Послание 17. К Иоанну, спафарию

Hearing that your eminence performed such a divine deed, we were amazed at your truly great faith, man of God! For the one who reported this said that you used the holy icon of the Great Martyr Demetrius instead of a recipient and thus performed the Baptism of your God-protected son. Oh confidence! “And in Israel I have not found such faith,” Christ said, it seems to me, not only to the centurion then, but also to you now, his competitor in faith (Matthew 8:10). He found what he was looking for, and you got what you hoped to get. There is a Divine command instead of a bodily presence, and here a bodily image instead of a prototype. There the word was characterized by the great Word, which invisibly performed a miracle of healing by the Divine; and here the great martyr was inherent in the spirit of his image, perceiving the baby. For unclean ears and unbelieving souls this is unacceptable as something incredible, especially for iconoclasts, but for your piety the manifestations are obvious and the evidence is clear. For what cannot God give to believers? And how is it that the one who is depicted on it in accordance with the name is not contemplated and recognized as existing in the icon? “The honoring of the image,” says Basil the Great, “goes to the prototype.” 22 So, the martyr received the child through his image, since you believed so. What a blessing to your eminence that you have acquired such a godfather, as they say, and not some boss, or nobleman, or, one might say, the one most clothed in a diadem, for what you have acquired is higher and more excellent! He is the most courageous of martyrs, the most glorious of miracle workers, a true friend of Christ, a companion of Angels; he could and can do so many and such great things in the heavenly realms that with the trumpet of his miracles he is glorified from end to end of the earth. Truly blessed are you, most pious man, that you have received such a successor, very happy is your son, who has been received with such great glory and power. However, we would like to see this son of yours, named Saint Demetrius, if you allow, so that by hugging him like a son, we, sinners, could properly greet him, and also tell others about this event. For good deeds should not be kept silent, but revealed to others as obvious evidence of pious faith. To Amphilochius about the Holy Spirit. Chapter 18. Creations in Russian translation. T.III. P.244. M., 1891. You might be interested in: