Tractatus Duo

BISHOP POTAMIUS TWO TREATISES: TO WHICH IS ADDED A LETTER TO SAINT ATHANASIUS. TREATISE I. ON LAZARUS. (Gall. t. v, p. 96.) I am tossed about, brothers, with great astonishment and great wonder, through ambiguous cares, here and there, in the hollow fold of a dizzying whirlpool, with prone waves. Lazarus died, a man familiar to God, as they say, according to the testimony of the Gospel in John (John 11:24), when, with a gesture of forty days’ will, he had weighed the losses of the flesh. For already, at a hastening sunset, what was owed to his earthly limbs—that is, more to the earth itself than to the man, as for us ourselves, according to the book of Genesis (Gen. 1), the best moisture of clay is the cause—he was buried and interred far elsewhere, with Christ as censor, while he lent salutary things within the borders of Judaea: that is, so that he began to be what he had been, namely clay; while he ceased to be what he was, form or fable. For here, through heavy globes of darkness and the little shades of black horror—that is, through the cycles of four days, with the alternating succession of increase and decrease, eight (so to speak) days together with the dark nights being reborn—he lay thus with a pendulous gaping of his jaws, with teeth knocked out in his mouth, with a fetid mouth. Truly, because, finished off by earthly decay, he would wither as a rotten clod; and the transmissions of the nerves, together with the miserable quality of the body, a wretched burial would condemn.

Therefore, with the limbs contracted between lean and countable ribs, the foul skin is stretched, and the stream of fluid which is released from the whirlpool of the entrails was already flowing, foul and livid, through the sole of the corpse, a stinking bilge. Alas, when could the corpse not, for four days and four nights, through the whole mouth, produce rivers of bile and phlegm from the bilges, the stinking breaths of the corrupted lungs from the decayed limbs? Since even the rose itself, the bloom of modesty and beauty, with its fragrant petal in its own prepared balm (so to speak) more precious, if it is plucked from the rose-garden by the sickle of the thumb, grows pale with a withering death, so that it lacks both the color of the flower and its scent? Water itself, if it is snatched from the river in which it lives, perishes, as its nature ceases to be what it lived. Therefore, because it lacks the substance of its element while being snatched, wherever it lies, the liquid draws away the mud; soon it becomes foul with stench. Therefore, no one should wonder if the body of a man, whom the spirit of wisdom, seasoned with salt, had preserved with a fragrant breeze, and whom the soul, with its nectar-like vitality and honey-flowing generosity of balm from the sky, had ruled, lest the clayey mass and sluggish clod become a divorce of the departing spirit, the fleeting line of the dead, with the conflicting qualities of the structure, every body relaxes into the stain of its own stench from putrefaction. Hence it is that, through the distance of things, all the nature of the limbs, compacted into one mass, grows torpid.

When the soul, which had been gathering the flower of the body, departs, the safe material is relaxed into putrefaction with a livid cheek; and instead of the voice of the corpse, the stench of the dead is drawn in through the black bellows. Therefore, the fabric of the body, composed of earth, moisture, cold, and heat—which four parts, always at war with each other, overturn the body of crimes in a storm (heat does not love cold, and cold is tormented by heat; opposites are enslaved to opposites: earth is spoiled by too much moisture, and moisture is fouled by earth)—with these fourfold elements standing together in a four-part mass, once the charioteer, who had assigned places to these four parts so that no one would violently remove its own mobility, and who, with a dominant whip, drove the divided parts with a harmonious joint at the boundaries, is separated by the divorce of death, these four parts, I say, with the soul departing, are mixed together in the bereaved globe of the body, once the author of the union is shaken off. But because the Lord had loved this young man (I speak of Lazarus) in the world, being prescient of future things, He said to His Apostles that Lazarus was sleeping (John 11 and following), whom He promised, if He were to approach that city, would immediately be awakened. Therefore, this Lazarus, whose limbs had been washed by a livid, wandering confluence through the blue veins, whom, placed in a tomb cut from rock, a heavy stone, thrust down by a massive weight, had shut in with a perennial door, could rise again, if they believed this, the most sacred true piety of God thundered. Soon the sisters, crowded with a throng, with wailing.

heat, fasts, and floods of tears, intoxicated, they cast themselves down at the knees of God with the wretched prostration of their whole body, and, mixing Hebrew cries with Greek in broken sobs, they atoned in the praises of the Savior. How great, I ask you, was the throng of people hastening there? What a crowd of onlookers? What harmony could there have been at such a great miracle, where there were weeping maidens, a dead brother, and Christ promising to raise a man? They gathered, I believe, for this spectacle, to be kept in everlasting memory: soldiers, Jews, Gentiles, proselytes, most distinguished senators, noble judges, slaves, and almost the whole city vied to come, to see whether Lazarus could rise again, whose stench already struck the peoples from farther away at the tomb. At the sight, the whole city marveled. What altars were there, O Christ Jesus? How saffron-hued, how comely, purer than a spring, whiter than snow, more radiant than the sun, and brighter than the moon? Alas, why do I ask, since I did not deserve to see you then? Yet now I have come to know how great and how vast you are in mercy. Behold, among these things, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, is said to have wept. Come, come, Potamius, servant of the living God: if you have any power, tell at least a little of the praises of the Lord. God wept, stirred by mortal tears; and while, relying on his own power, he recalled Lazarus from the bond of death, he performed the duty of piety with the solace of tears.

God was weeping, not because he knew that a dead man had perished before him, but because he might temper the weeping of the sisters. God was weeping because the devil, by teaching sin, had made exiles of almost all those to whom he had given everything and whom he had brought under his power, whom he had even set over paradise, with flowers and lilies, without any labor. God was weeping because the devil, through malice, had caused those whom he had made innocent to be found guilty. Alas, the thin breeze from heaven, you were abandoning the body you had ruled, through successive arts. But the Father, the Son, never despised you. For your death, Christ himself became mortal. At these tears and the scattered, pitiable hair of the sisters, the Savior, moved by pity, was repaying tears with tears. And because he himself was moved by the sisters' weeping, his Father's paternity was being bent by the tears of his son, our Savior, between the very heavens. Therefore, Jesus Christ soon approached the tomb of Lazarus. Immediately, at his command, the stones were rolled back; the secret chamber of horror lay open. The eyes of the groaning peoples, full of curiosity, were cast into the cave. Lazarus was seen with a pale face, his hands and feet bound; and as a proof of the miracles, he himself, dead and still bound by the feet, was untying himself with his own hands, as Christ had commanded. What, I ask you, brothers, were the cries there? What was the pressing of the onlookers? How curious were the eyes of those marveling? What a multitude was hanging on the necks of those arriving first? What weeping? What joys? What murmuring? What a new and heavenly miracle?

Death is conquered, the man is restored, the chains of hell are broken, and after four days Lazarus’s tongue moves, his hands are prepared for their function, his eyes run in their sockets, his steps are unfolded in walking, his hearing is renewed, his gaze is directed toward his parents, his kindred are counted with revived glances, cold water is sought, bread is not refused, his home is sought, and the miracles of Christ are recounted. TREATISE II. ON THE MARTYRDOM OF THE PROPHET ISAIAH. (From the same, p. 98.) When Isaiah was preaching about Christ, or when he had announced the sentence of future damnation to the Israelite people, the barbarity of the blasphemers, stirred up by savage ferocity, cut him from the head in two parts with a violent punishment, as if with two slices, and ordered his neck to be cut from the head through the ears down to the shoulders: as if it were too little that the frenzied savagery should pierce the martyr of God with a sharp sword, or that the blade itself should furrow the innocent man’s body through the yoke of the raging rack with a hissing blow across the ribs, unless the savage sought a rupture of torn flesh in one body, two slices of an almost twin corpse, and cut out two forms, as it were, from the equality of the joint. But in so great a miracle of the heavenly arena, no one, I think, will be able to see him thus in the resulting spectacle, unless he attempts to count the deeds. Therefore, with attentive eyes, take note of the new celebration of passions from the old discipline, and how noble, how illustrious, how strong the martyrdom was there.

When the saw made its way at the head—that is, the navel of gathered sensation—and with reciprocal grating drew furrows of teeth, the blade slipped, I believe, as it fixed its teeth, and through the harvest of hair and the thick veil of covering, or the glue of calloused skin, it plunged the Hebrew letters of the head into the texture of the crown. Soon, as the diligent cutter had fixed himself with effort into the bed of the heart’s concavity, the streams of a purple fountain poured forth from loosened courses of veins, lest the profane one should with his thumb trace the veins like worms, a saffron shower poured itself abundantly, so that the painting of the veins, covered by a flood of blood, would not tremble, nor would it wonder what that thing was from which the conquered man would be forced to blush. Indeed, the vaulted commerce of the inner viscera of the chaste young man lay open, the sound of a striking trumpet, the deep vitality, and the dry fasts of pleasures. But Belias, son of Hezechiah, a bloody man and prodigal in genealogy, a mathematician of catabolic things, and a high priest of soothsayers and pythons, demanded within the cuirass of the sacred breast the assembly of faith, the court of political letters of preaching. And although the possession of the body was already divided limb by limb, it would betray the inner things, reveal the hidden, extend the obscure, and what that thing was from which the conquered man would be forced to blush.

so that the infamous persecutor might tear the man of God apart with the teeth of others; yet the distinguished and illustrious prophet endured, among those who were cut down supine and hanging, with the immobile and unshaken posture of his body for as long as two men began to exist who would condemn the figures of the nations along with their persecutor. LETTER TO ATHANASIUS FROM THE ARIANS (UNDER ATTACK), AFTER THEY SUBSCRIBED AT THE COUNCIL OF ARIMINUM. (From the same place, p. 99.) To the most glorious and most blessed brother bishop Athanasius, Potamius. The raw filth of so great a prison-pit, heaped up from the damnable workshop, as you rightly write, the beginning and the bloody stench of the dung of dead corpses—what hand could have more thoroughly scraped or erased it with fiery powers, had not your head, crowned with chaste titles from exile, perennial, excluded the sect of heresy with anathema maranatha? You smiled, I say, upon us, perfected by catholic virginity, by slaying the faithless, by condemning the perjurers: you conquered corrupt minds, adulterated and ambiguous, the libidinous commerce of the accursed beast, damnably burdened with poison, by striking with the sword of the one faith.

Let the serpent lie, and let the earth that received it grow black with festering venom: let the serpent lie, condemned by a heavenly blow, let the serpent lie, touched with bloody horror: let the serpent lie, with its crushed eye-sockets, the bilge of its three-forked mouth gaping open, vomit and flow away. Let the author of crimes writhe, for whom it was not enough that he had deprived the first-formed of eternity, unless he had also burst forth against the Savior as a more virile hydra. He wished to separate our Lord Jesus Christ, as if he could cut the word of Christ, the linked clasp of substance in the unity of the Trinity, as it says (John 10:30): "I and the Father are one." And (John 14:9): "Who sees me sees the Father also." And (ibid., v. 11): "I am in the Father, and the Father in me." And (John 1:1): "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." A savage butcher, a parricidal deserter, with, I think, kite-like claws or unsound teeth, if he could, he tried to tear apart. And after this, what shall I oppose to the blasphemies? (John 14:28): "He who sent me," they say, "is greater than I." From whom was the Father begotten? Surely because the Son confesses; therefore greater because the Father than the Son? The order is placed first, the substance is not separated. What do you say to this, infamous adulterer? It is well that the antiquity of the fathers in a holier synod, swollen with the viperous will of impure virility, pierced you even with chaste missiles. For here too you are taught to have set forth snares of calumny, because the Savior says (John

(John 6:38): "I have not come to do my own works, but the works of him who sent me." What do you say, serpent? Do you pour darkness into this simple profession, which they think a trifling question, in this light? The time is at issue: the Savior, among men, because he had put on a human body, seemed to be in the body; therefore he said: "I have not come to do my own works." Did he deny the offices of a man in himself? He cries out, therefore, to proclaim in himself the one who ordered him, whom he remembers as his author, the Father, in himself; because the Son follows by name, that one is greater who precedes; but of the sender and the sent, because the three are one, there is one substance from the unity of the divinity (John 10:30): "I and the Father are one." And (John 14:9): "He who sees me, sees the Father also." And the Savior himself to the Apostles: "For so long a time," he says, "I have been with you, and do you not know the Father?" They also say that in the Lord's books substance is never seen to be written. Give back what you had stolen, most thievish tempter: behold, you are defeated in refuting concerning substance; for the good ancient flocks of holy prophets cry out with all their proclamations, as it is said; they were terrified by the voice of substance from the birds of the air to the beasts, and they cried out (Ezekiel 12:11): "I will give Jerusalem into transmigration." Behold, when Christ, God, had been least heard of by the earlier people, with the inhabitants wasting away, the columns of Jerusalem fell. Behold, wretch, although one sentence of God suffices, what the holy prophet thundered (Jeremiah...).

(Psalm 68:3): "I am fixed in the mire of the deep, and there is no substance." That is, because the substance of the Father had not yet come together with Christ in the branch. Just as that Evangelist (Luke 15), when, after wasting his goods by living luxuriously, he lost all his substance, as the holy seer of God wrote (Wisdom 1:5): "The Spirit of God will flee from a feigned thing." Hence he lost substance, because through luxury he lacked sanctity: if it suffices for you, he said; if you already tremble, all things are full; if you are still tormented, I intend; we read it written (Ecclesiastes 2:8): "For I have gathered gold and silver and the substance of kings and regions." This is that substance which the prophet mentions, saying (Psalm 61:12): "God spoke once, I heard these two things." For in one voice the prophet testifies that he heard these two things, as David says (Psalm 44:2): "My tongue is the pen of a scribe." For just as a pen is drawn with the subdivided equality of teeth and is expedited by consonant rays, so the Savior is united in indivisible connection with the works of the Father. For what the Father said, the Son cried out; and what the Son spoke, the Father fulfilled.

Rightly," he says. "God spoke once, and I heard these two things. Two persons bore one judgment, just as in the Decalogue a single sentence is inscribed on two tablets. Let heresy fall silent, condemned to eternal silence, struck by divine blows, consigned to the abyss and to Tartarus. Let the virgin mother, always with her laurels, alone with God, for us a dove more abundant in fruitfulness, raise her crowned head up to the clouds of heaven. Let her be blessed, most just, with the peoples gathered together in the unity of the Trinity; she whose praise is full, from now and forever, throughout all the ages of ages, may the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit bless her.