Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
1| So if someone is unworthy of a good life and knows in himself that he has lived it carelessly and without order, yet changes course and looks toward the divine with the eye of the soul, cleansed, estranged from his old and most wicked way of living, and receiving the healing that comes from God, he will live for all eternity. For this he ought to give thanks to God, who saved him and who saves all. And they would be saved more easily if they received the healing of the soul with pure faith and did not waver, like those who at one moment entrust themselves to the remedies and at the next run away from them, but instead endured with steadfastness and courage the cure that is justice, self-control and the other virtues. We, at any rate, strive as far as we can to fill those who are uninitiated in such teachings with good hope, calling on God as our helper in the undertaking. For it is no small task to turn the minds of our subjects, if they happen to be good, toward the worship of God, and, if they are bad and unfeeling, to bring them round to the opposite, making useful people out of useless ones. Rejoicing, then, in these very pursuits, and holding it the work of a good man to sing the praises of the Savior, I put away everything that the worse condition of my fortune senselessly brought upon me through the accident of ignorance, reckoning repentance the greatest salvation. I could have wished that this revelation had been granted me long ago, since blessed is the one who from his youth has been steadied and has rejoiced in the knowledge of divine things and in the beauty of virtue. Let this much be said, then, in moderation. For even if good people do not become wise from their earliest years, nor, as the saying goes, from the cradle, still it is cause for gladness if they are fortunate enough to gain wisdom even in the prime of life.
2| As for me, no education from human beings has ever helped me; every gift that men of sense esteem in character and conduct comes from God. And I hold before me, as it were, against every poison the evil one devises, no small shield: the knowledge of what is pleasing to God. From it I will select what is useful for the present discourse and sing praise to the Father of all.
3| And you yourself, Christ, Savior of all, be present and lend your help to this zeal for devotion; adorn the discourse that concerns your excellence, and guide the manner of its solemn speech. Let no one expect to hear any elegance of prettified words and phrases. For I know well that loose public oratory, crafted for pleasure, displeases people of sound mind, when the speakers care more for applause than for sober discourse.
4| Now some foolish and impious people say that our Christ was condemned, and that he who is the cause of life for the living was himself deprived of life... That those who have once dared to be impious should neither fear nor hide their own wickedness is nothing surprising. But this surpasses all simplicity: that they appear to have persuaded themselves that an imperishable God was overpowered by a man, or that cruelty prevailed over love for humankind, and that they do not consider that greatness of soul and patient forbearance are neither overturned by outrage nor driven from their natural firmness by abuse, but always . . . becomes, breaking the savagery of those who trample upon it by the strength of reason and magnanimity.
5| For the love of God for humankind had resolved to wipe out wrongdoing and to raise up decency and justice. That is why he gathered together the wisest of men and established the finest and most beneficial teaching for life, so that the good and blessed might emulate his own providence over the affairs of the world. What greater good could anyone name than this: that God himself presides over justice and makes those worthy of his instruction like himself, so that, as his goodness spreads to all, happiness may belong to human beings for all eternity?
6| This is the august victory, this the true power, this the greatest work and the fitting correction of all the peoples together. For all these things we give you the prize of victory with words of praise, Savior of the universe. But you, wicked and shameful blasphemy, puffed up with lies, rumors and slanders, you deceive the young and win over boys and those men who have something boyish in their ways; you lead them away from the worship of the true God and set up for them fashioned images to pray to and worship, so that, deceived, they may receive the wages of their own senselessness.
7| For they set themselves against the cause of all good things, Christ, who is God and the child of God. Is this God then worshipped as he deserves, who holds every kind of power and rises above all goodness? From this the praise is the greater and the wonder extraordinary, that he did not use the greatness of his power to avenge the insult, but forgave human beings in their foolish thinking, counting folly and sin as proper to humanity, while he himself, remaining true to his own purpose, diminished nothing of his native love for humankind. Go then, impious ones (for it will be said to you, because your sin goes unpunished), to the slaughter of victims, to feasts and festivals and drunken revels, pretending to religion while pursuing pleasures and licentiousness, claiming to perform sacrifices while enslaved to your own pleasures. For you know nothing good, nor the first command of the great God, who gives ordinances to the human race and charges his child to steer the life of these people, so that those who have lived rightly and prudently, according to the child's judgment, may obtain a second life, blessed and happy.
8| I have therefore set out God's decree concerning the way people live, not in ignorance, as the many do, nor from guesswork about the child. What kind of birth could there be, if God is one alone and is himself foreign to every union? But birth must be understood as twofold: the one by emission, which is the familiar kind, and the other from an eternal cause, whose principle, by God's providence, is seen by whoever among men is his friend; for a wise man will know the cause of the ordering of the whole. Since nothing is without a cause, the cause of existing things must exist before them. So, since there is a world and the things in it, and a salvation for them, the Savior of all must have existed beforehand; so that Christ is the cause of salvation, and the salvation of existing things is that which is caused, just as the father is the cause of a son, and the son is the one caused.
9| That he existed beforehand I think has been shown sufficiently. But how did he come down to human beings and the earth? The purpose of his coming down, as the prophets foretold, is care for the whole; for the Maker must care for his works. But since he was about to draw near to what is bodily and worldly, and to stay for a time on earth, and the need demanded this, he devised for himself a new kind of birth; for there was conception without marriage, a maiden who was the helper in birth of pure virginity and the mother of God, the beginning in time of an eternal nature, perceptible to the mind, and the rest of the apparition. A shining dove, flying out from Noah's ark, came down upon the virgin's bosom.
10| What followed is of a piece: the untouched union, purer than all chastity and greater than self-control itself; the wisdom of God from the swaddling clothes; and the Jordan, provider of the baths, turning to him with reverence,
11| and besides this the royal anointing, of one mind with the understanding of all; teaching and marvelous power that set right even what could not be healed; the swift and unhindered fulfillment of human prayers; and in sum his whole life on behalf of human beings; and instruction that taught not prudence but wisdom, its students learning not the so-called civic virtues but the paths leading to the intelligible world, laboring at the contemplation of the race that is always the same and practicing the thought of the greatest Father.
12| The benefits too were not small: sight in place of blindness, health in place of paralysis, a restoration to life again in place of death. I pass over the plentiful supply of necessities in the wilderness, and the abundance of every kind of food, from few provisions, for great crowds over a long time.
13| This thanksgiving, as far as we can, we render to you, Christ, God and Savior, greatest providence of the great Father, who save us from evils and teach the most blessed teaching. For I do not say this to praise you, but to give thanks.
14| What human being could praise you as you deserve? For it is said of you that you brought into being the things that are out of things that were not, that you kindled light for them, and that you set the disordered confusion of the elements in array by order and measure. But the crowning mark of your love for humankind lies in this: that you made those of a good nature eager for a divine and blessed life, and taught them to consider how, having become merchants of goods that are truly good, they might share their own wisdom and good fortune with more people, and themselves carry off the eternal fruit of virtue. Freed from licentiousness and partaking of kindness to others, keeping compassion before their eyes and standing as champions of the faith, they embrace modesty and every kind of virtue, the very virtue that the life of former times had driven out of human ways. That loss was once the cause, or rather the necessity, of the Savior's descent, since he exercises providence on behalf of all; for no one else could have been found who was a physician equal to so many evils and to the injustice that held sway in that former life.
15| So providence, reaching down even to the things of this world, with the greatest ease set in order everything that insolence and licentiousness had thrown into disorder. Nor did it do this in secret. For he knew that some people perceive his power by understanding and reason, while others, whose nature is more like that of the irrational animals, rely rather on their senses. Therefore he brought his blessed and wonderful healing openly before their eyes, so that no one, whether earnest or worthless, could doubt it: to those whose life had ended he restored life a second time, and those who had lost their senses he commanded to perceive soundly once again. To make the sea firm, to command a calm out of a storm, and at last, after undertaking wondrous works and calling people from unbelief to strong faith, to fly up into heaven: whose work is this, if not God's and that of the most exalted power?
16| Nor was the time close upon his passion without its share of those wonderful sights, when night, covering over the light of day, made the sun disappear. For terror seized the peoples everywhere that the end of all things had come, and that chaos, such as existed before the ordering of the world, would prevail once more. They searched too for the cause of so great an evil, and asked whether some offense had been committed by human beings against the divine, until he, in his gentle magnanimity, disregarding the insolence of the impious, restored the whole heaven, adorning it once more with the dance of the stars. And so, in some measure, the face of the world, which had grown gloomy, was restored again to its own brightness.
Cite a passage by its number: every paragraph here has its own anchor (for example https://openscriptorium.com/read/eusebius/040-constantine-s-oration-to-the-assembly-of-the-saints-chapter#p1), and the bracketed reference numbers link the same way.
← All of Eusebius of Caesarea: The Works of Eusebius of Caesarea