Doctor and Saint

Leo I died on 10 November 461 and was buried at St Peter’s; he was the first pope the Latin tradition called “the Great” (Magnus), and the only fifth-century pope to be both a Latin Doctor of the Church and a saint venerated in the Orthodox East. This file sets out his death, burial, and the translation of his relics; the title “the Great”; his declaration as Doctor of the Church by Benedict XIV in 1754; the Latin feast of 10 November and the Eastern Orthodox feast of 18 February; and his standing as a pre-schism Father — together with the honest naming of the irony that the East venerates the Chalcedonian Leo while not receiving his doctrine of Roman primacy. The full both-sides debate over that primacy is reserved to The Contested Legacy.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

Death and Burial

Leo died on 10 November 461, after a pontificate of some twenty-one years (from 29 September 440). He was buried at St Peter’s basilica in Rome — according to the early tradition not within the church proper but in its vestibule or portico (in porticu), among the tombs near the entrance (Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, 1–4; The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis), “Leo,” trans. Davis). More than two centuries later, in 688, Pope Sergius I had Leo’s remains translated into the basilica itself and an altar erected over them — the first of the early popes to be so honoured, a sign that by the late seventh century Leo’s memory had already acquired a distinct cultic standing (Neil, Leo the Great, 1–9; Liber Pontificalis, “Sergius,” trans. Davis). His relics rest in St Peter’s to this day.

That Leo’s grave should have become a place of honour is fitting for a bishop whose theology had made the cult of Peter and Paul central to the self-understanding of his city. The pope who taught that Rome’s true greatness lay in the apostles buried there came in time to be venerated near them.

“The Great”

Leo is the first pope to be called “the Great” (Latin Magnus) — a title later accorded to only two other bishops of Rome, Gregory I (d. 604) and, in some reckonings, Nicholas I (d. 867) (Neil, Leo the Great, 1–4). The epithet was not a formal canonisation but a verdict of reception: it registered the scale of what Leo had done — the doctrinal achievement of the Tome received at Chalcedon, the consolidation of the Roman see’s authority, the celebrated embassies to Attila (452) and to the Vandal Geiseric (455), and a body of sermons and letters that became foundational for the Latin Church. The title fused, as Susan Wessel argues, the memory of a churchman with the memory of a Rome remade in spiritual terms — a point developed in The Contested Legacy and in The Petrine Theology.

Doctor of the Church

In 1754, Pope Benedict XIV declared Leo a Doctor of the Church (Doctor Ecclesiae), placing him among the relatively small number of Fathers and writers whose teaching the Latin Church holds up as a model of doctrinal soundness (Wessel, 1–5; Neil, 1–3; cf. the parallel Roman declarations of other Fathers as doctors). The honour came late — nearly thirteen centuries after his death — and recognised above all Leo’s Christological contribution: the Tome to Flavian (Ep. 28; PL 54:755–782; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 12), whose confession of the two natures in the one person of Christ the Council of Chalcedon (451) received as a standard of orthodoxy (see The Council and the Tome).

A common Latin epithet attaching to Leo is Doctor unitatis — “doctor of the unity of the Church” — celebrating his role as a teacher of ecclesial unity. The phrase is itself a small index of the larger question this collection treats honestly: the unity Leo taught was a unity ordered around the see of Peter, and what the Latin tradition praises as the doctor of unity the Orthodox tradition receives more selectively. That selectivity is the subject of the next file.

Two Feasts: 10 November and 18 February

Leo is commemorated as a saint in both the Western and the Eastern calendars, but on different days.

In the Latin (Roman Catholic) calendar, his feast is 10 November, the day of his death. In the older calendar before the liturgical reform of 1969 his feast had been kept on 11 April; the 1969 revision of the General Roman Calendar moved it to the historical date of his repose, 10 November (Neil, Leo the Great, 1–4; Calendarium Romanum, 1969).

In the Eastern Orthodox calendar, Leo — “Leo, Pope of Rome” — is venerated on 18 February (1 March on the civil/Gregorian reckoning for those churches using the Julian calendar). The Byzantine Menaion for 18 February carries his commemoration with hymnography praising him precisely as the defender of Orthodoxy against the heresy of Eutyches and Dioscorus — that is, for the Tome and Chalcedon (Menaion, 18 February, trans. Lambertsen; OrthodoxWiki, “Leo the Great,” locating the Menaion texts). The Orthodox service remembers him as a teacher who “confirmed the Orthodox faith” and confounded the Monophysite error, and as a hierarch of the undivided Church.

That the two traditions keep Leo on different days is incidental — a matter of calendrical history, not of competing claims. What is not incidental is why the East keeps him at all.

A Pre-Schism Father of the Undivided Church

Leo belongs to the pre-schism Church — the centuries before the estrangement of East and West that the year 1054 conventionally marks (see The Pre-Schism Church). He is therefore numbered among the Church Fathers received across the later East–West divide (see Church Fathers). But he occupies an unusual place even among pre-schism Latins: he is one of the relatively few post-Nicene bishops of Rome whom the Eastern Orthodox venerate as a saint, and he is venerated precisely because of the Tome and Chalcedon. Where many later popes are, in the Orthodox reckoning, figures of the Western estrangement, Leo is remembered in the East as a Chalcedonian Father — the Roman voice that, at the council the Orthodox hold as the Fourth Ecumenical, confessed the one Christ in two natures (see Ecumenical Councils).

The acclamation attributed to the fathers of Chalcedon on hearing the Tome — “Peter has spoken through Leo” (Petros dia Leontos lelaleken) — is itself received in the Orthodox tradition, though, as the next file shows, the East reads it as praise of Leo’s orthodoxy rather than as a charter of his jurisdiction (ACO II.1.2; trans. Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon; see The Council and the Tome).

The Irony, Named Honestly

Here the collection must name plainly an irony it does not try to dissolve. The Eastern Orthodox venerate Leo the Chalcedonian Father while not accepting Leo’s doctrine of Roman primacy. The same Leo who is sung in the Menaion as the confessor of the two natures is also the pope who, “by the authority of blessed Peter,” declared Canon 28 of Chalcedon null and void — the canon by which the Eastern Church ordered the standing of Constantinople (see Leo and Canon 28). The Orthodox reception therefore makes a distinction it does not regard as arbitrary: it receives Leo’s Christology — his teaching on the person of Christ, vindicated at an ecumenical council — while declining his ecclesiology, his developed doctrine of a universal primacy lodged in the see of Peter.

The two sides of this reception are not in tension within the Orthodox view, which has always held that a Father’s authority is the authority of his orthodoxy and not of his office, and that even a great teacher’s particular opinions are weighed against the conciliar mind of the Church. But the result is striking enough to deserve statement: Rome’s greatest fifth-century pope, the Doctor unitatis of the Latin Church, is honoured as a saint by the very communion that does not receive the primacy he taught. The Latin tradition reads Leo as an early and authoritative witness to the papacy; the Orthodox tradition reads him as a Father whose Christology it shares and whose ecclesiology it does not. The full debate between those readings — and the modern scholarship that frames it — belongs to the next file, The Contested Legacy, and is governed there by the both-sides method of Methodology §4. Here it is enough to record the fact: Leo is, for the East, a saint received and a primacy declined, both at once.

References

Leo I, Tome to Flavian (Ep. 28) [PL 54:755–782]; and Sermones [PL 54]; trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 12 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1895).
The Book of Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis), “Leo” and “Sergius,” trans. Raymond Davis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000).
Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (451), ACO II.1.2; trans. Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005).
Menaion for 18 February, “St Leo the First, Pope of Rome,” trans. Isaac E. Lambertsen (and parallel service texts); located via OrthodoxWiki, “Leo the Great” (used to locate the Menaion, not as terminal citation).
Calendarium Romanum (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1969) — the 1969 General Roman Calendar moving the Latin feast to 10 November.
Susan Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 1–5.
Bronwen Neil, Leo the Great, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2009), 1–9.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Pope St. Leo I (The Great)” (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910) — used to locate primary references on the 1754 declaration and the relic translation.