Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 554

Gregory to Anastasius, bishop of Antioch. I have received the writings of your Fraternity, keeping the profession of the right faith; and I have rendered great thanks to Almighty God, who, even when the pastors of His flock are changed, guards even after them, unchangeable, the faith which He once delivered to the holy Fathers. But the excellent preacher says: No man can lay another foundation than that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus (1 Cor. 3:11). Whoever, therefore, with love of God and of neighbour holds the firmness of the faith which is in Christ, has set for himself as foundation that same Jesus Christ, the Son of God and of man.

It is therefore to be hoped that where Christ is the foundation, there may follow also the edifice of good works. Truth Himself likewise says by Himself: He who enters not by the door into the sheepfold of the sheep, but climbs up another way, he is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep (John 10:1, 2). Who shortly after subjoins, saying: I am the door. He therefore enters into the sheepfold of the sheep by the door, who enters by Christ. But he enters by Christ who thinks and preaches true things concerning the same Creator and Redeemer of the human race, and keeps what he has preached; who undertakes the summit of governance for the office of bearing a burden, not for the appetite of the transitory honour of glory.

He also watches diligently over the care of the flock he has undertaken, lest the sheep of God be either torn apart by perverse men speaking crooked things, or laid waste by malignant spirits that urge the allurements of the vices. Certainly we remember that blessed Jacob, who had long served for his wives, said: Twenty years I was with you; your ewes and she-goats were not barren. The rams of your flock I did not eat, nor did I show you what had been seized by a beast. I made good every loss; whatever perished by theft you exacted from me. Day and night I was scorched by heat and by frost; sleep fled from my eyes (Gen. 31:38). If, therefore, he who feeds the sheep of Laban thus labours and watches, with how great labour and with how great vigils ought he to be intent who feeds the sheep of God?

But in all these things may He Himself instruct us, who for our sake became man, who deigned to become what He had made. May He pour the Spirit of His love both into my weakness and into your charity, and in all solicitude and vigilance of circumspection may He open the eye of our heart.

But that men of right faith are advanced to sacred orders, for this thanks are to be rendered without ceasing to the same Almighty God; and we must ever pray for the life of our most pious and most Christian lord the emperor, and for his most tranquil consort, and for his most gentle offspring, in whose times the mouths of heretics are silenced, because, although their hearts seethe in the madness of a perverse sense, yet in the time of a Catholic emperor they do not presume to utter the depraved things they think. Moreover, while your Fraternity spoke concerning the guarding of the holy councils, you professed that you keep the holy first Council of Ephesus.

But because from an annotation of the heretical Codex, which was sent to me from the royal city, I have recognized — through this, that certain Catholic chapters had been censured along with heretical ones — that some in that same city esteem as the first Council of Ephesus that which is said to have been once composed by heretics, it is altogether necessary that your Charity seek out the same council in the holy Church of Alexandria and of Antioch, and find how it stands in truth. Or, if it please, we send from here what we have in our archives, preserved from antiquity. For that council which was made under the guise of the first Council of Ephesus asserts that certain chapters presented in it were approved, which are the teachings of Coelestius and of Pelagius.

And since Coelestius and Pelagius were condemned in that council, how could those chapters be received, whose authors were being condemned? But because it has come to us that in the Churches of the East no one attains to a sacred order except by the gift of bribes, if your Fraternity recognizes this to be so, let it offer this first oblation to Almighty God, that it may check the error of the Simoniacal heresy in the Churches subject to it. For — to say nothing else — what sort of men will they be able to be in the sacred orders, who are advanced to this not by merit but by bribes? May Almighty God guard your Charity with heavenly grace, and grant you to bring back from those who have been committed to you a manifold fruit and a measure overflowing to the eternal joys.