Chapter 25

When the father had threatened these things and withdrawn in anger, the son went into his own chamber, and lifting up his eyes to his own Master of the contest, he cried out from the depth of his heart: "Lord, my God, sweet hope and unfailing promise, mighty refuge of those who lean upon you, look upon the contrition of my heart with a merciful and gracious eye, and do not forsake me, nor depart from me; but, according to your unfailing promise, be with me, the unworthy and worthless; for I know and confess you as the Maker and Provider of all creation. Strengthen me yourself, then, to remain in this good confession until my last breath; look upon me and have mercy on me, and stand by me, keeping me unharmed from all the working of Satan;

look upon me, King; for my soul is strongly inflamed with longing for you, and is kindled as with thirst in a waterless land of burning heat, longing for you, the fountain of immortality. Do not hand over to the beasts a soul that confesses you; do not forget to the end the soul of your poor one; but grant to me, the sinner, all my life long, to suffer all things for your name and your confession, and to offer up my whole self as a sacrifice to you; for when you strengthen them, even the weak shall prevail, since you alone are the unconquered ally and the merciful God, whom all creation blesses, the One glorified unto the ages. Amen." Praying thus, he perceived a divine comfort visiting his heart, and being filled with courage, he passed the whole night in prayer. But the king, having communicated to his friend Arachis what concerned his son, and having declared his blunt boldness and unalterable resolve, Arachis advised him to make his conversation with the young man as friendly and soothing as possible, hoping perhaps to draw him over by flatteries. So on the next day he came to his son, and sitting down he called him closer. Then, embracing him, he kissed him, approaching him gently and mildly, and said: "My most longed-for and beloved child, honour your father's grey hairs, and, hearing my request, come and offer sacrifice to the gods.

For thus you will have them gracious to you, and will receive from them length of days, and a share in all glory, an unassailable kingdom, and every kind of good; and you will be pleasing to me your father all your life long, and honoured and praised by all men. For it is a great matter, where praise is concerned, to obey one's father, and especially in what is good and in goodwill toward the gods. But what have you supposed, my child? Did I, declining the good road, willingly choose to go the contrary way, or did I, through ignorance and inexperience of the good, give myself over to ruinous things? But if you think that I willingly prefer evil to what is profitable and choose death over life, you seem to me, my child, to have wholly fallen away from right judgement. Do you not see how I often give myself over to hardship and toil in campaigns against enemies, or busy myself with other duties of the commonwealth, so that, when there is need, I spare myself neither hunger nor thirst, neither marching on foot nor sleeping on the ground? And toward wealth and money I have such disdain and contempt that I sometimes empty out lavishly all the treasuries of my palace, to build the greatest temples of the gods and to adorn them with every kind of ornament, or to distribute the treasures of money lavishly to the armies. Sharing, then, such contempt for pleasures and such endurance in hardships, if I knew the religion of the Galileans to be better than the one in my hands, of how much zeal would I not have judged the matter worthy,

to despise all things and to secure my own salvation? But if you charge me with ignorance and inexperience of the good, consider how many sleepless nights I have spent when some question was set before me, sometimes not even a very pressing one, granting myself no rest at all until I had found a clear and most fitting solution to what was sought. If, then, I hold not even the smallest of these temporary matters worthy of contempt until everything is accomplished profitably and to the advantage of all, and if the discernment of hidden things is, as I think, searched out by no one in all the world more precisely than by me, as is attested of me by all — how could I have reckoned divine things, and what it is lawful to worship and to declare of God, contemptible, and not have busied myself with all zeal, all power, with my whole soul and my whole mind, in the search for these, to find what is true and most fitting? And indeed I sought with toil, spending many nights like the days upon these things, and calling together many wise and learned men to this counsel, and conversing with many of those called Christians. And by tireless inquiry and ardent search the road of truth was found by me, attested by men honoured for their eloquence and understanding, that there is no other faith except the one we walk in today,

serving the greatest gods and holding fast to the sweet and pleasant life given to all men by them, a life full of the greatest delight and gladness, which the leaders and initiators of the Galileans foolishly rejected, so as to give up readily even this sweet light and all delightful things, which the gods have granted us for enjoyment, in hope of some other uncertain life, not knowing what they say or about what they make their assertions. But you, dearest son, obey your father, who has found, through careful and most true searching, what is truly good. For behold, it has been shown that neither willingly nor by way of ignorance did I miss the good, but I found and embraced it; and I long that you too should not wander foolishly, but follow me. Reverence, then, your father. Or do you not know how good a thing it is to obey one's father and to be pleasing to him in all things? — just as, on the contrary, it is ruinous and accursed to provoke a father and to count his commandments as nothing?

For all who did this perished miserably in their wickedness; among whom may you, my child, not be numbered. Rather, doing what is pleasing to your begetter, may you obtain all good things, and become heir of my blessing and my kingdom." But the high-minded and truly noble young man, hearing his father's verbose and senseless entreaty, and recognizing the devices of the crooked serpent, how he had set a snare for his feet from his right hand, contriving to bend down his godlike soul and to hinder it from the prize set before it, set before his eyes the Master's command, who said: I came not to bring peace, but strife and a sword; for I came to set a son against his father and a daughter against her mother, and so forth; and that He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and Whoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father who is in heaven. Reasoning on these things, and fettering his soul with the divine fear,

and strengthening it with longing and love, he very seasonably took up that saying of Solomon: A time to love and a time to hate, a time of war and a time of peace. And first, praying in his mind, he said: Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me, for in you my soul has trusted, and in the shadow of your wings will I hope until iniquity passes by. I will cry to God the Most High, the God who has done me good — and the rest of the psalm. Then he said to the king: "To serve a father and to yield to his commands, and to minister to him with goodwill and friendship, our common Master teaches us, having sown such natural affection in us. But when the bond and friendship of parents brings the soul into danger and removes it far from the Creator, we are commanded to cut this off altogether, and in no way to yield to those who separate us from God, but to hate and turn from them, even if it be a father who commands what is hateful,

even if a mother, even if a king, even if the lord of life itself. For these reasons, to be deprived of God for the sake of a father's bond is impossible for me. Therefore neither trouble yourself nor me; but either be persuaded, and let us both serve the living and true God — for what you now worship are idols, the works of human hands, devoid of breath and dumb, procuring nothing at all but ruin and eternal punishment for those who worship them. But if you will not have this, do to me what seems good to you; for I am a servant of Christ, and neither by flatteries nor by punishments will I be turned from his love, as indeed I told you yesterday, setting in the midst the name of my Master and most surely establishing my word. But as for your saying that you do not willingly do evil, nor go astray from the good through ignorance, but that by much and toilsome inquiry you learned that it is truly good to serve idols and to be fastened to the pleasures of the passions — that you do evil willingly I cannot say. But that a great mist of ignorance is poured round about you, and that, walking as in palpable darkness, you do not see even a small gleam of light, whence, having lost the straight road, you have wandered among precipices and terrible ravines — this I too know surely, and I wish you, father, to know it.

Therefore, holding darkness in place of light, and clinging to death as though it were life, you think you have taken profitable counsel and devised what is advantageous; but it is not so, it is not so. For neither are the things you worship gods, but pillars of demons, holding within them all their abominable working; nor does the life you call sweet and pleasant, which you think is full of delight and gladness, have such a nature, but it is, according to the word of truth, loathsome and abominable. For a time it sweetens and soothes the throat, but afterward yields up returns more bitter than gall, as my teacher said, and sharper than a two-edged sword. And how shall I recount to you its evils? I will number them, and they shall be multiplied beyond the sand. For it is a hook of the devil, clothed about with loathsome pleasure as a bait, by which it drags down those who are deceived to the bottom of Hades. But the good things promised by my Master, which you called the hope of an uncertain life, are unfailing and unchangeable, know no end, and are not subject to corruption; there is no word able to set forth the greatness of that glory and delight, of the joy unspeakable, of the unceasing gladness.

For all of us, as you yourself see, die, and there is no man who shall live and not see death; but we shall all rise again, when the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, comes in unspeakable glory and fearful power, the only King of kings and Lord of lords, to whom every knee shall bow, of things in heaven and on earth and under the earth; and he will then bring such astonishment that even the heavenly powers themselves will be amazed; and there will stand before him with trembling a thousand thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand angels and archangels, and all will be full of fear and trembling. For one of the archangels will sound with the trumpet of God, and at once the heaven will be rolled up like a scroll, and the earth, breaking open, will send up the dead bodies of all the men who ever lived, from the time the first man Adam came to be until that day. And then all who have died from the beginning will in the twinkling of an eye stand living before the judgement seat of the immortal

Master, and each will give account of what he did. Then the righteous will shine like the sun — those who believed in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and finished the present life in good works. But how shall I recount to you the glory that will then succeed them? For though I compare their brightness and beauty to the light of the sun, though to the brightest lightning, I shall say nothing worthy of that brightness. For eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and it has not entered the heart of man, what God has prepared for those who love him in the kingdom of heaven, in the unapproachable light, in the unutterable and unending glory. And the righteous, indeed, will attain such good things and such blessedness; but those who denied the truly existing God, and were ignorant of the Maker and Creator, and served defiled demons, and rendered worship to dumb idols,

and longed for the pleasures of this empty life, and wallowed like swine in the mire of the passions, and made their own souls the base of operations for every wickedness — they will stand naked and exposed, ashamed and downcast, pitiable both in appearance and in fact, set forth as a reproach to all creation. And all their deeds, in word, in act, in thought, will come before their face. Then, after that most grievous shame and that unbearable reproach, they will be condemned to the unquenchable and lightless fire of Gehenna, to the outer darkness, the gnashing of teeth, and the venomous worm. This is their portion, this their lot, with which they will be together unto the unending ages, being punished, because, having thrust aside the good things of the promise, for a temporary pleasure of sin they chose eternal punishment. For these things, then — that one may attain that ineffable joy and enjoy the unutterable glory, and shine answering the angels, and stand with boldness before the good and most sweet Master, and escape those most bitter and unending torments and that painful shame —

of how much is it not worth to give up both money and bodies, or rather even our very souls? Who is so ignoble, who so without understanding, as not to undergo countless temporary deaths, that he may be delivered from eternal and unending death, and inherit the blessed and imperishable life, and be illumined with the light of the blessed and life-giving Trinity?"