Letter 558: Theodore Studite, attributed letter 558; Greek heading/source marker: Νεοφύτῳ.

The sweet and longed-for lines of your most excellent love in Christ, O good Neophytos, O thrice-most-beloved of friends and brothers, we received with open hands [literally, with upturned palms]—as the proverb has it—and, having received them, we read them, and having read them we gave thanks to the great providence of God, which most wisely, and in a manner beyond what any human being could tell, steers and conducts our affairs toward what is profitable; for we learned that you have been brought safely through into good circumstances, into ease, and that you are enjoying pure health. For what is sweeter to us, what more delightful, than to be brought such good tidings from you and concerning you, who love us as much as your own eyes? And at the same time, as though through a kind of mirror of your most pleasant letter, beholding with the intellectual eyes of the soul your longing toward us, we have been still more sincerely and more firmly attached to you and spiritually bound together, and clinging to your friendly conjunction and bond we hold fast to it more than the ivy to the oak, or the nails to the flesh, or the polyps [octopuses] to the rocks. And neither place nor time nor anything else whatsoever among all things will be able to part us from your love, since we have as our fellow-worker toward this the lawgiver of love, Christ, the cornerstone, the president and father of peace and concord, and the unifying and binding gift and grace of the Spirit. For even if place has separated us bodily from one another, yet the pure and guileless mode of friendship has spiritually joined us together and bound us all the more closely. For in the case of those who are joined, so to speak, in a fleshly manner, the more the sensible causes of their union are stripped away and cut off, the more their loves grow cold and wither away; but in the case of those who love according to Christ, the longing within the soul is kindled the more ardently in proportion as the material and visible things are quenched—being the tinder of the whole affection and of the entire disposition—once the chambers of the heart within have been emptied entirely. But may God kindle our own longing yet more and more into a more conspicuous blaze. And do you, for your part, never cease in any way to give rest to, to console, and to comfort our master, the sweet, the pleasant, the gracious one. Give him rest, however, not yielding to fleshly or natural bonds, nor as to a brother who underwent for you the same birth-pangs (for this belongs to ordinary people, and to those who grovel on the ground and incline toward earthly things alone), but for the sake of God himself, for the sake of the good itself, and as to a confessor and martyr of the truth, and as a champion of true religion and a defender of the faith. May the grace of the Most High, most excellent of brothers, preserve your love of God [theophilia] greater and higher than every satanic affront and assault.