Théodoret de Cyr
vers 393-vers 460 5th century
Consolation written to someone one actually knows, and dispossession quietly kept up for twenty-five years.
Who was Théodoret de Cyr?
Born at Antioch to a long-barren mother who had promised him to God, he was a monk and then, against his will, bishop of Cyrrhus, a poor small town in Syria which he gave aqueducts, bridges and baths with money he did not keep. He wrote a great deal, quarrelled a great deal, was deposed and reinstated. About two hundred of his letters survive, several of them to people who had just lost someone.
In their own words
I therefore scatter the cloud of sorrow from my soul, and urge you, my worthy friend, to vanquish the pain of your sorrow by the power of reason, and to bring your soul in this hour of need under the spell of God's word.
Our Lord did not destroy death to make one body victorious over death, but through that one body to effect our common resurrection, and make our hope of it a sure and certain hope.
[…] during all the time of my episcopate I have not acquired a house, not a piece of ground, not an obol, not a tomb, but of my own accord have embraced poverty, after distributing, at the death of my parents, the whole of the property which I inherited from them. Above all I implore you […] to grant me the help of your prayers.