Letter 140

140. To the Church of Antioch

Who will give me wings, as of a dove? And I shall fly to you and lay to rest the longing which I have for meeting your love. But as it is, I am in want not of wings only, but of the body itself, long since worn out by lengthy illness, and now utterly crushed by continual afflictions. For who is so adamantine in soul, who so wholly without sympathy and so savage, as to hear the groan that assails us from every side — like some downcast choir sounding forth a common and harmonious lament — and not suffer in his soul, and be bowed down to the ground, and be utterly consumed by these helpless cares? But the holy God is able to give some release from these helpless straits and to grant us some breathing space from our long toils. Therefore I ask that you too have the same comfort, and, rejoicing in the hope of comfort, endure the present pain of your afflictions. For if we are paying the penalty of our sins, the scourges are enough henceforth to win remission of God's wrath against us; or if through these trials we have been called to the contests for piety, the steward of the games is just, and will not allow us to be tried beyond what we are able to endure, but, for what we have already toiled through, will render us the crown of endurance and of hope in him. Let us not, then, grow weary in contending in the struggles for piety, nor through despair cast away what we have laboured for. For not one act of courage nor a brief toil displays the steadfastness of the soul; but he who proves our hearts wishes us, through a long and protracted trial, to be shown forth as wearers of the crown of righteousness.

Only let our purpose be kept unyielding, let the firmness of our faith in Christ be preserved unshaken, and he who will help us will come quickly; he will come and will not delay. For expect affliction upon affliction, hope upon hope, yet a little while, yet a little while. Thus the Holy Spirit knows how to console his own nurslings with the promise of what is to come. For after the afflictions comes hope, and from close at hand the things hoped for are present. For though one should name the whole of human life, it is an utterly tiny span, in comparison with that boundless age which is laid up in our hopes.

As for the faith, we neither accept a newer one written for us by others, nor do we ourselves dare to hand on the offspring of our own thought, lest we make the words of piety merely human; but what we have been taught by the holy fathers, this we declare to those who ask us. There is, therefore, established from the fathers in our church the faith written by the holy fathers who assembled at Nicaea; which we suppose to be on your lips too, but, lest we incur the charge of negligence, we do not refuse to set down the very words in writing. They are these. We believe in one God the Father almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten of the Father, only-begotten — that is, of the substance of the Father; light of light, true God of true God; begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things came to be, both the things in heaven and the things on earth. Who for us men and for our salvation came down; was made flesh, became man, suffered, and rose again on the third day; ascended into the heavens, and is coming to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit. But those who say, "There was once when he was not," and, "Before he was begotten he was not," and that "he came to be out of things that are not," or who affirm that the Son of God is of another hypostasis or substance, or changeable, or alterable — these the catholic and apostolic Church anathematizes.

In these things we believe. But since the statement concerning the Holy Spirit is left undefined — the fighters against the Spirit not having yet appeared at that time — they were silent about the necessity of anathematizing those who say that the Holy Spirit is of a created and servile nature. For nothing at all of the divine and blessed Trinity is created.