Letter 14: If I had thought only of the size of the loss you have suffered, I would have needed consolation myself — not just...

To Alexandra. If I had thought only of the size of the loss you have suffered, I would have needed consolation myself — not just because everything that touches you touches me, whether it brings joy or pain, but because I truly and deeply loved that admirable and genuinely excellent man. But the divine decree has taken him from us and translated him to the better life. And so I have scattered the cloud of grief from my own soul, and I urge you, my worthy friend, to overcome the pain of your sorrow with the power of reason, and to let God's word work its healing on your spirit in this hour of need. For what other reason, from our very cradles, do we drink in the teaching of the divine Scriptures like milk at the breast, if not so that when trouble falls on us we can apply the wisdom of the Spirit as a salve for our pain? I know how sad it is — how intensely grievous — when one has known the full worth of someone beloved, suddenly to be stripped of that person, to fall in a single moment from happiness to misery. But for those who are gifted with good sense and who use their power of right reason, no human contingency arrives entirely unforeseen. Nothing human is stable. Nothing lasts: not beauty, not wealth, not health, not dignity, none of all those things that most people value most highly. Some men fall from the heights of prosperity to the depths of poverty. Some lose their health and wrestle with one illness after another. Some who were proud of their distinguished ancestry find themselves bent under the crushing yoke of slavery. Beauty is spoiled by disease and worn away by old age. And the supreme Ruler has wisely permitted none of these things to be permanent or enduring, precisely so that their possessors, in fear of change, might lower their proud gaze; knowing how all such things ebb and flow, they might cease to trust in what cannot hold, and instead fix their hope on what lasts forever. We were made for the immortal life. The present life is a kind of road, not a destination.

Letter 14