Letter 263

263. To the Westerners

May the Lord our God, on whom we have set our hope, grant to each of you grace to attain the hope set before us, as great as the joy with which you have filled our hearts — both by the letter which you sent us through our most beloved fellow-presbyters, and by the fellow-feeling you showed us in our sorrows, as men clothed with bowels of compassion, according to what the aforesaid reported to us. For even though our wounds remain the same, yet it brings us some ease to have physicians ready, able, if they find the occasion, to bring a swift healing of our pains. Therefore again, through these beloved men, we both greet and exhort you: if the Lord grants you leave to come to us, do not shrink from visiting us. For the visiting of the sick is one of the greatest commandments. But if the good God and wise steward of our life reserves this grace for another time, then write to us whatever it befits you to write, for the consolation of the afflicted and the correction of the broken. For many are now the breakings of the Church, and great is our affliction over them; and there is no expectation of help from any other quarter, unless the Lord, through you who genuinely serve Him, sends out the healing.

Now the bold and shameless heresy of the Arians, having openly broken away from the body of the Church, abides in its own error, and harms us little, because their impiety is manifest to all. But those who have put on the skin of the sheep and present a gentle and mild appearance, while inwardly they tear without sparing the flocks of Christ, and — because they set out from among us — easily cast harm upon the simpler folk, these are the grievous ones, hard to guard against. These we ask your exactness to make publicly known to all the Churches throughout the East, so that either, walking uprightly, they may genuinely be with us, or, remaining in their perversity, may keep the harm to themselves alone, unable through unguarded communion to impart their own disease to those who draw near. And it is necessary to mention them by name, so that you yourselves may recognize those who work disturbances among us, and may make it clear to our Churches. For a word from us is suspect to the many, as though perhaps we had chosen this pettiness toward them out of certain private quarrels; but you, the further removed you are from them, so much the more credit do you have among the peoples — besides that the grace of God assists you in your care for the oppressed. And if more of you together decree the same things in agreement, it is plain that the multitude of those who decree will establish for all an unquestionable acceptance of the decree.

There is, then, one among those who contrive much grief for us: Eustathius, the man from Sebasteia in Lesser Armenia. He, long ago made a disciple of Arius — and that at the time when Arius was at his height in Alexandria, composing his wicked blasphemies against the Only-begotten — followed that man and was numbered among his most genuine disciples. When he returned to his own country, he gave to the most blessed bishop Hermogenes of Caesarea, who was judging him for his false doctrine, a confession of sound faith. And having thus received ordination from him, after that man's falling asleep he ran to Eusebius in Constantinople, who himself no less than any espoused the impious doctrine of Arius. Then, driven from there for whatever reason, he came and again made his defence to those in his own country, concealing his impious mind, while putting forward a certain correctness of phrasing. And having obtained the episcopate however he did, he is at once found to have written an anathema of the consubstantial in the assembly held by them at Ancyra. And going thence to Seleucia, he did, with those of his own opinion, the things that all know. And in Constantinople he again agreed to what was put forward by the heretics. And thus, driven from the episcopate because he had earlier been deposed at Melitene, he devised the journey to you as his road to restoration. And what was put to him by the most blessed bishop Liberius, and what he himself agreed to, we do not know, except that he brought back a letter restoring him, which, having shown it to the synod at Tyana, he was restored to his place. This man now ravages that very faith on which he was received, and is in company with those who anathematize the consubstantial, and is a leader of the heresy of the Pneumatomachi. Since, then, the power of doing wrong to the Churches has come to him from your quarter, and he uses the boldness given him by you for the overthrow of the many, it is necessary that the correction too come from your quarter, and that letters be sent to the Churches, telling on what terms he was received, and how, now changed, he annuls the grace given him through the fathers of that time.

Second after him is Apollinaris, who himself also grieves the Churches not a little. For having, through his facility in writing, a tongue sufficient for every subject, he has filled the world with his treatises, disregarding the charge which says, "Take heed to make many books"; for in the multitude, plainly, many things are also done amiss. For how is it possible, out of much speaking, to escape sin? His writings on theology, then, have their construction not from scriptural proofs but from human premises; and there are also his writings on the resurrection, composed in a mythical, or rather Judaic, manner, in which he says that we shall again turn back to the legal worship, and shall again be circumcised, and keep the sabbath, and abstain from foods, and offer sacrifices to God, and worship in Jerusalem at the temple, and in short shall become Jews instead of Christians. What could be more laughable than these things, or rather more alien to the evangelical doctrine? Then his writings on the incarnation too have made such a disturbance for the brotherhood that few of those who have read them still preserve the ancient stamp of true religion; but the many, attending to his innovations, have been turned aside to inquiries and contentious inventions of these unprofitable phrases.

As for Paulinus — whether he has anything blameworthy concerning his ordination, you yourselves can say; but he grieves us by being attached to the doctrines of Marcellus, and by admitting without discrimination into his communion those who follow that man. And you know, most honoured brethren, that the doctrine of Marcellus involves the setting aside of all our hope, since it neither confesses a Son in His own hypostasis, but says that He was brought forth and again returned into the source from which He came forth, nor admits that the Paraclete subsists in His own person; so that one would not err in declaring his heresy altogether alien to Christianity, and calling it a corrupted Judaism. We ask that the care of these matters be undertaken by you. And it could be done, if you would deign to write to all the Churches throughout the East, that those who corrupt these things, if they correct themselves, should be in communion, but if they wish contentiously to persist in their innovations, should be separated from. And that we ought to have sat in council with your wisdom and taken up these matters in common deliberation, we ourselves are not unaware; but since the occasion does not permit it, and to delay is harmful, the harm from these men having taken root, we have of necessity sent the brethren, that whatever escaped the instruction of the letter, they, supplying it of themselves, may rouse your reverence to provide the help sought for by the Churches of God.