Sermons & Letters 230

St. Leo the Great, the strenuous champion of the Catholic faith, the Priscillianists having now been throttled, the clandestine movements of the Manichaeans—as even Quesnel says—having been utterly cut down, and having at last carried off a singular triumph over Pelagianism creeping through the provinces of Italy, is compelled to advance to greater things, about to fight bravely and happily against the Eutychians, who, coming forth from the East as it were new and recent enemies, assailed the incarnation of Christ the Lord. But this heresy, which took its beginnings and its name from a single monk, the archimandrite of a Constantinopolitan monastery called Eutyches, so occupied the mind of the holy pontiff for the space of three years that he had to expend every effort and labor to destroy it from the very foundations;

and also to apply most weighty exertions to repairing the rights of bishops and of the Churches, violated and abolished with the greatest injury by factious men. In vain would I recount his grave prudence, which he used to elude the arbitrary wills and the caprice of those who, the rules of the sacred canons being contemned, by the power, nod, and command of the world alone, violently drove holy and orthodox pastors from their sees, or harassed them with various kinds of penalties. In the discharge of which offices, just as the fortitude, wisdom, and supreme prudence of his mind shine forth, so there stands out that supreme and universal power granted by God to the Roman pontiffs for taking cognizance of and judging the affairs of the faith and of all the Churches.

From which special prerogative and privilege, since it is not hidden that heretics and other envious men have not only always abhorred it, but even that they strove to assail it and to lead it to destruction—led namely by this reasoning, that they might extend the rights of other bishops beyond their due limits, and rather protract the authority of synods before their own arbitrary will, gradually restricting within narrow boundaries the dignity and power of the Apostolic See—yet we perceive that they labor in vain, if now, popular prejudices being set aside, we shall resolve to draw the truth of all things only from the acts of the councils and from the writings of the holy pontiff which survive.

For we have not judged that our discourse should abstain from these matters merely because Paschasius Quesnel has most fully described the life and deeds performed by St. Leo, and professes: 'I bow myself to the pontifical dignity with greater reverence than anyone else.' For he affirmed this deceitfully. For he omitted none of those things which would bring novelties of judgments into the Church, and would drive away the ancient source and the reason of the sacred hierarchy praised in the Scriptures. Of which Quesnellian craft I could set forth almost infinite examples even in this vestibule of my contest, did I not fear to cause the readers trouble unseasonably.

Especially since, apart from the primacy of honor, he adjudges nothing at all to anyone, except jurisdiction over the Roman episcopate, and this too dependent on other bishops who ought to be present at a Roman council of the Westerners. I therefore, who from earliest age have been inflamed with the study of truth, and have vehemently desired to draw it only from the purest sources, and to imbibe the minds of others, to whose instruction it had been committed to me to attend, was not without grave disgust observing these things.

Reflecting within myself that Quesnel assumed to himself no other aim in such dissertations than to draw the incautious and those little versed in ecclesiastical history to his own party, and to bind them fast with various enticements, so that they might gradually fall away from the due veneration, obsequiousness, and obedience toward the Apostolic See. For the novelty of doctrine, which injects cupidity into men, has in this our age obtained such force among almost all nations, that without any selection or love at all of sincere truth, their minds are given over to those things which are able to overthrow the institutions and precepts handed down by our ancestors.

To that plague of this our age, who love to claim for themselves the name of the learned, that saying of the Apostle seems to me to fit: 'For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires they will heap up to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.' And who could deny that Quesnel has fabricated fabulous things in the history of Eutyches and in the deeds performed by the great Leo?

He, confounding the episcopal dignity common to all bishops with jurisdiction, freely confesses that what he venerates in one, he wishes to be trodden underfoot in the rest, contending that by ancient institution neither Eutyches nor Flavian, disputing about the dogmas of the faith, had the Roman pontiff as legitimate and chief judge of controversies, to whom both accuser and accused of their own accord ran to prosecute their rights. Meeting which words of the most eminent Cardinal Baronius, the praised Quesnel deceitfully subjoins: 'We have freely acknowledged the Roman pontiff as the legitimate, and, if he be compared with individual bishops, as the chief judge of ecclesiastical controversies:'

but who on that account would bear that Flavian—whom the prerogative of his see, and his singular sanctity, and his constancy of faith persevering even unto martyrdom, ought to have so greatly commended—should be matched and joined with a rebellious, unskilled, obscure, and worthless monk, and that a degraded presbyter should be committed with his own bishop and the bishop of the holy see, a judge with a defendant, and both, as it were disputing about dividing a common thing, be set before Leo, as though about to contend over an uncertain outcome of the case. Far be so great an injury from the most sacred assembly of bishops.' What then? Does Quesnel defend the supreme judiciary power of the Roman pontiffs, which the testimonies of the Scriptures indicate, and which the tradition and practice of the ancients has asserted for them? He deceives indeed.

For he calls the Roman pontiff the chief and legitimate [judge] of the controversies of the Church in that sense only, namely a comparison having been made with individual bishops existing in their own sees. Wishing perhaps to indicate that no judgment of the Roman pontiff is to be held firm and ratified which is not aided and approved by the suffrage of other bishops gathered in synods. Which refrain Quesnel himself has explained a thousand times in his writings. Moreover, if it were injurious to the most sacred assembly of bishops that the causes of subject defendants, once judged in the provinces...

...should be re-examined by pontifical authority, as he himself fables, then with impunity the innocent could be vexed, oppressed, and deposed from their grades by metropolitans and the other suffragan bishops of the provinces, nor would there be held in the ecclesiastical hierarchy a judge who could avenge those afflicted with graver injuries and persecutions. Since therefore no just cause can belong to one who has dared to take up arms against the Church his mother, I could easily be led into the hope that, the trifles and fictions especially Beausobrian and Quesnellian in all the preceding books having been noted and rejected, I might likewise be able, with the divine power assisting, to accomplish this by setting my hand to writing the Eutychian history.