Letter 479: Theodore Studite, Letter 479; Greek heading: Θεοδότῳ πατρικίῳ.

From your honored letter we have seen your most-praised Excellency, and from hearing what was conveyed in it we have come to know your good soul. For that you should treat us sinners with such honorific words, and should desire to see our paltry face, and then also to be made to hear a word of salvation, is the mark of a man truly possessed by God and of a soul longing after God. And how wonderful are the works of the great and only God of us Christians, in that He called you out of an unholy nation [Theodore writes to a convert from the Bulgars] into the august knowledge of His truth, and that by so great a means, one seemingly involuntary yet most of all of your own free choosing, together with the kinsmen who came out with you, since it was not otherwise approved by the divine dispensation [oikonomia: God's providential ordering of events] to snatch you away from godlessness. Oh, the wonderful calling! Oh, the praiseworthy redemption! You were brought out of darkness into His wonderful light, and, having stripped off the old man together with his absurd and pagan reasonings and deeds, you put on Christ, being styled a Christian instead of a pagan, a son of light and a son of day instead of a son of darkness and of the night of impiety, worshipping one God, who is adored in Father and Son and Holy Spirit, having fled the impiety of polytheism and of Bulgarian idolatry; and then also confessing the One of the Holy Trinity, the very Son and Word of God, who through surpassing mercy toward our race became a man like us in all things, while yet being the same perfect God. For God is the Father, God also the Son, God also the Holy Spirit; one God, not three gods - away with that! - the one because of the one Godhead, the other because of the three persons. This is the true faith of Christians, which abolishes every error and heresy [hairesis: false teaching]. And since Christ is twofold, inasmuch as He is perfect God and perfect man - the one as begotten of the Father before the ages, like the radiance from the sun, the other as born of His mother at the end of the times, like our own birth, or rather above ours as well (since she who bore Him was a virgin both before and in the bearing and after the birth, for which reasons she is both truly understood and entitled Theotokos [God-bearer, Mother of God]) - for this reason, just as in respect of the Father He is uncircumscribed, so in respect of the mother He is circumscribed upon a panel, and His circumscription, that is to say His icon [eikon: image], is to be venerated, in which there is beheld by us Christians what form He took up and is glorified in, since He has become like us in all things except sin, having abolished every idolatrous likeness, in the worship of which the race of men was being destroyed from the days of old. Therefore he who does not accept that He be depicted in an image, O good friend, denies by the very facts - even if in word he assents - that the Son of God became man; and he who does not venerate His holy icon is proved not to venerate Him, even if he professes to venerate Him; for the honor of His icon passes over to Him, just as the denial of it sends up the denial to Him. Since, then, as I learn, you yourself also are thus persuaded, and on this account you withdraw from communion with the iconoclasts [eikonomachoi: image-fighters], I rejoice and rejoice with you, I give thanks and give thanks together with you, that you see the truth, although you are a late learner and a newly born son of God. And do not be amazed that error enters in even among Christians; for where salvation is, there the dragon the devil runs to work destruction, and this through one man who holds power. For this error has only now been brought in among the Christians, since the icon of Christ, and of the Theotokos and of His saints, has existed from of old. These things, most honored master, I have uttered to you as one moved by God, sinner though I am, for the confirmation of your faith, as a token of your love, since you are our brother and not a stranger, as you have said. And if you are a stranger to the world, that would be well; for we too, the lowly, have the same condition, and on this account we are cast out here for the sake of the word of God. And blessed are you, believing in Christ rightly and accounting all things secondary for His sake. But for us to see one another is difficult on account of the authority, unless God should command it in whatever way He shall dispense. We shall not cease to remember you and to love you as our brother; whom once we did not know after flesh and blood, but now we hold after the Holy Spirit as a kinsman, both of us having been brought forth from the mother of adoption, the font of baptism. Peace to you, friend and brother and master, peace also to your house and to all who belong to you, from the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.