To Eulogius, Patriarch of Alexandria, on Gregory’s Illness and the Agnoetae

Gregory to Eulogius, and so on. [a] Last year I received the letters of your most sweet holiness, but because of the extreme severity of my illness I have not been able to answer them until now. For it is now almost two full years that I have been confined to my bed, afflicted with such pains of gout that on feast days I have hardly been able to get up for as long as three hours to celebrate mass. And I am soon forced by severe pain to lie down again, so that I can bear my torment with groans in between. This pain of mine is sometimes moderate and sometimes extreme, but never so moderate as to leave me, nor so extreme as to kill me. So it comes about that, dying daily, I am daily kept back from death. Nor is it surprising that I, so great a sinner, am kept so long shut up in the prison of such corruption. That is why I am forced to cry out, “Bring my soul out of prison, that I may confess your name.” But since I am not yet worthy to obtain this by my own prayers, I beg that the prayer of your holiness may give me the help of its intercession, and deliver me from the weight of sin and corruption into that liberty, which you know well, of the glory of the children of God. [b]

Your blessedness, most sweet to me and ever to be honored, has told me in your letter that our common son Anatolius, deacon of the city of Constantinople, had written to you to say that certain monks from the region of Jerusalem had come to me to ask about the error of the Agnoetae. And you say that he begged your holiness to write to me and give your opinion on this question. But no monks have come to me from the region of Jerusalem to ask about anything, nor do I think that this common son of ours can have told you in his letters what was not so. I suspect, rather, that the interpreter mistook the meaning of his letters. For this same deacon wrote to me, more than two years ago now, that monks had come from that region to the city of Constantinople asking such questions, and he wanted to ask what I thought. Long before I received your letters, I gave him against that same heresy the very same answer that I afterward found in your holiness’s letter. And I gave great thanks to Almighty God that on every question the fathers of the Romans and of the Greeks, whose followers we are, have spoken with one spirit. For in many parts of this letter of yours I felt as though I were reading the writings of the Latin fathers against this heresy. And think how much I must love and praise the excellence of my most holy brother, in whose mouth I recognized the venerable fathers whom I love so much. Praise, then, be to him, and glory to him in the highest, by whose gift the voice of Mark still cries aloud in the see of Peter. By the outpouring of his spirit, when the priest enters the Holy of Holies to search out mysteries, spiritual bells ring out in holy church from the words of preaching, as they did in the tabernacle. Your preaching, then, is right and highly to be praised. But we implore the Almighty Lord to keep you long in this life too, so that the voice of truth may sound more widely in this world from God’s instrument, which you are. And as for me, I ask you to intercede for me, that the road of this pilgrimage, which has become too rough for me, may soon be finished. Then I, who cannot reach the promises of the eternal homeland by my own merits, may be able to reach them by yours, and to rejoice with the citizens of heaven. [c]