The Man and the Office

Leo I governed the Roman Church for twenty-one years across the collapse of the Western Empire, fusing in one person the administrator, the theologian, and the preacher. He understood himself as the indignus heres beati Petri, the “unworthy heir of blessed Peter,” exercising an office whose dignity he held to be undiminished by the weakness of its holder; the contrast between the sparse personal record of the man and the immense public record of the office is the key to reading him.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

A Pontificate in a Collapsing West

Leo’s twenty-one years as Bishop of Rome (440–461) fell within the lifetime of the Western Roman Empire’s disintegration, and the disorder of the age is the indispensable background to everything he did (Neil, Leo the Great, London: Routledge, 2009, 6–11; Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, Leiden: Brill, 2008, 1–4). Rome had been sacked by Alaric’s Goths in 410, an event that shook the confidence of the Christian and pagan worlds alike and provoked Augustine’s City of God; the city Leo inherited was a diminished imperial capital, its emperors residing chiefly at Ravenna, its security increasingly precarious before the movements of Vandals, Huns, and Goths. The reigning emperor through almost the whole of Leo’s pontificate was Valentinian III (425–455), a weak ruler under whose government the real military power lay with the general Aëtius until the latter’s murder in 454 (Wessel, 1–4; Jalland, The Life and Times of St. Leo the Great, London: SPCK, 1941, 53–60). Into the vacuum left by faltering secular authority the Roman bishop was drawn, by force of circumstance as much as by design, to act for the city and the Western church in ways that had no exact precedent. Leo’s greatness is in large part the greatness of a man who met an age of collapse with an unbroken sense of order, duty, and continuity (Neil, 6–11).

The Rescript of 445

The interpenetration of ecclesiastical and imperial authority in Leo’s world is concretely visible in the imperial constitution he obtained from Valentinian III in 445. Issued on 8 July 445 as Novella 17 of Valentinian, the rescript affirmed the primacy of the Roman see over the churches of the West, grounding it on the merit of Peter, the dignity of the city of Rome, and the authority of the Council of Nicaea, and it directed the provincial governors to compel by force any bishop who refused a summons to Rome (Valentinian III, Novella 17, 8 July 445, ed. Mommsen and Meyer, Codex Theodosianus, vol. 2; Wessel, 13–16; Neil, 35–38). Its immediate occasion was a hard jurisdictional conflict with Hilary, bishop of Arles, who had presumed to depose and replace a bishop within his Gallic province, and whose conduct Leo treated as an intrusion upon the order he held the Roman see bound to guard (Leo, Ep. 10; PL 54; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 12, Feltoe; Jalland, 88–96). The rescript shows imperial law lending its coercive arm to Leo’s understanding of Rome’s responsibility for the Western churches; the deeper theological account of that primacy, and its careful distinction from later claims, belongs to a fuller treatment elsewhere in this collection (see section 05) and is not pre-empted here.

The Unworthy Heir of Blessed Peter

Leo’s own most characteristic word for himself is not a title of grandeur but one of humility: he is the indignus heres beati Petri, the “unworthy heir of blessed Peter.” The phrase belongs to the cycle of sermons he preached each year on the anniversary of his consecration, where he reflects most directly on the office he bears. There he insists that the dignity of Peter “is not abated even in an unworthy heir,” precisely so that the honor and authority of the see should be referred to the Apostle and to Christ who gave the commission, and never to the personal merit of the bishop who happens to hold it (Sermon 3; PL 54:144–148; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 12, Feltoe; cf. Wessel, 17–22). The construction is deliberate and load-bearing: Leo separates the permanence and weight of the office from the frailty of the man, so that his confessed unworthiness magnifies rather than diminishes the chair he occupies. This is the inner logic of his whole self-presentation as pope — a stewardship held in the place of Peter (vice Petri), exercised in fear and dependence, in which the bishop is the heir and instrument of an authority that is not his own (Sermon 3; Neil, 28–35).

Administrator, Theologian, Preacher Fused

What distinguishes Leo among the bishops of his age is the seamlessness with which three vocations meet in one figure. The administrator is visible in the roughly one hundred and forty letters of the traditional collection, instruments of governance reaching from Gaul and Spain to Egypt and Constantinople, marked by precision of law and clarity of decision (Hunt, intro. to St. Leo the Great: Letters, FOTC 34, 1957; Neil, 17–24). The theologian is visible above all in the Tome to Flavian of 449, whose balanced confession of the two natures in the one person of Christ would be acclaimed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 as the voice of Peter (Leo, Ep. 28 [the Tome]; PL 54:755–782; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 12, Feltoe). The preacher is visible in the surviving sermons, terse, rhythmical, and doctrinally exact, in which the same Christology is set before the Roman congregation in the cadences of the liturgical year. These are not three careers laid side by side but one mind working in three registers, the theology of the Tome continuous with the preaching of the feasts and enforced by the governance of the letters (Wessel, 22–28; Neil, 17–28). It is this fusion — pastoral, doctrinal, and juridical at once — that gives Leo’s pontificate its unusual coherence.

The Corpus and the Hidden Man

The paradox of Leo is that the office is voluminously documented while the man is almost hidden. Ninety-six sermons survive as genuine, and the letters of the traditional collection number around one hundred and forty-three, though the corpus is counted variously and can be reckoned higher — up to roughly one hundred and seventy-three if the letters addressed to Leo are included alongside those he wrote (Neil, 17; Hunt, FOTC 34, intro.; Wessel, 17). Yet from all this public record almost nothing personal emerges: there is no autobiography, no circle of intimate correspondence revealing the private man, scarcely a confiding word about his own interior life beyond the formal humility of the anniversary sermons. We possess the bishop in extraordinary fullness and the human being barely at all. This is not an accident of survival but an expression of Leo’s own conviction, for he consistently effaces himself behind the office, attributing all that he does to Peter and to Christ. The reader who comes to Leo seeking the personality finds instead the function magnificently performed; the man is to be inferred only from the consistency, gravity, and discipline of the work (Wessel, 17–22; Neil, 1–4).

Why “the Great”

Leo is the first Bishop of Rome to be called Magnus, “the Great,” an epithet the Latin tradition would later extend among the popes only to Gregory I (590–604) (Neil, 11–17; Wessel, 1–4). The title gathers up several distinct achievements into a single judgment of stature. Doctrinally, the Tome gave the Latin West its decisive contribution to the Christological settlement of Chalcedon, and Leo’s name stands permanently attached to the council’s confession of the one Christ in two natures. Ecclesially, he articulated and enforced the Roman see’s sense of responsibility for the wider church with a clarity none of his predecessors had matched. Politically and pastorally, the tradition remembers him as the bishop who went out to meet Attila and the Huns in 452 and who interceded for Rome before the Vandals in 455, standing for his city when the empire could not (Prosper of Aquitaine, Epitoma Chronicon, s.a. 452; ed. Mommsen, MGH AA 9; Neil, 11–17). The Orthodox tradition venerates Leo as a saint and a Father precisely for the Christological witness of the Tome, received into the dogmatic patrimony of the undivided Church at Chalcedon; the later Western elaboration of his primatial claims is a distinct question. He is “the Great,” in the end, because in an age of dissolution he held together in his single person the faith, the order, and the courage that his church and his city most needed.

References

Leo the Great, Sermons, PL 54; trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 12; trans. Jane Patricia Freeland and Agnes Josephine Conway, St. Leo the Great: Sermons, Fathers of the Church 93 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
Leo the Great, Letters (incl. Ep. 10 to the bishops of Vienne; Ep. 28, the Tome to Flavian), PL 54; trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 12; trans. Edmund Hunt, St. Leo the Great: Letters, Fathers of the Church 34 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1957).
Valentinian III, Novella 17 (8 July 445), in Codex Theodosianus with the Novellae, ed. Theodor Mommsen and Paul M. Meyer (Berlin, 1905), vol. 2.
Prosper of Aquitaine, Epitoma Chronicon, ed. Theodor Mommsen, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892).
Bronwen Neil, Leo the Great, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2009).
Susan Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
Trevor Jalland, The Life and Times of St. Leo the Great (London: SPCK, 1941).