Note: Passages enclosed in [square brackets] are present in the Latin text of the PL but absent from the parallel Greek version of this letter.
Leo, bishop of the city of Rome, to the most beloved brother Bishop Julian.
Chapter I: Eutyches’s Error Destroys the Mysteries of Our Redemption
Though we have already sent the fullest letters to our brother Bishop Flavian against the error of great impiety — through the legates we dispatched from the City for the cause of faith — yet since our son the deacon Basilius has brought us the writings of your beloved, which greatly pleased us with their Catholic fervor, we have added this page consonant with those letters, so that you may unanimously and steadfastly resist those who seek to corrupt the Gospel of Christ. For the teaching of the Holy Spirit is one and the same doctrine in us and in you alike; and whoever does not receive it is not a member of the body of Christ, nor can he glory in the head of whom he asserts that his nature is not found there.
What advantage is it for this most imprudent old man to tear at the opinions of others under the name of Nestorianism — when he cannot shake their most devout faith? For as much as Nestorius departed from the truth by separating the Deity of the Word from the substance of the man assumed, so too this man departs from the right path who proclaims that the Only-begotten Son of God, born from the womb of the Blessed Virgin, bore the form of a human body but that the truth of human flesh was not united to the Word.
Who does not see what monstrous opinions arise from this false absurdity? For whoever denies that Jesus Christ is true man must be filled with many impieties — let Apollinaris claim him, or Valentinus usurp him, or Manichaeus have him — none of whom accepted the truth of human flesh in Christ. With this truth rejected, not only is it denied that He who was in the form of God, remaining in the form of a servant, was born a man with flesh and rational soul; but also his being under bonds, his mortality, his burial, his resurrection on the third day, and his coming at the Father’s right hand in that same body to judge the living and the dead are denied — as the prophet says: He would not understand, to do good; he meditated iniquity in his bed (Ps. 35:4). The mysteries of our redemption are made void if Christ is not believed to have assumed our true and complete nature.
Chapter II: The Properties of Both Natures Are Preserved in Christ Undivided and Unconfused
Do the testimonies of divine signs falsify the proofs of the body? Do the declarations of both natures confirm the Creator but leave the creature unsaved? Divinity does not diminish the flesh, nor does the humility of the flesh oppress divinity. He is eternal from the Father, temporal from the mother; inviolable in his power, passible in our weakness; one with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the nature of divinity, not one in the substance of the assumed man, yet one in person.
[Rich in poverty, omnipotent in abjection, impassible in suffering, immortal in death. The Word was not partly changed into flesh or into a soul; the simple and unchangeable quality of the divine nature, remaining wholly in its own essence, can neither be diminished nor increased — beatifying the assumed nature so that the glorified remains in the glorifying.]
Why then does it seem absurd or impossible that the Word, the flesh, and the soul should be one Jesus Christ, one Son of God and man — when flesh and soul, of different natures, form one person even without the Incarnation of the Word? For it is far easier for the power of divinity to effect this unity with man than for human weakness alone to achieve it in its own substances.
For neither was the Word changed into flesh nor flesh changed into the Word by any transformation; but each remains in one, and one is in both: divided by no diversity, confused by no mixture. Not one from the Father and another from the mother, but the same — differently from the Father before all beginning, differently from the mother at the end of the ages — to be the mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ (1 Tim. 2:5), in whom the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily (Col. 2:9). For the exaltation is of the assumed, not of the assumer, as God exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:9–11).
Chapter III: Neither Soul Nor Body of Christ Is Pre-existent; Both Are of Our Nature
[In the matter of what Eutyches dared to say at the episcopal judgment — that before the Incarnation there were two natures in Christ but after the Incarnation only one — it was necessary that he be pressed by the frequent and searching questions of the judges to give an account of that profession, and not have so empty-seeming a statement pass by unexamined, since it was evident it could only come from a draft of poisonous dogmas. For I believe that one who speaks thus holds this conviction: that the soul which the Savior assumed had dwelt in heaven before his birth from the Virgin Mary, and was joined to the Word in her womb. But Catholic minds and ears cannot tolerate this, for the Lord, coming from heaven, brought nothing of our condition with him; he received neither a soul that had previously existed nor flesh that did not come from his mother’s body.]
For our nature was not assumed in such a way that it was first created and then assumed, but so that it was created by the very act of assumption itself. Hence what was justly condemned in Origen — that souls, before they were placed in bodies, not only had life but performed diverse actions, as he asserted — must also be visited upon this man unless he prefers to renounce that opinion.
For the Lord’s birth according to the flesh, though it has certain things proper to it — conceived without concupiscence from an inviolate Virgin, born in such a way that her fecundity brought forth fruit while her virginity remained — yet his flesh was of no other nature than ours, nor was the soul breathed into him differently than in other men, excelling not by difference of kind but by the sublimity of virtue. For he had nothing of flesh opposed to him, no discord of warring desires fighting against his will. His bodily senses were active without the law of sin, and the truth of his affections, under the moderation of divinity and of mind, did not yield even to injuries.
True man united to God — God and likewise man in both — he was neither brought down from heaven with a pre-existing soul nor created from nothing in flesh, but held one and the same person in the divinity of the Word and a nature common with us in body and soul. For he cannot be the mediator between God and men (1 Tim. 2:5) unless the same one is both God and man, one and true.
The greatness of the matter urges extending this discussion at length; but with your learning, there is no need to labor copiously — especially since we have sent to our brother Flavian, through our legates, sufficient letters to strengthen the spirits not only of priests but also of laypeople. The mercy of God will provide, we believe, that without any loss to any soul both the sound may be defended and the wounded healed.
Given on the Ides of June, in the consulship of Asturius and Protogenes, most illustrious men.
Footnotes
- ↩ “The legates we dispatched from the City” — per nostros, quos ab Urbe pro fidei causa direximus. “The City” is Rome, and the letters dispatched are the Tome (Letter XXVIII) and the accompanying cluster. Leo’s reference to having sent the fullest letters to Flavian is the structural foundation of this letter: he is writing to arm Julian with the theological argument he has already stated definitively for Flavian, so that Julian can defend and propagate it in the East. The Tome is thus simultaneously the letter to Flavian and the doctrinal standard for every bishop in Leo’s network.
- ↩ The Latin is redemptions nostrae sacramenta — “the mysteries of our redemption.” Sacramentum here, as throughout this letter, carries its classical theological sense: the sacred mystery, the divine economy of salvation. Leo uses the same term throughout the June 13 cluster. The translation “sacraments” would wrongly narrow the word to its later liturgical sense; “mysteries” preserves both the breadth and the reverence Leo intends.
- ↩ This bracketed passage — present in the Latin but absent from the Greek version — is significant. Leo is criticizing the conduct of the 448 Constantinople synod for not pressing Eutyches more rigorously on what he meant by “one nature after the Incarnation.” The Nestorian formula of two natures before the Incarnation and one after is a confused position that Leo traces to the doctrine of the soul’s pre-existence. By failing to interrogate Eutyches’s profession systematically, the judges allowed an ambiguity that concealed a deeper error.
- ↩ June 13, 449 — the date given by all manuscripts, confirmed by the PL’s footnote (a): “Scripta 13 Junii an. 449.” The PL Admonitio before Letter XXXIV discusses at length whether Letter XXXV could actually have been sent on June 13 given that it mentions Deacon Basilius delivering Julian’s letters (a delivery that appears to postdate the dispatch of the main legates). The editorial conclusion is that two letters were sent to Julian on the same day — Letter XXXIV through the legates and Letter XXXV through Basilius — and that the manuscript tradition’s uniform dating to June 13 should stand. The consulship of Asturius and Protogenes confirms the year 449.
Historical Commentary