The letter of the Synod of Sardica (343/4). Your kindly nature, O most blessed Augustus and lord, is in harmony with a kindly will; and since mercy flows abundantly from the fountain of your fatherly devotion, we are confident that what we ask we may easily obtain. Not only with words, but even with tears we beseech that the catholic churches may no longer be afflicted with the gravest injuries, nor endure intolerable persecutions and insults, and — what is abominable — at the hands of our own brethren.
Let your clemency provide and decree that all judges everywhere, to whom the government of the provinces has been entrusted, and to whom only the care and concern of public business ought to pertain, should abstain from meddling in religious observance, and should not henceforth presume, usurp, and imagine that they may examine the causes of the clergy and break and harass innocent men by various afflictions, threats, violence, and terrors. Your singular and admirable wisdom understands that it is not fitting, not right, that men should be forced and compelled against their will and resistance to submit and give themselves over, oppressed by violence, to those who do not cease to scatter the corrupt seeds of an adulterate doctrine.
For this reason you labour and govern the commonwealth with wholesome counsels, you keep watch and remain vigilant, so that all whom you rule may enjoy the sweetest liberty. In no other way can things that have been thrown into confusion be settled, nor things torn asunder be held together, unless each man, bound by no necessity of servitude, has entire freedom of living. Surely the voice of those who cry out ought to be heard by your gentleness: 'I am a catholic, I will not be a heretic; I am a Christian, not an Arian; and it is better for me to die in this age than, under the domineering power of some private man, to corrupt the chaste virginity of the truth.'
And it ought to seem just to your holiness, most glorious Augustus, that those who fear the Lord God and the divine judgment should not be polluted or defiled by execrable blasphemies, but should have the power to follow those bishops and prelates who both keep inviolate the bonds of charity and desire to have perpetual and sincere peace. For it cannot be, nor does reason allow, that contraries 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 we both hope and believe without doubt — these considerations move your goodness, which is not merely implanted but inborn, command that the governors of provinces bestow no zeal, no favour, no partiality upon the most grievous heretics. Let your leniency permit the peoples to hear those teachers whom they wish, whom they judge fit, whom they choose, and to celebrate together the divine solemnities of the mysteries, and to offer prayers for your safety and blessedness. Let no perverse or envious man speak malicious things. Indeed there will be no suspicion, not to say of sedition, but not even of harsh murmuring. All will be quiet and modest.
And now those who are stained with the Arian and pestilent contagion do not cease to corrupt the sincerity of the Gospels with impious mouth and sacrilegious mind, and to deprave the right rule of the apostles. They do not understand the divine prophets. Crafty and cunning, they use a certain artifice, so as to cover their enclosed and ruinous corruption under a veil of chosen words, not pouring out their venomous poison until they have — under the pretext of the Christian name — snatched and ensnared the simple and innocent, and, lest they perish alone, made them guilty as partakers of their horrendous crime.
And this too we beseech of your devotion: that those who are still held either in exile or in desert places — namely those excellent priests, who excel in the dignity of so great a name — you would command to return to their own sees, so that everywhere there may be welcome liberty and joyful gladness. Who does not see, who does not understand? After nearly four hundred years, since the Only-begotten Son of God deigned to come to the aid of the perishing human race, as though before this there had been no apostles, and after their martyrdoms and departures no Christians, a new and most foul plague has now been poured out — not of corrupted air, but of execrable blasphemies, the Arian. Did those, then, who believed before, hold an empty hope of immortality?
We have lately learned that these fabrications were devised by the two Eusebii, by Narcissus, by Theodore, by Stephen, by Acacius, by Menophantus, and by two ignorant and wicked young men, Ursacius and Valens. Their letters are produced and are even refuted by suitable witnesses, who heard them barking rather than debating. Those who imprudently and incautiously mix their communion with these men — since they will become associates of their crimes and partakers of their misdeeds — must needs, when the day of judgment shall come, suffer eternal torments together with those who are already in this age cast out and repudiated. II. Narrative text. (6).
It is now doubtful to no one that those holy men undertook such care for the acquittal of the saint Athanasius that, after the sentences of the synod — which, out of reverence for priestly judgment, it had been lawful to keep within priestly or ecclesiastical conscience — it became necessary to write to the emperor and to organize an embassy. But what else do they beg by these letters than freedom of faith from the contagion of the Arian name, and pray that chains, prisons, tribunals, and all that deadly apparatus, and even novel modes of inquiry against the accused, be restrained? God taught the knowledge of Himself rather than exacted it, and, winning authority for His precepts by wonder at heavenly works, spurned a will compelled to confess Him.
If such violence were applied to the true faith, episcopal teaching would go to meet it and would say: 'God is the Lord of the universe, He needs no forced obedience, He does not require a compelled confession; He is not to be deceived, but to be deserved; He is to be venerated for our sake rather than His own; I cannot receive any but the willing, hear any but him who prays, seal any but him who professes; He is to be sought with simplicity, learned by confession, loved with charity, venerated with fear, retained by uprightness of will.' But what indeed is this, that priests are compelled by chains to fear God, and commanded to it by punishments?
Priests are held in prisons, the common people are arranged in custody bound in a chained line, virgins are stripped for punishment, and bodies consecrated to God are exposed to the public gaze to serve as a spectacle and for interrogation. They compel men, indeed, not that all should be Christians, but that they should be Arians, and by their wickedness they force the faith confessed in God into fellowship with their own sacrilege. By the authority even of their own name they lead the emperor astray, affirming as right that, under the appearance of the fear of God, he should hand over his own subjects to this perversity. They demand inquisitions, they crave the aids of the courts, they implore the royal authority.
And not even so do they blush at the perversity of their crime, in that they could not by any right of coercion extort the connivance of the peoples. If these things, brought forth from old papers, were instructing the age of our own time, there would, I think, have had to be doubt in matters so great. And when the accused was being demanded to be sentenced by any others whatsoever, inquiry would be made into the reliability of the documents, into the life of the judges, into the trustworthiness of the accusers, and even into the very character and deeds of the man himself. For the associated condemnation of the Arians would upset his acquittal, and it would be of great danger to dissolve the judgment together with the charge and the innocence, when no fresh inquiry had been undertaken, and when all the authority of antiquity, together with the doctrine of the faith, stood by in his own defence.
But when those very men who were then condemned as Arian heretics harry the realm, throw everything into confusion, and by power and ambition corrupt all men, then Athanasius, if he was guilty, may still be guilty. Let the witnesses speak, let the judges see to it, let the doctrine of the faith shine forth by evangelical and apostolic precepts. What dulling of understanding is this? What obtuseness of heart? What forgetfulness of hope? What love of crimes? What hatred of truth? They pervert the love of God into favour of the condemned. I come now to what has recently been done, in which the very profession of the crime disdained to contain itself within the secrecy of its own craft. Eusebius is bishop of Vercelli, a man serving God his whole life long.
He, after the synod of Arles — since bishop Paulinus had withstood such great crimes of these men — was ordered to come to Milan. The synagogue of the malignant being already gathered there, he was for ten days forbidden to approach the church, while their perverse malice spent itself against so holy a man. Then, when all their schemes had been lulled to sleep, he was summoned wherever it pleased them. He came together with the Roman clergy and Lucifer, bishop of Sardinia; and being urged in the assembly to subscribe against Athanasius, he said: that the priestly faith ought first to be established; that he had ascertained certain of those present to be defiled with the stain of heresy.
He set forth in their midst the faith expounded at Nicaea, which we mentioned above, pledging that he would do all they demanded if they would write out a profession of the faith. Dionysius, bishop of Milan, first received the paper. When he began to write what was to be professed, Valens violently wrenched the pen and paper from his hands, crying out that it could by no means be allowed that anything should be done from that source. The matter, after much outcry, was brought to the awareness of the people; a grievous grief arose in all; the faith was attacked by the priests. Fearing therefore the judgment of the people, those men passed over from the Lord's house to the palace. What sort of sentence they wrote against Eusebius, long before they entered the church, the sentence itself declares concerning them.