Leo, Maximus, and the Seal of the Fathers

From Chalcedon to the defense of the icons, the Christological centuries produced Fathers whose very biographies are dogma: Leo the Great, whose Tome the council acclaimed as Peter’s voice; Sophronius of Jerusalem, who sounded the alarm against monoenergism and surrendered the Holy City to the Caliph; Maximus the Confessor, who lost tongue and hand for the two wills of Christ; and John of Damascus, the “seal of the Fathers” — a seal on the synthesis, not a tombstone on the age. This file surveys the line, treating Sophronius most fully and deferring the rest to their collections.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Leo and Chalcedon

Leo, pope of Rome 440–461, enters the dogmatic history through a letter: the Tome to Flavian of Constantinople (Ep. 28, 13 June 449), written against the archimandrite Eutyches, for whom the incarnate Christ had only “one nature after the union.” With lapidary Latin balance the Tome confessed one person in two complete natures, each doing “what is proper to it in communion with the other” — the Word working miracles, the flesh subject to injuries (Leo, Ep. 28 [the Tome]; trans. NPNF II/12). Suppressed at the “Robber Council” of Ephesus (449), the Tome was read at Chalcedon (451), where the bishops acclaimed: “Peter has spoken through Leo; Cyril taught thus” — an acclamation whose second clause matters as much as its first, for the council received Leo because he agreed with Cyril, testing the Tome against Cyril’s letters before approving it (Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, vol. 2, session 2; on the checking of the Tome, session 4). The Definition that followed — one Christ “in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” — is the charter of all subsequent Christology (Chalcedon 451, Definition; see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). Orthodoxy venerates Leo (18 February) as a Father of the first rank while reading the Petrine acclamation as the council’s judgment on the Tome’s orthodoxy, not a blank cheque of papal authority — the council, after all, examined him (the Orthodox reading in Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, ch. 4). Full treatment: St. Leo the Great. His successor in the Latin patristic line, Gregory the Dialogist (c. 540–604), and the last great pre-Schism Latin, Bede (c. 673–735), have their own collections (St. Gregory the Dialogist; St. Bede the Venerable).

Sophronius: The Alarm at Jerusalem

Sophronius (c. 560–638) is the least-known indispensable Father of the era, and since he has no collection in this repository, this is his fullest treatment here. A sophist (professional rhetor) of Damascus, he became the companion of John Moschus in the monastic circuit of Palestine, Sinai, and Egypt — he is the dedicatee and posthumous editor of Moschus’ Spiritual Meadow — and a monk formed in the strictest Chalcedonian loyalty (on the life, Allen, Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, introduction; Quasten’s series ends before him; the Byzantine continuation in Louth, Maximus the Confessor, London: Routledge, 1996, ch. 1, for the milieu).

When the emperor Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople promoted reunion with the anti-Chalcedonians on the formula of “one energy” (mia energeia) in Christ, the aged monk Sophronius was the first to see the trap: one energy implied one will, and one will unmade the completeness of the manhood Chalcedon had confessed — “what is not assumed is not healed” returning a fourth time (Allen, Sophronius, 2009, on the Alexandrian Pact of 633 and Sophronius’ protest; the axiom: Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. 101). Elected patriarch of Jerusalem in 634, he issued his Synodical Letter — the encyclical a new patriarch sends announcing his faith — as a comprehensive dogmatic manifesto: two natures, each with its natural activity, in the one Christ (Sophronius, Synodical Letter; text and translation in Allen, Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy, 2009). The Sixth Ecumenical Council (680–681) later read and endorsed the letter, canonizing his lonely alarm as the Church’s confession (Constantinople III, acts; the endorsement noted in Allen, 2009, and in Hovorun, Will, Action and Freedom: Christological Controversies in the Seventh Century, Leiden: Brill, 2008). History gave him a second, darker distinction: as patriarch he negotiated the surrender of Jerusalem to the Caliph Umar (637/638 [Disputed: the sources allow either year; see Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992]), securing terms for the Christians of the Holy City, and died soon after — the Father at the hinge where the patristic Roman East became the Church under Islam. His feast is 11 March.

Maximus: The Confessor of the Will

What Sophronius began, his younger associate Maximus (c. 580–662) finished — Maximus called him “my blessed lord and father and teacher,” and carried the fight after the patriarch’s death through the Monothelite compromise decades (Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996, on the relationship and career; Allen, Sophronius, 2009). Maximus’ dogmatic contribution was the philosophical completion of Chalcedon: the will belongs to nature, not to person — therefore the incarnate Word has two natural wills, the human freely and deiformly following the divine, supremely in Gethsemane’s “not my will but thine” (Maximus, Disputation with Pyrrhus; Opuscula; the Gethsemane exegesis in Opusc. 6; on the theology, Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996; Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975, ch. 8). With Pope Martin I he secured the Lateran Council of 649, which condemned Monothelitism while the empire enforced it; both paid: Martin died in Crimean exile, and Maximus, tried at Constantinople and unbending, had his tongue and right hand mutilated in 662 and died that year in Lazic exile — vindicated posthumously by the Sixth Council (681), which confessed the two wills he had died for (the trial documents in Allen and Neil, Maximus the Confessor and His Companions: Documents from Exile, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). Behind the polemics stands the greatest speculative system of the patristic era — the cosmic Christology of the Ambigua, the logoi of creation gathered in the Logos — for which the reader is sent to the full collection: St. Maximus the Confessor.

John of Damascus: The Seal That Is Not a Terminus

John (c. 675–749), of the Mansur family of Damascus — Christian civil servants of the Umayyad caliphate — left administration for the monastic life in the Judaean desert, by later tradition at Mar Saba [Disputed: the Mar Saba localization rests on late hagiography; Louth notes the near-contemporary evidence places him more vaguely in the Jerusalem orbit — Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, ch. 1]. His Fount of Knowledge, crowned by the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (De Fide Orthodoxa), is the deliberate summation of the whole Greek patristic dogmatics — he disclaims originality on principle: “I shall say nothing of my own” — and it became the textbook of Byzantium and, in Latin translation, a load-bearing source for Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas (John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa, preface and passim; trans. NPNF II/9; Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, on the work and its Western afterlife). When iconoclasm erupted, John — safely outside the emperor’s reach under the caliph — wrote the Three Treatises against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, grounding icon veneration in the Incarnation (“I do not worship matter; I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake”) and distinguishing the veneration (proskynesis) given icons from the worship (latreia) given God alone (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images I.16; trans. Louth, PPS 24, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003; see Holy Icons). The iconoclast council of 754 anathematized him under his Arabic name — “Mansur, the one of evil name, of Saracen mind” — and the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) reversed the anathema and blessed his memory (the Hiereia anathemas read into the acts of Nicaea II; Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018; Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, ch. 7).

Tradition calls him the “seal of the Fathers” — the honorific expresses precisely his self-understanding: to gather, order, and hand on the Fathers whole (the epithet’s sense discussed via his summative role in Louth, St John Damascene, 2002; cf. Florovsky, The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century, Collected Works vol. 9, Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987). But as Section 01 argued, Orthodoxy reads the seal as the close of a synthesis, not of the age: the Damascene’s own hymns are sung by a Church that went on to Photius, Symeon, and Palamas (see The Unending Age of the Fathers). Full treatment: St. John of Damascus.

The Shape of the Era

Three things distinguish these centuries for the doctrine of the Fathers. First, biography becomes dogma: Maximus’ severed hand and Sophronius’ surrendered city are arguments, the criteria of doctrine and holiness fused under persecution — and the persecutor is now, repeatedly, a Christian emperor, proof that patristic authority is not court theology. Second, precision becomes devotion: the era’s technical vocabulary (energies, wills, enhypostaton) served the defense of real salvation — if Christ lacks a human will, human willing is unhealed (Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 1975). Third, the Fathers and the councils become explicitly one system — the councils proving the faith from the Fathers, which is the subject of the next file (see The Fathers in the Councils).

See Also

References

  • Leo the Great. Epistle 28 (the Tome to Flavian). Trans. NPNF II/12.
  • Price, Richard, and Michael Gaddis, trans. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. (Sessions 2 and 4: the Tome read and tested; the acclamation.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989. (The Orthodox reading of Chalcedon and Leo.)
  • Allen, Pauline. Sophronius of Jerusalem and Seventh-Century Heresy: The Synodical Letter and Other Documents. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. (Life, the Pact of 633, the Synodical Letter with text and translation, the conciliar endorsement.)
  • Hovorun, Cyril. Will, Action and Freedom: Christological Controversies in the Seventh Century. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
  • Kaegi, Walter E. Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. (The surrender of Jerusalem and its date.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1996. (Career, theology, the Sophronius relationship.)
  • Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil. Maximus the Confessor and His Companions: Documents from Exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The trials and mutilation.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Christ in Eastern Christian Thought. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1975. (Ch. 8: the two wills.)
  • John of Damascus. De Fide Orthodoxa. Trans. NPNF II/9. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth. PPS 24. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003.
  • Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The Mar Saba question; the Exact Exposition; Hiereia and Nicaea II; the Western afterlife.)
  • Price, Richard, trans. The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. (The anathemas against “Mansur” reversed.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century. Collected Works vol. 9. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987.
  • Gregory of Nazianzus. Epistle 101. Trans. NPNF II/7. (“What is not assumed is not healed.”)