LEO THE GREAT

CHAPTER VII.

LEO THE POPE.

The rule which governed Leo’s conduct as pope was a very simple one, it was to take every opportunity which offered itself for asserting and enforcing the authority of his see : he was not troubled with historical or Scriptural doubts or scruples which might cast a shadow of indecision, “the pale cast of thought” on his resolutions and actions. To him the papal authority had come down as the great inheritance of his position; it was identified in his mind with the order, the authority, the discipline, the orthodoxy which he loved so dearly; it suited exactly his Imperial ambition, in a word, his ‘Roman’ disposition and character, and he took it as his single great weapon against heresy and social confusion. At the very beginning of his pontificate irregularities in the Church of Aquileia were reported to him—how the watchfulness of the bishops of the province was relaxed, and how Pelagians were being allowed to slip, with errors unrenounced, into Church communion. His tone here with the bishops immediately under the shadow of his patriarchal authority was very peremptory. Having alluded to the scandal reported, he continues, in his letter to the bishop of Aquileia, “that this daring attempt may go no further, and that the evil introduced through the negligence of some may not reach to the overthrow of many souls, we enjoin upon you, brother, by the authority of our command here given, to assemble the synod of the bishops of your province, and compel all, whether priests, deacons, or clergy of whatever degree, who have been received into Catholic communion, from the company of Pelagians and Coelestians with such carelessness as not to have been first obliged to condemn their errors to compel them, we say, now that their hypocrisy has been in part discovered, to true amendment, which may do them good and hurt no one. They must openly condemn the authors of their arrogant heresy, and express their reprobation of whatever in their doctrine the universal Church has repudiated; and in full and open terms, making subscription with their own hands, they must profess their acceptance and full approval of all the decrees of synods which have been ratified by the authority of the Apostolic see for the purpose of annihilating this heresy. No obscurity, no ambiguity, must be tolerated in their professions”. This is the language, not of a resolute leader merely, but of an admitted superior to an inferior, and in this strain could Leo write to the metropolitan of the province of Venetia. In just a similar strain, in his character of metropolitan,does he write to the bishops of the home provinces of Campania, Picenum, and Tuscany. “It is allowed” he says, “that men who had married widows, and some, too, who had had more than one wife, have been admitted to the priesthood, contrary to the words of the Apostle, ‘The husband of one wife’ (1 Tim. III. 2), and the decree of the law, ‘Let the priest have a virgin to wife, not a widow, nor one divorced’ (Levit. XXI.. 14). All men who have been admitted with these disqualifications, we order, by the authority of the Apostolic see, to be deprived of all ecclesiastical functions and of the title of priest”.

In the year 444, Leo had occasion to enter into the affairs of the Church of Illyria. The relation of that Church to the See of Rome is of very great historical interest. The first “Vicar Apostolic” was Rufus, bishop of Thessalonica, appointed by Innocent I to preside over Illyria in his name and as his representative. This appointment would be based on the pope’s position as Patriarch of the West; when, therefore, Eastern Illyricum was transferred to the Eastern Empire a decree was issued by Theodosius, transferring its ecclesiastical cases to the jurisdiction of Constantinople. The decree was, of course, violently resisted by Boniface, then pope, and, in effect, by the mediation of the Western emperor Honorius, he procured its recall. But the authority of Rome in Eastern Illyricum still in Leo’s day needed insisting upon, and the ground could not yet be reckoned upon as thoroughly won. Accordingly, we find Leo’s language in dealing with the bishops of Illyria a good deal less dictatorial and absolute than what we have listened to before. He appoints Anastasius, bishop of Thessalonica, his vicar Apostolic, but in doing so he condescends to give reasons to justify his action, and even adopts an apologetic tone. He begs these metropolitans of Illyria to accept the admonition which comes from the authority of the Apostolic see in the spirit of charity and kindness : he grounds his actions on his desire to resist all possible usurpations. “Do not”, he says, “think it any invasion of your rights if you see me in this way taking precautionary measures against unlawful presumption”. (on whose part is not quite clear!). “Our care extends over all the Churches; for nothing less than this is required of us by the Lord, who committed to the Apostle Peter the primacy of Apostolic dignity as a reward for his faith, grounding the universal Church on him as its foundation; in fulfillment, then, of this obligation of solicitude which lies upon us, we would share it with those who are joined with us in a common office, and we appoint as our vicegerent, Anastasius, our brother bishop, following the example of our predecessors, whose memory we honor, and we have adjured him to be on the watch to prevent any unlawful presumption; and we admonish you to give him obedience in matters connected with ecclesiastical discipline”. The authority of the Apostolic see thus asserted seems to have been willingly accepted, and Leo is able to organize a regular system of provincial administration, finding its centre in Rome. The confirmation of the papal vicar is required for all episcopal elections, and the metropolitans are (according to Leo’s first letter) to be actually ordained by him : the latter point is, however, subsequently modified. Provincial councils, summoned by the metropolitans, are to meet every two years : when grave questions arise they are to be referred to a representative synod summoned by the vicar, and from this any difficulty still felt is to be taken up to Rome for solution. But, as if to guard against an esprit de corps, a national spirit which might prevail in the majority of those councils and make them jealous of Roman influence, any individual bishop who is discontented is to be allowed to appeal at once to Rome; as, in fact, Atticus, the metropolitan of Epirus Vetus, did not many years later, and secured the pope’s protection against the cruelty of the pope’s own vicar, Anastasius. Nothing could indicate more clearly than this ecclesiastical constitution of Illyria the ideal of papal government. The pope was to be a good deal more than a metropolitan of metropolitans.

Meanwhile, in 445, a letter from Leo’s future antagonist, Dioscorus, probably announcing his election to the see of Alexandria in succession to St. Cyril, gave Leo an opportunity of asserting a somewhat visionary claim to control even that patriarchal throne. The Church of Alexandria was founded by St. Mark, as that of Rome was by St. Peter; as Peter, then, lived on in the see of Rome, so we may conclude did St. Mark in that of Alexandria. But who was Mark? The disciple of St. Peter, ordained by him, instructed by him; such, therefore, it is insinuated, is the position of the Church of Alexandria to the Church of Rome. Such is the justification which Leo finds for giving Dioscorus detailed directions as to the celebration of mass and the days of ordination, which, however, do not seem to have in fact altered the customs of that Church. But about this time a more important controversy was occupying the pope’s energies.

St. Hilary of Arles, a slightly younger contemporary of St. Leo, born of a noble family, and having received the best education of the age, was already in early manhood in the great places of the State and on the high road to distinction, when the call of religion and the persuasions of his friend Honoratus led him to forsake the world and seek religious retirement in the island of Lerins. Thence he was summoned, on the elevation of Honoratus to the bishopric of Arles, to assist him in the administration; and on the death of his friend, in 429, the irresistible wish of the citizens forced him against his will to be his successor. He was a man of pure and lowly holiness, a zealous evangelist, simple and ascetic in his life, loving order and discipline, but hating oppression and fearless in rebuking it, a beautiful writer, and a most powerful preacher; if he is to be called a semi-Pelagian that would not seem to mean more than he could not go the length of all the Augustinian doctrine of Predestination and Grace. Altogether the fifth century does not present a nobler and a more beautiful character. Certainly the two greatest Christians of the West, in the year 444, were Leo, the pope, and Hilary of Arles; both were equally in earnest for true religion, both were specially zealous for ecclesiastical discipline; but similar as in all these respects their objects were, there was one point on which collision was only too possible. Hilary was inclined to exaggerate the metropolitan power of his see; Leo was bent on subordinating the metropolitans to the pope, and Gaul was debatable ground, outside the Roman patriarchate, but not outside the growing influence of the papacy. The circumstance out of which the actual collision sprang was not important. A council, presided over by Hilary, had deposed a prelate, Celidonius, on the ground of his having, while still a layman, married a widow, and as a magistrate inflicted capital punishment, irregularities which according to the ecclesiastical discipline of the time had for their consequence deposition. Celidonius appealed to Rome. Hilary, as soon as he knew it, with characteristic energy started in the middle of winter on foot to cross the Alps and go to Rome. Arrived there he first paid his devotions at the tombs of the Apostles, and then presented himself before Leo, urging him to keep himself within his canonical rights and not to try over again a case which did not belong to his jurisdiction. Leo, however, would not listen to him. He collected a council, and Hilary consented to take a seat in it, but his plain assertion of his rights there did not suit Roman ears, which, as a friend of Hilary’s subsequently said, “are very delicate”. “He said things”, Leo afterwards wrote, “which no lay-man could utter, no bishop listen to”. After protesting in vain, he left Rome, evading the guards which Leo, utterly unjustifiably, had put to watch him, and returned at once to Gaul. This proceeding, the only course consistent with the dignity of his see, Leo describes as a “disgraceful flight”. Having restored Celidonius, of the rights of whose case we are not now in a position to judge, Leo proceeded to listen to other charges against Hilary, which were very probably misrepresentations, but which Leo seems very readily to have believed and made the worst of. He excluded him from his own communion, deprived him of the metropolitan power over the see of Vienna, and even suggested that a sort of primacy in Gaul should be conferred on a bishop, Leontius, on the mere score of age. Leo’s conduct in this matter is the least creditable part of his life. Without a doubt he was tempted by the chance of asserting a more than doubtful right, which the appeal of Celidonius gave him. In yielding to the temptation he was led to act with almost unpardonable ferocity towards the saintly Hilary. He trusted to ex partestatements about him; he disregarded, in depriving his see of the metropolitan rights over Vienne, the settlement of his own predecessor Zosimus, which he also is driven to misrepresent, and he showed a reckless disregard of Gallic rights; indeed, the letter of Leo to the Bishop of Vienne, in which he announces his wishes, is one of those few which we would willingly not find among his writings. Granted that Hilary exceeded his metropolitan rights, a man so holy and unselfish is not to be recklessly accused of personal ambition, at any rate by a pope. If Leo be Peter, it was indeed true that “he refused to be subject to the Blessed Apostle Peter”, but in this he was doing anything rather than “revolting against ancient customs”; and the prelates of Gaul can hardly have learnt, without a smile, that Leo was instituting no novelty, but simply restoring antiquity, and protecting them from the aggressions of an unlawful ambition. Leo, in fact, seems to have been conscious that his policy needed some support independent of ecclesiastical order; he accordingly obtained from, or we should almost imagine, dictated to the Emperor Valentinian, that rescript, parts of which were quoted above, which grounding vaguely the rights of Rome on the “authority of a holy synod” as well as the merit of St. Peter and the dignity of Rome, makes the irresponsible absolutism of the Roman pontiff part of the law of the Empire, a rescript which the great Catholic historian Tillemont describes as a law “favorable à la puissance du siège de Rome, mais peu honorable à sa piété”. Hilary never seems to have acknowledged in any way his deposition; and that Leo, at his death, four years afterwards, should speak of him as a man “of holy memory”, may be taken as in some sort a retractation of the charges made when he was acutely irritated by his vigorous assertions of provincial independence.

It is a question not wholly settled how far Leo’s sentence was put into execution in Gaul. It was his desire, he says in a later letter, that the metropolitan dignity taken from Arles should be given to Vienne; this seems never to have been done, and Leo appears to recognize Hilary’s successor Ravennius as metropolitan. On the other hand, Leo received a petition from the provincial bishops, about 450, formally as King for the restoration to Arles of its ancient position, and the tone of their petition is certainly sufficiently abject. The papacy and the Empire combined had done their work upon them. They simply put themselves in Leo’s hands, and make a special point of grounding their claims on the fact, or tradition, that Trophimus was their first bishop, and Trophimus was sent by St. Peter. They even ask for a wider jurisdiction in Gaul for the bishop of Arles, as vicegerent of the pope. On the receipt of this, and a counter-petition from Vienne, Leo divided the jurisdiction of the province between the two bishops; and this decision was temporarily acquiesced in. Certainly, the result of the trouble was the extension of papal influence.

Meanwhile, about 446, Leo had an opportunity to assert long-resisted rights over the administration of the African Church. She was too weak and disorganized now under the long miseries of Vandal persecution to resist papal encroachments as she had done in the days of Celestine; and Leo is able to assume a tone of complete authority to correct abuses, and apparently to reverse a decision of an African council in the case of a priest, Lupicinus. The similar weakness of the Churches of Spain enabled him to speak to them, too, in a tone of greater authority; and the bishops of Sicily, over whom, of course, he had patriarchal rights, are soundly rated, desired to conform in everything to the customs of the Roman Church, whence they receive the consecration of their office, and commanded to send three representatives to the annual Roman synod.

The history now brings us round again to the Eutychian heresy. From what we have already told it will have been sufficiently apparent that the effect of the whole controversy was the exaltation of the Roman see.  It will become also apparent that this exaltation, when it passed certain due limits, represented not the tendency or the will of the whole Church, but at most one-half of it only, and that the progress of Rome’s aggrandizement represented nothing else than so many steps in the direction of the great schism.

The Eutychian controversy, then, told in the direction of the aggrandizement of the Roman see. For, first of all, the centre of the whole controversy, when it passed the limits of a local Constantinopolitan struggle, was the bishop of Rome. Far the greatest living theologian, he could not, had he been bishop of never so insignificant a town, have played a subordinate part. But he was bishop of Rome, and this, from our present point of view, is the significance of the Eutychian controversy. It made Rome the centre of orthodoxy, and Rome’s definition the standard of faith in the last great heresy on the Incarnation. It was from Alexandria that the champion came forth against Arius; and it was from Alexandria that the great dogmatic epistles against Nestorius went forth to be the canon of the true faith. Rome in both these capital controversies had to play a subordinate, even if a dignified part; but now, in the last capital heresy on the Incarnation, the source of the orthodox definition is Rome and Leo; and thus, just when Rome’s claims to jurisdiction were reaching their full height and compass, when the current of circumstances was setting full and strong in the direction of her authority, Eutyches thrust into her hands the glory of being not only the centre of authority, but the source of truth; not merely the great governor, but the safe teacher. The letter of Leo on the Incarnation is thus a corner-stone in the fabric of the later claim of infallibility: and yet that claim dates far later than the claims of jurisdiction; later, in fact, than Leo’s time. We shall find nothing of it in him, however vast his aspirations for the aggrandizement of his see.

Secondly, we must notice that the Eutychian controversy made Rome the recipient of appeal after appeal. Eutyches, Flavian, Eusebius, Theodoret, and several others made, or were believed to have made, their appeals in turn to the see of St. Peter; and all this gave Leo the opportunity of asserting an often-resisted claim, around which much of the history of papal exaltation centers.

The Council of Sardica, in AD 343-4, representing exclusively the Western Church, had passed a canon allowing discontented bishops to appeal from provincial synods to Julius, bishop of Rome. This canon gives the right of appeal to a particular bishop of Rome, but on the ground of “honoring the memory of the blessed Peter, and might therefore reasonably be taken as applying to all successive bishops of R.ome, at any rate as a precedent. Moreover, nothing is said in the canon of its applying only to the Western bishops; but the whole council is of exclusively Western authority, and the counter-decree of Constantinople in 381, shows clearly enough that no such canon would ever have received the consent of the Eastern Church. It had in no sense ecumenical authority. But this decree was the basis of Rome's claim of an universal appellate jurisdiction, and this chiefly through the canon of Sardica being reckoned and quoted at Rome as a decree of Nicaea. Zosimus had so quoted it to the African Church as his justification for reversing their judgment in the case of Apiarius; and this misquotation had so scandalized the Church of Africa, then still in the vigor of its life, that they had caused the authentic copies of the decrees of Nicaea at Alexandria and Constantinople to be examined, and finding that this canon was wholly absent from these, as from their own copies (and indeed practically contradicted by a real decree of the Nicene Fathers), they wrote back to Celestine, requesting him not to violate those canons to which he had appealed, denying him the right he claimed, and showing conclusively that the quotation of Nicaea he had made was utterly unjustified. However much, then, the canons of Sardica may at Rome have been regarded as an appendix to those of Nicaea, no pope after this could, without deliberate misquotation, quote the appeal-canon as having Nicene authority. He could not plead ignorance after this clear demonstration. It must therefore be admitted that Leo in urging, as he constantly did,  Nicene authority for receiving appeals from the universal Church, was distinctly and consciously guilty of a suppressio veri at any rate, which is not distinguishable from fraud. Of this crime we cannot acquit him; and how large a part this and similar “lies”—which they are none the less, though they be believed to be “for God”—have contributed to the advancement of the Roman see, it is quite impossible to estimate. The ‘custom of the Roman Church’ is a strange plea to urge on Leo’s behalf; it is the only one that can be urged.

It remains for us to consider a little more in detail the relation between Leo and the Eastern bishops in regard to papal authority. Except in the matter of receiving appeals, Leo’s claim in the East at once strikes us as utterly indefinite. He professes “his universal care” for all the Churches : he claims to be kept alive to what is done in the East; and the power of excluding any bishop from communion with Rome gives him a sort of hold on episcopal elections, as we remember in the case of Anatolius. He cannot tolerate that they should be effected without notification to him, without his having some hand in their confirmation. But all this is a vague claim, and in regard to infallibility there is no claim made at all. We cannot help being struck with the fact that when Leo comes to write his great Tome on the doctrine of the Incarnation, it is in the form of a letter to Flavian, and in a tone nowise different from that adopted by St. Cyril in his epistles against Nestorius. The bishop of Ravenna, indeed—Peter Chrysologus, to whom Eutyches had written at the same time as he appealed to Rome—replies by recommending the appellant to listen to Rome, because the blessed Peter, who lives and presides in his own see, gives the truth of the faith to those who seek it. But there is nothing of this language in Leo’s own letter. He classes it with that of St. Cyril : he expresses a wish that “Anatolius should not think his own letter(or 'The Tome') beneath his regard”; and asserts that he will find it to be in agreement in all respects with the piety of the Fathers”. When his letter, which he circulated all over the world, was received by a council at Milan in 481, it is commended as agreeing with the writings of St. Ambrose. Leo himself, after Chalcedon, recommends it as confirmed by that council. He fortifies it with patristic testimonies, and even speaks of it as the “decree of the synod”. “Those dogmatic definitions”, he says to Theodoret, “which God had first given by our agency, He established by the irreversible consent of the whole brotherhood of bishops”.

In the language of the Oriental bishops to Leo we have sometimes expressions of profoundest deference. Theodoret, for instance, begins his appeal to Rome with a sentiment which, in another age and context, must inevitably sound iromical and which must have even caused a qualm to the mind of a man whose Scriptural knowledge was as good as Leo's. “If,” he says, “Paul betook himself to Peter that he might carry back from him an explanation to those who were raising questions at Antioch about their conversation in the Law, much more do I,” &c. But even here we have to note that he grounds the primacy of the Roman see on the continuous piety of the Church; on the possession of the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul, and on the metropolitan majesty of Rome in the secular world,—a claim to pre-eminence of which, as we shall see, Leo was singularly shy, applying as it did to Constantinople as well as to Rome. As for Flavian, when he wrote to Leo he treats him altogether as his equal, and advertizes him of the deposition of Eutyches only that he may put the bishops subordinate to him on their guard.

At the Council of Chalcedon the respect paid to Leo in the persons of his legates culminating, as we shall see it did, in the twenty-eighth canon, must have seemed almost ironical. The doubtful orthodoxy of so many of the Eastern bishops, the connection of Anatolius with Dioscorus, the authority of Marcian and Pulcheria—all these influences combined with Leo’s own personal share in the controversy of the day to give him the presidency in the council; we notice that he demanded it “on account of the inconstancy of so many of his brethren”; but the presidency when gained was a position of limited influence : Rome could not carry out her wish of excluding Dioscorus altogether; she could not preserve the ‘Tome’ from criticism; she could not rid Theodoret of the necessity of satisfying the council as to his orthodoxy, though Rome had already received him; she could not, worst of all, offer effective opposition to the hated twenty-eighth canon. We must also notice the attitude taken up by the council towards Leo’s Tome when they received it. It was stamped with approval, not because it came from Rome, but because it was orthodox : that is, in agreement with the decisions of former councils and with the letters of Cyril, which had conciliar authority. We have seen that Dioscorus’ condemnation is represented in the acts of the council as proceeding from Rome through the synod, but some doubt is cast upon the authenticity of this sentence by the fact mat it exists among Leo’s own letters in a different shape. It remains to notice that Leo is called Bishop of all the Churches, and Bishop of the Ecumenical Church, by his own legates, and Ecumenical Archbishop, in a private appeal. It is probably in mistaken reference to those expressions of individuals that Pope Gregory the Great stated that the bishops of Rome were called universal bishops by the council of Chalcedon, but that the title thus offered them had been consistently rejected by them. Even as expressions used by individuals, these titles mean very little in the phraseology of the East; we may notice, for instance, that Dioscorus is called Ecumenical Bishop in the council at Ephesus.

The flattering opening of the synodical letter of the council to Leo may perhaps be taken as intended to palliate the most unwelcome conclusion. The bishops speak of him as “the interpreter to all of the blessed Peter”, they execrate the monstrous conduct of Dioscorus in excommunicating him “to whom the Saviour entrusted the care of the vine”; they describe him as presiding by his legates “as the head over the members”, but then the letter continue in a strain very unpleasant to the delicacy of Roman ears.

The Council of Constantinople had decreed that the bishop of that see should have the primacy of honor after the bishop of Rome, “because it is itself new Rome”. This precedence of honor had in effect become an extensive jurisdiction, and this jurisdiction had now been confirmed in the twenty-eighth canon of the Council of Chalcedon, which ran thus: “The Fathers gave with reason the primacy to the Chair of old Rome, because that was the royal city; and, with the same object in view, the hundred and eighty pious bishops (of Constantinople, the Second Ecumenical Council) assigned equal dignity to the Chair of new Rome” (the phrase is, however, afterwards modified by the expression “being next after old Rome”). This elevation of the rank of new Rome is grounded on her Imperial position; and it is further allowed that the see of Constantinople “should have the right of ordaining metropolitans in Pontus, Asia, and Thrace, with certain other bishops. This is the canon which the conciliar epistle has to introduce to Leo’s notice, and it does so in the most diplomatic terms, assuring Leo that the step has been taken solely in the interest of ecclesiastical order, and professing no doubt that the opposition of his legates will be reversed by Leo’s own acceptance of the decree;—for Leo’s legates had retired from the session when this canon was to be brought forward, saying they had no instructions from Rome on any such subject. When, however, they found out what had been done, they made a formal complaint of the violation of ecclesiastical discipline which the canon involved; they accused the bishops of having signed under compulsion, which they indignantly denied; finally, they produced the copy of the Nicene canons, in which was interpolated a clause about the Roman primacy which the Oriental bishops at once repudiated. Finding the determination of the council immovable, they could only protest, and returned to Rome with a message of very mixed import for Leo’s ears, which gave him complete satisfaction as far as the faith was concerned, but stirred his deepest indignation at the ‘ambition’ of the Church of Constantinople.

It is not our duty now to investigate how far this canon of Chalcedon was in fact dictated by Constantinopolitan ambition, and how far it was inconsistent with the decrees of Nicaea. It is, indeed, more than probable that the self-assertion of Rome excited the jealousy of her rival of the East, and all the Eastern bishops secretly felt that her cause was theirs : but it is more to our purpose to observe how full a proof this decree of Chalcedon is that the Roman claim of supremacy met with no acknowledgment at all in the Eastern Church.

At the same time as the epistle of the council, Leo received letters from the Emperor Marcian, Anatolius, and Julian of Cos, endeavoring to conciliate him in regard to the canon, and expressing their joy at the victory of the faith. Anatolius writes in as conciliatory a tone as possible, urging that the jurisdiction actually reserved for Constantinople is less than custom has sanctioned; complaining gently of the conduct of the legates after so much deference had been shown them, and emphasizing the fact that it was at the urgent wish of the emperor, senate and people, that the canon had been passed. We know, perhaps, already enough of Leo’s character to anticipate without difficulty that he refused to be thus easily conciliated. He seems to have more than half suspected evil of this council of Chalcedon : he had clearly warned his legates to be on their guard against Constantinopolitan ambition, and now his worst suspicions were more than realized. The tone of his replies is indignant in the extreme. He is astounded and grieved to find that just when the divine hand had restored the peace of the Church, it should be disturbed again by the spirit of ambition. He should have thought that, with Anatolius doubtful antecedents in the patronage of Dioscorus, an attitude of humility would have best beseemed him. “Let him remember”, he goes on, “the man whose successor he is; and throwing aside the spirit of pride, let him imitate the faith, the modesty, the humility of Flavian”. He calls to mind with indignation the grounds on which Constantinople has received these privileges, as being the second city of the Empire! As if the primacy of Rome was the result of her being the capital city of the West— not the see of St. Peter! The basis of the divine arrangements is not that of the secular state! There can be no safe building on any rock, save that which Christ laid as a foundation. From this point of view he speaks very scornfully of the extorted assent of the council to tins decree (an assent which there is every reason to believe was given with the best possible will), and makes short and contemptuous work of the antecedent canon of Constantinople. However many bishops may decree anything contrary to Nicaea, it is null and void. Then, taking his stand on the decrees of Nicaea, he takes up the cudgels for the rights of Antioch and Alexandria, apparently quite against the wishes of Theodoret and Maximus, who presided over those sees and had signed the decrees; nor, indeed, does mere seem any real contradiction to the canons of Nicaea in the action of Chalcedon, but all through these letters Leo is somewhat wild in his arguments, and seems sublimely unconscious that Rome could in any way be described as a glass-house in the matter of ecclesiastical ambition and violation of ancient traditions. The strife was not easily to be calmed. A letter arrives from Marcian, explaining how some, apparently mistaking, or professing to mistake, Leo’s attitude towards this canon for opposition to the dogmatic decrees of the council, were sheltering themselves under his authority in refusing their adhesion to them. Leo, in answer, writes to the emperor, sending his assent to the dogmatic definition as a matter of obedience to him, and begging him to make known his adhesion, at the same time making it very clear where his adhesion stopped. He had now ceased all direct intercourse with Anatolius, but looks eagerly for pretexts of complaint against him. He hears of his favoring a former Eutychian at the expense of a Catholic, and without apparently making very careful inquiries on the rights of the case, he writes begging the emperor to administer to him a stern reproof. To keep himself alive to what goes on in new Rome he appoints Julius to reside there as his ‘apocrisiarius’, or representative, and keep him well-informed of what is happening. The emperor, meanwhile, is pleading with Leo for Anatolius; and Leo, giving way not one inch, replies that he is quite ready to be reconciled if Anatolius will repent of his ambitious designs and keep the canons. Anatolius seems never to have been a man of great force and strength of character. It does not even appear how far he was a prime mover himself in the matter of the twenty-eighth canon; at any rate Leo’s persistency now wins the day, and produces from him a letter of penitence and self-humiliation, in which he conforms in other respects to the wishes of Leo, and in regard to the twenty-eighth canon speaks thus: “As for the privileges which the universal synod decreed in favor of the Church of Constantinople, let your holiness hold it for certain that there was no fault in me, a man who, from my youth, have loved peace and quiet, keeping myself in humility : it was the clergy of Constantinople, and the bishops of those districts, who had this desire; and yet, even in these matters, the whole efficacy and confirmation was reserved for the authority of your blessedness. Let your holiness then rest assured that I did nothing to further this matter, having always held myself bound to avoid the lusts of pride and covetousness”. Anatolius was clearly not the man to wage an equal war with Leo; as far as he is concerned, the submission is complete, and as such, Leo accepts it and is satisfied. But the claim did not rest with an individual bishop to abrogate, and, as a matter of fact, the canon did take effect, and that in Leo's own lifetime. It was one of the remoter causes of the schism of East and West.

We may sum up our consideration of this famous twenty-eighth canon in Thorndike's words : “To what effect is that disowned which takes place without him who protests against it? Unless it be set up as a monument of half the Church disowning the infinite power of the pope, the other half not pleading it, but only canonical pre-eminence by the Council of Nicaea”. Indeed, though the bishops and the emperor were deferential enough to the pope, yet (if we discount the magnificence of Leo’s own personality, and the impression his greatness made on his contemporaries),neither this canon, nor the council’s attitude towards Leo’s Tome, nor Leo’s own way of talking about it give modern Romanists any cause to look with gratification on the Council of Chalcedon. For, indeed, the Fourth General Council was not only in place, but in theological interests, and in its traditions of precedence, an Eastern more than a Western council, and the papacy was a Western not an Eastern development.

It remains to present, in brief summary, a few remarks as to the phenomena of the papal authority with which we have been dealing, and to ask whether, from a Christian and Catholic point of view, we are in a position to indicate any judgment upon it.

Ist, then, the papacy was a development, and at this date a most imperfect development. When pope Pius IX, proclaimed, “with the consent of the Holy Vatican Council”, that the personal infallibility of the pope was “a  dogma divinely revealed”, and “his definitions are irreformable of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church”; and proclaimed also that, in announcing the dogma, he was but “faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the first beginnings of the Christian faith”, he is using language which, in the light of history, we can simply call unintelligible. The papacy was a slow-growing development of the principle of government in the Church. St. Cyprian may be taken as the representative of the Episcopal theory pure and simple, the theory, that is, of the equal (in the main) and independent authority of bishops; this system gave way to the Metropolitan theory, which subordinated the bishops of a district to superiors, who were in a way their representatives in the eye of the universal Church; and preeminent, again, among these metropolitans were the patriarchs. It is easy to represent that this pyramid must have an apex, and that as the bishops had been subordinated to the metropolitans, and the metropolitans to the patriarchs, so the patriarchs should have their head, in turn, in the Pope of Rome. We can understand now why Leo has been called the “Cyprian of the Papacy”. The papacy was a development, then, and its roots lie deep-hidden in the early obscurity of the Roman Church; it was nourished, and grew with a natural growth, by the external pressure of circumstances.

But not only so: (2.) it represents also the conscious effort of personal ambition and fraudulent dealing. The magnificent result achieved in the superstructure of the papacy must not blind us to all the marks of the world and the devil’s influence, which are to be found upon its foundation and all through its fabric.

(3.) We need not deny that, in some respects, it was a beneficial development of Christian government. We may even say that some such institution was an ecclesiastical necessity in the Middle Ages; but this concession does not help us one step in the direction of accepting the papacy as, in fact, it claimed to be accepted; does not abrogate one jot the moral and intellectual duty of rejecting what is at best a parody of the Divine intention. 

(4.) For, taking the papacy at its best, it must be acknowledged to have been a most partial development of the Christian revelation; it was the development of one idea, that of government, at the expense of all others : justice, equity, consideration, humility, freedom, universal consent. And because it was partial, therefore it was schismatical. It involved, it necessitated, the severance of East and West; it had latent within it, even in Leo’s day, the prophecy of the yet far-off convulsion of the Reformation. The violation of the ‘proportion of faith’ in one direction, the over-riding of one idea, is sure to involve a corresponding excess on the other side. For when Christ committed the treasure of Divine life to the Church, He did indeed promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against it, but He never promised that human infirmity should not mar and thwart the expression of the Divine will or the Divine truth.

The papacy of Leo’s day was, as we have said, a very incomplete growth; it had not yet, as we shall see, overwhelmed the representative or ultimately democratical conception of Church government : again, the claim of infallibility is not yet made, or made but in vague and dim hints. How little this later conception had yet dawned upon the West may perhaps best be seen in the famous ‘Commonitorium’, published only a few years before Leo’s accession to the papacy. Its author, Vincent, retired like Hilary, to the monastery of Lerins, an island not far from Cannes, and he is known as Vincent of Lerins. This monastery was known at the time as one of the centers of that form of opposition to the extreme Augustinian doctrines, which is vaguely described as semi-Pelagiamsm; we say vaguely, for while the term really and strictly represents a more or less definite heresy, the Augustinian party were apt to class together under it all who were scandalized by their extreme Predestinarianism. Among those there seems little doubt that Vincent may be reckoned, though we cannot accuse him of any heretical denial of the doctrines of grace; and it is even probable that in writing his ‘Commonitorium’, or ‘Reminder’, he intended, by a side glance, to reflect upon the Augustinian doctrine as wanting in that “universality, antiquity and consent which are the marks of Divine truth”. But if this be so, it is not the main object of his treatise, or the cause of its celebrity. Its main object is to set out in clear terms, before an age confused with numberless heresies, the canon of Catholic truth, and this is done in the celebrated formula, “Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus”— that is Catholic truth which has been held from the first, universally, and by common consent in the Church. The importance of this treatise, from our point of view, is that, stamped as it has been by the general approbation of the Church of later ages, it is a clear demonstration how modern are the Roman claims of infallibility. For Vincent is looking at the canon of truth on all sides, he is testing it by all possible difficulties that might arise, yet he never hints that an easy solution of all difficulties as to the faith is to be found by inquiring what the pope has decreed. He even contemplates the extreme case of the whole Church being corrupted and overspread with heresy, and still to the question—What is the canon of truth? returns the answer—Let a man find out the voice of antiquity that cannot be corrupted. Nothing, then, could be more completely anti-Roman than this conception of the canon of doctrine which the age of Leo supplies us with, and yet it proceeds from a man who, as his writings show, held the papacy in the highest veneration, and whose work has become a text-book of Church doctrine.