This homily forces me into a great dispute, since it seems opposed to the preceding one. In this one the author teaches that a fast is to be kept on the vigil of Pentecost; but on the contrary, in the previous homily, that on account of the joy there is to be no fasting throughout the whole fifty days from Pascha to the coming of the Holy Paraclete. To say that this homily is spurious, and to be held much later than the holy bishop of Turin, neither the style, which is quite similar, nor the manuscript codices, nor the editors—who attribute both to Saint Maximus—permit this escape. What path of reconciliation, then, is to be entered upon? I premise that discipline—that is, the observance of rites—was not held the same in all the Churches, but that according to the tradition of our forefathers diverse customs were in use.
Sometimes one has been accustomed to be baptized by a single infusion or sprinkling, at other times by a threefold immersion; among the Greeks the consecration of the body of Christ in leavened bread has prevailed, among the Latins in unleavened bread, to pass over many other things. Nor has the Church always retained the same discipline; whereas in the earliest times the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist were conferred upon infants at once, these are afterward administered separately, and to the reborn of a more mature age. Formerly there was fasting on three days of the week; afterward a fast was appointed on Friday only and on the Sabbath. To come, then, to the question of contradiction, I confess indeed that, before Saint
Leo the Great no trace is found among the Fathers of a fast preceding the solemnity of Pentecost; nay rather, that together with Tertullian in his book On the Crown, chapter 5, Ambrose, Augustine, Cassian, Leo the Great, and Maximus himself proclaim the Sabbath on the vigil of Pentecost to be exempt from fasting. The whole controversy, therefore, turns on this: whether, while Leo still sat on the chair of Peter, the fast of the Sabbath preceding Pentecost was introduced. The solution of this question depends on the author of the Sacramentary, or Book of the Sacraments, which the most learned Blanchini first edited from a most ancient Veronese manuscript codex, in tome IV of Anastasius the Librarian, in the year 1735. In it, at no. 26, is found this prayer for the Mass on the vigil of Pentecost:
'Grant us, we beseech thee, O Lord, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, the new discipline of the spiritual observance of thy Paraclete, that our minds, cleansed by the sacred fast, may be rendered more fit for all his gifts. Through the Lord, etc.' This codex of the sacraments was inscribed to Saint Leo the Pope by its very editor Blanchini, who contends that its author, or compiler, was that same Saint Leo. This opinion not a few have approved, such as Gaetano Cenni in his dissertation on the Roman chair, tome IV of Anastasius the Librarian, §§ 11 and 12, page 152, and the editors of the Parisian Missal of 1739. But the Ballerini, in tome II of the works of Saint Leo, preface pages 3 and following, Venice edition 1756, set themselves against Blanchini and his followers.
They admit indeed that the Sacramentary is Roman and the most ancient of all that have hitherto come forth; they concede too that it contains not a few things of Leo which perfectly agree with his manner of writing; nevertheless they deny that that work was composed by Leo. They will have its author to be uncertain—ancient, however, and older than Gelasius I the pontiff himself. It is no objection, therefore, that in the days of Maximus, who in the year 465 came together at the Roman council under Hilary, the fast of the Sabbath before Pentecost began to be observed in the Church of Turin and in certain others. For just as Saint
Mamertus, who was given as bishop to the Church of Vienne in the year 474, instituted the Rogations and perhaps the fast before the Lord's Ascension, which Leo III afterward extended as public prayers to the whole Church; so too the Church of Turin, while Maximus still governed it, could anticipate the solemnity of Pentecost with a fast. And indeed the defenders of Leo's Sacramentary, in order to show that he who in three sermons on Pentecost—namely the first, the second, and the fourth—had said that fasting ceases for the fifty days from Pascha to Pentecost, did not write things contrary, say that, since the discipline of not fasting flourished in the Roman Church, Leo spoke thus;
but afterward, once the fast had been introduced by him, mention of it began to be made in the liturgy. In precisely the same way, if I were to say that Maximus, who lived long in the episcopate of Turin, acted thus, I shall seem to have brought forward nothing incongruous: namely, that at one time he commended the custom of the Church of not fasting from Pascha to Pentecost, but at another was an exhorter to fasting. Now they say that the author of this very homily is, first of all, the scribes of two codices of Holy Cross in Jerusalem, of which the earlier, 90, homily 38, bears the title: 'Here begins On Pentecost,' and the other, 99, homily 68, is inscribed thus: 'Here begins On Pentecost and on the Psalm: The Lord said to my Lord.' Next, the scribes of the codex of Saint Emmeram of Ratisbon, page 18, whose title is:
'On the solemnity of Pentecost'; the Ambrosian C 98; the Taurinensis with the heading: 'Likewise also On Pentecost, homily 7.' Three codices differ from these, and name three different authors. Namely codex Vatican 172, page 39, refers it to Saint Augustine; the other codex Vatican 6451, page 55, attributes it to Saint Ambrose; and finally codex II, formerly of the Minorite Convent of Holy Cross, in the Laurentian, to Saint Leo. Or do we think the cause sufficiently defended by the best critics, the Benedictine monks of the congregation of Saint Maur, who assigned it neither to Ambrose nor to Augustine, and by the Ballerini, who judged that it was not to be numbered among the works of Saint Leo? All the editors will have the very same: namely Gymnicus page 166, Galesinius page 138, Combefis tome V, page
261, Cumdius tome III page 226, Raynaudus page 222, Margarinus in the Great Library tome VI page 28. I believe you know, brethren, what is the reason why we celebrate this venerable day of Pentecost with no less joy than that with which we kept holy Pascha, and why we run through the observance of this solemnity with the same devotion as we fulfilled the services of that festival. For then, just as we have now done, we fasted on the Sabbath, we celebrated the vigils, we persisted in prayers through the night; whence it is necessary that a like joy should follow a like observance. There is a joy altogether alike: for then we received the Savior rising from the underworld, but now we await the Holy Spirit from the heavens:
then anxious and solicitous we proclaimed the coming; now trembling, or fasting, we long for the coming of the Paraclete; for in all things God provided for human salvation. For then the Savior opened the underworld to us for rising again; now the Paraclete unbarred the heavenly things to us for reigning; and by certain steps, as it were, of advancement, then we learned to return from death to life; but now we meditate on ascending from the earth to the heavens. And all these things Christ the Lord works in us, who, before he returned to the heavens, promised his disciples, saying: 'But when I shall have ascended, I will ask my Father, and he shall send you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you forever, the Spirit of truth' (John 14).
Whence it is to be believed that Christ has come to the Father, when we see that the Paraclete has descended to the apostles. It is to be believed, I say, as David says of the Savior, that he sits at God's right hand, because we perceive that the Holy Spirit, as the Lord promised, exults in the disciples: so the prophet of the psalms says: 'The Lord said to my Lord: Sit thou at my right hand' (Psalm 109). According to our custom, that seat is offered to him who, having completed some work, on arriving deserves for the sake of honor to sit. So then also the man Jesus Christ, overcoming the devil by his passion, unbarring the underworld by his resurrection, arriving as victor at heaven with his work as it were completed, hears from God the Father: 'Sit at my right hand.'
Nor is it a wonder if the fellowship of one seat is offered by the Father to the Son, who is of one substance and nature with the Father. But it may perhaps disturb someone why the Son is believed to be at the right hand. For although there is no grade of dignity where there is the fullness of the Godhead, yet the Son therefore sits at the right hand, not that he is preferred to the Father, but lest he be believed inferior. And therefore the Son is at the right hand, because, according to the evangelist (Matthew 25), the sheep are set at the right hand, but the goats at the left. It is necessary, then, that the first Lamb should obtain the portion of the sheep, and that the spotless leader should anticipate the place for the spotless flock that is to follow, as John says in the Apocalypse (chapter 14), saying:
'These are they who follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth, who have not defiled themselves with women' (Apocalypse 14). The prophet David, then, reports: 'The Lord said to my Lord: Sit at my right hand'; that is, the Lord Father offers to the Lord God Christ the Son the exalted fellowship of his throne, and for the sake of honor sets him at his right hand in an eternal seat. But we read in the Acts of the Apostles (chapter 1—rather 7) that the blessed Stephen, when he was being stoned by the Jews, said: 'Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Lord Jesus standing at the right hand of God.' Let us see, then, what is the reason why the same Lord is prophesied by David as sitting, but proclaimed by Stephen as standing. First of all, God, who is incorporeal and invisible (for he is a spirit, as the Lord says:
'But God is a spirit' [John 4]): how can he sit or stand? And further, on what kind of bench does God sit, who is infinite and immeasurable, and within himself rather contains every creature? These things, however, I judge to have been said of the Lord by holy men not because they are contrary to one another, but that now his omnipotence, now his mercy might be described. For surely for the sake of the power of a king he is said to sit, for the sake of the goodness of an intercessor he is suggested to stand; for the blessed apostle says: 'For we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ' (1 John 2). Christ, therefore, is a judge when he sits; he is an advocate when he rises; a judge plainly to the Jews, an advocate to Christians:
for here, standing before the Father, he pleads the causes of Christians, sinners though they be; there he sits with the Father, condemning the sins of the persecuting Pharisees; upon those he vehemently takes vengeance in his indignation, upon these, interceding, he gently has mercy; here he stands to receive the spirit of Stephen the martyr, there he sits to condemn the deed committed by Judas the traitor.