To Anastasius, Patriarch of Antioch, on the Earthly Burdens Laid on Him

Gregory to Anastasius, and so on. [a]

I have found what your blessedness wrote to be like rest to the weary, health to the sick, a fountain to the thirsty, shade to those oppressed by heat. For those words of yours did not seem to be spoken even by a tongue of flesh, since you revealed the spiritual love you bear me as though your very soul were speaking. But what followed was very hard: your love charged me to bear earthly burdens. Having first loved me spiritually, you afterward, loving me, as I think, in a temporal way, pressed me down to the ground with the burden you laid on me. So, losing all uprightness of soul and forfeiting the keen vision of contemplation, I may say, not in the spirit of prophecy but from experience, “I am bowed down and brought low altogether.” For such great burdens of business weigh me down that my mind can in no way lift itself up to heavenly things. I am tossed by the billows of a multitude of affairs, and after the ease of my former quiet I am battered by the storms of a tumultuous life, so that I may truly say, “I have come into the depth of the sea, and the storm has overwhelmed me.” So stretch out the hand of your prayer to me in my danger, you who stand on the shore of virtue. [b]

But as for your calling me the mouth and the lamp of the Lord, and saying that I do good to many, this too adds to the load of my wrongdoings: when my wrongdoing ought to have been punished, I receive praise instead of punishment. With what a bustle of earthly business I am distracted here, I cannot express in words; yet you can gather it from the shortness of this letter, in which I say so little to one whom I love above all others. Further, I let you know that I have asked our most serene lords with all possible urgency to allow you to come to the threshold of Peter, the prince of the apostles, with your dignity restored to you, and to live here with me as long as it may please God; so that, for as long as I am counted worthy to see you, we may relieve the weariness of our pilgrimage by speaking to each other of the heavenly homeland.