Letter 30
To my dear brother,
You asked me once why I write so many letters, and I gave you a short answer at the time. Let me give you a longer one.
Letters are the only way I have of maintaining pastoral relationships across the distances that my responsibilities require. A bishop cannot be everywhere; a letter can. The priest in a distant parish who receives a letter from his bishop — who knows that his bishop knows his name, his situation, his questions — is sustained and encouraged in a way that a formal visitation every few years cannot achieve.
Beyond the pastoral maintenance, there is something more: letters force precision of thought. When I write to you about a theological question, I have to think through my position more carefully than if I were simply speaking it aloud. The discipline of writing is the discipline of thinking clearly, and a bishop who does not think clearly cannot govern or teach clearly.
And beyond even that: the letters we write are, in some sense, our account of ourselves. Future generations who read this correspondence will know something about what we were trying to do and how we were trying to do it. This is not vanity; it is responsibility. We are not the last generation, and what we leave them is what they will have to work with.
So I write many letters.
Desiderius
Modern English rendering for readability. See the 19th-century translation or original Latin/Greek for scholarly use.