講道與書信 第 242 章

1. Scarcely had the new mission of legates into the East been undertaken — for the receiving of certain fallen ones who desired to come to penance — when both the supreme pontiff and the emperor Marcian at last deliberated about holding a general synod. That Leo had this in his wishes — at once, when the unhappy outcome of the Robber Council of Ephesus was heard — is shown by his letters given to Theodosius in that same year 449, in the month of October, concerning which we have spoken in the Disputations of the preceding book. But since the emperor Theodosius, inclined toward Eutyches, had been circumvented by factious men by whom he was led, the pontifical desires were then rendered wholly void, until, when Marcian had been raised to the empire, the affairs of the East, already nearly ruined, were set upright again.

Therefore the emperor, coming over to Leo's view, nevertheless did not agree about the place and time. It pleased Leo that the synod be gathered in Italy, reflecting within himself to guard against all the evils by which the memory of the Robber Council of Ephesus grievously afflicted him, and desiring moreover to be present at the council himself. But the emperor, seeing the heresy raging throughout the whole East, believed it must be throttled in that very place; and therefore, after letters had been sent to and fro, Marcian — led by the necessity of affairs and urged by the Eastern bishops — judged that the convening of the synod must no longer be deferred.

Since, then, neither custom, nor love of fatherland, nor the external foes the Huns under their leader Attila would permit Leo to depart from Italy, he chose Paschasinus, bishop of Lilybaeum, to fulfill his stead — a man whom few equaled in doctrine, holiness, and renown. The greatest strength and constancy of this bishop's soul had already been proved by that harsh and long servitude which he had endured among the barbarians; and his learning is especially known from the correction of the Paschal cycle, concerning which he had been consulted by St. Leo. And besides, the same holy

pontiff had esteemed him so highly that already two years before he had entrusted to him the care of restoring the ancient discipline and amending the morals of the Sicilian Church, as is gathered from the letter once numbered 4, now numbered 16 in Quesnel, the last chapter of which he closed with these words: 'These things, moreover, which we have believed should be intimated to you, the Lord inspiring us, we wish to come to your notice through our brothers and fellow-bishops Bacillus and Paschasinus. From their reports let us learn how reverently the institutes of the Apostolic See are observed by you.' Then, therefore, he wished to give new letters, as it were heralds of the office which a little later he was minded to commit to him.

Therefore, in order to prepare his mind by the necessary instruction, he sends to him that celebrated letter to Flavian, which (he says) the universal Church embraces, directed to be more carefully reviewed and learned by him. He discourses much concerning the Eutychian and Nestorian heresies, and relates that, in order to purge the Constantinopolitan Church from their taint, he had already sent pontifical legates thither, who, preaching about the sacrament of the Incarnation those things which the holy Fathers taught and which the whole body of the Churches had long held, happily obtained the result that they brought back the entire Constantinopolitan Church, with all its monasteries and many bishops, to good fruit;

and they gave their consent, and with their subscriptions anathematized Nestorius and Eutyches together with their dogmas. That these things might be clearly known by Paschasinus, 'I have transmitted,' he says, 'certain writings to your charity.' He then adds: 'You shall also know that I have lately received a letter of the bishop of Constantinople, which reports that the bishop of Antioch (namely Maximus), having sent circular letters through his provinces, gave the consent of all the bishops and of the letter, and condemned Nestorius and Eutyches with equal subscription.' In which matter we can by no means lend our ears and faith to Quesnel, who adjudged all these things to the merit of Anatolius as president of that assembly. For,

Leo, wishing to instruct Paschasinus about many matters, transmitted the series of all that had been done by his legates at Constantinople, certainly not assigning to Anatolius the purgation of the Constantinopolitan Church, nor the condemnation of Nestorius and Eutyches, but making mention of him only insofar as he had already obtained from him a report concerning those things which had been religiously carried out through Maximus in the Antiochene provinces for the defense and bulwark of the faith. What then? Could Anatolius, whose faith had been suspect, have presided over the Constantinopolitan assembly while the pontifical legates were present? It is a fiction; and we refute it in our dissertation on Photinus of Tyre, to which we refer our readers. 2.

In the last part of his letter, finally, the holy pontiff inquires of Paschasinus about the manner of observing the Paschal feast in the year 455; because in an annotation of Theophilus he had found that the Alexandrian bishop of holy memory had established that Pascha was to be celebrated on the eighth day before the Kalends of May: 'which we find utterly foreign to the ecclesiastical rule. Since,' he adds, 'in our Paschal cycles — as you deign to know well — it is written that Pascha must be celebrated on the fifteenth day before the Kalends of May of that same year.' Therefore, wishing to guard against all error and to remove ambiguity, he charges him to inquire and treat more diligently with certain skilled men the new reckoning of times, and the rule and course of the heavenly orbs.

But concerning this Paschal cycle, which St. Leo the Great earnestly desired to have corrected, we shall speak — keeping the order of events — when discussing the deeds which followed the Council of Chalcedon. It is strange, nevertheless, that in this letter nothing was indicated to Paschasinus about undertaking the journey toward Nicaea, that he might there act in the pontiff's stead in the synod which Marcian had demanded to be held without delay.

For since he had written the aforementioned letter on the eighth day before the Kalends of July, and we find that, scarcely two days having elapsed, he wrote three others — one to the emperor Marcian, another to Anatolius, and a third finally to Julian, bishop of Cos — in which he makes mention now of legates appointed to the new synod, it is therefore permissible to argue that on the seventh day before the Kalends of the same month he received imperial letters, by which it was demanded that the synod be no longer deferred. Quesnel, taking note of these letters, plainly dissembled all those things which lay open the rights of the supreme pontiffs.

And he merely turned his pen to exaggerating how Leo took it ill that the synod was neither deferred nor held in Italy, and that the wishes of Anatolius and the Easterns had prevailed more than his own. Yet it was in the mind of the supreme pontiff not to omit, by procrastination, his counsels of peace. I fear, however, that our interpreter has by no means attained the aim of the pontiff's will by these divinations. For Leo could have resisted the wishes of the emperor Marcian, as he sincerely confessed in the letter written to him on this occasion. Whose will he deferred to oppose for no other cause than lest he should seem to wish to resist the devout judgment of the prince. Let Quesnel, I beg, and as many as are wont to trifle as he does, take note of these words.

'We believed that your clemency' (thus he begins the letter) 'would grant this to our desire, namely that, in view of the present necessity, you would order the priestly synod to be deferred to a more opportune time.' The foundation of this pontifical confidence was this: 'That, when the priests had been summoned from all the provinces, there might be a universal council.' 3. For who is ignorant that the external aspect of those troubled times could have prevented the bishops of many provinces from going out of their dioceses, lest they should desert as orphans the peoples committed to them, exposed to the fury of the barbarians, and expose themselves to those dangers which are wont to be suffered from the forces of enemies?

Leo therefore did not take it ill that the synod was not deferred, whether because it was being urged by an imperial command which he could not resist; but because that time seemed to him less suitable for the safety of the priests and ecclesiastics, for which he wished to provide; and on the other hand, the city of Nicaea, to which the bishops were to convene, frustrated the pontifical desire by which he himself was led, that he might be immediately present at the general synod. Wherefore, when he had understood that that imperial command was derived from love of the catholic faith, and that the rights of the Apostolic See were not lightly injured, he was unwilling to resist it. This he clearly explained in the following words, adding:

'But because you, out of love for the catholic faith, have now willed that the assembly take place, lest I should seem to oppose a devout decision, I have sent my brother and fellow-bishop Paschasinus,' etc. Moreover, if in this matter the wishes of Anatolius and the Easterns availed anything, that must be ascribed to the pontiff's indulgence, who was unwilling to resist the devout decision of Marcian. But who would conjecture that he was led by any law or necessity to oppose, when he makes mention only of the imperial decision?

He had a strong spirit in defending the prerogatives and rights of his See, and indulgently permitted to the great princes only those things which could redound to the common utility of the Church, and which, on the other hand, would neither injure his own authority, nor inflict a wound or disgrace upon the pontifical dignity. 4. Then to Paschasinus he joined Boniface, a presbyter from the city of Rome, and sent him to the same synod; to whom he ordered also those two legates to be associated, namely Lucentius and Basil, whom he had already sent to Constantinople to hold a synodal assembly for receiving the lapsed who were doing penance. He finally appointed Paschasinus president of the general synod;

not indeed by that reasoning which Quesnel strove to interpret — namely, that he might withstand catholic constancy against the whirlwind of falsehoods, as a man who had undertaken the labor without hatred and favor for the destruction of heretical impiety alone — but because he had to assume and discharge the parts of the supreme pontiff. Wherefore we have judged that Quesnel's marginal note must be deleted, as rendering an equivocal sense, which he wrote on the margin of his edition: 'Note for what cause Leo desires his legate to preside over the universal synod.' For these words indicate that the pontiff owed this office to his own legate: 'The aforesaid brother and fellow-bishop of mine, in my stead' — St. Leo not obscurely signified that it was fitting or owed to convene;

chiefly in order to repair those rights of the Apostolic See which through the violence of the one Dioscorus had been ruined and abolished at the Robber Council of Ephesus, as is ascertained from the definition of the Council of Chalcedon. St. Peter — that is, the holy pontiff — is in agreement with himself in the following letter to Anatolius, in which he more clearly signifies that he was unwilling to resist the disposition of the most clement prince, especially because he himself had also with great desire demanded the general council.

But since, for those four men from Sicily and Italy going to the East for so grave a business, it would have been very difficult to carry out Leo's commands exactly, unless by some man of approved faith who could thoroughly know all the modes of acting, the zeal, the arts, the cunning, and the evasions of the Easterns; Leo, fearing — and reasonably — lest Paschasinus together with the other legates should be deceived in discharging their duties, charges Julian, bishop of Cos, to suggest to them those warnings and counsels, and to furnish those aids which he should judge able to be of profit for abolishing and overthrowing scandals and for the necessities of emerging affairs. We feign nothing at all by our own judgment.

This is indicated by those words of the most holy Leo, supreme pontiff, to the same bishop of Cos: 'That the uproar of all scandals may be removed, we necessarily enjoin upon your fraternity what may profit the whole Church, that with our brothers and fellow-bishops Paschasinus and Lucentius… whom we have ordered to go in our stead to the aforesaid assembly, you join your care and action, in all things using the authority of our injunction.' The following words are to be noted: 'Since we know that you have a greater knowledge of all the matters there transacted than our men, so that while you join your care and counsel to them, in no part may they be deceived.' 5.

It seemed to Leo that he had not yet sufficiently consulted the common good of the Churches, unless he had sent to the synod — which was being gathered first at Nicaea, then at Chalcedon — the rules that must necessarily be followed. Therefore on the same fifth day before the Kalends of July he wrote a letter to all the Fathers of this general synod, containing chiefly three chapters, in which the whole method of the matters to be transacted was set forth. For who indeed will be able fully and perfectly to explain the force, weight, and energy with which the text of that whole letter is filled?

That the Roman pontiff has the majesty of dignity, the authority of the supreme head, and jurisdiction over the universal Church even when gathered in councils, he makes sufficiently manifest, since no one — whether of the chief sees or of the inferior sees of bishops — has dared to gainsay him. For with these words full of authority and majesty he began the letter: 'I had indeed wished, most beloved, out of the charity of our college, that all the priests of the Lord should persist in the one devotion to the catholic faith, and that no one, by favor or by dread of secular powers… should depart from the way of truth.'

With a soft arm he here chides those who, in the preceding plundering synod, conquered by the friendship of the wicked or deterred by dread, had fallen into those horrendous and grave crimes through the arts of Dioscorus and Chrysaphius; whose punishment he asserts had hitherto been put off, in order that the mercy of God might be lavished upon the penitent. He adds that he had been invited by the emperor to preside over the synod, the right and honor of the most blessed apostle Peter being preserved. To whose wishes neither the necessity of the troubled times nor any custom permitted him to assent. Nevertheless he confesses that he was present at and presided over the synod in a twofold manner. First in those four legates acting as his vicarious person;

then by the preaching of the divine word, sufficiently set forth in the celebrated letter to Flavian, from which (he says) 'you could not be ignorant of what, from ancient tradition, we believe, nor can you doubt what we desire.' In the other chapter he asserts that it had already been most fully and most lucidly laid open to all what must be confessed by all about the sacrament of the Incarnation, piously and sincerely, 'through the letters which we sent to the bishop Flavian of blessed memory.'

Finally, taking note of the wicked rivalries of the factious, since the catholic bishops had been unjustly expelled from their sees and deported into exiles, and others substituted in the place of the survivors, he orders that first the medicine of justice be applied, lest anyone lack his own or use another's. From which mandate of Leo the Great, the pontiff, we understand that Eusebius of Dorylaeum, Theodoret of Cyrus, and other catholic bishops were to be restored; but to Domnus of Antioch, who had favored the nods of Dioscorus and Eutyches, no right could remain that he should be re-clothed with the former honor and dignity of which he had been stripped.

Assuredly, if Quesnel had attended to this Leonine prescription, he would scarcely have stirred up one out of so many questions, by inquiring why, when the acts of the Robber Council of Ephesus had been rescinded by Leo, it was not permitted to Domnus to return to the Antiochene see, for which Maximus had been ordained; nor would he have labored so greatly in vain to contend that that action concerning Domnus of Antioch was spurious. 6. But wishing to come again to our matter: Leo the Great does not desist from the study he had begun. For Boniface the presbyter, being about to depart from the city of Rome to discharge the office of pontifical vicar or legate in the synod, he handed over to him new letters to be delivered to the emperor Marcian, distributed into only two chapters;

in the former of which he renews to the emperor's mind the preceding petition, by which he would have preferred the synod to be deferred to more tranquil times, far from the hostile boundary. Yet he praises the pious imperial zeal, by which he set divine matters before human ones, inquiring lest there be a discord of opinions among the priests, and lest there be any disagreement in the preaching of the Gospel. These two things moved the pontiff's own mind there, lest he should resist these dispositions about holding the synod outside Italy and at such a time, desiring (he says) 'that in the hearts of all the catholic faith, which cannot be other than one, may be made firm.' After this he speaks about both Councils of Ephesus.

Of which he asserts that the one deservedly and justly condemned Nestorius, his dogma, and his followers; but the other, held for the cause of Eutyches, cannot be called a council, since it is established to have been conducted for the overthrow of the faith, and which was annulled chiefly by ecclesiastical, and then by the imperial, authority of Marcian himself. 7. The formula, moreover, of the future judgment to be held in the synod, the holy pontiff relates that he prescribed to all the Fathers through the four legates sent to Chalcedon, both in this and in the following, and finally in one letter to the empress Pulcheria, forbidding that any question about the faith be instituted;

since it would be too injurious and altogether unseemly to re-examine as doubtful the faith which our blessed Fathers preached as handed down to them from the apostles. Finally he pledges that he will be present at the council in his legates, saying: 'Nor should you believe that I too am absent from that council, as your clemency wished, since in these brothers whom I have directed — that is, in the bishops Paschasinus and Lucentius, in the presbyters Boniface and Basil, and also in my brother Julian, whom I wished to be a participant with them — my presence too is to be reckoned.' The holy pontiff wrote this letter on the sixth day before the Kalends of July in the year 451.

But when, after fifteen days, he had been made more certain that Paschasinus had sailed from Sicily to the East to carry out the mandates of the Apostolic See, he determined to give new letters to the emperor Marcian himself, in which he commends his legates to him, and again demands that no disputation about the faith be set up there. This same thing he performed toward Pulcheria Augusta, to whom he sent letters through Theoctistus the Magistrian. In this letter, indeed, first speaking about his legates sent to the council, he again explains how he had desired the synod to be gathered in Italy. Then [he explains] that the whole [moderation?] must be observed in ecclesiastical causes [contrary to] the Robber Council of Ephesus, where the chief men of the synod spared neither the brothers resisting them nor those consenting.

Wherefore, desiring that medicine be applied to the greater wounds, he decreed that pardon must not be denied to the corrected. Finally, desiring to obtain the extinction of the heresy, he resolved that even the heresiarchs, asking for indulgence, were neither to be rejected nor rashly received; who, although after the unjust judgment they were not honorable to the catholic brotherhood as they had been, yet — while they still retained their sees and were possessed of the honor of their episcopate — he orders that ecclesiastical peace be not denied to them, if through true and necessary satisfaction they came to their senses. 8. The rules, therefore, of all the matters to be transacted in the synod, both in this and in the preceding letters, and also in the memorandum given to his legates, St.

Leo proposed, prescribed, and predefined. From which indeed no one could be permitted to withdraw, lest the synodal Acts be rendered void and empty — as we shall see in a more opportune place, when treating of the primacy of the Constantinopolitan see after the Roman pontiff, which those Fathers, too favorable to the ambition of Anatolius, were attempting to establish. But since in the praised letters the holy pontiff most especially

the pontiff discourses about the dogma of the faith to be unanimously asserted according to the celebrated letter which he had written to Flavian, and about ecclesiastical peace to be given even to those who through the Robber Council of Ephesus had fallen away from catholic society, rendering themselves unworthy of those honors, grades, and prerogatives of the Church which they possessed — these same lapsed ones, desiring to come to sincere penance, he orders to be received once the due satisfaction has first been made by them; and he commands that this caution be observed, that even the chief heresiarchs asking for indulgence be neither rejected nor rashly received.

Wherefore, every penalty being relaxed for the penitent, he grants that they return to their ancient episcopal sees or retain them, provided that other catholics had not already been substituted in the place of the lapsed bishops, and that the lapsed ones themselves were still possessed of the honor of their episcopate. This indeed we judge that he wished to indicate by those words, all violent interpretation set aside, in which he said 'that all indulgence is to be granted to those petitioners who nevertheless still retain their sees and are possessed of the honor of their episcopate.' Since Quesnel had by no means grasped this economy of Leo's manner of acting and writing, he stirred up many questions, recalling to examination the cause of Domnus, formerly bishop of Antioch.

An inquisitive man, compelled to let his mind wander this way and that, asks why Thalassius of Caesarea, Juvenal of Jerusalem, Eustathius of Berytus -- who likewise played leading roles at the Robber Synod of Ephesus, together with Dioscorus and the Eutychian faction -- were able to keep their sees by the vote of the Council of Chalcedon, whereas Domnus, who had a case identical to theirs, was not permitted to return to his own see.

Surely, had he attended to the earlier decree of Leo, and considered with himself that Domnus had as yet neither obtained his see nor any longer enjoyed the honour of the episcopate -- because, once the Robber Synod of Ephesus was dissolved, the Catholic bishop Maximus had been substituted in his place -- he would by no means have laboured so greatly to persuade his readers that Domnus was no longer alive at the time of the Council of Chalcedon, nor would he have rejected as false and fabricated that act of the Council of Chalcedon which was written concerning him. But that this synodal act is sincere and genuine, the most illustrious Stephanus Baluzius proved by the gravest and most evident arguments, with the consummate erudition in which he excelled; although he did not raise the cited passage of Leo against Quesnel;

yet that testimony was most apt for refuting the more numerous and more notable arguments of his adversary, as we ourselves shall remark in what follows, when we come to speak of the acts of the Synod of Chalcedon.