Having read the letters of your charity which you sent by our son Patricius the deacon, I understood that the zeal of my solicitude displeased you—the solicitude whereby, according to that dominical charity which by many proofs you have shown me to have bestowed on you, I admonished concerning the guarding against those who were said to be adversaries of the common faith, lest it should be attributed to the negligence of the ruler, if anyone should presume to preach in the catholic Church those things which agreed with the notions of the heretics. Whether report truly noised this abroad, I delegated to the judgment of your charity to be investigated. Nor did I in any way injure your honor, to whom I committed the examination of those things which had been brought to me:
namely, that Atticus the presbyter, whom I had learned to dare such things, unless he had cleared himself by a complete satisfaction, and had condemned the heretics not only by his voice, but also by the subscription of his own hand, should be estranged from the grace of communion. He, by sending writings of a doubtful faith and an uncertain profession, confirmed rather than washed away whatever report had brought to us concerning him; whereas, if he had wished to prove his conscience sincere, he ought to have confessed not that Eutyches was odious to him, but that he reproved and condemned his perfidy: because human quarrels, even among catholics, are one thing;
the errors of the devil, which the catholic faith condemns, are another. And therefore, most dear brother, you ought in no way to doubt of our love, if you follow the example of the prophet and say: Did I not hate those who hated You, O Lord, and pine away over Your enemies (Ps. 138:21)? For I wish you to be in all things most certain that, just as I desire my own reputation to remain unharmed, so I desire that you too be found irreproachable in all things. But let the aforesaid Atticus, that he may appear free from all contrary suspicion, evidently show what he anathematizes and condemns in Eutyches, and let him subscribe—with all doubt removed—to the condemnation of the expressed error:
so that he may profess himself to have observed in all respects the definition of the Synod of Chalcedon concerning the faith—to which your charity also assented by subscribing, and which the authority of the Apostolic See confirmed—with the subscription of his own hand added, which may be recited in the Church in the presence of the Christian people: that on behalf of the catholic faith neither we may be held negligent, nor he any longer suspect. But if, persevering in the same depravity, he should refuse to obey the salutary precepts, let him receive the sentence of the Synod of Chalcedon, whose definitions he resists. Given on the fifth day before the Kalends of April, in the consulship of Leo and Majorian, Augusti.