Since you discern it to accord with the state of religion and with the full rules of the catholic faith that your ever-watchful care of exhortation should form the flock committed to you throughout all the members of the universal Church, you visited the province of Vienne last year—if you deign to remember—by letters sent to my lowliness; and whatever reached me, according as the offered opportunity had provided, came through the clergy of the Church of Arles, and indeed with the fullest pastoral solicitude. In these, just as you summon us, through the conversion of provinces—that is, of Dardania, Illyricum, and Scythia—to a fellowship of joys, so with most cautious admonition you instruct us as to what may forestall us through ignorance.
The condemnation, then, of Eutyches and Nestorius—whom long ago the authority of your holy see, through its most blessed predecessors, has trodden underfoot—was brought long since to our notice by the provision of apostolic diligence toward us. But this one thing now renders us much in suspense and anxious: that, whereas you had bidden us await with all zeal of expectation the outcome of the legation sent a second time to Constantinople, you have indicated neither what your son, my holy brother Ennodius, reported, nor whether the one that followed has returned; and you keep your promise suspended by so long a duration of silence that the taciturnity of the herald now leaves us no less astonished than the delay of the legation had before made us apprehensive.
Wherefore this sole cause has moved me to send your servants, my sons, Alexius the presbyter and Venantius the deacon, in the name of the whole province of Vienne—which, as the Church pertaining to me, has been committed to me by all your predecessors and by the apostolic see—together with this page of present service;
that through them I may learn, by the oracle of your most blessed reply, whether the fervour of the aforesaid schisms—which within the city of Constantinople had blazed up with the vice of pernicious obstinacy, and to which, what is the more to be grieved, you say the Churches of Alexandria and Antioch are bound—has, by your teaching with Christ's favour, been quenched with fitting correction; or whether the returned legation set forth in plain pages what might be read straightforwardly, or perhaps reported more by word of mouth something whence some suspicion of whatever kind about you might be reserved. For we fear lest the pontifical judgment, while it does not indicate favourable things, should have perceived adverse ones.
To this is added that we have learned, by the faithful report of divers persons, that Greece boasts of the reconciliation and concord of the Roman Church; which, as it is to be embraced if it is truly said, so it is to be feared lest it be craftily feigned. We beseech you therefore, all of us joined in my service, that you instruct us what I ought, as your fellow, to answer to your sons my brothers, that is, the Gauls; and because, secure, I promise—I will not say of Vienne, but of the devotion of all Gaul—that all seek out your judgment concerning the state of the faith: pray that the counterfeit profession of the lost may not so deceive us, even as the truth, once known, does not separate us from the see which you govern.