SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE, CALtF.
Jfatlws; for <&n%l&b heaters.
LEO THE GREAT.
BY
THE REV. CHARLES GORE, M.A.,
o
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD.
PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE TRACT COMMITTEE.
LONDON :
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.
NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, CHARING CROSS, S.W. ;
43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.G. J AND 48, PICCADILLY, W.
New York: Pott, Young, & Co.
SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE, CAL
1 1 1 ^ t I r\
CONTENTS,
ERRATA.
Page 57? ^ n e n, for Nestorius's, read Nestorius'.
,, 57, ,, 19, for instinct, read instincts.
,, 97, ,, 10, for his, read\isx.
,, 97, ,, 1 6, for Celestine, read Ccelestius.
, U3 n I3> /" A - D - 347, read K.V. 343-4.
,, 1 60, ,, 24, yfcr the, ;ra? this.
,, 1 60, ,, 29, /0r to, read can.
A. .LEO THE THEOLOGIAN 147
XI. LEO AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 166
CONTENTS,
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE AGE OF LEO 5
II. THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD 25
III. LEO AND THE MANICH^ANS 36
IV. EUTYCHIANISM 47
V. THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL 71
VI. LEO THE POPE 90
VII. LEO THE POPE (continued) 101
VIII. TRIUMPH AND DEATH OF LEO 130
IX. LEO THE DISCIPLINARIAN 139
X. LEO THE THEOLOGIAN 147
XI. LEO AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 166
LEO THE GREAT,
CHAPTER I.
THE AGE OF LEO.
OUR natural desire to know what great men were like
when they were young, and what the circumstances of
their youth were which moulded their capacity for
control and command, is proverbially liable to be
thwarted by lack of information. In the case of the
great Fathers of the Church, we hardly expect to know
much of their early years, and the deep interest which
invests the youth of St. Augustine has not many
parallels. Accordingly, of Leo the Great, before he
became an ecclesiastical character, we can tell almost
nothing.
He must have been born about the last decade
of the fourth century, and a tradition of uncer-
tain origin names his father, Quintius, and describes
him as a Tuscan ; while the citizens of Volaterrae
go further, and claim him for their own city. On
6 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
the other hand he himself, and his contemporary
and friend the chronicler Prosper, call Rome his
patria, and the statement seems to outweigh a
vague tradition, and entitle us to call Leo a Roman
by blood, as he was in spirit, and, we may add, in
religion.
Our ignorance of the circumstances of his birth
and education is only an example of the obscurity
which hides his private life from first to last. There
is no private or domestic interest about Leo such as
entwines itself around a character like St. Gregory of
Nazianzum. Not only did St. Leo live wholly for
the Church and for mankind, but his personal
character seems almost merged and lost in the cause
to which he has abandoned himself, and private
feelings hardly find utterance in the stern and hard
antitheses of his epistolary style. And yet in his ser-
mons there breathes a tone of simple, earnest spiritual
religion, which assures us of an intense devotion
and quiet of soul underlying the manifold and un-
ceasing activity of his outward life. In saying that
we know nothing about his education we must perhaps
make a slight exception. The polished and refined
style of his letters, quite unlike the rough and formless
Latin of the African writers, with all the merits and
all the faults of a late phase of culture, is sufficient
to assure us that he had a literary education : but we
must add, that from beginning to end of his writings
there is not a single indication of any acquaintance
with the pagan literature of old Rome. Indeed the
THE AGE OF LEO. 7
ecclesiastical authority of an age when the literature
of paganism was not yet quite a dead language, went
for the present against a " classical " education ; and
Leo was throughout life ignorant of Greek. More
than this we cannot say j but though our records are
silent on the individual, general history will throw
a little light for us on the circumstances of his
youth.
Leo was born into perhaps the most important
period of transition in the world's history, that stormy
period which links the ancient and the modern world :
the civilization of Rome and the civilization of
Christendom. The great empire of Rome, which
for four centuries had been almost conterminous with
the known world, which seemed irresistible by the
mere force of its name, and which in a condition
of profound peace had been obliterating national
distinctions, and uniting races the most opposite and
the most remote in the bonds of commerce and a
common government, was now being threatened, over-
whelmed and dismembered in all directions by the
barbarian hosts.
One by one the Imperial government was sur-
rendering the provinces of the Empire, either to
be occupied by the invading hordes, or to maintain
for a time, like Britain and Armorica, a precarious
independence ; l meanwhile the unity of the govern-
ment had been finally surrendered by the separation
1 Britain was abandoned A.D. 409.
8 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
of the Eastern and Western Empires at the death of
Theodosius the Great, 1 and the Imperial residence in
the West, which had been removed for purposes of
convenience at the beginning of the fourth century
from Rome to Milan, was transferred by Honorius,
from motives of cowardice, to Ravenna, 3 a city which
art had done its best to fortify, and which nature
had rendered almost inaccessible by surrounding it
with impassable morasses. Here, out of the reach of
danger, and remote from any natural centre of admi-
nistration, was exercised in the future what shadow
of authority still remained in the hands of the
Emperor of the West.
For if the Empire was becoming contemptible, that
contempt centred in the emperor. That supreme
position, perhaps the most magnificent that it ever
fell to the lot of man to fill, and which had in fact
during the four centuries of the Roman Empire, from
Julius to Theodosius, been filled by no inconsiderable
proportion of the greatest of the world's rulers, that
position, which in pagan days had raised its occupant
at once to the level of the gods, and still assigned to
him a superstitious and unbounded veneration, was
for nearly thirty years (A.D. 395-423) filled by
Honorius, a man of whom it is related 3 (and the
story must at any rate represent the estimate which
his subjects formed of his character) that he was
alarmed to hear of the loss of Rome, till he learned
J A.D. 395. 2 A.D. 404.
3 Procopius, torn. i. p. 316, edit. Bonn.
THE AGE OF LEO. 9
that it was not a favourite chicken of that name that
was lost, but only the eternal city.
While the emperor was thus sunk in contemptible
indolence the nobility of Rome seem as a class to
have been not much more worthy of respect. The
historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, who died about
the time of Leo's birth, gives us an excellent picture
of their character and manners. 1 They were extremely
wealthy, extremely luxurious, extremely indolent, and
extremely frivolous. They delighted in little but
vanity and display. At the same time to degrading
vices they added a gross superstition, often to be
found among those who were sceptics or even
atheists.
Meanwhile the plebeian population of Rome was
a congeries of all the nations of the earth, drawn to
Rome by the various attractions of the metropolis,
the circus, and, above all, the enormous largess of
provisions of various kinds which it was the pleasure
of the emperors to lavish upon the populace of the
capital.
Enough will have been said to show that neither
in the emperor, nor nobility, nor plebeians of the
capital were to be found the elements of social
cohesion, solidity, or resistance, nor would it seem
that much could be looked for from the diminished
and still constantly dwindling population of the
provinces.
1 Paraphrased by Gibbon, cap. xxxi. vol. iv. pp. 77, seq.
10 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
Salvian, a priest of Marseilles and a contemporary
of Leo, gives us a terrible picture of the morality of
the Roman Empire of his day. His work, " On the
Government of God," is a vindication of the ways of
God to man, in abandoning the Roman Empire to the
barbarians : the Christian world to the pagans and
the Arians. It is the punishment of sins. " Among
the chaste barbarians we alone are unchaste : " the
moral purity of Vandal and Goth contrasts in all direc-
tions, in Germany, in Africa, in Spain, with the universal
dissoluteness of the Romans.
To complete the picture we must add that almost
the whole strength of the army of that date, such as
it was, was to be found in the barbarians who had
recruited its ranks.
At the time of the invasion of Alaric, though
the troops were recalled from the provinces, even
as far as Britain, to the defence of Italy, it
was found impossible to raise an army com-
posed of Roman legions without the assistance
of Alani : and a few years later not only the assist-
ance of Alani, Huns and Goths, but the recall of pro-
vincial legions and compulsory levies of new troops
were necessary to enable Stilicho to raise a small
army to oppose Rhodogast, but he was actually
compelled to offer bribes to any slaves who would
enlist.
Amidst all these elements of weakness and decay,
into this last epoch of the Roman Empire Leo was
born. One of his earliest memories would probably
THE AGE OF LEO. II
have been of the awe and panic which seized the city
of Rome at the news of the advance of Alaric 1 with
his Goths, and of the burst of joy which hailed the
tidings of Stilicho's great victory at Pollentia. 2 He
may have seen the great general seated by the side
of his unworthy emperor ascend in triumph to the
capitol j and might even, had he wished it, have been
present on the occasion of the triumph at the last
gladiatorial games which ever disgraced the city of
Rome.
If Christian education kept him from the spec-
tacle, he would, at any rate, probably have read
the appeal which the poet Prudentius took the occa-
sion to present to the emperor against the blood-
thirsty and inhuman sport ; 3 but if he were there he
must have witnessed the martyrdom of the Asiatic
monk Telemachus, who, as we are told, rushed into
the arena to separate the gladiators, and died stoned
to death by the indignant multitude, but by his death
put a stop for ever to all similar combats. 4
The victory of Pollentia seemed to revive for a
moment the spirit of old Roman pride. The poet
Claudian a classical poet, "born out of his due
time," who across an interval of three hundred years
linked his name with the great poets of Rome ended
his lines on the event by bidding the " mad nations
1 A.D. 403. 2 A.D. 404.
3 The peroration to the second oration against Symmachus.
Theod. Eccl. Hist. b. v. cap. 26.
12 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
learn not to despise the name of Rome;" 1 and the
inscription on the triumphal arch boasted that the
" Gothic race had been for ever subdued." It was,
however, but a few years before the Gothic con-
querors had the opportunity of reading this inscrip-
tion for themselves.
Once more, in 405, the generalship of Stilicho
delivered Rome from the danger to which it was ex-
posed by the German hosts of Rhodogast. But the
feeble emperor sacrificed to his jealousies or his fears
that general who was the sole defence of his empire,
and Rome lay a helpless prey to the enemy. Leo
may have been present at the siege of Rome by
Alaric, in 408 ; he may have suffered from the awful
famine in which that siege involved the city ; and he
must, at any rate, have heard of the insulting scorn
with which Alaric at first rejected all terms the city
could offer, and of the enormous sum which stripped
the gorgeous city of its wealth, by which he was at
last bought off. He must have watched after this the
course of events, which made plain to any spectator
that he was witnessing the last stage of the great city's
decadence.
Again, Alaric appeared before the walls of Rome :
he set up Attalus, a creature of his own, as em-
peror, and again brought upon the city the pangs
of famine : the mock emperor retired, but Alaric,
1 De Bello Getico : " Discite vesanae Romam non temnere
gentes."
THE AGE OF LEO. 13
for the third time, appeared before the city. The
gates were opened to him, and Rome was in his
hands (A.D. 410). The sack of the city, that awful
scene of carnage, conflagration, and plunder, which
struck the knell of pagan Rome, and made an impres-
sion so deep and startling upon the imagination of
Jerome in his far-off cell in Palestine, cannot have
been lost upon the mind of the future pope ; joined
with the whole of his life's experience it must have
told him in tones he could not mistake that he lived
amidst the break-up of the old world ; but one thing
must have inspired his Christian heart with a glowing
sense of exultation and confidence the barbarian
hordes, who mocked at the power of the emperor and
the city, humbled themselves in solemn awe before
the representatives and symbols of religion : among the
smoking ruins of the city the churches rose intact :
their cupidity shrank before the sacred vessels, and
their lust before the consecrated virgins.
If paganism, with its last gasp, could accuse Chris-
tianity of having brought all this ruin on the city by
making her unfaithful to her ancient gods, Christianity
might, with far greater truth, reply, that whatever the
causes which brought about the destruction of Rome,
it was Christianity alone which could awe and con-
trol the new forces which were breaking over the
world. The conviction of the impotence of the
Western Empire must have been strengthened and
confirmed in Leo's mind by the events of each suc-
cessive year : on all sides were revolts and revolutions,
14 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
and the rise and fall of pretenders ; provinces were
occupied by barbarians, and the defences of the Empire
were entrusted to the Goths. Honorius died in 423,
and was succeeded, after a usurpation of two years,
by the infant Valentinian III., whose authority was
exercised in his name for twenty-five years by his
mother Placidia. Amid the universal decay of
military spirit within the Empire there arose two
generals of first-rate ability, Boniface and Aetius,
"who may deservedly be named the last of the
Romans." But the Empire, which could not even
control the forces nature provided her with, was
almost as much injured by their rivalries as assisted
by their genius. It is the last sign of the de-
cadence of a nation when she cannot even use her
great men. The revolt of Count Boniface in Africa
brought over there Genseric and his Vandals (A.D.
429); and though the Roman speedily repented of
the invitation he had given them, his repentance
came too late : the seven fair and populous provinces
of Africa and her illustrious Church became a prey
to havoc, murder, and desolation, which almost
obliterated their name off the earth. 1 Such were the
political events amongst which Leo grew to man-
hood and developed his mind and powers.
It remains to ask what were the theological cir-
cumstances of his education. He was born in a time
1 The siege of Hippo was in A.D. 430 ; the taking of Car-
thage, 439.
THE AGE OF LEO. 15
when paganism was almost dead. The celebrated
petition of Symmachus to the emperor for the resto-
ration of the altar of victory (A.D. 384) was the last
public effort of the old religion. In the year 388
A.D., it is related (and the story, at any rate, repre-
sents a truth) that the great Theodosius solemnly in
full senate, according to all the forms of the Republic,
put the question whether the religion of Jupiter or of
Christ should be the religion of the Empire ; and by
a large majority Jupiter was deposed. Temples in
Rome and in the provinces were, in some cases,
emptied and closed, very generally destroyed, and
occasionally converted into Christian temples. A
second Julian and another pagan reaction were now
no longer possible. A little later the Sibylline books,
objects of such reverential awe under the old reli-
gion, were burnt by order of Stilicho. It was not,
of course, possible that paganism should be extin-
guished all at once. The spirit and language of
the poems of Claudian are wholly pagan; there
were many to reproach Christianity with the cala-
mities of Rome, many who were heard to say they
feared the sacrifices of Rhodogast more than his
arms ; and, at the time of the great siege of Rome
by the Goths, the city is said to have fallen back for
succour upon the arts of Etruscan divination. But
as a power in politics or society paganism was a dead
thing ; and after Claudian there was no longer even
a literature to keep alive its memory.
Meanwhile, the Christian Church was consoli-
1 6 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
dating in East and West her doctrinal system. The
achievements of Leo's later days will sufficiently prove
his intimate acquaintance with the controversies of
the East, and especially with the great Nestorian con-
troversy which arose in his early manhood. His cir-
cumstances necessitated his connection with those of
the West. The address of Augustine and the African
council on the subject of Pelagianism reached
Pope Innocent in the last year of his life (A.D. 417).
The counter-appeal of Pelagius did not reach Rome
till after his death ; before this arrived, however,
Innocent had addressed an answer to the African
bishops, which at once assured them of his ortho-
doxy and support, and asserted broadly the autho-
rity of his see. Leo must have thus become ac-
quainted with the great Western controversy on the
subject of Grace, at the point where it was associated
with the growing claims of the Apostolic see, and
must have witnessed the blow which the authority of
that see suffered by the new pope Zosimus's tempo-
rary acquittal of Pelagius and Ccelestinus. He was
soon introduced in a more personal way into the
controversy.
An acolyte, Leo, of whom we hear in the letters
of St. Augustine, is sent in 418 to carry communi-
cations from Rome to the African Church on the
subject of the heresy, and if, as seems most pro-
bable, this is the future pope, it is interesting to
think that he must have come in personal contact
on the way with the greatest of Latin theologians.
THE AGE OF LEO. 17
After this Leo seems to have risen rapidly into dis-
tinction. Under the pontificate of Celestine (422-
432) he held the important office of Archdeacon of
the Church of Rome, and he seems by this time to
have been well known beyond the limits of Italy, and
even in the East. He had pressed the Gallican
Cassian, the legislator of Western monasticism, to
write a work on the Incarnation, and Cassian in
yielding to his solicitations calls him " the ornament
of the Roman Church, and of the divine ministry."
When St. Cyril, too, at the time of the Council of
Ephesus (431) wishes to put a stop to the ambitious
designs of the bishop of Jerusalem to obtain for his
see the dignity of a patriarchate, and for that pur-
pose seeks to secure the co-operation of Rome, it is
to Leo that he writes, as to one who knows the secrets
of the Apostolic see.
Some, indeed, on the strength of the position
which Leo held at this time have tried to vin-
dicate the authority of his authorship for some
anonymous works directed against Pelagianism,
or the semi-Pelagianism then prevalent in the Gallican
Church. Though we have not, however, any good
evidence for ascribing these works to Leo, we can
have no doubt of his zeal against Pelagian error;
indeed, the only authentic record of him under the
pontificate of Sixtus (432-440) shows him to us
keenly on the watch against the craft of the Pelagian
Julian of ^Eculanum, who seems to have sought to
be readmitted to the orthodox communion without
1 8 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
any real recantation of his errors. Thus educated
and equipped in controversy Leo was chosen to lead
the fight.
Amid the countless signs of decrepitude in the
Roman Empire, none, as has been already indicated,
was more marked than her inability to control and
use in her service the talents of her generals, which,
rightly directed, might have warded off for a time
the impending ruin. Instead of fighting for the
Empire, they fought with one another. One of those
quarrels arose in Gaul, about the year 439, between
the great general Aetius, in whose hands during the
regency of Placidia the real power of the Empire
lay, and a smaller rival, Albinus. Under the circum-
stances, with barbarian hosts ever ready to pour
down upon Italy, such quarrels could not too speedily
be put a stop to ; in the dearth of statesmen, men
turned to the Church, and Leo, already conspicuous
for dexterity and courage, was sent to negotiate a
reconciliation. While he was away, in August, 440,
Sixtus died.
There was no division of opinion, no danger
of an anti-pope now, as there had been on the
death of Innocent ; all Rome looked to Leo. He
was promptly elected to the vacant pontificate, and an
embassy sent at once to recall him to Rome. " For
more than forty days," says the chronicler Prosper,
" the Roman Church was without a bishop, awaiting
with wonderful peace and patience the arrival of the
deacon Leo." On his return, he was consecrated at
THE AGE OF LEO. 19
once, we must suppose, priest and bishop, on Sep-
tember 29; and the earliest of his works which sur-
vives to us is his short sermon upon his consecration.
We are apt to scoff, very often unjustly, at profes-
sions of unwillingness to accept preferment. On this
occasion, at any rate, Leo does not try our faith ;
on the contrary, he thanks God and the people for
the favour done him, and asks their prayers for the
success of his ministry.
It was a crisis difficult and trying enough to tax
the best energies of the strongest and the most capa-
ble when Leo v/as called to the highest position in
Christendom. In politics, while the empire of the East
was in its normal state of " perpetual and premature
decay," everything gave warning of the almost imme-
diate collapse of that of the West. It had lost the
more distant provinces and Spain, the Vandals
held Africa, Sicily had been desolated, and Rome
sacked ; and while all was weakness within, the bar-
barian hordes were full of vigour and energy, wild
and untamed, indeed, but replete with possibilities of
development and future power ; and the past had
shown that, if they could be controlled at all, that
power of control lay with the Church, and therefore
with the central figure in the Church, the bishop of
Rome.
There was wanted one who could appreciate the
opportunity, and make the Apostolic see with its
spiritual authority take the place of the tottering Im-
perial power ; and if this was to be done, then Rome
c 2
20 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
and the Church must exhibit, amid the ruins of a
falling world, an example of unshaken constancy.
She must stand like the rock in the midst of the tossing
waves. He then who could appreciate and rise to
the opportunity must throw the power of a great in-
tellect and a great spiritual influence into the scale
of Church discipline and ecclesiastical solidity. Con-
sistency, firmness, discipline, far-reaching organiza-
tion in a solid and united Church, these were the
qualities the age wanted, and that for the sake of
theology no less than in the cause of social order.
For, in the first place, the Goths who threatened to
become in a great measure masters of the future
were Arians by creed ; in the East, Nestorianism was
still a power, and Eutyches, the heresiarch of the im-
mediate future, was already an old man ; and in the
West there were Manichaeans, Priscillianists, and
Pelagians to disturb the Church's peace and perplex
the wearied hearts of men. Obviously, then, for
social and theological reasons alike, an authoritative
discipline was what was wanted in the Church no less
than the world.
Learning, especially in the West, was almost
dead : that sympathy, in which in later days the
Church has too often shown herself wanting,
which can appreciate and gently influence the
half-disciplined struggles of a " new learning," was
not then a need ; there was scarcely anything that
was either intellectually subtle or morally respectable
in the heresies of the day by comparison with the
THE AGE OF LEO. 21
Church ; under such circumstances, and in such an
age, when large sacrifices must be made to the sur-
passing necessity for ecclesiastical unity, solidity, and
strength, Leo, as bishop of Rome, was as completely as
any man in history the right man in the right place.
His moral character was simple, lofty, and severe ;
and the ideal of the Christian life, which he realized
in himself, he set his great energies, by word as well
as example, to impress upon the minds of his flock ;
but in this, as in everything, it was intensity and sin-
gleness of purpose which marked his influence, rather
than breadth or freedom of sympathy. His mind ex-
pressed itself naturally in his firm and emphatic style;
there is nothing domestic about him, and though
not wanting in generosity, he is perhaps deficient in
gentleness, mildness, and forbearance. Thus, if we ap-
proach his character with sympathy, it is not hard to
understand ; even if we cannot love, we must admire
him; but if we are to appreciate him as he deserves,
we must be ready to abandon the desire so natural
to us for soft and domestic manners, we must enter
into something of his large and imperial purpose, and
feel that if Christianity is a soft and gentle influence
in social life, it is also and before this an organi-
zation and a Church, the bearer of a Divine mes-
sage of truth, and gifted with a Divine authority of
government.
It will be judged from his personal character that
Leo, as a theologian, would be practical rather than
speculative, and we shall have evidence of this as we
22 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
proceed. There were no intellectual difficulties to
prevent his unhesitating acceptance of the doctrines
of the Church : he grasped them, he entered into, he
understood them, not with the speculative intellect of
the East, but the practical character of the West ; it
is in their practical bearings he is especially fond of
contemplating doctrines, and to the touchstone of
practical consequences that he inclines to bring false
opinions, an inclination which ought to commend
itself to the mind of English people.
But it is for ruling, that the disposition of Leo was
pre-eminently fitted. As the Church succeeded to
the vacant throne of Rome, so the old Roman spirit
of government passed into the great rulers of the
Church ; the great command,
" Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento,"
might have been spoken to the popes as well as to
the Caesars, and Leo has been rightly called " the
first Pope."
In the smaller sphere of Church government
he was rigid and stern in insisting on disciplinary
enactments ; he neither admitted laxity in himself,
nor could tolerate it in others : in the larger,
he exhibited the disposition and to a great degree
asserted, the authority of an oecumenical ruler :
he had an overmastering sense of the indefeasible
authority of the Church of Rome as the divinely-
ordained centre of the Church's unity, and he had
.the Imperial power of watching and controlling the
THE AGE OF LEO. 23
movements of the Church's life in the most widely
distant spheres at the same moment. Leo, in short,
was a saint of the sterner kind in his life, a theologian
of the practical kind in his sermons and writings ; and
he manifested all through his activity the comprehen-
sive grasp and energy of a world-ruler. To him, if
to any man, the Church of Rome owes the uncom-
promising claim, the magnificent conception, of the
Mediaeval Papacy.
We may notice before we bring this chapter to a
conclusion one circumstance of Leo's time, which
facilitated, and even rendered in a measure necessary,
the claim that he was to make and substantiate for his
see : he was almost the only great man in Europe.
Theodosius had been the last great emperor : there
was nobody in the secular world of considerable im-
portance in the West except Aetius, who was not more
than a general. Among churchmen, St. Ambrose and
St. Chrysostom had died while Leo was very young :
St. Jerome had been twenty and St. Augustine ten
years dead when he attained the Episcopate, and
St. Cyril had but four more years of life. 1 To
an age brilliant with names famous in theology
had succeeded one in which the most noteworthy,
with the exception of Leo himself, are those of
Theodoret, Prosper, Cassian, and Hilary of Aries,
while even heresy had not an able representative. "On
1 St. Ambrose died 397 ; St. Chrysostom, 407 ; St. Jerome,
420 ; St. Augustine, 430 ; St. Cyril, 444.
SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE, CALIF.
24 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
the throne of Rome alone, of all the great sees, did
religion maintain its majesty, its sanctity, its piety."
Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that a
man like Leo occupied a position of unusual promi-
nence, and was able to exercise enormous influence for
himself and for his see in the present and for the
future.
LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME. 25
CHAPTER II.
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD.
THE question of the relation between the Church
and the State is one of the highest importance
in every age, and one which is continually
presenting itself for solution in fresh aspects and
unforeseen conjunctions. The answer to it is of
the utmost significance in the middle of the fifth
century. In the West, with which we are mainly
concerned, the predominance of the Church was
unmistakable.
For many centuries the bishops of Rome had
been comparatively obscure persons : indeed, Leo
was the first really great man who occupied the
see, but he occupied it under circumstances which
tended without exception to put power in his hand.
The emperors had left Rome ; and in leaving it left
to the popes all the magnificent traditions of authority,
all the imaginative reverence which could not but
centre in the Eternal City. Year by year, as the
emperors became more and more the shadow of a
name, the popes became a substance and a reality.
Amid weakness and inefficiency all around, or, what
was hardly less disastrous, the rivalries of powerful
captains, the emperor could but look to the Church
26 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
for support, for the Church showed some signs of
power to control the barbarians ; and the chief im-
portance in the secular history of the Church of the
age lies in the authority she was enabled to wield over
those untamed hordes. It was the ecclesiastical
organization which gave the framework for modern
society.
It is thus that arrayed as it has come down to us in all
its legendary glory the celebrated meeting of Leo and
Attila is a symbol, no less than a fact. Take the nar-
rative in its most picturesque, if least historical shape,
and it speaks to us, as from the celebrated canvas of
Raphael : of the Church overawing and disciplining
the uncouth barbarians. The Huns, with their hideous
features and grotesque appearance, the very emblems
of uncivilized force, headed by their powerful and
fierce monarch, Attila, are threatening Italy and Rome.
The Empire is paralyzed with fear ; it turns to the
Church. Leo, the representative of religion, in his
sacerdotal robes meets the wild conqueror before
his own camp, and he whom arms could not stay
trembles and bows before the peaceful priest. The
great Apostles, the founders of the Church of Rome,
threaten him with their majestic and supernatural
presence if he refuses to withdraw, and, humbled
before the forces of the spiritual world in heaven
and in earth; the hideous king returns upon his
footsteps.
Such is the symbolical legend, but we must return
to its counterpart in history. It was not without reason
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 27
that the Roman world trembled in a panic of almost
helpless dread before the advance of the Huns. Their
hideous and half-human Mongol form and features,
the mystery of their origin, the resistlessness of their
advance combined to make them dreaded as a super-
natural portent. A trustworthy historian gives us
as "the marks of the race," a stump stature, a broad
chest, a big head, tiny eyes, a sparse beard, a snub
nose, a hideous colouring ; T and Attila, their resistless
king, was a true specimen of his race " of a terrible
presence, proud in his gait, rolling his eyes hither and
thither, powerful in council, a lover of war but capable
of controlling it, and ready to welcome and spare the
suppliant."
This was the man and this was the race which
carried so fully into practice their worship of the
god of war and of the iron scimitar, by passing over
Europe from East to West in " an almost unresisted
career of victory and carnage." They had dealt with
the Eastern empire insolently and almost at will they
dominated the Gothic and Teutonic tribes. Their
trembling victims, as it were acquiescing in helpless
submission to the tyranny of their awful king, called
him the " scourge of God." At last he was met and
defeated by Aetius in the battle of Chalons, but
treating the defeat as nothing more than a check, the
still terrible Hun turned southwards on Italy. Aquileia
was taken and annihilated, the cities of Lombardy were
1 " Teter colore." Jornandes, De Rebus Geticis, cap. 35.
28 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
ravaged, and the peninsula lay open before him. 1
The vicious and cowardly Valentinian fled in abject
terror. Aetius if not treacherous, was at least helpless.
In this extremity the emperor, senate, and people
entrusted the hopes of the city to a peaceful embassy,
and Leo, accompanied by the Consular Avienus and
the Prefect Trigetius, undertook to meet the bar-
barian.
They found him on the shores of the lake Benacus
where it receives the waters of the Mincius, with
an army enervated partly, no doubt, by the un-
accustomed luxuries of Italian fare and by the
southern climate, partly also it would seem by dearth
of food, and his own mind wrought upon by a super-
stitious dread of the fate of Alaric, who had not long
survived the conquest of the Eternal City. Rumours,
too, are said to have reached him of dangers" of
invasion at home, beyond the Danube. For his
meeting with the ambassadors we are left to our
imagination, but it may well be that with these
motives for withdrawal already acting upon him, an
additional impression was made upon his mind, sus-
ceptible, as it would appear, of religious impressions
by the words and dignity of the Roman pontiff. At
any rate the mission was successful, and he withdrew :
not however tamely or without threats. He swore
that Italy should suffer more than she had yet done
if the Princess Honoria with her rich dowry were not
1 A.I). 452.
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 29
sent him. This was the princess whose strange career
illustrated the shameful degradation of the Empire.
Among other adventures she had offered herself in
marriage to the King of the Huns ; and avarice and
ambition, more than anything else, induced him now
to claim her. He did not however survive to execute
his threats, but died on his return to his Hunnic
kingdom beyond the Danube while he was celebrating
new nuptials; and his death dissolved his empire.
His death was speedily followed by that of the general
who alone had ever been able to defeat him on the
field.
In a fit of contemptible jealousy the wretched
Valentinian, " drawing the first sword he had ever
drawn," murdered Aetius ; to quote the simple words
of Marcellinus, the chronicler, " the patrician Aetius,
the great defence of the Western State, and the terror
of king Attila, was murdered by Valentinian in the
palace with his friend Boetius : and with him fell the
Empire of the West, nor has it been able ever yet to
be raised again."
Meanwhile, the courage of Leo in meeting the
fearful Hun had made a great impression both in
the East and West, and within three years he stood
out again once more as the preserver of the city. In
the prosecution of his promiscuous amours the con-
temptible Valentinian was murdered at Rome (whither
he had returned in March, 455) by the influence of a
senator, Maximus, to whose wife he had goffered
violence. We cannot regret his death, but only its
30 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
consequences. The successful Maximus compelled
the Empress Eudoxia to become his wife ; by confess-
ing to her his complicity in the murder of her husband
he raised in her breast a fierce desire of revenge. At
her secret summons the victorious Genseric, king of
the Vandals, who had passed from Africa to conquer
Sicily, landed with a powerful force at the mouth of
the Tiber. Maximus speedily perished in an insur-
rection of the populace with the followers of Eudoxia,
but Genseric having set foot in Italy would not be
satisfied without sacking Rome. The city was power-
less. No armed force went out to meet the Vandal,
but, instead, a peaceful procession of clergy, headed
by their valiant bishop. In the interval of forty-five
years since Rome had been taken by the Goths she
had had time to recover something of her former
splendour : it was not to be expected that the ra-
pacious Vandal would have altogether abstained from
pillage, and indeed it is somewhat difficult to find
out what was the effect of Leo's prayers. " He
induced him," says Prosper, " to refrain from fire,
slaughter, or outrage :" however this may have
been, we know, on the one hand, that Leo's remark-
able courage extracted some concessions from the
barbarian, and on the other that the city was pillaged
for fourteen days. Leo succeeded in saving but three
large silver vessels from the sack of the churches ; and
by a curious combination of circumstances, the spoils
of Titus from the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem, the
golden table and the candlestick with seven branches,
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 31
were carried off to Carthage from the Temple of
Peace at Rome by a barbarian from the shores of
the Baltic. 1 Genseric returned with his vast spoils to
Carthage, taking with him many thousand captives of
both sexes, and amongst them the unfortunate empress
whose invitation had brought him to Rome. This
devastation may be said to have finally destroyed
the pagan city, and the whole interest and glory of
Rome henceforth centred in the Papacy.
We must notice that to neither of Leo's encounters
with barbarian kings do we find any allusion in his
own writings ; what slight allusion we have to the cir-
cumstances which caused them refer exclusively to the
religious duties of enduring correction, and of gratitude
for deliverance. This is both remarkable and interest-
ing. It shows us that Leo was superior to the weak-
ness of vanity, and if he was the saviour of his
country, was not inclined to boast of it.
We have seen how the State could avail itself of
the services of the Church, it remains to see how
the Church could make the State its instrument.
Speaking generally, we may say there is no attempt
in the Western Empire of this date to control the
Church. There is, indeed, a rescript of Valentinian,
dated in 452, which seems to be aimed at the
judicial power in civil matters exercised by bishops.
The importance and force of this rescript are not clear.
The great Roman Catholic champion, Baronius, sees
1 Gibbon, iv. 257.
32 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
in the invasion of the Huns and the murder of
Valentinian a divine judgment on this attempted inva-
sion of the rights of the Church. Leo says nothing
about it, and at any rate he had not in general any
cause of complaint against the emperor on the score
of resistance to Church authority.
When Leo was in conflict with Hilary of Aries
(A.D. 448), he seems to have thought it desirable
that the secular power should back up his spiritual
authority. Accordingly, a rescript was obtained
from the emperor, the terms of which are certainly
remarkable. It speaks of the merits of St. Peter,
the dignity of Rome, and the authority of a coun-
cil, as conspiring to confirm the primacy of the
Roman bishop, and warns men that " the peace of
the Church will not be secured till with one consent
it recognise its ruler." The document goes on to con-
demn, wholly from Leo's point of view, the conduct
of Hilary, and to approve the pope's requirements.
" His commands," it continues, " would, of course,
have been valid through Gaul, even without the
Imperial sanction; for what can be beyond the
authority of so great a pontiff in the affairs of the
Church?" Still it is thought desirable that the
Imperial authority should intervene ; and " this is
our perpetual injunction, that the bishops, neither
of Gaul, nor any other province, be allowed contrary
to ancient custom, to attempt anything without the
authority of the pope of the Eternal City ; but that
for them, and for all, the law shall be whatever
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 33
the authority of the Apostolic see has or shall have
ordained." The assistance of provincial magistrates
is then promised to compel the attendance of recal-
citrants at the command of Rome. Such a constitu-
tion ought to have pleaded, surely, in the eyes of
Baronius to obtain for Valentinian a natural death !
It is of course a purely Western document, though it
bears the name of both emperors ; and we regret, as
we read its extravagant language, that Leo, in the hour
of struggle, should not have been able to resist the
temptation of extracting anything he wanted out of
the feeble-minded emperor.
He was able on another occasion to use the
influence of the Western Court to endeavour, though
unsuccessfully, to move the Eastern, which he did not
find nearly so subservient. In his relations to the
Court of Theodosius, we are constantly reminded
that the summoning of councils was dependent
upon "the commandment and will of princes."
It was the emperor who summoned "the Council
of Ephesus in 449, and Leo, though he always
speaks most respectfully, 1 is inclined to complain
that at least he should have been given longer
notice. The occasion, the place, and the time were
all decided by the emperor, and Leo sends his
apologies for not attending in person. Afterwards,
when the council had ended so disastrously, Leo
1 We do not think that, judging by the standard of the official
language of the clay, we need accuse Leo of much flattery or over-
obsequiousness.
34 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
wholly fails to obtain from the emperor permission
for a new synod to be held in Italy, and the control
of the emperors in this matter is only an example of
the general interference in ecclesiastical matters in
the East to which Leo has to give a constant prac-
tical recognition. Indeed, he constantly calls upon
them to do the Church's work, especially when he
could not altogether depend upon the ecclesiastical
authorities. In theory, Leo holds that the civil and
ecclesiastical authority should be very closely united.
" Human affairs cannot," he says, "be safe unless the
royal and sacerdotal authority combine to defend the
faith." " Your empire," he tells the Emperor Leo,
on his accession, " is given you, not only to rule the
world, but to defend the Church." And he can give
a prince no higher praise than to ascribe to him a
" sacerdotal mind." So intimate, indeed, is the rela-
tion he would have to exist between Church and
State, that he would visit ecclesiastical error with
civil punishment. Unlike St. Martin of Tours, and St.
Ambrose, he even apologizes for the execution of Pris-
cillian the heretic, who, for the first time in the his-
tory of Christianity, was put to death for his heresy
by the secular arm ; T " for," he writes, " though
the forbearance of the Church, contented with a
sacerdotal sentence, is unwilling to take a bloody
revenge, yet at times it finds assistance in the severe
1 A.D. 384. It is possible, however, that Priscillian was put
to death not for heresy but for magic, under a law of Valentinian
and Valens. See Milman's "Lat. Christianity," i. 251.
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD. 35
commands of Christian princes, because the fear
of punishment for the body sometimes drives men
to seek healing for the soul." Without approving
the sentiment, we must remember that there is
more justification for subjecting religious error to
civil punishment in a half-barbarous age than in our
own.
These remarks may be sufficient to indicate the
relations of Church and State in East and West under
Leo's pontificate of twenty-one years.
D 2
36 LEO THE GREAT AND HI'S TIME.
CHAPTER III.
LEO AND THE MANICH^EANS.
A MAN of Leo's orthodoxy, with a will so dominant
and a purpose so strong, placed where he was in an
age like the fifth century, must inevitably have come
in conflict with numberless heresies. If there was
one truth committed to the Church, and that truth
was to be preserved, the task of preserving it must
mean battle. Nor was Leo a man to shrink from the
necessity. Accordingly, we find him coming more or
less in contact with almost all the manifold heresies-
then troubling the world. We do not, however,
propose to allude to all the smaller conflicts of which
we may find mention in his writings, but rather to-
confine ourselves to the one or two great struggles
which made his life famous ; and perhaps it will be
well to say at starting, for the benefit of those who
may be unused to the language of such conflicts, that
we have to do with men who, whatever their short-
comings, were terribly in earnest ; and we must not
expect to find soft actions and mincing words.
Believing with a steadfastness of simple faith that
God had committed One Truth to His Church to be
the guide of the intellect and the salvation of the
'LEO AND THE MANICH^ANS, 37
souls of men, it was impossible for them to speak and
act (orthodox and heretic are mainly alike in this) as
if religious opinions were a matter of indifference, and
as if error had no influence in producing sin a
corrupt doctrine a corrupt life. This habit of mind
had, of course, its dangers. It tended to make
defenders of the faith harsh and inconsiderate in their
zeal for God's truth. It was difficult for them to
remember that though the rejection of divine truth
was the soul's condemnation, they could not really
appreciate from outside the extenuating circumstances
of this or that particular case. It was not in the
spirit of the age to recall this to their minds ; it was
an age which dealt with men in masses. Thus they
seem sometimes, as was said, inconsiderate in their
sweeping and general condemnations and dogmatic
assurance. Moreover, the literary character of their
surroundings was not refined, and they called one
another hard names without scruple, and sometimes
without justice. These were the special faults -of their
time ; on the other hand, their method had this
advantage that, at a time when men specially needed
clear and uncompromising doctrine, it held up before
them in an unmistakable way a system of truth
as literally divine and absolutely authoritative, and
warned them in very plain terms that they rejected it
on their eternal peril.
Our age is very different from theirs, and we find it
hard to accept their method. We have our virtues-
more individual considerateness, more gentleness of
38 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
dealing, more intelligent sympathy; on the other
hand, the dangers to which we are exposed are at
least not less than theirs, and we are fully in a
position to profit by their example and by the tone of
their minds. We are apt to talk as if what a man
'' happened to believe " were matter of comparative
indifference ; as if opinion had no effect on life ; and
it is considered hardly politic or polite to insist very
strongly on the divine authority of a doctrine ; it would
be wiser to shelve the Athanasian Creed, we think,
which is the legacy to us of Leo's age. That this-
state of mind is worldly, and not the Christianity of
the Bible or the Church, we shall probably admit,
even when we are ourselves imperceptibly influenced
by it, and it may, therefore, have a bracing and
wholesome effect upon our mind to try and enter
into the vigorous, uncompromising sternness of
another age, " contending earnestly for the faith once
for all delivered " in simple trust and total self-
sacrifice ; perhaps we shall be inclined to excuse even
a little violence, and shall sometimes seem to see a
more real charity breathing in stern words than in all
the indifferentism of modern talk.
Without more apology we approach Leo's conflict
with the Manichaeans. This sect stands unrivalled
in the world's history for the strange vicissitudes of
fortune which it has undergone, and the intense
tenacity of life which it has exhibited. "In vain
proscribed, persecuted, deprived of the privilege of
citizens, placed out of the pale of the law by succes-
LEO AND THE MANICH^EANS. 3<)
sive imperial edicts j under the abhorrence, not
merely of the orthodox, but of almost all other
Christians, it was constantly springing up in all
quarters of Christendom with a singularly obstinate
vitality." It would seem that recent troubles, and
especially the capture of Carthage by Genseric, in
439, had driven a very large number of persons
belonging to the sect to Rome, and their ranks were
doubtless recruited from the secret votaries of pagan-
ism. They were noted there moving about with pale
faces and shabby clothes. They were observed to
fast when the Church was not fasting, and to make
distinctions of meats. These peculiarities of appear-
ance and life sufficed to mark them out to the
vigilant eye of Leo, though they seem to have wished
to escape notice and pass as Catholics ; for Church and
State alike hated Manichaeism, and no man in the
Church more than the then bishop of Rome. For
this hatred he had reason enough, theological and
moral.
It was the great theological task of Leo's life,
as we shall have occasion to see, to maintain the
real, full, and abiding humanity of Jesus Christ. He
had taken our whole human nature, will, conscience,
heart, soul and spirit, and not that only, but body
too. That flesh, which sin had so thoroughly and
often defiled, He had taken and redeemed and sancti-
fied by uniting it to Himself. The lowest is joined
to the highest. The material body, of the earth
earthy, has been taken by the Almighty Creator to
40 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
Himself. From henceforth then let no man speak
lightly of the material world, for in man it is united
to God.
Of the truth of this Leo had an intense and pas-
sionate conviction, while the denial of it was the
mainspring of all systems akin to the Manichaean.
There is a dreamy tendency in Eastern philosophies,
hardly intelligible to our English common sense, to
say that matter, as such, is evil. We cannot enter at
any length here into an explanation of the way in
which Manichaeism developed this idea ; it is of
course St. Augustine and not St. Leo who is identified
with its refutation. We can only say here that,
according to the Manichaeans, there were two prin-
ciples at war in the world, the good principle, which
is God, and the evil principle which is matter, or the
things of sense as such. It is against opinions akin
to these, we must remember, that St. Paul in his
later epistles has to fight against men " who forbade
to marry" and "commanded to abstain from meats."
It was of course incumbent upon a Manichaean, as a
natural consequence of his opinions, to deny the pos-
sibility of an Incarnation. God and matter, these were
the eternal foes ; between them was waged the un-
ending war in every particle of the universe. A recon-
ciliation, an atonement of the highest and the lowest,
God taking flesh, these were ideas most repugnant
to the philosophy of Manes, and Leo has, therefore,
every theological reason to hate Manichaeism. Indeed,
" the Manichaean impiety " is the common expression
LEO AND THE MANICH^EAXS. 41
by which he characterizes all denials of the real and
full humanity of Jesus Christ.
And he had fully as grave moral reasons for his
antagonism to it. If we believe that the material
and the sensible is the evil, that belief may reduce
itself to practice and influence our lives in two
different directions. It may make us struggle to
be as far as possible separate from the flesh, to
trample out all carnal impulses, to mortify, to slay,
to crush the body; that is to say, it may exalt
asceticism as an end in itself, not merely as a
measure of self-discipline, and reckon every suffering
inflicted on the body as a blow aimed at a mortal
foe.
But this philosophy may also have (and in fact
has had in history) a quite different tendency. For
with all our efforts we cannot escape from the body ;
there the spirit is, entangled in its meshes, indis-
solubly bound up with it in all its actions and in every
motion ; we may rack our every limb with torture,
but with what result ? We must feel and handle
and eat, that is, we must have to do with evil and be
contaminated by it. What matter then a little more
or less ? Is one act worse than another ? Nay,
rather since by the very law of our nature we are
involved in evil, let us give up the struggle ; all
physical life is alike evil, and therefore the mode of
life is a matter indifferent. By some such process
of thought as this the same philosophy may lead to
the extreme of self-maceration, and to the extreme of
42 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
license, or to a life made up partly of asceticism and
partly of license, a compromise not unacceptable to
the average inconsistency of human beings, and
which may have been embraced by some of the
Manichasans of Leo's day. If they attracted attention
by their fasts on the one hand, they were convicted
of flagrant immorality on the other. In the year
444 a diligent search was made for the disciples of
the sect throughout Rome by Leo's orders, which
resulted in the discovery of a very large number
of teachers and disciples, amongst whom their
" bishop " was taken. They were brought up for
trial before an august assemblage of civil and eccle-
siastical authorities, and there is no possibility of
doubting the evidence which tells us that confession
was made of hideous immoralities in their secret
assemblies, immoralities seemingly public and cere-
monial.
Once again in the history of this sect the full
vials of ecclesiastical and Imperial wrath were poured
out upon them. They were subjected (those, that is,
who would not make retractation of their errors and
embrace Catholicism) to perpetual banishment and to
all kinds of civil penalties, by an edict of Valentinian
reviving the laws of previous emperors ; and Leo, by
sermons and letters, did his best to make their shame
ring through Christendom, and succeeded, in fact, in
stirring up bishops both in East and West to emulate
his activity. To exhibit the strength of Leo's feelings
on Manichaeism, it is only necessary to quote two sen-
LEO AND THE MANICH^EANS. 43
tences from his sermons, in which he says, that " while
the devil, under various guises, holds his dominion in
all errors, his citadel he has built in the madness of
the Manichaeans, and found there the amplest room
wherein to walk at large with more vaunting arro-
gance, where he may lord it over, not one form of
corruption, but a mixture of all errors and impieties
in general. The profanity of the pagans, the darkness
of carnal Jews, the illicit arts of magic, in a word, all
the blasphemy and sacrilege of all heresies all has
flowed together and meets here as in the common cess-
pool of all corruption." "All other heresies, however
justly to be condemned, have yet a hold, each in their
way, of some element of truth, but in Manichaeism
there is nothing which, from any point of view, can
be regarded as tolerable.' 7
Before passing on, we may pause a moment to
notice one effect which Leo's efforts against this sect
had on his own mind. In the spirit of the whole
Catholic Church he insists on the value, and even
necessity of fasting, that is, of bodily self-discipline in
its widest sense. But whereas sometimes ascetic zeal
has hurried part of the Christian world into an almost
Manichsean hatred of the body, Leo is specially
careful to maintain the true disciplinary principle.
" Salutary is the mode of life," he says, " which uses
a spare diet, and restrains the appetite for delicacies ;
but woe to the opinion of those who turn even fast-
ing into a sin ! For to the injury of the Creator they
condemn the creatures ; and those that eat are, in
44 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
their eyes, contaminated, eating what the devil, and
not God, has made. Nay, but no substance is in
itself evil : evil itself has no nature.' 1 The good
Author of all made all things good, and whatever has
been given to man for food and drink is holy and
clean. It is gluttony, not food, that makes men
impure."
Fasting therefore is a means, not an end ; and
this is constantly insisted on in Leo's sermons : it is a
means towards making the body apt for pure, holy,
and spiritual activity; towards subjecting the flesh,
as he often says, to the reason and spirit. " A man
has true peace and liberty when the flesh is ruled by
the judgment of the mind, and the mind is directed
by the government of God." 2 " What good has been
done by weakening the flesh without strengthening
the soul?" " Therefore, we must indeed refrain
from food, but it is more important to fast from
errors."
Again, because fasting has this directly moral
object, it should show its rationality by being
joined to works of mercy. "The abstinence of the
faster must be the refreshment of the hungry." The
sick, the weak, the exile, the orphan and the widow,
must feel the benefit of our chastisement of the flesh.
1 f.e., evil is not a positive quality, a substance among sub-
stances, but is a mere negation and defect : what exists becomes
evil not by acquiring something new, but by losing its true
quality.
2 Sermons 42, 2, 4, 39.
LEO AND THE MANICH/EANS. 45
Fasting which is not joined to such works of mercy
is a mere carnal affliction, not a purification of the
soul ; and if a man is too weak to fast, let him occupy
himself in works of love. In all this, as in the whole
of Leo's Christianity, we notice a total freedom from
superstition and morbidity of mind, a freedom not
generally attributed to the saints of the fifth century,
for St. Leo was a contemporary of St. Simeon of the
Pillar.
Having dealt thus sternly and successfully with
Manichaeism in Italy, Leo, a few years later (A.D.
447) comes into indirect collision with the kin-
dred heresy of Priscillianism in Spain. The death
of Priscillian had, as is usual in similar cases, failed
to suppress his opinions, which were at the time
especially prevalent in Spain, his native country. This
heresy was in its foundation Oriental, and akin to
Manichaeism : it was Sabellian in its denial of a real
Trinity, more than Arian in its doctrine of Christ,
and as it added the practice of magic and astrology
to its other errors, we may well suppose that it would
have met with no lenient treatment at the hands of
Leo. The state of Spain, overrun by Suevi, Goths,
and Vandals, who were Arian as far as they were
Christian at all, was favourable neither to orthodoxy,
nor to any sort of political order. The bishops could
not meet in synod, and discipline was in a state of
collapse. The heretics were living as Catholics, and
even the bishops were conniving at, if they were not
tainted by, their opinions. Leo, not being on the
46 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
spot, could only act mediately by stirring up the
bishop Turibius to activity against them, and we hear
of more than one council which seems to have been
due to his inspiration. We may pass now over minor
conflicts, and come to consider Leo as the great
champion of the Incarnation against the heresy of
Eutyches.
LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME. 47
CHAPTER IV.
EUTYCHIANISM.
THE heresy of Nestorius, which may be said in a
-sense to have given rise to that of Eutyches, dates
from the year 428. It was finally condemned in
the third General Council, held at Ephesus in 431.
It was not like the heresy of Arius, a denial of the
real Godhead of Jesus Christ, or like that of Apolli-
naris, a denial of His real manhood, but it was a
denial of the perfect union of the Godhead and the
Manhood in the one Person. The Catholic expression
which Nestorius could not tolerate was the title
" Theotocos " l applied to the Virgin. " The child of
two or three months old I cannot call God," he said.
What was born of Mary was a man to whom the
Eternal Lord united Himself.
The great opponent of this heresy was the
famous St. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria; but in
the ranks of his followers there was none more
zealous among the zealous monks, or more
strenuous in insisting on the unity of the Person
of Christ than the Archimandrite, Eutyches, who
1 " Mother of God" more exactly, perhaps, " God-bearer,"
for the point emphasized by the term is not the dignity of the
mother, but the nature of the Son.
SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE, CALIF,
48 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
became the author of the next great heresy in
the opposite extreme. Upon this man's moral cha-
racter no slur has been cast ; he was simply a some-
what narrow-minded person, of great intensity and
obstinacy of conviction, untempered either by real
theological insight or by moderation and balance of
judgment. He had, as it were, learned the orthodox
formula in its extremest form, and brooding on this,
without any regard to counter-truth, he lost the pro-
portion of faith, and, without intending it, found
himself a heretic, asserting that in Christ Incarnate
there was no real human nature. The character of
his temper is consistently recognised by his great
Western opponent, St. Leo, who calls him "unskilful,"
" ignorant," "imprudent," "obstinate," but shrinks
from harder names.
Against this man a petition was presented at a
council held at Constantinople in November, 448,
by Eusebius, bishop of Dorylaeum, characterizing
him in the language of the theological controversies
of the day as a blasphemer and a madman. This
language was, indeed, thoroughly suitable in the
mouth of Eusebius, a man of unswerving and
impetuous orthodoxy, but with no mildness or
considerateness of temper. While still a layman
he had denounced Nestorius, and in their com-
mon opposition to the impugner of the unity of
Christ's Person, he and Eutyches had been allies and
friends. Gifted, however, with theological perception
more accurate than Eutyches, he became alarmed at
EUTYCHIANISM. 49
the one-sided exclusiveness of his old ally's doctrine,
which seemed to deny the reality of Christ's human
nature, and with the violence of character which was
natural to him he became his bitter enemy. His
bitterness shocked the Archbishop Flavian, who then
presided over the Church of Constantinople. " Your
petition," he said, " astounds us when we think of
the reputation of the man against whom you bring
it." Could not Eusebius deal with Eutyches in private
before bringing a public accusation against him ?
No, said Eusebius ; Eutyches had once been his
friend, and he had repeatedly warned him in vain of
the course he was pursuing, and he could go no more
to hear his blasphemous words. Still remonstrating
with Eusebius for his violence the council neverthe-
less acceded to his request that Eutyches might be
summoned.
Meanwhile, the bishops assembled professed in
varying terms their orthodox belief in the two
natures of God and man united in Christ's Person.
Twice was Eutyches summoned in vain. " His
monastery was his tomb," he said ; " he could not
leave it: on that he was fully determined. Besides,
Eusebius was his personal enemy, and brought this
accusation out of malice. He was ready to sign the
decrees of Nicaea and Ephesus ; but, better than all,
he preferred to hold to Scripture. After the Incar-
nation he adored one nature of God made man." He
was also reported to deny that Christ was of one
substance with us. A mere report, however, St. Flavian
E
50 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
would not willingly accept. He still trusted Eutyches
would come before the synod and repent of his
error. He showed the council the temper of mind
in which they should act towards the wanderer from the
faith by reminding them how our Lord had been at
pains to seek out the lost sheep, and how He rejoiced
over the return of a penitent. Again and again
Eutyches was sent for, but he was daily becoming
more obstinately determined not to leave the monas-
tery, and was trying to raise up a monastic party to
support his views. Eusebius, meanwhile, "compared
to whom," as Flavian said, " fire was cool," was
growing furious, and urged that Eutyches should be
brought by force. At the next session of the council
the accused sent a monk to say he was ill. " He
groaned all night," the monk said, " and could not
sleep ; he kept me awake with his groaning." Still
the archbishop was gentleness itself. "We would
not be hard on him we will wait till God makes
him well; we wish him nothing but good. God
delights not in the destruction of the living : we are
not the children of inhumanity, but the children of
the mercy of God."
At last Eutyches came, and in such a way as to show
how he had profited by the delay, for he was accom-
panied by a great crowd of soldiers, monks, and officers.
He professed to be in great peril from Eusebius, and
refused to enter the council without security for
his personal safety. He brought also with him an
Imperial order that the patrician Florentius should
EUTYCHIANISM. 51
have a seat in the council. " As we know him to be
faithful/' said the document, "and of approved ortho-
doxy, we will him to be present at the deliberations of
the council, because the question is one of the faith."
A long dialogue now followed, in which Eutyches was
most unwillingly brought to the point. He professed
unwillingness to speculate on the nature of the God-
head, asked where Scripture speaks of " two natures,"
and asserted his agreement with the doctrine of St.
Cyril. At last, however, in answer to a final question
of the patrician Florentius, " Do you confess that
our Lord is of one substance with us, and of two
natures after the Incarnation?" he was forced to the
assertion, "Christ was of two natures before the union,
but after the union I acknowledge one nature." In
support of this position he appealed to Athanasius and
Cyril, and from it he could not be moved. He was
therefore condemned in the usual form. " Bewailing
and lamenting his complete ruin, we," the bishops
said, "decree through our Lord Jesus Christ, who
has been by him blasphemed, that he is thrust out
from all priestly office, and from our fellowship, and
from the presidency of his monastery : and be it
known to all men who after this converse with or visit
him, that they lay themselves too under the sentence
of excommunication, because they have not abstained
from intercourse with him."
It is at this point that Leo enters into the contro-
versy. It appears that Flavian wrote to Leo as to
other distinguished bishops, giving an account of the
E 2
52 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
action of the council. For some cause, however,
his letter was delayed. Leo's first information on
the controversy and its result came in the shape of
an appeal from Eutyches, and a letter from the
emperor which seems to have been also favourable
to the condemned opinions. Eutyches, of course,
asserted his orthodoxy, pleaded his old age, and
attempted to get the pope on his side by representing,
apparently not with truth, that he had appealed to
Rome from the council, and his appeal had not been
listened to or allowed. He had, in fact, made no
public appeal at all, but had intimated to Florentius
privately that he appealed to "the Roman, the
Egyptian, and the Jerusalem Councils." Though
Eutyches* professed submissiveness to the judgment
of the see of Rome was all Leo could have desired,
and though he had previously had occasion to com-
mend his zeal against Nestorianism, he was too wise
a man to repeat the mistake of his predecessor
Zosimus in the case of Ccelestius and commit
himself without further information. He writes to
the emperor to lament his ignorance of the real state
of the case. To Flavian he complains vigorously of
the want of information, and demands an explanation
of the treatment to which, on his own showing,
Eutyches had been subjected. Meanwhile, however,
the arrival of Flavian's account of the matter was
sufficient to secure Leo's adherence to the sentiments
of the council, and a letter to Flavian assures him of
his sympathy. This is followed in June, 449, by "the
EUTYCHIANISM. 53
Tome," or doctrinal epistle, a document of great
celebrity, which, while it is nominally a letter to
Flavian, is really addressed to the ecclesiastical world
at large. In itself it is a sign of the times : for here
we have a Latin bishop, ignorant of Greek, defining
the faith for Greek- speaking bishops, in view of
certain false opinions of Oriental origin; but the
document is still more remarkable for its contents
than for the circumstances which produced it. Before,
however, attempting to give an idea of what these are,
it is necessary to pause and ask what is the signifi-
cance of the heresy of Eutyches, and whether it was
really necessary for the Church to take such serious
notice of it.
Nothing is easier than to represent the condemna-
tion of Eutyches as an example of ecclesiastical pugna-
city and theological hair-splitting. Here was a man who
had grown grey in orthodoxy, nay, more, had worn
himself out in defence of the truth of Christ's Divinity,
accused in extreme old age by a man who seemed to
represent the very spirit of bitterness. The accused
man was no rationalist, no conceited and impertinent
impugner of authorities, on the contrary, he constantly
appeals to Church authorities, only he prefers to be
satisfied with the words of the Bible, and does not
like to inquire too minutely into the mysteries of the
Godhead. He confesses that God was incarnate and
made man ; he confesses that the manhood and the
Godhead were separate before the Incarnation; he
confesses that after the Incarnation the Person was One
54 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
and Divine. What then is his fault ? he cannot see a
subtle distinction between " Person " and " Nature ; "
confessing the One Personality of the Incarnate
Christ, he cannot confess after the Incarnation " Two
natures." The mystery of the Incarnation he cannot
explain : he cannot bring himself to define the nature
of the union of the Godhead and the Manhood, only
he knows that His Nature is Divine, and thinks it
safer to speak of one Nature, one Person not one
Person and two Natures and for this, as he patheti-
cally puts it, he is " thrust out of the number of the
orthodox at the close of his days." Surely here is an
instance of exaggerated and impertinent accuracy of
definition ; surely the Church could have been con-
tented with his general confession that God was
Incarnate in Christ Jesus that Christ Jesus was
God.
So it is easy to argue; and if the Church had had
to do only with an individual, very possibly this argu-
ment might be sound ; but it is the Church's duty to
look beyond the individual to the remoter conse-
quences of his teaching, and if we look at the matter
from this point of view, we shall see how necessary
it was to guard the proportion of faith, and how
fatal it would have been if Eutyches' one-sided
exaggeration of orthodoxy had been allowed to pass
unnoticed.
From the very first, the belief in Christ involved a
belief in His humanity and His Divinity. " Whom say
ye," Christ had asked, " that I, the Son of Man, am ? "
EUTYCHLANISM. 55
'" Thou art the Christ, -the Son of the living God."
'This confession by St. Peter of Christ's Divine
Nature was the starting-point of the Christian Church :
this co-ordinate belief in the Son of Man who was
also the Son of God, is the primary law of Christian
Faith. But as faith is rather .trust in a Person than
assent to a proposition, it took a little while before
this moral quality of trustful faith came to express
itself clearly in propositions or in a theory of the
Person of Christ, it being mainly the rise of suc-
cessive false opinions, which compelled it to pass
into logical expression. The instinct of Christianity
dates before its logic, and the believing ear was
shocked when it heard from Arius, for example, that
Christ was in any sense not absolutely God. Such a
statement, so antagonistic to all its feelings, instincts,
.and devotion, excited an irrepressible indignation in
the Christian heart. Not fully God.! Then, by an
inevitable inference not fully, absolutely in His own
right Sovereign, not able to claim full adoring
worship. But that this He was, this He could claim,
the whole Christian life involved as its secret, its clue,
its inspiration. It followed then He was in all
and every sense God ; and the Church looked about
for an expression most certain to secure this
truth, and decreed Him " of one substance with the
Father."
The expression was not in Scripture, it had not
been insisted on before, nay it had even been rejected
as a doubtful expression when other questions were at
56 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
issue, but now this- seemed to be the one expres-
sion which alone could make it quite certain that no
man could be an orthodox Christian without under-
standing the full measure of the dignity of the Lord,
Thus, in the necessity of opposing a false opinion-
that threatened to cut away the roots of her life and
worship, the Christian Church was driven to express-
her right instinct in a true logical formula ; her feeling
became a dogma, and if it had shrunk from this
necessity, the feeling itself could not have lived long
unimpaired. If the Church had refused to anathe-
matize error she would have lost or impaired her
heritage of life and devotion ; but conscious now of
what she condemned, she gained at the same time a
more intelligent consciousness of what she believed.
We pass over a century. Another danger threatened
the Church. Nestorius denied that the Babe on
Mary's knees was God. The new error necessitated
a new dogma. The Christian knew that in wor-
shipping Christ, God and Man, he was worship-
ping not two Persons but one, and that one the
Eternal Son who had been born of Mary. He, then,
who denied that Mary's child was God, denied
either that it was indeed God who had taken flesh, or
that it was indeed flesh that He had taken. Christ
was one Person, and that Person Divine. For this
truth' Eutyches had fought Christ is One ; He is
Divine : but having but one idea, and that to oppose
Nestorianism, he lost in his assertion of the unity
and Divinity of Christ's Person all sense of the
EUTYCHIANISM. 57
counter-truth which alone gives reality to the Incar-
nation, the truth of His humanity.
Eutyches never formulated a heresy, he was no
philosopher ; but he refused to say that the human
nature remained in Christ after the Incarnation.
He shrank from calling Christ "of one substance"
with us men : in some sort of way he left us
to suppose that the human nature was absorbed
into and lost in the Divinity. Well, if the
Church's instinct had been right when she refused
at Nestorius's bidding to separate into two Persons
the God-Man Christ, it was at 'least as sound now
when it condemned in Eutyches the merging or an-
nihilation of the human nature. The whole doctrine
of our salvation depends on Christ being of one sub-
stance with us. He did not merely touch our nature
as from the outside, and by touching transmute it into
something else : He took it in all its parts, body, soul
and spirit, with all its feelings, wants, instinct, powers,
temptations, weaknesses sin only excepted He took
it all, He is it, and He is it for ever. The whole
doctrine of the second Adam centres in this. No
assuming of the appearance of man, of the clothing
of mere human flesh, will avail anything : Christ is
the second Adam, the new man, the first parent of a
restored human nature. The whole value of the
Atoning Sacrifice depends on this, that it was Man
who offered himself in that human nature, that in us
had sinned : the whole meaning of the Ascension is
lost if it is not our human nature which is exalted
58 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
to God's right hand. All this the Church felt, and
asked no more.
To grieve over the error of the old opponent
of heresy, this was natural ; but to hesitate to con-
demn him would have been a failure of charity, not
to him, but to mankind who was to come after
him ; it did not matter that the Bible did not speak
of two natures in one Person : the Bible in every
page of the New Testament assumes the real
humanity of Christ, our Brother as well as our Lord;
and, as for expressions to convey the truth, that was
the best which was most clear, most positive, most
unmistakable Two Natures in One Person. We
may say that this was the last of the im-
portant heresies on the doctrine of the Incar-
nation which the Church had to deal with. The
Church had now secured the truth of the Supreme
Divinity as well as the Real Humanity of Christ : she
had proclaimed that the Divinity and the Humanity
were united in the one Divine Person who was born,
and died, and rose again : and she had confessed that
in that one Divine Person remained for ever uncon-
fused, though united, the Divine and Human
Natures. Nothing more could be wanted for the
full doctrine of the Incarnation ; and if a later heresy
could rise to deny that Christ had a Human will, such
a doctrine had already been condemned by anticipa-
tion in the condemnation of Eutyches.
Perhaps these considerations may put us in a better
position to appreciate the necessity for such dogmatic
EUTYCHIANISM. 59
definitions of the Church as are given us in the
Nicene and Athanasian Creeds and the decrees of
Councils. What was the Church's task ? To preserve
and hand down the truth through ages, very different
in character and circumstances : through the darkness
of the Middle Ages, when learning seemed dead, when
religion itself sometimes seemed lost in the confusion
and bloodshed all around ; through all the mental
convulsion and strife of tongues of such a period as
the Reformation through all the ecclesiastical dead-
ness and spiritual sloth of such a period as the last
century in England. Surely it was necessary then
that, to live through ages so different one and un-
changed, the truth must not be left to the shifting
sands of feeling, but must be enshrined in some sharp,
clear-cut, uncompromising, dogmatic formula, which
admitted of no equivocation, which was before
all things unhesitating and clear-voiced. So only would
no spiritual sloth be able to impair or obliterate it,
no intellectual strife disintegrate, no unintelligent
brutality forget it : so only would it stand an unshaken
column amid the tossing waves, and ring on one
clear dominant note amid howling winds and con-
fused echoes, and shine as one bright light amid
dense and blinding mists.
It was said by Plato to be the mark of a philo-
sopher that he deals, not with persons, but with prin-
ciples. Accused as the great controversial churchmen
so constantly are, and not always perhaps unjustly, of
personal rancour, it may seem almost paradoxical to
60 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
say that in this respect the opponents of Eutyches
exhibited a thoroughly philosophical character and
spirit, but the truth is so. It is sometimes complained
that they are at small pains to inform us of the exact
nature of the opinions of Eutyches, and in their sen-
tence of condemnation accuse him almost at random
of " following without alteration the blasphemies of
Apollinaris and Valentinus ;" whereas Eutyches him-
self anathematized Manes, Valentinus and Apollinaris
in the Ephesine Council. The truth is, Flavian and the
other bishops were at particular pains to assure them-
selves by personal examination that Eutyches did deny
the permanence of the Two Natures in the Person of
Christ, and that no persuasions would induce him to
forsake his error : this done, their business was no
further with the man, but with the principle which he
represented : it is this which accounts for the appa-
rently vague way in which they lump together
opinions of very different origin. Valentinus was an
Alexandrian Gnostic of the second century, who, in the
spirit of a philosophy utterly alien to the mind of the
dull old monk Eutyches, having for a fundamental
principle a belief in matter as evil could not conceive
of any real union of God with it ; and among other,
to us hardly realizable opinions such as the dis-
tinction between a "spiritual'' and a "natural"
Christ was found to deny the material reality of
the body of the Saviour. Nobody could be in
intellect or spirit less like the obstinate and ignorant
monk than the subtle and refining Gnostic, but in this
EUTYCHIANISM. 6 1
one result they agreed they emptied our salvation of
its reality by denying the full humanity of Christ
and thus, for the purposes of the council, dealing not
with persons, but with a principle of denial, they come
under the same head. Apollinaris, again, was a man
more like Eutyches indeed in opinions and fortunes
than Valentinus, but still very wide apart from him.
Like Eutyches, he had been a champion of the
Divinity of Christ (at the time of the Arian heresy) ;
like Eutyches, he fell into his error through misguided
zeal for the unity and Divinity of Christ. Christ, he
said, was not perfectly human : he had human flesh
and a human soul, but the human spirit was in Him
replaced by the Divine Word. Now there is no
probability that Eutyches had much theory or philo-
sophy at all of Christ's person peculiar to himself,
certainly he did not hold the philosophy of Apolli-
naris ; but in this they were one they both denied
the real full human nature of the Incarnate Christ ;
and for this, and for this only, did general councils
deal with them. It is necessary to keep this in mind
when we find Eutyches called a Valentinian, a dis-
ciple of Apollinaris, even a " follower of the Mani-
chaean impiety," by the council and by Leo : they
are not dealing unfairly with him, for it is not with
Aim, as an individual or his opinions, if he had any,
they are dealing at all. He becomes a name, an
abstraction, a counter, representing not a system
but a result, a result which demanded the same
treatment whether it proceeded from an Oriental
62 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
theosophy, an imprudent theology, or an obstinate
fanaticism.
Having this in view, and bearing in mind the
immense theological and practical importance of the
Eutychian controversy, we shall be in a position
to appreciate the arguments which Leo directed
against the heresy. We will give them in his own
words, and at a length something adequate to the
importance of the subject, gathering them from his
celebrated "Tome," supplemented by subsequent
letters.
He begins by insisting that this, like other heresies,,
is due to ignorance of Holy Scripture. " When men
are hindered by any obscurity in recognising the
truth, they go for aid, not to the voices of prophets, or
the letters of apostles, or the authority of evangelists,
but to themselves ; and they become the masters of
error through not having been the disciples of truth :' J
they will not " labour in the broad field of Holy
Scripture." This, said he, "proceeds at starting to
enunciate the truth as contained wholly in the very
elements of the Creed as then recited at Rome :
*I believe in God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus
Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was born of the
Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary: 7 in these three
clauses almost all the machinations of the heretics
are destroyed. For when God is believed omni-
potent and Father, the Son is shown to be co-eternal
with Him, in nothing differing from the Father, for
He is of God. God ; of omnipotent, omnipotent ; of
EUTYCHIANISM. 63
co-eternal, co-eternal by generation not later in
time, not inferior in power, not dissimilar in glory, not
divided in essence : but this Eternal, only-begotten of
the Eternal Father, was born of the Holy Ghost and
Virgin Mary, which birth, in time, diminished nothing
from the other birth Divine and Eternal, added
nothing to it, but bent its whole power to repairing
that human nature which had been deceived ; that
by its virtue it might both destroy death and him
who had the power of death."
Passing from this statement to Scriptural proof,
Leo goes on to emphasize, as against Eutyches,
the abiding reality of both the natures, Divine and '
human, in the Person of Christ. " The pro-
perties of each nature and substance remaining/
intact and combining in one Person, humility was /
taken by Majesty, weakness by Power, mortality
by Eternity ; and to pay the debt of our fallen
state, the inviolable Nature was united to the
passible. So, as was needed for our healing, the one
and same Mediator between God and Man, the Man
Jesus Christ, both could die in one element of Him-
self, and could not die in the other. In the inviolate
and perfect nature of very man was born very God,
complete in what is His, complete in what is ours
complete in what is ours, that is, as God made us,
not in what the deceiver introduced and man admitted
into our nature. He took the form of a slave without
spot of sin, raising humanity without detracting from
Deity, for that self-emptying, by which the invisible
64 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
made himself visible and the Creator a mortal, was the
condescension of pity, not the failure of power. Each
nature retains its own properties without defect."
Thus, throughout the life of Christ we can discern
the distinct operations of the two natures. " As
God is not changed by condescension, so humanity
is not annihilated by exaltation. Each, in union
one with the other, does what is proper to its own
nature the Word performing what belongs to the
Word, the Flesh carrying out what belongs to the flesh.
The one is brilliant with miracles, the other stoops
under injuries : the birth of the flesh shows the
human nature the birth of a virgin proves the
Divine power ; the infancy of the Little One is shown
in the humble cradle, the greatness of the Most High is
declared in the voice of Angels His life begins like
the life of men, whom Herod sought to slay, but He is
Lord of all, whom the Magi adored ; and when He
came to be baptized by John, the hidden Divinity is
revealed by the Voice from heaven. As man, He is
tempted of Satan ; as God, He is ministered to by
the Angels. To hunger, to thirst, to be weary, to
sleep this is evidently of the man ; but to feed the five
thousand with the five loaves, to give the Samaritan
woman the living water, to walk upon the sea, to
subdue the tossing waves this, without controversy, is
of the God. To omit many examples, it belongs not to
the same nature to lament with pitiful feeling the dead
friend, and removing the stone which had hid him
four days in the grave, to wake him to life again at
EUTYCHIANISM. 65
the command of His voice or to hang upon the
Cross, and to make all the elements tremble, turning
day into night or to be pierced with nails and
to open the gates of Paradise or to say, ' I and
the Father are one/ and ' the Father is greater
than I.'"
And yet united as these two distinct natures are
in the unity of the Person, the acts of the one are at
times assigned to the other. Thus, " the Son of Man
is read in Scripture to have come down from Heaven,
when the Son of God took flesh : again, the Son of
God is said to have been crucified and buried, though
it was not in His divinity (by which the only-begotten
is of one substance with the Father), but in the
weakness of man's nature that Christ suffered. In
the same way in the Creed we say the Son of God
was crucified and buried, as the Apostle says, ' they
would not have crucified the Lord of Glory? In all
such expressions it is necessary to bear in mind that
each nature remains unconfused, and the purpose of
our Lord's work after the Resurrection was nothing
else than to manifest the permanent reality of His
Human nature."
But if Leo in condemnation of Eutyches em-
phasizes the reality of the Two Natures, no less does
he insist, as against Nestorius, on the unity of Per-
sonality in Christ, and that Personality Divine. " He,
the same Christ, is begotten eternally of the Father
and born in time of His Mother, inviolable in His
own Divine strength, and subject to suffering in our
F
66 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
weakness the same, rich while He is poor, omni-
potent while He is outcast, impassible while He is
suffering, immortal while He dies : nor was the Word
in any part of Himself converted into flesh or soul, for
the nature of God is simple and unchangeable, re-
maining entire in His own essence, admitting neither
of diminution nor increase : in such manner then did
the Deity assume and beatify the human nature, that
in receiving glory it (the humanity) remained intact
in that nature which was to glorify it. Why should
it seem improbable or impossible that the Word and
the flesh and the spirit should form one Jesus Christ,
and the same should be Son of God and Son of Man,
when the flesh and spirit which are of natures so
unlike, apart from any incarnation of the Word, make
up one person in man ? The Word was not there-
fore converted into flesh, or the flesh into the Word,
but each Nature remains in the one Person, and the
One in each Nature, not sundered by their distinction,
nor confused by mixture not one Christ from the
Father, another of the Mother but one and the
same, begotten eternally in one way and born in time
in another."
So he states the true doctrine ; and from this point
of view he presses Eutyches with the results of his
false teaching, without, as we have said, any very
exact attempt to determine the precise position which
Eutyches held, if indeed he held any, beyond denial of
the Two Natures. He presents him with a dilemma.
Either Eutyches must deny the spiritual part of
EUTYCHIANISM. 67
human nature to Christ (like Apollinaris) in which
case the soul of Christ being only Divine, the Deity
suffered ; or he must deny Him the bodily part, in
which case he falls into the " Manichaean madness,"
asserting all the bodily action of Christ's life to have
been mere appearances. If by any means he can
evade the dilemma there is a further difficulty : he
becomes an Arian (against his will and despite the
whole tendency of his life and teaching). For Christ
is said to have been exalted, rewarded, &c. : in what
was He rewarded ? In His Divine Nature ? Then
must He have been inferior to the Father. In His
Human Nature ? Then that must have remained in
Him to be exalted and rewarded.
Argument is also brought to bear on Eutyches from
the subject of the Eucharist : is he " ignorant of what
is so familiar in every mouth in the Church of God
that not even children's tongues are silent about the
reality of the Body and Blood of Christ in the
Sacraments of Communion? This is what is given,
This is what is taken in that mystical distribution of
spiritual sustenance, so that receiving the power of
the heavenly food we are transubstantiated into (pass
into) His flesh who was made our flesh."
Above all, he presses Eutyches with the practical
result of his doctrine : if you deny the reality of
Christ's humanity you deny the reality of our salva-
tion. " What reconciliation can be made by which
God can be propitiated in regard to mankind, unless
One Mediator between God and man undertake the
F 2
68 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
cause of all ? But how could one be a real mediator
unless equal to the Father in the form of God, He
share in our nature too in the form of a servant, so
that through one new man, the old should be renewed,
and the bond contracted by the fall of one should be
loosed by the death of One who alone owed nothing
to death ? For the shedding of the Blood of the
Just for the unjust was so powerful in privilege, so
rich in value, that if all the captives should believe in
their Redeemer, the chains of the tyrant could keep
none of them back. Now what hope can they have
in the protection of this Sacrament 1 who deny the
reality of human nature in the Body of our Saviour ?
By what sacrifice are they reconciled, by what blood
redeemed ?" " Let not then any Christian think he
need blush to own the reality of our body in Christ :
all the Apostles and disciples of Apostles and the
illustrious doctors of the Church whose merits brought
them to the crown of the martyr or the glory of the
confessor, shone in the light of this faith, joining in
one common note of confession that in our Lord
Jesus Christ is to be recognised one Personalty of
the Deity and the flesh." Thus then he sums up to
the clergy of Constantinople the doctrine of the
Church on the Person of Christ in refutation of all
1 It will have been noticed that Leo uses the expression
"sacraments of communion" above; here he speaks of the
sacrament of atonement. Any outward act which has a
mystical and religious value would in his language be called a
sacrament.
EUTYCHIANISM. 69
the heresies : " We call Christ not God only, like the
Manichseans, or man only, like the Photinians, nor man
in such a sense as that there should be anything want-
ing to Him which certainly belongs to man's nature,
whether soul or rational mind or flesh (which, they say,
was not taken of a woman but was produced by the
transmutation and conversion of the Word into flesh),
which three falsities have produced three sects of the
Apollinarians ; nor do we say that the blessed Virgin
Mary conceived a man without deity, who created by
the Holy Spirit, was afterwards taken by the Word
upon Himself for preaching which we publicly con-
demned Nestorius ; but we say that Christ, the Son
of God, very God, was begotten of God the Father
without any beginning of time, and that same Christ,
very man, was born of a human mother, in the
fulness of time ; and that His humanity, in which He
is inferior to the Father, diminishes nought from His
nature by which He is equal with the Father. But
the one Christ is both these, as He most truly said,
*I and My Father are one,' according to His
Divinity, and ' My Father is greater than I,' accord-
ing to His Humanity. This faith, which alone makes
true Christians, do ye hold with perseverance, and
assert with constancy."
We have now said enough of the position and
methods of Leo in combating the errors of Eutyches.
His "Tome" is justly one of the most celebrated of
pontifical decrees. A legend, professing to rest on
the authority of St. Gregory, declares that it was cor-
70 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
rected by St. Peter with his own hand; in it the
Fathers of Chalcedon confessed that Peter spake by
Leo, and a council held at Rome under Gelasius
pronounced an anathema on the man who disputes
but one iota of it.
In it, with his other dogmatic epistles, in broad
clear lines did the master pen of Leo lay down for the
Church the Doctrine of the Incarnation, with a con-
summate regard for the equal reality of the Divine
and human natures in this One Person of Christ, the
Word. It is our duty now to follow the varying
fortunes of the contest between the Church and the
partizans of Eutyches, till under the generalship
of Leo, the Church at last, after hard fighting and
many reverses, came out victorious.
LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME. 71
CHAPTER V.
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL.
THE records of the Councils and the frequent letters
of Leo give us a tolerably complete and satisfactory
picture of the Eutychian controversy and the chief
actors in it. There was Eutyches himself, of
whom, with his opponent, the noble-minded and
gentle Archbishop Flavian, and the relentless Bishop
of Dorylaeum we have heard something already.
There is the feeble Emperor Theodosius, whom Leo
is constantly trying to bring over to the orthodox
side by repeated appeals, always most respectful, and
couched in the somewhat fulsome language of courts,
but never succeeds in detaching from the interest of
Eutyches. This attachment to Eutyches seems to
have been due, not to any strength of will in the
emperor himself, but to the influence of the eunuch
Chrysaphius, the rival at court of the emperor's
sister, the orthodox Pulcheria, and the godson and
partizan of the heretic. Foiled in his design of
obtaining the see of Constantinople for his godfather
by the election of Flavian, he had been from the first
the enemy of the archbishop : subsequent events had
confirmed his animosity, and he was, no doubt, heartily
glad of any opportunity of opposing Flavian and
72 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
forwarding Eutyches. As for the emperor, he was a
blameless and devout nonentity, whose chief accom-
plishment, that of copying and decorating religious
books, earned him the surname of Calligraphes, the
fair writer. He was now in the forty-eighth year
of his age; and during the forty-one years of his
inglorious, but mainly peaceful reign, the pre-
dominant influence on his life had been that
of his sister, Pulcheria. She was throughout
on the side of the orthodox faith, and she was a
woman on whose support any cause might justifiably
congratulate itself. To great abilities, and something
of the spirit and capacity for government of her-
grandfather, Theodosius the Great, she united a
piety which led her in her youth to dedicate her-
self, with her two sisters, to a perpetual virginity ;
all through her life she combined in a remarkable
degree the administrative duties of an empress with the
devotion of a recluse, and numberless churches in
all the provinces of the East owed their foundation
to her. To her Leo ascribes a main share in the
suppression of Nestorianism, and she laboured equally
hard against the heresy of Eutyches ; but though she
had controlled throughout the education of her
brother, she was able no more than Leo to counter-
act in this respect the influence of Chrysaphius.
With these authorities in Church and State Leo is in
constant correspondence ; he is constantly writing to
excite or keep alive in their minds a righteous and
orthodox zeal; we have frequent letters also to
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL. 73
Faustus and other archimandrites of Constantinople,
who were Etityches' opponents ; and to Julian,
bishop of Cos, who acted later as Leo's deputy at
the court of Constantinople. The circumstances of
the controversy will introduce us to the other most
important actors in it.
From the first the Emperor Theodosius had de-
clared his intention of assembling a council ; this was
apparently done at the instance of Eutyches, sup-
ported by the eunuch ; and not only was there this
circumstance to awaken the suspicions of the ortho-
dox, but also the fact that the professed object of the
council was the suppression of Nestorianism, nothing
being said of the counter-heresy. Such are the
evil omens with which the second Council of Ephesus
is introduced to our notice. Leo hardly ventures
directly to oppose the emperor's wishes. He praises
his zeal for religion, but hints, under cover of this
commendation, that in a matter which admits of no
possibility of doubt there can be no need of a
council ; he complains, too, that too short a time is
allowed for preparation. Theodosius had requested
that he would be present himself, but the needs of
the city and the precedents of his see alike prohibit
such a step. He sends to represent him three
legates "a latere," accompanied by a notary, Julius,
bishop of Puteoli; Juratus, a presbyter, who died
upon the road ; and Hilary, the deacon, afterwards
pope. They left some time before the 23rd of June
449, anticipating no good from a council assembled
74 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
under such auspices, and Leo was left to await the
result in a state of anxiety which could ill-brook
delay, and which expresses itself in constant letters.
He lived in this suspense till the beginning of
October, when news brought by the fugitive Hilary
more than confirmed his worst fears ; but we must
return to accompany the legate to Ephesus.
The council met on the 8th of August, 449, in the
Church of the Blessed Virgin, at Ephesus, that same
church which eighteen years before had been the
scene of the condemnation and deposition of Nes-
torius. All the circumstances under which the coun-
cil assembled were inauspicious to St. Flavian and the
orthodox. Dioscorus, the patriarch of Alexandria, an
already declared partizan of Eutyches, was appointed
by Imperial order to preside. The representative of
Rome sat next, and Flavian was degraded to the fifth
place. The other members of the council which had
condemned Eutyches were excluded, and the bishops
numbered altogether about 130. The proceedings of
the assembly soon degenerated into uproar and dis-
order. The Imperial soldiery, and still more the crowd
of violent monks whom the abbot Barsubas had
brought with him, and who had no idea except that the
authority of their great patron St. Cyril was being en-
dangered, exercised a terrorism over the council from
outside, and even broke into and interrupted the
proceedings. Dioscorus managed to prevent Leo's
letter from being read at all, and while Eutyches was
introduced into the council to plead his own cause,
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL. 75
his accuser Eusebius was not admitted. The records
of the Council of Constantinople were read, and the
sympathies of the majority were soon evident. They
could not tolerate without interruption the expres-
sion, " Two natures after the Incarnation." When
Eusebius's demand that Eutyches should confess
the two natures was recited the assembly burst out,
" Take and burn him ! Let him burn alive ! Let
him be cut in two ! As he divided, 1 let him be
divided ! Anathema to the man who holds two
natures!' 7 The tumult was tremendous. "I want
your voices and hands too/' cried the -president;
" but if any one cannot shout let him hold up his
hand." Eutyches was now formally declared ortho-
dox and reinstated in his ecclesiastical position, and
Dioscorus proceeded to pronounce the deposition of
Flavian and Eusebius ; when he was silent Flavian
exclaimed, "I appeal from you." Hilary, who
throughout had been the active representative of
Rome, uttered but one word : " Contradicitur." All
the rest of the bishops who had assented, from what-
ever motives of belief, fear, or ignorance, to the
acquittal of Eutyches, assented also to the condem-
nation of St. Flavian and Eusebius, in the midst of a
scene of ever-increasing tumult, and under various
degrees of compulsion. Many afterwards reversed
their verdict. Indeed, the complaints made by some
of them in the Council of Chalcedon of the treat-
1 L e. The two natures.
76 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
ment they had received, are not wanting in humorous
touches ; as when Stephen, the bishop of Ephesus,
asserts that his notaries' records were rubbed out,
and their ringers nearly broken by Dioscorus' nota-
ries, who wanted to take away their ink-bottles and
so prevent their taking further notes. Several com-
plained that they had been made to subscribe blank
parchments, and had only been driven to such an
ignominious course by much hard treatment and by
being kept shut up all day in the church till evening.
The terrified bishop of Smyrna said he had signed
" what they gave him." In the midst of all the con-
fusion Hilary escaped to Rome. St. Flavian was not
so fortunate, and almost his last act was to lodge an
appeal from the council to the pope and the western
bishops. Loaded with insults, and perhaps with actual
blows by Dioscorus, pressed upon and trampled under-
foot by furious monks with Barsubas at their head,
who stood over him and cried, " Murder him !" he
escaped, only to be cast into prison, then exiled, and
die of his injuries within a few days at a village
in Lydia. So ended a council, oecumenical in inten-
tion, almost unanimous in its verdict, but wanting
altogether in that which alone can give a council
authority, the acceptance of the Church.
When the courageous deacon, who alone had
boldly supported St. Flavian, 1 reached Rome "by
1 Of the conduct of Julius, the other legate, we know nothing.
Leo speaks in general commendation of the conduct of his
legates.
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL. 77
unknown and untraversed ways," and brought to the
pope the news that Dioscorus had packed and
managed the council, that his own letter had been
treated with contumely, that Eutyches had been re-
instated and St. Flavian and Eusebius condemned
(even though he had escaped before he could know
that all this course of impiety had culminated in the
murder of St. Flavian) the state of mind of his
master may be imagined. His indignation fairly
boils over. He calls the action of the council
"a crime so monstrous that it exceeds all other
sacrileges." He brands it with the name of the
" Latrocinium," by which it has been known in his-
tory. " It was a den of robbers, not a council ;"
all its acts are null and void. Thus he protests, but
in indignation, not in fear. The half-anticipated
result only stirs his energies. He was surrounded,
when he received the news, by a council of more
than provincial representation, convened apparently
in view of the present crisis of the Church. In his own
name and in the name of the council Leo proceeds
to bring his influence to bear in all possible directions
by frequent letters. He writes to St. Flavian, of
whose death he did not yet know, in indignation and
sympathy ; to the archimandrites and Church of Con-
stantinople at large, urging them to be loyal to their
faith and their archbishop, and warning them that
while he lives no other bishop of his see can have
the communion of Rome. There are letters, too, to
Julian of Cos, and Anastasius of Thessalonica,
SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE, CALIF.
78 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
striking the same notes of exhortation and confidence.
Meanwhile, all possible pressure is being brought by
him to bear on the emperor of the East to induce
him to summon a larger and more oecumenical synod,
and to summon it in Italy. The justification for this
petition is found in the opposition offered by his
legate to the decision of Ephesus and in Flavian's
appeal to Rome, and, till it can be granted, Leo im-
plores the emperor, by all that is most sacred, to con-
sider as null and void all that has hitherto been done,
and let the question remain as it was before the first
decision of Constantinople. In furtherance of these
objects he does not trust merely to his own influence
with the emperor. The zeal of the orthodox at
Constantinople is inspired to demand a "plenary
synod :" all Pulcheria's piety and authority is set
to work with the same object ; and taking advan-
tage of the presence of Valentinian at Rome, with
his mother Placidia, and his wife Eudoxia, the
daughter of Theodosius, he brings all their influ-
ence as well to bear on the Eastern emperor. We
have a letter from Placidia to Pulcheria, which
describes how the pope, when solemnly asking their
intercession with Theodosius, could hardly speak
for tears.
About July, 450, Leo sends some legates to explain
his views on the crisis and press his wishes. He
seems still full of confidence in the cause of the
Church, but it was a confidence due to the convic-
tion of his own heart, not to any external circum-
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL. 79
stances. In them, indeed, he could find no ground
for anything but alarm, Dioscorus' influence was
predominant all over the East, and he had even
carried his audacity so far as to excommunicate Leo,
in the spring of the year 450, and get ten bishops
who were with him at Nicsea to sign the excommuni-
cation. The emperor, no doubt under the influence
of Chrysaphius, was completely on his side. To the
appeals of Leo and of the Imperial family of the
West he had written replies, in which he professed
his unshaken orthodoxy, and his complete satisfaction
with the Ephesine council. He had even issued an
Imperial edict confirming its acts, branding Eusebius
and Flavian with the name of Nestorians, and pro-
scribing under civil penalties Nestorian worship, the
consecration of Nestorian prelates, and the reading
of Nestorian books, classing under this head the
works of Theodoret. All this was against Leo ; and
he had, besides, a cause of anxiety in the successor of
St. Flavian. Anatolius, the new archbishop, had
been Dioscorus 7 representative at the court of Con-
stantinople. His election was presumably due to
that bishop's influence with the emperor. What ante-
cedents could be worse than these in Leo's eyes ?
What security had he for his orthodoxy ? More than
this : Anatolius had offended him by writing simply to
announce his consecration without asking any consent
to it on Leo's part. All this Leo does not, of course,
pass over. He writes to the emperor demanding
somewhat peremptorily, though still with the utmost
80 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
respect, that the archbishop should read the writings
of Catholic Fathers on the Incarnation, the famous
letter of St. Cyril against Nestorius, and the acts of
the orthodox Council of Ephesus. " Let him not
scorn, moreover," he adds, " to read again my letter
(i.e. ' The Tome'), which he will find to agree in all
respects with the pious sentiments of the Fathers."
This done, he demands that he should make a public
profession of faith to be transmitted to the Apostolic
see, and to all bishops and Churches of the world.
With a view of supporting this demand, he sends the
legates to whom allusion has been made above.
Leo was thus acting constantly and boldly ; but
with the emperor against him, Dioscorus triumphant,
and a doubtful man on the throne of St. Flavian,
what prospect could be blacker than his ? Before,
however, the legates could arrive at Constantinople,
a single event had changed the whole aspect of
affairs.
On July 28th, 450, the fiftieth year of his life, and
the forty-third of his nominal reign, Theodosius died,
in consequence of a fall from his horse. The political
events of the last years of his reign had been most
dishonourable to the Empire and to himself : the base
policy of Chrysaphius had subjected him to the
contemptuous rebukes of Attila, and he was obliged
to buy off the demand of the king of the Huns for
the eunuch's head by an enormous bribe. Such was
the inglorious end of a nominal reign. He was suc-
ceeded by his far greater sister Pulcheria, in whose
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL. 8 1
person for the first time the Empire submitted to be
governed by a woman. The accession to supreme
power of one so vigorous in character and so
orthodox in religion cannot but have been hailed
with delight by the opponents of Eutyches. Almost
the first act of her reign, the execution of Chrysaphius,
delivered them from an unscrupulous enemy, and
the speedy accession of Marcian, as husband of
Pulcheria, to a share in the Imperial power gave the
Church a valuable friend.
Educated in the profession of arms, Marcian was a
brave and able soldier, " who loved peace, but was
not afraid of war ;" he was also a wise administrator
and an orthodox prince. He set himself at once to
carry out Leo's wish for a fresh council, and though
Leo had to submit to its being held in the East, he
was in other respects thoroughly satisfied. The
prospect of orthodoxy had suddenly brightened.
Anatolius in the interval had willingly signed " the
Tome" against Eutyches, and it was being circulated
for signature all over the world : all the bishops who
by the influence of Dioscorus and Chrysaphius had
been banished for adherence to Flavian, were recalled,
and their recall was followed by the exile of Eutyches,
not quite far enough, however, to satisfy Leo. The
body of St. Flavian himself was by the direction of
Marcian brought to Constantinople, and buried with
becoming dignity in the Church of the Apostles.
Nor was it only at court that orthodoxy was trium-
phant. All the bishops whom ignorance and fear
G
82 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
had induced to subscribe to the condemnation of
Flavian, with the return of brighter days hastened to
signify their adherence to the orthodox faith repre-
sented in " The Tome." Dioscorus' hopes were gone,
and Leo's influence everywhere predominant. " The
light of the Catholic faith," as he writes to Julian,
" is everywhere shining abroad."
But with this change in the prospects of Catho-
licism corresponds a remarkable change in Leo's
wishes. It will be remembered that after the con-
clusion of the Council of Ephesus Leo had strongly
urged upon the emperor to consider as null and void
the acts of both councils the one which had con-
demned and the one which had absolved Eutyches
and treat his position as a still open question to be
tried in a fresh council. His language now is com-
pletely different. So far from the question being
open, he treats it as settled once for all. The true
faith is decided Eutyches is a heretic. All that is
needed now is rejection of the heretics, and caution
in admitting the penitent. The bishops who had re-
tracted are to be allowed the privileges of their own
churches, they are not yet to be admitted to the
communion of Rome : as for Dioscorus and his most
prominent partizans, they are to be treated in their
turn as heretics, and their names no longer recited at
the altar. Thus he would treat the whole matter as
settled already, and with the rise of this attitude
towards the question has disappeared all his desire
for a general council. Perhaps as he could not have
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL. 83
one in Italy under his own direction he did not wish
to have one at all. At any rate, he writes to the
emperor to beg that it may not for a moment be
considered an open question " whether Eutyches'
opinion was impious or Dioscorus' verdict monstrous :''
he sends legates again, but only to assist Anatolius in
deciding the cases of those who were seeking re-
admission to the orthodox communion. As for the
council, that he wishes at any rate postponed, as the
time, he says, is too unquiet to admit of bishops
leaving their dioceses, and he has not any interval left
him to summon the Western bishops. The emperor,
however, is firm, and Leo submits, though he declines
now, as in the former case, to leave Rome him-
self, and appoints four legates to represent him at the
council, two bishops, Lucentius and Paschasinus
of Lilybaeum, and two presbyters, named Basil and
Boniface.
These legates were armed with written instructions,
and to their number was added Julian, of Cos, whose
knowledge of Eastern affairs made him an important
instrument for Leo's purposes.
The bishops who had been desired to assemble at
Nicaea on the first of September, 451, met there to the
number of 520. 1 For the convenience of the em-
peror they were summoned to Chalcedon, where the
council opened on October 8th, in the presence of a
considerable number of civil dignitaries, to represent
1 Or, counting those who were absent, but voted by proxy
through their metropolitans, 630.
G 2
84 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
the emperor, and control the proceedings. 1 Leo,
who had to yield to the Imperial wishes as regards the
time, the place, and to a certain extent the scope of
the council (for it was no doubt assembled to deter-
mine the faith, as well as to proclaim it), carried his
point as regards the presidency, and his legates occu-
pied the first place. Next to them sat Anatolius,
Dioscorus, Maximus of Antioch, and Juvenal of Jeru-
salem. The book of the Gospels was placed in the
midst. At once an attack was made on Dioscorus
by the Papal legates. They failed in their attempt to
eject him altogether, but he was ordered out of his
place to sit in the middle of the council. He was
joined there by Eusebius, who had been through the
winter with Leo at Rome. To a similarly ambiguous
position Theodoret 2 of Cyrus was admitted, who was
accused of Nestorianism, but had the decided sup-
port of Rome. These preliminary questions were not
1 They may with truth be described as " the effective presi-
dents."
2 This bishop was in some ways the most eminent man of the
Oriental Church of his day. He was noted for his piety, gene-
rosity, zeal in the conversion of heretics, and, more than all, as a
commentator on Scripture; he was one of the most eminent with
St. Chrysostom, of the literal or Antiochene school of commen-
tators : "he abounds," says Dr. Newman, "in modes of think-
ing and reasoning which without any great impropriety may be
called English/'' It cannot be denied that in his opposition to
Cyril he fell short of the orthodox standard as regards the unity
of the person of Christ, but though he never accepted the
"Articles" of St. Cyril, he did, as we shall see, recover his
orthodoxy.
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL. 85
decided without violent clamour and tumult from
both sides, which the magistrates succeeded in re-
ducing to something like order by a dignified re-
proof " These rabble-clamours neither befit bishops
nor benefit your cause !" but the outbreaks continued
at very short intervals. As the records of the
" Robber Council " were read, the bishops who had
signed its decrees strenuously disclaimed respon-
sibility for their acts, on the ground of the disorder
of the proceedings and the violence of Dioscorus'
faction. The reading of the records went on late
into the evening, when a provisional sentence pro-
nounced on those chiefly responsible for it elicited
loud cries of " A just sentence ! Christ has deposed
Dioscorus ! Christ has deposed the homicide ; God
has vindicated the martyrs I" mingled with shouts
for the emperor and empress, and the solemn words
of the Trisagion. In the Babel of tongues ended
the first session of the council.
In the second session of the council "The Tome "
was read and hailed with loud applause. " Thus we
all believe ! Peter has spoken by Leo ! Leo and
Cyril teach alike ! eternal the memory of Cyril !
This is the true faith ! This is the faith of the
Fathers ! Why was not this read at Ephesus ?" All,
however, were not so easily contented. The bishops
of Palestine and Illyria took exception to some pas-
sages, as carrying too far the idea of the duality of
natures. Another bishop asked for time to consider
it quietly, and the matter was postponed for five days.
86 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
The business of the third session was the trial of
Dioscorus. The accuser was Eusebius, and petitions
were presented against him from Alexandria also, ac-
cusing him of acts of persecution, avarice, and a vicious
life. After being summoned several times by the
council and evading the citations, he at last finally and
determinately refused to come. "What I have spoken,
I have spoken," he said ; " I have nothing to add to
it." Sentence was therefore pronounced upon him
in his absence by the Roman legates, and he was con-
demned for receiving Eutyches after he had been re-
gularly condemned by his bishop. " The Apostolic
see,' 7 it was added, " has forgiven the acts done at
Ephesus by persons acting under compulsion, and
who from that time to now have been obedient to the
archbishop Leo and the holy and universal synod.
But Dioscorus has continued to make a boast of ac-
tions which ought to be his shame." The document
summarized his crimes. He refused to read the
letter of Leo at the Council of Ephesus. Far
worse, he had the presumption to excommuni-
cate him; finally, when he had stood accused of
various misdemeanours, though thrice summoned, he
had refused to attend. For these reasons, " Leo,
archbishop of the great and elder Rome, through us
and through the holy synod here present, together
with the blessed apostle Peter, who is the rock and
corner-stone of the Catholic Church, and the founda-
tion-stone of the right faith, hereby strips him of the
dignity of the Episcopate, and deprives him of all
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL. 87
sacerdotal privileges. Therefore, let this holy synod
decree what is agreeable to the canons on the afore*
said Dioscorus." To this Anatolius and the other
bishops expressed their assent. The deposition of
Dioscorus was confirmed by the emperor, and he
was banished to Gangra, in Paphlagonia, where he
died within a few years. The see of St. Mark was
given to Proterius, the archpriest of Alexandria, whose
orthodoxy was undisputed ; but the deposition of
Dioscorus was the beginning, not the end, of troubles
for the Egyptian Church. When a number of Egyp-
tian bishops in the Chalcedonian synod were urged
to subscribe Leo's " Tome " and condemn Eutyches,
they pleaded the custom of their Church, which re-
fused them the right to act without their archbishops ;
they did not shrink from the most abject entreaties
that they might not be forced to sign till a new arch-
bishop had been appointed, and assured the council
that if they did they would be murdered on their return
home. These men showed a true instinct as regards
the sentiment of the Egyptian Church, its loyalty
to the patriarch, and its violence against his enemies.
In effect, only a small proportion of the Egyptian
Christians recognised Proterius, and his appoint-
ment resulted in the Jacobite schism, the adherents
of which to this day recognise Dioscorus as their
" teacher."
At the fourth session the question of Leo's " Tome"
came up again according to arrangement, and was
now finally accepted by the whole council, a personal
88 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
conference with the Roman legates having satisfied
the scruples of the Illyrian bishops.
The harmony of the council was, however, im-
perilled in the fifth session by a definition of faith,
produced at the request of the magistrates, which
failed to satisfy the Roman legates. They accused it
of ambiguity as regards the two natures, and
threatened, if it was carried, to leave the council and
have a synod held in Italy. At the suggestion of the
magistrates, however, a commission was appointed to
revise the definition, and it finally met the approval
of all in a form which seemed to exclude all possible
errors and guard equally the unity of the Person, and the
duality of the Natures. In the next session Marcian
and Pulcheria attended in state, and the synod listened
to an address from the emperor, in which he declared
himself to have come not " to exercise power, but to
confirm the faith." At the conclusion he and the
empress were hailed with acclamations of delight, and
he was styled a " second Constantine."
Thus was the Church's faith in the Incarnation
finally settled, and settled entirely to Leo's satisfac-
tion. The first three out of the four sections which
compose the synodal letter addressed by the council
to the pope must have been read by him with an
unclouded brow nothing could have been more
complimentary to himself and to his see. But the
fourth section treats of a canon the famous 28th
decreed by the council, against which Leo's legates
had protested, and protested in vain, and which stirs
THE FOURTH GENERAL COUNCIL. 89
his deepest indignation that, namely, which concerns
the position and dignity of the see of Constantinople
in Christendom : but before dealing with this matter
we must take a retrospective view of the position in
the Church which the see of Rome occupied at the
date of Leo's papacy in theory and in practice.
90 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
CHAPTER VI.
LEO THE POPE.
As we are not writing a history of the Papacy, but
the life of a particular pope, we cannot perhaps do
better than begin the subject by stating, in his own
language, what he conceived to be the position and
office of his see in the Church as a whole. When
we have done this we shall be able to ask ourselves
the further question, What are the meaning and justi-
fication of this conception, and how did it arise ?
and to examine whether the theory is shown by the
facts of history to have been put in practice in Leo's
own case, or to have remained a theory, a hope, a
prophecy, to which future years only could give sub-
stance and reality.
For stating Leo's theory of the papal power we
have considerable materials. A provincial council
used to assemble annually at Rome on Leo's "birth-
day," that day, that is, on which he was consecrated
to the episcopate, and it was his custom on that
occasion to preach a sermon before the assembled
bishops on the dignity and authority of the see of
St. Peter.
His heart rejoices, he tells them, as he sees "so
LEO THE POPE. 91
distinguished a crowd of his brother bishops," and
feels their presence is only a visible sign of their
hearts' devotion to his see ; he realizes the presence
of the angels amongst them, the ampler grace of
the divine co-operation which cannot but be vouch-
safed to a meeting of so many, so wholly one in
purpose and faith ; but, above all, his heart seems to
glow at such a moment with the consciousness of the
continual, one might almost say mystical, presence of
St. Peter, with and in his successors. This is a thought
he is constantly repeating ; he himself is but Peter's
representative, "the love of the whole Church recog-
nises Peter himself in his see," and " Peter's care still
rules in all parts of the Church." What Peter was
then, that his representative is ; and Peter was the
first of the Apostles, the Rock, the one whose especial
commission it was " to strengthen his brethren," to
" feed Christ's sheep." More than this, not only had
he the primacy, but also he is the channel through
which is given whatever graces the other Apostles
have ; " Christ willed that His sacred gift (the spread-
ing of the Gospel) should belong to the office of all
the Apostles, only so far as is consistent with His hav-
ing endowed the blessed Peter, chief of all the Apostles,
with it in a supreme manner, and His having willed
that from him as from a head His gifts should flow out
into the whole body, so that he should know that he
has no share in the divine mystery who has dared to
retire from the solid foundation of Peter." St. Peter
has thus no mere primacy of authority and jurisdic-
92 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
tion, but a mediatorial position, and it is but a natural
and less important consequence that he who is one with
Christ in His mediatorial office should share His regal
power; that "though there are many bishops and pas-
tors, yet Peter should govern them all by his peculiar
office, whom Christ governs by his supreme autho-
rity. Thus great and wonderful," so Leo sums up the
matter, "is the share in its own power which the
Divine condescension assigned to this man !" Rome,
again, as the metropolis of Christendom, occupies
more than her former position as head of the Empire :
" They (the Apostles Peter and Paul) it is," he says,
addressing the city of Rome, "who have brought
thee to such a height of glory, that as a holy race, an
elect people, a royal and sacerdotal state, raised to
be head of the world through the holy see of the
blessed Peter thou shouldst rule with a broader
sway in the divine religion, than by thine earthly do-
minion." Indeed, her earthly sway was but the prepara-
tion for her religious authority. The Roman Empire,
uniting the world, was just the divine preparation for
the spread of the universal Gospel.
Here, then, we have a theory of papal functions,
vague and undefined, but vast enough to justify
almost any assertion of pastoral and disciplinary
authority. The points in the theory which require
notice are, first, that whatever Peter was among the
Apostles, that the pope is among the bishops ; so that
the whole Petrine privilege is inherited by Rome,
not by any other of the sees founded by St. Peter.
LEO THE POPE. 93
Secondly, that the position here claimed by the
pope is not that of a patriarch, or chief among
patriarchs, it is an immediate relation to the whole
Church, East and West, similar to the relation of the
capital to the whole Roman Empire.
Thirdly, and this is the most important point, the
position asserted for Peter among the other Apostles
is not merely that of a "first among equals," or even of
a superior among inferiors, it is something generically
different; he is a mediator between Christ and the
other Apostles ; he is the only immediate recipient of
sacerdotal grace, and what the others receive they
receive through him. Leo seems to shrink, not
unnaturally, from calling Peter the head, from whose
life the members live, but he calls him a head, a kind
of head, from or through which alone grace is de-
rived to the limbs. The importance of such a claim
as this cannot be exaggerated ; if it be admitted, the
whole question is settled, and separation from Rome
is separation from grace, and therefore from Christ.
Such, then, is the theory of papal authority which a
great and good man like St. Leo can assert in the
middle of the fifth century. When it is first pre-
sented to us, we are inclined to ask how could Leo,
a man so full of Scriptural knowledge, offer such a
theory to men ? Where is there a word in Scripture
which even hints at St. Peter being the channel of
any kind of grace to the other Apostles ? What be-
comes of all St. Paul's vehement assertions of the
independence of his apostolate ? Taken at the very
94 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
most, how can such a benediction as " Thou art the
Rock," or such seemingly occasional and incidental
injunctions as, " Strengthen thy brethren," "Feed my
sheep/' be given any force which can justify such a
claim ? So we question, the first time we think about
the matter, in blank astonishment. Is this theory,
then, we are tempted to ask, a merely artificial
thing? Is it the invention of this or that man, wish-
ing to frame a foundation to support ambitious de-
signs ? Is it the conscious product of deception ?
To this we may answer that probably the theory of
the papacy is much more the result of conscious
effort than the papacy itself. When the power and
influence of the popes was continually growing, they
and their supporters began to look about for argu-
ment to justify their position, but the position itself
was in very large measure the product of circum-
stances. No doubt there was much of personal ambi-
tion that went to build up the fabric, no doubt much
unscrupulousness may be laid to the charge of popes,
and those who worked for them, in the way of mis-
quotations and falsification of documents and of
such unscrupulousness Leo himself, as we shall see,
is not wholly innocent, but all their ambition, all their
unscrupulousness, would not have availed anything
if there had not been something to inspire and to give
force and direction to it, and, above all, to sustain it
and give it continuity a tendency in the social order,
a necessity of the ecclesiastical world which put
Rome forward and kept her there. The institution of
LEO THE POPE. 95
the papacy is too great a thing, and occupies too large
a place in the world, to be the product of deception, or
machination, or personal ambition ; too great even to
be the work of a set of men consciously planning
and organizing an institution : it has all the aspect of
a natural growth, a development deep-rooted in the
circumstances of Church and State. If so, then
there must be something providential in its growth,
however much the purpose of Providence may still
be found to be thwarted and misdirected by human
ambition and human deception.
Up to some indefinite period in the third century
the Church of Rome was, as it were, a Greek colony
in the Latin city. Its language, its literature, its
liturgy, its officers, all were Greek. This was the
period of its obscurity, but even then a special vene-
ration centred round the Church of St. Peter, the
Church whose orthodoxy through all the early con-
troversies was unsullied, the Church of the metropolis
where, more than anywhere else in the face of the pagan
and Imperial power, Christianity required to be full
of faith and full of courage : even then in the domi-
neering character of St. Victor we seem to have a
foretaste and a prophecy of the popes of the future.
The period of the great Eastern councils did much
to foster the growing dignity of Rome. While the
East was agitated by one heresy after another on
the most central points of the faith, Rome stood
aloof from the violence and heat of the discussion,
and as the great and acknowledged patriarchate
96 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
of the West received, in her more dignified repose,
constant appeals from Eastern disputants ; while, as
applicants became more numerous, her support
became continually of more importance for warring
parties. Still, too, through all these discussions the
bishops of Rome, with one partial exception, main-
tained with consistency the orthodox faith. And now,
as the see increases in importance, the character of
its occupants becomes more distinguished, and the
political circumstances of the time favoured their
prominence. The withdrawal of the seat of Govern-
ment and the Imperial residence from Rome left all
the magnificent traditions of government and autho-
rity, all the splendid prestige of the Eternal City to
centre round the head of the bishop of Rome, whose
personality as the great Western representative of
Christendom became constantly more important as
paganism was beaten under and died away, and as each
emperor in turn was more contemptible than the last.
Again, all the needs of society and of the Church
demanded centralization in an age of general confu-
sion and barbarian invasions ; and if men were look-
ing for a centre for social organization, whither could
they look but to Rome ? Long-engrained custom
claimed Rome as the centre of society. Just when
affairs were in this condition, when all the circum-
stances of Church and State were preparing the way
for the Mediaeval papacy, Leo was born. His earliest
ecclesiastical memories must have been associated
^7ith the dignified pontificate of Innocent I, and with
LEO THE POPE. 97
his vague and large claims to jurisdiction in the West,
during whose life the Pelagian controversy in Africa,
producing appeals from both parties to Rome, gave the
pope a magnificent opportunity of exercising authority.
But if the circumstances of Leo's youth were calcu-
lated to inspire him with a deep sense of the position
of the Roman see as centre of the ecclesiastical
world, and of her vocation to carry on the Imperial
traditions of the secular capital, they must have
taught him, also, that his position was not assured in
the Church, and that her decisions and demands
would not by any means always meet with acceptance.
Zosimus, Innocent's successor, A.D. 417, acting with
less caution than Leo showed in the similar case of
Eutyches 7 appeal, was induced by the personal
address of Celestine and by the letter from his greater
coadjutor Pelagius, to absolve those heretics and
write in their favour to the African Church. This
decision was of course rejected. He replied with
an assertion of prerogative, which in its context is
specially audacious, that " the tradition of the
Fathers has ascribed to the Apostolic see so great an
authority that no man can dare to dispute its judg-
ment ;" but he soon after perceived his mistake, con-
demned the heretic and issued the " Tractoria,"
which became the test of orthodoxy. About this
period also the claim of Rome to be the supreme
court of ecclesiastical appeal a claim supported, as
we shall see, by a gross misquotation received a
violent check from the African Church in the case of
H
98 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
the priest Apiarius, the Africans finally declaring
with great emphasis, "That God has committed
bishops and clergy to the judgment of their own
metropolitans," but "it was not to be thought that
God would inspire one individual with justice and
withhold it from a multitude of bishops in council."
Those circumstances under the pontificate of Zosimus,
Boniface, and Celestine, must have tended to teach
Leo the need of prudence as well as determination, if
Rome was to carry the day. The heresy of Nestorius
gave Celestine, in 451, an opportunity of presenting
Rome to the Eastern World as a pillar of orthodoxy,
and a denunciation of excommunication against the
heretic was issued by "the pope.
It was, then, at a somewhat critical moment in the
history of Papal aggrandizement that Leo became
bishop of Rome. Circumstances were thrusting
greatness upon the see of St. Peter : the glory of the
Empire was passing into her hands, the distracted
Churches of Spain and Africa, harassed and torn in
pieces by barbarian hordes and wearied with heresies,
were in no position to assert independence in any
matter, and were only too glad to look to any centre
whence a measure of organization and of strength
seemed to radiate; and the popes had not been slow
in rising to welcome and promote the greatness with
which the current and tendency of the age was
investing them. Their rule seems to have been,
more than anything else, to make the largest claim,
and enforce as much of it as they could, but the
LEO THE POPE. 99
theory of papal power was still indeterminate, vague,
unfixed. She was Patriarch of the West what
rights did that give her ? What was her claim in
Gaul, or Spain, or Africa ? What, still more, was her
position in regard to the Churches of the East?
Nothing of this was settled or recognised. Was
her claim, again, a claim of jurisdiction merely, or
did she hold herself forth as a doctrinal authority in
a sense in which other bishops were not? In this
respect, again, the claim into which Leo entered was
indefinite and unformulated. In Leo, as we have
seen, we get something more of a definite theory of
papal power, at any rate in the matter of jurisdiction;
and the theory, as it appears in him, is on the high
road to justify universal absolutism. Indeed the
whole bent of Leo's mind tended in that direction.
The Imperial instincts of old Rome are dominant in
him, all that sense of discipline, order, government
all the hatred of ununiformity, individuality, eccen-
tricity. These are the elements which make up
Leo's mind. He is above all things a governor and
an administrator. He has got a law of ecclesiastical
discipline, a supreme canon of dogmatic truth, and
these are his instruments to subdue the troubled
world ; before these, radiating from Rome as a
centre, all must bow down; local traditions, the
rights of national Churches, these are nothing if
they seem for a moment to impede and thwart this
universal sway. He has no notion, such as we strive
in our days to grasp, of a unity consistent with and
H 2
100 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
comprising minor differences. " Truth," he says,,
"which is one and simple, does not admit of any
variety." " The Catholic faith, which is true and
one, may not be vitiated by any diversity." These
are his watchwords : they must be admitted to be
watchwords appropriate to his age. There was no
originality of thought in the world worth respecting ;
the only opposition in regard to dogma that Leo
came across was from the soul-destroying impurities of
the then Manichaeism, and the half-stupid obstinacy of
Eutyches. In the matter of jurisdiction we find our-
selves less in sympathy with Leo than in the matter
of doctrine, and yet even here we feel that the age
wanted solidarity and unity much more than freedom.
We shall defer any attempt to suggest a moral
judgment on Leo's theory till we have made ourselves
more acquainted with the details of his policy.
LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME. IOI
CHAPTER VII.
LEO THE POPE.
THE rule which governed Leo's conduct as pope was
a very simple one, it was to take every opportunity
which offered itself for asserting and enforcing the
authority of his see : he was not troubled with histori-
cal or Scriptural doubts or scruples which might cast a
shadow of indecision, "the pale cast of thought" on his
resolutions and actions. To him the papal authority
had come down as the great inheritance of his position;
it was identified in his mind with the order, the autho-
rity, the discipline, the orthodoxy which he loved so
dearly; it suited exactly his Imperial ambition, in aword,
his " Roman " disposition and character, and he took
it as his single great weapon against heresy and social
confusion. At the very beginning of his pontificate
irregularities in the Church of Aquileia were reported
to him how the watchfulness of the bishops of the
province was relaxed, and how Pelagians were being
allowed to slip, with errors unrenounced, into Church
communion. His tone here with the bishops imme-
diately under the shadow of his patriarchal authority
was very peremptory. Having alluded to the scandal
reported, he continues, in his letter to the bishop of
102 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
Aquileia, " that this daring attempt may go no further,,
and that the evil introduced through the negligence
of some may not reach to the overthrow of many
souls, we enjoin upon you, brother, by the authority
of our command here given, to assemble the synod
of the bishops of your province, and compel all,
whether priests, deacons, or clergy of whatever
degree, who have been received into Catholic com-
munion from the company of Pelagians and Cceles-
tians with such carelessness as not to have been first
obliged to condemn their errors to compel them,
we say, now that their hypocrisy has been in part
discovered, to true amendment, which may do
them good and hurt no one. They must openly
condemn the authors of their arrogant heresy, and
express their reprobation of whatever in their doc-
trine the universal Church has repudiated; and in
full and open terms, making subscription with their
own hands, they must profess their acceptance and
full approval of all the decrees of synods which have
been ratified by the authority of the Apostolic see
for the purpose of annihilating this heresy. No
obscurity, no ambiguity, must be tolerated in their
professions." This is the language, not of a reso-
lute leader merely, but of an admitted superior to
an inferior, and in this strain could Leo write to
the metropolitan of the province of Venetia. In
just a similar strain, in his character of metropolitan,
does he write to the bishops of the home provinces
of Campania, Picenum, and Tuscany. " It is.
LEO THE POPE. 103
allowed," he says, "that men who had married
widows, and some, too, who had had more than one
wife, have been admitted to the priesthood, contrary
to the words of the Apostle, ' The husband of one
wife' (i Tim. iii. 2), and the decree of the law,
6 Let the priest have a virgin to wife, not a widow,
nor one divorced' (Levit. xxi. 14). All men who
have been admitted with these disqualifications, we
order, by the authority of the Apostolic see, to be
deprived of all ecclesiastical functions and of the title
of priest."
In the year 444, Leo had occasion to enter
into the affairs of the Church of Illyria. The rela-
tion of that Church to the See of Rome is of very
great historical interest. The first " Vicar Apostolic"
was Rufus, bishop of Thessalonica, appointed by
Innocent I. to preside over Illyria in his name and
as his representative. This appointment would be
based on the pope's position as Patriarch of the West;
when, therefore, Eastern Illyricum was transferred to
the Eastern Empire a decree was issued by Theo-
dosius, transferring its ecclesiastical cases to the juris-
diction of Constantinople. The decree was, of course,
violently resisted by Boniface, then pope, and, in effect,
by the mediation of the Western emperor Honorius,
he procured its recall. But the authority of Rome
in Eastern Illyricum still in Leo's day needed
insisting upon, and the ground could not yet be
reckoned upon as thoroughly won. Accordingly, we
find Leo's language in dealing with the bishops of
104 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
Illyria a good deal less dictatorial and absolute than
what we have listened to before. He appoints Anas-
tasius, bishop of Thessalonica, his vicar Apostolic,
but in doing so he condescends to give reasons to
justify his action, and even adopts an apologetic
tone. He begs these metropolitans of Illyria to
accept the admonition which comes from the authority
of the Apostolic see in the spirit of charity and
kindness : he grounds his actions on his desire to
resist all possible usurpations. " Do not," he says,
" think it any invasion of your rights if you see me
in this way taking precautionary measures against
unlawful presumption " (on whose part is not quite
clear !) " Our care extends over all the Churches ;
for nothing less than this is required of us by the
Lord, who committed to the Apostle Peter the
primacy of Apostolic dignity as a reward for his faith,
grounding the universal Church on him as its founda-
tion ; in fulfilment, then, of this obligation of solici-
tude which lies upon us, we would share it
with those who are joined with us in a com-
mon office, and we appoint as our vicegerent,
Anastasius, our brother bishop, following the
example of our predecessors, whose memory we
honour, and we have adjured him to be on
the watch to prevent any unlawful presumption;
and we admonish you to give him obedience in
matters connected with ecclesiastical discipline."
The authority of the Apostolic see thus asserted
seems to have been willingly accepted, and Leo is
LEO THE POPE. 105
able to organize a regular system of provincial ad-
ministration, finding its centre in Rome. The
confirmation of the papal vicar is required for all
episcopal elections, and the metropolitans are (ac-
cording to Leo's first letter) to be actually ordained
by him : the latter point is, however, subsequently
modified. Provincial councils, summoned by the
metropolitans, are to meet every two years : when
grave questions arise they are to be referred to a
representative synod summoned by the vicar, and
from this any difficulty still felt is to be taken up to
Rome for solution. But, as if to guard against an
esprit de corps, a national spirit which might prevail in
the majority of those councils and make them jealous
of Roman influence, any individual bishop who is dis-
contented is to be allowed to appeal at once to Rome ;
as, in fact, Atticus, the metropolitan of Epirus Vetus,
did not many years later, and secured the pope's
protection against the cruelty of the pope's own vicar,
Anastasius. Nothing could indicate more clearly
than this ecclesiastical constitution of Illyria the ideal
of papal government. The pope was to be a good
deal more than a metropolitan of metropolitans.
Meanwhile, in 445, a letter from Leo's future
antagonist, Dioscorus, probably announcing his elec-
tion to the see of Alexandria in succession to St.
Cyril, gave Leo an opportunity of asserting a some-
what visionary claim to control even that patriarchal
throne. The Church of Alexandria was founded by
St. Mark, as that of Rome was by St. Peter ; as Peter,
106 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
then, lived on in the see of Rome, so we may conclude
did St. Mark in that of Alexandria. But who was
Mark ? The disciple of St. Peter, ordained by him,
instructed by him ; such, therefore, it is insinuated,
is the position of the Church of Alexandria to the
Church of Rome. Such is the justification which
Leo finds for giving Dioscorus detailed directions as-
to the celebration of mass and the days of ordina-
tion, which, however, do not seem to have in fact
altered the customs of that Church. But about this
time a more important controversy was occupying the
pope's energies.
St. Hilary of Aries, a slightly younger contem-
porary of St. Leo, born 1 of a noble family, and having
received the best education of the age, was already in
early manhood in the great places of the State and
on the high road to distinction, when the call of
religion and the persuasions of his friend Honoratus
led him to forsake the world and seek religious
retirement in the island of Lerins. Thence he was
summoned, on the elevation of Honoratus to the
bishopric of Aries, to assist him in the administration ;
and on the death of his friend, in 429, the irresistible
wish of the citizens forced him against his will to be
his successor. He was a man of pure and lowly
holiness, a zealous evangelist, simple and ascetic in
his life, loving order and discipline, but hating op-
pression and fearless in rebuking it, a beautiful
1 Born probably 401.
LEO THE POPE. 107
writer, and a most powerful preacher ; if he is to be
called a semi-Pelagian, that would not seem to mean
more than he could not go the length of all the
Augustinian doctrine of Predestination and Grace.
Altogether the fifth century does not present a nobler
and a more beautiful character. Certainly the two
greatest Christians of the West, in the year 444, were
Leo, the pope, and Hilary of Aries ; both were
equally in earnest for true religion, both were specially
zealous for ecclesiastical discipline ; but similar as in
all these respects their objects were, there was one
point on which collision was only too possible.
Hilary was inclined to exaggerate the metropolitan
power of his see ; Leo was bent on subordinating the
metropolitans to the pope, and Gaul was debatable
ground, outside the Roman patriarchate, but not out-
side the growing influence of the papacy. The cir-
cumstance out of which the actual collision sprang
was not important. A council, presided over by
Hilary, had deposed a prelate, Celidonius, on the
ground of his having, while still a layman, married a
widow, and as a magistrate inflicted capital punish-
ment irregularities which according to the eccle-
siastical discipline of the time had for their conse-
quence deposition. Celidonius appealed to Rome.
Hilary, as soon as he knew it, with characteristic
energy started in the middle of winter on foot to
cross the Alps and go to Rome. Arrived there he
first paid his devotions at the tombs of the Apostles,
and then presented himself before Leo, urging him
108 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
to keep himself within his canonical rights and not
to try over again a case which did not belong to his
jurisdiction. Leo, however, would not listen to him.
He collected a council, and Hilary consented to take
a seat in it, but his plain assertion of his rights there
did not suit Roman ears, which, as a friend of
Hilary's subsequently said, " are very delicate." " He
said things," Leo afterwards wrote, "which no lay-
man could utter, no bishop listen to." After pro-
testing in vain, he left Rome, evading the guards
which Leo, utterly unjustifiably, had put to watch
him, and returned at once to Gaul. This proceed-
ing, the only course consistent with the dignity of his
see, Leo describes as a " disgraceful flight." Having
restored Celidonius, of the rights of whose case we
are not now in a position to judge, Leo proceeded to
listen to other charges against Hilary, which were
very probably misrepresentations, but which Leo
seems very readily to have believed and made the
worst of. He excluded him from his own communion,
deprived him of the metropolitan power over the see
of Vienna, and even suggested that a sort of primacy
in Gaul should be conferred on a bishop, Leontius,
on the mere score of age. Leo's conduct in this
matter is the least creditable part of his life. With-
out a doubt he was tempted by the chance of asserting
a more than doubtful right, which the appeal of
Celidonius gave him. In yielding to the temptation
he was led to act with almost unpardonable fero-
city towards the saintly Hilary. He trusted to ex parte
LEO THE POPE. 109
statements about him ; he disregarded, in depriving
his see of the metropolitan rights over Vienne, the
settlement of his own predecessor Zosimus, which he
also is driven to misrepresent, and he showed a reck-
less disregard of Gallic rights ; indeed, the letter of
Leo to the Bishop of Vienne, in which he announces
his wishes, is one of those few which we would
willingly not find among his writings. Granted that
Hilary exceeded his metropolitan rights, a man so
holy and unselfish is not to be recklessly accused of
personal ambition, at any rate by a pope. If Leo be
Peter, it was indeed true that " he refused to be sub-
ject to the blessed Apostle Peter," but in this he was
doing anything rather than "revolting against ancient
customs;" and the prelates of Gaul can hardly have
learnt, without a smile, that Leo was instituting no
novelty, but simply restoring antiquity, and protecting
them from the aggressions of an unlawful ambition.
Leo, in fact, seems to have been conscious that his
policy needed some support independent of eccle-
siastical order; he accordingly obtained from, or
we should almost imagine, dictated to the Emperor
Valentinian, that rescript, parts of which were quoted
above, which grounding vaguely the rights of Rome
on the " authority of a holy synod " as well as the
merit of St. Peter and the dignity of Rome, makes
the irresponsible absolutism of the Roman pontiff
part of the law of the Empire a rescript which the
great Catholic historian Tillemont describes as a
law "trop favorable a la puissance du siege (de
110 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
Rome), mais pen honorable a sa piete." Hilary never
seems to have acknowledged in any way his deposi-
tion ; and that Leo, at his death, four years after-
wards, should speak of him as a man " of holy
memory," may be taken as in some sort a retractation
of the charges made when he was acutely irritated by
his vigorous assertions of provincial independence.
It is a question not wholly settled how far Leo's
sentence was put into execution in Gaul. It was his
desire, he says in a later letter, that the metropolitan
dignity taken from Aries should be given to Vienne ;
this seems never to have been done, and Leo ap-
pears to recognise Hilary's successor Ravennius as
metropolitan. On the other hand, Leo received a
petition from the provincial bishops, about 450,
formally asking for the restoration to Aries of its
ancient position, and the tone of their petition is
certainly sufficiently abject. The papacy and the
Empire combined had done their work upon them.
They simply put themselves in Leo's hands, and
make a special point of grounding their claims on
the fact, or tradition, that Trophimus was their
first bishop, and Trophimus was sent by St. Peter.
They even ask for a wider jurisdiction in Gaul for the
bishop of Aries, as vicegerent of the pope. On the
receipt of this, and a counter-petition from Vienne,
Leo divided the jurisdiction of the province between
the two bishops; and this decision was temporarily
acquiesced in. Certainly, the result of the trouble
was the extension of papal influence.
LEO THE POPE. Ill
Meanwhile, about 446, Leo had an opportunity
to assert long-resisted rights over the administration
of the African Church. She was too weak and dis-
organized now under the long miseries of Vandal
persecution to resist papal encroachments as she had
done in the days of Celestine ; and Leo is able to
assume a tone of complete authority to correct
abuses, and apparently to reverse a decision of an
African council in the case of a priest, Lupicinus.
The similar weakness of the Churches of Spain
enabled him to speak to them, too, in a tone of
greater authority ; and the bishops of Sicily, over
whom, of course, he had patriarchal rights, are
soundly rated, desired to conform in everything to
the customs of the Roman Church, "whence they
receive the consecration of their office," and com-
manded to send three representatives to the annual
Roman synod.
The history now brings us round again to the
Eutychian heresy. From what we have already told
it will have been sufficiently apparent that the effect
of the whole controversy was the exaltation of the
Roman see. It will become also apparent that this
exaltation, when it passed certain due limits, repre-
sented not the tendency or the will of the whole
Church, but at most one-half of it only, and that
the progress of Rome's aggrandizement represented
nothing else than so many steps in the direction of
the great schism.
The Eutychian controversy, then, told in the direc-
112 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
tion of the aggrandizement of the Roman see. For,
first of all, the centre of the whole controversy, when
it passed the limits of a local Constantinopolitan
struggle, was the bishop of Rome. Far the greatest
living ecclesiastic, and, on the dogmatic side, the
greatest theologian, he could not, had he been bishop
of never so insignificant a town, have played a sub-
ordinate part. But he was bishop of Rome, and
this, from our present point of view, is the signifi-
cance of the Eutychian controversy. It made
Rome the centre of orthodoxy, and Rome's defini-
tion the standard of faith in the last great heresy
on the Incarnation. It was from Alexandria that
the champion came forth against Arius ; and it was
from Alexandria that the great dogmatic epistles
against Nestorius went forth to be the canon of the
true faith. Rome in both these capital controversies
had to play a subordinate, even if a dignified part ;
but now, in the last capital heresy on the Incarnation,
the source of the orthodox definition is Rome and
Leo ; and thus, just when Rome's claims to juris-
diction were reaching their full height and com-
pass, when the current of circumstances was setting
full and strong in the direction of her authority,
Eutyches thrust into her hands the glory of being
not only the centre of authority, but the source of
truth ; not merely the great governor, but the safe
teacher. The letter of Leo on the Incarnation is
thus a corner-stone in the fabric of the later claim
of infallibility : and yet that claim dates far later
LEO THE POPE. 113
than the claims of jurisdiction ; later, in fact, than
Leo's time. We shall find nothing of it in him,
however vast his aspirations for the aggrandizement
of his see.
Secondly, we must notice that the Eutychian con-
troversy made Rome the recipient of appeal after
appeal. Eutyches, Flavian, Eusebius, Theodoret,
and several others made, or were believed to have
made, their appeals in turn to the see of St. Peter;
and all this gave Leo the opportunity of asserting an
often-resisted claim, around which much of the his-
tory of papal exaltation centres.
The Council of Sardica, in A.D. 347, representing
exclusively the Western Church, had passed a canon
allowing discontented bishops to appeal from pro-
vincial synods to Julius, bishop of Rome. This
canon gives the right of appeal to a particular bishop
of Rome, but on the ground of "honouring the
memory of the blessed Peter," and might therefore
reasonably be taken as applying to all successive
bishops of Rome, at any rate as a precedent.
Moreover, nothing is said in the canon of its apply-
ing only to the Western bishops ; but the whole
council is of exclusively Western authority, and the
counter-decree of Constantinople in 381, shows
clearly enough that no such canon would ever have
received the consent of the Eastern Church. It had
in no sense oecumenical authority. But this decree
was the basis of Rome's claim of an universal appel-
late jurisdiction, and this chiefly through the canon
i
114 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
of Sardica being reckoned and quoted at Rome as
a decree of Nicsea. Zosimus had so quoted it to the
African Church as his justification for reversing their
judgment in the case of Apiarius ; and this mis-
quotation had so scandalized the Church of Africa,
then still in the vigour of its life, that they had caused
the authentic copies of the decrees of Nicsea at
Alexandria and Constantinople to be examined, and
finding that this canon was wholly absent from these,
as from their own copies (and indeed practically con-
tradicted by a real decree of the Nicene Fathers),
they wrote back to Celestine, requesting him not to
violate those canons to which he had appealed,
denying him the right he claimed, and showing con-
clusively that the quotation of Nicsea he had made
was utterly unjustified. However much, then, the
canons of Sardica may at Rome have been regarded
as an appendix to those of Nicsea, no pope after this
could, without deliberate misquotation, quote the
appeal-canon as having Nicene authority. He could
not plead ignorance after this clear demonstration. It
must therefore be admitted that Leo in urging, as he
constantly did, Nicene authority for receiving appeals-
from the universal Church, was distinctly and con-
sciously guilty of a suppressio veri at any rate,,
which is not distinguishable from fraud. Of this,
crime we cannot acquit him ; and how large a part
this and similar "lies" which they are none the less,
though they be believed to be " for God" have con-
tributed to the advancement of the Roman see, it is
LEO THE POPE. 115-
quite impossible to estimate. The "custom of the
Roman Church" is a strange plea to urge on Leo's-
behalf; it is the only one that can be urged.
It remains for us to consider a little more in
detail the relation between Leo and the Eastern
bishops in regard to papal authority. Except in,
the matter of receiving appeals, Leo's claim in the
East at once strikes us as utterly indefinite. He
professes his u universal care" for all the Churches :
he claims to be kept alive to what is done in the
East ; and the power of excluding any bishop from
communion with Rome gives him a sort of hold
on episcopal elections, as we remember in the case of
Anatolius. He cannot tolerate that they should be
effected without notification to him, without his
having some hand in their confirmation. But all
this is a vague claim, and in regard to infallibility
there is no claim made at all. We cannot help being
struck with the fact that when Leo comes to write
his great "Tome" on the doctrine of the Incarnation,
it is in the form of a letter to Flavian, and in a tone
nowise different from that adopted by St. Cyril in
his epistles against Nestorius. The bishop of
Ravenna, indeed Peter Chrysologus, to whom
Eutyches had written at the same time as he
appealed to Rome replies by recommending the
appellant to listen to Rome, because "the blessed
Peter, who lives and presides in his own see, gives
the truth of the faith to those who seek it." But
there is nothing of this language in Leo's own letter.
I 2
Il6 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
He classes it with that of St. Cyril : he expresses a
wish that "Anatolius should not think his own letter
(or 'The Tome ') beneath his regard ;" and asserts that
11 he will find it to be in agreement in all respects
with the piety of the Fathers." When his letter, which
he circulated all over the world, was received by a
council at Milan in 481, it is commended as agreeing
with the writings of St. Ambrose. Leo himself, after
Chalcedon, recommends it as confirmed by that
council. He fortifies it with patristic testimonies,
and even speaks of it as the " decree of the synod."
" Those dogmatic definitions," he says to Theodoret,
" which God had first given by our agency, He es-
tablished by the irreversible consent of the whole
brotherhood of bishops."
In the language of the Oriental bishops to Leo
we have sometimes expressions of profoundest defer-
ence. Theodoret, for instance, begins his appeal
to Rome with a sentiment which, in another age
and context, must inevitably sound ironical, and which
must have even caused a qualm to the mind of a
man whose Scriptural knowledge was as good as
Leo's. " If," he says, " Paul betook himself to Peter
that he might carry back from him an explanation to
those who were raising questions at Antioch about their
conversation in the Law, much more do I," &c. But
even here we have to note that he grounds the
primacy of the Roman see on the continuous piety of
the Church ; on the possession of the tombs of St.
Peter and St. Paul, and on the metropolitan majesty
LEO THE POPE. 117
of Rome in the secular world, a claim to pre-emi-
nence of which, as we shall see, Leo was singularly
shy, applying as it did to Constantinople as well
as to Rome. As for Flavian, when he wrote to
Leo he treats him altogether as his equal, and
advertizes him of the deposition of Eutyches only
that "he may put the bishops subordinate to him on
their guard."
At the Council of Chalcedon the respect paid to Leo
in the persons of his legates culminating, as we shall see
it did, in the twenty-eighth canon, must have seemed
almost ironical. The doubtful orthodoxy of so many
of the Eastern bishops, the connection of Anatolius
with Dioscorus, the authority of Marcian and Pulcheria
all these influences combined with Leo's own
personal share in the controversy of the day to give
him the presidency in the council ; we notice that he
demanded it " on account of the inconstancy of so
many of his brethren ; " but the presidency when gained
was a position of limited influence : Rome could not
carry out her wish of excluding Dioscorus altogether ;
she could not preserve the "Tome" from criticism; she
could notridTheodoret of the necessity of satisfying the
council as to his orthodoxy, though Rome had already
received him ; she could not, worst of all, offer
effective opposition to the hated twenty-eighth canon.
We must also notice the attitude taken up by the
council towards Leo's "Tome" when they received it.
It was stamped with approval, not because it came
from Rome, but because it was orthodox : that is, in
SAINT MARY'S COLLEGE, CALIF.
1l8 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
agreement with the decisions of former councils and
with the letters of Cyril, which had conciliar
authority. We have seen that Dioscorus' condem-
nation is represented in the acts of the council as
proceeding from Rome through the synod, but some
doubt is cast upon the authenticity of this sentence
by the fact that it exists among Leo's own letters in
a different shape. It remains to notice that Leo is
called " Bishop of all the Churches," and " Bishop
of the (Ecumenical Church," by his own legates, and
" (Ecumenical Archbishop," in a private appeal. It is
probably in mistaken reference to those expressions
of individuals that Pope Gregory the Great stated
that the bishops of Rome were called " universal
bishops " by the council of Chalcedon, but that the
title thus offered them had been consistently rejected
by them. Even as expressions used by individuals,
these titles mean very little in the phraseology of
the East ; we may notice, for instance, that Dioscorus
is called " (Ecumenical Bishop " in the council at
Ephesus.
The flattering opening of the synodical letter of
the council to Leo may perhaps be taken as intended
to palliate the most unwelcome conclusion. The
bishops speak of him as the " interpreter to all of
the blessed Peter," they execrate the monstrous conduct
of Dioscorus in excommunicating him to whom "the
Saviour intrusted the care of the vine ; " they de-
scribe him as presiding by his legates " as the head
over the members," but then the letter continues
LEO THE POPE. 119
In a strain very unpleasant to the " delicacy of Roman
ears."
The Council of Constantinople had decreed that
the bishop of that see should have the primacy of
honour after the bishop of Rome, " because it is itself
new Rome." This precedence of honour had in effect
become an extensive jurisdiction, and this jurisdiction
had now been confirmed in the twenty-eighth canon
of the Council of Chalcedon, which ran thus : " The
Fathers gave with reason the primacy to the Chair of
old Rome, because that was the royal city ; and, with
the same object in view, the hundred and eighty pious
bishops (of Constantinople, the Second (Ecumenical
Council) assigned equal dignity to the Chair of new
Rome " (the phrase is, however, afterwards modified
by the expression " being next after old Rome"}. This
elevation of the rank of " new Rome " is grounded
on her Imperial position ; and it is further allowed that
the see of Constantinople " should have the right of
ordaining metropolitans in Pontus, Asia, and Thrace,
with certain other bishops." This is the canon which
the conciliar epistle has to introduce to Leo's notice,
and it does so in the most diplomatic terms, assuring
Leo that the step has been taken solely in the interest
of ecclesiastical order, and professing no doubt that
the opposition of his legates will be reversed by
Leo's own acceptance of the decree ; for Leo's
legates had retired from the session when this canon
was to be brought forward, saying they had no in-
.structions from Rome on any such subject. When,
120 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
however, they found out what had been done, they
made a formal complaint of the violation of eccle-
siastical discipline which the canon involved ; they
accused the bishops of having signed under com-
pulsion, which they indignantly denied ; finally, they
produced the copy of the Nicene canons, in which
was interpolated a clause about the Roman primacy
which the Oriental bishops at once repudiated.
Finding the determination of the council immovable,
they could only protest, and returned to Rome with
a message of very mixed import for Leo's ears, which
gave him complete satisfaction as far as the faith was
concerned, but stirred his deepest indignation at the
" ambition " of the Church of Constantinople.
It is not our duty now to investigate how far this
canon of Chalcedon was in fact dictated by Con-
stantinopolitan ambition, and how far it was incon-
sistent with the decrees of Nicaea. It is, indeed,
more than probable that the self-assertion of Rome
excited the jealousy of her rival of the East, and all
the Eastern bishops secretly felt that her cause was
theirs : but it is more to our purpose to observe how
full a proof this decree of Chalcedon is that the
Roman claim of supremacy met with no acknowledg-
ment at all in the Eastern Church.
At the same time as the epistle of the council, Leo
received letters from the Emperor Marcian, Anatolius,
and Julian of Cos, endeavouring to conciliate him in re-
gard to the canon, and expressing their joy at the vic-
tory of the faith. Anatolius writes in as conciliatory
LEO THE POPE. 121
a tone as possible, urging that the jurisdiction actually
reserved for Constantinople is less than custom has
sanctioned ; complaining gently of the conduct of the
legates after so much deference had been shown them,
and emphasizing the fact that it was at the urgent wish
of the emperor, senate and people, that the canon
had been passed. We know, perhaps, already enough
of Leo's character to anticipate without difficulty that
he refused to be thus easily conciliated. He seems
to have more than half suspected evil of this council
of Chalcedon : he had clearly warned his legates to
be on their guard against Constantinopolitan ambition,
and now his worst suspicions were more than realized.
The tone of his replies is indignant in the extreme.
He is astounded and grieved to find that just when
the divine hand had restored the peace of the Church,
it should be disturbed again by the spirit of ambition.
He should have thought that, with Anatolius'
doubtful antecedents in the patronage of Dioscorus,
an attitude of humility would have best beseemed
him. " Let him remember," he goes on, " the man
whose successor he is ; and throwing aside the spirit
of pride, let him imitate the faith, the modesty, the
humility of Flavian." He calls to mind with indig-
nation the grounds on which Constantinople has
received these privileges, as being the second city
of the Empire ! As if the primacy of Rome was
the result of her being the capital city of the West
not the see of St. Peter ! " The basis of the divine
arrangements is not that of the secular state ! There
122 LEO T.HE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
can be no safe building on any rock, save that which
Christ laid as a foundation.' 7 From this point of view
he speaks very scornfully of the " extorted assent "
of the council to this decree (an " assent" which
there is every reason to believe was given with the
best possible will), and makes short and contemptuous
work of the antecedent canon of Constantinople.
However many bishops may decree anything contrary
to Nicaea, it is null and void. Then, taking his stand
on the decrees of Nicaea, he takes up the cudgels
for the rights of Antioch and Alexandria, apparently
quite against the wishes of Theodoret and Maximus,
who presided over those sees and had signed the
decrees; nor, indeed, does there seem any real
contradiction to the canons of Nicaea in the action
of Chalcedon, but all through these letters Leo is
somewhat wild in his arguments, and seems sublimely
unconscious that Rome could in any way be described
as a " glass-house " in the matter of ecclesiastical
ambition and violation of ancient traditions. The
strife was not easily to be calmed. A letter arrives
from Marcian, explaining how some, apparently mis-
taking, or professing to mistake, Leo's attitude towards
this canon for opposition to the dogmatic decrees of
the council, were sheltering themselves under his
authority in refusing their adhesion to them. Leo,
in answer, writes to the emperor, sending his assent
to the dogmatic definition as a matter of obedience
to him, and begging him to make known his adhesion,
.at the same time making it very clear where his
LEO THE POPE. 123
adhesion stopped. He had now ceased all direct
intercourse with Anatolius, but looks eagerly for
pretexts of complaint against him. He hears of his
favouring a former Eutychian at the expense of a
Catholic, and without apparently making very careful
inquiries on the rights of the case, he writes begging
the emperor to administer to him a stern reproof.
To keep himself alive to what goes on in "new
Rome " he appoints Julius to reside there as his
" apocrisiarius," or representative, and keep him well-
informed of what is happening. The emperor, mean-
while, is pleading with Leo for Anatolius ; and Leo,
giving way not one inch, replies that he is quite
ready to be reconciled if Anatolius will repent of
his ambitious designs and keep the canons. Anatolius
seems never to have been a man of great force and
strength of character. It does not even appear how
far he was a prime mover himself in the matter of the
twenty-eighth canon ; at any rate Leo's persistency
now wins the day, and produces from him a letter
of penitence and self-humiliation, in which he conforms
in other respects to the wishes of Leo, and in regard
to the twenty-eighth canon speaks thus: "As for the
privileges which the universal synod decreed in favour
of the Church of Constantinople, let your holiness
hold it for certain that there was no fault in me, a
man who, from my youth, have loved peace and quiet,
keeping myself in humility : it was the clergy of Con-
stantinople, and the bishops of those districts, who
had this desire ; and yet, even in these matters, the
124 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
whole efficacy and confirmation was reserved for the
authority of your blessedness. Let your holiness
then rest assured that I did nothing to further this
matter, having always held myself bound to avoid
the lusts of pride and covetousness." Anatolius was
clearly not the man to wage an equal war with Leo ;
as far as he is concerned, the submission is complete,
and as such, Leo accepts it and is satisfied. But
the claim did not rest with an individual bishop to
abrogate, and, as a matter of fact, the canon did
take effect, and that in Leo's own lifetime, It was
one of the remoter causes of the schism of East and
West.
We may sum up our consideration of this famous
twenty-eighth canon in Thorndike's words : " To
what effect is that disowned which takes place without
him who protests against it ? Unless it be set up as a
monument of half the Church disowning the infinite
power of the pope, the other half not pleading it,
but only canonical pre-eminence by the Council of
Nicaea." Indeed, though the bishops and the em-
peror were deferential enough to the pope, yet (if we
discount the magnificence of Leo's own personality,
and the impression his greatness made on his con-
temporaries), neither this canon, nor the council's
attitude towards Leo's " Tome," nor Leo's own way of
talking about it give modern Romanists any cause
to look with gratification on the Council of Chalce-
don. For, indeed, the Fourth General Council was
not only in place, but in theological interests, and in
LEO THE POPE. 125
its traditions of precedence, an Eastern more than a
Western council, and the papacy was a Western not
an Eastern development.
It remains to present, in brief summary, a few
remarks as to the phenomena of the papal autho-
rity with which we have been dealing, and to ask
whether, from a Christian and Catholic point of
view, we are in a position to indicate any judgment
upon it.
ist, then, the papacy was a development, and at
this date a most imperfect development. When pope
Pius IX. proclaimed, " with the consent of the Holy
Vatican Council," that the personal infallibility of
the pope was a " dogma divinely revealed," and "his
definitions are irreformable of themselves, and not by
the consent of the Church ; " and proclaimed also
that, in announcing the dogma, he was but " faith-
fully adhering to the tradition received from the first
beginnings of the Christian faith," he is using lan-
guage which, in the light of history, we can simply
call unintelligible. The papacy was a slow-growing
development of the principle of government in the
Church. St. Cyprian may be taken as the representa-
tive of the Episcopal theory pure and simple, the
theory, that is, of the equal (in the main) and inde-
pendent authority of bishops ; this system gave way
to the Metropolitan theory, which subordinated the
bishops of a district to superiors, who were in a way
their representatives in the eye of the universal
Church; and pre-eminent, again, among these metro-
126 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
politans were the patriarchs. It is easy to represent
that this pyramid must have an apex, and that as the
bishops had been subordinated to the metropolitans,
and the metropolitans to the patriarchs, so the
patriarchs should have their head, in turn, in the
Pope of Rome. We can understand now why Leo
has been called the " Cyprian of the Papacy." The
papacy was a development, then, and its roots lie
deep-hidden in the early obscurity of the Roman
Church ; it was nourished, and grew with a natural
growth, by the external pressure of circumstances.
But not only so : (2.) it represents also the con-
scious effort of personal ambition and fraudulent
dealing. The magnificent result achieved in the
superstructure of the papacy must not blind us to
all the marks of the world and the deviFs influence,
which are to be found upon its foundation and all
through its fabric.
(3.) We need not deny that, in some respects, it
was a beneficial development of Christian govern-
ment. We may even say that some such institution
was an ecclesiastical necessity in the Middle Ages ;
but this concession does not help us one step in the
direction of accepting the papacy as, in fact, it
claimed to be accepted ; does not abrogate one jot
the moral and intellectual duty of rejecting what is
at best a parody of the Divine intention.
(4.) For, taking the papacy at its best, it must be
acknowledged to have been a most partial develop-
ment of the Christian revelation ; it was the deve-
LEO THE POPE. 127
lopment of one idea, that of government, at the
expense of all others justice, equity, consideration,
humility, freedom, universal consent. And because
it was partial, therefore it was schismatical. It in-
volved, it necessitated, the severance of East and
West ; it had latent within it, even in Leo's day,
the prophecy of the yet far-off convulsion of the
Reformation. The violation of the " proportion of
faith " in one direction, the over-riding of one idea,
is sure to involve a corresponding excess on the other
side. For when Christ committed the treasure of
Divine life to the Church, He did indeed promise
that the gates of hell should not prevail against it,
but He never promised that human infirmity should
not mar and thwart the expression of the Divine will
or the Divine truth.
The papacy of Leo's day was, as we have said, a
very incomplete growth ; it had not yet, as we shall
see, overwhelmed the representative or ultimately
democratical conception of Church government :
again, the claim of infallibility is not yet made, or
made but in vague and dim hints. How little this
later conception had yet dawned upon the West
may perhaps best be seen in the famous " Commoni-
torium," published only a few years before Leo's acces-
sion to the papacy. Its author, Vincent, retired like
Hilary, to the monastery of Lerins, an island not far
from Cannes, and he is known as Vincent of Lerins.
This monastery was known at the time as one of the
centres of that form of opposition to the extreme Au-
128 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
gustinian doctrines, which is vaguely described as semi-
Pelagianism ; we say vaguely, for while the term really
and strictly represents a more or less definite heresy,
the Augustinian party were apt to class together under
it all who were scandalized by their extreme Predes-
tinarianism. Among those there seems little doubt
that Vincent may be reckoned, though we cannot
accuse him of any heretical denial of the doctrines
of grace ; and it is even probable that in writing his
" Commonitorium," or "Reminder," he intended,
by a side glance, to reflect upon the Augustinian
doctrine as wanting in that " universality, antiquity and
consent " which are the marks of Divine truth. But
if this be so, it is not the main object of his treatise,
or the cause of its celebrity. Its main object is to
set out in clear terms, before an age confused
with numberless heresies, the canon of Catholic
truth, and this is done in the celebrated formula,
" Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus "-
that is Catholic truth which has been held from
the first, universally, and by common consent in the
Church. The importance of this treatise, from our
point of view, is that, stamped as it has been by
the general approbation of the Church of later ages,
it is a clear demonstration how modern are the
Roman claims of infallibility. For Vincent is look-
ing at the canon of truth on all sides, he is testing it
by all possible difficulties that might arise, yet he
never hints that an easy solution of all difficulties
as to the faith is to be found by inquiring what
LEO THE POPE. 129
the pope has decreed. He even contemplates
the extreme case of the whole Church being cor-
rupted and overspread with heresy, and still to
the question What is the canon of truth ? returns
the answer Let a man find out the voice of antiquity
that cannot be corrupted. Nothing, then, could be
more completely anti-Roman than this conception
of the canon of doctrine which the age of Leo
supplies us with, and yet it proceeds from a man
who, as his writings show, held the papacy in the
highest veneration, and whose work has become a
text-book of Church doctrine.
130 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE TRIUMPH AND DEATH OF LEO.
THOUGH the Council of Chalcedon had finally pro-
nounced the Catholic decision upon Eutychian
opinions, it had by no means suppressed the
Eutychian faction. It was especially among the
monks that this heresy had the firmest hold, and it
is to them that the troubles which marked the closing
years of Leo's life are due. In Palestine, headed by a
man named Theodosius, they were guilty of all sorts
of violences, and even succeeded in seizing Jerusalem,
dispossessing the Bishop Juvenal and putting a parti-
san of their own in his place. Rumours of all this
naturally excited grave alarm in Leo's mind, though
he found some consolation in the zeal which Marcian
and Pulcheria showed in the orthodox cause. One
thing which troubled him was the fear that his
" Tome " had been misinterpreted in being translated
into Greek, and might have thus given his enemies
ground for calling it Nestorian. It will be remembered
that Leo was himself ignorant of Greek, and could
not apparently find anybody in Rome who was in a
better position. In this fear he addressed another
letter to them of almost as much theological value as
THE TRIUMPH AND DEATH OF LEO. 131
" The Tome " itself, in which especial care is taken to
exhibit the truth as a mean between the two extremes :
of Eutychian error on the one side, and Nestorian on
the other. From the epistle some extracts have
already been given, in speaking of Leo's theology of
the Incarnation. He also addressed a letter to the
Empress Eudocia, who was said to be favouring the
monks. This lady, whose name we mention here for
the first time, had a career so wonderful, so full of
all the elements of an oriental legend, that having
named her we must pause to give some brief record
of her life.
The beautiful Athenais was educated by her father,
Leontius, in the philosophy and religion of the
Greeks, and by his special design was left at
his death with almost no other provision than her
virtue, her learning, and her looks. Driven by the
jealousy of her brothers from Athens she sought
refuge at Constantinople, and threw herself at the feet
of Pulcheria. It took but a little while for that
princess to fix upon her as the suitable wife for her
imperial brother, and as the complaisant Theodosius
fell in love with her in accordance with his sister's
wishes, she very willingly accepted Christianity, with
the name Eudocia, married the emperor, and on the
birth of a daughter, received the style and title of
Augusta. Forthwith she welcomed and pardoned
her trembling brothers, whom she had summoned to
Constantinople, and then started off on an august
pilgrimage of thanksgiving to Palestine, where she
K 2
132 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
half-exhausted the Imperial treasury with the lavish-
ness of her alms and foundations, outstripping even
the magnificence of the Empress Helena. Mean-
while, she exercised her literary talents by poetical
paraphrases of Scripture and other poems. But the
term of her glory drew near. She ventured to become
the rival of her patroness Pulcheria, and had to request
permission again to withdraw to Palestine, pursued
this time by evil rumours of unfaithfulness to her
husband, most probably slanderous. Still tormented
by court influences, she at length indulged her feel-
ings of indignation by ordering the massacre of an
imperial official, and this outbreak of revenge sealed
her disgrace. A life which had seen such strange
vicissitudes of fortune was brought to a close by
sixteen years of exile in Palestine, which were spent
in devotion. She died at Jerusalem in 460. This
was the woman who was now accused in her sacred
exile of favouring Eutychianism, to which the friend-
ship of the Palestinian monks, and, possibly, a not un-
natural opposition to court influences, may have in-
clined her, for though her husband was now dead, his
sister was still probably alive. 1
Leo's exhortations to her were addressed at the
secret request of Marcian, but in the letter that
remains to us, he urges only religious considerations
to move her to exertions in the cause of orthodoxy,
1 Pulcheria, however, died in the year 453, and is honoured
by the Greek Church as a Saint.
THE TRIUMPH AND DEATH OF LEO. 133
and specially the sacred memories of the land of her
retirement. Whatever effect these exhortations had
on Eudocia, at any rate, in the January of the following
year Leo is able to congratulate the emperor on his
restoration of order and orthodoxy. Juvenal was
restored, not only without the opposition, but with the
goodwill and desire of his flock. But "the dark-
ness still broods over Egypt " and elsewhere ; indeed,
we may say that the immediate result of the Chalce-
donian decision was to raise up rival bishops and
schismatical troubles in almost all the great sees of
the East. A monk, named George, was rallying
Cappadocia round the standard of Eutyches ; Carosus
and Dorotheus were collecting adherents in Con-
stantinople itself; and in the Alexandrian diocese the
monks were showing that they could be at least as
violent in the cause of heresy as they had been for
St. Cyril twenty years before. Dioscorus seems to
have remained quietly enough in his exile at Gangra,
till his death in 454, but his name lived in the
memories of his people, and stirred their animosities
against the " Nestorian Council," as they called
Chalcedon. Proterius, his orthodox successor, was
very ill received, nor did Leo's somewhat over-in-
tellectual remedy of public readings from the earlier
bishops of Alexandria, showing them to have held the
orthodox faith, and of his " Tome " which he directed
Julian to translate over again for them, produce the
calming effect desired ; perhaps he relied more on
Imperial efforts and on the removal of Dioscorus by
134 LE O THE GREAT AND HIS TIME..
death. " Foolish and unstable souls," he graphically
writes, " have now something to fear, and nothing to
follow"; but the one they should fear soon followed
their leader in error into the other world. Marcian,
the pillar of orthodoxy, died in 457, and his death
was the signal for Eutychian risings at the capital and
in Alexandria. The former were suppressed before
much harm was done, but the latter rapidly assumed
dangerous proportions. A monk called Timothy, and
nicknamed "the Cat" (" ^Elurus "), was set up in oppo-
sition to Proterius; and as a -climax of evil, Proterius
was brutally massacred in the baptistery, and his
body was treated with incredible and almost cannibal
outrage. Through all this Leo is prompt and un-
daunted ; his governing mind has full sway of the
orthodox party. He writes to this bishop and to that ;
he marshals their ranks, he directs their energies, he
declares his wishes, he demands, " according to the
canons," notification of every episcopal election, he
stirs up the energies of the new emperor Leo, 1 he
keeps up the spirit of the refugee Egyptian clerics,
he scouts the notion which emanated from the
emperor, of allowing the question of the faith to be
reopened in any sort of council or informal con-
ference, he laments the laxity of Anatolius. Not
1 Leo, an obscure Thracian, who, however, became known as
"the Great," ascended the throne as a nominee of an Arian
patrician, Aspar, who "might have placed the diadem on his*
own head if he would have signed the Nicene Creed." The
pope does not scruple, we find, to invoke the aid of this latter,
though an Arian, against the Eutychians.
THE TRIUMPH AND DEATH OF LEO. 135
content with the remoter influence of letters, he sends
legates to Constantinople, "not," as he says, "to
dispute, but to teach what is the rule of the apostolic
faith ; " and as the emperor was constantly being told
that his doctrine was Nestorian, he addresses to him
a long, dogmatic epistle sometimes known as the
"Second Tome," to which is attached an ample col-
lection of patristic testimonies to his own doctrine
(i Dec., 45 7). The pope's energy apparently moulded
the emperor's decision. By his own act he appears
to have deposed " the Cat," who was allowed at
first to come to Constantinople, but was very soon
afterwards banished. Meanwhile, in 458, Anatolius
died, and was succeeded by Gennadius, whose
orthodoxy was satisfactory to Leo; while another
Timothy, with the surname of Solophaciolus, who
likewise met with the pope's warm approval, was
elected into the vacant see of Proterius. The
letters of congratulation which Leo wrote on the
occasion to Constantinople and Alexandria are the
last of his writings. God allowed him to live just
long enough to see religious peace restored to the
world, and orthodoxy supreme to remain so for a
period of, at any rate, sixteen years, till after the
death of Leo the emperor. His work was done. He
had said his "Nunc dimittis." He had felt the
full importance of the crisis, and now his eyes had
seen the Lord's salvation. " The glory of the day
is everywhere arisen," he had written. " The divine
mystery of the Incarnation is restored to the age
136 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
it is the world's second festivity since the Advent of
the Lord." He died late in the year 461, the repre-
sentative of sober, Western, practical, Christianity, at
the very time when the people of Antioch were
lavishing an excess of veneration on the just-dead
body of the fantastic ascetic Symeon of the Pillar.
Leo was buried in the Church of St. Peter. At the
end of the seventh century the body was removed
by Pope Sergius from its first position, where a crowd
of tombs had gradually collected round it, to a more
honourable place, and it was again transferred with
great pomp, in 1607, to the new Basilica. There
was another translation to its present position in
1763. Leo has been honoured in the Church as a
saint and confessor. He has also been commonly
known as " The Great." A decree of Benedict XIV.,
in 1754, raised him to the title and cultus of a
" doctor of the Church." He is commemorated in
the Eastern Church on Feb. 18 ; in the Western, on
April n, possibly the day of the first translation of
his body.
If we may define a " great man " as one who
maintains universal interests with consistency and
power, we shall surely feel that Leo has every right
to this title. There was at least nothing little, nothing
weak to be found in his conception of life or in his
conduct of it. Nor can anything except blind preju-
dice grudge him his canonization. 1 Identifying, as he
1 The Protestant theologian Dumoulin classes him and Gregory
the Great as " les deux bons Papes."
THE TRIUMPH AND DEATH OF LEO. 137
did, the interest of Christianity with the supremacy
of that authority which centred in his own see, he
had that sort of ambition for which his order has
been distinguished the sort of ambition which is
least personal and least vicious. That in the exercise
and extension of his prerogative, as he deemed it, he
was not always strictly conscientious we have been
constrained to admit. He urged a false plea when he
urged the Canon of Nicaea as justifying his claims
of universal appellate jurisdiction, and he can hardly
have urged it ignorantly. In his hostility to Anatolius
he was not careful to be just : he pursued with some-
thing like relentless bigotry and this was the worst
act of his life perhaps the greatest saint of his age.
But, as an overbalancing claim on the other side of
the account, let us reckon that the world has seldom
seen a life dedicated more unreservedly and more
simply in all its parts and powers to Christ and His
Church; seldom an eye more single, a purpose
more clear, or action aimed more directly or con-
tinuously at God's greater glory. Add to this the
consideration of his personal life and Christian
character, as it is shown to us, especially in his
sermons ; that strong, simple, sensible, manly Christi-
anity ; that unsparing claim upon his own life first,
and then on that of those committed to his charge
at Rome ; that modesty which keeps himself and his
exploits so completely hidden through all his mani-
fold and glorious activities and who, even of those
most opposed to papal aggrandizement, can refuse to
138 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
rise and own him a saint ? Nor must we forget how
large the debt we owe to him for preserving unim-
paired to us the priceless treasure of a faith in our
Lord's Humanity.
LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME. 139
CHAPTER IX.
LEO THE DISCIPLINARIAN.
THERE have been preserved to us some hundred and
seventy of Leo's letters, and nearly a hundred ser-
mons, from which to draw our conception of his
character and his work. Of the letters, a very large
proportion are occupied with the Eutychian contro-
versy and those universal Church interests of his day
of which we have already given some account. To
political matters we have, except as far as they are
necessarily interwoven with ecclesiastical affairs, almost
no allusion ; there are no reflections on those facts
which give secular importance to the fifth century, the
passing away of the old order in the Romish Empire,
and the surging in upon the world of the undisciplined
barbarian hordes ; no speculations as to the future ;
no sign that Leo perceived the part the papacy should
play in moulding modern society. To Maximus, to
Avitus, to Majorian, whose reigns in the West coin-
cided with the last six years of Leo's life, we have no
kind of allusion. All his interests during these years,
so far as letters reflect them, are centred in the East
and her theological troubles. Leo, we must con-
clude, like his successors, " specialized his functions,"
140 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
and did his work in the sphere God had intrusted to
him, without troubling himself to go beyond it. His
feelings as a Roman are all directed into the channel
of the Church.
There are, however, some aspects of Leo's activity
which come out in his letters which we have reserved
for summary here one of these is his disciplinary
zeal : his enactments in this direction help to throw
an interesting light on the condition of the Church
of his age. First of all we have, in the matter of
ecclesiastical order, one example of Leo yielding to
the influence of other sees. In the year 444 (as,
indeed, on other occasions) the right day for cele-
brating Easter was in dispute. According to the
Roman calendar it should fall on March 26, ac-
cording to the Alexandrian on the 23rd. Consulta-
tions took place : St. Cyril's reply insists strongly on
the Alexandrian calculation. Paschasinus, whom
Leo consulted, though he writes in an almost grovel-
ling tone of deference, still insinuates that Alexandria
s right, and Leo consents to yield, though he does
so, he says, for unity' sake, not because his reason
is persuaded. It was not often that desire for unity
led Leo to submit the judgment of his own see to
external influences. He had another conception of
the true mode of promoting unity, but probably
here he could not have carried his point, and con-
cession was only common prudence. Jealous as Leo
was for his own see and her prerogatives, he could
have an eye to those of others where his own were
LEO THE DISCIPLINARIAN. 141
not in danger. Thus we find him reproving a
bishop of Frejus for consulting him first instead of
his metropolitan. He is the final, not the primary
court of appeal.
In general, his conception of the episcopal office
is a very lofty one. The bishop is to be stern and
relentless in suppressing error and vice. " It is
negligent rulers who nurture a plague by shrinking
from austere remedies :" strong government, he
seems to think (though, perhaps, by this period of
the world's experience his eyes would have been
opened), is the antidote to all evils. " Where obe-
dience is secure doctrine will be sound/' Still the
government is to be a government of love and dis-
cretion. " Firmness must be rendered acceptable by
courtesy, justice tempered by mildness, and the best
bridle for license is patient dealing." " We must con-
tinue," he says to Rusticus, bishop of Narbo, " in
the work intrusted to us and in the labours we have
undertaken. We must uphold justice with constancy,
and show clemency with loving-kindness. What we
have to hate is not men, but sins. While we rebuke
the proud we must bear with the weak ; and when
necessity arises for severer castigation, let it be admi-
nistered, not in the spirit of wrath, but of healing."
As regards the discipline of the clerical office, we
find ourselves on the verge of the celibate restriction.
A second marriage, we have seen, or marriage of a
widow, even in the lay state, is a bar to orders ; and
all who are in orders must, if they are married men,
142 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
abstain from the privileges of matrimony. Another
rather curious bar to orders in Leo's eyes is the condi-
tion of a slave. He bases his refusal to allow the
ordination of slaves on the ground that their condi-
tion does not leave them the liberty and leisure re-
quisite for a priest; but it is couched in language
which breathes the spirit of a Roman patrician much
more than the feeling that in " Christ Jesus there is
neither bond nor free." He talks of the " dignity of
birth" being wanting to them, and he speaks scorn-
fully of " the mean estate (vilitas) of a slave polluting
the Christian ministry."
While we are on the subject of ordination, it is
important to notice, that though in Leo the theory of
ecclesiastical government from above, centred in one
supreme head, is in conspicuous prominence, it has
not yet swallowed up the democratic and represen-
tative conception of Church authority. A bishop is
two things he is a channel of divine grace in a
special manner, in which capacity the term
"sacerdos" 1 (priest), is given him, par excellence;
and he is also a governor or supreme pastor, and in
this capacity is called episcopus (surveyor). Now
his specifically sacerdotal functions belong to him in
virtue of his consecration, pure and simple. They
are quite independent of other considerations ; but
his canonical authority depends, in Leo's conception,
on something more than this. To govern the Church
1 " Sacerdos " in Leo's days generally means a bishop.
LEO THE DISCIPLINARIAN. 143
he must represent the Church : and this is an in-
gredient of all right episcopal authority, which is far
too often forgotten in our days. Listen to Leo's stern
sentences : " He who is to preside over all, must be
elected of all." " Before a consecration must go the
suffrages of the citizens, the approbation of the
people, the judgment of persons of distinction, the
choice of the clergy ; that the rule of Apostolic
authority may be in all respects observed, which
enjoins that a priest to govern the Church should be
supported, not only by the approval of the faithful,
but also by the testimony of those without." (i Tim.
iii. 7.) " No metropolitan do we allow to ordain a
priest (bishop) on his own judgment, without the con-
sent of clergy and people : the consent of the whole
community (state) must elect the president of the
Church :" only where division makes unanimity im-
possible the metropolitan may decide the election in
favour of the man who has the best support. " No
reason can tolerate" (he says finally to the African
bishops), " that persons should be held to be bishops
who were neither elected by the clergy, nor demanded
by the laity, nor ordained by the provincial bishops
with the consent of the metropolitan ;" that is, they
are bishops as far as divine functions go (for he goes
on to intimate the sacramental validity of their ordina-
tion), in virtue of their consecration by whatever two
bishops it may have been performed ; but they have
no right to exercise episcopal supervision, because
they lack the delegation of the Church. The terms
144 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
Leo uses are vague : we cannot distribute exactly the
influence of clergy and laity, and the still more inde-
terminate weight which is to be allowed to outside
public opinion : that is to say, he is stating a prin-
ciple, not laying down regulations ; but the principle
emerges clear and distinct, that it is in virtue of
what he represents that a bishop governs, and that
episcopal authority is not personal and absolute, but
representative and constitutional ; that a bishop
should not be imposed from above by authorities,
whether in Church or State, but raised from below.
How much the Church has been the loser, and how
impossible the due exercise of episcopal authority
can become by the neglect of this principle, we are
ourselves in a position to conceive. Its execution,
in Leo's day, was facilitated by the canonical restric-
tions which forbade clergy ordained in one Church
to "wander" to others. The character of the
possible bishops in any Church would then be well
known to all the clergy, and all would have to have
risen through the inferior office. Searching and exact
repudiation of all heresies is of course a condition of
episcopal election which no consent of a particular
Church can over-ride. The part is subject to the
whole.
As regards the administration of the Sacraments, we
may notice as a point of interest that Baptism was
still (except in cases of necessity) to be given only
at Easter and Pentecost. A rule of the Roman
Church as regards the Mass brings out the relation
LEO THE DISCIPLINARIAN. 145
in which the priest was understood to stand to the
people. The oblation of the Eucharist is the act of
the whole people, acting through or by the priest, not
of the individual priest for himself. The oblation is
therefore in a normal way to be offered once only on
any day, but it is to be repeated on festival days as
often as may be necessary to enable all the faithful
to offer, where the church cannot hold them all at
once.
In regard to the discipline of penitence, we see in
Leo's time the transition from public to private dis-
cipline. All reconciliation of the lapsed he asserts
to be through priestly ministration, and he gives
abundant regulations for the supervision of penitents
who are publicly known as such ; but in the ordinary
cases, " in the case of the penitence which is required
of the faithful," he directs that private confession first
to God, and then to the priest (or bishop ?) should be
substituted for the public confession which was cal-
culated to cause scandal, such as would have the effect
of deterring people from penitence at all. Persons
undergoing penitence are exhorted to abstain from
commerce and the civil law courts, while abstinence
from military service is commanded, and abstinence
from marriage is recommended in the case of persons
who have at any time been excommunicated.
We may notice, in conclusion, how strongly in the
spirit of the Church of that age he condemns the
taking usury or interest on money, whether by clergy
or laity : " it lacks all humanity/' he says, and,
L
146 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
playing on the words, " the usury of money is the
death of the soul (fanus pecunice, funns animcz)"
These regulations may suffice to give us some kind of
idea of the disciplinary system which Leo administered
in an age when secular disturbances, and barbarian
inroads made any discipline very difficult.
LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME. 147
CHAPTER X.
LEO, THE THEOLOGIAN.
THE extracts we have already made from Leo's
theological letters on the subject of the Incarnation
will have given us some idea of his style and manner.
We shall have gathered that he is always stern,
trenchant, dogmatic, terse, never diffuse or flowery in
his language. He has a definite doctrine to enforce,
and his whole energy is concentrated in its enforce-
ment : never was there a man who allowed less of his
own personal feelings to intrude themselves into his
theology, or, it is perhaps truer to say, whose person-
ality was so wholly and completely merged in reverence
for dogmatic truth and zeal for its exhibition and pre-
servation. In his theological statements we can hardly
have failed to notice and admire the sureness and
clearness of his grasp on the doctrine of the Incar-
nation ; the absolute balance of mind with which he
emphasizes its various aspects in the " proportion of
faith ;" the wisdom with which avoiding all small,
insignificant, or doubtful arguments, he occupies him-
self with enforcing large and positive conceptions, and
insists constantly on the practical bearing and result
L 2
148 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
of a doctrine. This is one out of several indications
of the entirely Western character of his theology. It
is wholly on the practical, not the speculative side.
There is no theorizing or philosophizing on the
relation of persons in the Trinity, only a supreme
grasp on the dogma as a thing of most intensely
practical moment. The doctrine is to him not so
much a subject of contemplation as an instrument for
governing and subduing the world and the passions of
men.
In his statements of the doctrine of the Trinity we
notice a most striking resemblance to the language of
the Athanasian Creed. " The Nature of the Only-
begotten is the Nature of the Father and the Nature
of the Holy Spirit; alike impassible, alike unchange-
able is the undivided unity and consubstantial equality
of the Eternal Trinity." " Between the Father and
the Son there is no difference in essence, no diversity
in Majesty." " It is eternal to the Father to be the
Father of the co-eternal Son : it is eternal to the Son
to be begotten of the Father out of all time : it is
eternal to the Holy Spirit to be the Spirit of the
Father and the Son ; so that the Father has never
been without the Son, or the Son without the Father,
or the Father and the Son without the Spirit, and all
idea of gradation of existence being excluded, none
of the Three has there priority or inferiority. Thus
the unchangeable Deity of the Blessed Trinity is one
in substance, undivided in operation, concordant in
will, alike in power, equal in glory/' " The whole
LEO THE THEOLOGIAN. 149
Trinity is together one Influence, one Majesty, one
Substance, unsevered in operation, inseparable in
love, indifferent in power, together filling all things,
containing the universe : for what the Father is, that,
too, is the Son, and that is the Holy Spirit." This
theology in style and language is exactly the theology
of the Athanasian Creed, and has a thoroughly West-
ern cast. The doctrine of the East is of course
essentially the same : the full and absolute and equal
Divinity of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost in the
unity of the One God is truth for East and West
alike ; but take this statement, for example, out of
the writings of St. Basil, and it will be evident that it
could not live in quite the same theological at-
mosphere as the statement we have quoted from Leo.
" ' My Father is greater than I/ that is, as far forth as
Father, since what .else does ' Father 7 signify than
that He is the cause and origin of Him who was
begotten by Him ?" " The Son is second in order to
the Father, since He is from Him ; and in dignity,
inasmuch as the latter is the origin and cause of His
existence.' 7
These statements may be explained 1 by the words
of Bishop Bull, "The Catholic Doctors, both be-
fore and after the Nicene Council, are unanimous
in declaring that the Father is greater than the
Son, even as to Divinity; i.e. not in nature or any
1 Newman's "Ariansof the Fourth Century," cap. ii. 3, from
whom the quotations are borrowed.
150 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
essential perfection which is in the Father and not in
the Son, but alone in what may be called authority,
that is, in point of origin, since the Son is from the
Father, not the Father from the Son/' In accepting
this statement about the Catholic Fathers we must
surely add that the refinement would have been alien
to the spirit of Leo and the spirit of the Athanasian
Creed. It is far from contradicting that Creed : it
asserts indeed all that the Creed asserts the essen-
tial and real equality of the Three Persons, as God,
only it adds something, viz.. that there is a trans-
cendental priority, even though neither of time, nor of
any assignable quality, which is inherent in the idea
of Fatherhood. Such a representation was suited
to the Eastern, not the Western mind; it was
philosophical more than theological, it concerned
the conception of human thought about the Trinity,
rather than the Faith in it ; and the Athanasian
Creed expresses that which, the philosophizing apart,
is the common creed of East and West. Leo's
theology, then, is the theology of the Athanasian
Creed.
We may further refer to a passage quoted on
the doctrine of the Incarnation (p. 58), where the
metaphor of the union of soul and body in man
is used to illustrate the union of the Divine and
Human natures in Christ, as it is in the Athanasian
Creed, and we may add, by Vincent of Lerins, the
contemporary of Leo. All these connections between
the theology and language of Leo and his contempo-
LEO THE THEOLOGIAN.. 151
raries and of the Athanasian Creed are of importance
as indicating the date of the Creed. It may be
taken as certain, that it is a Western document,
and that its style and theological statements would
fix its date in the fourth century. We may add that
the absence of actual reference to the phrase " two
natures " in Christ is a probable indication that the
Creed antedates the Eutychian controversy. It is a
summary of the theology of the Trinity and the
Incarnation, adapted to the use of the West, in view
>of all the known heresies, enclosing the true doc-
trine within the lines of utterly unambiguous and
trenchant formulae ; a summary which, though we
cannot assign it to Leo as its author, or indeed deter-
mine its source more accurately than by ascribing it
with all probability to the South Gallican Church,
we may at least describe without danger of error as
couched in the theological language and breathing
the highest dogmatic spirit of that period of Western
theology of which Leo is the greatest represen-
tative : it is the theology of the Church, as with
purpose clear, to govern and to Christianise the
new age dawning on the world, she encased the
faith of her spirit in a mould of cast-iron, wherein
it might live in uncontaminated power through all
the periods of intellectual deadness and military dis-
order, and through the Babel of tongues which
belongs to ages of " new learning " and intellectual
revival.
Of Leo's statement of the theology of the Incar-
152 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
nation we have already said enough, but his mode of
treating the Atonement requires notice. A passage
quoted (p. 60) will show that Leo, like every Chris-
tian, held that the sacrifice of Christ availed to enable
the Father to pardon man and reconcile him to Him-
self. This is the common substratum of all Christian
doctrine on the Atonement ; but in conceiving the
mode in which the sacrifice effected the reconciliation,
great differences are found between different periods
of Christian theology ; indeed this could hardly be
otherwise.
The revelation of the Bible does not go beyond
the teaching that Christ's death had a recon-
ciling and propitiatory power in the sight of God ; the
mode of its action and the ground of its necessity
and justice are left to our conceptions, which on so
mysterious a subject are very certain to be various.
Thus some have held that the love of God in Christ
made satisfaction to His justice others (though this
is certainly unscriptural) that the love of the Son
propitiated the wrath of the Father. Leo, in common
with many great teachers of the early Church, held a
different, now almost completely-abandoned view.
With him, though God requires the sacrifice as a con-
dition of man's reconciliation, yet the sacrifice ap-
pears to be made, not to God, but the devil. A
ransom has to be paid to deliver man from captivity.
This ransom is paid to the tyrant who holds the
captives : that tyrant is the devil. As man had fallen
by his free will, he is justly under the dominion of
LEO THE THEOLOGIAN. 153
the devil. The devil has rights over him, rights that
he would retain unless that humanity which he had
conquered could conquer him again. Now in redeem-
ing man God chose to overcome the devil by the rule
of justice, not of power. Whereas His omnipotence
could have torn man from his clutches without any
regard to his (so to speak) just claims, He preferred
to defeat him in fair and equal fight. For this
purpose He became man, and His Incarnation
deceived the devil. Seeing the child suffering the
sorrows and pains of childhood, seeing Him grow
by natural stages to manhood, having had so many
proofs that He was mortal, he concluded that He was
infected with the poison of original sin. He set
therefore in motion against Him all his methods
and instruments of persecution, as if he were only
exercising a right upon sin-stained humanity, his
slave. He spent his whole force on Him, thinking
that if He must yield to death whose virtues exceed
so far those of all the saints, he would be secure
of his dominion over everyone else. But in perse-
cuting and slaying Christ whom was he slaying?
One who though Man was sinless, and owed him
nothing, in whom he had nothing. But thus by
exacting the penalty of iniquity from Him in Whom
he found no fault, he exceeded his bond ; he went
beyond his right he broke his covenant. This in-
justice in demanding too much, cancelled the
whole debt of man due to him ; his rights are over :
man is free, and the nails which pierced our Lord's
154 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
hands and feet at the instigation of the devil, thus
really transfixed the devil himself with perpetual
wounds. Such is the theory. The sacrifice of Christ
on this showing was the paying off by God in human
nature of the debt due to the devil. It was a transac-
tion between Man (though that Man was also God)
and the devil, and it is difficult to see in what relation
this transaction stands to the sacrifice which Leo
constantly conceives in common with all Christians as
having been offered to God. Certainly we should feel
that though his conception of the dominion of the
devil over human nature tallies well with such Scriptural
expressions as " the Prince of this world/' " Prince
of the power of the air," "the God of this world,"
the further refinements as regards the deception of
the devil by the Incarnation are neither Scriptural
nor agreeable to our feelings of reverence, and we
may feel grateful that we are dealing here with
a phase of Christian opinion, not with a Church
doctrine.
It is rather strange that living as Leo did so near
the Pelagian controversy, and having occupied a
foremost place in its suppression in Italy, we should
have so little upon the subject in his writings. Of
course, when he does speak about it his language is
thoroughly orthodox. "The whole gift of good
works is due to the previous operation of God : no
man is justified by virtue before grace, which is to
every man the beginning of .righteousness, the fount
of good, the source of merit :" nothing in us then ante-
LEO THE THEOLOGIAN. 155
dates the operation of grace, all are in need of the
salvation of Christ.
While speaking of grace we may notice that
Leo very constantly dwells upon the gift of grace
to man as a gradual process, only culminating in
the Incarnation and descent of the Holy Ghost.
" God did not take a new counsel for man, or look
upon him with mercy only at the end of the days,
but he established one and the same ground of salva-
tion for all men from the beginning of the world.
The grace of God, by which the whole body of
saints is justified, was given when Christ was
born (not for the first time, but) only in larger
measure. The sacrament of great holiness (the In-
carnation) with which now the world is filled, was
so powerful even in its previous indications that they
obtained it no less who believe the promise than
who welcomed the gift." " In former ages, as well,
the light of truth was sent out to illuminate the holy
patriarchs and prophets; and in diverse ways and mani-
fold signs the Deity of the Son declared the operations
of His presence/' 7 " All the saints who preceded our
Saviour's time were by this faith justified, by this
sacrament made the body of Christ, expecting the
universal redemption of believers in the seed of
Abraham."
Thus there was no beginning to the operation
of the Holy Spirit upon man since his crea-
tion. " Firmly holding the faith, then, beloved,
let us not doubt that when the Holy Ghost on the
156 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
Day of Pentecost filled the disciples of the Lord, this
was not the beginning of the gift, but its completion :
for patriarchs and prophets and priests, and all the
holy men of former times, flourished by the sanctifica-
tion of the same Spirit ; and outside this grace no
sacraments were ever instituted, no mysteries ever
celebrated the virtue of the grace was always the
same, though there is a change in the measure
of the gift."
As regards the merits and cultus of saints, we
notice in Leo a complete absence of anything which
might be called superstition. Indeed, there is a very
marked difference in this respect between the writings
of Leo and those of his great successor, Gregory the
First. The exaggeration of saint-worship and the
growth of legend have been very great in the interval.
As for Leo, he holds that the merits of saints can
work wonders, and give aid to the Church on earth.
He speaks often of St. Peter assisting the people with
his prayers and with his merits, and in a similar
strain of St. Paul and St. Lawrence all of them
saints especially connected with Rome. He attributes,
again, the deliverance of the city from the barbarians
to the care of the saints ; and the Leonine Sacrament-
ary, which contains certainly much belonging to his
age, is full of such prayers as this : " Assist us, Lord,
by the prayers of thy saints, that we who celebrate
their festival may experience their aid." But it is
noticeable that he never alludes to the Blessed Virgin
at all as assisting us by her prayers, nor to any other
LEO THE THEOLOGIAN. 157
saints save those mentioned above ; nor even in their
case does he invoke them or direct them to be in-
voked. 1
Speaking generally, we may say that what is con-
stantly present to his mind is the thought that they are
aiding the Church by their patronage, prayers, and
merits. Elsewhere, he very jealously distinguishes be-
tween the value of the martyrdom of saints and that of
the death of Christ. " The saints received crowns, but
gave them not, and to their courage we owe examples
of patience, not gifts of righteousness." "No man's
goodness affects himself alone ; but the holiness of
the martyrs affects us by way of example it is better
to teach in act than in word." To relics we have no
allusion, except in so far as he rejoices in the body of
St. Flavian being brought back to Constantinople, and
excites the zeal of Juvenal and Eudocia in Palestine by
the memory of the local memorials amidst which they
moved. His sermons, as Dean Milman has truly
said, " are singularly Christian ; Christian, in dwelling
almost exclusively on Christ, His birth, His passion,
His resurrection !"
The practical discipline of the Christian life falls, in
Leo's teaching, under three heads, Prayer, Fasting,
Almsgiving ; and, orthodox as Leo undoubtedly was
on the subject of Divine grace, he is never behind-
1 We may notice, in passing, that Leo expressly denies the Im-
maculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. "Jesus Christ
alone, among the sons of men was born innocent : for He alone
was conceived without the pollution of carnal concupiscence.*'
158 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
hand in laying a wholesome practical stress upon
good works. " By prayer, the mercy of God is sought,,
by fasting, the lusts of the flesh are extinguished, by
almsgiving, satisfaction is made for sin." " In alms
and fasting lie the most effectual petitions for pardon,
and the prayer which is winged by such suffrages rises
more speedily to the ears of God." Almsgiving he
uses in a broad sense, almost equivalent to love.
" Alms destroy sins," he says, quoting Ecclus. iii. 30,
" abolish death, extinguish the penalty of eternal fire."
It is a grace without which we can have no other ;
while " he who has cleansed himself by almsgiving
need not doubt that even after many sins the splen-
dour of the new birth will be restored to him."
(cf. St. Luke xi. 41). But in all this it is the spirit of the
giver, not the mere matter of the gift, which is to be
looked to. We must be careful how we give ; as, for
example, not to patronize the forward and overlook
the retiring. "There are some who blush to ask
openly for what they need, and prefer suffering under
the misery of silent want to undergoing the confusion
of making a public request." Such must be sought
out and their poverty relieved, while their modesty
is unhurt. "Blessed is he," says the Psalmist
(Ps. xl. i, Vulgate), " who understandeth about the
poor and needy." There should be a special care for
slaves and a remembrance of the heathen, as well as
the poor Christians. Above all, let the gift be the
gift of a good will : gifts not made in the spirit of
faith, though they be never so large, avail nothing ;
LEO THE THEOLOGIAN. 159
" according as the originating will is good the gift is
reckoned ;" and " no man's income is small whose soul
is large." The spirit of almsgiving is the spirit of
love. " There is no love without faith, and no faith
without love." Such is the spirit in which Leo loves
to deal with the duty of almsgiving ; of his mode of
speaking on fasting we have said enough above.
Before concluding this notice of Leo's ascetic
theology, there are two points which it is worth
while to notice.
First : that in Leo we become constantly con-
scious of the superior value of corporate over
individual action. In fasting, in praying, in giving
alms he would have the Church act altogether, and be
conscious of the communion of their whole life, and
the interaction of all their efforts. " The fullest aboli-
tion of sins," he says, < ; is obtained when the whole
Church joins in one prayer and one confession. For
if the Lord has promised to grant whole whatever is
asked by the pious consent of two or three, what can
be denied to a people of many thousands celebrating
together one observance, and praying with united
hearts through the one spirit 1 ?" " Though it is open to
every one of us to visit our body with voluntary
punishments, and now more moderately, now more
sharply, to subdue the lusts which war against the spirit,
yet on certain days it is expedient we should celebrate
all together a general fast ; and our devotion is more
effectual and more holy as the Church is giving herself
as a whole to works of piety with one will and one
l6o LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
intention. Public acts are preferable to private, and
the attention of all in common gives the best ground
for expecting useful results."
At the same time the communion of effort is to
him strictly consistent with individual freedom, as
regards the choice of the degree and mode of self-
discipline. " Let us embrace," he says, " the blessed
strength of holy union and enter the solemn fast with
the concordant purpose of a good will. Nothing hard
or difficult is asked of any one, nor anything enjoined
upon us which exceeds our strength, whether in the
infliction of abstinence or the giving of alms. Each
one of you knows what he can do and what he cannot.
Each must fix his own standard, each must rate him-
self at a just and reasonable estimate, that the sacrifice
of mercy may not be offered with sadness, nor reckoned
among the losses of life. Let him give to this pious
work so much as shall justify his heart, wash his con-
science, in a word, be a blessing alike to him who
takes and him who gives. That soul indeed is
blessed and much to be admired who through love
of doing good fears not loss of means, and doubts
not that He who has given him money to spend will
do so still. But as the magnanimity belongs but to a
few, and as the work of looking after a man's own
household is one most full of piety, without prejudice
to the more perfect, we give it as a general rule to
you to work according to the measure of the means
which God has given you. That benevolence to be
cheerful, which so controls its gifts that while it relieves
LEO THE THEOLOGIAN. l6l
and rejoices the poor, it brings not want upon its own
home. Let us fast, then, Wednesday and Friday, and
keep our vigils together on Saturday in St. Peter's, 1 by
whose merits and prayers we trust that the mercy
of God will be with us through all, through our Lord
Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth," &c.
Secondly : we are bound to notice a peculiarity in
Leo's penitential sermons, viz., the slight allusion he
makes to what we should be apt to call the chief
element of repentance, confession of sin. The far
greater stress is laid on the practice of the contrary
virtues or works of reparation. Even where he is
speaking in Lent on the remedies Tor sins, as well those
of habitual laxity, as the more venial and incidental,
and in preparation for the Easter communion, he
makes almost no allusion to confession, sacramental
or otherwise, but talks of the duties of self-knowledge,
fastings, works of mercy, prayer, self-discipline, as the
means of purification. Forgiveness of injuries is
much insisted on from the same point of view : " Let
the man who contracted the stain of malice, seek
the cleansing of benevolence." All this would
seem to indicate that in Leo's mind penitence and
progress, conversion and sanctification were not
separated in the life of the ordinary Christian, not
under ecclesiastical discipline, as much as they are
with us.
It remains to make some notice of Leo as a
The occasion is the September Fast.
M
162 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
Preacher. 1 No cares of the universal Church ever
could induce him to neglect his personal duties to
his own community ; he was throughout a diligent
pastor and preacher. We have sermons " for
his birthday;" 2 sermons "for the collections," or
stated day of the year (in July), when by a custom
instituted in place of a still older Pagan solemnity,
the Roman Christians gave alms ; sermons for the
Fast of the loth Month Advent as we should say;
sermons for Christmas, Epiphany, the Transfiguration,
Lent, Passiontide, Easter, Ascension-tide, Pentecost,
the Pentecostal Fast, St. Peter's and St. Paul's Day,
with its octave, St. Laurence's Day and the September
Fast.
Of the substance of these sermons, dogmatic
or practical, we have already given some account.
A few of their characteristics it remains to notice.
First, then, they are very short and very simple. A
Greek writer tells us that in the end of the fourth
century at Rome neither the bishop nor anyone else
preached in the church to the people. However
this may be, the style and brevity of Leo's sermons
assure us that there is no tradition of pulpit eloquence
behind him. Their brevity of style is such as would
make them more suitable to be read than merely
listened to ; but they bristle with epigrams of deep
moral significance, which must have caught the ear
1 For a translation of many of St. Leo's " Sermons on the
Incarnation" see Dr. Bright's edition. London: Masters, 1862.
8 Vide supra, p. 82.
LEO THE THEOLOGIAN. 163
and impressed themselves on the memory of his
hearers. Their general character is well-described
by Milman : " They contrast with the florid, desultory,
and often imaginative and impassioned style of the
Greek preachers. They are brief, simple, severe ;
without fancy, without metaphoric subtleties, without
passion : it is the Roman censor animadverting with
nervous majesty on the vices of the people; the Roman
praetor dictating the law and delivering with authority
the doctrine of the faith." At the same time we
must say that this account seems to underrate the
disciplined, but intense and most real feeling which
breathes in so much that he says, the sympathy of
the pastor with his people, and the love and humility
which temper the severity.
We may notice, also, the practical aim of all he says.
If he is stating dogma, it is as a basis of life ; if he
is enlarging on a mystery, it is as a motive to reverence
of thought and joyful submission of intellect ; if
some merchants arrive from the East and justify
Eutyches, Leo is in the pulpit at once with the true
doctrine; do the people desert the tombs of the
martyrs and their festivals for the races and the games,
Leo is prompt to warn them of the sin and danger
of ingratitude. No dangerous tendency which he
observes in their lives escapes unnoticed. A relic of
paganism survived in a prevalent custom of turning
and bowing to the rising sun as people went into St.
Peter's. However they may explain and justify such
a practice to themselves as a worship of the Creator,
M 2
SMUT MARY'S COLLEGE, CALIF,
164 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
not of His creature, it is paganism, says Leo, and
must cease. Specially he is careful to admonish
against the sins of avarice and worldliness an age no
longer tried by the fires of persecution. The devil
has other arts besides those of open violence, and
they are not always the least successful.
A word must be said on another aspect in which
Leo is presented to us. He is the reputed originator
of the collect. " The Collect as we have it," says
Dr. Bright, " is Western in every feature : in that
4 unity of sentiment and severity of style ' which
Lord Macaulay has admired ; in its Roman brevity
and majestic conciseness, its freedom from all luxuriant
ornament and inflation of phraseology ; " and not
only is it undoubtedly Western, but there is no writer
of the West to whose style it can bear a closer resem-
blance than to St. Leo's. We have a " Sacramentary,"
the earliest of the Roman Church which has come down
to us, which contains a number of these collects, and
much of it, at any rate, belongs to Leo's age, and very
probably may have been composed by him. The
collect in the English Prayer-book for the Third
Sunday after Easter (referring originally to the newly-
baptized on Easter-Eve), for the Fifth Sunday after
Trinity (suggested by the disasters of the expiring
Empire of the West), and for the Ninth, Thirteenth,
and Fourteenth Sundays, after Trinity, are from the
Leonine Sacramentary. 1
1 Bright's "Ancient Collects," pp. 208, 209.
LEO THE THEOLOGIAN. 165
It will not be wholly out of place to mention
before we take leave of Leo and his writings that
tradition looks back to him as the benefactor of many
of the Roman Churches : he is said to have restored
their silver ornaments after the ravages of the Vandals,
and to have repaired the basilicas of St. Peter and
St. Paul, placing a mosaic in the latter which repre-
sented the adoration of the four-and-twenty elders : we
are told also tha the built a Church of St. Cornelius,
established some monks at St. Peter's, instituted
guardians for the tombs of the Apostles, and erected
a fountain before St. Paul's where the people might
wash before entering the Church.
1 66 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
CHAPTER XL
LEO AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
THE course of the narrative has already given us
some acquaintance with a considerable number of
the contemporaries of Leo. There are, however,
some with whom he came into more or less direct
contact whose names or whose actions we have not
yet had occasion to mention. There is, for example,
a figure sufficiently clearly marked in the Church
histoiy of the period, but which looms with phantom-
like indistinctness at the elbow of Leo in some close,
but to our eyes at this distance of time, utterly
indefinite relation to him and his activities. St.
Prosper of Aquitaine is well-known as the able
and steadfast defender of Augustinianism against the
semi-Pelagians. Perhaps his most celebrated work
in this cause is a poem " on the ungrateful," that is,
those who denied or limited the action of Divine
grace on the human will. The chief merit of
this hexameter poem is no doubt its orthodoxy,
for neither the conviction of truth, nor the en-
thusiasm which pervades them, can overcome the
irredeemable dulness of these four books. Prosper,
however, seems to have had real poetical ability, espe-
LEO AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 167
daily if a beautiful little poem of a husband to his
wife is really his. Besides his poetry he wrote a work
against Cassian, and is known also as a chronicler of
his age. This man seems to have been brought by Leo
with him to Rome as his secretary, his great theo-
logical knowledge rendering him an invaluable ally.
Curiously enough he is never named in Leo's works,
but tradition even goes so far as to assert that he
was the real author of Leo's theological letters.
There is every reason to disbelieve this. Leo's per-
sonality is very marked and distinct, and appears
continually the same and unmistakable in his acts
and writings, theological and practical ; nor, indeed,
is the tradition we have alluded to anything but
vague ; there is, however, no reason to d }ubt that
St. Prosper gave Leo all the assistance which an able
and zealous secretary can give his chief. It is pro-
bable that he survived his master.
A greater man was his opponent, John Cassian,
a monk of Palestine (whether Oriental by birth
or not is somewhat uncertain), who had visited
more than once the Solitaries and Coenobites of
Egypt, and had laid deep to heart the lessons of
their self-mastery. He came to Constantinople in
the beginning of the fifth century, and became the
deacon and fervent disciple of St. Chrysostom.
Sent to Rome in 405, he very probably remained
there for some years, and may there have made
the acquaintance of St. Leo, to whom, as we have
seen, he alludes in terms of high praise in his work
1 68 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
on the Incarnation, written about A.D. 430. Cassian's
place in history is important in two aspects. First :
he is the chief representative of semi-Pelagianism.
Revolted alike by the heresy of Pelagius, and by the
extreme annihilation of human free-will involved in
the Augustinian doctrine, he endeavoured to steer
a middle course, keeping to the teaching of his great
master St. Chrysostom. In this attempt he fell no
doubt into the partial denial of " Prevenient Grace, 7 '
but the general aim of his doctrine is thoroughly
Christian. The other chief aspect of his work is
more important. He was the legislator and founder
of Western Monasticism. About 410 he seems to
have retired to Marseilles and founded two com-
munities, one of men and the other of women. His
works on the regulations of monastic life, imbued
as they are with a profound respect for the asceticism
of the East, had a very great influence on the monasti-
cism of the West. It is more important for us to
notice this activity in the direction of monasticism,
because this is one of the tendencies of Leo's time
(the future importance of which we cannot overrate),
of which we hear almost nothing in his life and
writings. The tradition of his having established a
monastic community at Rome, if true, may be taken
as a sign of his sympathy with it, but, indeed, without
such sign we can hardly fail to see that the whole
tendency of Leo's mind all his love of discipline,
order, government all his practical enthusiasm,
would have found a fitting issue in the monasticism
LEO AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 169
of St. Benedict. Cassian would seem to have survived
the beginning, at any rate, of Leo's pontificate.
We may mention another noteworthy character
with whom tradition brings Leo in contact. St.
Valentine, traditionally known as Bishop of Passau,
was apparently consecrated bishop by St. Leo, for
missionary work in Rhcetia. He was one of that
noble army of martyrs, in will if not in deed, who
were the Apostles of the still barbarian tribes out of
which the nations of modern Europe were to arise.
What is chiefly remarkable in the record we have of
St. Valentine's labour is the simple way in which his
protracted want of success, and consequent de-
spondency, is recorded. A far more celebrated name
belonging to this class is St. Patrick, whose apo-
stolic labours in Ireland seem to have been con-
temporaneous with Leo's pontificate. Another of
whom we have a much more authentic account is
St. Severinus, " the Apostle of Noricum " certainly
one of the most saintly, and at the same time
simple and vigorous characters of his time. 1 His
mission began about the year 455, and his stern
asceticism and boundless love and devotion seem
to have given him an almost unlimited influence
and authority over the Arian and pagan tribes
amongst whom he laboured. His life is full of
significance and prophecy, and sets before us in a
vivid and touching picture the power of the religion
1 See Charles Kingsley's "Hermits."
1 70 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
of Christ over rough but not unfeeling hearts. It
will be seen without difficulty how these pioneers
of religion were preparing the way for the more
solid and consistent Church organization, with the
maintenance of which we associate the name of
Leo. Love must go before to teach and to win,
before authority could follow to discipline, to
organize, and to perpetuate ; and thus St. Severinus
and St. Leo represent but two stages of the same
activity. The labours of some of our own mission-
aries in India, are evidence enough to us that zeal
and love are spent half in vain if there be no
Church organization to back them ; and we do not
need proofs to convince us that machinery and organi-
zation are but empty forms till they are ensouled by
love.
The subject of this memoir is a man so great and
so good, that so soon as we in any measure under-
stand him we cannot but admire and revere his cha-
racter. Singleness of aim, simplicity and sanctity of
life, a lofty intelligence, indomitable energy, acknow-
ledged power triumphant through difficulties, these
are things which in and for themselves must rivet
our attention and excite our interest ; they are quali-
ties which are universal, which belong to no age or
country, and in possessing which it is that
"The truly great
Have all one age, and from one visible space
Shed influence. They both in power and act
Are permanent, and time is not with them
Save as it worketh through them, they in it."
LEO AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 1 71
So far, then, we might be content to enter as we
may into the character of Leo the Great, to sympa-
thize with his efforts and rejoice in his successes ; to
try and know him, in short, as a human character,
one with us in human brotherhood, or, nearer still, in
the communion of saints, without troubling ourselves
much about the interval of time which separates us
from him, or the condition, so different from ours, of
custom and circumstance under which he lived.
And this sort of knowledge of a character in history
is, after all, at once the most interesting and the
most important, because it is only by so knowing the
men of past times that their characters can become
united to us in human sympathies, fruitful for us of
moral example and warning, or capable of animating
us for struggles and victories like theirs. But if we
are to rise, even in the humblest measure, to a right
conception of the meaning which specially in modern
times attaches itself to history, we cannot stop here,
but must go on to ask of any character, how he came
to be what he was : not what were the eternal and
unchangeable conditions of life under which he lived,
the same more or less for us as for him. but what were
the special features of his age and country, its pecu-
liarities, its differences from our own, and in what
relation did he stand to all these ? was he, and in what
degree was he, the product and representative to us
of the social conditions of a time long past ?
And the character of Leo, interesting as it is in
itself, is at least no less interesting in relation to his
172 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
time. He is a man pre-eminently representative. In
an age like our own, where tendencies are so manifold,
so complex, so contrary one to another, a man in any
complete sense representative of the age is almost an
impossibility. A man can feel the force of a great
impulse and become the representative of a great cause,
but how shall a man represent and embody various
movements each in themselves hesitating, tentative,
uncertain, and antagonistic each to the other, tending
to no clear end or single issue, or tending at any rate
to an issue and a unity far off and unforeseen ? In
such an age to be representative of any one tendency
is to be antagonistic to a host of others, and no one
of these can make good any special claim to belong
to or to be the age. Or if a man be in any sense
able to be in sympathy with the age in all its manifold
feelings and wants, the character of such an one
must so lose in definiteness of view or fixity of position
that he becomes representative only in ceasing to be
a consistent character at all. But the conditions under
which Leo lived were wholly different. A struggle,
simple and direct, was going on in the Church
and in the State, and both these struggles turned
upon a single issue : to grasp the one clear want of
the age in its civil and religious aspects, to interpret
this want, to rise up to supply and satisfy it, this was
Leo's work. The tendencies of the age may be said
to live in him, and find in him their interpretation.
Again, not only is he the representative of the age,
but in any adequate sense he is its only representative :
LEO AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. 173
we have had occasion to notice how in all the period
of his greatest activity, he was the only great man, the
only man of first-rate importance alive ; he was the
theologian of the age, the administrator of the. age,
the governor of the age, the man of greatest intellect
of the age, the representative also for the age of the
power of civilization against the forces of barbarism.
He was all this the man of the Church at a mo-
ment when the Church was the important element in
the world, the one all-important character in that
period of history which is the meeting-point of the
old world and the new. It is a period of which the
significance and interest can hardly be overrated.
It has a double aspect, "looking before and after":
it looks back upon the all-but-exhausted civilization
of which it still wears the garb and bears the name :
it looks forward into the dawning age, and is preg-
nant with prophecy and promise, laying down the
lines and shaping the destinies of the world which is
to be.
174 LEO THE GREAT AND HIS TIME.
TABLE OF DATES.
A.D.
395 Death of Theodosius the Great ; accession of Honorius in
the West, Arcadius in the East. St. Leo probably bom
circa 390-400.
397 Deaths of St. Ambrose and St. Martin of Tours.
402 St. Innocent I., Pope.
407 Death of St. Chrysostom.
408 Theodosius II., Emperor of the East.
410 Sack of Rome by Alaric and the Goths.
412 Pelagian Controversy.
417 Zosimus, Pope.
418 Boniface, Pope.
420 Death of St. Jerome.
422 St. Celestine I., Pope.
425 Valentinian III., Emperor of the West.
430 Vandals desolate Africa. Death of St. Augustine.
431 Council of Ephesus (3rd (Ecumenical) Nestorius con-
demned.
432 Sixtus III., Pope.
440 St. Leo I., Pope.
/\\\ Death of St. Cyril. Leo expels Manichseans from Rome.
445 Quarrel of St. Leo with St. Hilary of Aries.
448 Eutyches condemned at Constantinople.
449 " Robber Council " of Ephesus. Murder of St. Flavian.
Anatolius succeeds him at Constantinople.
450 Marcian, Emperor of the East.
TABLE OF DATES. 175
A.D.
451 Council of Chalcedon (4th (Ecumenical). Dioscorus de-
posed. Proterius, his successor, murdered. Timothy
'* The Cat " usurps the see of Alexandria.
452 Encounter of Leo and Attila.
453 Death of Attila.
455 Maximus, Emperor of the West. Sack of Rome by
Genseric. Avitus and Majorian, Emperors of the West.
457 Leo I., Emperor of the East.
458 Gennadius, Bishop of Constantinople.
460 Timothy Salophaciolus, Bishop of Alexandria. Triumph
of the Orthodox cause.
461 Severus (Ricimir), Emperor of the West. Death of St.
Leo.
WYMAN AND SONS, PRINTERS, GREAT QUE.EN STREET, LONDON,
BQ
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Gore, Charles
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Gore, Charles
Leo the Great
