Sermons & Letters 183

A journey is always troublesome and unpleasant. Here the whole letter of Turribius ought to be brought forward. But since it has been printed after Leo's letter XV, to the same Turribius, column 711—because we found it appended there in the Quesnellian edition which we have used—lest it be repeated twice, we refer the readers to that place. 1. Concerning the letter of Julian of Cos to Leo Augustus, Quesnel gave this forewarning.

To the letters of Leo the Great we subjoin the one letter which survives of Julian, bishop of Cos, not merely for the sake of filling an empty page, but also on account of the very great intimacy which existed between the two pontiffs. This shone forth especially in the cause of the faith, which the one, from the watchtower of the Apostolic See, defended especially in the Western parts, and this one, as it were the vicar of apostolic solicitude, defended in the Eastern. The subject of the letter is given by Liberatus the Deacon, chapter…

…15 of the Breviary, where he narrates that Leo Augustus, in order to check the heretics who were importunately demanding that a new synod be convened, wrote to the bishops of the several cities, consulting them about both matters as to what ought to be done—both concerning the ordination of Timothy, and concerning the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon…. Those who wrote back that the Council of Chalcedon was to be defended even unto blood, because it held no other faith than that which the Council of Nicaea established; that Timothy, moreover, was not only not to be reckoned among the bishops, but even to be deprived of the Christian appellation. This judgment of all you have collected in the one letter of Julian, which by no means ought to have been separated from the eighteen (now twenty) letters which Leo wrote to him. 2. Furthermore, the same Quesnel, in dissertation 1, at the year…

…457, thinks that this letter was written by Julian at Cos, whence he gathers from this letter Julian's return to his own Church; nor does he suppose him to have stayed any longer at Constantinople after Marcian died. But these things are gathered to be false from the letter now published for the first time, 144, to Julian himself, as well as from letters 147 and 152, written under Leo Augustus in the year 457, in which it is openly presumed that he was still present at Constantinople, and had even given letters to St. Leo concerning the disturbances stirred up at Constantinople after the accession of the new emperor, to which the holy Pontiff replied in letter 144.

That Julian should have deserted, without the Pontiff's own consent, the office and charge entrusted to him by that same Pontiff, is incredible—especially since other difficult circumstances demanded his diligence. Nor indeed can it be believed that Aetius was substituted for Julian, as if the latter had already departed from Constantinople and laid down the office committed to him; for there survive Leo's letters 152 and 153, written on the same Kalends of September in the year 457, both to Julian and to Aetius, in which the care of each is stirred up for the good of the faith. Nor let the inscription of letter 147 to Julian cause difficulty; which, since in the manuscript…

…in the Grimanic manuscript it is inscribed also 'to the presbyter Aetius, equally,' it is believed to have been sent to Aetius also by the same copy, for this reason: that it was uncertain to the Pontiff whether Julian was residing at Constantinople. For we suspect that this heading, 'and to the presbyter Aetius equally,' omitted in the Ratisbon codex, ought to be deleted, and we have conjectured, in note 2 (col. 1115, no. h) on letter 147, that another letter was perhaps delivered to Aetius on the same day. But if the holy Pontiff in this letter complains that Julian had not written on that occasion when Anatolius had transmitted letters to the same Pontiff, this rather presumes that he was still remaining at Constantinople.

But he perhaps omitted to write for this reason: because he had written about nearly the same matter a little before, and knew that Anatolius had given fuller letters. To Aetius, indeed, no delegation or substitution in Julian's place is anywhere indicated. As to the fact that in the following years no other letters to Julian have been found, whereas several others certainly written are missing, this argument is weak for believing that Julian deserted Constantinople and abandoned his office, which the cause of the faith still required. Moreover, since the same Julian is read as a subscriber to the Synod of Constantinople under Gennadius, successor of Anatolius, about the year 459 (vol. V of the Councils, p. 51), it seems sufficiently probable that he persevered in the same city up to this time. 8.

Among those to whom Leo Augustus sent the encyclical, of which we spoke in the admonition to letter 156, was Julian, to whom, even though residing at Constantinople, that encyclical could be directed—just as it is found inscribed also to Anatolius, bishop of Constantinople. But whereas all the others to whom the same imperial letter was directed were at least metropolitans, Julian alone, a simple bishop of Cos, was without this rank. This, however, demonstrates the peculiar esteem in which he was held on account of his illustrious deeds against the Eutychians. These things have been preserved for us in the encyclical codex by Epiphanius Scholasticus, who—besides the autograph letter of Leo, which as a Western man he easily found and inserted—rendered the other letters from the Greek;

and therefore this letter of Julian is not the original itself, but a version from the Greek: for the whole encyclical codex was brought forth in Greek. Baluze, following Surius, published this codex collated with several manuscripts, and its variants were useful to us.