Letter 239

239. To Eusebius, bishop of Samosata.

The Lord has granted us now too, through our most longed-for and most reverent brother Antiochus, my fellow-presbyter, to greet your Holiness, and to exhort you to do what is customary, to pray for us, and to find for ourselves some consolation for the long separation in the converse that comes through a letter. And in your prayers we exhort you to ask of the Lord first and above all this: that we be delivered from the absurd and wicked men who have so prevailed over the people that we now reflect nothing other than the events of the capture of the Jews. For the more the churches slip away into weakness, the more men's love of rule grows strong. And the name of the episcopate has now passed to wretched house-bred slaves—no one of God's servants choosing to put himself forward in their place, but only the desperate, such as those now sent in by Anysius, the nursling of Euippius, and by Ecdicius of Parnassus, whose appointer left him in the churches as an evil provision for himself in the life to come. These men have now driven my brother out of Nyssa and brought in his place a man—or rather a slave worth a few obols, but in his corruption of the faith a match for those who appointed him. And to the village of Doara they sent a corrupt man, the servant of orphans, who had run away from his own masters, and who, through the flattery of a godless little woman—who formerly used George for her own will, and now has this man as his successor—they have sent, doing outrage to the pitiable name of the episcopate. And as for the affairs of the Nicopolitans, who could lament them as they deserve—when the wretched Fronto, who formerly pretended, forsooth, to be an advocate for the truth, in the end shamefully betrayed both the faith and himself, and received as the wages of his treachery a name of dishonour? For he received from them the dignity of a bishopric, as he supposes, but by the grace of God he has become the common abomination of all Armenia. Only there is nothing they dare not attempt, nor do they lack fellow-workers worthy of them. As for the rest of the affairs of Syria, the brother Antiochus both knows and will relate them better than we.

As for those from the West, you yourself met with them earlier, when the brother Dorotheus had related everything. What kind of letters must I give him again as he departs? For perhaps he will share the journey with the excellent Sanctissimus, who has great zeal and is going about the East, collecting from each of the notable men subscriptions and letters. What, then, must be written through them, or how I am to agree with those who write—I myself am at a loss; but if you quickly find people coming to us, count us worthy to be informed. For to me it comes to mind to say the saying of Diomedes: 'Would that you had not entreated him'; because, he says, 'the man is overbearing.' For in truth haughty characters, when courted, are wont to become more disdainful. For if the Lord is propitiated to us, what other addition do we need? And if the wrath of God persists, what help to us is the Western brow? Those men neither know the truth nor endure to learn it, but, preoccupied with false suspicions, they now do those things which they did before in the case of Marcellus—quarrelling with those who reported the truth to them, while they confirmed the heresy by themselves. For I myself wished to write to their chief apart from the common form: nothing about ecclesiastical matters, except so far as to hint that they neither know the truth of our affairs nor accept the way by which they might learn it; but in general, that one must not set upon those humbled by trials, nor judge pride a dignity—a sin sufficient by itself to make enmity with God.