Peter’s Letter on the Outrages of Lucius at Alexandria

Palladius, the governor of the province, was a pagan by religion and a man who regularly bowed down before the idols. He had often thought of making war on Christ. After gathering the forces already listed, he marched against the church as though he were pressing on to conquer a foreign enemy. Then, as everyone knows, the most shocking deeds were done. At the mere thought of telling the story, the memory fills me with anguish. I have shed floods of tears, and I would long have remained in this bitter state if I had not eased my grief by meditating on divine things. The crowds burst into the church called Theonas. There, instead of holy words, the praises of idols were spoken. There, where the Holy Scriptures had been read, one could hear indecent clapping of hands and effeminate, obscene talk. There outrages were done to the virgins of Christ that the tongue refuses to describe, for “it is shameful even to speak of them.” One well-meaning man, only hearing of these wrongs, stopped his ears and prayed that he might rather become deaf than have to listen to their foul language. If only they had been content to sin in words alone, and had not gone beyond the wickedness of their words with deeds! For insult, however bad it is, can be borne by those in whom Christ’s wisdom and his holy lessons live. But these same villains, vessels of wrath made ready for destruction, screwed up their noses and poured out foul noises through their nostrils, as if, so to speak, from a spring. They tore the clothes off Christ’s holy virgins, whose way of life was the very image of the saints, and dragged them in triumph through the whole town, as naked as the day they were born. They made indecent sport of them as they pleased. Their deeds were barbarous and cruel. If anyone took pity and interfered and urged them to show mercy, he was sent away with wounds. Ah, woe is me! Many a virgin was brutally raped. Many a girl lay silent, beaten on the head with clubs, and even their bodies were not allowed to be given up for burial. Their grief-stricken parents cannot find their corpses to this day. But why tell of sorrows that seem small beside greater ones? Why linger over these and not hurry on to more pressing events? When you hear them, I know that you will be amazed, and will stand with us, silent for a long time, astonished at the kindness of the Lord in not bringing all things to an utter end. At the very altar the impious did what, as it is written, never happened and was never heard of in the days of our fathers. [a]

A boy who had renounced his manhood and wanted to pass for a girl, his eyes, as it is written, painted with black eye paint, his face reddened with rouge like their idols, and dressed in women’s clothes, was set up on the holy altar itself, where we call on the coming of the Holy Spirit. There he danced and waved his hands about and whirled around, as though he were at the front of some disreputable stage, while the onlookers laughed out loud and raised rude and indecent shouts. But since this seemed to them more decent than improper, they went on to proceedings they thought fitting for their indecency. They picked out a man who was notorious for utter baseness and made him strip off at once all his clothes and all his shame. They set him up on the throne of the church as naked as the day he was born, and named him a vile advocate against Christ. Then, in place of divine words, he spoke shameless wickedness; in place of awesome doctrines, wanton lewdness; in place of godliness, ungodliness; in place of self-control, sexual immorality, adultery, foul lust and theft. He taught that gluttony and drunkenness, and all the rest, were good for human life. Things being so, even I withdrew from the church. For how could I stay where troops were coming in, where a mob had been bribed to violence, where everyone was scrambling for gain, where mobs of pagans were making grand promises? And then, if you please, a successor is sent out in my place. It was a man named Lucius, who had bought the bishopric as he might buy some worldly rank, and was eager to keep up the evil character and conduct of a wolf. No synod of orthodox bishops had chosen him. No vote of genuine clergy, and no demand of the laity, had called for him, as the laws of the church require. [d]

Lucius could not make his entry into the city without a parade. So, fittingly, he was escorted not by bishops, not by presbyters, not by deacons, not by crowds of the laity. No monks went before him chanting psalms from the Scriptures. Instead there was Euzoius, once a deacon of our city of Alexandria, who long ago was deposed along with Arius at the great and holy Synod of Nicaea, and more recently was raised up to rule and ravage the see of Antioch. And there too was Magnus the treasurer, notorious for every kind of impiety, at the head of a great body of troops. In the reign of Julian this Magnus had burned the church at Berytus, the famous city of Phoenicia. In the reign of Jovian, of blessed memory, he had only narrowly escaped beheading by making many appeals to the emperor’s mercy, and had been forced to rebuild the church at his own expense. [f]

Now I call on your zeal to rise up and take our part. From what I write you should be able to judge the nature and extent of the wrongs done against the church of God by the rise of this Lucius against us. He had often been rejected by your godliness and by the orthodox bishops of every region, yet he seized on a city that had just and righteous cause to regard and treat him as an enemy. For he does not merely say, like the blasphemous fool in the psalm, “Christ is not true God.” Corrupt himself, he corrupted others too, and rejoiced in the blasphemies constantly spoken against the Savior by those who worshiped the creature instead of the Creator. Since the scoundrel’s opinions were quite on a level with a pagan’s, why should he not dare to worship a newly made God? For these were the words with which he was publicly greeted: “Welcome, bishop, because you deny the Son! Serapis loves you and has brought you to us.” That is what they called their native idol. Then, without a moment’s delay, the Magnus already mentioned, the inseparable partner in Lucius’s villainy, his cruel bodyguard and savage lieutenant, gathered all the crowds placed under his command. He arrested presbyters and deacons, nineteen in number, some of them eighty years old, on the charge of being involved in some foul violation of Roman law. He set up a public court and, knowing nothing of the laws by which Christians defend virtue, tried to force them to give up the faith of their fathers, which had been handed down from the apostles through the fathers to us. He even went so far as to claim that this would please the most merciful and gentle Valens Augustus. “Wretched man,” he shouted, “accept, accept the teaching of the Arians! God will pardon you, even though you worship with a true worship, if you do this not of your own will but because you are forced. Compulsion that carries no responsibility always has its excuse, while free action is answerable and is often followed by accusation. Think these arguments over carefully. Come willingly. Away with all delay. Sign the doctrine of Arius now preached by Lucius,” and here he named him, “and be quite sure that if you obey you will have wealth and honor from your prince. But if you refuse, you will be punished with chains, the rack, torture, the scourge and cruel torments. You will be stripped of your property and possessions. You will be driven into exile and condemned to live in savage regions.” [g]

So this fine character mixed threats with deceit, and in this way tried to persuade and force the people to desert true religion. But they knew very well how true it is that the pain of betraying true religion is sharper than any torment. They refused to lower their virtue and noble spirit before his trickery and threats, and so they were driven to answer him: “Stop, stop trying to frighten us with these words. Say no more empty words. We worship no God who arrived late or was newly invented. Foam at us if you like in the empty storm of your fury, and dash yourselves against us like a raging wind. We hold to the doctrines of true religion even to death. “We have never thought of God as powerless, or unwise, or untrue, or as at one time a Father and at another time not a Father, as this impious Arian teaches, making the Son a being of time who passes away. For if, as the Ariomaniacs say, the Son is a creature, and not by nature of one substance with the Father, then the Father too will be reduced to nothing by the Son’s not existing, since by their account he was at one time not a Father. But if he is always a Father, and his offspring is truly from him and not by derivation, for God cannot be acted upon, then is he not mad and foolish who says of the Son, through whom all things came into being by grace, ‘there was a time when he was not’? [j]

“These men have truly become fatherless by falling away from our fathers from all over the world, who assembled at Nicaea and anathematized the false teaching of Arius, which is now defended by this latest champion. They laid down that the Son is not, as you are now forcing us to say, of a different substance from the Father, but of one and the same substance. Their godly understanding saw this clearly, and so, by carefully weighing together the divine words, they confessed him to be of one substance with the Father.”

For putting forward these and similar arguments they were imprisoned for many days, in the hope that they might be brought to fall away from their right mind. But instead, like the noblest of athletes in a stadium, they crushed all fear. From time to time, as though anointing themselves with the thought of the bold deeds of their fathers, they held fast to their godliness all the more nobly with the help of holy thoughts, and treated the rack as a training ground for virtue. While they were struggling in this way, and had become, as the blessed Paul writes, a spectacle to angels and to men, the whole city ran to gaze at Christ’s athletes. By their stout endurance they were overcoming the scourges of the judge who tortured them. By their patience they were winning trophies against impiety and displaying triumphs over the Arians. Their savage enemy thought that by threats and torments he could break them and hand them over to the enemies of Christ. So the savage and inhuman tyrant mistreated them with the tortures his cruel ingenuity devised, while all the people stood by wailing and showing their sorrow in many ways. Then he once more mustered his troops, who were well drilled in disorder, and summoned the martyrs by the seaport to a trial, or rather, as it might better be called, to a condemnation decided in advance, while the idol worshipers and the Jews, in their usual way, raised hired cries against them. When they refused to give in to the open heresy of the Ariomaniacs, they were sentenced, while all the people stood in tears before the court, to be deported from Alexandria to Heliopolis in Phoenicia. It is a place where none of the inhabitants, who are all given over to idols, can bear even to hear the name of Christ. [k]

After ordering them to go on board, Magnus took up his position at the harbor, for he had pronounced his sentence on them near the public baths. He showed them his drawn sword, thinking he could strike terror in this way into men who had again and again struck hostile demons to the ground with their own two-edged blade. So he ordered them to put out to sea, though they had no provisions on board and were setting off without a single comfort for their exile. Strange and almost incredible to tell, the sea was all foaming. I think it was grieved and unwilling, if I may put it so, to receive the good men on its surface and so to have any share in an unjust sentence. Now even the ignorant could see the savage purpose of the judge, and it may truly be said, “At this the heavens stood astonished.” [l]

The whole city groaned, and it is mourning to this day. Some men beat on their breasts, first with one hand and then the other, and raised a mighty noise. Others lifted both their hands and their eyes to heaven as witnesses of the wrong done to them, all but saying in words, “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth,” what lawless deeds are being done. Now everything was weeping and wailing. Laments and sighs sounded through the whole town, and from every eye flowed a river of tears that threatened to flood the very sea with its tide. There on the harbor stood the Magnus already mentioned, ordering the rowers to hoist the sails. Up went a mingled cry of girls and married women, old men and young, all sobbing and mourning together, and the noise of the crowd drowned out the roar of the waves on the foaming sea. So the martyrs sailed away to Heliopolis, where everyone is given over to superstition, where the devil’s pleasures flourish, and where the city’s position, surrounded on every side by mountains that reach to the sky, makes it fit for the terrifying lairs of wild beasts. All the friends they had left behind groaned and spoke words of grief, both together in public in the middle of the town and each one alone in private. They were even forbidden to weep, by order of Palladius, the prefect of the city, who happened himself to be a man wholly given over to superstition. Many of the mourners were first arrested and thrown into prison, then scourged, torn with carding combs and tortured. And champions of the church as they were, in their holy zeal, they were sent off to the mines of Phennesus and Proconnesus. [m]

Most of them were monks, devoted to a life of ascetic solitude, and they were about twenty-three in number. Not long afterward, the deacon who had been sent by our beloved Damasus, bishop of Rome, to bring us letters of comfort and communion was led publicly through the town by executioners, his hands tied behind his back like some notorious criminal. He suffered the tortures given to murderers, and was terribly scourged with stones and bits of lead around his very neck. He went on board ship to sail away like the rest, with the mark of the sacred cross on his forehead. With no one to help him and no one to tempt him, he was sent off to the copper mines of Phennesus. During the tortures the magistrate inflicted on the tender bodies of little boys, some were left lying where they fell, without the holy rites of burial, though parents and brothers and relatives, and indeed the whole city, begged that this one comfort might be given them. Alas for the inhumanity of the judge, if indeed a man can be called a judge who only condemns! Those who had fought nobly for true religion were given a worse fate than a murderer’s, for their bodies lay unburied. The glorious champions were thrown out to be devoured by beasts and birds of prey. Those who, for conscience’ sake, wanted to show sympathy to the parents were punished with beheading, as though they had broken some law. What Roman law, or indeed what foreign custom, ever punished anyone for showing sympathy to parents? What example is there of anyone among the ancients committing so lawless a deed? Pharaoh did once order the male children of the Hebrews to be killed, but his edict came from envy and fear. How much greater is the inhumanity of our day than of his! How much better, if there is any choice in wrongdoing, were their wrongs than ours! How much better, if what is unlawful can be called good or bad, though in truth wickedness is always wickedness. [o]

I am writing things that are incredible, inhuman, dreadful, savage, barbarous, pitiless and cruel. Yet through all this the followers of the Arian madness pranced about, so to speak, in proud triumph, while the whole city mourned. For, as it is written in Exodus, “there was not a house where there was not one dead.” [q] These men, whose appetite for wickedness was never satisfied, planned new disturbances. Always working their evil will in evil deeds, they shot the special venom of their wickedness at the bishops of the province, using the treasurer Magnus, already mentioned, as the instrument of their injustice. Some they handed over to the Senate. Others they trapped as they pleased. They left no stone unturned in their eagerness to hunt everyone from every quarter into impiety. They went about in every direction, and like the devil, the true father of heresy, they sought whom they might devour. [r]

In all, after many fruitless efforts, they drove eleven of the bishops of Egypt into exile at Diocaesarea, a city inhabited by Jews, the murderers of the Lord. All of them were men who had lived an ascetic life in the desert from childhood to old age. They had mastered their inclinations to pleasure by reason and discipline. They had fearlessly preached the true faith of godliness and had drunk in godly doctrines. They had won victory over demons again and again, were always putting the adversary to shame by their virtue, and had publicly exposed the Arian heresy with the wisest arguments. Yet these men, like hell, were not satisfied with the death of their brothers. Fools and madmen as they were, and eager to make a name for themselves by their evil deeds, they tried to leave memorials of their own cruelty all over the world. For look: now they stirred up the emperor against certain clergy of the catholic church who were living at Antioch, together with some excellent monks who came forward to testify against their evil deeds. They had these men banished to Neocaesarea in Pontus, where they soon lost their lives because the land was so barren. Such were the tragedies acted out at that time. They would indeed be fit to be handed over to silence and forgetfulness, but they are given a place in history to condemn the men who wag their tongues against the only Son. Infected as they are with the raving madness of blasphemy, they not only try to aim their arrows at the Master of the universe, but have also waged a war without truce against his faithful servants. [s]