VOL. XII.

THE

LETTERS AND SERMONS

OF

LEO THE GREAT

BISHOP OF ROME,

TRANSLATED, WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND INDICES,

BY THE

REV. CHARLES LETT FELTOE, M. A.,

LATE FELLOW OF CLARE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

b

PREFATORY NOTE.

EXCEPT for such valuable help-chiefly however in the way of comment and explanation-as Canon Bright's volume (S. Leo on the Incarnation) has supplied, both the selection and the translation of the Letters and Sermons of Leo Magnus are practically original. It is even more difficult to feel satisfied oneself, than to satisfy others either with a selection from a great man's works or with a translation of them. The powers of Leo as a preacher both of doctrine and of practice are very remarkable, and in my anxiety to keep within the limits imposed by the publishers, I have erred in presenting too few rather than too many of the Sermons to the English reader. Only those that are generally held genuine are represented, though several of the doubtful ones are fine sermons, and those translated are in most cases no better than those omitted. Even when the same thought is repeated again and again (as is often the case), it is almost always clothed in such different language, and surrounded with so many other thoughts of value, that every sermon has an almost equal claim to be selected.

With regard to the Letters, the series connected with the Eutychian controversy-the chief occupation of Leo's episcopate-is given nearly complete, whereas only specimens of his mode of dealing with other matters have been selected for presentation. With one or two exceptions, however, I feel more confident about the Letters than about the Sermons that the omitted are less important than the included. I wish I could make even a similar boast about the merits of the translation.

The text rendered is for the most part that of the Ballerinii as given by Migne (Patrologie, Vol. LIV.), though a more critical edition is much to be desired.

FORNHAM ALL SAINTS',
Eastertide, 1894.

CHARLES LETT FELTOE.

INTRODUCTION.

LIFE.

THE details of Leo's early life are extremely scanty and uncertain. Is is probable that he was born between 390 and 400 A.D. There is a tradition that his father was a Tuscan named Quintian, and that Volaterræ, a town in the north of Etruria, was his birthplace. Of his youth we know nothing: his writings contain no allusions to that or to any other part of his personal history. One may reasonably infer from the essentially Roman character of his literary style, from the absence of quotations out of pagan literature, and from his self-confessed gnorance of Greek, that his education was, though thorough after its kind, limited to Christian and Latin culture. A reference to the pages of any secular history of the Roman empire will give the reader an idea of the scenes amidst which, and no doubt by the aid of which, Leo the boy was formed and moulded into Leo Magnus, the first great Latin-speaking pope and bishop of Rome, the first great Italian theologian, "the final defender of the truth of our LORD'S Person against both its assailants 2" (i.e. Nestorius and Eutyches), whom it pleased GOD in His providence to raise up in the Western (and not as oftenest hitherto in the Eastern) portion of His Church. Politically, intellectually, and theologically the period in which this great character grew up, lived and worked, was one of transition: the Roman Empire, learning and thought, paganism were each alike at the last gasp, and neither in Church nor State was there any other at all of Leo's calibre. This consideration will account for the wonderful influence, partly for good and partly for bad, which his master-mind and will was permitted to exercise on the after-ages of Christendom.

During his early manhood the Pelagian controversy was raging, and it is thought that the acolyte named Leo, whom Augustine mentions in his letters on this subject as employed by pope Zosimus to carry communications between Rome and the African church, is the future pope. Under Celestine, who was pope from 422 to 432, he was archdeacon of Rome, and he seems already to have made a name for himself: for Cassian, the Gallican writer whom he had urged to write a work on the Incarnation, in yielding to his suggestion, calls him “the ornament of the Roman church and of the Divine ministry," and S. Cyril (in 431, the date of the Council of Ephesus) appeals to Leo (as Leo has himself recorded in Letter CXIX., chap. 4) to procure the pope's support in stopping the ambitious designs of Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem. Under the next pope, Sixtus (432-440), we hear of him in Prosper's Chronicon (under the year 439) again in connexion with Pelagianism 3: he seems to have stirred up the vigilance of the pope against the crafty designs of one Julius of Eclanum, who, having been deprived of his bishopric for holding that heresy, was attempting to be restored without full proof of orthodoxy.

2 Wilberforce on Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, p. 246, quoted by Bright.

The objection that Prosper and Leo himself both speak of more than Rome or any other Italian city can claim the honour Rome as his patria does not seem of sufficient weight to over- with certainty. throw a tradition, which it is somewhat hard to account for the existence of. To a native of central Italy under the Empire, who had spent all his public life in Rome, the Eternal city was equally patria, whether it was his actual birthplace or not. At the same time there is no evidence that Volaterræ any

3 The chief error of Pelagius (= Morgan), who is commonly thought to have been of British origin, was, as is well-known, the denial of original or bir:b-sin: see Article ix.