Leo, bishop, to Marcian Augustus.
Chapter I: The System by Which the Alexandrian Bishop Reports the Paschal Date to the Apostolic See, Which Then Circulates It to the Churches
Your piety’s faith is made manifest through many proofs across the churches of Christ — so that when solicitude arises for the common religion, your aid is rightly sought. Mindful of the stewardship entrusted to me, I must extend my care to future matters as well, not unjustly seeking the zealous aid of your clemency. In an observance always varied by the lunar cycle’s condition, no error must be allowed to occur. The Paschal feast — which contains the greatest mystery of human salvation — though always celebrated in the first month, is subject to the mutability of the lunar cycle, often producing an ambiguous choice of the most sacred day. Hence it happens, unlawfully, that not all the Church observes what must be a single thing. The holy Fathers sought to remove every occasion for this error: delegating all this care to the bishop of Alexandria, since the Egyptians were held to possess ancient expertise in this calculation, with the duty of indicating the feast’s date each year to the Apostolic See — whose letters would then convey a general notice to the churches in distant regions.
Chapter II: The Controversy in Theophilus of Alexandria’s Hundred-Year Calculation
Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria of holy memory, in compiling a hundred-year table of this observance, set the Paschal feast of the seventy-sixth year far differently from all others’ decrees. From the first consulship of the elder Augustus Theodosius, he ordered the sequence of sacred observance to be recorded for the longer period — whose seventy-fourth year we celebrated on the day before the Ides of April. The next year, God willing, the same feast will be held on the day before the Nones of April, as the regular order of the hundred-year annotation declares. But the seventy-sixth year’s Paschal date — assigned to the eighth day before the Kalends of May — exceeds the limit of the ancient constitution, having no example or authority from the Lord’s Passion, while others have assigned it to the fifteenth day before the Kalends of May.
Chapter III: Leo Asks Marcian to Convene an Inquiry to Resolve the Discrepancy
The legitimate span — fixed from the eleventh day before the Kalends of April to the eleventh before the Kalends of May — encompasses the necessity of all variations, so that We neither hold the Lord’s Pascha earlier nor later than is right. That the feast should occasionally reach the tenth or ninth before the Kalends of May is defensible, since the day of the Passion does not exceed its limit even if the day of the Resurrection seems to. But extending the Paschal observance to the eighth before the Kalends of May is too bold a transgression of the ancient rule.
Since Theophilus’s hundred-year calculation appears to set the seventy-sixth year’s Paschal date against ecclesiastical custom — and it is no light fault if the truth and unity of so great a mystery are not held by the universal Church — I beseech your clemency to lend its zeal to this. Let Egyptians, or others who hold certain knowledge of this calculation, resolve this scruple of our solicitude — directing the general observance to a day that neither abandons the paternal constitutions nor exceeds the fixed limits. Let your piety swiftly inform me of this inquiry’s findings, so that no fault of discord may arise in the divine mysteries.
Dated the seventeenth day before the Kalends of July, in the consulship of Opilio, most illustrious man.
Footnotes
- ↩ This administrative arrangement — the Alexandrian bishop reports the Paschal date to the Apostolic See, which then issues the general notice to the universal Church — is a small but precise illustration of how the Apostolic See functions as the coordinating center of the universal Church’s common life. The bishop of the second see provides the technical calculation; the Apostolic See receives it, evaluates it, and issues it as a general direction to all. The direction to distant churches comes from Rome, not from Alexandria. The system thus places the Apostolic See’s authority between the Alexandrian calculation and the universal church’s observance — a quiet but consistent application of the primacy structure to a matter of calendar discipline.
- ↩ Theophilus of Alexandria (d. 412) — the predecessor of Cyril and a figure of enormous influence in the late fourth and early fifth century. His hundred-year Paschal table (the Laterculum Theophili) was the standard computational resource used by both Eastern and Western churches for determining Easter dates. The table ran from the year 380 onward for one hundred years. The dispute Leo is raising concerns the calculation for the seventy-sixth year of the table — which would fall in 455 — where Theophilus’s assignment of the feast to April 24 appeared to exceed the ancient constitutional limit established by the Fathers.
- ↩ June 15, 453. This letter is the only letter in the Leo corpus dealing primarily with the Paschal computation controversy. Its significance for the primacy question lies not in its technical content but in what Chapter I reveals about the administrative structure: the Alexandrian bishop reports to the Apostolic See; the Apostolic See issues the general direction. That Leo is asking the emperor to convene an inquiry rather than simply resolving the matter by fiat reflects both his recognition that the calculation is a technical question requiring expertise and his expectation that the emperor will serve as the instrument through which the resolution is sought and reported back to Rome.
Historical Commentary