Letter 66: Chrysostom thanks the Antiochene presbyters for receiving a monk and calming his opponents.
John Chrysostom→Castus, Valerius, Diophantus, and Cyriacus, presbyters of Antioch|c. 405 AD|John Chrysostom|From Cucusus (modern Goksun), Armenia Secunda|To Antioch, Syria|AI-assisted
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PG 52 Epistulae source-specific import; English is a new modern rendering from Greek.
With the tongue I have seldom written to your Reverence, but with the mind I have written much more continually and frequently. Do not think, then, that our letters to you are only as many as you have received on paper and in ink. Count as letters as many as we have desired to send you. If you judge in that way, snowstorms of letters have been sent from us to you. If there is no one to carry them, the silence comes not from our neglect but from the difficulty of the situation.
I have said this so that, whether we write or keep silent, you may hold the same opinion about our love for you. Wherever we may be, we carry your memory everywhere, engraved on our mind. Now we are very grateful to you because you received the good monk with the goodwill that befits you and made gentler those who wanted to quarrel with him at the wrong time. I was not speaking in vain or flattering you when I said that even if countless waves rose from every side, your affairs were in calm water. Those who so easily avert shipwrecks for others clearly stand far from the surging waves.
Write to us continually about your health. You know how eager we are to learn it. Letters from you announcing your well-being have such power that, although we are surrounded by so many dangers, wars, disturbances, tumults, and daily deaths, whenever we receive such letters we are lifted up by pleasure and gain the greatest comfort from them. Such is genuine love: through letters containing such good news, people separated in body can easily recover one another.
With the tongue I have seldom written to your Reverence, but with the mind I have written much more continually and frequently. Do not think, then, that our letters to you are only as many as you have received on paper and in ink. Count as letters as many as we have desired to send you. If you judge in that way, snowstorms of letters have been sent from us to you. If there is no one to carry them, the silence comes not from our neglect but from the difficulty of the situation.
I have said this so that, whether we write or keep silent, you may hold the same opinion about our love for you. Wherever we may be, we carry your memory everywhere, engraved on our mind. Now we are very grateful to you because you received the good monk with the goodwill that befits you and made gentler those who wanted to quarrel with him at the wrong time. I was not speaking in vain or flattering you when I said that even if countless waves rose from every side, your affairs were in calm water. Those who so easily avert shipwrecks for others clearly stand far from the surging waves.
Write to us continually about your health. You know how eager we are to learn it. Letters from you announcing your well-being have such power that, although we are surrounded by so many dangers, wars, disturbances, tumults, and daily deaths, whenever we receive such letters we are lifted up by pleasure and gain the greatest comfort from them. Such is genuine love: through letters containing such good news, people separated in body can easily recover one another.
AI-assisted translation - This translation was produced with AI assistance and has not been peer-reviewed. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek below for scholarly use.