After this the remaining number of columns was set in place with such ease, and the church was so magnificently constructed, and the peoples thirsted with greater ardour for faith in God, that, at the captive's admonition, an embassy of the whole nation was sent to the emperor Constantine. The whole affair was set forth. He was entreated to send priests who might complete the gift of God begun among them. And when he had sent these to them with all joy and honour, he was much more gladdened by this than if he had joined to the Roman empire nations unknown and kingdoms unheard of.
These things, as thus done, were set forth to us by that most faithful man Bacurius, king of that very nation and among us count of the domestics, whose greatest care was for both religion and truth, when at that time he was living with us at Jerusalem, quite harmoniously, as duke of the Palestinian frontier. But let us return to what we began. After Helena, the mother of the religious prince, endowed with the highest honours of the Roman realm, had departed from this light, Constantia, then left the widow of Licinius, enjoyed the solace of her brother Augustus.
It happened that a certain presbyter opened up matters of this sort in the presence of the prince's sister; and when much familiarity granted him opportunity, he began little by little to sprinkle in his talk, saying that envy had been engendered against Arius, and that his own bishop, goaded by the sting of rivalry, had contentiously stirred up the affair on account of private quarrels, because Arius was held dear enough among the common people. By suggesting these and other things of this kind more frequently, he won over the mind of Constantia to his own.
When she, being about to die, was visited by her brother and was gently and reverently addressed by him, she is said to have begged of him as a last favour, that he would receive the presbyter into his familiarity and would listen to whatever things should be suggested to him by that man for his hope and salvation; saying that she indeed, now departing from the light, cared for nothing, but was anxious for her brother's estate, lest perchance for the punishment of the innocent he might suffer the ruin of his kingdom. Having received these admonitions from his sister, and believing his own sister's solicitude on his behalf to be faithful, he lent his ear to the presbyter, and meanwhile ordered Arius to be summoned from exile, that he might set forth how he thought concerning the faith.
Then that man drew up a confession of faith which seemed to contain not indeed our meaning, yet our words and profession. The emperor indeed marvelled, and thought that one and the same doctrine was contained in his exposition and in that of the council formerly held.
Yet he in no way relaxed the vigour of his mind, but sent him back again to the examination of a council, since, indeed, priests were being invited to come together from all the world for the dedication of Jerusalem. He wrote to them concerning his name, that, if they approved the exposition of his faith and recognized that he had either been circumvented at that time through envy, as he alleged, or was now corrected from his error, they might use a clement judgment toward him — seeing that the moderation of the council had been so great that the assent even of his bishop Alexander should be accommodated to it, and not overthrown. But by those who at first, favouring his undertakings, had subscribed with dissimulation, he was easily received.
But when he had gone on to Alexandria, there his whole undertaking was frustrated, since indeed there is room for deceits among the ignorant, but to aim deceit at those who know it is nothing else than to provoke laughter. Meanwhile, while these things were being vainly agitated at Alexandria, the venerable Augustus Constantine, in a suburban villa of Nicomedia, in the thirty-first year of his reign, ended his days, having by testament written his children heirs to the succession of the Roman world.
At which time, since indeed Constantius, to whom he had decreed the kingdom of the East, was not present, it is said that he secretly summoned [a certain presbyter], whom he had thereafter treated familiarly, and delivered to him the testament which he had written, and adjured him under oath to hand it into no one's hands but Constantius's, when he should have come. And because the eunuchs who were in the palace also favoured this, by their art the report of the emperor's death was suppressed until the arrival of Constantius. But when Constantius had come, the presbyter restored the deposit. For the grace of this benefit the emperor, greedy of empire, was so bound to him that he who had striven to command all men suffered himself with an even mind to be commanded by that man.
From this, with the emperor bound to himself, he began to press for the restoration of Arius and to persuade him to compel the unwilling priests to acquiesce. At that time at Alexandria Alexander, at Jerusalem Maximus the confessor, at Constantinople likewise Alexander — as we have learned from the writings of Athanasius — were exercising the priesthood. But Eusebius, who was at Nicomedia, of whose dissimulation in subscribing we spoke above, having obtained an ample space of time and become familiar to the prince through the presbyter, contrived to overturn everything and to recall the acts of the council to nought. He caused Arius, who was vainly tarrying at Alexandria, to come, and by imperial edicts a council to be summoned once more to Constantinople.
There assembled chiefly those who followed Arius and Eusebius, who, having often conferred with Alexander that he should receive Arius, yet accomplishing nothing, did not even refrain from injuries against him. At last, appointing him a fixed day, they gave notice that either he himself should receive Arius, or, if he resisted, he should know that, being driven from the church and thrust into exile, Arius was to be received by another. Then he, on the night which lay before the appointed day, lying beneath the altar and passing the whole night vigilant in prayer and tears, commended the cause of the church to the Lord.
And when the light had risen and yet Alexander did not cease from prayer, Eusebius with all his followers, like the standard-bearer of a heretical war, went up in the morning to the house of Arius and bade him follow quickly to the church, protesting that Alexander, unless he there acquiesced, should be expelled and yield his place. So then there was the highest expectation of all, to which side the perseverance of Alexander or the insistence of Eusebius and Arius would incline. And when the minds of all were held in suspense with expectation, as in such a matter, Arius, going to the church, thronged by a crowd of bishops and peoples, turned aside to a public place for the cause of human necessity.
When he had sat down there, his intestines and all his inward parts flowed out into the pit of the privy; and so in such a place he paid the death worthy of his blasphemous and foul mind. When this had afterward been announced in the church to Eusebius and to those who together with him were wearying that holy and innocent man Alexander about receiving Arius, they, overcome with shame and covered with confusion, departed. Then was fulfilled the word unto the glory of the Lord which Alexander had proclaimed to God in his prayer, saying:
«Judge, O Lord, between me and the threats of Eusebius and the violence of Arius.» But these things for the present had indeed a little effect of shame; yet the heretics, conferring among themselves, and fearing lest perchance, if the affair as it was done should come whole to the emperor Constantius, he might not only withdraw from their perfidy, in which he was cunningly ensnared and held, but also decree something more severe by royal authority against the authors of his deception, arranged through the eunuchs, whom they held already deceived in the perfidy, that the emperor should learn of Arius's death as composedly and as generally as possible, and should hear nothing that might seem to indicate God's vengeance.
When these things had thus been done concerning the matter — Now at Alexandria, upon the death of Alexander, Athanasius had received the see. But that this same man was of keen intellect and exceedingly vigilant in ecclesiastical affairs had already then become sufficiently known to the heretics, when he had come to the council at Nicaea with his aged bishop Alexander, by whose suggestions the deceits and fallacies of the heretics were vigilantly detected. As soon, therefore, as they learned that he had been made bishop, judging — as the case showed — that their affairs would not easily prosper through his solicitude, they set about in every way to devise against him the engines of deception.
But it does not seem to me out of order to repeat above a few things concerning this man's origin, and of what training he had been from a boy, as we have received it from those who had passed their life with him, and to record it. At the time when at Alexandria bishop Alexander was keeping the day of Peter the martyr, when, after the solemnities were completed, he was awaiting the clergy who were to come together to his banquet in a place near the sea, he sees from afar boys upon the shore of the sea imitating in play, as is wont to be done, a bishop and those things which it is the custom to do in the churches. But when he had intently and for a long while watched the boys, he sees certain more secret and mystical things being enacted by them. Immediately perturbed, he ordered the clergy to be called to him and showed them what he himself was seeing from afar.
Then he commanded them to go and to bring all the boys, arrested, to him. And when they were present, he inquired what game was theirs and what they had done, and how. They, as such an age is wont, at first denied through fear, then disclosed the deed in order, and confessed that certain catechumens had been baptized by them through Athanasius, who had been the make-believe bishop of that boyish game.
Then he, diligently inquiring of those who were said to have been baptized what they had been asked and what they had answered, and likewise of him who had asked, when he sees that everything held according to the rite of our religion, having conferred with the council of the clergy, is reported to have determined that for those upon whom the water had been poured with the questions and answers entire, the baptism ought not to be repeated; but those whom that game had appeared to have as presbyters or as ministers, the parents being called together, he handed over to the church to be nurtured, under the adjuration of God.
When Athanasius had been instructed even a little, he was straightway restored by his parents to the priest, like a faithful thing of the Lord's committed to trust, and, like a certain Samuel, was nurtured in the temple of the Lord; and by him, as he was going to the fathers in a good old age, Athanasius was chosen to carry after him the priestly ephod. But so great were this man's struggles in the church for the integrity of the faith, that even concerning him that seems to have been spoken which is written: «For I will show him how much he must suffer for my name's sake.» For against his persecutions the whole world conspired, and the princes of the earth were stirred up; nations, kingdoms, and armies came together against him. But he preserved that divine saying, saying:
«If an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; if battle rise up against me, in this will I hope.» But since his deeds are so many and so great that the magnitude of the matters suffers me to pass over nothing, while the multitude of the deeds, being exceedingly great, compels me to omit much, my mind wavers in uncertainty, being unable to decide what to keep and what to leave out. And therefore we shall record the few things which pertain to the matter; the rest his fame will narrate — reporting, without doubt, less than the truth. For it will find nothing that it can add. So then, when Constantius alone obtained the kingdom of the East — Constantine his brother having been slain by the soldiers not far from Aquileia at the river Alsa — Constans, brother of both, governed the West industriously enough.
For Constantius, by nature and with a royal disposition, while he indulged too much those first fosterers of his reign, was through the eunuchs craftily deceived into perfidy by perverse priests, and with intent enough zeal complied with their depraved contentions. But they, fearing lest perchance the opportunity of approaching the king should at some time be given to Athanasius, and through him the truth of the faith, which they were perverting, should be taught according to the Scriptures, set about in every way to accuse him before the prince and to represent him as guilty of all crimes and disgraces — to the point that they showed the emperor an arm of a human body carried in a casket, which they affirmed had been cut off by Athanasius, for the sake of the magic art, from the body of a certain Arsenius.
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sedetaliaquamplurimaeriminosasimuletflagitiosaconponunt, quibusexcausisimperatoriuberetconvocatop. CXVIIaed. Bened. Phot. p. 481a,. Symeon. Vit. Athanas. p. CXLIVbsuounoexcomitibus, adnitentequoqueArchelaotunccomiteorientisnecnoneteo, quiFoenicenprovinciamgubernabat, congregariiubet. eodedueiturAthanasius, loculuscumhumanobrachiocircumfertur, in- vidiaehorrornonsolumreligiosas, sedetvilesanimaspervadit.
But they compose also very many other criminal and at the same time disgraceful charges, for which causes the emperor ordered — one of his companions being summoned, and with the further support of Archelaus, then count of the East, as well as of him who governed the province of Phoenicia — that a council be gathered. Thither Athanasius was led; the casket with the human arm was carried about; the horror of the odious spectacle pervaded not only religious but also base souls.
Now this Arsenius, whose arm was said to have been cut off, had at one time been a reader of Athanasius, and, dreading correction on account of a fault, had withdrawn himself from the assembly. Those disgraceful men, thinking at the outset of their concocted charge, kept him hidden with a certain person whom they had believed most trustworthy for their crimes, retained him — that the charge might be brought against Athanasius; and whether the very contemplation of humanity or divine providence impelled him, escaping secretly through the silence of night, he sailed out from his confinement to Tyre, and on the day before the last day for pleading the case, Arsenius presented himself to Athanasius and informed him how the course of events stood. Athanasius bade the man be at his house and that his presence be made known to no one.
Meanwhile the council was convened, into which quite a number of those privy to the concocted calumny came together, almost all with hostile mind and prejudgment against Athanasius. About the same time Paphnutius the confessor, of whom we made mention above, was present, being conscious of Athanasius's innocence. When he had seen Maximus, bishop of Jerusalem, who together with him had stood forth a confessor with an eye gouged out and a knee-tendon severed, but who out of excessive simplicity suspected nothing of the priests' wickedness, seated with the rest whom the stain of the faction had made allies, he did not hesitate to approach the midst of the assembly:
'You,' he said, 'O Maximus, with whom I share one and the same badge of confession, with whom my mortal sight was likewise gouged out and thereby won for me a clearer vision of the divine light — you, I say, I will not suffer to sit in the council of the malicious, nor to enter in with those who work iniquity.' And laying his hand upon him, he raised him up from their midst; and instructing him point by point, he thereafter joined Athanasius to himself in perpetual communion. But meanwhile the case is set forth. First is brought in the accusation of a certain woman, who claimed that on some occasion she had received Athanasius into her lodging, and that by night, while she suspected nothing, she had suffered from him the violence of defilement. Athanasius is ordered to be brought in to answer these charges.
He entered together with his presbyter Timothy, and admonished him that, after the woman had finished her speaking, Timothy himself should answer to what she had said, while Athanasius remained silent. And when the woman had finished delivering what she had been schooled in, Timothy turned to her and said: 'Truly, woman, did I ever lodge with you? Or did I do you violence, as you assert?' Then she, with the shamelessness such women have, thrusting her hook at Timothy, cried: 'You, you did violence to me; you in that very place defiled my chastity!' At the same time, turning to the judges, she began to call the faith of God to witness that she was speaking the truth. Then a ridiculous shame began to seize them all, because so easily, while the true defendant was silent, the fabrication of the trumped-up crime had been laid bare.
Yet the judges were not permitted to hold an inquiry concerning the woman — whence, or through whom, or in what manner this slander had been contrived — since the liberty of judgment lay with the accusers themselves. From here they pass to another charge. A deed unheard of in all the ages is brought forward. 'This,' they say, 'is a matter in which no one can be deceived by the trickery of words; the thing is enacted before the eyes, while words fall silent. This arm, Athanasius,' they say, 'accuses you of having severed it. This is the right hand of Arsenius; declare in what manner, or for what uses, you cut it off.' Then he replied: 'Who among you knew Arsenius, that you should recognize this to be his right hand?'
Several rose up who said they knew Arsenius very well, among whom some were without complicity in the plot. Athanasius then begged the judges that they would order his own man, whom the matter required, to be brought in. And when Arsenius had been brought in, Athanasius, lifting up his face, said to the council and the judges: 'This is Arsenius.' And raising up his right hand no less, he said: 'This too is his right hand, and this is his left. But as for this hand which these men present, look you into whence it comes.' Then, as it were a kind of night and darkness was poured over the eyes of the accusers; they knew not what to do, nor whither to turn. For the very witnesses who a little before had said they knew him were now confirming that this was indeed Arsenius.
But since the council was being held not for the purpose of judging the man, but of crushing him, a sudden uproar arose from them all; it was clamored that Athanasius was a magician and deceived the eyes of the beholders, and that such a man ought by no means to live any longer. And making a rush upon him, they prepared to tear him apart with their own hands. But Archelaus, who together with the others presided over the council by the emperor's command, snatched him out of the hands of those who would have torn him and led him out through hidden exits, and counseled him to entrust his safety to flight, wherever alone he might. [The remainder condemns Athanasius as one who had confessed, so to speak, to the charges laid against him.]
And having so contrived the proceedings, they sent word throughout the whole world; and with the emperor compelling the assent of the rest of the bishops to their crime, from this point Athanasius is now driven a fugitive over the whole earth, nor was any place safe for him; and men are stirred up by imperial edicts to search him out. Rewards are offered to informers, if anyone should bring in Athanasius alive if possible, or at least his head. Thus with all the might of the realm they moved against him in vain — the man for whom, hidden in the pit of a waterless cistern, it seemed he had never seen the sun. But as it happened, when he had been betrayed, admonished as it were by the Spirit of God on the very night on which men were coming with informers to seize him, after six years he removed to another place.
Thus those who had come were frustrated, and their masters too were turned to flight, so that punishment should be sought from the innocent maidservant as a false informer. Presuming nothing henceforth to be safe for himself in the kingdom of Constantius, Athanasius withdrew as a fugitive to the domains of Constans. By him he was received with sufficient honor and reverence; and Constans, having more carefully learned the cause of Athanasius, which he had come to know by report, wrote to his brother that he had ascertained for certain that Athanasius, priest of the Most High God, was suffering unjust flights and exiles.
He would therefore do rightly if without any trouble he restored Athanasius to his own see; but if he would not, Constans declared that it would be his own care to accomplish this himself, penetrating into the innermost parts of his brother's realm and exacting from the authors of the crime the most fitting punishments that he threatened. His brother, aware of this, feigning kindness, of his own accord bids Athanasius come to him, and having touched him with a light reproof, permits him to go in safety to his own church. Yet the emperor, admonished by wicked counselors, said: 'It is no great thing, Athanasius, that the bishops ask of you — that of the many churches which are at Alexandria you concede one to the congregations of those who are unwilling to commune with you.' Then Athanasius, God suggesting it to him, found a counsel ready for the occasion.
'And what is there, O emperor,' he said, 'that could be denied to you when you ask, you who hold the power of commanding all things? But there is one thing which I pray, that you would also gladly grant my little petition.' And when the emperor promised that he would perform all that Athanasius wished, however difficult they might be, if he would willingly yield this one thing, Athanasius said: 'This is what I ask, that — since here too' (for the matter was being transacted at Antioch) 'there are peoples of ours who are unwilling to commune with those men — one church be granted them to hold.' The emperor, well pleased, promised that this seemed to him most equitable and greatly to be granted.
But when he had referred the matter to those whose counsels he was using, they answered that they were unwilling either to receive a church there or to give one here, because each man was consulting more for himself than for the absent. Thus the emperor, marveling at Athanasius's prudence, bids him hasten more quickly to take up his own church. But when the emperor Constans, through the crime of Magnentius, was cut off from his kingdom and his life at once, those old instigators once again began to rouse up hatreds against Athanasius in the prince; and having driven him from the church, they send in his place a certain George, an associate of their own perfidy and savagery. [For previously certain rewards were being promised to informers.]
He too, when he had come to the western parts to avenge his brother's murder and recover the kingdom, and when, the tyrant being extinguished, he alone held the citadel of the realm, sets about to wear down the western bishops and, through deception, to force them into consent with the Arian heresy — the condemnation of Athanasius having first been sent ahead as it were a most powerful battering-ram of siege. On this account a council of bishops is convened at Milan. Many were deceived; but Dionysius, Eusebius, Paulinus, Rhodanius, and Lucifer, proclaiming that there was fraud in the business, and asserting that the subscription against Athanasius was contrived for no other cause than the destruction of the faith, were thrust into exile.
To these Hilary too is joined, being either unknown to the rest or disregarded. But the outcome of the affair showed that the business had been carried out with such a design. There, according to what the Easterners had composed at Seleucia, these crafty and cunning men easily circumvented the simple and inexperienced priests of the West, proposing to them in this manner: whom did they wish rather to honor and adore, the homoousion or Christ? And since those men were ignorant of the force of the word — what 'homoousion' signified — the term was, as it were, brought into a kind of loathing and execration, they affirming that they believed in Christ, not in the homoousion.
Thus the minds of many — except a few who fell knowingly — were deceived, and coming against what the fathers had written at Nicaea, they defile the word 'homoousion' as though it were unknown and alien to the Scriptures, [contaminating themselves] with the fellowship of the heretics. In that storm the face of the Church was foul and exceedingly base; for it was being ravaged not, as before, by outsiders, but by her own. One drove into flight, another was driven; and each belonged to the Church. Nowhere was there an altar, nor sacrifice, nor libations; yet prevarication and lapse were being wrought, but they did not glory alike, because the Church grieved even [over her own]. Therefore Liberius, who at that same time was fulfilling the priesthood in the city of Rome as successor after Julius (son of Marcus, whom Silvester had preceded), [another] is substituted in his place.
And [the Church was divided] not so much by diversity of sect as by that of communion and ordination. But at Jerusalem Cyril, having received the priesthood after Maximus with an ordination already confused, sometimes varied in faith, more often in communion. At Alexandria, however, George exercised the episcopate which he had seized quite shamelessly by force, so that he reckoned that the fasces of jurisdiction had been entrusted to him rather than a priesthood to be administered by devout offices. At Antioch indeed many things were done, and very confusedly, at various times. For when Eudoxius had died and many bishops of various cities were striving after that see with the utmost ambition, at last, against the decrees of the council, they transfer thither Meletius from Sebaste, a city of Armenia.
Yet he too is again thrust into exile by those very men, because, contrary to their expectation, he began to preach in the church not the faith of Arius, but ours. A great crowd, following him after he had been expelled from the church, was severed from the heretics [and clung to him]. Meanwhile, so that at length exceeding-rich malice might rage even against its very self, [these Antiochenes,] cut off from the church, are split once more into three sects and parties.
For those men whom we mentioned a little above as not acquiescing in the dissimulations of Eusebius and the rest, and as having endured exile together with Arius, afterwards refused to commune even with Arius himself when he returned from exile, on the ground that by a feigned confession he had communed with those who confessed the Son to be of the very substance of God the Father; for they themselves [held] what Arius had first taught — that the Son was created and made out of things non-existent, not begotten — with sufficient free, or rather shameless, blasphemy. [Eunomius,] corrupted by an inward and outward royal disease, yet exceedingly powerful in dialectical art, wrote many things against our faith and gave laws of disputation to his followers; from whom even now the Eunomian heresy is named.
Another too, Macedonius by name, whom, after our men had been expelled — nay rather slain — they had set up as bishop at Constantinople, because he confessed the Son to be like the Father, although he blasphemed the Holy Spirit equally as those men did, was nevertheless expelled by them, because he preached the Son too to be similar, as concerning the Father. Yet neither is he joined to our men, from whom he held a different opinion concerning the Spirit.
Thus that pestilential beast, which through Arius had first raised its head as it were from the nether world, suddenly appeared three-formed: through the Eunomians, who say the Son is in all things unlike the Father, because in no way can the thing made be like the maker; through the Arians, who say the Son can indeed be called like the Father, but by the bounty of grace, not by the property of nature — that is, insofar as a creature can be compared to the Creator; and through the Macedonians, who say the Son is indeed like the Father in all things, but that the Holy Spirit has nothing in common with the Father and the Son. These things indeed were done among them thus; but even as it is written concerning such:
'They were torn asunder and were not pricked in heart' (Ps. 34:16). Very many of them indeed, who seemed to lead a more attentive life, and very many monasteries at Constantinople and the neighboring provinces, and noble bishops, rather followed the error of Macedonius. But the emperor Constantius, while he is preparing to go with arms to meet Julian — whom he had left as Caesar in Gaul, and who of his own accord was presuming to himself the dignity of Augustus — died in the twenty-fourth year of his reign after his father's death, in the town of Mopsucrenae in Cilicia. After him Julian obtains the principate, first presumptuously seized, then as legitimate, and now alone. He at first, as though censuring the misdeeds of Constantius, bids the bishops be released from exile; but afterwards he rises up against our men with the whole art of doing harm.
Meanwhile those bishops who had survived are released from their exiles. For Liberius, bishop of the city of Rome, returned while Constantius was still living; but whether this was because he had acquiesced in the emperor's will as to subscribing, or because he had yielded for the favor of the Roman people, by whom on departing he had been besought with entreaties, I do not hold ascertained for certain.