Leo, pope, to Julian, Bishop of Cos.
Chapter I: Leo Marvels That Julian Has Interceded for Anatolius’s Illicit Claims
Your charity has often demonstrated, through steadfast and resolute commitment, how faithfully you guard the sacred canons of the Nicene Fathers — judging all ecclesiastical discipline dissolved if anything should violate their holy decrees. I marvel, therefore, that you could send such writings through our brother and fellow bishop Lucianus — intervening so greatly on behalf of a desire for something new and transgressive that you think I ought to grant some special concession by assenting to what is being sought illicitly.
Chapter II: Leo Declares That No Urging or Pleading Will Persuade Him to Undermine the Church’s Order
However much I embrace you with affection, you cannot persuade me — by urging or by pleading — to undermine the order of the Church. If our brother and fellow bishop Anatolius wisely recognizes the divine benefits and the assent of my favor by which he obtained so great an episcopate, let it suffice him — elevated to so eminent a see — to give thanks to God for his episcopal honor and to restrain himself within it from illicit desires. Those who love him especially ought to counsel him in this way: that he seek not the impossible, and that he not harm himself through such desires — for no advocacy will move me to agree with what he is pursuing by trampling the decrees of the Fathers.
Chapter III: What Leo May Not Licitly Grant, Julian May Not Licitly Obtain
In replying to your letters with the charity I hold toward you, I urge that the order of the universal Church — fortified by its most salutary and most true establishment — outweighs any request for concessions in anyone’s favor: which neither I may licitly grant, nor you obtain without our mutual guilt.
Dated the eleventh day before the Kalends of June, in the consulship of Herculanus, most illustrious man.
Footnotes
- ↩ Leo opens by invoking Julian’s own established record as a defender of the Nicene canons — the same canons whose authority grounds Leo’s refusal of Canon 28. The move is pointed: Julian’s letter interceding for Anatolius contradicts his own acknowledged principles. One who holds that ecclesiastical discipline collapses the moment the Nicene decrees are violated has, by his own standard, no ground on which to plead for Canon 28.
- ↩ The phrase non potes me… persuadere, ut ordinem Ecclesiae dissolvam — “you cannot persuade me… to undermine the order of the Church” — is the clearest statement in the entire corpus that Leo’s refusal of Canon 28 is an act of personal will, not merely the passive application of a canonical rule. It is addressed not to Anatolius but to Julian of Cos — Leo’s own trusted personal representative in Constantinople, a man Leo embraces with deep affection. Even this bond, even this trusted intermediary, cannot move Leo. The refusal is unconditional: no urging, no pleading, no relationship, however close, will produce a different answer. Read alongside Letter CVI’s “which can never gain Our agreement” and “far be it from my conscience,” this sentence completes the picture of a refusal that is simultaneously canonical in its ground and volitional in its act.
- ↩ The phrase quam nec ego possum licite praestare, nec tu sine reatu nostro consequi — “which neither I may licitly grant, nor you obtain without our mutual guilt” — frames the Canon 28 claim as something that would implicate both parties in wrongdoing if it were conceded. Leo is not simply declining; he is warning Julian that his own intercession places him in moral jeopardy. If Leo granted what is asked, it would be an illicit act on Leo’s part; if Julian obtained it by his advocacy, it would be a shared guilt. The refusal is framed as an act of protection — for Julian as much as for the Church.
- ↩ May 22, 452 — the same date as Letters CIV, CV, and CVI, completing the four-letter coordinated response to the Canon 28 campaign. Letter CVII is the shortest of the four, but its brevity is the brevity of a position stated without qualification: no relationship, no advocacy, no favor will change the answer. That Leo directs this to Julian of Cos — his most trusted Eastern agent, the man who had served as his eyes and ears at Constantinople through the entire Chalcedonian crisis — makes the finality of the refusal all the more decisive.
Historical Commentary