Letter 5: 8 cf. Corinth. II 6, 14 sq.

Scarcely will any human tongue whatsoever suffice to declare the mighty acts of the Lord in our times. For who could be strong enough either to embrace in thought or to utter in speech that, at the very crisis of both struggling causes, He restored you to peace both for the public's prayers and for holy religion's sake -- unless, in consideration of so great a miracle, it must be cried out with the prophet: this is the change of the right hand of the Most High, which powerfully humbles those who exalt themselves and mercifully exalts those who humble themselves? In which things also, if the measure of the heavenly dispensation be weighed more keenly, assuredly it plainly appears that the destruction of the faithless crept in for this reason, that the faith of your clemency might be proved even amid adversities, and that the more it was believed to be pressed by hostile circumstances, so much the more brightly your magnanimity might shine forth; and that for this reason the departure of your gentleness came about from the city of Constantinople, so that, sought after by the desires of all, you might return with greater glory, and that out of the perils of adverse things it might be made known to all what useful thing was in you: doubtless after the example of that virtue of David, who, yielding for a little while to the furies of the murderer with singular patience, immediately as victor and entreated by the prayers of the peoples, returned to the kingdom with a more excellent height. Rejoice therefore, venerable Emperor, that those were your enemies who stood forth as enemies of the Godhead, and be glad both that you have labored together with the Church and that you have been restored to your empire together with the freedom of the catholic faith; and, so that in all things you may teach that your cause is common to you with God, relying manfully upon His help, press on, so that through Him by whom He subdued the usurpers of public authority, He may also drive out the tyrants of the Church. For just as your piety deservedly and rightly trusts that at that time we implored our God in supplication for nothing else than that the rulers of the Roman empire, such as we now speak of, might be restored to us, so you perceive it is awaited that you should show yourselves by the very quality of your own acts to be of such a kind. Look, we beg, upon the constancy in catholic devotion of Marcian and Leo of august memory, conspicuous to the whole world, and weigh with wholesome consideration that -- since they who deviated from their uprightness could not stand in the same place -- he without doubt will be the lawful successor of royal power, divinely bestowed, who shall have persevered as an imitator of their faith. You owe, most glorious and most clement son and Emperor, reverence to such and so great men of august memory; you owe a return for the gifts of God. He brought you back to the empire of these men: do you render to God a service like to theirs. And because these things, as the blessed apostle Peter teaches us, with my humility lately preaching it, have been refuted by those who are to fall, may they, with God as their favorer, go forward to those who are to abide in the solidity of the kingdom. I indeed, receiving from the letters which your clemency dispatched an immense pledge of your venerable religiousness, both breathe again with vast congratulation and do not at all doubt that your mind in divine matters will accomplish things far greater than I desire; but, mindful of my office, I therefore exhort your clemency in this regard with a more extended address, because, out of affection for both your empire and your salvation, I ever earnestly desire that you cleave to those causes by which alone both the stability of the present kingdom is guarded and the glory of the eternal one is procured. Wherefore, before all things I pray that you decree the church of Alexandria, freed by the dispositions of your clemency from a deadly no less than a heretical invader, to be restored to a catholic and lawful bishop, and that, with those cast out whom he is reported to have ordained for various churches by diabolical rashness, you appoint bishops of right faith to be substituted, and, just as you have purged your commonwealth from tyrannical domination, so everywhere you strip the church of God of the robberies and contagions of heretics, and that you not rather allow that to prevail which the iniquity of those times stirred up -- whom a rebellious spirit roused not only against your empire but against God as well -- than that which so many and so great pontiffs, together with the eminent and orthodox princes, the assent of the universal Church decreed. Command that the constitutions of the Council of Chalcedon, or those things which my predecessor Leo of blessed memory taught fully with apostolic learning, flourish inviolate, because in no way can that be reopened which has been laid to rest by their definition, nor can he be received in any degree who has been condemned everywhere by the one mouth of the whole catholic truth. For this indeed is, as you have proved by experience, the catholic faith, which has deposed the powerful from their seat once it was injured, and, kept safe, has preserved the humble who are to be exalted. Wherefore it must be sufficiently acted upon by your piety, that He who is the author of this gift to you may Himself be its propagator. Given on the seventh day before the Ides of October, after the consulship of Basiliscus and Armatus.