13. To Odo, the abbot of Saint-Lucien de Beauvais

Partial, fragmentary, first-draft.

To the most beloved Odo, the brother Peter, humble abbot of Cluny sends greetings.

…

I have desired for a long time and I have desired greatly, my beloved, to write to your Charity, when an opportunity presented itself, so that my affection which was not able to be manifest to you in the living voice (since distance prevents this) might at the least make its way through the dead devices of letters. But at the urging of the command of the Egyptians who taught that my hands serve more in the hamper that to recreate in the zeal of writing, which drove those to besmear with muddy works, not to be purified by divine sacrifices, I have not been able to…

Such is the reason because not as your Erudition wrote with others

The spirit meditates on divine things, the eyes read, the hands write, the tongue speaks, the interior man and the exterior man work together to offer to God a sacrificium medullatum.

The apostolic life of the monk: “the spirit considers what is fitting to say, the tongue says it, the hand traces it, the eye rereads it; the entirety of the interior and exterior man labours and cooperates in this onorous holocaustawhich one offers to God for his friends and he bears fruit from it.