To Constantius Augustus

That men not be subjected against their will by force to the heterodox. The voice of oppressed Catholics, that the rulers of places not show favor to heretics. The solemnities of the mysteries, and prayers for the king.—Your singular and admirable wisdom understands that it is not fitting, not right, to compel and force unwilling and resisting persons to subject and bind themselves by violence to those who do not cease to scatter the corrupted seeds of adulterous doctrine. For this reason you labor, and govern the commonwealth with salutary counsels; you keep watch also, and are vigilant: that all over whom you rule may enjoy the sweetest liberty. By no other means can those things which are disturbed be composed, those things which are torn apart be restrained; unless each person, bound by no necessity of servitude, has an unimpaired freedom of living.

Surely the voice of those who cry out ought to be heard by your mildness: I am a Catholic, I do not wish to be a heretic; I am a Christian, not an Arian: and it is better for me to die in this world than, under the domination of any private person's power, to corrupt the chaste virginity of truth. And it ought to seem just to your holiness, most glorious Augustus, that those who fear the Lord God and divine judgment should not be polluted or contaminated by execrable blasphemies; but that they have the power to follow those bishops and superiors who both preserve inviolate the bonds of charity and desire to have perpetual and sincere peace. Nor can it be, nor does reason permit, that things which are contrary should agree, that unlike things should be glued together, that true and false should be mingled, that light and darkness should be confounded, or that day and night should have any conjunction.

If therefore, as without doubt we both hope and believe, these things move your goodness—not an acquired but an innate goodness—command that the rulers of places show no zeal, no favor, no support to the most grievous heretics. Let your lenity permit the peoples to hear those teachers whom they wish, whom they judge fit, whom they have chosen, and to celebrate together the solemn rites of the divine mysteries, and to offer prayers for your safety and blessedness.

The suspicion of sedition is removed. The cunning of the Arians.—Let no perverse or envious person speak maliciously: there is indeed no suspicion not only of sedition, but not even of harsh murmuring. All things are quiet and modest. And now, those who are defiled by the Arian and pestilential contagion do not cease with impious mouth and sacrilegious spirit to corrupt the sincerity of the Gospels and to pervert the right rule of the apostles. They do not understand the divine prophets. They are crafty and cunning, employing a certain artifice to cover the enclosed pernicious corruption with a veil of probing words, and they do not pour out their poisoned venom until they have caught and ensnared simple and innocent persons under the pretext of the Christian name, and, lest they perish alone, make them sharers and guilty participants in their horrible crime.

That pious priests return to their own sees.—We also beseech your piety that those who are still held either in exile or in desert places (distinguished priests, namely, who excel in the dignity of so great a name), you command to return to their sees: so that everywhere there may be welcome liberty and joyful gladness.

The Arian heresy is new.—Who does not see, who does not understand? After nearly four hundred years, after the only-begotten Son of God deigned to come to the aid of perishing humankind, as though before there had been no apostles, and after their martyrdoms and departures no Christians, a new and most foul plague—not of corrupted air, but of execrable blasphemers—the Arian plague, has now been poured forth. Did those, then, who believed before, hold an empty hope of immortality? We have lately learned that these fabrications were invented by the two Eusebii, and by Narcissus, and by Theodorus, and by Stephanus, and Acacius, and Menophantus, and by two inexperienced and wicked young men, Ursacius and Valens: whose letters are produced, and are even convicted by competent witnesses, who heard them barking rather than disputing.

Those who imprudently and incautiously mix their communion with these men, since they are companions in crimes, must of necessity be sharers in their offenses; and even those who have already been cast down and rejected in this world, when the day of judgment shall come, will suffer everlasting punishments.

Letters and a legation after the acquittal of Athanasius. The cruelty of the Arians.—It is now doubtful to no one what kind of care those holy men took in the acquittal of Athanasius: so that after the sentences of the synod, which, out of reverence for priestly judgment, it had been right to contain within priestly or ecclesiastical conscience, it was necessary to write to the king and to dispatch a legation. But what else do these letters entreat, than that the liberty of faith and the contagion of the Arian name be averted, and that bonds, prisons, tribunals, and all that savage apparatus, and new tortures inflicted upon the accused, be restrained? God taught the knowledge of himself rather than exacted it: and, winning authority for his precepts by the admiration of heavenly works, he spurned a coerced will to confess him.

If force of this kind were applied to the true faith, episcopal teaching would come forward and say: God is the Lord of all things, he has no need of compelled obedience, he does not require a coerced confession. He is not to be deceived, but to be won over. He is to be venerated for our sake rather than for his own. I cannot receive one who is unwilling, nor hear one who does not pray, nor seal one who does not profess. He is to be sought with simplicity, to be learned through confession, to be loved with charity, to be venerated with fear, to be retained with uprightness of will. But what is this, that priests are compelled by chains to fear God, commanded by punishments? Priests are confined in prisons, the people, bound in the custody of a chained order, are disposed about; virgins are stripped for punishment, and bodies consecrated to God, exposed to public view, are fitted for the enjoyment of spectacle and torture.

They compel, forsooth, not that all should be Christians, but that they should be Arians: and by crime they drive the faith confessed in God into fellowship with their own wickedness. They also lead the Emperor into error by the authority of their own name, affirming it to be right that, under the guise of fear of God, he should hand over his subjects to them in this perversity. They demand tortures, they desire the support of judicial proceedings, they implore royal authority: and not even so do they blush at the perversity of their crime; they were not able by any right of compulsion to extort the connivance of the peoples.

The judicial form was not observed in the case of Athanasius.—If these things, brought forth from ancient documents, were instructing the time of our age; there would have been reason to doubt, I think, in matters of such importance. And when a verdict was demanded from various parties that he was guilty; inquiry would be made into the trustworthiness of the documents, into the life of the judges, into the credibility of the accusers, and into the conduct and actions of the man himself. For the joined condemnation of the Arians would move toward his acquittal: and it would be a matter of great danger to dissolve a judgment together with the inquiry into guilt and innocence without taking it up again: and the whole authority of antiquity, together with the doctrine of the faith, would stand in support of his defense.

But when those very men who were then condemned as Arian heretics are the ones who agitate the matter, disturb everything, and corrupt all by power and ambition, and Athanasius, if he was guilty, can still be guilty: let witnesses speak, let judges see, let the doctrine of faith shine forth in the precepts of the Gospels and the apostles: what obtuseness of understanding is this? What dullness of heart? What forgetfulness of hope? What love of crimes? What hatred of truth? They transfer love of God into favor for the condemned.

The unjust condemnation of Eusebius of Vercelli.—I come now to that which was recently done, in which even the profession of crime disdained to contain itself within the secrecy of its art. Eusebius is bishop of Vercelli, a man serving God in his whole life. After the synod of Arles, when bishop Paulinus had resisted the great crimes of those men (at Arles, in the year 353), he was ordered to come to Milan. A synagogue of malignant men having already been assembled there, he was forbidden to approach the Church for ten days, while perverse malice exhausted itself against so holy a man. Then, when all their schemes had been ripened, he was summoned at their pleasure. He appeared together with the Roman clerics (the deacon Hilary and Pancratian), and with Lucifer, bishop of Sardinia. When pressed to subscribe against Athanasius, he said that the priestly faith ought first to be established; that he had found certain of those present to be polluted with the heretical stain.

He placed in the midst the faith set forth at Nicaea, of which we made mention above: promising that he would do everything they demanded, if they would write their profession of faith. Dionysius, bishop of Milan, first received the paper: when he began to profess it in writing, Valens violently snatched the pen and paper from his hands, crying out that it could not be that anything should be done from that. After much clamor the matter was brought to the knowledge of the people: a heavy grief arose among all, the faith was assailed by the priests. Fearing therefore the judgment of the people, they passed from the Lord's house to the palace. What kind of sentence they wrote against Eusebius long before he entered the church: the sentence itself speaks for itself.

Hilary in the presence of the king.—I am not unaware, most pious emperor, that those things which are brought before the hearing of the public conscience concerning certain matters are accustomed to be judged either weighty or trivial according to the dignity of those who speak: while, with differing opinions, the contempt or favor of a person moves an ambiguous judgment toward the pursuit of understanding. But as for me, who am about to speak piously before you on a divine matter, there is no fear of common custom: because, since you are good and religious, neither does the fault of judgment among the prudent in matters of religion consider what a person hears from whom, but whether what is heard is religious. And because the opportunity of your presence has been granted to me by God, the duty of my conscience has not ceased even in regard to these things: lest in the discourse on religion which I hold with you, some unworthiness of the one speaking with you should give offense.

He remains in communion with the Churches of Gaul. He is exiled by faction. Secure in his own innocence.—I am a bishop remaining in the communion of all the Gallic churches and bishops, though in exile, and still distributing communion to the Church through my priests. I am in exile, however, not for any crime, but by faction; and I have been brought before you, the pious emperor, by false reports of a synod, not on account of any consciousness of my crimes, through impious men. And I have no slight witness to my complaint: my lord, your religious Caesar Julian, who endured more contumely from evil men on account of my exile than I endured injury. For the letters of your piety are at hand: and all those things which they contrived for my exile are not hidden, but are false. He himself also, whether the minister or the author of all that was done, is within this city.

That you, Augustus, were circumvented, and your Caesar deceived, I will reveal with such confidence in the condition of my conscience, that if I am shown to have done anything unworthy not only of the holiness of a bishop but even of the integrity of a layman, I will no longer await the priesthood through pardon, but will grow old within the penance of a layman.

He asks to be heard in the presence of the author of his exile. The reasons for this little book.—These things now, most worthy emperor, I leave to your judgment, as to how far and in what manner you command me to speak, and I proceed to those matters which are most especially to be dealt with in this time with you. You will indeed grant for the present, as instruction for the case, that I bring the one by whose agency I am in exile to a confession of the falsehoods he has committed, while he is present. But I will say nothing about him unless you command it. Now however, because I have fear concerning the peril of the world, concerning the guilt of my silence, concerning the judgment of God, and concern for the hope, the life, and the immortality not so much of myself as of you and of all. Because this concern is common to me with very many, this expectation of common hope is from me.

Constantius desires to hear the faith from the bishops and does not hear it. The faith sworn in baptism. The faith repeatedly made new and therefore no faith at all.—Recognize the faith, most excellent and most devout emperor, which you long desire to hear from the bishops, and do not hear. For while those from whom it is sought write their own views, and do not proclaim what belongs to God, they have carried the world around in an endless cycle of error and of strife ever returning upon itself. For it would have been fitting, in the modesty of human weakness, that every mystery of divine knowledge be contained within those very limits of conscience within which one believed, and that after the faith in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit had been confessed and sworn in baptism, nothing else should be either doubted or innovated.

But the presumption, or the pliability, or the error of certain persons has partly fraudulently confessed, and partly boldly transgressed, the immutable constitution of apostolic doctrine: while in the confession of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit it eludes the truth of the natural signification, lest that remain in the understanding which must be confessed in the sacrament of regeneration. On this account, in the conscience of certain persons, neither is the Father father, nor the Son son, nor the Holy Spirit holy spirit. Under the compulsion of this necessity, as though it were an unavoidable occasion, the practice of writing and innovating the faith has from that point grown up. Which practice, after it began to found new things rather than to retain what had been received, neither defended what was old nor confirmed what was new: and the faith became one of times rather than of the Gospels, being both described according to the years and not held according to the confession of baptism.

It is exceedingly dangerous and even pitiable for us that there now exist as many faiths as there are wills, and that we have as many doctrines as there are customs, and that as many occasions of blasphemy spring up as there are vices: while either faiths are written as we wish, or are understood as we do not wish. And whereas, according to one God and one Lord and one baptism, there is also one faith, we depart from that faith which alone exists: and while many faiths are made, they have begun to tend toward there being none at all.

Whence so many faiths are written. The faith changed four times.—For we are mutually conscious that since the synod of the Nicene council nothing else has been done but write the faith. While there is strife over words, while there is dispute over novelties, while there is occasion over ambiguities, while there is complaint over authors, while there is contention over factions, while there is difficulty in reaching agreement, while one has begun to be anathema to another: almost no one now belongs to Christ. For we wander on the uncertain wind of doctrines: and either while we teach, we cause confusion; or while we are taught, we err. Now indeed, what change does the faith of the most recent year already contain within itself? First, that which decrees that homousion be passed over in silence: next, that which in turn decrees and proclaims homousion: third thereafter, that which excuses by indulgence the word ousia simply assumed by the fathers: last, the fourth, which does not excuse but condemns it. And to what end has it finally come?

That neither among us nor among any before us does anything holy and inviolable thereafter endure. But as for the likeness of the Son of God to God the Father, if the faith of our wretched time is such that it is uncertain whether he is like either wholly or only in part; then truly these distinguished arbiters of heavenly mysteries, these investigators of invisible secrets, are bringing calumnies against the professions of faith in God. We decree annual and monthly faiths concerning God, we repent of our decrees, we defend what we have repented of, we anathematize what we have defended: we condemn in our own what belongs to others, or in others' what belongs to us; and biting one another, we have already been consumed by one another.

The evangelical faith is corrupted.—Then faith is sought: as though there were no faith. The faith must be written: as though it were not in the heart. Regenerated through faith, we are now taught toward faith, as though that regeneration were without faith. We learn Christ after baptism; as though any baptism could exist without faith in Christ. We amend, as though sinning against the Holy Spirit admitted of pardon.

But the perpetual cause of this very impiety is chiefly this, that we are unwilling to confess the evangelical faith: while we defend our impieties before the people with much speaking, and with the vanity of high-sounding words we mock the ears of the simple with deceiving words; while we avoid believing concerning the Lord Christ those things which he taught must be believed concerning himself, and under the fair name of peace we creep into a unity of faithlessness, and while rejecting novelties we ourselves again rebel against God with new words, and under the name of the Scriptures we lie about what is not written: wandering, prodigal, impious, while we both alter what abides, and lose what we have received, and presume upon what is irreligious.

We must return to the faith confessed in baptism.—What is observed by sailors as most safe above all in winter on a stormy sea, namely to return in the fury of shipwreck to the port from which they had set sail; or what befits reckless young men, who when in the management of their own household they have transgressed the customs of their fathers' observance and have spent their freedom lavishly, find that under the very fear of losing their patrimony the only necessary and safe recourse for them is to return to their father's way of life: so amid these shipwrecks of faith, with the inheritance of the heavenly patrimony now nearly squandered, the safest course for us is to retain the first and sole evangelical faith confessed and understood in baptism, and not to alter what alone I have received and heard as right belief: not that those things which are contained in the synod of our fathers are to be condemned as written irreligiously and impiously, but because they are seized upon by human rashness for the purpose of contradiction, so that under the name of novelty the Gospel might be denied, in order that it might be dangerously innovated as though under the guise of correction.

What has been corrected always advances, so that while every correction displeases, a correction following upon correction condemns every correction: and as if now, whatever it may be, it is no longer any correction of a correction, but has begun to be a condemnation.

Hilary requests a hearing, intending to set forth the faith from the Scriptures.—How greatly do I now, O Lord Emperor Constantius, truly admire your blessed and devout will, desiring faith only according to what is written: and rightly indeed hastening toward those very words of the only-begotten God, so that a breast capable of imperial solicitude may also be filled with the knowledge of divine utterances. He who rejects this is antichrist, and he who feigns it is anathema. But this one thing I ask through this sincere hearing of your condescension, that in the presence of the synod (at Constantinople) which now disputes concerning the faith, you deign to hear a few things from me out of the evangelical Scriptures, and I will speak with you in the words of my Lord Jesus Christ, of whom I am either an exile or a priest. For earthen vessels contain no ignoble treasures: and the weaker bodies are the more to be revered: and among us it is the unlearned fishermen who have lately spoken of God.

Upon the humble and trembling man God looks, according to the prophet, at his word. You seek faith, O emperor: hear it, not from new documents, but from the books of God. Know that it can be granted in the West, whence those who come shall recline in the kingdom of God with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Remember that it is not a question of philosophy, but the doctrine of the Gospel. I ask a hearing not so much for myself as for you and for the churches of God. For I have the faith within myself, I have no need of what is external: what I have received I hold, and I do not alter what belongs to God.

Heretics draw the Scriptures to their own side.—But remember nonetheless that there is no heretic who does not now lie by claiming that he preaches according to the Scriptures those things by which he blasphemes. For hence Marcellus, when he reads the Word of God, does not know it. Hence Photinus, when he speaks of the man Jesus Christ, is ignorant of him. Hence also Sabellius, while he does not understand that I and the Father are one, is without God the Father and without God the Son. Hence also Montanus through his frenzied women defends another Paraclete. Hence also Manichaeus and Marcion hate the law: because the letter kills, and the prince of this world is the devil. All of them speak the Scriptures without the sense of Scripture, and put forward faith without faith. For the Scriptures consist not in reading but in understanding; and they consist not in transgression but in charity.

The manner of the discourse whose abundance is requested.—Hear, I ask, those things which are written concerning Christ: lest under them those things which are not written be proclaimed. Lend your ears to those things which I am about to speak from the books: lift up your faith toward God. Hear what profits unto faith, unto unity, unto eternity. I am about to speak with you with honor for your reign and your faith, all things tending toward the peace of East and West, in public awareness, before the dissenting synod, amid a notorious dispute.

A pledge of the future discourse.—I set forth meanwhile a pledge of my future discourse before you.

I will defend nothing tending to scandal, nor anything that is outside the Gospel: but you will understand from me that in the mystery of the only true God, and of Jesus Christ whom he has sent, there is proclaimed one God the Father from whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus Christ through whom are all things, born of God, who is before eternal ages, and was in the beginning with God, God the Word: who is the image of the invisible God, in whom dwells all the fullness of divinity bodily, who, being in the form of God, humbling himself for the cause of our salvation, received the form of a servant from the conception of the Holy Spirit of a virgin, made obedient unto death, even the death of the cross: and after the resurrection from death thereafter sitting in the heavenly places, he will come as judge of the living and the dead, and king of all eternal ages.

For he is the only-begotten God, and true God, and great God, and God over all: and every tongue shall confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. These things I have so believed in the Holy Spirit that I cannot be taught any faith concerning the Lord Jesus Christ beyond this: not thereby taking away the religious devotion of the faith of the fathers, but, according to the symbol of my regeneration and the knowledge of the evangelical doctrine, not departing from it in accordance with these things.