Letter 98: Severus urges Valeriana to govern a women's community through vigilance, discipline, and example.

Severus rejoices that Valeriana has been appointed to lead the sacred virgins. Her new authority is a gift from God, but it also requires vigilance. He urges her to gird up the loins of her understanding: leadership in a women's community is not ornamental, and it cannot be carried by title alone. She must govern souls in a way that produces spiritual profit. His instructions are practical. Valeriana must restrain disorder, cultivate obedience, and shape the community through her own example. A leader who only commands from outside the discipline she teaches will fail. The women under her care need firmness, but firmness should make them more alive to God, not merely more afraid of the superior. Work, prayer, modesty, silence, and mutual care are all part of the same formation. Severus also treats her office as a kind of spiritual commerce. The good leader gathers profit from every quarter: from correction, from endurance, from small acts of order, and from the hidden labor of daily discipline. Valeriana's community can become a place where every part of life is turned toward Christ. For that to happen, her authority must be both visible and inwardly credible. She must be the first practitioner of the rule she asks others to keep. The advice is not abstract spirituality. It imagines the daily realities of a house of women: speech, work, obedience, temptation, fatigue, and the superior's example. Severus wants Valeriana to turn those ordinary pressures into formation. Her success will be measured not by control alone, but by whether the community becomes more watchful, more peaceful, and more useful to God.

I rejoiced greatly on learning that your religiousness had by God's decree received the headship of those ^ Epiphanius; cf. ^ Ep. 17 (P. G. Ixxvii. 108). ^ TtrAos. * Sic. sacred virgins. And after other things. Wherefore gird up the loins of your understanding, and with watch- ing and strenuousness guide the rational souls over which you have been appointed to be head to every good action. Require from them not only asceticism of body, but also purity of mind. Make the virgins' holy convent inaccessible to every male, and let none whatever set foot within their sacred precincts: neither if he be a boy in his time of life, nor if he has reached advanced old age, except the priest who performs divine service for you. Neither let the virgins look freely at one another, but with eyes turned downwards let them say what is needed. The lust of the flesh obtains occasions from the lust of the eyes, as the divine John the Evangelist says in his epistle.^ Paul the wise also writes to the Ephesians, " Let no foul speech proceed out of your mouth: but that which is good for needful edification, in order that it may give grace to them that hear." ^ To this also your religious- ness must, carefully see: i.e. that all the virgins do not take their food separately, lest one be hungry and another drunken: ^ but be at one and the same table, as it is written in the Acts of the Apostles concerning those who in the beginning believed on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that they were all together, and they broke bread in a house and "took food, with gladness and singleness of their heart praising God "; and that "the heart and soul of the whole number of 1 I J. ii. i6. 2 Eph. iv. 29. ^ I Co. xi. 21. VII. I. those who had believed was one, and none said of any of the things that he possessed that it was his own, but everything that they had was common."^ But neither let any of them keep a bondwoman within to minister to her: but let those that are young minister to those that have grown old. It is not lawful for a virgin or a solitary, who have promised to imitate Christ, to keep a bondman or bondwoman. " The Son of man," He says, " came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many.'"' If therefore the bondwomen are willing to be bound with the yoke of virginity, after due - examination receive these, and let them live with the rest as freewomen; and let them have no liberty of intercourse with their former mistresses, nor for the future perform service for them. "He that was called as a bondman in the Lord is the Lord's freedman,"^ as the divine Apostle says. But, if they desire to minister to their mistresses in the monastery while yet bondwomen and living a secular life, use all your power to expel these women. If " evil communications corrupt gentle dispositions,"* much more does the servile character cause corruption in the characters of the freeborn when it lives with them. But do not exert yourself to apply correction to all these things immediately, lest you grow weary of labours, and load yourself with an excessive burden: but cut away the ^ Ac. ii. 44, 47, iv. 32. 2 Mt. XX. 28. ^ I Co. vii. 22. 4 Id. XV. 33. evil practices little by little, and provide the proper remedy for every disorder, like the most skilled physicians: and, when you have healed one disorder according to the method proper for it, then bestir yourself to cure another also; and thus you will make the whole body sound by gradual corrections, and will win the reward of wise stewards/ Enforce God's laws: but slanders against you or contumelies despise; and thus you will be a good example of humility of mind to those under your headship. Those that are ill comfort: before those that are well hold out readi- - ness for ascetic exercises. Those that are harassed by cares help and sympathize with them, inasmuch as you also are clad in bodily infirmity, and strengthen them with hopes for the future: teaching them that " the fashion of this world passeth away."^ Warn them not to despise the work of their hands. In fact even the wise Paul used to work: and he would say, "These hands ministered to my necessities and to them that were with me. And I have showed you all things, how that ye ought so to labour and work and help the weak."^ Warn them to have ever in their mouth meditation upon the divine scriptures, and to sing night and day the songs that the Holy Spirit delivered to us through David's mouth, not men's hymns, which are made to give pleasure, and which weaken the soul and relax the vigour of asceticism. " Meditate upon these things: think upon these things: 1 Lu. xii. 42-44. 2 I Qq vii 31. 3 Ac. xx. 34, 35. in order that thy progress may be manifest to every- one ": ^ and you may be as a ship that is engaged in commerce and gathers the spiritual profit from every quarter, in Christ Jesus our Lord.