Letter 12: Theodore Studite, Letter 12; Greek heading: Θωμᾷ δισυπάτῳ.

What greeting, or what word of comfort, could be found on the part of us, the lowly, for your Lordship in regard to the griefs that have befallen you, O master? You have been estranged from the city that bore and nourished you; you have been deprived of your great hearth; you have been stripped of your brilliant rank, and I will add, of your property as well; you have been parted from your friends, your companions, your most beloved children; you have been banished hither and thither. And as for the hardships of banishment, all that makes for suffering to your body, unaccustomed to it: scarcity of food, of drink, of baths; the desolation of having none to converse with; the abundance of those who press in upon you and assail you. For those who once were grateful are now perhaps ungrateful, and your friends and acquaintances have turned their faces away, whether they are near or far, ceasing to recognize and to love and to care for you. To these is added anxiety over the few servants and slaves still left to you, and before these, over your most excellent children; and the power to help is not at hand. And amid all this you sit before the city, just as Israel once, led away to the Assyrians, sat by the rivers of Babylon; whereof it is said, 'There we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion' [Psalm 137:1]. Your portion, then, is of groaning and dejection and tears. But since there is present in you the grace of knowledge and the gift of prudence, we do not at all suppose that you collapse under these things, knowing as you do that the life of man is a trial [literally a place of testing], according to the renowned Job [Job 7:1], whose sufferings, all of them, are not unknown to your great experience, nor is the other unstable course of this present life, which holds itself now one way, now another, on nearly every day and hour; for it resembles a flowing and an ebbing, flowers and dreams and whatever else of the kind, according to the divine utterances of the saints. For let your honorable soul reckon up how many things have been done in the interval of time since the deportation: some men cast down, others raised up, some dead, others having prospered, others having met misfortune. And there is no standing still in the unstable and ever-moving course of our life. And that, again, is true, that we are all in exile, inasmuch as we were resettled, through the first-formed man [Adam], out of paradise, as the account has it, and dwell in this death-bearing region, until we sing, 'Bring my soul out of prison, that I may confess to your name' [Psalm 142:7], passing over from sojourning into freedom. So that men could not even banish those of their own kind, according to the strict sense of the word, being themselves exiles; since we are all marked out as sojourners and strangers. If there is any such medicine of consolation for you, any solace of comfort, we ask, we beseech, that you bear with long-suffering the things that have befallen, and with thanksgiving the griefs, which we are persuaded you have done. For whence else shall we bear the affliction? Then, that even from this we shall gain great things: through inaction the greater well-doing, through poverty the wealth that does not fail, through dishonor the glory that is undefiled. And perhaps even our pious sovereigns who rule [the Roman emperors] will themselves at long last be moved to bring you back to your home and to restore what is due. For we know their love of mankind and their readiness to repent, which they employ greatly in such matters. But so long as you continue in exile, may the Lord God comfort you with a comfort of endurance and of thanksgiving, and may he also persuade the rulers themselves to do for you what has been mentioned above, and to give you back, the longed-for one, to those who love you.