Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 162

Gregory to Anastasius, Patriarch of Antioch. The writings of your Beatitude I found as a weary man finds rest, a sick man health, a thirsty man a fountain, one scorched by heat a shade. For those words did not seem expressed through the tongue of the flesh, because you so opened your spiritual love which you bore, as if the mind were speaking through itself. But very hard was that which followed, because your love commanded me to bear earthly burdens, and me whom you formerly loved spiritually, afterward, as I judge, loving temporally, you have pressed down even to the earth by the burden laid upon me; so that, utterly losing all rectitude of mind and dropping the keen edge of contemplation, not through the spirit of prophecy but through experience I may say:

I am bowed down and humbled exceedingly (Ps. 119:107). For so great burdens of occupations press me down that my mind is by no means raised to things above. I am shaken by many billows of affairs, and after those leisures of quiet I am afflicted by the tempests of a tumultuous life, so that I may rightly say: I am come into the depth of the sea, and the tempest hath overwhelmed me (Ps. 69:2). To me therefore in peril stretch out the hand of your prayer, you who stand on the shore of the virtues. But whereas you call me the mouth of the Lord, whereas you call me a lamp, whereas you affirm that by speaking I profit many and can shine to many, you have, I confess, brought my own estimation of myself into the greatest doubt. For I consider who I am, and I detect nothing in myself of the sign of this good.

But I consider who you are, and I judge that you cannot lie. When therefore I wish to believe what you say, my infirmity contradicts me. When I wish to dispute what is said in my praise, your holiness contradicts me. But I beg you, holy man, let something concerning this our contest be agreed between us, so that even if what you say is not so, it may be so because you say it. Moreover, as to the other patriarchs, your fathers, I have directed to you a synodical letter; because with me you are ever that which by the gift of Almighty God you have received to be, not that which by the will of men you are thought not to be. To the bearer of the present, Boniface the defensor, I have enjoined certain things which he ought more secretly to intimate to your holiness.

Moreover, I have transmitted to you the keys of your beloved, blessed Peter the Apostle, which, placed upon the sick, are wont to flash with many miracles. (Cf. John the Deacon, bk. I, ch. 23; bk. IV, ch. 25.)