however, was very delicate and of good appearance. But the unjust men ordered her to be unveiled (for she was veiled), so that they might feast their eyes on her form. And all her people and the others who saw her wept. Therefore, the two priests, rising up in the midst of the people, placed their hands upon her head, while she, weeping, looked up at .

ners of the Antichrist, because his heart was confident in the Lord. But the elders said: As we were walking in the garden, the sun entered with the girls. And she dismissed the girls and closed the doors of the garden, and a young man who was hidden came to her and lay with her. But we, being in a corner of the garden, seeing the wickedness, ran to them and saw them together. We could not seize him because he was stronger than us and because he opened the doors and leaped out, but we seized her and asked who the young man was, and she refused to tell us. We testify to this. And the whole synagogue believed them as elders of the people and judges, and condemned her to die. Consider deeply, Constantius, the accursed fabrications of you Arians, if such are not the things you have done in the meantime concerning Athanasius, as those men did concerning Susanna. For who would not have believed you, the emperor, saying: Athanasius committed sacrilege? But because you were more detestable than those lost false elders of yours, we did not trust you: for it was said to you that an absent man could not be condemned. For those elders brought criminal allegations against a man who was present, and the whole synagogue gave its verdict against a man who was present; you, on the contrary, when you were forcing a Catholic to be condemned unheard and absent on the accusation of heretics, the machinery of your stage-play had certainly already begun to be seen.

But now hear what was granted to chaste Susanna by the defender of the innocent, by the avenger of the oppressed. Hear what the book of Daniel relates concerning the vindication of Susanna. Then Susanna cried out with a loud voice and said: "Eternal God, who knows hidden things, who knows all things before their generation, you know that they have given false testimony against me; and behold, I am dying, though I have done none of those things which these wicked men have fabricated against me." And the Lord heard her voice. And when she was being led away to perish, God roused the holy spirit of a young boy, whose name was Daniel, and he cried out with a loud voice: "I am innocent of this blood." And all the people turned to him, and they said: "What is this speech that you have uttered?" But he, standing in their midst, said: "Thus, you fools of Israel, without inquiring and without knowing the truth, you have condemned a daughter of Israel; return to judgment, for they have given false testimony against her." So also now, with Athanasius crying out to God, God has made all his servants rise up for the truth against you, his adversaries. He has granted to his worshippers what he then granted to his most devoted Daniel, so that we might understand you to be a false witness, that you are one of the brood of vipers, that you have fabricated these falsehoods together with your fellow-sacrilegers.

all return to a just judgment, now that the death sentence is being imposed on you by your tormentor, even those whom the devil, the master of your soul, had ensnared through your cunning without their knowledge. For it is impossible, except for your fellow Arians, that anyone should not wish Athanasius’s innocence to be vindicated by God, that anyone should not favor the innocence of Athanasius, just as now with Susanna, after it became clear that she was attacked by a false charge—chaste by the unchaste, pure by the adulterers, a handmaid of God by the servants of the devil. Thus, by you, serpentine sons of Satan, the standing of an innocent man faithfully serving God was assailed; but you have been laid low. For all your poisons lie dead, slain by the power of God, since every Christian soul is beseeching God that, just as Susanna, He deign to rescue Athanasius from a false charge, to rescue him from your executioner’s sword, from your savagery as a murderer. Meanwhile, again and again I urge you to see what madness has seized you Arians, what insanity has gripped you, that you dared to contrive these things for the murder of an innocent man, when you knew that God knows all things before they happen. But it is no wonder that this engine was constructed against Athanasius through you and yours, since you have not hesitated to say of God the Father: “He is not the true Father; for He does not have a true Son.” For you who say that the Son of God is from nothing, what else are you saying but that He is not the true Father?

It is not, I say, surprising that you have risen up so against Athanasius, the servant of God, when you did not hesitate to lay your deadly hands upon Him whose servant Athanasius is. For a brigand who has not spared the master of the house will not be able to spare the household that resists him. But let us now return to that which you commanded us to do. You said: condemn Athanasius. What had intervened that we did not see him face to face? What had been done that I did not examine every hinge of the case? Why did you not allow him to be overcome by suitable witnesses? Did the most holy Daniel—or rather, through Daniel, the Holy Spirit—condemn unheard-of things? For we read that the glorious Daniel said to the people: separate them from one another. And he called one of them and said to him: you, who have grown old in evil days, now your sins, which you formerly committed, have come upon you, judging unjust judgments, and condemning the innocent indeed, but acquitting the guilty, the Lord saying: you shall not kill the innocent and the just. Now, however, if you saw this, tell under which tree you saw them conferring? And he said: under a mastic tree. But Daniel said: you have rightly lied to your own ruin; for the angel of the Lord, receiving a command from God, will cut you in two. And when he had removed him, he ordered the other to be brought forward and said to him: seed of Canaan and not of Judah, appearance seduced you and lust overturned your heart; thus you used to do to the daughters of Israel, and they, indeed, fearing, lay with you.

But the daughter of Judah did not endure your injustice. Now, however, tell me, under which tree did you catch them conversing with each other? He replied: under an ilex. Then Daniel said to him: you have rightly lied, and to your own head; for the angel of God stands with a sword to cut you in two, so that he may destroy you. And the whole synagogue cried out with a loud voice and blessed God, who saves those who hope in him. And they rose up against the two presbyters, since Daniel had proven them false witnesses from their own mouths, and they did to them what they themselves had wickedly wished to do to their neighbor, according to the law of Moses, and they killed them; and the blood of the innocent was saved on that day. What can your imprudence, Constantius, answer to these things? You see that not even those guilty of such a great crime were condemned indiscriminately, until everything had been most diligently examined; and yet you did not hesitate to order that the priests of God should pronounce a sentence of death against him whom you knew to be innocent. What would we have heard if we had done so? Surely those things which those false presbyters, those rocks of lust, those false witnesses, hear: "You, grown old in evil days, now your sins, which you formerly committed, have come upon you, judging unjust judgments, condemning the innocent, indeed, and releasing the guilty," as the Lord says: "You shall not kill the innocent and the just." Would we not, by right and merit, deserve to hear these things, we who, either enticed or terrified by you, the bilge-water of the Arian dogma, had been led to the condemnation of an innocent man? And therefore all these evils have come upon you.

You, along with your followers, are about to hear what they heard through Daniel—whether because you are accused of a false charge, or because you have invited the whole chorus of bishops to the murder of an innocent man, and because you have wished the entire people of God to adopt your heresy—and you will hear, and indeed more severely, because your crimes are graver, since you have emerged as a destroyer of the religion of God, you have slain a vast multitude of those calling themselves Christians, you have introduced your Arian heresy into the Church, you have condemned the Catholic faith, you have denied that God the Father is the true Father, you have said that His only Son is not the true Son, and you have asserted that the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, is not the true Spirit of God. For the faith of the holy Church cries out against you and against all the enemies of God that it believes in the true God the Father, unbegotten, and in His only Son, born from the unbegotten and true Father, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, born not made, of one substance with the Father, which in Greek they call *homousion*, through whom all things were made and without whom nothing was made, and in the Paraclete Spirit, the true Spirit of God. Therefore to you, false witness, spiritual adulterer, sacrilegious murderer, more severe things will fittingly be said, fittingly because you are greater in such and so many crimes than those false presbyters, the enemies of Susanna.

For if it is said to those who lie: "You have rightly lied to your own peril; for already the angel of the Lord, receiving a command from God, will cut you in two," and: "You have rightly lied to your own peril; the angel of God remains, having a sword to cut you in two, so that the vessel may perish," how much more, unless you look out for yourself, will such things be said to you! That it is written: "Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it," had fallen from your heart, covered with the darkness of errors. That you should order an innocent man to be condemned? Unless I am mistaken, in every place the sacred law speaks of not condemning the innocent and the just. And therefore, because you have done these things contrary to God's command, we consider you one of those whom the Lord strikes in the Gospel: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, because you are tombs which do not appear, and men walking upon them do not know." Indeed, those whom you, sacrilegious one, enticed to love you, through your efforts had not considered that you are a tomb full of all impurities; they thought you a man. But we, as soon as you began to impose on the bishops the necessity of condemning an absent man, immediately said that you are a cultivator of injustice and a persecutor of justice. Likewise, when we, as legates of the blessed church, urged you to condemn the sect of Arius, and you said that that sect was rather the catholic one, we foretold that you had been the forerunner of Antichrist.

When you deign to persecute Christians, when you kill, you make yourself, Constantius, like those to whom the Lord says: "Woe to you who build monuments to the prophets, but your fathers killed them. Therefore you bear witness, not consenting to the works of your fathers, since they indeed killed them, but you have built their sepulchres." For this reason I send prophets and apostles, and from among them they will kill and persecute, so that all the blood of the prophets which has been shed from the foundation of the world up to this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zacharias, who perished between the altar and the temple, may be inquired into. Thus I say to you: it will be required of this generation. That you are among them is understood from this: because, although you restore the memorials of the blessed martyrs, yet you shed the blood of the servants of the only Son of God. Return, Constantius, to the house of God, be a Christian, lest you be found outside the Church, as you are today among those whom the Lord strikes, saying: "Strive to enter through the narrow door, for I say to you: many seek and will not be able. When the master of the house rises and closes the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock, saying: 'Lord, Lord, open to us,' and answering he will say: 'I do not know where you are from.' Then you will begin to say: 'We ate and drank before you, and in our streets you taught.' And he will say to you: 'I do not know where you are from; depart from me, all you workers of iniquity.' There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets entering the kingdom of God, but you yourselves are cast out. Do not hold yourself so hateful as to allow yourself to hear these things among them, especially since you see that you have been more wicked than one to whom it is rightly said: "Depart from me, worker of iniquity." You will be, Constantius, if you wish to remain in this malice of yours, among that carnal people to whom it is said: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to you"; you will be, I say, among them, because you are a persecutor of those who urge you to earn the favor of God, just as they were persecutors of the prophets and apostles. Again the defense of the truth demands that it be asked of you why you ordered an absent man to be condemned. Tell me, please, did you command this to be done well or ill? If you say well, I believe you take refuge in the deed of blessed Paul, because he wrote to the Corinthians that he had already punished that sinner whom he had found to have gravely offended. Let us now see if you, beast, have only the limbs and body of a man, but a wild mind, if you have acted as the apostle acted, if you have conducted the matter in the same order as he who said: "Thus fornication is heard among you, such as not even among the Gentiles, so that someone has his own father's wife. And you are puffed up and have not rather mourned, so that he who did this deed might be removed from your midst. I, indeed, as absent in body, but present in spirit.

I judged that, being present, I should hand over that man who had done the deed, in the name of the Lord Jesus, with you assembled and with my spirit together with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit might be safe on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. You say, I believe: "And for that reason I had commanded you to condemn an absent man, because the apostle also condemned." First of all, the blessed apostle had been informed by those whom he knew to be faithful, whom he had proven devoted to God, and he knew the whole holy church of Corinth to be a witness. You, on the other hand, O darkness, you deigned to urge us, with you and your sacrilegious accusers, hateful heretics to God, to the condemnation of an absent man. Then, when you hear the apostle saying: "With you assembled and with my spirit together with the power of the Lord Jesus, to hand over such a man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh," you, O darkness, why, when we said: "We will go to him at our own expense, we will hear him in the congregation to which he was divinely appointed, only give us Catholic accusers according to the command of sacred law," why did you refuse? Why, as if we were gladiators and not bishops, did you work so that we might kill him according to your wishes, whose blood you had long thirsted for? Meanwhile, you should know that you have been handed over to Satan, so wretched, for your murders and for your sacrilege, just as that man was found guilty at Corinth.

For neither are those deeds which you have done and are doing lesser deaths, so that, if the Holy Spirit speaks through the mouth of the blessed apostle that he handed that man over to Satan for destruction, it has not also handed you over, as soon as you committed such grave crimes. For if it were not so, you would surely have remembered that the apostle said: "You have been bought with a price, do not become servants of men"; you would never have dared to compel the priests to condemn an unheard-of man. For I, who have been bought with a price, because I have been freed from the law of sin and made a servant of justice, ought not to have had a burden imposed on me by you, so that I might again become a servant of iniquity and injustice. Therefore, a burden has been imposed by you, because you have been handed over to Satan for destruction on account of homicides and sacrilege. If you had not been handed over to Satan, you would remember that the apostle wrote to Timothy: "But we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully," knowing this, that the law is not laid down for the just man, but for the unjust and disobedient and impious and sinners and criminals and profane, parricides and matricides, the unchaste, male fornicators, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is opposed to sound doctrine which is according to the gospel of the glory of the blessed God, which has been entrusted to me.

If you have not been handed over, from the time you denied the Son of God, to the destruction of Satan, how did you deign, passing over such great things which could have restrained you from so great a crime, to leap forth to do these things, which can sweep away all those things that are known to be of sound doctrine? You who do these things, which are opposed to sound doctrine, who proscribe, torture, deport, cast into prison, and kill, tell me, I beseech you, if you are unlike that King Herod, whose butchery the sacred Scripture describes in this way: At the same time, King Herod sent forth his hand to harm certain men from the church. He killed James, the brother of John, with the sword, and when he saw that this pleased the Jews, he added that he should seize Peter. Now it was the days of Unleavened Bread. When he had seized him, he cast him into prison, handed over to be guarded by four quaternions of soldiers, wishing after the Passover to bring him out before the people. Peter, however, was kept in prison. Therefore, a most earnest prayer was made to the Lord for him by the church. And when it was about to happen that Herod would bring him forth, that night Peter was sleeping among the soldiers, bound with two chains, and guards before the door, and they were guarding the prison. And behold, an angel of the Lord stood by, and light from him shone in that place; and striking Peter’s side, he roused him, saying: Arise quickly.

And he arose, and the chains fell from his hands, and further: and when he had passed the first and second guards, he came to the iron gate which leads into the city, which opened itself to them. And when they had gone out, they proceeded one street, and immediately the angel departed from him. And Peter, turning to himself, said: now I know that the Lord truly sent his angel and snatched me from the hands of Herod and from all the expectation of the Jewish people. When day came, there was turmoil among the soldiers as to what had become of Peter. But Herod, when he had searched for him and not found him, interrogated the guards and ordered them to be led away. We see you similar to him in everything, both in cruelty and in sacrilege; for just as he killed the blessed apostle James, so also you have killed a vast multitude of believers, just as the apostle James believed; just as he in the apostle James persecuted the only Son of God, so also you persecute both those whom you have already killed and us. Again we both instruct and exhort you: that you return to the church of God and cease already to persecute Athanasius or us who act against your heresy, lest by the example of that Herod you begin to perish, whose destruction holy scripture speaks of, saying: he went down from Judaea to Caesarea and stayed there. He was, however, hostile to the Tyrians and Sidonians. And they came to him with one mind and, having persuaded Blastus, who was of the king's bedchamber, they sought peace, because their regions were nourished from the royal treasury.

On the appointed day, however, Herod, clothed in royal garments, sat on the tribunal and harangued them. But the people cried out: "The voices of God, not of man." Immediately the angel of the Lord struck him, because he did not give honor to God, and he expired, swarming with worms. Did you not know, you who wish to seem learned in the law, that the blessed apostle John said, that you might declare an innocent man condemned? From this we understand that we have known him if we keep his commandments. But he who says, "I have known him," and does not keep his commandments, is a liar, and in this there is no truth. But those who have kept his word, truly the love of God is perfected by them. You command against God's commandment; but the apostle says that he who has not kept his precepts has not even known him, because, he says, if he says, "I have known him," and does not keep his commandments, he is a liar, and in him there is no truth. You wish us to be liars, you wish us to be found murderers, for this purpose without doubt, that we may not be found to be Christians. For Christians are neither liars nor murderers. The apostle says: Those who have kept his word, truly the love of God is perfected among them; and you, apostate forerunner of the Antichrist, say: Whoever does not keep his commandments will live. Moreover, he who says he is in the light, he says, and hates his brother, is in darkness until now. But he who loves his brother remains in the light, and there is no scandal in him.

But he who hates his brother walks in darkness and does not know where he is going, because darkness has blinded his heart. What can be said by you, a man of darkness, to these things? Why do you press upon those placed in darkness with light? Hate with me, and you yourselves hate him whom I unjustly hate; be partakers of my madness; be, like me, also murderers. Then if it is said that he who hates his brother walks in darkness, so that he does not know where he is going, evidently because the darkness of violence has blinded his eyes, what if someone has killed his brother? What if he has been a murderer? But to you the crime of a murderer seems nothing, you who are found to have shed the blood of so many servants of God. Do you dare to command the priests of God to do those things which are pleasing only to your father the devil and to you, his Arian sons? Likewise, the most holy apostle exhorts us that, holding to the path of justice, we may deserve to be established in everlasting rest; and you, most wise man, compel us to come with you to eternal torments. "Sons, let no one deceive you. He who does justice is just; but he who commits sin is from the devil, because sin originates from the devil. For the Son of God was manifested for this purpose, to undo the works of the devil. Therefore, since it is said by the apostle that sin is from the devil, and you compel us to commit capital crimes, what else can I call you but the procurator of the devil?

in such a way that I see him so loving his cause, so cherishing his interest, that you desire all of us to be found on his side. For whence do you compel every worshiper of God to make a transition to him, unless because you have chosen to favor his party? You hear the blessed apostle say: "The Son of God was declared for this reason, to undo the works of the devil"; and you are urging the worshipers of God to complete the work of the devil. When you do these things, do you not seem to have set yourself up as an assailant of him who undid the work of the devil? But it is not surprising if you have chosen that what the only Son of God dissolved might be rebuilt through you, a satellite of the devil, especially since you have not hesitated to deny even him who destroyed the work of the devil. Hence it is nothing to you to shed the blood of an innocent, because, having denied the lover of the innocent and defender of his own worshipers, you have betaken yourself to him to whom Judas Iscariot betook himself. Therefore, if you cannot deny that shedding the blood of a just man is the work of the devil, it is certainly clear that you have done the work of the devil and urged us to do it. John, most beloved of God, still speaks, that fraternal charity may be kept inviolate, saying: "From this the sons of God and the sons of the devil appear. Everyone who is not just is not from God, and who does not love his brother, because this is the promise you heard from the beginning, that we love one another; and not as Cain, who was from the evil one and killed his brother." And for what reason did he kill him?

since his works were evil, but his brother’s were just. Do not be amazed, brothers, if the world hates us. We know that we have made a transition from death to life, because we love our brothers; but he who does not love remains in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that every murderer does not have eternal life remaining in him. Therefore, since everyone who is found to hate his brother is called a son of the devil, a murderer, is compared to Cain the fratricide, and is designated as remaining in death, why did you compel me to fulfill this work, which would have made me a fratricide like Cain and a son of the devil, which would have made me remain in perpetual death? Since you already see that I have made a transition from death to life, since God has already placed me among those whom he has deigned to call sons, for what reason did you wish me to become Cain, also darkness and a son of the devil? In what did I harm you, in what matters did I stand as an adversary to your salvation, that you desired me to be harmed in such a way? Why do we repeat these things except so that you might at last be able to understand that you are ignorant of what is truly good? For if you knew, you would never have committed such a crime yourself and would not have urged us to perpetrate it. Tell me amid these things, I pray, why do you persecute the bishop of the house of God? For the apostle says that he who hates his brother is a murderer. If you do not wish to have the name of murderer, why do you hate your brother?

prove that Athanasius is worthy of hatred, what evil deeds he has done is clear, so that he is worthy of being hated even by all of us. Surely you will not point to some unjust deed committed by him that would make him hateful. Since this is so, it is necessary that you hate him for this reason, because your work is evil, but Athanasius’s is just. For this reason indeed you wish to kill him, because he did not imitate you as a criminal, villainous, and sacrilegious person. It is established that this is so. For when the glorious apostle introduces the comparison of Cain and Abel, you seem to me to be Cain, and Athanasius Abel, from this the children appear, he says, of God and of the devil. All who are not just are not from God, and who does not love his brother, because this promise which you have heard from the beginning is that we love one another and not as Cain was from evil, and killed his brother. And why did he kill him? Because his works were evil, but his brother’s were just.

You should not doubt that your deeds are evil, but Athanasius's are just. For you are a murderer, a destroyer of the religion of God, a denier of the only Son of God, an assailant of the apostolic faith, a founder of Arian idolatry; whereas Athanasius continues in the fear of God in such a way that, as far as can be seen, he is found to have committed nothing that could separate him from those most beloved of God. Since these things are so, we urge you to love yourself in Athanasius. You retain the scripture: you shall love your neighbor as yourself, and he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For just as you hate yourself in him, not knowing that it is evil to hate a just man unjustly, so you will begin to love yourself in him, if this malevolence of yours is turned into benevolence. Then you will be able to be snatched from the darkness in which the blessed apostle says you dwell. For he says: "Do not be surprised, brothers, if the world hates us. We know that we have made a transition from death to life, because we love our brothers. But he who does not love remains in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that every murderer does not have life remaining in him." Nor dare you say any longer: "Condemn an innocent man," you a man who has no life remaining in you, a man who has not yet made the transition from death to life. For if you had made it—that is, if you had believed in the only Son of God as we do—you would not have chosen to be a murderer, lest you begin to go back again to death.

Thus, being placed in a twofold position without hope of life, you have deigned to command the killing of an innocent man among the priests. But perhaps you will try to say: I love those who love God, and I hate those who hate him. But you cannot say this of Athanasius, since it is rather evident that you hate God, because you have both abandoned him and crossed over to idolatry. Therefore, since you pursue no fault in the priest of God, but only justice, only the religion of God, it remains that you still see us, whom you urged to kill the innocent, as the blessed apostle John has commanded us to be toward our fellow servants: he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. I am commanded by the apostle to lay down my life for a brother, and by you, a slave of Antichrist, I am ordered to kill a brother. And again: Let us have confidence in God, he says, and whatever we ask we shall receive from him, because we keep the commandments, and we do what pleases him before his sight in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and let us love one another, as he gave us the commandment. But how can I be heard by him in every supplication, if I am one who does not keep his commandment? For he commanded me to love my brother, not to kill him. And further: Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God. And again: Whoever does not love his brother does not know God, because God is love.

From this the love of God in us is declared, because God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the expiator of our sins. Dearest ones, if therefore God loved us, we too ought to love one another. And again: if anyone says that he loves God and hates his brother, he is a liar. But he who does not love his brother cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And again: we have this commandment from him, that whoever loves God should also love his brother. And again: from this we understand that we love the sons of God when we love God and do his commandments. For this is the love of God, and his commandments are not burdensome. Consider these few out of many, and you will find to what darkness you have dragged us, you man of darkness. From this we understand, he says, that we love the sons of God because we love God and do his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments; and you deign to drive me to destroy these commandments, to establish others contrary to them, which have been brought forth through you by the instinct of the devil. How can I be found to be one who loves God, when I am found to have been made an adversary of his commandments through you? From which deeds, what else do you seem to me to be but one of those tares destined for the fire? Concerning whom the Lord says: just as, therefore, tares are gathered and burned with fire, so it will be at the end of the world.

The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather from his kingdom all scandals and those who commit iniquity, and they will cast them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, then the just will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. You see that, if I, with you the heretic acting sufficiently, were to condemn an innocent man, I would be with you in Gehenna. For we could not attain the kingdom of God, in which we could shine like the sun, if we had either committed murder or violated the apostolic faith. Rejoice still that you live in these evils, refuse to recognize the evils you do, and you will undoubtedly find yourself among those wicked ones whom the Lord designates as coming to the fire, saying: The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the company of the just, and they will cast them into the furnace of fire; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. You deign to hold as nothing the persecution of the servants of the only Son of God, you limb of the devil, who had thought that you could lead the entire holy church into scandal. But see what God promises to you and to all your fellow-sacrilegious ones: He who receives one such child in my name receives me; but he who scandalizes one of the little ones who believe in me, it is expedient for him that a millstone be hung around his neck and that he be sunk into the depths of the sea. Woe to this world from scandals. For scandals must come, yet woe to the man through whom scandal comes.

But if your hand or your foot scandalizes you, cut it off and cast it from you. And further: See that you do not despise any of these little ones; for I tell you that their angels in heaven always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven. Therefore, you who not only despise those who believe in his divine majesty but also kill them, what reward will that one whom you deny present to you, who would have said that it would be better for you if you hung a millstone around your neck and were plunged into the depths of the sea than that you had led one of those believing in him to scandal, than that you had despised one of those who are to possess the kingdom of heaven? What will he present to you, who for that reason have deserved to be cut off from the members of his holy church, because you are the one through whom the devil has sown scandals in our days among the people of God? Although you have stirred up scandals, yet you have deceived only those who did not know that you have already withered like a stream cut off from its source, like a broken branch from the tree; but we who recognize you as placed outside the church, who see you as an enemy of the only Son of God, knowing you to be dead, we see your efforts, with God's help, beneath our feet. For we know that the dead cannot rule over the living. But why do you say that you live in Christ? How can you prove it, since you deny him? For they cannot live unless they confess him to be the true God, the true Son of God.

Whence do you live, since you persecute us for the very reason that we confess ourselves to be his servants? Or do you perhaps persecute us for another reason? Have you perchance found that we have offended against you, and are you therefore so hostile toward us? We ourselves do not recall that we have sinned against you. For how could it be proved that we have sinned against you, when we urge you to come from death to life? And yet, if you feel that we have offended against you, accept what the Lord has commanded you to do concerning us, saying: "If your brother sins against you, go and rebuke him between you and him alone; and if he listens, you will have gained your brother; but if he does not listen to you, take with you still one or two, so that every word may rest on the testimony of two or three witnesses. But if he does not listen to them, tell the church; but if he does not listen to the church, let him be to you as a heathen and a publican." Since you have not done these things which the Lord commanded to be done, since you have not only failed to admonish us between you and us, in whose presence you could have convicted Athanasius, one of us, of being guilty, but have compelled him to be condemned unheard by us, his fellow priests, since you have taken away his hearing, how can you justly accuse us of having offended against you, when you have fulfilled none of these commandments of the Lord? Why do you persecute us so fiercely, when you are rather guilty of transgression, you who have acted toward us not at all according to the commands given to you by the only Son of God, but have done everything as it pleased our enemy the devil?

For that one's counsel is of this sort, that one's will such that an unheard-of man be condemned, that an absent man be killed, that the blood of an innocent be shed; since you, I say, did not act in the manner in which the Lord commanded you to act, you dared to bring it to the blessed church, you dared to say: "Athanasius has sinned and his communion ought to be condemned by all." But what will you attempt to say? He offended against God; and behold, it cannot be found that he offended against God, since neither you nor the fellow-sacrilegious sons of your whore the Arian heresy can be admitted as witnesses against a catholic bishop. For the Lord was speaking about three catholic witnesses, about servants of his majesty, that the blessed church should believe them, not us profane ones, born from adultery of a whore. But if we have not understood that precept of the Lord in this way, then worshippers of Saturn and of all idols can be admitted as witnesses against the household servants of God, and your fellow-blasphemers abandoned by God, Jews placed without light as you are. For if you heretics, and indeed of all sects, are to be admitted as witnesses against Christians, then both pagans and Jews ought to be, since whether Jews or pagans or you heretics are placed outside the Lord's church, without God, just as all those who were not in the ark of the most holy Noah were then.

Just as those placed outside the ark could not be saved, so too you will perish in this way, unless, believing in the only Son of God, you remain dwelling with us in the holy Church. Therefore, if neither you nor your fellow blasphemers can be witnesses, how did you, most foolish king, cause a man of complete innocence to be condemned, and indeed by his own fellow priests? I add this: that you had already accused him of being a murderer at Serdica in the synod of Catholics, and your iniquity was utterly unable to prove it. I add that you yourself gave letters to the church of the Alexandrians, asserting that man to be a just man, a Catholic bishop. Finally, even if he had sinned, Athanasius should have been expelled by the people entrusted to him, and indeed that people should have sought another worthy man from their own body to be made bishop for themselves; he should not, however, have been sought out by the sword through you, the emperor. But since you, in place of an innocent man, against whom you established nothing true, in place of a Catholic, sent your fellow sacrilegist George, and inflicted such great insults and such great punishments on those unwilling to be stained by his sacrilege, so that you proscribed very many, banished them to exiles in the mines, killed very many indeed, and even today you do not cease to do these things to those unwilling to accept your blasphemy, which is also George's—things which enraged, most savage barbarian enemies would scarcely do—how do you think you can be understood to be a Christian, you who seem fiercer than the most savage beasts and more monstrous than all wild animals?

You dared to say that Athanasius should be struck down, not seeing that you Arians were then punished, and indeed by the power of God, when you planned to introduce idolatry into the Lord’s church. But perhaps you still say: Athanasius has wronged me. To pass over the fact that in this too you are a liar, did you not know what was written about how the Lord commanded you to act toward those who wrong you, that you would have pursued him with the sword? Then Peter approached him and said: “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times shall I forgive him? Up to seven times?” He says to him: “I do not tell you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.” Are you ashamed to call Athanasius your brother? If you profess yourself a Christian, you ought to call all Christians brothers, and indeed not only Athanasius, but also those whom you see begging for alms. For all of us established in the Lord’s church are one to him, with whom there is no acceptance of persons. And yet you would do well if you were unwilling to call him your brother; for since you are a son of pestilence and he is one of the sons of light, since you are a slave of our enemy and he is a servant of God, it is most unjust if you are called a brother of a man of God, you forerunner of Antichrist. If you had seen that he had wronged you in some matter, it should have been forgiven by you immediately, so that God might forgive your own crimes. But now, because you were unable to forgive on account of your stubbornness and ill will, to you.

You who have made the Lord’s commandment void, hear what can be set before you: then Peter, approaching him, said: “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times shall I forgive him? Up to seven times?” He says to him: “I do not tell you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.” Therefore the kingdom of heaven is likened to a human king, who wished to settle accounts with his servants. And when he had begun to settle accounts, one was brought to him who owed ten thousand talents. But since he had nothing from which to pay, the master ordered him to be sold, along with his wife and children and all that he had, and the debt to be paid. But that servant, falling down, begged him, saying: “Have patience with me, and I will repay you everything.” But the master, taking pity on that servant, released him and forgave him the debt. However, that servant, going out, found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred denarii, and seizing him, he choked him, saying: “Pay what you owe.” And that servant, falling down, begged him, saying: “Have patience with me, and I will repay you.” But he refused, and went and put him in prison until he should pay the debt. But his fellow servants, seeing what was happening, were grieved, and came and told their master everything that had been done. Then his master called him and said to him: “Wicked servant, I forgave you the entire debt because you begged me; should you not also have shown mercy to your fellow servant, just as I showed mercy to you?

And his angry master handed him over to the torturers, until he should repay the entire debt. So also will my Father, who is in heaven, do to you, if you do not each forgive your brother from your hearts. What do you answer to this, you whose mind’s eyes have been utterly unable to see these things which the Lord commanded to be done? Where do you place that which has offended neither against you nor against God, but is enduring persecution, because he holds to the apostolic faith, because he refuses to become a sacrilegious man like you? You have resolved to kill the preacher of truth, desiring thereby to be placed in that honor in which are those whom the Lord designates in the Gospel and the prophets as murderers, and he reveals that they will also stretch forth impious hands against Himself, saying: There was a man, a householder, who planted a vineyard and surrounded it with a hedge, and dug a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to tenants, and went abroad. When the time for the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants, to receive some of his fruits; and the tenants, seizing the servants, beat one, stoned another, and killed another. Again he sent more servants to them, and they did likewise to them. Finally, he sent them his only son, saying: They will fear my son. But the tenants, seeing the son, said among themselves: This is the heir, come, let us kill him, and we will have his inheritance. And they seized him and killed him and cast him out of the vineyard.

When, therefore, the master of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants? They say: He will destroy the evil ones badly, and will lease the vineyard to other tenants who will render him fruit in their seasons. Since you greatly desire to be one of these, and you were persuading us to become accomplices in your crimes—for your counsels are no different from those wicked counsels of those who are found to have killed the prophets, who finally laid impious hands upon the only Son of God, especially since you are also reducing to nothing the sufferings of those blessed ones sent to the tenants, by asserting that they were killed on account of one who existed when he did not exist, while the sacred scriptures proclaim that the only Son of God has always reigned and reigns with the Father. The Lord's letters reveal that the Father and his only Son have one divinity; and you say that he, for whom the glorious prophets were killed, was made from nothing. For if what you say is true, it is evident that the blessed prophets were killed on account of a creature. And where will that be, that the Lord rages with great indignation against those who serve a creature rather than the Creator? If the blessed prophets were killed for a creature, how does God hold them most dear? How is it that, because the Jews did not believe their words, they are today enemies of God? Whence are the Jews enemies of God? Whence are they found to be placed outside the Lord's vineyard?

unless it is because they would have turned out to be murderers of the prophets, unless it is because the prophets proclaimed the eternal God, the Son of the eternal God, and your fellow blasphemers not only did not believe their prophecies, but even killed them. For what else do you think the Jews were persecuting in the prophets except the only Son of God, just as also in the apostles and martyrs? Learn from yourself, at least, that what I say is true, since you too persecute the true Son of God in Athanasius as well as in us. Since these things are so, you had decided that we should be joined to the murderers of the prophets, to the spillers of the blood of the righteous, to your fellow-sacrilegists, that is, the Jews, whose imitator you evidently are. For you said that we should condemn Athanasius for no other reason, and you ordered that we should also accept the faith of Arius, except so that we might be equal to the Jews both in the shedding of the blood of the righteous and in denying the only Son of God, in all of which you are already a participant. For if they killed the prophets, those who spoke about the coming of the only Son of God, and you kill those who believe as the prophets believed. But how long shall I discuss these things with an unbeliever, since I have proposed to show you that you are one of those to whom the Lord says: Therefore I say to you, because the kingdom of God will be taken away from you, and will be given to a people who produce its fruit?

For you are not in this nation, which is found to produce fruits of justice, so that you would not be declared one of those whom you hear have been driven from the kingdom of God because of the slaughter of the righteous and their own unbelief. Note that you are acting among those whose wickedness the Lord reveals, saying: The kingdom of heaven is like a human king who made a wedding feast for his son and sent his servants to those invited to the wedding, and further: and they refused to come. Again he sent servants to them, saying: Tell those invited: Behold, I have prepared my banquet; my oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered and everything is ready; come to the wedding. But they neglected it and went away, some to their farm, others to their business; the rest seized his servants and, after abusing them, killed them. When that king heard this, he became angry and sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their cities. Then he said to his servants: The wedding is indeed prepared, but those who were invited were not worthy; go therefore to the exits of the roads and invite whomever you find to the wedding. And the servants went out onto the roads and gathered together whomever they found, both bad and good, and the wedding was filled with those reclining at table. But the king entered to see those reclining, and he saw there a man not wearing a wedding garment and said to him: Friend, how have you come here without having a wedding garment? And he was silent.

Then the king said to the ministers: take him by the feet and hands and cast him into the outer darkness; there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Therefore, since you are without the wedding garment, Constantius, you will be in perpetuity, unless you convert, such as the one to whom it is said: friend, how did you enter here without a wedding garment? Thus you will come into the outer darkness. Nor should you doubt that you will come to the outer darkness, since you have already turned entirely into darkness. For those who have shed the blood of the righteous prophets, who have denied the only Son of God, are called both darkness and sons of the devil. Since you are also doing these things, you will certainly persist as a son of darkness and of the devil, unless you take thought for yourself. How, you say, can I take thought for myself? By ceasing to persecute us and by embracing the apostolic faith; which if you do not do, as you are now, you will always be among those to whom it is said: woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who tithe mint and dill and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done and not omitted those. Blind guides, straining out a gnat but swallowing a camel. If you do not hear these things worthily with them, where is the just judgment that proceeds from you, who strive to kill a just man preaching the apostolic faith? Where is just judgment, you who persecute them with all the forces of your empire?

You see those whom you would neither wish to condemn unheard nor abandon the catholic faith, and are you diligent toward those whom you know have both shed innocent blood with you and rejected the evangelical faith? What is this mercy established by you and in you, which the holy law commands to be shown? Surely it is that mercy which tortures, proscribes, deports, sends to prison, leads into exile, places in the mines; that mercy which kills by hunger, thirst, beatings, nakedness; and finally, that mercy which punishes by the sword. This, Constantius, is your mercy, which comes not from the law of God but from the presumption of the devil. "Judgment and mercy and faith," it says, "these you ought to have done, and not omitted those." Where is your faith? You have condemned the faith held by the most blessed Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and by all the prophets, apostles, and martyrs, and you have established that faith to be received by all worshippers of God which the devil, through your master Arius, vomited forth against this catholic faith. From these things you are understood to be one of those who are known to hear: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, who tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have left behind the weightier matters of the law: judgment and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, and not omitted those. Blind leaders, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.

Or will you deny that you strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, you who, though not only when asked but also sometimes spontaneously giving alms, yet, as has often been said, proscribe Christians who confess their faith, deport them, torture them, and finally kill them? And for that reason you must realize that you are among those to whom it is said: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you are like whitewashed sepulchers, which outwardly appear beautiful to men, but within are full of the bones of the dead and every filth. So also you outwardly appear just to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity." You are among those murderers to whom it is said: "Serpents, offspring of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of Gehenna? Therefore, behold, I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes, and you will kill some of them and crucify them and persecute them from city to city, so that all the blood of the righteous which has been shed upon the earth may come upon you, from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom you killed between the temple and the altar. Amen, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

Your actions prove you to be of that serpentine breed. For you are found to be one of those to whom these words were spoken concerning what they would perpetrate. Or if you deny that you are among those who hear from the Lord’s mouth: “serpents, offspring of vipers,” prove that it was not you, but the Jews, who sent a soldier to Alexandria, that a soldier of the Jews besieged the doors of God’s house, that Syrianus was the leader of the Jewish soldiers. Prove that Jews entered the basilica with arms and killed a certain number. If you cannot prove it, because it is established that you sent men to attack God’s religion, we rightly say that you are one of those to whom it was said: “serpents, offspring of vipers, how will you flee the judgment of Gehenna?” Without doubt you will not flee the judgment of Gehenna, but you will always burn there with your fellow serpents, unless you look out for yourself. “Then,” it says, “they will hand you over to tribulation and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. And then many will be scandalized and will hand each other over and will hate each other. And many false prophets will arise and will seduce many. And because iniquity will abound, the charity of many will grow cold.” If your sacrilegious mind does not know that I suffer persecution from you because of the only Son of God, you could not be of that breed, not be in the opinion of those to whom it is said: “serpents, offspring of vipers, how will you flee the judgment of Gehenna?

Therefore, behold, I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes, and by them you will be killed and crucified and persecuted from city to city. Since you are the one who carries this out today, you will not dare to deny that you are of the serpentine breed. For you have killed many Christians in many places, and you hold others bound in prisons and workhouses. Even from this you can see that you are one of those to whom it is said: serpents, offspring of vipers, and further on: behold, I send to you prophets and wise men and scribes, and you will kill some of them, since you do not deign to execrate those whom you see, on account of your abundant iniquity, have fallen away from the apostolic faith—those whose charity has grown cold—but rather those whom you see remaining in that state of faith in which the blessed prophets, apostles, and martyrs, while persevering, merited to obtain the eternal friendship of God. For at Alexandria you do not execrate Achetas and Didymas, who are known to have become Arians from being Christians, but those whom you still know to stand with us. Or if it is not so, why do you not now execrate Didymas and Achetas, whom you formerly execrated? Unless it is because they were then considered execrable by you because they were still Christians, but now they are most dear to you because they have begun to be, like you, apostates and blasphemers. But now we believe, after so many proofs presented to you, that you are one of those to whom it is said: serpents, offspring of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of Gehenna?

You will not apply yourself to being able to cure the wounds so grave inflicted upon you by the devil, because you are both a murderer and a sacrilegious man; from which crimes if you are unwilling to be freed, your blood shall be demanded from you, we being before God innocent of your blood, we who have revealed the truth to you in every way. Not only your blood will be demanded from you, but also the blood of those whom you have either led to embrace heresy or enticed to slay an innocent. But if you should say: I thought the faith of those whom you call Arians was catholic, if you wavered in the matter of faith, if you were ignorant that those who claim to believe in a creature are heretics, those who say that God does not have a true Son, did you also not know that it is not just to persecute an innocent with the sword? Did it escape you that the Lord said to blessed Peter: sheathe your sword in its place. For all who take up the sword will perish by the sword? What then, Constantius, will you do, you who have slain so great a multitude of servants of Christ, the only Son of God?

You see, then, that he whom you persecute in us says that all who take the sword will perish by the sword. What will you receive, who, unless you have obtained pardon for your crimes by believing in him whom you deny, you deserve to be struck so many times, and indeed by the sword of God, as many times as you have struck those devoted to his mercy? What man of God did you say imposed the necessity on the priests to strike an absent man, to punish an unheard man, to shed the blood of an innocent man? Why did you refuse to hear Athanasius, our fellow priest, from us? Why did you, like thieves, secretly wish to cut the throat of a man of God? Unless it is because you are among those against whom these words were uttered: No one ascends into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the son of man who is in the heavens. For just as Moses raised up the serpent in the desert, so must the son of man be raised up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Therefore, he who believes in him is not judged; but he who does not believe in him is already judged, because he did not believe in the name of the only son of God. This, however, is the judgment: that light came into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light; for their works were evil.

Everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come into the light, so that his works may not be condemned. For he who does the truth comes into the light, so that his works may be made manifest, because they are done in God. If you knew yourself to be a slave of the Son of God alone, you would surely never deny His majesty, never order His servants to be slain, now secretly, now publicly; but because you are a lover of darkness—indeed, darkness itself, because your works are evil—you did not wish the matter you had brought forward to be most fully examined by the priests of God. Why did you not wish it? Unless because you feared that your serpentine work would be made public. "While we are in the body," says the Apostle, "we are pilgrims from the Lord; for we walk by faith, not by sight. We dare, even having good will, to be more pilgrims from the body and to be present to the Lord, and we strive, whether absent or present, to please Him. For all of us must appear before the tribunal of Christ, so that each one may bear the burden of his own body, according to what he has done, whether good or evil." And you, Constantius the heretic, say: "Condemn a Christian, a Christian." Why do you say this? Unless because you have judged that shedding the blood of the righteous, and also abandoning God and embracing idolatry, is the best course.

But again I beseech you, most pious emperor, to recognize yourself, since you are both a denier of the only Son of God and a persecutor of those who believe in Him, lest you be found comparable to those whose wickedness is described in the Acts of the Apostles: when there was great dissension among them, the tribune, fearing that Paul might be seized by them, ordered the soldiers to descend and snatch him away into the camp. On the following night, the Lord appeared to him and said: "Be steadfast; for just as you have testified about Me in Jerusalem, so must you also testify at Rome." When day came, some of the Jews gathered together and bound themselves by oath, saying that they would neither eat nor drink until they had killed Paul. There were nearly forty who had made this conspiracy, and they approached the chief priests and reported, saying: "We have vowed by oath that we will taste nothing at all until we kill Paul; now therefore, convene a council and make it known to the tribune, so that he may bring him to you as if you were about to inquire more diligently concerning him; but we, before he approaches, are prepared to kill him." If you did not seek Athanasius, a priest of God, by this same method, if you did not pretend to do one thing while having arranged to accomplish another, can you deny that you too are driven by the same hostile spirit by which the Jews were driven and are still driven? For unless you had been stirred up by that spirit against us who serve God, you would never, without doubt, have ordered an innocent man to be condemned in his absence.

But I repeat these things so often, as if even you yourself, when you occasionally rest from the goads of your frenzy, do not consider that you have in every way so deviated from the rule of justice that you could not see even in the Acts of the Apostles how, when the Jews were petitioning for the execution of Paul, the blessed man, the pagan governor Festus did not at all lend his assent to the assembly of the Jews, but promised that he would hear both them and Paul, once they were brought together. A pagan preserved the law of equity; you, however, have destroyed it. Or is it equity to condemn the unheard, to kill the absent, and to deny a hearing to a just man—to a man for whom the entire people of God bears witness that he was falsely accused by you and yours, a Christian by you Arians? Therefore, as I had begun to relate what transpired between the Jews and the blessed Paul under Festus, hear this: Now when Festus had come into the province as governor, he went up to Jerusalem, with men laying ambushes to kill him on the road. Festus therefore replied that Paul was to be kept in Caesarea, but that he himself would set out sooner. Therefore, let those among you come down, and if there is any charge against the man, let them accuse him.

He therefore stayed among them no more than eight or ten days, went down to Caesarea, and on the next day sat on the tribunal and ordered Paul to be summoned. When he had been brought, the Jews who had come down from Jerusalem stood around him, charging many grave crimes which they could not prove, while Paul gave an account that he had committed no offense against the law of the Jews, nor against the temple, nor against Caesar. A pagan held the path of equity between the blessed Paul and your fellow-murderers the Jews, and you, eager to obey the desires of your evil meditations, had decided that equity and justice were to be removed from our minds. But how could we have done what you were compelling to be done against justice, we who remembered the scripture: "Do not judge according to the person, but judge a just judgment"? You condemned without a hearing, as you said at the time; why did you not remember that Nicodemus said: "Surely our law does not judge a man unless it hears from him himself and knows what he has done"? Why did you refuse to let be heard the one whom you declared guilty of death, unless you had brought false charges? The Lord says to the Jews: "He who speaks a lie speaks from his own, for he is a liar and his father is a liar." And you, when you have been shown to be a liar, do you think that you are not the son of a liar, and do you dare, a deceiver, to resist the truthful, a sacrilegious man, the priests of the Lord?

You dare, whom we note to be that thief and robber whom the Lord foretold, saying: "Amen, amen, I say to you, he who does not enter through the door into the sheepfold, but who climbs in by another part, that one is a thief and a robber." You indeed stretched out your hands to claim Christ's sheep for the Antichrist; but as you have been recognized as a thief and a robber, you have been shunned and rejected. Why did the sheep of God not follow you or your fellow-sacrilegist George? Why do they follow him whom you bitterly lament to be the bishop of the Alexandrians? Except that God indeed appointed him as their bishop, whereas the devil sent you and George as thieves and robbers to slaughter. "He who enters through the door," he says, "is the shepherd of the sheep; the doorkeeper opens for him, and the sheep hear his voice, and he calls his sheep by name and leads them out; and when he has brought out all his own, he goes to them, and the sheep follow him, because they know his voice; they do not follow another, but flee from him, because they do not know his voice." Therefore, because you did not enter through the door into the church, you are seen to be a robber and a thief; for you do not know the Son of God, so that you might claim to have entered through the door, since he would call those both thieves and robbers, because even then they did not believe in his divine mercy, nor would they believe thereafter, and they would attempt to instruct his sheep otherwise.

Therefore, since you scatter insane teaching from this place, you are, because you did not believe in Him, certainly that thief and robber who was already foreshadowed at that time; you are most clearly proven to be so by your blasphemies. That this is so is proved by the following utterance of the pronouncement: Jesus said to them: "Amen, amen, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door; if anyone enters through me, he will be safe and will enter and find pasture; a thief does not come except to steal." O you thief, therefore, who are found to have entered God's sheepfold for the purpose, evidently, of having stolen and killed, with what voice can you still say: "Athanasius, Bishop of the Alexandrians, ought not to be, but rather George," when you see that you and George or all your fellow-sacrilegers are nothing other than thieves and robbers? God wished his servants to be shepherds over the flock, so that they, recognizing you and yours to be thieves and robbers, would drive them out.

But for that reason you have decided that you and your followers are for us the ordained ones set over the Lord's flock, so that you might freely ravage the Lord's flock. Since you are such a person, we will not be able to wonder that you said that an absent worshiper of God should be punished. For you could not have retained that the Lord said: "If you love me, keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate, so that the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it does not see Him nor recognize Him, may be with us forever; you recognize Him, because He remains with you and is in you." But tell me, I pray, how can the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, dwell in us, if we had done your will or your father's will? Further on also: "He who hears," He says, "my commandments and keeps them, that is the one who hears me. But he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and show myself to him." Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him: "Lord, what has happened that you reveal yourself to us and not to this world?" Jesus answered and said to him: "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and remain with him. He who does not love me does not keep my words." From these pronouncements of the Lord, how great an enemy you have shown yourself to be can be inferred: "He who hears my commandments and keeps them, that is the one who loves me." How did we show that we loved Him, if we were to trample on His commandments as you do?

For you are trampling upon the Lord's commandments, since you command not only that what He ordained to be observed should not be observed, but also that He Himself be denied. Or how will the Father be able to love me because I have kept the commandments of His Son, if I condemn an innocent man? The Son of God says: If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and remain with him; and you say, food of fire, apostate: condemn the innocent. In what way would we have been found to love the Son, if against His commandments we were to slay an innocent man? How could it happen that the Father would love us and the Father and Son would come and deign to dwell in us, if, tearing up the Lord's commandments, we were to keep your sacrilegious precepts? Behold, Constantius, that envious lover of your will, the devil, from what glory he has tried to drive us through his client, had not the piety of the Lord come to our aid, so that, considering you no longer a man, whom God made in His own image and likeness, but the filth of all sewers, we would trample upon your sacrilegious commands. For who would not wish, unless more wretched than you Arians, to be loved by the only Son of God? Who is there who does not wish to be loved by His Father? Who would refuse to be a temple of the Father and His only Son? Which, certainly, he cannot attain who, like you, has been a murderer and a sacrilegious man; you, indeed, can also attain it, if, converted, you truly repent.

The Lord further says: "This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends, if you do what I command you. I no longer call you servants, but friends." And again: "You did not choose me, but I chose you and placed you, that you might go and bear fruit, and your fruit may endure; and whatever you ask of my Father in my name, He will give to you." How shall we be able to be friends of the only Son of God, if, contrary to the prohibition of that piety, we condemn an absent man and kill an innocent one? How shall our fruit be able to make increases of growth? How shall we receive from the Father whatever we ask in His name, if, as you were compelling, we were not only to punish His worshiper but also to deny Him Himself? Had you not found, in the letter of the blessed apostle to Titus, a man dedicated to God, concerning the irreproachable office of a bishop, that it is worthy to offer to God, that you desired to make us murderers?

For this reason I left you in Crete, that you might correct and establish what was lacking in the cities, a presbytery, as I arranged for you: if anyone is without reproach, a husband of one wife, having faithful children, not accused of luxury or insubordinate; for a bishop must be without reproach as a steward of God, not insolent, not wrathful, not drunken, not a striker, not sordidly avaricious, but hospitable, kind, sober, just, holy, continent, embracing that faith of the word which is according to doctrine, so that he may be able to exhort in teaching and refute those who contradict. For there are many who are also insubordinate, vain talkers and deceivers, especially those from the circumcision, who must be refuted, who overturn entire households by teaching what they ought not for the sake of base gain. Since, therefore, he wished such a bishop to be made, one who would live this path of righteousness, by what authority have you deigned to give new precepts to exclude the mandates of the blessed apostle? Those precepts, namely, which are known to have arisen from the will of the devil. The apostle does not want me to be wrathful, not a striker, and you want to make me a murderer. From these things it can be gathered that the Holy Spirit spoke through the mouth of the blessed apostle, but an evil spirit spoke through your mouth, you Arians. Meanwhile, you see that the apostle commanded that you, who resist the truth, be restrained by the intervention of a bishop, so that your blasphemy might be punished through sound doctrine.

I did not bring forward the saying of the blessed apostle, that a bishop ought to be without reproach, in order to deny that I am a sinner, since I know my own conscience and hear that just man Job saying: "Who is free from defilement? No one, even if his life on earth were but a single day," and I note the blessed John saying: "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." Therefore I did not bring forward the apostle's precept because, remembering that I am a sinner, I proclaim myself to be without defilement, but so that you might realize how evil is the thing you have commanded to be done. "Exhort the young men likewise," he says, "that they be sober in all things, presenting yourself through all things as a pattern of good works, in teaching, in integrity, in gravity, in sound and irreproachable speech, so that the adversary may stand in awe, having nothing evil to say about us." How could I have presented myself as a pattern of good works to others if I had shed the blood of a servant of God? How would the peoples of God recognize me as proclaiming the sound teaching handed down by the apostles, if I had embraced your heresy, if finally, even in hypocrisy, I had communicated with your satellites, the Arian pseudo-bishops? How could my speech be brought forth as sound and irreproachable, if, abandoning the evangelical and apostolic faith, I had embraced your blasphemy? How could the adversary have stood in awe?

How could he say nothing evil about me, when, if I had decided that I ought to yield to you, he would have found that I had become both a murderer and a sacrilegious man? Again, when he warned that servants ought to be subject to their masters, "for the grace of our Savior has shone," he says, "upon all men," rebuking us so that, renouncing impiety and worldly desires, we may live soberly, piously, and justly in this world, awaiting the blessed hope in the coming of the glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to free us from all iniquity and to cleanse for himself a people abundant, emulators of good works. Since he commanded us to walk in these good works, what did it seem to you, that you leaned toward committing murder? For how could we have been seen renouncing impiety and living piously and justly, if we had shed the blood of an innocent man with you? But also, since he says that the Lord gave himself for our sins precisely so that he might snatch us from the works of Satan and establish us for this purpose, that we might be emulators of good works, if that deed of yours had been perpetrated by us along with you, in what part would we be except in that where Cain is? "For the grace of our Savior has shone," he says, "upon all men," rebuking us so that, renouncing impiety and worldly desires, we may live soberly, justly, and piously in this world. And you, Emperor Constantius, deign to say that we are impious, wicked, lost, malignant, iniquitous, unjust.

Where shall I find that blessed hope which the blessed apostle teaches me I ought to await, if not only do I slay the servants of Him who alone is able to bestow all blessedness, but also deny Him Himself? For you do both, Constantius, because you both persecute and kill His servants and, abandoning Him, have judged that you should be delivered over to idols. Why do you do these things, unless the grace of our Savior God has not dawned upon you? For if it had dawned, you would have remembered the apostle speaking in his precepts: "See therefore how you walk cautiously, not as fools, but as wise men, redeeming the time because the days are evil. Therefore do not become imprudent, but understand what the will of the Lord is." If the will of the Lord is to kill an innocent man, to abandon the evangelical faith, then not only this part but the whole body of the blessed apostle's letters could lend support to your prescriptions; but if no part of the sacred scriptures favors your prescriptions, it is clearer than light that you live under the power of darkness; whence it has come about that you have drawn nothing from the sacred fountains of the scriptures which could have removed you from such great perils. For if the power of darkness had not reduced you under its dominion, you would surely retain what the Philippians hear: "Be my imitators, brothers, and observe those who walk as you have our example.

For many are walking, whom I often used to point out to you, but now I say even weeping, enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their own confusion, who have a taste for earthly things. I wish to know, most prudent emperor, in whom we ought to become imitators of the apostle. Teach me, apostate, if the apostle was a murderer, if he was a blasphemer, if he was a destroyer of evangelical faith, if he was a sacrilegious man; for he professes that he did all these things even before he believed in the only Son of God. But you, who today do those things which he did before the recognition of the only Son of God, by what right have you dared to order us, the Lord’s priests, to condemn an innocent man, to spit upon apostolic faith by accepting your heresy? By what right have you ordered these things to be done, which are brought forth contrary to the form of the apostle, except because you are among the enemies of the cross of Christ, among those who were already designated then by the mouth of the holy apostle? Should we listen to you and your followers, whose end the apostle says is destruction? To those satellites of yours who, abandoning the transmitted form of discipline and the rule of faith through the apostles, have handed themselves over to you for the sake of base gain; to those who have made more of the abundance of your table than of what the Lord promises to his own; to those who have chosen to be your table-companions rather than that of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, or martyrs, to whom it is most rightly said: your god is your belly.

Examine," says the Apostle, "hold fast to the good, abstain from every evil appearance"; and because we have seen your accursed work, O Arians, and have shunned it, we labor under hatred. But how beautiful and how delightful it is to be hated by you, yet to be loved by God. You have cast us out of the office entrusted to us, thinking that you could destroy what God has built. "But to each of us," as he writes to the Ephesians, "grace has been given according to the measure of Christ's condescension," on account of which he says: ascending into the heights, he led captivity captive, he gave gifts to men. But what is this "he ascended" except that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth? And he who descended is the same who ascended above all the heavens, so as to fill all things. And he himself appointed some as apostles, some as prophets, others as evangelists, and still others as pastors and teachers, for the perfection of the saints in the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all meet in the unity of faith and in the knowledge of God, into a perfect man, into the measure of the full stature of Christ, so that we may no longer be wavering children, carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the wickedness of men, by cunning as a remedy for error. But, acting in truth, let us grow in love in him who is the head, Christ, through whom the whole body is compacted and joined together by the joint of mutual service, making the increase of the body, according to the measure of each part, for its own building up in love.

Since you read that these things are so, why did you dare to remove the shepherds whom God wished to preside over his flock? Why? Except so that with you, shepherds of the Lord's flock could be carried about by every wind of doctrine. Were they not to be led like little children, approaching the faith by every wind of doctrine? Were they not to retreat from the apostolic and evangelical faith by the cunning of you, the most wicked of men, to the remedies of your prince, the devil? You removed bishops from the congregations over which they presided by divine favor, for this purpose, that you might teach not apostolic but heretical doctrine. Woe to you, wretch, through whom Satan does these things. You, a wise man, had found a suitable pretext for your deceit, a way by which you could defend the sheep of God for your father, who, so that you might persist in these evils, had already wounded your heart with those darts with which he wounded the minds of Eve and Adam, namely, to establish you in this depravity. You had found, I say, a wise man, a suitable pretext for your deceit, a way by which you could plunder the Lord's flock, saying: Athanasius sinned, and therefore whoever kills him with me will be bishop; whoever moreover deems that he should be kept will not be; and those who condemned Athanasius were joined to the pseudo-bishops of your Arian dogma.

If anyone, fearing your anger, had done this, they would have incurred through you, murderer and sacrilegious one, a threefold crime: either because they would condemn an innocent man, or because Catholics would communicate with heretics and allow you wolves to enter the flock of God, since the apostle says that shepherds are given for this reason, so that every doctrine of demons, which is brought forth through you heretics and all adversaries of the church, might be excluded, and the servants of God running in truth would remain immovable until they came to the highest perfection; and you, darkness, have deigned to remove the shepherds established by the judgment of God, so that you, a wolf, might turn all into the prey of the devil, your lover. "So that now," he says, "we may not be little ones tossed about and carried around by every wind of doctrine, in the wickedness of men, in cunning as a remedy for error. But doing the truth, in love let us grow in that one who is the head, Christ." How could we grow in him, if we had followed you, darkness, since you deny that he is true God, since you say he was not born from the substance of the Father, but you assert he was made from nothing? How could we have grown in him, we who were not going to walk in truth, once we had followed you, the apostate?

Next he says: "Let us grow in love by doing the truth." And it is evident that the priest of God, Athanasius, was assailed through you and your men on the basis of false charges. If we had done what you command, how would we have been seen to run either in truth or in love, we who would have extinguished the love we hold with our fellow bishop Athanasius? And because we would have yielded to a false accusation, and we ourselves, joined with you, a liar, in the slaughter of an innocent man, would deserve to be struck by divine wrath along with you. So then, Constantius, is the house of God built through falsehood, through the shedding of innocent blood, through blasphemous preaching? Woe to you, who are alive for this purpose, that the devil may accomplish all these evils through you. You say to me: "Punish the innocent man, abandon the Catholic faith, and take up the poisons of my heresy." And the Apostle says: "This I say and testify in the Lord, that you no longer walk as the Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart." Whom shall I obey, you or the Apostle? You, the sacrilegious apostate, or him who is found to have already shed his blood for the only Son of God? Whom of you shall I follow? Shall I hold to the temple of demons or to that temple of God? You, who by your deeds declare yourself either a Jew or a pagan, or him who has already attained the heavenly kingdoms through this faith which you execrate?

If indeed you do not reveal yourself as a pagan by your deeds, you could defend yourself, so that these things are not deservedly brought against you. First, because you deny the Son of God, you are a pagan or a Jew to us; then, since you proscribe, deport, torture, burden with false charges, and kill the innocent, you cannot be found to be a Christian who is recognized as a man of God through his way of life, but certainly one of those about whom the Spirit of God says through the apostle, that they are in the vanity of their own mind, senseless, alienated from the life of God through the blindness of their own heart. When, therefore, those who are blind in heart are revealed by the words of the apostle to do what you do, with what face do you dare to say to those sound in heart and mind: you have erred, you are deceitful to the truthful, you are liars? The apostle, as is the truth, says: in Jesus, putting aside according to your former way of life the old man, who is corrupted by the desire of error. But be renewed in the spirit of your understanding and put on the new man, who was created according to God in justice and holiness and truth. Putting aside falsehood, speak truth each one to his neighbor. Where have you neglected these salutary warnings which the apostle urges us to keep? For how could we have been found to have put aside the old man and put on the new man, who is according to God?

how would we have been seen as remaining in justice, holiness, and truth, we who, acting unjustly with you, would have extinguished that new man, who was created according to God, and would have begun again to bear that old man, who is corrupted according to the desire of error, as he was corrupted before he began to know God? For all these things are done by those who are not domestics of God, but satellites of Antichrist: laying aside falsehood, speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, because we are members of one another. If you had been among the members of the Church of God, believe me, you would never have brought falsehood to the Church; but because you are a man of the one who deceived Adam and Eve through deceit, therefore you brought falsehood, so that you might ensnare us just as the devil ensnared the first-formed men; you said: condemn Athanasius, because he has gravely offended, otherwise you will be in the greatest guilt before God. Accept the faith of Arius, and you will live forever.

Take also what your most beloved one did concerning Adam and Eve, and you will find that you now do concerning us what he then did concerning them. "And they were both naked," says Moses in Genesis, "then Adam and his wife, and they were not ashamed; but the serpent was wiser than all the beasts that were there," and further: "and the serpent said to the woman: Why is it that the Lord God said you should not eat from any tree that is in paradise? And the woman said to the serpent: We will eat from every tree that is in paradise, but from the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of paradise, God said, you shall not eat from it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die." We say to you in the place of the serpent persuading us to condemn the unheard-of, to slay the innocent: the Lord commanded that the innocent and just not be killed. And the serpent said to the woman: "You will not die. For God knew that on whatever day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods knowing good and evil." Thus, as that serpent speaks through you to us: "You will be more just if you shed just blood, you will be more blessed if you, anathematizing the apostolic and evangelical faith, take up the Arian perfidy" *** is trampled, with God propitious, in you indeed already by us who know his deceit. But we grieve for you, God is witness, because through you he has set himself to ensnare us; for it is established that then he approached Adam and Eve through himself.