Letter 329: Theodore Studite, Letter 329; Greek heading: Εὐπρεπιανῷ τέκνῳ.

I, my child, when you came to me at Anatolikoi [the theme/region of Anatolikon] and reminded me of my love for you, dissuaded you then from shutting yourself away during the persecution; and when you separated yourself from the brethren, I supposed for the most part that you had done this out of love for me, for the sake of quiet, and I did not consider it to be any great fault on your part. For this reason I imagined in my mind that you were dwelling in the Prousian mountains [the mountains around Prousa, modern Bursa] and serving God, and I rejoiced. But when I now heard nothing of the sort, but rather that you have been carousing, supposedly under the pretext of dispensation [oikonomia, the prudent accommodation by which one avoids a greater evil] so as not to be caught by the heresy, and that you go about in white garments, living alone, and serving the abbess in the manner of a steward or rather a curator, buying up cattle and carrying burdens from inside out and outside in, going out and coming in, I was beside myself, I was unstrung, I became as one dead. Woe is me, the wretched one! Brother, what have you done, how did you dare to do this whole thing? You who were formerly a confessor in the matter of the Moechians [the "adulterers," Theodore's name for the party that accepted the uncanonical second marriage of the emperor Constantine VI] and now in the matter of the iconoclasts [eikonomachoi, "image-fighters," those who attack the veneration of icons] have lately become a Christ-trafficker, accounting divine things as merchandise; you who of old were scrupulous even in your glance are now a slave to a woman, that I may say nothing worse; you who fled so far from your own people are now turned back again and live as flesh and blood with [your] brothers; you who fled your fatherland are now a clothes-thief. The divine Basil says somewhere [St. Basil the Great] that you have both destroyed the senator and have not made a monk, and this because he did not live strictly, but held back some of his own goods. But you, pardon me, have not destroyed the monk, but have denied him. What shall we call you? A monk? But you are a reveler. But you say, you tell me that within you wear the black [habit] and that in your heart you have not denied. This is exactly what all those now say who are in communion with the heresy. It would have been better for you, O man, to have communed with the heresy and to repent, than to have cast off the holy habit [schema] and be impenitent; for in casting it off you have trampled underfoot the Son of God, you have accounted the blood of the covenant a common thing, you have insulted the Spirit of grace. Therefore you are not even worthy to partake of the holy things. Oh, oh, what have you done, and that being one near to my breast [an intimate, a confidant]? You have brought me down into the chambers of Hades, you have mixed for me a cup of death; the devil has taken you by a way wherever he wished. But come to your senses again, my good child Euprepianus; you have been mocked by Satan, while thinking to mock him -- for a few days, under the [pressure of] circumstance, in paternal obedience and in service, to bear white garments and to cover the head, as you did with me in the prison, coming by night through the roof-tiles. Yes, it is permissible [oikonomia would allow] to go home again afterward and cast off the head-covering and the outer cloak and hold to the divine work. But to do so as you were doing is a casting-off of the habit [rhipsoschemia, the renouncing of the monastic schema]. Have mercy on yourself, brother, and on me, your unworthy father, and, as soon as you receive this letter, both shear your hair and cast off the white garment and bind yourself together with a brother and sit as the rest of your brothers do, writing back to me at once, that I may again reply to you. I know that you did this thinking to do something good. But undo it; it is the work of the evil one.