Letters to Eulogius

Collection of 8 letters to St. Gregory the Great (Dvoeslovo), addressed to Eulogius, Patriarch of Alexandria, represents a valuable fragment of the history of the relationship between Rome and Alexandria at the end of the 6th century. The letters, written in the period around 590-604, cover a wide range of topics, reflecting both theological discussions and practical issues of church life. St. Gregory touches on issues of church discipline, the appointment of bishops and the resolution of internal conflicts. The letters contain information about the socio-political situation of that time, which directly or indirectly influenced the life of the Church. Letter I II III IV V VI VII VIII The mother and guardian of all good, love, which unites the hearts of many, does not consider those absent whom it has in the eyes of the spiritual. And so for us, beloved brother, contained by one root of love, physical absence and local distance have no power; because we are not far from one another when we are one with each other. Our constant desire is for the root of love to be common to us and to other brothers. Something special draws us to the Church of Alexandria; some kind of private law encourages us to maintain love for her with great zeal. For as everyone knows, the blessed Evangelist Mark was sent to Alexandria by the holy Apostle Peter, his teacher; then we are connected by the unity of teacher and student in such a way that I, as a teacher, seem to preside over the student’s department, and you, as a student, preside over the teacher’s department. In this unity of hearts, we are strengthened by the virtues of your Holiness, knowing that you will fully follow the statutes of your leader and with complete reverence always delve into the depths of the teacher, from which the preaching of salvation arose in your country. Therefore, having received the scripture from Your Holiness, our heart rejoiced at this fraternal visit, but was also embarrassed by sorrow, having learned from the letter about your troubles and sorrows, and we, out of fraternal compassion, weep with you. But since now various shocks are spreading everywhere, then, in the face of a common misfortune, we should not so much grieve over our own misfortune as try to overcome with patience what cannot be avoided. “We don’t even want to talk about our misfortunes, how much we suffer from the sword of the Lombards, who daily either rob or kill our fellow citizens, fearing that by describing our sorrows we might increase the sorrows of your heart, which is so compassionate towards us.” Some time ago, we entrusted our common son, Deacon Sabin, who has the position of interceding for the Church in the royal city, with letters that he was to send to your brotherly love. If you received them, then we wonder why you did not answer us anything about them. In the current circumstances, when one must be afraid that someone’s pride will not introduce temptation into the Churches, it is very necessary to carefully re-read the letters written to you, and with all care and attention to preserve what relates to your honor and the peace of the Church 1 . Almighty God, in His goodness, who has given you the heart and love of a pastor, may he preserve you in his ministry, may he protect you from every calamity, internal and external, and through your preaching may he turn the souls of the lost to himself. We received the letter-bearer Isidore the deacon, our common son, with due love when he brought us the blessing of St. Evangelist Mark. You, shining with the merits of a good life, have sent us, neighboring paradise, fragrant trees. And we, like sinners, send you from the west trees suitable for building ships, which, like a semblance of our restless spirit, are always rushing about in the waves of the sea. We wanted to send large trees, but the ship, due to its smallness, could not accommodate large ones. Your all-loving Holiness, in your letters, talks a lot about the department of St. Peter, the Supreme Apostle, and says that he himself sits on it to this day as his successors. Although I recognize myself as unworthy not only to enjoy the honor of those chairing, but also to be among those standing; but I readily accept everything that has been said because I hear this about the Chair of Peter from someone who himself occupies the Chair of Peter. No matter how far I am from the desire to accept honor for myself, I was very pleased when you, Most Holiness, learned from me, and rewarded yourself with the same. For who does not know that the Holy Church was established by the firmness of the Supreme Apostle, whose firmness of spirit is marked by the very name of Peter, which comes from petra (stone)? The Truth itself tells him: “I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 16:19); He also says to him: “And when you have returned, strengthen your brethren” (Luke 22:32); and again: “Simon Ionin, do you love Me? ... feed my sheep” (John 21:16). And so, although there are many Apostles, but, by primacy, one department of the Supreme has received such a dignity that in three places it refers to one. For Peter exalted the pulpit, on which he deigned to rest and end his present life. He also decorated the pulpit to which he sent his disciple the Evangelist 3. He also established the department on which he sat, although he had the intention of resigning, for seven years 4 . If the see belongs to one and only one, on which, by order of the Divine, three bishops now preside, then everything that I hear good about you, I impute to myself, and you, that you know good about me, then impute to your dignity; because we are all one in Him who says: “That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You, that they also may be one in Us” (John 17:21). Paying the debt for your greeting, I express to you my great joy that I have learned about your unrelenting labors against shameless heretics, and I pray to the almighty Lord, may he help you, most blessed shepherds, with his protection, and may, through your tongue, pluck out from the bowels of the Holy Church every root of sorrow, so that, having grown, it will not again be an obstacle and defilement for many. For having received the talent, at the command: “I will buy it until I come” (Luke 19:13), although I myself am powerless to make the purchase, I rejoice in the success of your purchase, knowing that if I am not a participant in your work by doing, then I am a participant by love. The good of a neighbor, I think, is communicated to the idle when he has a common joy with another about his deeds. I wanted to send logs to you; but you didn’t explain whether you need them, etc... 5. I ask you, strengthen me with your holy prayer against all the sorrows that I endure in this life, and with your intercession before the almighty Lord, protect me from them. The words of a scientist are always useful: for by listening to him, we either learn something that we knew was unknown to us, or, more importantly, we learn something that we didn’t even know about, that is unknown to us. I was found among such listeners today, when Your Holiness in his letter obliged me to send to you the deeds of all the martyrs who were collected, in the time of Constantine of blessed memory, by Eusebius of Caesarea. About these Acts, before the letter to your Holiness, I knew nothing, whether they were collected or not collected. For this reason I thank you, because your Holy teaching instructed me, and I began to know what I did not know. For besides what is contained in the books of Eusebius about the deeds of the holy martyrs, neither in the archives of our Church, nor in other libraries of Rome, I know nothing except a small collection in one scroll. However, we have, in one codex, a collection of the names of almost all the martyrs, dividing their sufferings for each day, and daily, in their memory, we perform solemn liturgies. But this book does not indicate who suffered in what way, but only indicates the name, place and day of suffering. Thus, we know every day, as I said, many saints from various countries and regions, crowned with martyrdom. But I think you already have all this. And what you wanted to receive from us and what we have not found before, we are now looking for, and if we can find anything, we will send it to you. As for the logs, about which you write that they are short, the reason for this is the smallness of the ship that carried them, and so on. Blessing of St. We received the Evangelist Mark, or, more accurately, the Holy Apostle Peter, with the same pleasure with which it was sent, and repaying the debt to you for your good will, we ask your Holiness: deign to pray for us, so that we may be honored to quickly avoid present evils, and not be deprived of future joys. The letter-bearer, our common son, having brought a letter to Your Holiness, found me and left me sick: why can I respond to your abundant source with almost many drops of my short letter. I consider it a heavenly gift that in my bodily illness I received the writings of your all-loving Holiness: it brought me great joy with the news of the teaching in the city of Alexandria, the conversion of heretics and the agreement of the faithful, so that the joy of the spirit tempered my excessive sorrow. We always rejoice with new joy over your good deeds, although we do not consider this perfection of your work as news. For we have never been unaware of the grace of Almighty God, abundantly poured out on you, most blessed Shepherds, which grows the people of the Holy Church and multiplies the spiritual harvest for the heavenly granary. Therefore, we give thanks to Almighty God, seeing the fulfillment of this scripture on you: “Where there is much life, strength is evident to the ox” (Prov. 14:4). For if the strong ox had not drawn the tongue of the listeners’ hearts across the earth, then such a great field of the faithful would not have grown. Knowing that by doing good, you rejoice with others, for your pleasant news I pay you with similar news. While the people of the Angles, living on the edge of the world, have hitherto continued in their treachery and veneration of wooden and stone idols, with the help of your prayers, I considered it my duty, by the will of God, to send a monk from his monastery to preach to this people. With my permission, the German Bishops consecrated him Bishop, and he, having received encouragement from them, reached the said people on the borders of the world. Now a written notice has come to us about his well-being and labors, from which it is clear that he and the other preachers sent with him shine with such miracles in this people that in the signs they show they appear to be imitators of the Apostolic powers. He, our brother and co-bishop, informs that on the feast of the Nativity of the Lord, which took place on this first indictment 7, more than ten thousand Angles were baptized by him. I am telling you all this so that you will know what you are doing among the Alexandrian people with words, and at the ends of the world with prayer. For your prayers are where you are not, just as your holy deeds are where you are. You have completely satisfied me regarding the identity of the heretic Eudoxius, 8 about whose error I have not found anything in Latin. The testimonies you presented of such strong men as Vasily, Gregory and Epiphanius show that the enemy was clearly crushed by so many arrows of our heroes. As for those errors, the appearance of which we are now learning about in the Church of Constantinople, everything that you answered regarding them is very reasonable, and worthy of the judgment of such an important department. Why do we thank Almighty God when we see that the tablets of the covenant still exist in the ark of God. For what if not the ark of the covenant, the shepherd's heart? Since spiritual teaching lives in this ark, then, without a doubt, the tablets of the law also lie in it. Your Holiness has also noticed that you no longer write words to some people, whose origin was lent to vanity, and yet you say to me: as you ordered. I ask you to remove this word of command from my hearing; for I know who I am and who you are. In place you are my brothers, and in virtue you are my fathers. I did not order, but only considered it necessary to indicate what seemed useful. And yet I do not find that you would like to firmly retain in your memory the very thing that I presented to you for preservation in your memory. For I said: “You should not write such words either to me or to anyone else.” But in the very title of the letter that you sent to me, who forbade such expressions, you depicted the word of a proud name, calling me the universal Pope. I ask your kind Holiness not to do this anymore; for what is given to another in excess of what is proper is taken away from you. I seek success not in names, but in virtues (moribus). And I do not consider it an honor that deprives my brothers of honor. For honor for me is what serves as honor for the universal Church. My honor is the unshakable strength of my brothers. I am then truly honored when every other person is given due honor. For when your Holiness calls me Pope Ecumenical, he takes away this dignity from himself, because he recognizes me as occupying everything (me fatetur universum). Let this not happen! May words that puff up vanity and insult love be removed! At the Council of Chalcedon and from subsequent Fathers, as your Holiness knows, this name was proposed to my predecessors. But none of them wanted to use it because they loved the honor of all priests in this world and thereby wanted to preserve their honor with Almighty God. Paying the debt for your benevolence, I ask you, deign to remember me in your prayers, so that, having no power in my merits, through your intercession, the Lord will release me from the union of my sins. Last year I received a most pleasant letter from your Holiness, which I could not answer until now due to my extreme illness. For for almost two years now I have been confined to my bed, and I suffer such suffering from gout that on holidays, for three hours at a time, I can hardly get up to perform the solemn liturgy; but immediately, after that, a serious illness forces me to go to bed again, so that I can, with an intermittent cry, endure its torment. This disease is sometimes weak, sometimes very strong; but she is never so weak as to leave me completely, nor so strong as to kill me, so that, while I am in death every day, I am daily distracted from death. And it is not surprising that I, a great sinner, have been kept in the prison of this corruption for so long. This prompts me to cry out: “Bring my soul out of prison to confess to Your name” (Ps. 142:8). But as I am unworthy for this to be fulfilled through my prayers, I ask your Holiness, help me through the intercession of your prayer, and free me from the burden of sins and corruption, bringing the children of God into the freedom known to you. Your most dear and venerable Beatitude, they wrote to me that our common son, Deacon Anatoly from the Church of Constantinople, informed you through a letter that some monks from the countries of Jerusalem came to me with a question about the error of the Agnoites 9 . You say that the deacon asked your Holiness to write to me how one should think about this controversial subject. But the monks from the countries of Jerusalem did not come to me with any question, and he, our common son, could not write to you something that did not exist, and I think that the interpreter was mistaken in his letters. For this deacon, two years before this, wrote to me that monks from the above countries came to Constantinople with such a question, and asked my opinion about it. I answered him against this heresy long before receiving your letter, and I answered the same thing that I later found in your Holiness’ letter; That’s why I thanked Almighty God a lot, seeing how the Roman and Greek Fathers, whom we follow, speak in the same spirit about all sorts of controversial subjects. For in your letter I found many such thoughts that I seemed to read the writings of the Latin Fathers against the said heresy. Imagine how much I could love and praise the good in my most holy brother, when in his mouth I recognized the voice of the venerable Fathers, whom I love so much. May there be praise and glory in the highest to Him, by Whose gift the voice of Mark is still heard in the seat of Peter, to Him Who, by the outpouring of His Spirit, in the words of preaching, makes, as in the tabernacle, the voice of spiritual bells, when the priest enters the Holy of Holies to explore the mysteries! Your preaching is right and worthy of great praise. But we beg the almighty Lord to preserve you for a long time in this life, so that the organ of God in you may spread more the voice of truth in this world. And for me, I ask, intercede, so that the path of my wandering, so cruel for me now, will soon end, and I, through your merits, which I cannot do through mine, will achieve the promised eternal fatherland, and will rejoice with the citizens of heaven. “As cold water is good for a thirsty soul, so is good news from the earth from afar” (Prov. 25:26). What good news could there be for me, promoting the good of the Holy Church, if not the news about the life and well-being of your all-loving Holiness, who, having received the light of truth, enlightens the Church with the word of preaching, and instructs on a better path by the example of her virtues? Whenever I consider in my heart your spirit unanimous with me, when I find myself constantly abiding in your heart, I always thank Almighty God: for love cannot be divided by place. Although we are far apart in body, we are always inseparable in spirit. Our common son, Deacon Anatoly, notified me in a letter that in the royal city, apart from secular affairs, there were no important church affairs. But I think he informed me about this before Your Beatitude spoke about church matters. And I rejoice that where we happened to be present, it seems to me that I was there too. For as a servant of truth, a follower of Peter and a preacher of the holy Church, you, I am sure, could say what should have been proclaimed by the lips of a teacher in the pulpit of the Apostle Peter. Before this, when Abramius of Alexandria departed, I answered your Holiness, what is my opinion about your writings published against the heretics Agnoites, mentioning why I am answering so late. But this Abramius, due to the need of navigation, they say, slowed down for a long time in the city of Naples; which is why I am again expressing the thoughts that I wrote then: “in your teaching against the heretics, called Agnoites, there is much that we are surprised at, but there is nothing that would be disgusting to us.” In the same sense, even before that, I wrote quite a lot to our common son, Deacon Anatoly. Your teaching is so consistent with the Latin Fathers in everything that I am not surprised why the spirit is not different in different languages. .... What you said about the fig tree, in the same sense, Blessed Augustine says about it like this: “When the Evangelist added: “There is no time for figs” (Mark 11:13), then it is obvious that under the guise of a fig tree, the Lord was looking for fruit in the synagogue, which had the foliage of the law, but did not have the fruit of works. For it was impossible for the Creator of all things not to know that that fig tree had no fruit, when everyone could have known it, because the time for the fig trees had not yet come.” As for the Scripture: “But of that day or of that hour no one knows, neither the angels nor the Son” (Mark 13:32), then your Holiness rightly judges that this should directly refer not to the Son himself, since He is the head, but to His body, which we make up. The same thought is expressed in many places by St. Augustine. He also expounds another thought that can be applied to the Son, that is, that Almighty God sometimes speaks according to human custom, for example. to Abraham: “Today I know that you fear God” (Gen. 22:12). This is not because God then only recognized the fear of God in Abraham, but because Abraham himself made him realize that he feared God. For as we call a day joyful, not because the day itself is joyful, but because the day makes us glad; so the almighty Son says that He does not know the day, which He makes unknown, not because He Himself does not know, but because He does not allow anyone to know it. That is why the Father is called the one who knows, since the Son, co-essential with Him, has knowledge of what even the Angels do not know, according to that (divine) nature from the Father, by which He is above all the Angels. From here comes the following, more subtle, understanding: the Incarnate Only Begotten Son, who became perfect man for us, knows the day and hour of judgment in human nature, but does not know from human nature. That is, he knows in it, but not from it; because, like God, who became man, he knows the day and hour of judgment by the power of His Divine nature. So at the wedding, when the Virgo Mother spoke about the lack of wine, he answered: “What do you and I need, Woman? My hour has not come” (John 2:4); - He said this not because the Lord of the Angels, who, together with other creations, created the very hours and times, was subject to an hour, but I mean that the Virgin Mother, with a lack of wine, wanted a miracle from him. To this she immediately received an answer: “What is it for me and for you, woman?” which means, as it were, the following: “I have the power with which I can perform a miracle from the Father, and not from the Mother.” For, by nature from the Mother, He could die, but by nature from the Father, He worked miracles. That’s why, when he was on the cross and dying, he recognized Her as his Mother when, entrusting Her to his disciple, he said: “Behold your Mother” (John 19:27). And so, saying: “What do I and You, Woman? My hour has not come,” he says, as it were: for a miracle, the power of which I do not have in Your nature, I do not recognize You; but when the hour of death comes, I will recognize You as Mother, because from You I have that nature by which I can die. Thus he said about knowledge that he did not have it, because it was not of human nature. In a word, God and man know the day and hour of judgment; but because there is God and man. And this is so obvious that whoever is not a Nestorian cannot possibly be an Agnoite. For whoever recognizes the incarnation of the Wisdom of God Herself, can one reasonably say that there is something that the Wisdom of God does not know? It is written: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word. All this happened” (John 1:1,2). If all, then without a doubt, the very day and hour of judgment. Who is so foolish as to say that the Word of the Father did what he does not know? It is also written: “Jesus knows that the Father has given all things in his hand” (John 13:3). If all, then of course the day of judgment. Who is so stupid as to say that the Son took into his hands what he does not know? Regarding the place where (the Lord) says to the women about Lazarus: “Where will you lay him” (John 11:34)? Our opinion is the same as yours: for if they say that the Lord did not know where Lazarus was buried and therefore asked, then, without a doubt, they will be forced to admit that the Lord did not know in what places, after the crime, Adam and Eve hid, when he said in paradise: “Adam, where are you?” (Gen. 3:9), or where is Abel, when, denouncing Cain, he said: “Where is your brother Abel?” (Gen. 4:9) And if he didn’t know, then why did he immediately add: “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me?” (Gen. 4:10) However, Severian of Gaval 10 speaks differently about this place. In his opinion, the Lord, when asking the wives where they laid the deceased Lazarus, said this as if to denounce them, that is, as if he clearly recalled the crime of Eve and said to the wives: “I placed my husband in paradise, and you laid him in the tomb.” In response to this, he, our common son, Deacon Anatoly, asked me another question: what, he says, if they object to me that just as the immortal deigned to die, that he might deliver us from death, and the eternal, existing before time, desired to undergo time, so the Wisdom of God deigned to accept our ignorance, that he might free us from ignorance? But I have not yet answered him, because until now I was overcome by a serious illness. Now, through your prayer, I have begun to recover, and if I become so strong that I can dictate, with the help of the Lord, I will answer him. I don’t consider it necessary to talk to you about this subject, so as not to seem to be teaching you what you know; for medicines also lose their healing power if they are applied to healthy and strong members. We also announce to you that we are experiencing great difficulty here from interpreters. For we do not have those who would correctly express the meaning of the originals, but always want to convey one meaning of the words, and obscure (confundunt) the entire meaning of the sayings. Why does it happen that we can only understand what is translated except with great difficulty. I received the blessing of Saint Mark the Evangelist and your Beatitude. May Almighty God preserve your life for many years to come for the edification of the Holy Church, and may He inspire you to pray for me more earnestly, so that I, suppressed by my sins, may arise through the power of your prayers from Almighty God. The people to whom I handed this letter, having arrived in Sicily, turned from the error of the Monophysites and joined themselves to the holy, universal Church. Arriving at the Church of Blessed Peter, the Supreme Apostle, they asked me to introduce them with my letter to the goodwill of your Beatitude, so that the heretics around them would not be allowed to do any violence to them. One of them says that the monastery in which he was located was built by his parents, and therefore wants to receive from your Holiness the right to expel the heretics living in this monastery if they do not return to the bowels of the holy Church. It is enough for me to point this out to you; for we are confident that your Beatitude will take on the task of completing everything related to the glory of Almighty God with all zeal, but I ask you to pray for me; for I, suffering from the sword of the Longobards, am also subjected to severe torment from gout. We thank Almighty God a lot for the fact that the lips of our hearts taste the sweetness of love, and the Scripture is fulfilled: “As cold water welcomes a thirsty soul, so is good news from afar from the earth” (Proverbs 25:25). For until now I was greatly embarrassed by the letter of Boniface Khartularius, my confidant living in the Royal City, having read the news that your all-loving and desired Holiness suffered the impoverishment of bodily light. This letter struck me with great sorrow. But suddenly, through the assistance of the grace of our Creator and Redeemer, I received a letter from your Beatitude, and, having learned that you were free from the said bodily illness, I was very happy, so that I felt in my heart as great a joy as my grief and sadness had been before. For we know that your life, with the help of Almighty God, is salvation for many, and that swimmers among the waves are then safe when an experienced and skillful pilot holds the helm. To my joy about your health, my joy was added when I learned that your word has reduced the number of enemies of the Church and increased the flock of the Lord. So, daily, under the action of your tongue, the seeds of heaven increase, the barns on high are filled with them, and we rejoice in the fulfillment of the Scripture in you: “Where there is much life, strength is evident to the ox” (Proverbs 14:4). And from here we conclude: the more you bring fugitives to the service of Almighty God, the greater your merit with Him, and the greater your merit, the more you can ask for through your prayer. Therefore, I ask you to pray more earnestly for me, a sinner, now when I am so greatly overwhelmed by bodily illness, heartbreak, and immeasurable devastation from the destruction of so many barbaric swords. In all these disasters, I am looking for consolation, not temporary, but eternal, which I cannot ask for on my own, but I hope to receive through the intercession of your Beatitude. For the past year I have not received a single letter from your Holiness, and I was very sad. Your blessing, which you sent without a letter, was given to me and accepted. But since your own word pleases me more than the one conveyed, I accepted with less pleasure what was given to me. With the news that what I sent was accepted, I ordered our common son, Deacon Epiphanius, to write to Alexander and Isidore, deacons of your holy Church. I also wrote that I had large logs for masts and crossbars ready, but the small ship that arrived could not carry them, and you did not write anything to me about this. Why, if you need such logs, then write to our common son Boniface the deacon, whom we are now sending to the Royal City, as our attorney, so that he writes to me when to prepare it, so that when your Beatitude sends for them, everything will be ready. Moreover, we sent a small cross, in which was enclosed a blessing 11 from the chains of your lovers, the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, may it always be before your eyes. Through this Blessing many miracles are performed. May Almighty God inspire the heart of your Beatitude to continually pray for me, and may He protect you and all of yours with His right hand, and after many years may He lead you into the Kingdom of Heaven. The blessings of Mark sent by you, most blessed brother, we accepted with the same love with which they were sent, and according to their meaning, and we thank your love for them; for by these external signs we recognize your inner disposition towards us. Here, in all likelihood, is a letter from St. Gregory to Eulogius about the title: Ecumenical Patriarch, which was then adopted by the Archbishop of Constantinople, and in which the saint seemed to be. The Pope is proud, arrogating to himself universal power (that is why he himself did not accept the title: Ecumenical). St. Eulogius did not answer the letter, as they think, either because he did not understand the name of the Ecumenical as strictly as St. Gregory, or, because he did not want to get involved in disputes about such a subject. Of course, the Roman See. Of course, the See of Alexandria. Those. See of Antioch. We omit too private subjects of correspondence. Of course, Augustine, head of the monastery of St. Andrey. Arian, who was the teacher of Valepthu the Emperor. What the heretic must be thinking about is what St. asked. Grigory Evlogia. Heretics who appeared around the half of the 6th century. They argued that Jesus Christ, as a person, does not know some subjects. Bishop of Syria, contemporary of St. Chrysostom. See Cave in Hist. scriptorum eccles. In the words: Benedicto and Eulogia of St. Gregory often means gifts sent from one to another