Moriendum esse pro dei filio

It must be died for the Son of God — Lucifer, Bishop of Cagliari V. IT MUST BE DIED FOR THE SON OF GOD. It had indeed been fitting, Emperor Constantius, to discuss nothing further with you concerning the divine scriptures, namely with one whom we have discovered to be a falsifier of the truth, with you whom we have caught from those acts of yours being among those who are called wise for themselves, because they are in fact traveling the path of foolishness; it had been fitting, as we have said, after all those things which we have heaped up, to now offer silence, especially since we remember it is written: do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you become like him, and again: say nothing in the ears of a fool, lest, when he hears, he mock your sensible words. But because you still applaud yourself for the power of your arms and the empty dominion of your empire, because you are able to violate by force those whom you ought to have established by reason in what you had decided, in all these things by which you think yourself great, I wished, especially in this book, to make known to your mind, defiled by sacrilege, that you are wretched and that every rage of your butchery is despised by the servants of God. For we wish you to have it fixed and manifest that you, with your temporal, fleeting, fragile, corruptible kingdom, will pass away and will come to eternal punishment, unless you provide for yourself while there is still time, but that Christians will come to eternal rest and will obtain an incorruptible kingdom.

will you attempt to defend that you are to seize the kingdom of heaven through this heresy of yours, you who, together with your fellow-pestilential Arians, fearing that you might at some point be compelled to yield, vanquished by us Christians as truth itself cries out, having rejected debate, have decided to take refuge in the strength of your fragile arms? as if you could overcome, with fragile years, those who will obtain immortal gifts, you enemy of the divine religion, you forerunner of Antichrist against the religious servants of Christ, you soldier of God against those whom the only Son of God has deigned to invite to enjoy the eternal friendships of his divinity, saying: blessed are you, when men hate you and pursue you with curses, and revile you and speak every evil against you. rejoice and exult, for your reward is great in heaven; for thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you. you, powerless in all things, thought to drive from their rank, to overthrow those whom you see are prepared to be killed for the only Son of God, because they have chosen not to be tormented with you deniers in the underworld, but to attain the heavenly kingdom; you thought to overcome, through the empty authority of your reign, those who shine as temples of God by the very confession of their faith. For just as you Arians, by denying the Son of God, are designated as houses of the unclean spirit by the voices of the prophets, apostles, and holy gospels, so we who confess the Son of God show ourselves to be temples of God.

that the soldiers of God could have succumbed to your butchery, your cruel and sacrilegious mind, favoring the suggestions of your fellow heretics, had presumed. We, whom God calls his temples, thus: 'For I will dwell in them and walk among them, and I will be their God and they will be my people.' You had judged that you could conquer these, whom the apostle exhorts to lift up God and carry him in their bodies; you had indeed thought that you could subdue these to your futile reign for years; but you perceive, standing even within the veil in your palace, you received an answer from me: that for preserving salvation, all servants of God, with your frivolous authority trampled, consent in mind, will, zeal, virtue, and voice. You notice how your fleeting dominion, however much it deigns to rage against us, is thereby judged to be weak, contemptible, empty, feeble, and abject; for whenever your hand, stirred up by fury and crime, prevailed to destroy us, we remember that we have grown and emerged more and more as victors. You slaughtered very many in Alexandria, you mangled certain ones throughout the world, you destroyed those resisting you in various places; but all these, which you are least willing to hear, are martyrs; we believe that all those most blessed ones, slain by your sword, are in paradise. Believe me, we have resolved to be killed by you, because we have seen that it is better in all ages to have God as a lover than to be punished with you, the imitator of Judas Iscariot and the Jews.

Hence, finally, Constantius, we are prepared to undergo every destruction, not fearing the serpent's hisses inflicted through you. We can never repent of our counsels. If we, who still seem to have resisted your cruel hands, are slaughtered by you—for death, which you threaten to inflict upon us, is prepared for all; yet such great blessedness as the holy martyrs have attained, no one, as we see, has achieved except those who, by dying, conquered death for the sake of the only Son of God. You torture, kill, and exterminate men consecrated to God, and you cannot give reasons for the hatreds you bear. Because you err, you are also angry with us for holding to the true path; and although you could correct yourself by our salutary admonition, you instead heap up your errors with cruel deeds, wrenching minds consecrated to God from their eviscerated bodies—minds of those who have resolved to keep faith with God to the very end of life. You see that this is so, and indeed not without your greatest grief, when you realize that you cannot turn us away from this, the only religion, nor drag us back from this course in which we strive toward the prize of the upward calling—not when you openly make yourself an enemy, not when you pretend to be a friend (for you see what it is in you that deceived Eve), not when your word, by which you creep like a cancer, swells with the false, feigned tumor of knowledge.

you compose, by bolstering yourself with all your crimes, stained by your edict as a destroyer, the harvest of all errors, while you yourself are the source of all error, you affirm yourself as a bearer of light, though you are beset by every darkness. Therefore, by no means can we be turned from the path of truth; although you lack all understanding, yet you can at last see yourself despised in part, Constantius, most savage emperor. For we know this to be the first business of the Christian faith: to be moved from one's rank neither by prosperity nor adversity, not to be led away from a once-adopted resolve. We perceive that with this one religious utterance: "I am a Christian, I do not wish to be as you are, Constantius, apostate," every crime is excluded; by this one utterance, a safeguard of salvation, a bond of freedom and honor is granted; we observe that by this confession a shield of protection is granted to you, a weapon against the devil raging through you against us; and you ask: "Deny that you are Christians." So that we may endure steadfast against the opposing danger and not shrink from your torturing cruelty, that we may be encouraged rather than grieved, this is brought about by the conscience which recalls that the only Son of God offers the presence of his divinity to protect and render victorious his own; hence it comes about that by the punishment by which you believe we are destroyed, we are given life.

For we, who believe that he for whom we suffer is with us, take this as an increase of virtue, that which you, punisher, hoped would benefit your torture; hence it is that we are not broken by your evils shaking us, but are the more firmly strengthened the more we are assailed by your varied and continuous cruelty. For he is with us, he who protected the Hebrew youths believing in him in the fiery furnace; he himself strengthens our minds, he himself guides our reason, he himself inflames our hearts with his divine love and animates them to endurance of holy passion, whence none of us thinks of the death you threaten to inflict, but of immortality, not of a temporary punishment inflicted by you, but of eternal glory. For the sacred scriptures reveal that the martyrs of God are consecrated by torments and crowned by the very test of passion: "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints," and: "If they suffered torments before men, their hope is full of immortality." And: "Having been troubled in few things, they will be well disposed in many, because God tested them and found them worthy of him." He tested them like gold in a furnace and accepted them as a holocaust offering; "in time there will be regard for them." They will judge nations and rule over peoples, and their Lord will reign forever.

Therefore, those who presume that they will attain such great happiness through the greatness of God must both exult and, contemplating future joys, trample upon your present evils. The divine voice of the only Son of God is: "He who loves his soul in this world will lose it, and he who hates his soul for my sake will preserve it for eternal life." Clinging to this divine precept, Christians, although your hoof, Constantius, may recoil into our wounds, resounding in our limbs, we stand and will stand immovable, stronger than you the torturer and all your punishments, pondering only this with ourselves: that this butchery of your cruelty is useful to us for eternal glory. Often mercy is shown to the vanquished by barbarians, and there is a place for clemency even among arms, and certainly among those who lead a life by a savage rite. But this is unspeakable, what is done against us by you, who have wished you well and are desiring that it may happen, and we do not cease to pray to God continually; you plunder, proscribe, slaughter with the sword, punish in various ways, and you do not permit the bodies you have decreed to be mangled to be buried, you forbid alms to be given, you have filled all mines and all places, which were thought worthy to be called exiles, with our number resisting your cunning; you do not cease to harass the innocent by banishing them, by afflicting them with hunger, thirst, and nakedness. These evils you inflict upon those who desire to attain eternal blessedness.

And yet, most cruel emperor, whatever your savagery has inflicted upon us and will yet inflict, recognize that it is a lie, since neither is the death inflicted by you upon the saints who preceded us as martyrs a death, nor is it a loss or a detriment, but rather an investment of faith. We Christians are always tortured by you tyrants in persecution through a perverse interrogation. For by the same method by which the guilty are compelled to confess, we are likewise compelled to deny Christ, the only and most true Son of God. But just as they, having confessed according to their deserts, are condemned, so we, because we do not deny the Son of God, are crowned, and for us the condemnation inflicted by you is a victory; we are removed from your midst, before whom you dare not blaspheme. For with a single voice the soldier of Christ lays low that one who, remaining in you, speaks against our religious confession, that one who through you thirsts for our blood, that one who has besieged your mind; he trembles at the presence of the worshippers of God and cannot bear it when we disagree with you, who say that the Son of God is from nothing, when we stand against your threats and trample upon all the cruelty of your butchery, aided and protected by his power. You certainly feel yourself chastised by the constancy and endurance of his servants, of him who says: Do not fear him who can kill the body; rather, fear him who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna. And we are encouraged by the exhortations of his most blessed apostle Paul to trample upon you, the tyrant of all tyrants: We are sons of God.

But if we are sons of God and heirs of God, indeed co-heirs of Christ, since we suffer together, so that we may also be glorified together; and again: I consider that the sufferings of this time are not worthy of the future glory that will be revealed in us. Contemplating the glory of that splendor, it is fitting that we servants of Christ endure all pressures and persecutions not only inflicted by you through the devil, but also through all his men, because although they are many, yet from all of them we are freed who believe that the Son of God is the true Son, and although we remember that there are two persons, Father and Son, we nevertheless claim one divinity for the Father and His only Son. Hearing these just and invincible allegations of ours, because he who has besieged your mind cannot bear the truth, he goads your bestial mind to vex us as harshly as possible, to torture us with exquisite kinds of punishments, because we are unwilling to abandon the saving path. Hence it is that your excessive cruelty mocks our bodies, why we greatly value the faith and do not deny that we are worshipers of God. You throw yourself against us with all the forces of your butchery, thinking you will harm us, ignorant that we rejoice in the occasions of our testing, we indeed who consider this our greatest happiness, if in this contest of justice it falls to us by your butcher's hand to be slaughtered for the Son of God.

We stand firm against your madness with a religious mind, since in us that one for whom we suffer prevails, whatever you, with profane boasting, empty speech, and vain talk, and perverse will, hurl under the guise of our person as an insult to the divine majesty itself. All these things your hard mind and the obstinate savagery of your breast beget for the destruction of its own salvation, while you dissent from the religion of God, led by madness, seized by frenzy, and finally tormented by every savagery with which you are both goaded and driven. With that one whom you deny protecting us against your savagery, beast, we resist like masses set against the sea, as is usual. Though the devilish waves strike through you and the world's storms, wandering far and wide, beat upon us, more and more the virtue will be and remain immovable, nor shall we, overwhelmed, succumb to the waves of your infestations foaming around us, but we shall always stand erect against all dangers, since the Christian spirit is not abject, to be laid low and tossed about by vices, but is so noble and high-born that it remains immovable and victorious against all temptations. We are not Christians who think to enjoy the sweetness of this present fragile life, but we are those who desire to attain the glory of eternal security and happiness, the possession of perpetual blessedness.

It must be died for the Son of God — the blessed apostle John’s religious voice exhorts us, that despising earthly things we may desire to follow heavenly ones: “And the world passes away, and its desire; but he who has done the will of God abides forever, even as God abides forever.” Since these things are so, I desire you to know that with all your tricks and deceits and with the vast cruelty of your savagery you lie beneath the feet of God’s servants, that all the glory of your vain dominion is led by us and accounted as nothing, and that you are felt by us to be nothing else, with all the vigor and authority of your empire, than an empty breeze. Perhaps some of your flatterers may say that we boast of these things. Do you not remember, Constantius, that I said, with the judges listening when the veil was let down, that even if you had decreed that your entire soldiery hurl all the weapons of your kingdom against us, the executors of your blasphemy against us as despisers of your sacrilegious decree should dash all their arms, yet not even thus could we withdraw from our resolve? But you, with that prudence of yours, have judged that your soldiers must die for you in every war, but have decreed that Christians ought to have become deniers of God. And indeed your men feel the pain of wounds, grieve that they have perished, grieve to lose this light.

But we cannot first feel the torments of the punishments in which Christ suffers, in which Christ works out eternal salvation; then, because we should count present things as nothing and we shall always be in that eternal light, how can it be that we would not prefer to be killed by your sacrilege-polluted hands for Christ the Son of God, the giver of eternal life, since we see that we cannot otherwise please God the Father unless, when summoned by you to deny the only Son of God, we have confessed through death itself that he is the true Son of God? Your detestable mind bears it unworthily that we say Christ the Son of God is the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Power of God, true God from true God, born of the Father, that is, from the substance of the Father, light from light, born not made; that he is of one substance with the Father, which in Greek they call *homoousion*, through whom all things were made, without whom the Father never existed. You bear it unworthily, worm of Arius, that we defend that the clarity, power, magnitude, eternity, and divinity of the Father and his only Son are one; that it is not new what we, as legates, asserted in your palace and do not cease to affirm, that it has always been believed and is believed by Christians, just as at Nicaea against your Arian heresy and against all errors the sacred faith is seen to have been written down. If at last you open the eyes of your heart, pierced by the serpent’s bites, you may find that this is what it has.

This faith the Church defends, which she knows was handed down to her through the blessed apostles. If you could traverse the whole world in a moment, most stupid Emperor, you would find Christians everywhere believing as we do, persisting in this defense of ours, desiring to die for the Son of God as we do. But your novel preaching and recent religion, blasphemy under the pretext of faith uttered by you to the ruin of your own salvation, has not only been unable so far to traverse even the Roman frontier, and that despite your best efforts, but wherever it tried to fix its roots, it withered, with all the servants of God, of course, withdrawing from you and from your few followers, whom the Lord foretold would be tares sown among the wheat, remaining with you. All this the craftsman of fraud and death has granted you and is still granting you, who through you entices and deceives many with crooked flatteries, who, though guilty of every crime, suggests to your most bitter heart that you punish us as if guilty of some crime. But look ahead at last, open the eyes of your heart, in which there is no light for you, but only utter fog and vast darkness, and you will find that your death, inflicted by a fragile power, restores a more perfect life, that this leads us more to glory through fires, through swords, through chains and wild beasts, through whatever finally your rage, most pious Emperor, has decreed to inflict upon us in slaughter.

Protected by God, we are not only not destroyed, but are more and more invigorated, remembering that there is nothing above us except God, from which a soul devoted and surrendered to God blushes to yield to you through your dead blasphemy, to a barking dog against the truth, to the teeming worms of Arius. The souls of Christ’s servants, whenever they diligently examine the true force of torments, consider that there is no greater torment than to be conquered by you, our adversary, a slave of Christ’s slave. We recall that the Lord said: if anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself to himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his soul will lose it, but whoever loses his soul for my sake will find it. For what profit is it to a man, if he gains the whole world, but suffers loss to his own soul? Or what exchange will a man give for his soul? The dignity of martyrdom compels us to condemn the life of a Christian by death, since a new kind of salvation has been granted through the Son of God: to perish in order not to perish. We know that this discipline has been divinely handed down to us, that we should maintain the force of such a name without any terror of military service, since we have long been drawn away from desire for this light by a longing for eternal memory, and the fellowship of Christ has set us apart to trample upon all earthly things.

grows, Constantius, the battle of your cruelty; but note that the glory of Christ's soldiers also grows, and we are not finally slowed down from the line of battle by fear of torments, but are rather provoked to the line of battle by your very torments. That this is so you will not be able to deny, when you see Christians throughout the whole world animated with an equal and similar heat of virtue to wage the contest, when you see the uncorrupted firmness of faith of Christ's soldiers, which your detestable blandishments do not deceive, the threats of your fury do not terrify, the tortures of your butchery and the torments of your cruelty do not overcome, with that one, of course, remaining in us and always established with us who said to the blessed apostles: I am with you all days until the consummation of the world. He is present everywhere, because he is the son of the omnipotent one, all-powerful, with whom there is one eternity and divine power with the Father. But how great a fog of unbelief has beset you, and how great a cloud of darkness and errors has covered your breast, cannot be said, you who, although you pretend to be a Christian, nevertheless strive to remove the Christian name from the midst. Amid these things, you must see that readers will grant pardon, because the mediocre eloquence of my talent has not been able to describe you for execration according to the merit of your impiety; for they seemed to see that I have given a form to all who fear God and have provided material to those who will treat of you, by which order they could cut you off, placed as you are without the roots of eternal life.

Nor should you say that we rebuke you with abusive words, if you hear what you deserve from rustics, albeit Christians. We know that one should not curse, but rather pray for one's enemies; for the Son of God, although he is lord of the world, nevertheless when he was cursed, did not curse back. Moreover, if the lord of the world were to curse, everything would surely collapse from the force of such great majesty. You say, of course, to this: the Lord wished you, his bishop, to be gentle, and you present yourself as obstinate toward me. The prophets, apostles, and the chorus of the Gospels teach that one should not kill; you, on the contrary, deign to kill those consecrated to God. We Christians know that to placate the one we worship, we need those things by which we know he is delighted and rejoices. Therefore, if what you do is to be considered pleasing to God, then all of us must be murderers, sacrilegious, and blasphemers. O Constantius, how great your madness appears; the old deceiver, the circumscriber of the innocent, is seen to have established his seat in your mind, and do you think you have not yet been exposed? You still pretend to be a sheep, when you are a wolf; you, who are called a beast by the most holy prophets, a dog and a rapacious wolf by the most blessed apostles, are suborned, while you are a worker of iniquity, as if a minister of justice; and do you think you are a man, when you bear nothing of a man except the outlines and the general shape? You grieve at being called a monstrous beast, that you bear nothing of a man except the outlines and the general shape.

Tell me, if you can, whether you, the murderer of the innocent, can deservedly be called a Christian and not rather a demented, dull-witted, and senseless enemy of the religion of God, in which piety, humanity, and all justice reside, in which we are taught not to return evil for evil, in which we are taught not to kill, but to be killed for the Son of God? With your sacrilegious effort, considering your despised and vain dominion, you apply tortures; but there is a protector of the faith, a governor of salvation, a ruler of souls, whom you drive us to deny, always with us, always present in our struggle, who raises up the champions and defenders of his divine name. Hence it is that we stand stronger against the seeds of your injustice and your ministers, that is, your fellow executioners who torture, and we are inspired so that your claw, our limbs beaten and torn, may overcome them. For how will a savage, repeatedly inflicted blow be able to overcome an impregnable faith, when every soldier of Christ knows that the one for whom he suffers is present with him and rejoicing in the endurance of his servants?

We are, of course, servants of Christ, strengthened by His majesty, with free voice, uncorrupted mind, naked indeed to your fragile weapons, but clad in those arms which the blessed apostle prayed that we might put on, saying: "From now on, be confirmed in the Lord and in the power of His might." (And: "Put on the arms of God, so that you may be able to stand against the devices of the devil, for your struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in the heavens. Therefore take up the arms of God, so that you may be able to resist on the evil day and stand perfect in all things, girding your loins in truth, putting on the breastplate of righteousness and shodding your feet in the preparation of the gospel of peace, in all things taking up the shield of faith, in which you may quench all the glowing darts of the wicked one, and the helmet of salvation and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, praying through every prayer and supplication at all times in the spirit and watching in that spirit.") Therefore, since your cruelty and that of your father cannot overcome us, armed as we are in such a way, fortified with such great power, as has often been said, we have stood and we stand and, until you consume our bodies, we shall stand, protected by the saving shield of Christ, surrounded by the breastplate of His piety, guided by the Holy Spirit, immovable and more and more in all things the authors, driving away every voice of servitude.

We are indeed certain and confident that we cannot be turned from our determined strength by any of your snares, any of your cunning, any of your quibbling, any of your deceits, since we know that the end of sins is death, and then follows a life which is everlasting, and we embrace the counsels of the blessed apostle and desire to be found his imitators and participants, who establishes that when our old man is corrupted, the one within is renewed, and if the earthly house of our body is dissolved, a heavenly one is built, and that while placed in the body we are pilgrims from the Lord; with which apostle we will not be able to offer abundant praises to God in the heavenly realms unless we first come, with death overcome, to receive immortal rewards. Therefore, when our bodies have been scattered and utterly dissolved by you, then let us presume ourselves to be most whole; when death has been inflicted by you, then we believe we are able to live more fully. How do you still presume, Constantius, meanwhile emperor, always most foolishly, to thrust forward those things which extinguish you, but enliven us? To destroy us you rise up with evil and perverse counsel, you have been swift to shed the blood of the servants of the only Son of God, not knowing that by our blood heaven is opened, by our blood the fire of Gehenna is extinguished. Secular ambition drives you, heavenly majesty admonishes us, who fear to lose eternal salvation.

We know that we must die for God; for just as you, unless you make the transition from the camp of the devil to the army stationed in the heavenly camps, will be held forever by fire in Tartarus, so we, if we have preferred to be slaughtered for the Son of God by you, a most savage beast and monstrous wild beast, spurning your threats and your tortures, will rejoice in heaven. For blessed are those who suffer persecution for the sake of righteousness, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs; and it did not say: blessed are those who inflict persecution. We Christians know that we have been made soldiers of Christ for this purpose, that on the unjust battlefield declared by you, confessing our leader, so that we may obtain the triumphs of victories, we may die armed; hence you seem to us the more savage, and also the more merciful, when you deign to kill a Christian who confesses himself as such. In this, however, you are judged most criminal, that under the appearance of affection and of one wishing to give counsel, you flatter us to be cast down, as if it were useful for us to be preserved by you after being driven from our rank, but to be condemned by God. We know that you are afraid lest we die in this perseverance of faith amid all these punishments devised by your detestability, and yet you apply various and harsh tortures. Thus you desire that we, whom you so hostilely persecute, be variously tortured, and indeed at every moment; but you have decided that we are not to be killed, as if death alone makes blessed soldiers of Christ, and not also torments which, the more severe they are, produce the greater glory of virtue.

For indeed, we who know that the life of righteousness is more abundant and more prolonged on this field of war do not turn our backs, do not make the crossing to your camp, the camp of the enemy of God, but rather, placed amid these disasters you inflict, we desire to be brought back to the sheepfold of God, from which the devil, having seized you, now possesses you. And yet I say this not so that you may spare us; for you will find us to be Christians, just as you have already found those you killed to be steadfast in faith, patient in suffering, victorious in interrogation—through Him, of course, who does not abandon His confessors, whose soldiers we acknowledge ourselves to be, and, as you perceive, we join battle bravely, we fight steadfastly. For we know that it is a great glory, an immense sublimity, and a singular... to adorn the life of eternal salvation with the honor of suffering, that it is the greatest nobility to despise the torments of your power, to spurn you, not to fear your rage, you who rage so rabidly against the innocent, you who, though you are the teacher of blasphemy, injustice, and utter cruelty, nevertheless think you can appear a pious, prudent, and just Christian—blind, dull, and ignorant of the truth. Take note, devourer of the innocent, that in whom Christ keeps watch, he cannot be conquered by your torments. He overcomes hunger, scorns thirst, subdues the squalor of prison and the horror of the penal dungeon by the vigor of his strength, tramples every punishment, crushes all tortures, and does not fear the death you threaten with such great effort to inflict.

You think you surpass him who remembers what is written: "What shall I render to the Lord for all that He has rendered to me? I will take the cup of salvation and invoke the name of the Lord. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints," and: "Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or hunger, or nakedness, or danger, or the sword?" As it is written: "Because we are afflicted to death for your sake all day long, we are counted as sheep for slaughter, but in all these things we prevail because of Him who loved us." What of yours could remove us from these salutary precepts I utterly cannot see. For although you do not cease, with all your impious office, to entice those who consent to your depravity over to us, raising them up, like Epictetus and the others whom you have made from servants of God into your own and your father's satellites, yet may this madness be far from us, that we should prefer the false to the true, or that any happiness offered through you should entice us into your kingdom. Keep your empty glory for yourself, and keep all the prudence of your most foolish heart for yourself and your peers, whom a similarity of character has joined to you; leave us our folly, since we confess Christ the Son of God to be the true Son, since we defend Him to be of one substance with the Father, since we profess to desire to be killed for His sake, lest we deny His divinity; leave us this kind of folly. Why do you labor to make us lose it?

Why do you think that truth, which you suppose you can attack, can be overcome, ignorant that it prevails by its own strength? For whence do you see the people of God resisting with unconquered courage against your savage and harsh torments, if not because this is the apostolic and evangelical faith that we defend? They resist your cruelty, they trample upon your madness—those whose hope is eternal immortality and heavenly life, whose ardor is kindled by the desire for perpetual light, and whose salvation rejoices in the promised blessedness. Indeed, so secure are we, knowing that we are destined to enjoy eternal life, that we endure everything gladly, when we profess that we do not consider our own torments, but your torturer's punishments; we Christians compensate for bodily losses with gains of the soul, we count the crown in our wounds, and we triumph most joyfully in Christ over the torments and pains inflicted by you. Remember, Constantius, from the recent memory of your crimes, how you branded yourself in the city of Alexandria, how many your single signature cast down over the precipices, how many it caused to be mowed down by the sword, how many it consumed by hunger and thirst or killed in prisons, how many it caused to be strangled by cutting off their breath; and yet, although you raged with all these cruelties against the holy martyrs whom your gladiatorial spirit killed, you rage more cruelly against us, while you hold back the sword, while you take care that the remedy of a swifter death does not come to our aid.

We allow ourselves to be torn apart and burned in our whole body, proving that nothing is more fitting to the gravity and constancy of wise men than to be driven from their judgment and purpose by no terrors, but that it is most beneficial to be tortured for God, and that those consecrated to God cannot die, cannot be overcome by perpetual torments, but that you are rather overthrown and reduced to nothing. Accept what is set down in the twenty-sixth psalm: "The Lord is my illumination and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the defender of my life; at whom shall I tremble? When the wicked draw near to devour my flesh, my enemies who afflict me have themselves grown weak and fallen. If camps stand against me, my heart will not fear. If battle rises against me, in this I will hope. One thing I have asked of the Lord, this I will seek: that I may dwell in the house of God for all the days of my life." Therefore, since the power of justice is perfected in these sufferings, since, because Christ suffers in us, we do not even feel the punishment, for the reason that where fault is absent, neither is there punishment, how have you thought that you could overcome those dedicated and devoted to God by these means, by which faith supplies invincible increases of virtue? I believe, indeed, and truth does not deceive me, that, although you still apply all your forces of butchery to tear apart the limbs.

and the torturer, raging long in our blood over our torn limbs, may dry up, yet you can never conquer the household of God, never overcome the army of Christ, nor subdue it by pains, nor bend it by oppressive penalties. We Christians refuse no tortures, no death; we cannot tremble at your tyrannical commands or at the swords of your judges, because we resist you armed with the sword of God. The blessed apostle, moreover, says to the Ephesians: "Be strengthened in the Lord and in the power of his might. Put on the armor of God, so that you may stand against the devices of the devil, for your struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against spiritual forces of evil." You, who cannot overcome us who are clothed in the armor of God—you, through whom all the demons rage for our destruction—we finally urge you to surrender yourself to us, lest you be tormented for all ages along with those whom the apostle describes. Thus, the sons of light cannot be conquered in the darkness of your prison by the son of darkness, as if those in whom the creator of light deigns to dwell could experience darkness.

Let virtue endure what mortal nature has taught must be borne; for if you attempt to consume our limbs with fire, we will feel you burning more in our bodies than we ourselves, who, running willingly and eagerly to death for the faith, presume that we are not losing life but rather gaining it, and indeed an eternal one after the fragile. Your sword’s edge always stands drawn and ready for the slaughter of Christians, and yet that blade of your sword seems to us more cruel than any lead, just as the edge of your soul does. We endure all things secure in suffering, as if we were inflicting the torments we undergo, because he who rages through you against us is laid low by our faith. For we know that we cannot be destroyed by death brought on in perpetual malice, we who have believed in Christ, the sole true giver of eternal life, the Son of God; but we are believers and rightly presume that even the bodies you now burn, torture, and mangle will rise again to light and eternal life. For if we knew that after being killed by you we would be nothing, we would certainly be most foolish not to look after this life, so that it might be as long and full of all advantages as possible—which could happen to us, had we judged it better to comply with you than with the decrees of God.

And now, if through you this present life is taken away, and immortal life is taken up, it is necessary for his servants to despise this present life for the sake of the Son of God, together with its goods, since every loss of this kind is compensated by immortality. How great the virtue, how great the strength of spirit, how great the firmness of faith of those whom you have killed and of those who still resist your sacrilege, take note, Constantius: those blessed martyrs whom we see established by the power of God in the heavenly kingdom, or these whom you have not yet been able to kill, stand against you, a savage beast, who do not cease to threaten us with unspeakable and speakable horrors, while you have always been and are far more willing to hear that princes rise up against you as rivals than that those confessing Christ the Son of God emerge as victors. For it had pleased your heart, obsessed with the darkness of all errors and your mind blinded by deep gloom, to turn us all away from God through your heresy, first to make us your clients, then your fellow satellites. But the truth has conquered you and, in you, the one who contrived to engineer this; for it prevails by its own power.

We are, in short, expecting at every moment that, beyond those torments you have already inflicted, you will add still more, appointing fiercer torturers, more savage avengers, who, against your deadly edicts, may attack with the sword, or crucify, or burn with fire, or tear our entrails and limbs with any unheard-of kind of punishment, those soldiers devoted to God who resist, so that by the vigor of faith, through God’s mercy, we may trample upon your threats and tortures and torments; so that we stand now, through the Lord, unmoved, and will always stand, if indeed it is not we who conquer your gnashings, but He Himself in us, by whose help we are guided, by whose strength we are preserved. For how great or what sort are you, that you can strip us of those goods which have been divinely conferred upon us? You seize us, [deny us,] make us destitute, condemn us, conquer us, burn us, kill us by even the most wretched means, and yet you cannot conquer the unconquered faith of Christians. By which you ought to have understood that you will receive the penalties of your error and cruelty, and that, on the contrary, because this narrowest path, through the difficulty set before us, leads sublimely to the reward of immortality, we will not be able to yield to your cruelty, we who know that martyrdom is the singular imitation of the Lord’s fortitude.

The way of the martyrs is indeed full enough of labor and difficulty, and so arduous that no one can fulfill it with human strength; but we, who are aided by the help of divine support, must always trample upon you, as we now trample. Hence it is that we have chosen not only not to fear you, the adversary of the religion of God, but even to provoke you of our own accord. You are provoked, since you are always expected not to show mercy, merciless one, but to kill. Hence it is that our happiness cannot admit of division, because, even when we are killed for the Son of God, he himself lives in us through love, he who is both the spur in distress and the strength in the battles of persecutions. For by whatever means you may try to strip yourself against the worshipers of God, you will never be able to nullify the sealed virtue, especially since worldly torments neither entice nor terrify. Since these things are so, what else shall I call you, persecutor of the house of God, than wretched, you who obey the instigations of your robber demons, by whose goads you have been driven to perpetrate these machinations, through whom, with their persuasion clinging to your heart, you willingly err in your sacrilegious conviction. You indulge your innate folly. And would that you were willing to err and be foolish only with your fellow blasphemers, the Arians! You even try to drag us into the fellowship of your evils; you proscribe, you despoil; but we know that poverty sought for the sake of Christ is a kind of supreme happiness.

You threaten, executioner, with death; but we not only do not withdraw our neck, but even offer it, so that we may be slaughtered for the sake of God’s only Son. Why have I recounted these things? So that you might know that your punishments have no power against the servants of Christ, and that we cannot fear that which we always expect to come. You take it ill that you are called a heretic, and yet you dare to say that the Son cannot be compared or equated to the Father; we, who defend the one divinity for Father and Son, declare the Son equal to the Father, we believe, as the blessed Apostle Paul believed, who says of the Son: “Who, since he was in the form of God, did not consider it a usurpation to be equal to God.” What is “who, since he was in the form of God”? Except that the Son is, as God the Father is, immutable, inconvertible, inestimable, ineffable, eternal, perfect. What is “who, since he was in the form of God”? Except that the Son inhabits the same inaccessible light as the Father, except that the divine sublimity of Father and Son is one. The Holy Spirit, abiding in the blessed Apostle, already then beholding all your heretical hearts, added an interpretation of what it is for the Son to be in the form of God: “Who, since he was in the form of God, did not consider it a usurpation to be equal to God.” The blessed Apostle declares the Son equal to the Father, manifesting the one divinity of Father and Son; and you dare, with the satellites of your sacrilegious audacity and the partakers of your sacrilege, to say: “For we cannot equate or compare the Son to the Father.

or why do you think the Lord said: “He who sees me sees also the Father,” and “I and the Father are one,” except that the power of the Father and the Son is one? You say that the Son has a beginning; but we say that He is without beginning, since everything that has a beginning must also be able to have an end. Therefore, since we believe that the only Son of God is eternal, that is, coeternal with the Father, and you, the enemies of God, deny this, do we not most rightly call you madmen and sons of pestilence stuffed with every folly? Concerning you, the blessed apostle cries out, as he then did about the Jews: “And just as they did not acknowledge God in their knowledge, God delivered them over to a reprobate mind, so that they do things that are not fitting.” And to the Philippians: “Be my imitators, brothers, and observe those who walk in this way, as you have our example. For many walk, as I often told you, and now I say it weeping, as enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in the confusion of those who savor earthly things.” And to Timothy, concerning you, Constantius, and your most beloved fellow reprobates: “But the Spirit clearly says that in the last times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to seductive spirits, to the teachings of demons, to the hypocrisy of liars, having their own conscience cauterized.

The Holy Spirit still strikes and slays you through the mouth of the same blessed Apostle Paul: In the last days perilous times will come. There will be men who love themselves, covetous, proud, disdainful, blasphemous, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, wicked, without affection, without faith, slanderers, incontinent, harsh, without kindness, traitors, insolent, puffed up, lovers of pleasures more than of God, having the appearance of piety but denying the truth itself; and avoid these. And further: Just as Jannes and Mambres resisted Moses, so too will these resist the truth, men corrupt in mind and reprobate concerning the faith, but they will advance no further; their folly will be manifest to all, just as that of those was. And further: There will be a time when they will not endure sound doctrine, but will heap up for themselves teachers to gratify their own desires, turning their ears away from the truth and turning instead to fables.

Deserting the apostolic faith, you have turned to fables. Like a cancer, your speech can creep, when the Holy Spirit has foretold through the mouth of the apostle, you call Catholics heretics, and shortly after, that very thing which you called Catholic and which you compelled us to accept, you say is blasphemy. Likewise, a little later, what you had just maintained at Antioch, acting against Aëtius, was blasphemy, you now again affirm as Catholic; hence you also judged that Aëtius was at Constantinople, because you had approved him as Catholic. Know therefore from this very fact how great the difference is between truth and falsehood, when you yourself, as it seems to you, are skilled and have a designated number of secretaries, yet we observe that you have been able to persuade no one except those who feared your butchery; we, however, to whom nature suffices for speaking, strangers to all knowledge of pagan letters, are able to destroy every heresy, because the matter itself and the truth speak. You and your assistants have amassed the full art of pagan letters; we know only sacred letters. Our speech is common, whereas yours is polished and ornate, which may even be called eloquent; and yet: your speech, sought through art, sweetly persuasive, can persuade no Christian except one who is not, but is only called so, like you, who, though you are a wolf, are judged by the ignorant to be one of the sheep. Who is so senseless, unless like you who have drunk in all madness?

Which of God’s servants would not wish to be honored by death in the service of devotion? Who would not desire to pour out the blood of his own life for Christ, when a death of this kind makes life more whole and finds eternal glory? We stand, as you perceive, protected by the power of God, shod with the precepts of the Gospel, with a fixed and immovable step, so that our footsteps cannot be snatched away by you through a headlong fall. We stand holding the shield of faith, so that the smoking darts of the enemy, hurled through you, cannot wholly take hold—indeed, they are always struck back against you. Our heads are fortified with the helmet of salvation; the word of the Lord is in our mouth, so that the enemy stationed in you may be struck down by the spiritual sword, laid low, and likewise scattered. You will perceive that the holy faith, which you were compelling us to cast aside, is the shield of our soul—strong, impenetrable, and a woven breastplate, through which no weapons of the devil, brought in through you, can pierce. Seeing such perseverance among Christians, you say, “I must defend the Arian dogma once taken up by me”; you say such things, erring with an honest intention. For you perceive that nothing in human affairs is more excellent than religion, and that it ought to be defended with the utmost force; you defend with the sword, but we know that religion is to be defended not by killing, but by dying for God and by enduring all the evils that you inflict. By defending religion in such a manner, what cruelty of yours will be able to conquer?

If any of your soldiers in this fragile militia of your empire keeps faith with you, a mortal, in some outstanding deed, he becomes more acceptable and dearer; if he dies for you, a vain man, he attains the highest glory, because he has fallen in death for you, his leader. How much more must faith be kept by us, the soldiers of his clemency, to God the eternal emperor. Since this duty of devotion, which we have undertaken, compels us to act, you, because you are blind in not believing that Christ is true God, the Son of the true God, because you are simply wretched, having by no means escaped the darkness of eternal death, wished us also to return to the old blindness, so that we might seem to have lost prudence not simply, but detestably, along with the light. For we know that for you there is one condemnation of death, because you refuse to believe, and for us a twofold evil, if, having rejected our belief, we should prefer to return to perdition. How did you presume that we could be separated from you by false attentions, which, while they entice, kill, or by all kinds of cruel tortures, from the love of God? Who would reject such great happiness offered to him, unless he were more wretched than you, when he sees that by the confession of a single word, “I am a Christian,” adversities succumb, joys come forth, kingdoms are opened, eternal empires are prepared? You say: Deny the Son of God, or the power of my realm will kill you. How much better it is to be killed by an enemy of Christ than by Christ!

How much better it is to be slain by you, a friend of Antichrist, and to be brought to life by Christ! Who would not wish to be found a partner and companion of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, and all the righteous, rather than of Judas, whose imitator you have proved to be? John the Baptist was punished in prison by your pestilent Herod; James was killed by the savagery of Herod. The apostle John was banished to an island. Blessed Peter was crucified; blessed apostle Paul was bound. He was shut up in prisons. He was scourged and often stoned; finally he was killed. But all these endured that most gladly because they were made friends of God, as we observe. And we ourselves prefer to be slain by your cruel hand than to yield to your butchery. Why do you hold us in hatred, why do you persecute us with such savagery? Surely because we confess ourselves Christians; and those blessed ones whom we have mentioned were killed by your fellow-tyrants for the only Son of God, because they declared themselves his servants. The holy Spirit speaks through the mouth of the religious David on behalf of our people: If we have forgotten the name of our God and if we have stretched out our hands to a foreign god, does not God inquire into these things? For he himself knows the secrets of the heart; because we are put to death for you all day long, we are counted as sheep for slaughter; and you, Constantius, enslaved to Arian idolatry, meanwhile emperor, "Fear," you say, "the gnashings of my madness, which is growing fresh again for your destruction, and be apostates with me.

Hearing this, you do not wish to be healed of your wounds, but rather you proceed more fiercely with blind and irrational rage, driven by the prompting of those who insinuate themselves into your mind and goad you, unknowing, into fury. These are the spirits to whom you are known to sacrifice, that you may deny the only Son of God; they, because they can do nothing to harm us on their own—for we are protected by the greatness of God—persecute us through you, their satellite, whom they know to be their most hostile enemy, and they exercise through you, their lover, the cruelty they can with the utmost violence, thinking that by your intervention as executioner they will violate our faith. The teaching of all the sacred scriptures is that to believe in the Son of God is the first and perfect righteousness. Hence it is that when you are defeated in the contest, those demons are defeated in you, because the victory is granted to us not by the strength of our frail bodies, but by His mercy. He supplies the strength, so that amid all the instruments of your torture we remain unmoved, so that we are not broken by the pains of wounds or the blows of examinations, but rather are raised up; hence true worship of God is that in which the minds of the worshippers offer themselves as immaculate victims to God. And do you think that any worshipper of God is so sluggish and dull that the ardor of such a desire does not rouse him and arm him, goad him, spur him, and finally inflame him with those torches of love with which the holy prophets, apostles, and martyrs are inflamed?

Whom, I ask, of our men would not thrust his spirit into your cruel hands to be killed for Christ? Whom would it not urge to attain the glory and heights of martyrdom not only through these tortures you administer, but even through more cruel ones? Indeed, since your punishments are easily overcome if the glory of those very punishments is set before the eyes. For that which lacerates is not considered where such a great reward for the penalty is offered. By incorruptible rewards, Constantius, your torments are conquered, and torture is crushed, death is subdued, which, when it is inflicted, rather restores life. The wounds inflicted by you would cause grief, Emperor, if they did not immediately make us friends of God; and since we presume that we will then truly live if we are punished by you on account of the Son of God, and that we will then lose nothing of salvation, how can it be that we yield to your empty gnashings? You thought, and I believe you still vainly think, that we could and can be subdued by your force. How long, Constantius, will you abuse the patience of God? On the contrary, I urge, driving these things from your dark senses, let your foolish mind receive those meditations which can set you on the path that leads to the kingdom of God. Grasp pleasantly what leads you to the banquet of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the friends of God.

You who have dared, a man of utter injustice, to consider yourself just, setting yourself above all the bishops established by the judgment of God in the holy Church and rejecting the holy faith which the Church has always held and holds, you have striven to preach the blasphemy of your fellow-sacrilegist Arius, uttered by his mouth, now through your satellites, now through your edict, now through unclean spirits with your own polluted mouth, and you wish to be called a perfect worshiper of God and one who does everything holily, when as yet no one among those kings who are called tyrants has ever been found to be more cruel, more detestable, or greater in blasphemies than you. That these things are so, in the book which is entitled *On Apostate Kings*, because I have already opened it to your imprudence, now I wish you to know this: unless you convert in time, unless you believe, as we do, that the only Son of God always reigned with the Father and that the Father was never without the Son, and that the kingdom of the Father and of His only Son is one and that the Father and the Son possess one divinity, you will perish forever, since your master Arius called the Son of God a creature and you have extolled his blasphemy to the heavens with praises. We urge you, we beg you, we impel you to become most beloved of God, and you complain that you suffer injury from us.

Thus you defend the empty severity of your office, as if it will snatch you from everlasting torments; you raise your proud head above the Lord’s priests, not heeding what is written: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” The Apostle, who, though he was in the form of God, says of the only Son of God whom you persecute among us, did not consider it a usurpation to be equal to God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, found in appearance as a man; he humbled himself unto death, and death on a cross. He who is always in the form of the Father, both was and is and will be, being truly the Son, truly immutable and inconvertible, because he is the all-powerful Son of the Almighty God, yet for the sake of our salvation deigned to humble himself, so that he might raise up, exalt, and lift high us who lay prostrate and cast down. That his holy humility has made you, a rabid dog, bark against his divine majesty, you who see in the sacred scriptures only what is written concerning the humility he assumed, passing over those things that tell of his eternal divinity.

What do you say to this, Constantius, you to whom the bishops of your Arian dogma often cry out that you are the bishop of bishops? Do you believe that those dying for the one Son of God will possess the kingdom of the heavens, or do you not believe it? If you believe, why do you drive us to deny his eternity? Why do you not cease from persecuting, why do you not leave those who believe in him in peace? Why are you always restless and always hostile toward us, presenting yourself as a violent persecutor, yet under the title of peace a treacherous enemy? I grieve that you have acquired such great evils for yourself; I mourn that you are placed entirely without hope of eternal life. Moreover, although you not only tear us apart with swords but also gnaw at us with your teeth, yet be certain that we, protected by God, will overcome your rage, and do not deign to despise us in that regard. You see that our bodies are fragile; but what is most important, we are strong, raised up and fortified by wisdom, having our adornments and defenses in our hearts and minds. Whence do we now see ourselves adorned? Whence do we feel ourselves fortified and safe? Whence do we know ourselves wise? Except that we both avoid your blasphemy and gladly surrender our mortal bodies to your sword for the sake of the Son of God, knowing that, when you have been able to destroy our earthly dwelling, you cannot destroy the heavenly one which we possess. For this reason indeed we know that goods and evils have been set before us, so that all the force of our wisdom might be engaged in discerning goods and evils.

What is more foolish than to fear you, to deny God? What is wiser than to trample upon your wicked head and to please God by this deed? Hence it is that you see that with all our strength we stand ready in the contest of justice, with faith intact, with devotion steadfast, with mind uncorrupted, to take our stand in the battle line which has been declared by you, the unafraid soldiers of the living God. The shield of faith is also borne by us bravely, and so, with God protecting, whatever the devil hurls through your hands is extinguished, because our feet are shod with evangelical teaching and armed with spurs. Although you are Augustus, yet in you the serpent that roars for the slaughter of us innocents is crushed, since it cannot bite and trip us up through its executioner; for God wishes us to be oppressed by you, not indeed so that we abandon the faith and the path of the patriarchs, apostles, and martyrs, but so that, compelled by you to deny the only Son of God, we do not refuse even to undergo death. We are not, like you, so foolish and perverse as to prefer to cast aside saving things and to take up deadly ones; we are not fleeing the protection of heavenly medicine. We see that, although the physician may cut with the knife, burn with the cautery, and by the fire of mustard bring the sick man to every pain, yet being cut, burned, cauterized, and bitten is not an enemy; indeed, it is good for this reason, because it removes useless pains through pains applied for the sake of health.

God wills that we dissolve death by death, that we shatter eternal torments by temporary sufferings, that we void future perpetual punishments by your punishments—namely, we who, when you have taken life from us, presume that life can rather be conferred, and indeed eternal life in place of temporal, incorruptible and perpetual in place of fragile and fleeting. Do you think it insufficient that those who confess themselves Christians should merely be put to the sword, unless you inflict every kind of torture upon their bodies? It makes no difference by what kind of death you deign to punish us, so long as through these things we are admitted to the enjoyment of eternal life, so long as through these things your madness is killed, while we on the contrary are brought to life. For if you think it wretched that I should prefer to be killed for the Son of God by any cruel punishment—to say nothing of the eternal glory of the blessed martyrs—I know that one must die by some kind of death. Indeed, I will give you many who perish more cruelly in their beds, whom some internal suppuration has swollen and the pain of sinews struggling with each other has contracted. The issue is the cause, not the stake from which I hang.

What do you say, most foolish king? Am I sent by you into these punishments, into this kind of penalty, unjustly or justly? If unjustly, the cross will be yours who set it up, not mine whom you have fixed; if justly, the guilt of my crime, not your punishment, will begin to torment me. Moreover, as far as the outcome is concerned, it matters nothing whether I die by a nail from you or by a lance, with my hands bound behind my back or stretched out and spread apart, whether prone and bent or upright and erect, whether you kill me lying in my bed or cut my throat while I stand, whether you take off my head with a sword or an axe, whether you bind me to a stake or a cross, whether you burn me with fire or bury me alive, whether you hurl me from a rock or sink me in the sea, whether with a great effort of a labandax you sever my head far from me with one vast blow, or with all subtlety you play with a more subtle arrow, long piercing my body, let your cruelty devise a hundred thousand forms of punishment, from all these only immortality will come to me through this death inflicted by you. I cannot but rejoice when you heap up such things, since through these punishments I know that every punishment can be ended. For even those things that are external and that I think can happen through your savagery—whether birds or dogs tear my body, whether they cling to my body, whether wild beasts attack those cruel eyes while you watch, whether I lie on the ground and am reduced to the bone by claws and teeth—after all these things I am safe with God.

when you have consumed my body with such and so many forces of your bestial savagery, the creator of things will restore and repair it, and indeed from a corrupt state into eternal incorruptibility. But for you, our most unjust persecutor, you must know that an endless punishment is coming, nor should you think you will suffer with impunity, you who have judged that the name of the only Son of God should be subjected to your footsteps and impiously and nefariously trampled. The voice of the blessed apostle is: that I have not suffered worthy passions of this time for the coming glory. Which glory we are certainly about to possess, if we choose to be killed by you rather than deny the Son of God. When that revelation and brightness has shone upon all of us believers, we will be blessed servants of his, always placed in his kingdom; you, on the other hand, if you persist in your perfidy, will be in the outer darkness, a deserter indeed of the army and an assailant of the truth, you who have done the will of the devil, whence it is necessary that you, unless you have extracted yourself from his snares, be tormented with him in inextinguishable fire, as it is written. We say these things not from ourselves; for concerning you transgressors, concerning you blasphemers who deny that the only Son of God is truly that Son, and concerning all who refuse to believe in him, we read in the most holy prophet it is set down: their worm will not die and their fire will not be extinguished. You will always be, if you remain in this madness, in inextricable darkness.

For just as we who confess the Son of God will obtain the rewards of immortality and enjoy eternal light, so you, his denier, must necessarily be brought to eternal ruin and darkness; you will be led down that path which you hold, not, as the Arians falsely claim for you, to heaven, but to the hated citadel of the world, to the left hand of the wicked and to the impious Tartarus; for it is the path of that fugitive whose every will you are found to fulfill, you his satellite; it is, I say, the path of that serpent who turned you from the heavenly way to hold to this way of injustice. This is that broad and spacious way of which the Lord speaks in the Gospel, saying: How broad and spacious is the way that leads to destruction. Therefore, if you are unwilling to take thought for yourself, it cannot be doubted that you are among those whom the blessed John strikes, saying: Now the axe is placed at the root of the trees; if anyone does not bear good fruit, he will be cut down and thrown into the fire. You, therefore, and all your accomplices, since you are most bitter trees bearing the fruit of death, indeed sinning against God, unless you make your journey and passage to the heavenly realm, you will be cut down and, sooner than word can tell, you will come precipitated into the deep abyss, whence you will without doubt see those whom you now unjustly persecute, just as then the rich man saw Lazarus in the bosom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the friends of God, and of all the prophets, apostles, and martyrs.

you will not escape those punishments, Constans, unless first you believe that the only Son of God is truly the Son of God, and then, as has been frequently said, you confess that he has always reigned with the Father and is reigning, that is, without beginning and without end, and you transfer yourself from the abominable assembly of the Arians to the Catholic Church, that is, from death to life, and confess as we Catholics confess that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are a perfect Trinity and have one divinity. Thus you hate Christians and persecute them in every way, as if your malevolence could overcome those who, having entered upon a hard and rough path, although they are objects of your contempt, mockery, and hatred, nevertheless in this present life wish to be poor, humble, ignoble, and subject to your injuries, believing that by enduring all things known to be bitter for the sake of God, they will come to those extraordinary rewards which the Apostle relates are to be obtained, those things which neither eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the mind of man, which the Lord has prepared for those who love him. Therefore, since God will present those things to those who love him, when we displease you, when we are punished by you, we presume that we please God. For your deadly sentence can have no authority to punish us eternally, since you who condemn are yourself to be condemned, and indeed for this, that you may suffer perpetual penalties.

Moreover, we whom you torture, mangle, and kill will be received by eternal joys, immense and boundless happiness will hold us, and everlasting blessedness will embrace us. Know, therefore, that divine power has been given to us all the more, so that while you think you are condemning us, we condemn you; while you presume you can punish us, we punish you, Constantius, the sacrilegious one—since He whom you deny deigned to give us, His bishops, the authority that what we bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven. We endure temporal evils for the sake of God, so that we may attain eternal goods; we flee from temporal things that are offered to us by you as if they were goods, because those goods of yours are followed by eternal evils. For this reason we have chosen to endure the present things that you think are harmful to us, so that, as glorious confession persists in us, we may merit to obtain eternal and immortal goods—just as you, along with those who, fearing you, are found to have obeyed your will and abandoned God’s commandments, since they have deigned to choose present goods more and to despise future ones, will fall into immortal evils. For these goods are more desirable than gold and precious stone, and sweeter than honey and the honeycomb. Indeed, your servant guards them, and in guarding them there is great reward.

We know that this life, which you labor so greatly to take away, is very brief; we know that both the goods and the evils of this life are brief, but the goods of that eternal life, which we desire to attain, are everlasting; for we know that for these brief goods in which you delight and take pleasure, eternal evils will succeed for you and for us Christians, whom you despise and whom you do not cease to mangle with all the powers of your empire, and that for these brief evils, eternal goods will succeed for us. You have read that this is so in the 125th Psalm: "The Lord has magnified to do with them," and further on: "Those who sow in tears will reap in joy. They went forth and wept, casting their seeds; but they will come in exultation, bearing their sheaves." And in the 128th: "Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways. You will eat the labors of your fruits; you are blessed, and it will be well with you." It will indeed be well forever for those who have not denied the Son of God, who will enjoy the labor of their holy confession; but for you, if you have determined to remain always in this madness in which you now live, it will be ill perpetually, as you will receive what Judas Iscariot now receives. Then we will see you suppliant, and yet all lamentation of your repentance will be in vain. For indeed, here either eternal life or death is acquired.

We want you to know that we always turn these things over in our heart, that we think of them day and night: your perpetual punishments and the eternal rewards and merits of God’s servants, what He threatens to you, the denier and persecutor of His name, by way of punishment, and what, on the contrary, He promises to those who confess, by way of everlasting glory.