Nicene and Post-Nicene Church Fathers Series 2 - The Still Small ...

To Ascholius. 2548
Letter CLXIV. 2547
1. It would not be easy for me to say how very much delighted I am with your holiness’s
letter. My words are too weak to express all that I feel; you, however, ought to be able to
conjecture it, from the beauty of what you have written. For what did not your letter contain?
It contained love to God; the marvellous description of the martyrs, which put the manner
of their good fight so plainly before me that I seemed actually to see it; love and kindness
to myself; words of surpassing beauty. So when I had taken it into my hands, and read it
many times, and perceived how abundantly full it was of the grace of the Spirit, I thought
that I had gone back to the good old times, when God’s Churches flourished, rooted in faith,
united in love, all the members being in harmony, as though in one body. Then the persecutors
were manifest, and manifest too the persecuted. Then the people grew more numerous
by being attacked. Then the blood of the martyrs, watering the Churches, nourished many
more champions of true religion, each generation stripping for the struggle with the zeal of
those that had gone before. Then we Christians were in peace with one another, the peace
which the Lord bequeathed us, of which, so cruelly have we driven it from among us, not a
single trace is now left us. Yet my soul did go back to that blessedness of old, when a letter
came from a long distance, bright with the beauty of love, and a martyr travelled to me from
wild regions beyond the Danube, preaching in his own person the exactitude of the faith
which is there observed. Who could tell the delight of my soul at all this? What power of
speech could be devised competent to describe all that I felt in the bottom of my heart?
However, when I saw the athlete, I blessed his trainer: he, too, before the just Judge, after
strengthening many for the conflict on behalf of true religion, shall receive the crown of
righteousness.
2. By bringing the blessed Eutyches 2549 to my recollection, and honouring my country
for having sown the seeds of true religion, you have at once delighted me by your reminder
of the past, and distressed me by your conviction of the present. None of us now comes
near Eutyches in goodness: so far are we from bringing barbarians under the softening
power of the Spirit, and the operation of His graces, that by the greatness of our sins we turn
gentle hearted men into barbarians, for to ourselves and to our sins I attribute it that the
influence of the heretics is so widely diffused. Peradventure no part of the world has escaped
2547 Placed in 374.
2548 cf. Letter liv.
2549 Eutyches was a Cappadocian, who was taken prisoner by the Goths, in the reign of Gallienus, in a raid
into Cappadocia. It was through the teaching of these captives that the ancestors of Ulphilas became Christians.
cf. Philost., H.E. ii. 5.
To Ascholius.
623
216