Letter 424: Theodore Studite, Letter 424; Greek heading: Ἰωάννῃ λογοθέτῃ.

The occasion has opened a door of frankness [parrhesia, freedom of bold speech] for us to address good men who are at the same time friends; and of such men who could be greater than your piety? You who, for this very thing, for your being pious, have endured no few afflictions and ill-treatments at the hands of the man who both gave offense to God and destroyed the world in impiety, and who broke off his life in a manner counterbalancing his apostasy [an allusion to the violent death of the iconoclast emperor Leo V, killed in 820] -- though not in a holy place, even if the saying frightens like a bogey (because the temple defiled by heretics is not the holy temple of God, but a common house, as the Great Basil says [Basil of Caesarea]), since the angel set over it, as over every church, had withdrawn on account of the impiety. Therefore neither was the sacrifice performed in it acceptable to God; and hear Him saying: 'The impious man who sacrifices to me a calf is as one who slays a dog' [cf. Isaiah 66:3]. But if you should take it that the impious man died as though in a temple, this manner too would be fitting; for it was necessary, it was necessary, that the man who had set himself against the temples of God should see in a temple the swords being bared against him; it was necessary that the man who had made the divine altar to vanish should himself be made to vanish at an altar, that against the hand stretched out for the outraging of Christ a cutting should be brought, that against the head moved [in impiety] a sword should drive destructively, that against the shoulder raised for the maltreatment of the pious a mortal blow should come, that the man who had dishonored the holy icon [eikon, sacred image] of Christ, of the Theotokos [the God-bearer, the Virgin Mary], and of any one whatsoever of the saints, should be sent away dishonored from the imperial halls. Why then, my lord, have I thus dramatized for you the death of the accursed one? Because it is necessary that from this not only the pious emperor should recognize the outcome corresponding to the impiety of the impious man, but every human being also. And I marvel greatly how our good master, knowing this, does not triumph over the wickedness of the murderer and grant both to himself and to his subjects the propitiation of orthodoxy, as a king of peaceful rule in imitation of Christ. For this reason I, the lowly one, ask and entreat that you, the most pious, be urged on -- just as I have also heard that you have been stirred -- to give yourself wholly to the restoration of the faith, in which lies the salvation both of the dominion and of all the subject people.