Letters and Sermons (incl. the Tome to Flavian)
- Language:
- English
- Translation:
- C. L. Feltoe
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~210,000 words · 1,006 passages
Cite this work
- APALeo I. (n.d.). Letters and Sermons (incl. the Tome to Flavian) (C. L. Feltoe, Trans.). Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-i/letters-and-sermons-incl-the-tome-to-flavian
- MLALeo I. Letters and Sermons (incl. the Tome to Flavian). Translated by C. L. Feltoe. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-i/letters-and-sermons-incl-the-tome-to-flavian.
- ChicagoLeo I. Letters and Sermons (incl. the Tome to Flavian). Translated by C. L. Feltoe. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/leo-i/letters-and-sermons-incl-the-tome-to-flavian.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Letters and sermons of Leo the Great, among them the Tome to Flavian, the letter that settles how Christ is to be understood as God and man at once.
Context and history
The Tome is of 449 and had an immediate consequence: at the council of Chalcedon in 451 it was read aloud and the bishops acclaimed it, saying that Peter had spoken through Leo. The formula of two natures in one person that came out of it still defines the Christology of most churches — and it caused the separation of those that did not accept it. The sermons are another matter: short, made to be spoken, and useful for seeing how preaching was done in fifth-century Rome.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
oftenest hitherto in the Eastern) portion of His Church. Politically, intellectually, and theologically the period in which this great character grew up, lived and worked, was one of transition: the Roman Empire, learning and thought, paganism were each alike at the last gasp, and neither in Church nor State was there any other at all of Leo's caliber. This consideration will account for the wonderful influence, partly for good and partly for bad, which his master-mind and will was permitted to exercise on the after-ages of Christendom. During his early manhood the Pelagian controversy was raging, and it is thought that the acolyte name Leo, whom Augustine mentions in his letters on this subject as employed by pope Zosimus to carry communications between Rome and the African church, is the future Pope. Under Celestine, who was pope from 422 to 432, he was archedeacon of Rome, and he seems already to have made a name for himself: for Cassian, the Gallican writer whom he had urged to write a work on the Incarnation, in yielding to his suggestion, calls him "the ornament of the Roman Church and of the Divine ministry," and S. Cyril (in 431, the date of the Council of Ephesus) appeals to Leo (as Leo has himself recorded in Letter CXIX., chap. 4) to procure the pope's support in stopping the ambitious designs of Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem. Under the next pope, Sixtus (432-440), we hear of him in Prosper' s Chronicon (under the year 439) again in connexion with Pelagianism: he seems to have stirred up the vigilance of the pope against the crafty designs of one Julius of Eclanum, who, having been deprived of his bishopric for holding that heresy, was attempting to be restored without full proof of orthodoxy.