Letter 448: Theodore Studite, Letter 448; Greek heading: Εὐστρατίῳ ἡγουμένῳ.

I rejoiced on receiving your honored letter, most beloved of fathers, and on being instructed that matters touching your holiness stand thus and so; for, so far as I could judge from those who reported them - trustworthy men though they were - I was grievously disposed, having heard of the dissembling signature [a subscription, apparently consenting to iconoclasm, that Eustratius is reported to have given]. And receive me, most honored one, as I discourse rather more frankly. It is not free of blame that you, having been detained by an imperial officer, remained unharmed - that is, set free; for this is the sort of inducement that belongs to the things commonly bruited about. None, therefore, of those who have professed openly is acknowledged to have remained without imprisonment, or at the least exile, that is, banishment. But those who escape these fall within the abduction [that is, they have effectively gone over to the enemy], so that I may not grieve you by speaking more harshly. Or did you not perceive clearly, most discerning one, the cruel persecution of Leo, who bears the name of a beast [Leo V, 'the Lion,' Roman emperor 813-820]? Whose Ahab-like hand [after Ahab, the persecuting king of Israel] seized even those subject to another dominion, and stretched out and destroyed, and - what was the more humane course - kept them under guard after a bitter scourging, not to speak of those under his own hand. But if you yourself suffered nothing of this kind after your arrest, forgive me, holy one: you have been despoiled. And do not say to me that your own churches are preserved, and that the depicted images [historiai, the painted holy images] remain intact, and the commemoration of our most holy patriarch [the liturgical naming of the deposed patriarch Nicephorus]; for this too is what others who have been led away allege in their own defense. These things cannot be preserved unless there has taken place a betrayal of true resistance [enstasis, steadfast confession of the faith]. What is the profit, if we, who both are and are called the temple of God, have been rendered worthless and have purchased for ourselves lifeless houses? The icon [eikon, image] of Christ does not fall away, nor that of the Mother of God [Theotokos, 'God-bearer'], nor that of any saint; for it abides in them as in their prototypes [the originals whom the images represent], but those fall who think to destroy them - and indeed so also do those who, sparing these images, betray frank confession and the affliction that comes through it. Alas - others dying, others banished, others scourged, others kept under guard; the mountains and the deserts, the rocks and the caves holding the blessedly persecuted - and we remaining at home, and supposing that we abide unharmed? By no means. Let all the world's material substance of those who only seem to keep it perish; let the acknowledged harm of the soul be preferred to it - the harm which every maker of excuses has undergone. These things I have spoken out of love and by way of admonition, and that we are deserving to come under penance, and that in a time of orthodoxy nothing should be left untested. And it is well to walk by way of humility and to heal what has grown sick, rather than, by self-justification, to rub against ourselves the greater charges.