Letter 319: Theodore Studite, Letter 319; Greek heading: Νικήτᾳ ἡγουμένῳ τοῦ Μηδικίου.

I am glad to receive replies from your Honor to the things I write, yet even when I receive none I will not keep silent. Therefore now too I address your Holiness, discharging the debt of love and making known my own wretchedness, that I am alive by your holy prayers, stumbling much against God each day, but desiring, together with you who are holy, to serve Christ by faith working through love. You have surely learned that the common father of many, and my own sacred sponsor [the one who received Theodore as his spiritual father], has departed to the Lord, the truly Theophanes [Theophanes the Confessor, abbot of the Great Field]. Blessed is that man, who contended well in the ascetic life and bore away at the close of his life the fairest crown, the confession of Christ, in such a most grievous sickness and affliction and bodily old age; and yet, as though youthful in body, he carried off the prize, that he might become a support and security to those who stand firm, but a reproof to those who make excuses with pretexts in their sins [cf. Psalm 141:4]. By his prayers, together with those of you my fathers, may I too, the sinner, be saved. My venerable brother Arsenios I greet most warmly.