The Contested Legacy

Leo I is the patristic high-water mark of the developed Roman doctrine of primacy, and his legacy is read in two incompatible ways. The Roman tradition receives Leo as an early and authoritative witness to the papacy later defined at the First Vatican Council (1870); the Orthodox tradition receives his Christology while reading his primacy as a primacy of honour within a synodal Church, distinguishing the genuine doctrinal authority that the East accepted from the ecclesiological claims it did not — with the annulment of Canon 28 as the fault line. This file — a §4 both-sides treatment governed by Methodology — sets out the two readings, the Canon 28 fault line, and the modern scholarship that frames the question (Susan Wessel’s “spiritual rebuilding of a universal Rome” and Bronwen Neil’s critical introduction), each side sourced — the Roman reading reported accurately in its own terms, and the Orthodox reading, within which this collection stands, stated as the judgment of the Church, which has examined the developed papal claim and not received it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

A Father Received Two Ways

Leo presents the historian and the theologian with a single fact and two interpretations. The fact is that, in the middle of the fifth century, the bishop of Rome articulated the most fully developed doctrine of papal primacy the early Church had yet produced: a theology in which the see of Peter holds, by divine institution, a plenitudo potestatis over the whole Church, and in which the living pope acts as the vicarius and living voice of Peter himself (see The Petrine Theology). The two interpretations concern what that fact means for the Church’s order — and they diverge so sharply that they describe, in the end, two different Churches. This file lays them side by side, reporting the Roman reading accurately in its own terms while standing, with the whole of this collection, within the Orthodox reading.

The Roman Reading: An Early Witness to the Papacy

The Roman Catholic tradition reads Leo as one of the clearest patristic witnesses to the papacy — not its inventor but its articulate exponent, a pope who put into doctrinal form a primacy the Roman see had always possessed by Petrine right. On this reading Leo’s sermons on the natale of his own consecration and on the feast of Peter and Paul (Sermones 2–5; 82–83; PL 54) state, with new theological precision, that Peter lives and judges in his successors, that the Roman bishop bears the firmitas of the rock, and that the care of all the churches devolves upon him. Leo’s annulment of Canon 28, “by the authority of blessed Peter” (Epp. 104–106; PL 54:993–1011; trans. Feltoe, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 12), is read as the exercise — not the overreach — of exactly that office: a council’s act in matters of order being judged and voided by the see that holds the keys.

For the Roman tradition, this Leonine doctrine is continuous with what the First Vatican Council (1870) dogmatically defined in Pastor Aeternus: that the Roman pontiff possesses, by the institution of Christ in Peter, an ordinary, immediate, and universal jurisdiction over the whole Church, and (under stated conditions) infallibility in defining doctrine (Pastor Aeternus, First Vatican Council, 1870). Leo is cited in the Roman case as a patristic anchor for that definition: a fifth-century pope, received by an ecumenical council and venerated East and West, who already taught the substance of what 1870 made dogma. On this reading the Tome‘s reception at Chalcedon — “Peter has spoken through Leo” — is not merely praise of Leo’s orthodoxy but a recognition by the assembled East of the teaching authority of Peter’s see (Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, 5–30; Catholic Encyclopedia, “Pope St. Leo I”). Leo is thus, for Rome, the doctor in whom the developing papacy becomes visible, vindicated at Vatican I.

[Disputed: the meaning of “Peter has spoken through Leo” — Roman position: the acclamation recognises the doctrinal authority of the Petrine see, of which Leo’s Tome is the organ (Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages, 5–30; Catholic Encyclopedia, “Pope St. Leo I”). Orthodox position: the acclamation praises Leo’s orthodoxy — the fathers approved the Tome because they found it agreed with Cyril, and examined it before receiving it, so the words honour a true confession, not a juridical prerogative (Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, 165–171; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, vol. 2, intro.).]

The Orthodox Reading: Christology Received, Ecclesiology Not

The Orthodox tradition draws a distinction it does not regard as arbitrary: it receives Leo’s Christology and declines his ecclesiology. The Tome to Flavian, confessing the one Christ in two natures, was received at Chalcedon and stands in the Orthodox memory as a witness to the Fourth Ecumenical Council’s faith; Leo is venerated as a saint and a Father for it (see Doctor and Saint). But his doctrine of a universal Petrine jurisdiction the Orthodox tradition does not receive, holding instead that Rome’s primacy was a primacy of honour (presbeia tēs timēs) within a synodal, conciliar Church — the first place in a taxis of sees, not a supreme governing power over them (Meyendorff, The Primacy of Peter; Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, 119–125).

On this reading Chalcedon itself supplies the decisive evidence. The fathers examined the Tome against the standard of Cyril before approving it — they did not receive it on Leo’s authority but tested it for orthodoxy — and the same council enacted Canon 28, ordering the standing of Constantinople on the imperial-city principle, which Leo rejected. The Orthodox tradition reads this as a Church that honoured Leo’s confession while ordering its own life conciliarly, without reference to a Roman power to bind it (Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, 148–171; L’Huillier, The Church of the Ancient Councils, 267–296). Leo’s particular opinions about his own office are, in the Orthodox view, weighed against the conciliar mind of the Church like any Father’s — received where they accord with it, declined where they do not. The veneration of Leo and the non-reception of his primacy are therefore, for the East, not a contradiction but the ordinary operation of a tradition in which a Father’s authority is the authority of his orthodoxy.

The Canon 28 Fault Line

The point where the two readings make contact and refuse to merge is Canon 28 of Chalcedon — treated in full in Leo and Canon 28. The canon granted Constantinople, “New Rome,” privileges equal to Old Rome’s and the second rank after it, on the ground that it was the city of the emperor and senate; Leo declared it void by Petrine authority. The same episode is read by the two traditions as proving opposite things.

For the Roman tradition, Leo’s annulment is the papacy working as it should: a primacy of jurisdiction, not merely honour, voiding a canon the universal Church could not enact without the Apostolic See’s consent. For the Orthodox tradition, Leo’s annulment is precisely what a primacy of honour may not do — and the canon’s survival in the East, reaffirmed at Trullo (692, Canon 36) and lived by ever after, shows that the conciliar Church did not regard Roman ratification as constitutive of its order (L’Huillier, 267–296; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity, 59–66). Canon 28 is thus the fault line in the most literal sense: it is the single text at which Leo’s two legacies — the Christological, received by all, and the ecclesiological, received only by Rome — visibly separate. What one tradition reads as the papacy vindicated, the other reads as two ecclesiologies already diverging a full six centuries before the schism was named.

Modern Scholarship: Wessel’s “Universal Rome”

The major modern study is Susan Wessel‘s Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2008), the most detailed treatment of Leo in English. Wessel’s central thesis is that Leo, faced with the collapse of the Western imperial order under the barbarian kingdoms, constructed a “universal Rome” — a spiritual and ecclesial Rome that would succeed the imperial city and outlast it. As the political Rome failed, Leo built, in the realm of idea and institution, a Rome whose greatness was no longer that of empire but that of Peter: he fused a developed Petrine theology, the cult of Peter and Paul as the city’s true founders, and the practical apparatus of papal letters, decretals, and law into a single, durable ideology of Roman primacy (Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, esp. 1–5, 285–321). On Wessel’s account Leo’s achievement was not merely administrative but conceptual — he transformed how Rome thought of itself, transferring the romanitas of the dying empire onto the see of Peter and thereby giving the medieval papacy its founding self-image. Wessel’s reading is historical rather than confessional: it neither endorses nor refutes the primacy claim, but explains how Leo made the ideology that the Roman and Orthodox traditions now read so differently. That same constructive achievement is, for the Roman reader, the early papacy coming into its own, and for the Orthodox reader, the moment a distinctively Western ecclesiology took the shape that would one day divide the Church.

Modern Scholarship: Neil’s Critical Introduction

The accessible critical entry point is Bronwen Neil‘s Leo the Great in Routledge’s The Early Church Fathers series (London: Routledge, 2009). Neil provides a concise scholarly introduction to Leo’s life and pontificate in historical context, together with annotated translations of selected letters and sermons organised by theme — including, expressly, Leo and the primacy of Rome (Neil, Leo the Great, esp. 1–40 and the thematic selections). Neil situates Leo’s primacy theology within the pressures of his age — the doctrinal crises of Eutyches and the Latrocinium, the barbarian threat, the rivalry with Constantinople — and presents the sources that let a reader weigh the competing receptions for themselves. Where Wessel supplies the large interpretive thesis, Neil supplies the critical apparatus and the texts; read together they let the Leonine primacy be examined as a historical construction rather than asserted or denied as a dogmatic claim. Both works are cited here not to settle the theological question but to frame it: modern scholarship has clarified what Leo did with remarkable precision, while leaving the confessional question of what it means exactly where the two traditions have always left it.

Where This Collection Stands

The Roman reading and the Orthodox reading both rest on real evidence and real principles. Rome can point to Leo’s own words, his exercise of the office in the Canon 28 annulment, and the council’s acclamation of his Tome, and read in them an early papacy continuous with Vatican I. The Orthodox can point to the council’s examination of the Tome, its enactment and the East’s permanent retention of Canon 28, and the patristic principle that a Father’s authority is the authority of his orthodoxy, and read in them a primacy of honour within a synodal Church. The disagreement is not about Leo’s sentences, which both traditions can quote, but about the shape of the Church those sentences presuppose — and on that question this compendium does not stand outside the two traditions but within one of them: the universal jurisdiction and infallibility defined at Vatican I are a teaching the Orthodox Church has examined and not received, and the reading of Leo as its patristic anchor is therefore reported here as Rome’s account of her own doctor, accurately and in its own terms, not as an open question for the Church. Leo remains, for the one tradition, the doctor of the papacy vindicated at Vatican I, and for the other — and for this collection — the Chalcedonian Father whose Christology is received and whose ecclesiology is not. The contested legacy is, in the end, the contested Church.

References

Leo I, Epistulae 104, 105, 106 [PL 54:993–1011]; Sermones 2–5, 82–83 [PL 54]; Tome to Flavian (Ep. 28) [PL 54:755–782]; trans. Charles Lett Feltoe, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 12 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1895).
Acts of the Council of Chalcedon (451), ACO II; trans. Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 3 vols. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005).
Council of Chalcedon (451), Canon 28; Council in Trullo (Quinisext, 692), Canon 36; trans. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1.
Pastor Aeternus (First Vatican Council, 1870), Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ.
Susan Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), esp. 1–5, 285–321.
Bronwen Neil, Leo the Great, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2009), esp. 1–40.
T. G. Jalland, The Life and Times of St. Leo the Great (London: SPCK, 1941).
John Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1989), 148–171.
John Meyendorff et al., The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church, rev. ed. (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1992).
Peter L’Huillier, The Church of the Ancient Councils (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1996), 267–296.
Alexander Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, trans. Lydia Kesich (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1977), 119–125.
Walter Ullmann, A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1972), 5–30.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Pope St. Leo I (The Great)” (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910).