Justified True Belief

(●) The bishop of Rome whose letter about Christ a council adopted as its own words, and who rode out unarmed to meet Attila. + If you have ever said that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, one person and not two, you have said something in the shape Leo gave it. He did not invent the belief. What he did, in a letter written in the summer of 449 to a bishop in Constantinople who was losing an argument and about to lose his life, was find the sentences that held it steady, and several hundred bishops meeting at Chalcedon two years later heard those sentences read aloud and wrote them into the definition the church has used ever since. There is something quietly funny about how it happened. Leo was a Latin bishop who had no Greek, settling a Greek quarrel about Greek words for bishops who spoke no Latin. His whole training was Roman: law, administration, plain speech, a horror of loose ends. That turned out to be exactly what the argument needed, because the dispute had reached the stage where every side could quote the same texts at each other, and what was wanted was not a subtler formula but somebody who would say the obvious thing clearly and refuse to be moved off it. The fifth-century record is thinner than the confident dates suggest. Nobody wrote down when Leo was born, or where. The reference books print "c. 400", and that figure is a convention rather than a record: it is reckoned backwards from the one thing that is known, that he was already a senior deacon around 430, together with a guess about how old such a man was likely to be. The death is firm. He died in the closing months of 461, and the Roman tradition keeps 10 November as the day.

(●) c. 400 AD: He was born somewhere in Italy, into a generation that would watch Rome sacked twice. + The Liber Pontificalis, the Roman book of the popes, says of him only that he was "of the Tuscan nation," and that his father was named Quintian. That is the whole of the birth record. Against it stands the fact that Leo himself, and his friend the chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine, speak of Rome as his patria, his home country, which for a man of central Italy who spent his working life in the city proves less than it looks. What is certain is the weather of his childhood. In August of 410, when he would have been about ten, Alaric and the Goths came through the Salarian Gate and plundered Rome for three days. The city had not been taken by a foreign enemy in eight hundred years, and the shock of it ran through the whole Mediterranean; Augustine was still writing The City of God in answer to it a decade later. Leo grew up in a Rome that had learned it could be entered, and he would be the man standing at the gate the next two times somebody tried. He appears in the written record first as a young cleric, or at least a young cleric with his name appears. Around 418 Augustine mentions an acolyte named Leo, a cleric in one of the minor orders and the sort the Roman church sent with its post, going between Rome and the African church during the Pelagian dispute, the long quarrel over whether a person can make the first move toward God under his own power. It is thought, though it cannot be proved, that this is the same man.

(●) c. 430 AD: As a deacon of the Roman church he was already the man other bishops wrote to. + Under Pope Celestine, who held the Roman see from 422 to 432, Leo was archdeacon of the city. A see is a bishop’s chair, and by extension the district he governs from it, so to hold the Roman see is to be bishop of Rome. An archdeacon in that period was not a junior figure. He ran the city’s charity, handled the correspondence, and in practice managed the bishop’s business, which is why the job was a standard road to the chair itself. Two small pieces of evidence show how far his name had already carried. John Cassian, the monk of Marseilles whose writings shaped Western monasticism, wrote a book against the teaching of Nestorius because Leo asked him to. Nestorius was bishop of Constantinople, and his way of distinguishing the divine and the human in Christ was then dividing the Greek church. In the dedication Cassian called Leo "the ornament of the Roman church and of the Divine ministry." And in 431, the year the Council of Ephesus met, Cyril of Alexandria wrote to Leo rather than over his head, asking him to enlist the pope against the ambitions of Juvenal of Jerusalem. Leo recorded the appeal himself years afterwards (Letter 119). A deacon whom Cyril of Alexandria treats as worth writing to is not an ordinary deacon.

(●) 440 AD: He was elected bishop of Rome while he was away in Gaul making peace between two quarrelling officials. + In the spring of 440 the imperial court sent Leo north on an errand that had nothing to do with theology. Aetius, the general who effectively ran the Western empire, was at odds with Albinus, the praetorian prefect in Gaul. A praetorian prefect was the senior civil officer of a whole region, the man who ran the courts and the taxes while the general ran the troops, and with the Huns on the horizon the court could not afford a feud between the two men holding the frontier. A deacon of Rome was sent to patch it up, which tells you what the government thought of his standing. While he was gone Pope Sixtus III died, in August. The clergy and people of Rome elected the absent deacon anyway and sent a deputation after him to fetch him home. Prosper says the Roman church went more than forty days without a bishop, waiting for him with remarkable patience. On 29 September 440 he was consecrated bishop of Rome. The sermon he preached that day is the first in his collected works, and it is very short. He thanks the congregation for reckoning him present when a long journey had forced him to be absent, asks them to pray for him, and stops. His editors guessed the reason for the brevity and were probably right: the ceremonies had already run long.

(●) 449 AD: He wrote out what the church believes about Christ, and a council refused to read it. + The quarrel began with an elderly monk. Eutyches, head of a large monastery outside Constantinople, had spent years fighting the teaching of Nestorius, who had so stressed the distinction between the divine and the human in Christ that he seemed to end with two persons wearing one name. Pushing away from that error, Eutyches fell over the other side and said that after the union there was only one nature left, the human having been absorbed into the divine. In November 448 the bishops within reach of the city met in synod at Constantinople, a synod being a working council of bishops rather than a full council of the church, and under their own bishop, Flavian, they condemned him. Eutyches appealed to Rome. Flavian’s own account of the case was delayed in the post, so Leo first heard the story from the condemned man, which did not improve his temper. When Flavian’s letter finally arrived, Leo answered in June 449 with the document that is Letter 28 in his collection and is known simply as the Tome: a short, patient, pounding statement that Christ is one person in two complete natures, God and man, with neither thinned out to make room for the other. He sent it east with three legates, men who carried his authority as his personal representatives, and he expected it to be read. It was not. The council that met at Ephesus on 8 August 449 was run by Dioscorus of Alexandria with soldiers and a crowd of monks in the hall, Eutyches was restored, Flavian was deposed, and Leo’s letter never left its wrapping. Leo’s deacon Hilary got out one Latin word of protest, contradicitur, "it is contradicted," and then got out of the building, and carried the news back to Rome. Flavian was imprisoned, exiled, and dead within days; the witnesses questioned afterwards at Chalcedon said he had been beaten in the hall, and though a few modern historians doubt that detail, nobody doubts that he went into exile alive and did not come out. Writing two years afterwards to Pulcheria, sister of the emperor Theodosius, Leo described what had happened at Ephesus as "that meeting, not of judges but of robbers" (Letter 95), and the name stuck: historians still call it the Robber Council.

(●) 451 AD: At Chalcedon the bishops heard his letter read out and answered, "Peter has spoken thus through Leo." + Theodosius II died in a riding accident in July 450, and his sister Pulcheria and her new husband Marcian reversed the policy within months. A general council was called, and it met from 8 October to 1 November 451 at Chalcedon, across the water from Constantinople. It was the largest gathering the church had yet held. At the second session the Tome was read out in Greek translation, and the bishops did not debate it. They shouted, and the council’s own acts record what they shouted: "This is the faith of the fathers, this is the faith of the Apostles. So we all believe, thus the orthodox believe. Anathema to him who does not thus believe. Peter has spoken thus through Leo." Then, pointedly, a question: "Why were not these things read at Ephesus?" The council did not simply ratify the letter, and Leo did not simply get his way. The bishops wrote their own definition, using Leo’s substance and some of his phrasing, and adopted it on 22 October. Then, at the sixteenth session on 1 November, they passed a twenty-eighth canon giving the see of Constantinople privileges equal to Rome’s, because Constantinople was now the imperial city. A canon is a standing rule of church order rather than a statement of belief, and this one was about rank: who sits where, and whose word carries in a dispute. Leo’s legates protested on the spot, and Leo himself refused to confirm the canon and went on refusing in letter after letter for the rest of his life. The doctrine he had wanted was won. The church order he had wanted was not.

(●) 452 AD: He rode north to meet Attila the Hun, and three years later walked out to meet the Vandals. + In 452 Attila came over the Alps into Italy, destroyed Aquileia, and turned south. There was no army between him and Rome that anyone trusted. The city sent an embassy of three: Leo, a former consul named Avienus, and Trygetius, who had been prefect. Prosper of Aquitaine, writing within a few years of the event, says that Leo took it on trusting in the help of God, who he knew had never failed the pious in their labours, and that when Attila received the embassy he was so struck by the presence of the high priest that he called off the campaign and withdrew beyond the Danube. A century later Jordanes added the details that have furnished the paintings: the meeting took place "in the Ambuleian district of the Veneti at the well-travelled ford of the river Mincius," near modern Mantua (Getica XLII, in Mierow’s translation). Jordanes also gives the unromantic version of the reasoning. Attila’s own men, he says, talked him out of Rome, not from any tenderness toward the city but because Alaric had sacked it forty-two years before and had died within months, and they did not like the precedent. Plague and hunger were working through the Hunnic camp that summer, and an army was gathering on the Danube behind them. All of that is probably true, and none of it changes the fact that an unarmed bishop went where the government would not. The second time went worse. In 455 the emperor Valentinian III was murdered, and the Vandals under Genseric sailed from Carthage. Leo again went out of the gate to meet them at the head of his clergy. He obtained something: the city was not burned and the people were not massacred. But it was plundered for fourteen days. Rome kept a yearly thanksgiving for the city’s deliverance from a barbarian sack, and one year Leo had to preach to a thin congregation about how few had come, complaining that more was being spent on demons than on the apostles and that mad spectacles drew bigger crowds than blessed martyrdoms (Sermon 84). Which sack that thanksgiving remembered is not settled. Feltoe, who translated the sermons in the nineteenth century, took the anniversary for the deliverance from the Vandals; the sermon’s modern editors date it earlier and read it as the commemoration of Alaric’s sack.

(●) 461 AD: He died after twenty-one years in office, and his letter outlived the empire that carried it. + His last years were spent on the thing he had always been spent on. A monk named Timothy the Cat seized the see of Alexandria and his supporters murdered the lawful bishop in a baptistery; Leo pushed the new emperor into acting, and set out the faith of Chalcedon all over again in a long letter backed with a chain of quotations from earlier fathers, sometimes called the Second Tome. Alexandria was settled in 460. His last surviving letters are the letters of a man whose work has come out right. He died late in 461, on 10 November by the Roman reckoning, and was buried in the portico of Saint Peter’s. His body has been moved three times since: Pope Sergius brought it inside the basilica near the end of the seventh century, it was carried into the rebuilt church in 1607, and it was moved a last time in 1715 to the altar that now bears his name. Two titles were added afterwards, and they arrived in opposite ways. "Great" was not conferred by anybody. It came from common use, the way a nickname does, and only two other bishops of Rome have been given it, Gregory at the end of the sixth century and Nicholas in the ninth. The other title was formally granted, and it took its time: Doctor of the church, a designation for a writer whose teaching the church commends to everyone, was given him in 1754, nearly thirteen centuries after his death.

What He Taught

(T1) Christ is one person in two whole natures, and neither one is thinned out to make room for the other. + Stir blue paint into yellow and you get green, and the blue and the yellow are gone; there is no getting them back out of the tin. Put a costume on a man and you get one thing pretending to be another, with nothing on show but the costume. Those are the two pictures people reach for when a combination is hard to hold, and every wrong answer about Christ in the fifth century turned out to be one of them. Eutyches had the paints: the human nature poured into the divine and gone, like a drop of honey in the sea, which is the image his side of the argument kept reaching for. Others had the costume, a divinity wearing a man. Leo’s answer was to refuse both and hold the plain reading of the Gospels. The word "nature" here means simply what something is, everything that belongs to being that kind of thing; a human nature is a real body, a real mind, a real will, real hunger and tiredness. "Person" means who somebody is, the one who does the acting and to whom you say "you." Leo’s claim is that in Christ there is one who, and two whats, and that the two whats stay whole. The Tome makes the case by pointing at the Gospel narratives rather than by arguing in the abstract, and it is worth watching the method. To be hungry, thirsty, tired and asleep, Leo says, is plainly human; to feed five thousand from five loaves and walk on water is plainly divine, and both are in the same story about the same man. He weeps at the grave of his friend, and then he shouts into the grave and his friend walks out. He hangs on a cross with nails through him, and he opens paradise to a thief. Neither column can be deleted without deleting the Gospel, and neither can be assigned to a different someone. So Christ is one person, and both columns are his. Underneath it runs a reason that is not speculative at all. If he is not really God he cannot save us, and if he is not really man he has not joined us. Leo had put it in a Christmas sermon years earlier, and he never improved on it: unless he were true God he would not bring us a remedy, unless he were true man he would not give us an example.

(Q) "For each form does what is proper to it with the co-operation of the other; that is the Word performing what appertains to the Word, and the flesh carrying out what appertains to the flesh. One of them sparkles with miracles, the other succumbs to injuries." + Source: Leo, Letter 28 (the Tome), section 4 (Feltoe translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 12). "Form" is Leo picking up Paul’s language in Philippians: "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men." (Philippians 2:6-7) In the section just before, Leo had said the thing even more compactly: both natures retain their own proper character without loss, and as the form of God did not do away with the form of a slave, so the form of a slave did not impair the form of God.

(T2) Baptism hands an ordinary person a dignity that he is then able to betray. + Leo’s Rome was not a Christian city in any tidy sense. It was a city where most people had been baptised and a good many of them had not stopped doing what they had always done. In one Christmas sermon he tells his congregation, with obvious distress, that Christians climbing the steps of Saint Peter’s basilica were turning round at the top to bow toward the rising sun before going in to worship (Sermon 27). Some of them, he allows, may have meant it for the Creator of the light rather than the light. It does not matter: a pagan watching will see a Christian do exactly what a pagan does, and will conclude that nothing much has changed. His answer to that is the argument he made his own. He does not lead with a rule. He leads with what has happened to the person he is talking to. God took a human nature; the man standing on those steps was washed into that; therefore the sin he is contemplating is not merely forbidden, it is beneath him. Leo is arguing from status down to behaviour, the way you would tell a son of a great house that a certain thing is not done, not because a law forbids it but because of who he is. The phrase he uses, "partner in the Divine nature," is Peter’s: God has granted his promises "so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire." (2 Peter 1:4) Leo is not suggesting that a Christian stops being a creature and turns into God. He means what the sentence in Peter means, that the life of God has been let into a human life and is now at work there. What follows from it is a practical question about Tuesday.

(Q) "Christian, acknowledge thy dignity, and becoming a partner in the Divine nature, refuse to return to the old baseness by degenerate conduct." + Source: Leo, Sermon 21 (On the Feast of the Nativity, I), section 3 (Feltoe translation). The closing lines of his first Christmas sermon, and the most quoted sentence he ever wrote. What comes immediately after it is the same argument pressed home: remember the Head and the Body of which you are a member, remember that you were made a temple of the Holy Spirit at your baptism, remember that your purchase money is the blood of Christ.

(T3) What was visible in Christ has passed into the church’s sacraments, so that faith now walks where sight used to walk. + Every believer after the first generation runs into the same small grievance, usually around the time of a hard prayer that goes unanswered. They got to see him. I get a book and a piece of bread. Leo preached an Ascension sermon that takes the grievance seriously and turns it over. He begins with Thomas, who would not believe until he had put his hands into the wounds, and with what Christ said to him: blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. Then he draws the conclusion for the whole church. On the fortieth day the visible presence ended. It did not end by being taken away and nothing put in its place. What had been visible, Leo says, passed over into the mysteries, into the things the church does at the font and the altar and in the reading of the word; and sight gave way to teaching, so that faith could be a better and stronger thing than looking. "Sacrament" is worth pausing on, because Leo’s Latin word sacramentum is wider than the modern English one. It can mean a rite like baptism or the Lord’s Supper, and it can mean any ordinary thing that God has loaded with a meaning and made a channel of something real. Leo uses it both ways and the argument works either way: the same Lord who was once in one room in Galilee is now at work in every room where his people gather, and the change is not a downgrade. Christians have divided over what exactly happens at the altar, and those arguments came centuries after Leo and are not settled by him. What the sentence claims is narrower and is common property: the church’s life now is continuous with what the apostles saw, and not a memorial of an absence.

(Q) "And so that which till then was visible of our Redeemer was changed into a sacramental presence, and that faith might be more excellent and stronger, sight gave way to doctrine." + Source: Leo, Sermon 74 (On the Lord’s Ascension, II), section 2 (Feltoe translation). Leo’s Latin is three words long and has been quoted for fifteen centuries: in sacramenta transivit, it passed over into the sacraments. Feltoe renders the phrase "was changed into a sacramental presence." The sermon goes straight on to the proof Leo thinks decisive, that the faith of the apostles grew bolder after the Ascension rather than weaker, and carried them to prisons and beasts and fire.

(T4) Peter is the rock Christ named, and what Christ founded in Peter is standing still. + Once a year, on the anniversary of his consecration, Leo preached about the office he held, and the five sermons that survive are the clearest statement of the Roman claim that anyone had yet made. They are also, and this is easy to miss, sermons about his own inadequacy. He opens the third of them by quoting Habakkuk, "Lord, I heard Thy speech and was afraid," and asking what could be more dismaying than labour given to the frail, exaltation to the humble, dignity to the undeserving. The argument he builds starts where any reader of the Gospels starts. Christ asked the disciples who he was, and Peter answered for them all: "Simon Peter replied, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." (Matthew 16:16) Christ answered that Peter had not worked this out for himself but had been told it by the Father, and that on this rock he would build his church. Leo takes the new name at face value: from Peter being called the Rock and pronounced the Foundation, he says, we learn what Peter’s association with Christ was. Then comes the step that is Leo’s own. Since the confession was not Peter’s achievement but God’s gift, its firmness does not die with Peter. What Peter believed remains because Christ remains, and what Christ established in Peter remains for the same reason. Leo gives it a shape anyone who has stood inside a large building can hold on to: a foundation that is not crushed by the weight of the temple resting on it. He draws a strong conclusion from it: whatever is rightly done or rightly decided in Rome is Peter’s doing, because Peter’s authority lives on in his chair. Christians have read that conclusion in sharply different ways ever since, and the reading is not settled by reading Leo. What the sermon plainly does not say is that the bishop of Rome is personally impressive. Leo’s entire point is that he is not, and that the thing holding is not him.

(Q) "For the solidity of that faith which was praised in the chief of the Apostles is perpetual: and as that remains which Peter believed in Christ, so that remains which Christ instituted in Peter." + Source: Leo, Sermon 3 (On His Birthday, III, preached on the anniversary of his consecration), section 2 (Feltoe translation). "Birthday" here means the anniversary of a bishop’s ordination, not of his birth. A little later in the same sermon Leo says the thing in a form his congregation could picture: throughout the church, Peter daily says, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God."

(T5) A fast that does not feed somebody is only hunger. + Roughly a third of Leo’s surviving sermons are about fasting and the collection, which surprises readers who come to him expecting nothing but the Tome. Four times a year the Roman church kept a fast, and every time Leo preached the same connection, in different words, until nobody could miss it. The connection is this. Going without food, taken by itself, is a diet. It becomes something else when two things are attached to it. The first is that the appetite being starved is not only in the stomach: when the body fasts from food, he tells them, let the mind fast from vices, and he lists them without softening, envy, temper, the appetite for getting even, the lust to see somebody punished. A man who skips dinner and then spends the evening nursing a grudge has fasted from nothing that mattered. The second is the poor, and here Leo is entirely practical. The money not spent on the food you did not eat is money in your hand, and there are people in this city who need it in theirs. He goes further than the arithmetic. God could simply have given the poor what he gave you, Leo says, and he did it this way instead so that both of you would have something to gain, they in patience and you in love. The line that follows is the one worth keeping: it is by you that the Lord feeds and clothes his poor. The reasoning is older than Leo and comes from Christ himself, who put the whole of it into one sentence about a judgment: "And the King will answer them, Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me." (Matthew 25:40)

(Q) "And hence we warn you, beloved, in fatherly affection, to make this winter fast fruitful to yourselves by bounteous alms, rejoicing that by you the Lord feeds and clothes His poor." + Source: Leo, Sermon 19 (On the Fast of the Tenth Month, VIII), section 3 (Feltoe translation). The tenth month is December, and this is the winter Ember fast, one of the four seasonal fasts of the Roman year, kept on the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday of the same week. Earlier in the same sermon comes the other half of the teaching: when the body fasts from food, let the mind fast from vices.

(Q) "For unless He were true God, He would not bring us a remedy, unless He were true Man, He would not give us an example." + Source: Leo, Sermon 21 (On the Feast of the Nativity, I), section 2 (Feltoe translation). Preached years before the Tome, to ordinary Romans on Christmas morning, and it is the Tome in one sentence. The reason Leo would not let Eutyches shave anything off either side is sitting here in plain view: take away the Godhead and there is no cure, take away the manhood and there is nobody to follow. Paul had stated the same double truth in one clause: "For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5), and Leo quotes it in the Tome at exactly the point where he needs both halves at once.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Chalcedon wrote his letter into its own definition, and that sentence became the common property of Christendom. + The council did not adopt the Tome as a document. It did something more lasting: it wrote Leo’s substance into a definition of its own and put four adverbs at the centre of it. Christ is to be confessed in two natures, the bishops said, "unconfusedly, immutably, indivisibly, inseparably," and then the clause that is Leo’s own thought in the council’s words: the distinction of the natures is not taken away by the union, "but rather the peculiar property of each nature being preserved and being united in one Person and subsistence." Two of those adverbs are aimed at Eutyches, who had confused and changed the natures, and two at Nestorius, who had divided and separated the person. The definition fences a road on both sides and leaves the mystery in the middle unexplained, which is the mark of a good creed rather than a failure of one. That definition is now held in common by the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the historic Protestant confessions, which makes it one of the very few things nearly all Christians say in the same words. Leo’s own way of putting things also ran straight into the Western liturgy: the language of the Athanasian Creed, recited in the West for a thousand years, is close enough to his that scholars have long noticed the resemblance.

(†) Whole churches refused the Tome, and the division outlasted every empire involved in it. + Honesty requires the other half of the record. Chalcedon did not end the argument; in large parts of the Christian East it started a new one. Egypt, much of Syria, and later Armenia and Ethiopia would not accept the council, and the churches descended from them, the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox, have never accepted it since. They are usually called the Oriental Orthodox churches, and between them they number tens of millions of Christians today. Their objection was never that Christ is less than fully man. It was that Cyril of Alexandria had spoken of "one incarnate nature of God the Word," that Cyril had been vindicated at Ephesus in 431, and that Leo’s way of counting to two sounded to them like Nestorius coming back in Latin dress. Their own formula, that Christ is out of two natures in one united nature, was meant to say what Chalcedon said and to say it in Cyril’s vocabulary. Imperial politics did the rest: the emperors enforced Chalcedon with a heavy hand in provinces that had their own reasons to resent Constantinople, and by the time anyone tried persuasion the split had hardened into separate hierarchies. Fifteen centuries later the theologians went back and looked again. Joint commissions in the 1970s, and then the agreed statements the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox theologians signed at the monastery of Anba Bishoy in Egypt in 1989 and at Chambésy in 1990, concluded that the two families confess the same faith in the incarnate Word and have been divided largely by two vocabularies, each using the word "nature" to mean something the other did not. The old anathemas, the formal sentences of condemnation each side pronounced on the other, have not all been lifted, and the churches are still not in communion, which is to say their people do not yet share one another’s altars. But the finding matters for reading Leo: the great division his letter is blamed for turns out to have been, in substantial part, a quarrel about what a word meant.

(†) The West read his anniversary sermons as the charter of the papacy, and Christians have read that claim in opposite directions ever since. + No earlier bishop of Rome had set out the Petrine claim as fully or as confidently as Leo did, and the later Western church built on him. Medieval canon lawyers quoted his anniversary sermons; the reforming popes of the eleventh century took them as settled ground; the First Vatican Council in 1870 cited him when it defined papal primacy. Catholic readers have generally seen in him the office working exactly as it should, a bishop of Rome saving the doctrine of the incarnation when the Eastern sees had failed it. The Reformers read the same sermons and drew the opposite conclusion, while keeping without argument the council Leo’s letter had shaped. Calvin is a fair sample: in the fourth book of the Institutes he goes at the man rather than the doctrine, granting Leo learning and eloquence and then calling him "excessively desirous of glory and dominion," and reading the claims for Peter’s chair as the seed of everything the Reformation refused. The Eastern Orthodox position is different again and is worth stating in its own terms rather than as a milder Protestantism: the East honours Leo as a saint and holds Chalcedon as an ecumenical council, one of the handful of gatherings whose decisions bind the whole church, while reading the honour Chalcedon paid Rome as a primacy among equal bishops, a first place among them, and not a jurisdiction over them, a right to overrule them. That is precisely what the twenty-eighth canon said, and precisely why Leo would not sign it. Both readings are still live, and nothing in Leo settles between them. What can be said without taking sides is that the Tome and the anniversary sermons have had very different careers. One of them united the church and the other divided it, and they came from the same pen in the same decade.

(†) Where he fell short: he welcomed the executioner against heretics, and reached for the emperor’s law against a fellow bishop. + Two things in Leo’s own record, written by his own hand, are worth naming plainly, and neither requires a modern standard to see. His contemporaries saw them. - The sword against heresy. In 447 Leo wrote to Turribius, bishop of Astorga in Spain, about the revival of the Priscillianists, a sect that mixed Christian language with astrology and magic (Letter 15). Sixty years earlier the emperor Maximus had executed their founder Priscillian and several followers at Trier. Leo does not merely record it. He approves it: the rulers of the world, he writes, so abhorred the thing that "they laid low its originator, with most of his disciples, by the sword of the public laws," and this severity "was for long a help to the Church’s law of gentleness," which relies on the judgment of priests and "shuns blood-stained vengeance," but is assisted by the stern decrees of Christian princes. The sentence gives away that he knew where the difficulty lay, and he stepped over it anyway. And the objection was not anachronistic: Martin of Tours and Ambrose of Milan had protested the executions when they happened, and Sulpicius Severus reports in his Chronicle that Martin withdrew from communion with the bishops who had procured them. The weapons of this warfare, Paul had written, "are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds." (2 Corinthians 10:4) And when the disciples proposed fire on a village that would not receive Christ, "he turned and rebuked them." (Luke 9:55) - The imperial rescript against Hilary of Arles. In 444 Hilary, bishop of Arles and a man of real holiness, deposed a bishop in a provincial synod. The deposed man appealed to Rome; Hilary walked to Rome in midwinter to argue his case, was treated roughly, and went home stripped of his metropolitan rights, which is to say his authority over the other bishops of his province. Leo then obtained from the emperor Valentinian III a rescript, issued in 445: a rescript was a written ruling from the emperor carrying the force of law, and this one made resistance to the Roman see a matter for the civil power. Leo’s own nineteenth-century translator called the episode "not very creditable," and it is hard to improve on the verdict. The parable that governs this is the one about letting the wheat and the weeds grow together, where the master’s reason for refusing an early harvest is precisely the risk of pulling up the wrong plants: "No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them." (Matthew 13:29) Neither charge touches what Leo is chiefly read for, and that is worth saying too. The sentences he wrote about Christ have held for fifteen hundred years under scrutiny from every direction. The man who wrote them also believed that the empire’s coercive power was a proper tool of the church’s peace, and Christians of every communion have since had a long and costly education in why it is not.