The Monks Attacked and Their Leaders Banished

The emperor Valens issued an edict ordering that the orthodox be persecuted both in Alexandria and in the rest of Egypt, and depopulation and ruin on an enormous scale followed at once. Some were dragged before the courts, others thrown into prison, and many tortured in various ways. In fact every kind of punishment was inflicted on people whose only aim was peace and quiet. When these outrages had been carried out at Alexandria just as Lucius saw fit, Euzoius returned to Antioch. Lucius the Arian, accompanied by the commander in chief of the army with a large body of troops, went at once to the monasteries of Egypt, where the general himself attacked the gathering of holy men with even greater fury than the ruthless soldiers. When they reached these solitary places, they found the monks busy with their usual exercises: praying, healing diseases, and casting out demons. Yet with no regard for these extraordinary signs of divine power, they would not let them go on with their solemn worship, but drove them out of their houses of prayer by force. Rufinus declares that he was not only a witness of these cruelties but one of those who suffered them. [a]

So in them the things the apostle speaks of were lived again: “For they were mocked and tested by flogging, were stripped naked, put in chains, stoned, killed with the sword, went about in the wilderness dressed in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, tormented, of whom the world was not worthy, wandering in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth.” In all these things “they gained a good report” for their faith and their works, and for the cures that the grace of Christ worked by their hands. But as it seems, divine Providence allowed them to suffer these evils, “having provided something better for them,” so that through their sufferings others might obtain the salvation of God; and the events that followed seem to prove it.

So when these wonderful men proved stronger than all the violence used against them, Lucius in despair advised the military commander to send the fathers of the monks into exile. These were the Egyptian Macarius and his namesake of Alexandria. Both of them were accordingly banished to an island where not one inhabitant was a Christian. On this island there was an idol temple, and a priest whom the inhabitants worshiped as a god. When these holy men arrived on the island, the demons of the place were filled with fear and trembling. Now it happened at that very time that the priest’s daughter was suddenly possessed by a demon. She began to rage violently and to overturn everything in her way, and no force was enough to hold her back. But she cried out with a loud voice to these saints of God, “Why have you come here to drive us out of this place too?” Then the men showed there too the special power they had received through divine grace. They cast the demon out of the girl and gave her back, healed, to her father; and they led the priest himself, and all the inhabitants of the island as well, to the Christian faith. At once the people broke their images to pieces and changed the form of their temple into that of a church; and having been baptized, they gladly received instruction in the teachings of Christianity. So these marvelous men, after suffering persecution for the homoousian faith, were themselves approved all the more, became the means of salvation for others, and confirmed the truth.