Letter 113: Theodore Studite, Letter 113; Greek heading: Πατρικίῳ.

Reckoning myself a debtor to your renowned magnanimity, I have now resolved to greet you, the one longed for, not by bare voice but by a letter. For even if the present time does not permit one to divulge a mystery to others, yet it cannot forbid it to you who are mine; for you are both my masters and of my blood, whence also the affection [for you] — and not so much from kinship as from the spirit of virtue. For there are other kinsmen too, but not so beloved that I should write to them in like manner. I pray for you, sinner though I am, the things that bring salvation, and indeed the things that bring health to soul and body. And this I say on account of the present heresy [hairesis — the iconoclast error that denies the veneration of holy images] and the soul-destroying delusion, that you, my God-fearing master, may be preserved unharmed, you and your whole household; for the wrath has begun from the Lord, [proceeding] from insolent Byzantis [Byzantion/Constantinople, here named as the seat of the iconoclast persecution], inasmuch as she has of old been wont to reject the things that pertain to the Lord. And already the fire devours everything on every side. Blessed is he who understands and remains unburned. For if Christ was poor and needy for our sake, how are the properties of poverty not in him — namely color, touch, body — from which and in which is [his] circumscription [perigraphe — the capacity to be delimited and thus depicted in an image]? They therefore do away, O man of God, with the saving dispensation [oikonomia — God's plan of salvation through the Incarnation] of the Word, those who do not confess that he was circumscribed; and the present events are the preludes to the coming of the Antichrist. But woe to you, Byzantis, because the judgment has begun from you, and in you may the evils come to their end, when your sins shall have been filled up. These things [I write] to you out of longing and out of toil, to your great-mindedness, which knows the greater things.