Theopedia

Leo the Great

In the incarnation the properties of each nature and substance were preserved entire, and came together to form one person… Each nature preserves its own characteristics without diminution, so that the form of a servant does not detract from the form of God.

Leo the Great, Tome (Letter 28.3), quoted in Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 87.

Overview

Leo the Great was bishop of Rome from 440 to 461.1 He is best known for the Tome, a letter on the person of Christ that the Council of Chalcedon (451) adopted as the basis of its own Christological definition, and for being the pope credited with first systematically developing the primacy claims of the Roman see.21

Life and Ministry

Leo’s tenure as bishop of Rome coincided with the last phase of the church’s controversy over how to describe the union of Christ’s divine and human natures. A Constantinopolitan presbyter named Eutyches, pressing opposition to Nestorius to the opposite extreme, taught that Christ had only one nature after the incarnation; his teaching was condemned at a synod in Constantinople, but in 449 Dioscurus of Alexandria convened a general synod at Ephesus that forcibly excluded Eutyches’ opponents and restored him, a synod later known as the “Robber Synod.”3 Its ruling was overturned two years later, when a new general council met at Chalcedon (451). There Dioscurus was deposed and Leo’s own letter to Flavian, patriarch of Constantinople, known as his Tome, was adopted as a true exposition of the church’s faith; the council framed its own Christological definition in agreement with Leo’s letter.4

Leo did not attend Chalcedon in person. His legates presided there, but by his own account this was not something owed to his see: writing to request the arrangement from Emperor Marcian and Empress Pulcheria Augusta, Leo did not claim a standing right to preside, but argued that the Eastern bishops who had presided at the disorderly Robber Synod had proved unfit for the task and that a different moderator was needed.5

Theological Contribution

The Tome and Chalcedonian Christology

Leo’s Tome set out, in Ronald Heine’s description, “the more balanced position that had been arrived at in the Latin-speaking church,” and its language is echoed throughout the formula Chalcedon went on to produce.2 Leo insisted that the incarnation joined two complete natures, divine and human, in one person without either nature losing its own properties: “the properties of each nature and substance were preserved entire, and came together to form one person… an inviolable nature was united to a nature that can suffer,” so that Christ “was able to die in respect of the one, unable to die in respect of the other.”6 A. A. Hodge records Leo’s own summary tag for this union, “Totus in suis, totus in nostris” (wholly in what is his own, wholly in what is ours).7 Chalcedon’s own definition, that Christ is known “in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” draws directly on this formulation.8

Original sin and traducianism

On the separate question of how the soul is transmitted from one generation to the next, Louis Berkhof records that “Leo the Great called [traducianism, the view that the soul as well as the body originates by propagation from one’s parents] the teaching of the catholic faith,” aligning him with the Western line, running back through Tertullian, that tied the soul’s traducian origin to the doctrine of the transmission of original sin.9 The Reformed tradition generally took the opposite, creationist view; Calvin himself rejected what he called “that ancient figment of certain writers, that souls are derived by descent from our first parents.”9

Opposition to Manichaeism

Leo also confronted Manichean adherents who concealed their beliefs while outwardly participating in the church’s worship. Benedict Pictet preserves Leo’s own description of the practice: “When they (the Manichees) dare to be present at our mysteries, in order to conceal their infidelity, they so manage themselves in the communion, that sometimes… they receive with their unworthy mouths the body of Christ; but they altogether refuse to drink the blood of our redemption.”10

Historical Significance

The Second Helvetic Confession later numbered Chalcedon, whose definition drew on Leo’s Tome, among “the first four most excellent synods” whose Christological decrees it received without qualification.11

Leo’s other legacy is more contested. Herman Bavinck identifies him as the pope who first “clearly and with all deliberateness in several letters developed this primacy of the Roman See and elevated it to the rank and value of a religious dogma, one that has its basis in Matthew 16:18.”1 Bavinck traces a direct line from Leo’s claims through Gregory VII’s Dictatus Papae, Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302), and the First Vatican Council’s 1870 declaration of papal jurisdiction over the whole church.1 The Eastern church resisted this claim from the start: Chalcedon’s own twenty-eighth canon granted Rome and Constantinople equal standing rather than subordinating the latter to the former.1

John Calvin examined Leo’s own record on the question and found less there than later Roman claims assumed. At the Robber Synod, Calvin notes, “the deputies of the Roman Church sat among the others just as in a sacred and lawful Council,” conceding first place to Dioscorus rather than contesting it as though it were theirs by right.5 And at Chalcedon, where Leo’s legates did preside, Leo’s own letter requesting the arrangement treated it as an exceptional accommodation to the previous council’s disorder, not as a right he already possessed: “That which is asked as a special privilege, and out of the usual order, certainly is not due by a common law.”12

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 86. ↩ ↩2

  3. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Person of Christ,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 401. ↩

  4. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:401-402. ↩

  5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), bk. 4, chap. 7, secs. 1-2, 366-67. ↩ ↩2

  6. Leo the Great, Tome (Letter 28.3), quoted in Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine, 87. ↩

  7. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 388. ↩

  8. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:402. ↩

  9. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 182. ↩ ↩2

  10. Benedict Pictet, Christian Theology, trans. Frederick Reyroux (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1845), 431-32. ↩

  11. Heinrich Bullinger, The Second Helvetic Confession (Zurich, 1566), chap. 11, “Of Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, the Only Savior of the World.” ↩

  12. Calvin, Institutes, bk. 4, chap. 7, sec. 2, 367. ↩