The Tome to Flavian

The flagship of Leo’s doctrinal legacy: the dogmatic letter (Ep. 28) that he sent to Flavian of Constantinople on 13 June 449, in answer to the Eutychian crisis that Flavian’s Home Synod of 448 had brought to a head. The Tome confesses two complete and undiminished natures, divine and human, united in the one persona of the Word, each retaining its own properties and proper operation — distilled in the hinge sentence, “each form does what is proper to it in communion with the other.” This file expounds that Christology, the persona/two-natures grammar that carries it, the Western tradition (Tertullian, Augustine, Hilary, Ambrose) behind its idiom, and the way the Tome both converges with Cyril of Alexandria and differs from him in vocabulary — a difference that earned it acclaim at Chalcedon as the voice of Peter, but suspicion among strict Cyrillians and the non-Chalcedonians.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Eutychian Crisis and Flavian’s Synod

The Tome was occasioned, not theorized. In November 448 a Home Synod (synodos endemousa) of some thirty to forty bishops then resident at Constantinople, presided over by the Patriarch Flavian and prompted by the accusation of Eusebius of Dorylaeum, examined the teaching of Eutyches, an aged and influential archimandrite of a monastery in the capital (ACO II.1.1, the acts of the 448 synod, re-read at Chalcedon; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, vol. 1, 1–37). Eutyches, a zealous opponent of Nestorius, had pressed Cyrilline language past its limit: he would confess that Christ was “of/from two natures” (ek dyo physeōn) before the union but “one nature” (mia physis) after it, and — most damningly — he balked at saying that Christ’s flesh was consubstantial with ours, conceding the point only under pressure and never with conviction (ACO II.1.1; cf. Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, 523–526). The synod found this a denial of the integrity of Christ’s humanity and deposed and excommunicated him.

Eutyches did not submit. He appealed over the synod’s head to the great sees — to Rome, to Alexandria, to Ravenna and Jerusalem — protesting that he had been wronged and that he held nothing but the faith of Nicaea and of Cyril (Leo, Ep. 20; Ep. 21; trans. Hunt, FOTC 34). Flavian for his part sent Leo a full account of the proceedings. So by the spring of 449 the Bishop of Rome had before him both the appellant’s complaint and the patriarch’s record, and the dispute that had begun in a monastery of Constantinople had become a matter on which Rome was asked to pronounce. Leo answered with the letter that the Church would come to call the Tome.

The Writing of the Tome

The Tome is Leo’s twenty-eighth letter, addressed Dilectissimo fratri Flaviano Leo episcopus and dated 13 June 449 (Leo, Ep. 28; PL 54:755–782; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12; also Hunt, FOTC 34). It was drafted in Leo’s chancery — the prefect Prosper of Aquitaine is traditionally associated with its Latin polish — but its theology is unmistakably Leo’s own, the same confession he was preaching from the Roman pulpit at the very season he composed it (cf. Sermon 21–30; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12; see Preaching the Mystery). Leo intended it to be read into the record of the general council that the Emperor Theodosius II had by then summoned to Ephesus; his legates carried it east. That it was suppressed there, and only vindicated two years later at Chalcedon, belongs to the next stage of the story (see The Latrocinium and the Road to Chalcedon).

The letter is short, lucid, and pastoral in tone, organized less as a syllogism than as a rule of faith expounded against a specific error. Leo first rebukes Eutyches for “unskilfulness” — for not knowing the very Creed he claimed to defend — and then walks through the Christology of the Apostles’ Creed phrase by phrase, showing that the catholic confession already contains, in plain baptismal language, everything Eutyches had abandoned (Ep. 28.1–2; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12).

The Two Natures in One Person

The doctrinal core of the Tome is a confession of two complete natures in the one Person of the Word. Against Eutyches’ single nature, Leo insists that the Son of God, “remaining in the form of God” and equal to the Father, “took the form of a slave without stain of sin, increasing the human and not diminishing the divine” (Ep. 28.3; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12). The Incarnation is therefore addition, not subtraction or fusion: the Godhead lost nothing and the manhood was real and entire. The two natures are not two persons but one and the same Son, in whom each nature is preserved whole — “complete in what was His own, complete in what was ours” (Ep. 28.3–4; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12).

Leo’s grammar here is precise and deliberately Latin. The single subject is the one persona of the Word; the natures (naturae) are what is doubled. Because there is one persona, the properties of both natures may be predicated of the one Christ — the communicatio idiomatum, the “communication of idioms,” by which it is true to say that the Son of God was crucified and that the Son of Man came down from heaven, the title given according to one nature while the act belongs to the other (Ep. 28.5; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12; cf. Grillmeier, vol. 1, 534–539). This is the same conviction the Greek tradition guarded with the Theotokos: it is one who is born, suffers, and is glorified, and that one is at once true God and true man.

“Each Form Does What Is Proper to It”

The hinge of the whole letter — the single sentence over which Chalcedon, and the schism that followed it, would turn — comes in the third section. In the Latin: “Agit enim utraque forma cum alterius communione quod proprium est: Verbo scilicet operante quod Verbi est, et carne exsequente quod carnis est” (Ep. 28.4; PL 54:767). In the NPNF rendering: “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” (trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12).

The sentence does two things at once, and both must be held together to read it rightly. First, it affirms the distinct proper operation of each nature: the Word works what is the Word’s — the miracles, the divine majesty — and the flesh undergoes what is the flesh’s — hunger, weariness, suffering, death (Ep. 28.4; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12). The integrity of the humanity, which Eutyches denied, is thereby guarded at the level of activity: a nature that does nothing of its own is no real nature at all. Second, and decisively, the phrase cum alterius communione — “in communion with the other” — binds the two operations into a single concrete agency. The two forms never act in isolation, as though two subjects took turns; each acts always in communion with the other, because there is only one persona who acts in and through both. Leo immediately illustrates: “The one of these shines out in miracles, the other succumbs to injuries” — yet it is the same Christ who raises the dead and who weeps at the tomb, who walks on the water and who hangs upon the cross (Ep. 28.4; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12). The clause that guarantees the two is held in the same breath as the clause that guarantees the one.

The Western Sources

The Tome is not an ad hoc composition but the deposit of a long Latin tradition, and its idiom — natura, forma, persona, substantia — is the inheritance of the Western Fathers rather than of the Alexandrian school. Behind Leo’s two-natures language and his communicatio idiomatum stand Tertullian, who first fixed for the Latin Church the formula of “one person in two substances” (una persona, duae substantiae) in Against Praxeas, and whose vocabulary of persona and substantia Leo’s grammar directly continues (Tertullian, Adversus Praxean 27; cf. Grillmeier, vol. 1, 528–529; Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, 220–238). Behind it stand Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose of Milan, whose Latin Christology of the two natures Leo had absorbed, and above all Augustine, whose teaching on the one Person and the integrity of the assumed humanity supplies the deep structure of the letter (Augustine, Enchiridion 35–40; Sermons on the Incarnation; cf. Wessel, 222–230). Leo himself signals this rootedness by appealing not to a theologian’s argument but to the regula fidei, the rule of faith confessed in baptism — the Tome presents itself as the catholic tradition speaking, not as a private opinion (Ep. 28.1, 5; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12).

Convergence and Difference with Cyril

Here lies the fact that governs the Tome’s whole subsequent reception. In substance Leo and Cyril of Alexandria confess one Christ: a single subject, true God and true man, the Virgin truly Theotokos, the humanity real and entire. Both reject Nestorius’ two sons and both reject Eutyches’ absorption of the manhood. But in vocabulary the two differ sharply. Cyril’s governing formula was mia physis tou Theou Logou sesarkōmenē — “one incarnate nature of God the Word” — using physis and hypostasis nearly as synonyms for the one concrete subject. Leo’s governing formula is two natures in one person, natura naming precisely what is doubled and persona naming what is single (cf. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 23–46; Grillmeier, vol. 1, 543–550). The Tome makes no use of Cyril’s mia physis and does not move within his terminology at all; it reaches its dyophysite confession by the independent road of the Latin tradition. This is why some Eastern bishops at Chalcedon, hearing Leo’s “each form does what is proper to it,” paused over whether it divided the one Christ into two operating agents in the manner of Nestorius, and why the council appointed a committee to test the Tome by the standard of Cyril’s letters before ratifying it (ACO II.1.2; Price and Gaddis, vol. 2, 9–25; see The Council and the Tome).

When that scrutiny was satisfied, the council’s acclamation was unreserved: “Peter has spoken through Leo; this is the faith of the Fathers; Leo and Cyril teach alike” (ACO II.1.2; Price and Gaddis, vol. 2, 24–25). The Tome’s authority is therefore genuinely pan-Orthodox: it was received by an Ecumenical Council as a standard of the faith, and the Chalcedonian Definition is in part its precipitate. Yet the very Latin grammar that made it luminous to the West made it suspect to strict Cyrillians and, after 451, to the non-Chalcedonians, for whom “two natures after the union” and a sentence assigning a proper operation to each remained the language of Nestorius however orthodox Leo’s intent (cf. Severus of Antioch’s reading; see The Council and the Tome and the non-Chalcedonian reception treated in section 04). The Tome is thus at once the charter of Chalcedonian Christology and one of the irritants of the schism it could not prevent.

See Also

References

  • Leo the Great, Letter 28 to Flavian (the Tome), PL 54:755–782; trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 12 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark; repr. Grand Rapids); also trans. Edmund Hunt, St. Leo the Great: Letters, Fathers of the Church 34 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1957).
  • Leo the Great, Letters 20–21 (to Eutyches and Flavian); trans. Hunt, FOTC 34.
  • Leo the Great, Sermons (esp. 21–30, De Nativitate); trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser. 12.
  • Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum (ACO), ed. Eduard Schwartz, tom. II (Chalcedon); the 448 Home Synod acts re-read at Chalcedon, ACO II.1.1.
  • Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols., Translated Texts for Historians 45 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005).
  • Tertullian, Adversus Praxean 27.
  • Augustine, Enchiridion 35–40.
  • Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London: Mowbray, 1975).
  • John Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1975).
  • Susan Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2008).