The Letters and Church Order

Alongside his sermons, the surviving letters of Pope Leo I are the principal record of his pontificate and one of the richest documentary deposits for fifth-century church order in both East and West. This file surveys the corpus — its size, range, and editions; the great Western-jurisdiction episode of the Hilary of Arles affair (445) and the imperial Novella 17 of Valentinian III; Leo’s correspondence with the Eastern sees of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch and the Western churches of Gaul, Spain, Africa, and Italy; and his work as the administrator who, through writing, built and maintained an order of which Rome held itself the guardian. The primacy doctrine underlying that order is treated in section 05 and is not argued here.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

The Corpus and Its Editions

Leo governed by correspondence as much as by preaching, and the letters he sent across the Mediterranean world form, with the Sermones, the documentary backbone of his pontificate. The traditional collection numbers roughly 143 letters, though the figure is not fixed: it varies by edition, and if the letters addressed to Leo by emperors, bishops, and synods are counted alongside those he wrote, the total rises to something on the order of 170 pieces (the count is conventionally given in the range of about 143 to 173). The honest statement is that the corpus is large and its boundaries editorial rather than canonical (Neil, Leo the Great, London: Routledge, 2009, 13–17; Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, Leiden: Brill, 2008, 17–21).

The standard early-modern edition is that of the brothers Pietro and Girolamo Ballerini (Venice, 1753–1757), whose ordering and numbering were taken up into Migne’s Patrologia Latina, volume 54 (PL 54), the reference text by which individual letters are still cited by number (Ep. N). For English readers the principal translations are Charles Lett Feltoe’s selection in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, volume 12 (1895), which renders the most important dogmatic and disciplinary letters, and Edmund Hunt’s fuller translation in the Fathers of the Church series, volume 34 (1957). The manuscript transmission is itself a major field, since Leo’s letters circulated within and shaped later canonical collections, lending them an authority in Western church law out of proportion to their original occasions (Neil, 13–17; Wessel, 17–21).

The Value of the Letters

The worth of the corpus is threefold. It is, first, a source for Christology: the most famous single item, the Tome to Flavian (Ep. 28), belongs to this collection, as does the body of letters surrounding the Council of Chalcedon and the management of its aftermath. It is, second, a source for papal administration — the routine business of appointments, appeals, depositions, the dating of Easter, the reconciliation of penitents and of converts from heresy, and the regulation of ordinations. It is, third and most broadly, a primary witness to fifth-century church order across the whole Latin and much of the Greek world: through these letters one watches the machinery of late-antique ecclesiastical governance in operation, with Rome at its hub (Wessel, 17–21; Neil, 13–17). For the disciplinary and pastoral content especially, the letters are read as the working papers of an administrator rather than as treatises — which is precisely their evidential value.

The Vicariate of Arles and the Hilary Affair (445)

The single most consequential Western-jurisdiction episode of the pontificate, and the one for which the letters are the indispensable record, is the conflict with Hilary, bishop of Arles. Hilary, an able and ascetic metropolitan, had presumed to act far beyond his own province: he deposed Chelidonius, bishop of Besançon (on a canonical charge concerning Chelidonius’s marriage and prior office), and intervened in the affair of a certain Projectus, appointing a successor while the sitting bishop yet lived. Chelidonius appealed to Rome. Leo received the appeal, found against Hilary’s procedure, restored Chelidonius, and sharply curtailed Hilary’s metropolitan over-reach, stripping him of the vicariate’s jurisdictional powers while Hilary himself came to Rome to plead and then withdrew (Leo, Ep. 10, to the bishops of the province of Vienne; PL 54; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 12; Wessel, 13–16, 53–62; Neil, 35–38).

From the conflict Leo obtained imperial backing in the form of the rescript of Valentinian III, issued on 8 July 445 as Novella 17 of Valentinian. The constitution 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, and the authority of Nicaea, and decreed that nothing be done against ancient custom without the authority of the Roman bishop, directing provincial governors to compel by force any bishop who refused a Roman summons (Valentinian III, Novella 17, 8 July 445, ed. Mommsen and Meyer, Codex Theodosianus, vol. 2; Wessel, 13–16; Neil, 35–38). It is essential to read the episode for what it was and was not. Leo did not abolish the see of Arles; he redefined the vicariate — the delegated supervisory authority over the Gallican churches — curtailing the powers Hilary had abused. After Hilary’s death Leo in fact restored a measure of metropolitan honour to Arles under his successor Ravennius (Leo, Ep. 40, to Ravennius; Ep. 66, on the privileges of Arles; PL 54; trans. Feltoe; Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul, Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1989, 173–205). The affair is thus a case study in how Leo asserted Roman supervisory authority over a Western church while, with the same hand, preserving the local structure within a reordered discipline.

Relations with the Eastern Churches

Leo’s correspondence reached the great Eastern sees during the most turbulent decade of the Christological crisis. With Constantinople he wrote to the archbishop Flavian — to whom the Tome was addressed — over the case of Eutyches and the Robber Synod of 449, and afterward conducted a long and careful correspondence with Anatolius, Flavian’s successor, over the reception of Chalcedon and, pointedly, over the twenty-eighth canon, which Leo refused to confirm (Leo, Ep. 106, to Anatolius; PL 54; trans. Feltoe; the canon and its constitutional stakes are treated in Leo and Canon 28). He corresponded with Alexandria and with the see of Antioch as he laboured to stabilize the post-Chalcedonian settlement and to monitor the wavering of the Eastern episcopate, and he addressed the Emperors Marcian and Leo I directly on the security of the council’s definition. This whole eastern dossier is the administrative counterpart to the dogmatic achievement of the Tome: the doctrine had to be governed into place, and the letters are the instrument of that governance (Wessel, 285–321; Neil, 39–49).

Relations with the Western Churches

Westward, the letters show Leo as the standing point of reference for the Latin churches. In Gaul the Arles affair was only the most dramatic of many interventions in metropolitan order. To Spain he sent the long Ep. 15 (447) to Turibius of Astorga, refuting Priscillianism point by point and calling for a Spanish council — the doctrinal side of which is treated in the companion file. With the churches of Africa, recovering from the Vandal conquest, he corresponded over irregular ordinations and the discipline of clergy displaced by the invasion (Leo, Ep. 12, to the bishops of Mauretania Caesariensis; PL 54; trans. Feltoe). In Italy and the suburbicarian provinces he regulated ordinations, the penitential discipline, and liturgical observance, and to the metropolitans of Aquileia and elsewhere he wrote on the proper reconciliation of clergy returning from the Pelagian and Manichaean errors (Leo, Ep. 1 and Ep. 2; PL 54; trans. Feltoe; Neil, 30–35). Across all these provinces the same pattern holds: a local difficulty is referred to Rome, and Rome answers with a ruling framed as the maintenance of ancient and universal order.

Leo as Administrator

What the corpus discloses, taken whole, is a churchman building ecclesiastical order by the patient exercise of correspondence. Leo’s instinct was for continuity, precedent, and structure: he ruled less by innovation than by insisting that the existing canons and customs of the Church be observed, and by making the Roman see the place where their observance was adjudicated. The letters are accordingly conservative in temper even where their effect was to enlarge Roman influence — Leo presents every intervention as the defence of an order he did not invent but inherited (Wessel, 53–62, 285–321; Jalland, The Life and Times of St. Leo the Great, London: SPCK, 1941, 88–96). The theology of the Roman primacy that grounds this administrative practice — the Petrine doctrine of the heres beati Petri — is set out, with its divergent Roman and Orthodox readings, in section 05; here it is enough to observe the practice itself: a bishop governing a fragmenting Western Christendom, and reaching into the East, by means of the written word.

References

Leo I, Epistolae, PL 54; trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, Letters and Sermons of Leo the Great, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 12 (Oxford/New York, 1895); trans. Edmund Hunt, St. Leo the Great: Letters, Fathers of the Church 34 (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1957).
Pietro and Girolamo Ballerini, eds., Sancti Leonis Magni Romani Pontificis Opera (Venice, 1753–1757), the basis of the PL 54 numbering.
Valentinian III, Novella 17, 8 July 445, ed. Theodor Mommsen and Paul M. Meyer, Codex Theodosianus, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1905).
Susan Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
Bronwen Neil, Leo the Great (London: Routledge, 2009).
Trevor G. Jalland, The Life and Times of St. Leo the Great (London: SPCK, 1941).
Ralph W. Mathisen, Ecclesiastical Factionalism and Religious Controversy in Fifth-Century Gaul (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1989).