The Arians and the Council of Nicaea

Consider, my dear friend, whether this is not so. The devil has sown this perverseness in their hearts. If they are confident in their wicked inventions, let them first defend themselves against the proofs of heresy that have been brought against them; then will be the time to find fault, if they can, with the definition framed against them. For no one who has been convicted of murder or adultery is free, after the trial, to challenge the judge’s sentence and ask why he worded it this way and not that. That does not clear the convicted man; it rather adds to his crime the further charge of insolence and impudence. In the same way, let these men either prove that their opinions are godly (for they were accused and convicted at the time, and their complaints came afterward, and it is only right that those who are under a charge should confine themselves to their own defense), or else, if their conscience is unclean and they know their own impiety, let them not find fault with what they do not understand. Otherwise they will bring on themselves a double charge, of impiety and of ignorance. Rather, let them look into the matter in a teachable spirit, learn what they have not known until now, and cleanse their impious ears at the spring of truth and in the teachings of true religion. [a]

This is what happened to Eusebius and his party at the Council of Nicaea. As long as they stood firm in their impiety and tried to fight against God, the terms they used were full of impiety. The assembled bishops, three hundred more or less, gently and with love asked them to explain and defend themselves on godly grounds. But they had hardly begun to speak when they stood condemned, and one differed from another. Then, seeing the straits their heresy was in, they fell silent, and by their silence they confessed the disgrace that had come upon their false teaching. So the bishops rejected the terms these men had invented and published against them the sound faith of the church. And as all signed it, Eusebius and his party signed it too, in the very words they now complain of, I mean “from the substance” and “of one substance,” and that “the Son of God is neither a creature nor a work, nor one of the things that have come into being, but that the Word is an offspring from the substance of the Father.” And what is truly strange, Eusebius of Caesarea in Palestine, who had said no the day before but afterward signed, sent his church a letter saying that this was the church’s faith and the tradition of the fathers. He openly confessed that they had been in error before and had been rashly fighting against the truth. For though he was ashamed at the time to adopt these phrases, and excused himself to his church in his own way, he plainly means to imply all this in his letter, since he does not deny “of one substance” and “from the substance.” And so he got himself into a difficulty. For while excusing himself, he went on to attack the Arians for saying that “the Son did not exist before his generation,” and so denying that he existed before his birth in the flesh. Acacius knows this too, though he also, out of fear, may pretend otherwise because of the times and deny the fact. That is why I have added the letter of Eusebius at the end, so that from it you may see how little respect Christ’s enemies show their own teachers, and Acacius above all. [c]

Are they not committing a crime, then, even in thinking of contradicting so great and so ecumenical a council? Are they not transgressing when they dare to oppose that good definition against Arianism, acknowledged as it is by the very men who first taught them impiety? And suppose Eusebius and his party did change again even after signing, and went back like dogs to their own vomit of impiety. Do not the present objectors deserve still greater loathing for this? For they give away the freedom of their own souls to others, and are willing to take these men as masters of their heresy. These are, as James has said, double-minded men, unstable in all their ways. They do not hold one opinion but shift back and forth, now recommending certain statements and soon dishonoring them, and in turn recommending what they were just now finding fault with. But this, as the Shepherd has said, is “the child of the devil,” and the mark of peddlers rather than of teachers. For what our fathers have handed down, this is truly teaching; and this is truly the mark of teachers, to confess the same thing as one another and to differ neither from themselves nor from their fathers. Those who lack this mark should be called not true teachers but evil ones. So the Greeks, since they do not bear witness to the same teachings but quarrel with one another, have no truth in their teaching. But the holy and true heralds of the truth agree together and do not differ. For though they lived at different times, they all move toward the same end, being prophets of the one God and preaching the same Word in harmony. [h]

So what Moses taught, Abraham kept; and what Abraham kept, Noah and Enoch acknowledged, distinguishing clean from unclean and becoming acceptable to God. Abel too bore witness in this way, knowing what he had learned from Adam, who himself had learned it from the Lord. And the Lord, when he came at the end of the ages to abolish sin, said, “I am not giving you a new commandment, but an old commandment, which you have heard from the beginning.” That is why the blessed apostle Paul, who had learned it from him, when he described the offices of the church, forbade deacons, not to mention bishops, to be double-tongued. And in his rebuke of the Galatians he made a sweeping declaration: “If anyone preaches to you any other gospel than the one you received, let him be anathema. As I have said, so I say again: if even we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you any other gospel than the one you received, let him be anathema.” Since the apostle speaks this way, let these men either anathematize Eusebius and his party, at least for turning around and professing the opposite of what they signed, or else, if they admit that their signatures were good, let them not complain against so great a council. But if they do neither the one nor the other, they are all too plainly the sport of every wind and wave. They are swayed by opinions that are not their own but other people’s, and being such, they deserve as little deference now as before in what they say. Rather, let them stop carping at what they do not understand, or else, not knowing how to tell things apart, they may simply call evil good and good evil, and think that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter. No doubt they want teachings that have been judged wrong and rejected to gain the upper hand, and they struggle violently to undermine what was rightly defined. There should be no reason, on our side, for any further explanation or reply to their excuses, nor on theirs for any further resistance; they should simply accept what the leaders of their heresy signed. For though the later change of Eusebius and his party was suspect and unprincipled, their signature, given when they had the chance to make at least some little defense of themselves, is sure proof of the impiety of their teaching. They would not have signed before unless they had condemned the heresy, and they would not have condemned it unless they had been hemmed in by difficulty and shame. So to change back again proves their contentious zeal for impiety. So these men too ought, as I have said, to keep quiet. But since, out of an extraordinary lack of modesty, they perhaps hope to argue for this devilish impiety better than the others did, let us now examine them too, statement by statement, as we did their predecessors, even though I have already argued against them at length in my earlier letter to you. For now no less than then, their heresy will be shown to have no soundness in it, but to come from evil spirits. [l]