The Ninety-Six Sermons

The surviving preaching of St. Leo the Great is the first substantial body of papal sermons to come down to us intact: ninety-six genuine tractatus, short and rhetorically polished, organized around the cycle of the liturgical year and edited critically by Antoine Chavasse in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 138 and 138A. This file describes the corpus and its transmission, its arrangement by feast and fast, the celebrated clarity of Leo’s Latin, and the way the sermons served as the seedbed in which the Christology of the Tome was first preached.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Surviving Corpus

Of all the bishops of Rome before the sixth century, Leo I (pope 440–461) is the only one from whom a substantial body of preaching survives, and it survives because his hearers — and Leo himself — judged it worth preserving in writing. The standard count of the authentic sermons is ninety-six; the critical edition by Antoine Chavasse carries the title Sancti Leonis Magni Romani Pontificis Tractatus septem et nonaginta (“ninety-seven sermons”), the higher figure reflecting an editorial numbering and the inclusion of pieces whose authenticity has been weighed differently, while ninety-six remains the conventional total of the genuine homilies (Chavasse, ed., CCSL 138 and 138A [Turnhout: Brepols, 1973]; cf. the older edition reprinted at PL 54:137–468). A handful of further sermons are transmitted under Leo’s name in various manuscripts but are regarded as spurious or doubtful, so that the corpus is unusually stable: scholars dispute the edges, not the core.

Two features of the transmission deserve emphasis. First, the sermons were not literary compositions written for the desk but preached texts — delivered before the Roman congregation and then taken down and edited into the polished form we read, so that they preserve both the immediacy of oral address (“dearly-beloved,” dilectissimi, recurs as a direct vocative) and the controlled architecture of written prose (Sermon 21.1; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12). Second, the medieval Church received them as a treasury: extracts entered the office of readings, and the great Nativity and Lenten sermons were copied, excerpted, and read liturgically for centuries, which is one reason so much of the corpus survived where the preaching of Leo’s predecessors did not (Hunt, intro. to St. Leo the Great: Sermons, FOTC 93).

The Tractatus and the Chavasse Edition

In the manuscripts and in the standard modern edition the individual sermons are styled tractatus — “treatments” or “expositions” — rather than homiliae or sermones in the later technical sense, and the designation is apt, for each is a compact doctrinal treatment of the day’s mystery rather than a running commentary on a lectionary text (Chavasse, CCSL 138, praefatio). The 1973 Chavasse edition is the scholarly reference point: it distributes the corpus across two volumes, CCSL 138 carrying roughly the first half of the cycle and CCSL 138A the second, with a continuous numbering that runs to ninety-seven and an apparatus establishing the text against the early manuscript tradition (Chavasse, ed., CCSL 138/138A). Where a reader needs the older Migne text, the sermons appear at PL 54, but the column references there should be used with care, since Migne reproduces the earlier Ballerini numbering; the Chavasse numbering is now standard, and the two principal English translations — Charles Lett Feltoe’s in NPNF 2nd series volume 12 and the FOTC 93 version by Jane Patricia Freeland and Agnes Josephine Conway — both key to it (Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12; Freeland and Conway, FOTC 93).

Organized by the Liturgical Year

The most striking thing about the collection as a whole is its shape: it is not a random gathering of occasional addresses but a cycle that follows the Roman liturgical year, so that the corpus is in effect a year of Leo’s preaching reconstructed feast by feast and fast by fast (Hunt, FOTC 93, intro.). The arrangement, following the order of the Chavasse edition, runs as follows.

The cycle opens not with a feast of the Lord but with Leo’s own ministry: the anniversary sermons of his consecration (the natalis or natale ordinationis sermons, roughly Sermon 1–5), preached on the yearly commemoration of his elevation to the see of Peter, in which he sets out his understanding of the episcopal — and Petrine — office (Sermon 3, on the anniversary of his consecration; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12). There follow sermons on the annual collections for the poor (the collecta, Sermon 6–11) and the December fast and Ember days (Sermon 12–20). The doctrinal heart of the first half is the great series On the Nativity (In Nativitate Domini, Sermon 21–30), preached at Christmas across successive years, including the famous Sermon 21 with its address “Christian, recognize your dignity” (Sermon 21.3; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12). The cycle moves on to Epiphany (Sermon 31–38), then to the long Lenten course — the Quadragesima sermons (Sermon 39–50) — within which falls the single great sermon On the Transfiguration (Sermon 51), preached in the Lenten season as a meditation on the glory hidden beneath the coming Passion (Sermon 51; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12).

The second half of the year is dominated by the Passion sermons (De Passione Domini, Sermon 52–72), an extended sequence preached through Holy Week that forms, with the Nativity series, the Christological core of the whole corpus. After these come the feasts of Ascension (Sermon 73–74) and Pentecost (Sermon 75–81), then sermons for the further Ember fasts of the year (the ieiunium of the four seasons), the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul on 29 June, the commemoration of the Maccabees and the Roman saints, the September fast (the fast of the seventh month), and the alms-collections — closing, in the last numbered piece, with a sermon directed against Eutyches, in which the preacher’s pulpit and the controversialist’s dogmatic concern visibly converge (Sermon 96; Chavasse, CCSL 138A; Hunt, FOTC 93, intro.). Read in order, the corpus is thus a calendar: the mysteries of Christ unfolded in the rhythm of the Roman year, framed at either end by the bishop’s own office and the discipline of fasting and almsgiving.

The Quality of the Latin

Leo’s sermons are admired not only for their doctrine but for their prose. He is one of the masters of late-antique Latin, and the qualities that make him so are everywhere in the sermons: a studied use of the cursus, the rhythmical cadencing of clause-endings that gives his sentences their characteristic balance and weight; a fondness for antithesis, in which the paradoxes of the Incarnation are set out in matched, opposed phrases — the impassible made passible, the eternal born in time, majesty taking on lowliness — so that the rhetorical form itself enacts the doctrine of the two natures; and an unusual brevity and economy, each sermon being short, tightly constructed, and free of digression (Hunt, FOTC 93, intro.; on Leo’s style see also the analyses cited there). This is preaching of high catechetical clarity: Leo states the mystery in measured, lapidary sentences a congregation could carry away, and the same balance and antithesis that polish the prose also serve the teaching, holding the divine and human in Christ in a single, undivided utterance (Sermon 21.2; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12).

Seedbed of the Tome

For all their liturgical occasion, the sermons are doctrinally compact, and in them Leo had already worked out — in the pulpit, before the Eutychian crisis forced it into a conciliar document — the two-natures Christology that the Tome to Flavian of 449 would make a touchstone of orthodoxy. The Nativity and Passion sermons in particular state, in homiletic form, the very confession the Tome would state in dogmatic form: that in the one Christ the Word’s assumption of flesh neither diminishes the Godhead nor absorbs the manhood, but that each nature acts according to its own properties in communion with the other (Sermon 21–30, De Nativitate; cf. Sermon 52–72, De Passione; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12). The continuity is so close that the Tome reads in places like a sermon distilled to its propositions, and the sermons read like the Tome preached. The corpus is therefore not a sideline to Leo’s theology but its native soil: the place where his Christology was first spoken aloud, and from which the conciliar formula grew.

See Also

• Preaching the Mystery — the theological companion to this file: what Leo preached, the dignity of the redeemed Christian, and the admirabile commercium
• The Tome to Flavian — the dogmatic document the Nativity and Passion sermons anticipate
• The Incarnation and the Two Natures — the full Christology the sermons preach in compact form
• Church Fathers — Leo’s place among the patristic witnesses
• St. Cyril of Alexandria — the Eastern Father whose Christology Leo’s preaching parallels

References

• Leo the Great, Tractatus septem et nonaginta (Sermons), ed. Antoine Chavasse, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 138 and 138A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1973).
• Leo the Great, Sermones, PL 54:137–468 (Ballerini numbering).
• Leo the Great, Letters and Sermons, trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 12 (New York, 1895).
• St. Leo the Great: Sermons, trans. Jane Patricia Freeland and Agnes Josephine Conway, Fathers of the Church 93 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).