Letter 226

226. To the ascetics under his charge.

The holy God is able to grant us also the joy that comes from meeting in person, since we long both to see you always and to hear how you fare; for in nothing else do we find rest for our souls than in your progress and in your perfection through the commandments of Christ. But as long as this is not granted to us, we count it necessary to visit you through brothers who are most genuine and who fear the Lord, and to converse with your love by letter. For this very reason we have sent our most reverent and most genuine brother and fellow-worker in the Gospel, Meletius, my fellow-presbyter, who will set before you the longing we have for you and the care we feel for your souls; for night and day we beseech the Lord on behalf of your good standing, that we too may have boldness on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ through your salvation, and that you may shine out in the splendour of the saints, when your work has been tested by the righteous judgement of God.

At the same time the hardship of this present season fills us with much anxiety, a season in which all the churches have been shaken and all souls are being sifted. For certain men have opened their mouths without restraint against their fellow-servants. Falsehood is spoken without fear; the truth is kept concealed. Those who are accused are condemned without trial, while those who accuse are believed without examination. Hence I too, hearing that many letters are being circulated against me, branding us and pillorying us and accusing us on matters for which we have our defence ready at the tribunal of truth, was at first inclined to keep silent—as indeed I did; for this is now the third year in which, struck by these slanders, I bear the lashes of the accusation, content that I have the Lord, who knows what is hidden, as witness of the calumny. But since I see that many have already taken our silence as a confirmation of the slanders, and have supposed that we keep silent not out of forbearance but because we have no mouth to open in defence of the truth, for this reason I have undertaken to write to you, urging your love in Christ not to accept as true, without qualification, the slanders that come from one party only; for, as it is written, the law judges no one unless it first hears him and learns what he is doing.

And yet, for a fair-minded judge the facts themselves are enough to make the truth plain. So that, even if we keep silent, you are able to look closely at what is being done. For those who charge us with false doctrine have now plainly shown themselves to be joining the party of the heretics; and those who condemn us on account of the writings of others are seen to be contradicting their own confessions, which they deposited with us in writing. Consider the habit of those who dare such things: that it is always their custom to go over to the stronger side, to trample on those of their friends who are weak, and to court those who are in power. For these men who composed those notorious letters against Eudoxius and his whole party, and sent them round to all the brotherhoods, solemnly charging them to flee from communion with them as the ruin of souls, and who for this reason would not accept the votes brought forward for their deposition, because those votes had been cast by heretics—as they then persuaded us—these same men have now forgotten all this and have gone over to them. And no denial is left open to them; for they have plainly disclosed their own purpose by warmly embracing, at Ancyra, communion with them in private houses, since they had not yet been received by those very men into public communion. Ask them, then: if Basilides, who is in communion with Ecdicius, is now orthodox, why, on their return from Dardania, did they overthrow his altars in the territory of the Gangrenes and set up their own tables? And why even now do they make incursions into the churches of Amasea and Zela and install presbyters and deacons of their own? For if they hold communion with them as orthodox, why do they fall upon them as heretics? And if they have taken them to be heretics, how is it that they do not turn away from communion with them? Are not these things plain even to a child's understanding, most honoured brothers—that always, looking to their own advantage, they set about either to slander certain men or to commend them?

From us too, then, they have separated themselves—not out of vexation that we did not write back to them (for this is the chief thing on account of which they say they were provoked), nor because we did not receive the chorbishops whom they say they sent. And yet those who contrive this will give account to the Lord. For a certain Eustathius was sent, and after delivering letters to the office of the Vicar, and spending three days in the city, and being about to set off for his own home, late one evening, when I was already asleep, he is said to have come near our dwelling. But hearing that I was asleep, he went away and did not approach us again the next day; rather, having thus discharged his duty toward us, he departed. And this is the offence in which we did them wrong; and these long-suffering men did not weigh against this fault our former service, the service we rendered them in love, but they so heaped up their anger against us over this sin that, so far as it lay with them, they made us proscribed in all the churches throughout the world.

Yet this is not in truth the cause of the division. Rather, since they thought they would gain favour at that time with Euzoius if they estranged themselves from us, they devised for themselves those pretexts, in order that they might find some standing with them through their war against us. These men now also slander the faith of Nicaea, and call us 'consubstantialists,' because in that faith the only-begotten Son is confessed to be of one substance with God the Father—not as though from a single substance divided into two kindred parts (far from it; for that holy and God-loving synod did not understand it so), but in the sense that what the Father is according to substance, this the Son too must be understood to be. For so those very men explained it to us when they said, 'light from light.' And this is the faith of Nicaea, brought by them from the West, which they delivered to the synod at Tyana, by which also they were received. But they have a certain clever doctrine for such changes of theirs: that they use the words of the faith as physicians do, according to the occasion, adapting them now in one way, now in another, to the conditions before them. The unsoundness of this sophistry it is not for me to expose, but for you to perceive. For the Lord will give you understanding to recognize which is the straight word and which is the crooked and perverted one. For if at one time one creed must be composed, and at another another, and they must change with the times, then false is the declaration of him who said: 'One Lord, one faith, one baptism.' But if these words are true, let no one deceive you with these empty arguments. For they slander us as innovating concerning the Holy Spirit. Ask, then, what the innovation is. For we confess what we have received, that the Comforter is ranked with the Father and the Son, and is not numbered with the creation. For we have believed in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; and we are baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. For this reason we never separate the Comforter from his conjunction with the Father and the Son. For our mind, enlightened by the Spirit, looks up to the Son, and in him, as in an image, beholds the Father. Neither, then, do we devise names of our own, but we name him Holy Spirit and Comforter, nor do we consent to set aside the glory due to him. These are our beliefs, declared with all truth. On these let the accuser accuse; let him who persecutes us persecute; let him who believes the slanders against us prepare himself for the trial. The Lord is near; let us be anxious for nothing.

If anyone writes in Syria, this is nothing to us. For 'by your words you will be justified,' he says, 'and by your words you will be condemned.' Let my own words judge me; but let no one condemn us for the faults of others, nor bring forward, as proof that we are now in communion with those who composed those writings, the letters written by us twenty years ago. For we, before those writings, being laymen, wrote to laymen, before any such suspicion against them was even stirred up; and we wrote nothing about the faith, nor anything of the kind that these men now circulate to our slander, but bare forms of address, fulfilling an affectionate greeting. For we equally shun and anathematize, as impious, both those who are sick with the doctrines of Sabellius and those who champion the dogmas of Arius. If anyone says that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are the same, and supposes one thing with many names, and one hypostasis uttered under three appellations, such a man we rank in the party of the Jews. Likewise, if anyone says that the Son is unlike the Father in substance, or brings down the Holy Spirit to a creature, we anathematize him, and we hold that he is near to the error of the Greeks. But to stop the mouths of those who accuse us by our writings is impossible; rather it is more likely that they will be provoked the more by our defences and contrive against us greater and harsher charges. To guard your ears, however, is not difficult. So, what lies in your power, do this. Keep your heart pure for us and free from prejudice against the slanders; and concerning the charges brought forward, demand from us the reckoning. And if you find the truth with us, give no place to falsehood; but if you perceive us to be powerless in our defence, then believe our accusers as speaking the truth. Those men are wakeful to do us harm; this we do not require of you. Carrying on a trader's life, they make our slander a side-trade; but you we exhort to remain at home and to live becomingly, fulfilling the work of Christ in quietness, and to shun their gatherings, which are made deceitfully for the ruin of those who hear them—so that you may both keep your love toward us pure, and preserve unbroken the faith of the fathers, and appear approved before the Lord as friends of the truth.