Leo, bishop, to the most glorious and clement Emperor Theodosius.
Chapter I: Leo Complains of the Ephesine Robbery
From the beginning, in councils held, we have received such confidence from the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, that we have authority to defend the truth for our peace, so none may disturb it, fortified as it is, while harm is swiftly removed.
The episcopal council you ordered in Ephesus concerning Flavian is proven to harm the faith and wound all the churches. [Lacuna] These things we know not from uncertain report but from the most reverend bishops sent by us and our faithful deacon Hilarus, narrator of the acts.
This proceeded from the fault that those gathered did not judge with pure conscience and right judgment, per custom, concerning the faith and the erring. We know not all who should have convened were present; some were rejected, others admitted who, by the aforementioned priest’s judgment, gave captive hands to impious subscriptions, knowing it would harm their status unless they obeyed, issuing a sentence that injured all churches.
Our representatives, sent from the Apostolic See, seeing this so impious and contrary to the Catholic faith, reported it to us.
Chapter II: Leo Requests Affairs Remain as Before the Pseudo-Synod
Hence, most tranquil of princes, we beseech you to remove the peril to religion and faith from your piety’s conscience, lest human presumption violate Christ’s Gospel. Behold, I, most Christian and venerable emperor, with my fellow priests, fulfilling sincere love’s duty toward your clemency — desiring you to please God above all, prayed for by the Church for you — beseech before the indivisible Trinity’s one Deity, injured by such deeds yet guardian and author of your empire, and before Christ’s holy angels: that you order all to remain as before any judgment, until a greater number of priests from the whole world convene.
Do not bear another’s sin’s burden, for we fear, as we must say, that the indignation of Him whose religion is being scattered be provoked. Keep before your eyes the glory of blessed Peter, the shared crowns of all apostles, and the martyrs’ palms, whose sole cause of suffering was confessing the true divinity and humanity in Christ.
Chapter III: Leo Urges a Council in Italy
As this mystery is now impiously opposed by a few imprudent ones, all our region’s churches and priests supplicate your clemency with groans and tears. Since our representatives faithfully protested and Bishop Flavian gave an appeal’s libel, order a general synod in Italy to repel or mitigate all offenses, so nothing remains doubtful in faith or divided in charity.
With bishops of the Eastern provinces convened, those led astray by threats and injuries from truth’s path may be restored by salutary remedies. Those with harsher cause, if they accept better counsels, may not fall from the Church’s unity. This is necessarily required post-appeal, as the Nicene canons’ decrees, established by the world’s priests, attest.
Favor the Catholics, per your and your parents’ custom, granting freedom to defend the faith. As we pursue the Church’s and your kingdom’s cause and salvation, that your provinces enjoy just peace, defend the Church’s unshaken state against heretics, so Christ’s right hand may defend your empire.
Dated the third day before the Ides of October, in the consulship of Asturius and Protogenes, most illustrious men.
Footnotes
- ↩ The Latin opens ab initio… accepimus fiduciam a beatissimo Petro et principio apostolorum — “from the beginning… we received confidence from the most blessed Peter and the prince of the apostles.” The phrase ab initio — “from the beginning” — is as important as the Petrine reference itself. Leo is not appealing to a recent conciliar grant; he is appealing to an authority in place from the Church’s foundation. The council that Dioscorus exploited cannot overturn what Peter established, because conciliar authority itself derives from the Petrine foundation. This is the premise from which all three chapters of the letter follow.
- ↩ A lacuna — a gap in the transmitted Latin text — appears here. The parallel appeal in Letter XLIV (PL 54:825), addressed to the same emperor on the same day, supplies additional content at this point. The PL’s editorial note before this letter discusses the textual relationship between these two parallel appeals at length.
- ↩ Hilarus the deacon — later Pope Hilarius (461–468) — was one of Leo’s three legates at Ephesus II. He barely escaped being compelled by force to subscribe to the council’s acts and returned to Rome as the sole firsthand Roman witness to the proceedings. Leo’s designation of him as narrator actorum — “narrator of the acts” — establishes the evidentiary basis of the entire appeal: Leo is not theorizing about what happened at Ephesus; he has an eyewitness.
- ↩ The Latin is sacramentum — “mystery” in the classical theological sense, not in the narrower liturgical sense. Leo uses sacramentum consistently throughout the corpus to designate the great sacred economy of the faith in Christ — the Incarnation, our redemption, the divine plan. Here the mystery being impiously opposed is Christ’s true divinity and humanity, which Eutyches’s theology destroys.
- ↩ The insistence on Italy — in Italiae partibus — runs through every post-Latrocinium appeal Leo sends to Theodosius. A council in Italy would sit beyond Dioscorus’s reach and within the Apostolic See’s sphere, where the canons could govern proceedings without imperial pressure. Theodosius refused every time. The council that eventually fulfilled Leo’s requests — Chalcedon, 451 — was held near Constantinople after Theodosius’s death in July 450, under the new emperor Marcian and empress Pulcheria.
- ↩ October 13, 449 — the same date as Letter XLIV, Leo’s companion appeal to the same emperor, sent the same day with the joint voice of the Roman Synod. The PL also includes a third, longer parallel version of the same appeal (PL’s Letter XLV, pages 827–832 of PL 54) in the Chalcedonian manuscript tradition. The relationship between these three parallel texts is discussed in the PL’s editorial notes; for the project’s purposes, Letters XLIII and XLIV represent the two main versions of this appeal, and PL’s XLV, which substantially overlaps with both, does not require a separate entry.