| #### 3. CHALCEDON. 446-452 |

| #### #### In the theological crisis of 448-451 which draws to a head in the Council of Chalcedon, the rivalry of Alexandria and Constantinople again plays its part. For the third time in less than forty years the Egyptian primate is to sit in judgment on the "primate of honour. " But while the Alexandrian is, this time, as much in the wrong as was Theophilus in 407, the issue is not merely personal. As in 431 it is a question of the faith, and it is the successor of Theophilus and St. Cyril who now patronises the heresy. #### This time it was the Bishop of Constantinople who was the Catholic, and when, worsted, and obstinate to the last in his heresy, Dioscoros of Alexandria fell, his people, save for a tiny minority of court officials and imperialists, chose to follow him out of the Church. Not that they would so describe their action, nor Dioscoros himself. They were the Catholics, the rest were Nestorians, and Nestorian too that Council of Chalcedon which condemned Dioscoros; while, for the orthodoxy of their faith, the Egyptians appealed to the theology of St. Cyril ! The story of the events of which the Council of Chalcedon in 451 is the centre, offers many points of very high interest. Its definitions brought to a finish the debate on the fundamental theology of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the council’s proceedings were the occasion of the clearest testimony to the Roman Primacy as a primitive Christian tradition, which the collective eastern episcopate, acting freely, ever made. On the other hand, the circumstances in which the definition was adopted by the council produced effects which reacted on the relations between Church and State for centuries. The last long stage now began in the struggle between Rome and the Catholic Emperor for the control of the Church within the Empire -- the struggle which only ended with the destruction of the Church there, with its transformation into a State institution from which, actually, Rome was excluded. Chalcedon is incidentally an important stage in the long road that leads from the Council of 381 to the schism of 1054. We can note, once more, in the history of the intrigues and debates which preceded, accompanied and followed the council, all the features that appeared twenty years earlier at Ephesus. Not one of them is missing: the innovator with his theory, the bishops, condemnation, the appeal to the emperor, the court's policy of expediency, the pope defining the Faith, the definition disregarded so long as the court bishops are in the ascendant; finally comes the council -- which is not a means of the pope's choosing, but of the emperor's -- and, resulting from the accidental circumstances of the council, a long aftermath of religious feud and civil disorder. #### At Ephesus St. Cyril had been the great figure. Twenty years later that role fell to his one time adversary Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus. Theodoret has his place in ecclesiastical history and a great place again in the history of Catholic theology. Theodore of Mopsuestia had been his tutor, as he had been the tutor of Nestorius, but Theodoret had revised his master's theories, expurgated them of their errors and heretical tendencies, and if ever he had leaned to Nestorianism he was by this time most assuredly Catholic. His terminology, judged by the more exact use of later times, is, like that of all these pioneer thinkers, loose and faulty. But he was a more exact scholar than St. Cyril, and if he lacked St. Cyril’s intellectual power and depth, he was a useful counterbalance to the Alexandrians, as he was also a barrier against the heretical tendencies of some of his own associates. He was, too, a great bishop, a true shepherd to the vast diocese he ruled for so long, a model of pastoral zeal and charity. St. Cyril’s death in 444 left Theodoret the greatest personality in the Eastern Church. #### Such was the man whose opposition a monk of Constantinople, Eutyches, now drew down on himself. Eutyches was himself a highly influential person in the religious life, not of the capital only but of all the Eastern Empire. He was the head of one of the city's largest monasteries -- it counted three hundred monks -- and by reason of his great age, and the repute of his ascetic life, a kind of patriarch of the world of monks, while at the court the all-powerful official of the moment was his godson, the eunuch Chrysaphius. Eutyches, then, had the means to impress his ideas on a very large world indeed and in theology his ideas were Apollinarian. Whence bitter opposition to Theodoret and all who shared his opinions, and a long campaign of mischief-making throughout the East designed to undo the union of 433, to destroy the remaining chiefs of the Antiochian school and to impose on all, not only the Alexandrian theology as alone patient of an orthodox meaning, but also the heresy that Our Lord was not truly a human being. To this Theodoret replied in a work -- Eranistes (The Beggar-man) -- in which, in dialogue form, without naming Eutyches he exposed and attacked the peculiar form of Apollinarianism he professed. At the same time the Bishop of Antioch, Theodoret's superior, appealed to the emperor to suppress the new heresy. #### How great was the influence of Eutyches at court was revealed immediately. An edict appeared snubbing the Bishop of Antioch for his intervention, while Irenaeus, Bishop of Tyre, another of the party, was deposed and ordered to resume his lay status-an unprecedented usurpation on the part of the State; whereupon, heartened by these signs of imperial patronage, the intrigues spread ever more widely. One of the most notable of the Antiochian survivors of the crisis of 431 was the Bishop of Edessa -- Ibas. He, too, had been a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia and a friend of Nestorius. He had turned from Nestorius in irritation and disgust, upon his refusal to accept the Theotokos unreservedly, but, true disciple of Theodore, Ibas, while himself orthodox enough, remained the sworn enemy of the Alexandrian mode of theologising in what concerned the Incarnation. Towards Ibas, too, the intrigues were then directed, as they were directed, once more, against Theodoret and against the bishop who was their superior and the nominal leader of their party, Domnus of Antioch. #### In this new offensive Eutyches found a powerful ally in the new Bishop of Alexandria, Dioscoros. Dioscoros comes down to us painted in the darkest of colours, a kind of ecclesiastical brigand and blackmailer, to whom no crime came amiss if it furthered his immediate ambition and greed for money. When, later, Flavian of Constantinople died as the result of the injuries received at the council where Dioscoros presided, tongues were not lacking to say that he died at the patriarch's own hands ! Be that as it may, he had already, in the four years since he succeeded St. Cyril, won a name for carrying things with a high hand, with a cruelty and unscrupulousness that seemed to show a complete absence of heart. For some time, now, this sinister personage had been in close relation with Eutyches. The monk had done him good service at court. Now it would be for him to return the obligation; and how eagerly he welcomed the opportunity ! #### He began by an imperious letter to Domnus questioning the orthodoxy of Theodoret, and that of Domnus for tolerating Theodoret. Theodoret received an order from the court to confine himself in Cyrrhus. Everything seemed to threaten a crusade of Eutyches against the Catholics of Syria and Asia Minor. Eutyches had even taken the step of seeing what Rome would do for his party, representing his Catholic victims as Nestorians, of course, when (November 8, 448) the whole situation suddenly shifted. Eutyches was formally denounced to his own bishop, Flavian, for the heretic he undoubtedly was. The tables were turned. The hunter was now himself in the toils. #### But a much more anxious man than Eutyches was the Bishop of Constantinople! He had much to fear if he betrayed the faith, but more -- in this world -- if he condemned the all-powerful monk. So far, all through the crisis, he had striven to ignore the crisis. Now he must act, particularly since the denunciation was the work of the bishop who had been the first to denounce Nestorius, and who made every sign that, once again, he would hold on, Eusebius of Dorylaeum. #### Eutyches was cited to answer to the charge. He refused to come, repeatedly. His health, his age, his vows, his holy rule, all were alleged in turn, and when at last he did appear it was with a letter of protection from the Emperor and with the highest officers of the court for escort. He refused to give up his theory. There were not, in God Incarnate, two natures, for a humanity such as ours Christ Our Lord had not. And he quoted as his defence the formula dear to St. Cyril "One incarnate nature of God the Word. " He had taken this formula in its monophysite sense, and had developed it in his own way, for whatever the consequences of St. Cyril’s use of the term physis, the substantial error of Eutyches is his own. It finds no warrant in St. Cyril, nor did the Egyptians who, after Chalcedon, broke away in the name of St. Cyril claim Eutyches, too, as a patron. They were indeed as anxious to condemn him as was Chalcedon itself. #### Flavian's council -- thirty-two bishops in it -- made short work of Eutyches once they had forced him into the open. Since he would not consent to admit the two natures they deposed him, from his office and from his orders, and declared him excommunicated. Given the circumstances it was an act of very high courage. Flavian was to pay for it with his life. #### Eutyches of course appealed, first to Alexandria and then, the emperor also writing on his behalf, to Rome. Dioscoros acted immediately. Without even the formality of an enquiry, beyond the reading of Eutyches' exposition of his belief, he declared the sentences passed on him null and received him into communion. With the court, too, Eutyches' good favour continued. He petitioned for a council to try his appeal, the emperor consented. The council was summoned (March 30, 449) to meet at Ephesus for the following first of August. Dioscoros was summoned to it, and the pope was invited also. #### It was the good fortune of the Church that at this moment the Roman See was ruled by one of the only two of its bishops whom all later history has agreed to style "the Great. " This was St. Leo I. He had, at this time, been pope a matter of nine years and was a man close on fifty years of age. He was gifted in the handling of men, and possessed of a vast experience. For years before his election he had been employed in important diplomatic missions by the emperor as well as by the popes. He was the traditional Roman character at its best, the natural instinctive ruler, and he added to this the less usual happy circumstance that he was a skilled theologian, and for knowledge of the merits and the history of this latest question in no way dependent on the learning of others. But here, too, the Roman genius showed itself in his leaning towards simple formulae to express what could be expressed, and in his silence about matters which lay beyond human powers of elucidation. It is also worth recalling that St. Leo wrote a Latin of singular strength and clearness in which the whole man is admirably mirrored. Of Eutyches he had already some knowledge, from the attempt to trick him into patronising the heresy in the preceding year. Now he had the monk's account of the trial, and the emperor's recommendations too. Finally, but very tardily, as the pope reprovingly noted, he received a report from Flavian. #### St. Leo fell in with the emperor's plan for a council and appointed three legates to represent him. To them he entrusted a series of letters (June 13, 449). To the emperor he wrote that in a letter to Flavian he was going to expound " what the Catholic Church universally believes and teaches" on the matter. To Flavian he wrote the dogmatic letter ever since famous as the Tome of St. Leo. It is written with all his own vigorous clearness, and marked by that consciousness of his office that is so evident in every action of his twenty-one years, reign. Our Lord, it states, is only one person but possesses two natures, the divine and the human. These natures are not confused, not mixed, though the singleness of personality entails a communion in the acts and properties of each distinct nature, the only Son of God having been crucified and buried as the Creed declares. There is, in this historic document, nothing whatever of speculative theology, nothing of ingenious philosophical explanations to solve difficulties. The pope shows no desire to explain the mystery, none at all to discuss rival theories. He makes a judgment, gives a decision, re-affirms the tradition, and all in his own characteristic style which fitted so well the office and the occasion. #### The council met -- a week late -- and in the same basilica which had seen the condemnation of Nestorius in 431. There were a hundred and twenty bishops present, and, by command of the emperor, Dioscoros presided. St. Leo, to judge from his letters, although he had consented to take part in the council had not expected very much from it. But there developed immediately such a transformation that in the end the pope could not see the council for the episcopal bandits who composed and directed it--- in illo Ephesino non synodo sed latrocinio to quote his own lapidary phrase. And as the Latrocinium, the den of thieves, of Ephesus it has gone down to history. #### The Latrocinium lasted a fortnight, the second session being held on August 22. The first move of Dioscoros was to exclude forty-two of the bishops, some because they had been judges in the previous trial of Eutyches, others because they were suspected of being unfavourable to his theories. What little opposition threatened to show itself Dioscoros quelled with terrible threats of punishment to come, deposition, exile, death; and to give the threats reality paraded the soldiery placed at his disposal. #### The pope's letters were ignored, the legates, Julius of Pozzuoli weakly making no protest. [ ] Next Eutyches was allowed to make a vague profession of faith in which there was no sign of his heresy. His accuser was not allowed to speak, and the sentences on Eutyches were all annulled. He was rehabilitated and restored to his monastery. Finally there came what might be called the trial of Flavian. It could only end in the way Dioscoros and Eutyches had planned when they worked the summoning of the Council. He was deposed, condemned and marched off to prison. All the bishops present signed the acquittal of Eutyches and the sentence on Flavian, except St. Leo's legatees. In the second session it was the turn of the Antiochian theology. St. Cyril’s famous propositions, which had slept since the peace of 433, were brought out once more, and confirmed and officially accepted as Catholic doctrine. Ibas and Theodoret, like Flavian, were deposed and excommunicated -- in their absence, for, needless to say, they had been most carefully kept away from Ephesus. Luckily for themselves, perhaps, for such was the ill-treatment to which Flavian was subjected that he died from it. The legates managed to escape. #### Once more in the East, then, heresy was supreme, the heresy of a faction, of a small minority, and it was supreme because the heresiarchs had the emperor's ear, and because that influence seemed to a group of bishops themselves not heretical (as yet) an instrument for the subjection of a rival group. The days when Eusebius of Nicomedia “managed" Constantine seemed for the moment to have returned. #### There remained, however, Rome, and St. Leo. Flavian, before he died, had managed to draw up an appeal. Theodoret also wrote one in truly magnificent style as became the great stylist of his time. There was, too, the report of the legates when, ultimately, they had made their way back. St. Leo did not lack for details. This was his opportunity to write to the emperor, October, 449, protesting vigorously against the mockery of the recent council, "an insult to the faith, a blow to the entire Church” and demanding a truly general council in which bishops from all over the world should sit, and in which Flavian's appeal could be heard. He wrote also to the sister of Theodosius, the Empress Pulcheria. From the emperor, two months later even, the pope had had neither reply nor acknowledgement. At Christmas therefore he wrote once more, and in the February of 450, at his urgent request, the emperor's western colleague Valentinian III wrote, too, and Valentinian's mother the Empress Galla Placidia. Finally, March 17, St. Leo himself wrote yet again, and once more to Pulcheria. In April the emperor at last replied. His letter is a defence of what was done at Ephesus, pointedly ignoring the fact of the appeals from its victims to the pope, ignoring, too, the reminders of Valentinian III's letters that the Roman See is supreme in all matters of religion. Theodosius more or less suggests that the East can regulate its own disputes in these matters. Let the most revered Patriarch of Rome -- a new title he coins for the Roman Bishop -- keep to the things that really concern him. #### Meanwhile a " successor " to Flavian had been appointed, one of the Bishop of Alexandria's henchmen, and had sent to St. Leo notice of his election. It gave the pope a last opportunity to plead with Theodosius. The pope explained that he could not enter into communion with “him who now presides over the Church of Constantinople" until he is satisfied of his orthodoxy. Such satisfaction he can give by notifying his assent to the letter recently sent to Flavian -- the Tome. The two bishops who bear the letter will receive his submission. This letter bears the date of July 16, 450. Whether or not it would have had any more success than the previous appeals no one can say, but before the two bishops reached Constantinople the long deadlock was ended. Theodosius II was dead, killed by a fall from his horse. #### The situation changed immediately. The new ruler was the devotedly Catholic Pulcheria, and the man she married shortly afterwards and associated with herself in the Empire, Marcian, was Catholic too. The exiled bishops were immediately recalled, the body of Flavian brought back to Constantinople with all manner of solemnity. Eutyches was placed in retirement, and gradually, one by one, the bishops of the Latrocinium went back on their acclamations and votes. In all they had done, they now explained, they had yielded only to fear. The council for which St. Leo had pleaded, a truly universal council, would be summoned and St. Leo was asked himself to preside (August to November, 450). The edict convoking the council is dated May 17, 451, and the place and date are Nicea for September I following. St. Leo had already decided how the servile bishops of the Latrocinium should be dealt with. The rank and file were to be received back on easy terms, if they acknowledged their wrongdoing. The case of the leaders, Dioscoros notably, he reserved to himself. Now, accepting the plan of a new council, St. Leo named four legates to represent him. One of the legates is to preside. The council is not to discuss the matter of faith involved. It is simply to accept the letter to Flavian and the definition of faith it contains. #### There were the usual delays. There was a change in the place of meeting. The council finally opened at Chalcedon on October 8, 451, with between five and six hundred bishops present -- so far as mere numbers went it was easily the greatest council of antiquity, and the greatest of all councils until that of the Vatican fourteen hundred years later. Among the members of the council the Roman legates had the first place. With them lay the initiative. They led the council. But the actual presidency was in the hands of a body of eighteen high officials of the court. Upon them lay the responsibility for maintaining order within the Council. They were, compositely, the Speaker of its discussions. The council’s first care was to revise the proceedings of the Latrocinium. Dioscoros was removed from the seat he occupied as Bishop of Alexandria, and, as one of those to be judged, placed in the middle of the floor. Theodoret, reinstated by St. Leo's orders, was next introduced and his appearance gave rise to the council’s first "scene. " Curses and execrations from the Alexandrians, cheers and acclamations from his own supporters, greeted him as he took his place. Then the minutes of the Latrocinium, amid further demonstrations of emotion, were read out by the notaries and the question being put by the presiding officials the council declared Flavian's condemnation of Eutyches in 448 to have been in accord with the traditional faith, and its own. #### But the emperor's representatives were not content with this. They asked the council for a new declaration of faith. Upon which the bishops declared that the Tome of St. Leo was sufficient. The Tome was then read, in company with the creed of Nicea and St. Cyril’s two letters to Nestorius. The bishops cheered and cheered again the successive declarations, and the perfect accord between the two theologians, Roman and Alexandrian, between the Tome and the definitions of Ephesus 431. When the Tome itself was read their enthusiasm broke all bounds. "Behold the faith of the Fathers! the faith of the Apostles! So do we too, all of us, believe, all who are orthodox believe the same! Anathema to whoever believes otherwise! Thus through Leo has Peter spoken! " #### Dioscoros, in the next session, was tried and deposed. He had protected the heretical Eutyches, had suppressed at the Council of 449 St. Leo's message to the council, and, latterly, had excommunicated St. Leo himself. St. Leo had left it to the council to sentence Dioscoros, and the council now left it to St. Leo's representatives. " Then, Paschasinus, with his fellow legates, Lucentius and Boniface ' holding the place of Leo the most holy and blessed Patriarch of Great Rome and Archbishop' solemnly recited a summary of the crimes of the Bishop of Alexandria and concluded: ' Wherefore the most holy and most blessed archbishop of great and elder Rome, by us and the present most holy synod, together with the thrice- blessed and praiseworthy Peter the Apostle, who is the rock and base of the Catholic Church, and the foundation of the orthodox faith, has stripped him of the episcopal and of all sacerdotal dignity; wherefore this most holy and great synod will vote what is in accordance with the canons against the aforesaid Dioscoros. ' " [ ] #### In 431 Rome had deposed the Bishop of Constantinople, and a General Council had carried out her decision. Now, twenty years later, Rome had similarly deposed a Bishop of Alexandria and a second General Council had once more, unanimously, accepted the decision because of the see whence it came. #### The fifth session was marked by a striking protest against imperial interference in matters of Church discipline. "We are all of the same opinion, " the council made known to its lay presidents "that government of the Church by imperial edicts must cease. The Canons are there. Let them be followed. Upon you lies the responsibility. " #### The work of the council was now finished, the Tome of St. Leo solemnly accepted, the outrage of 449 made good, the chief criminal punished. The bishops might have dispersed, but the emperor still wished for a declaration of faith, a new creed, a new rule by which to measure orthodox and heretic. To this the council objected; the Tome of St. Leo, the bishops declared, was a sufficient statement of the true doctrine. As for the legates, it was in their instructions that they were not to consent to a reopening of the discussion about the point of faith. But the emperor's representatives insisted, and a profession of faith was drafted, and put to the council at its sixth session, October 22, 451. Most of the bishops liked it well enough, but the bishops of the East -- the Antioch group -- protested; so, also, did the papal legates. The draft had, in fact, omitted all reference to the Tome of St. Leo, and in place of the Roman formulary, "in two natures", it contained the ambiguity favoured by Dioscoros, "of two natures". The new creed was, seemingly, as carefully ambiguous as all the creeds of State manufacture since the days of Constantine. It was designed no doubt as a statement of Catholic doctrine, but designed also to avoid any provocation of Monophysite [ ] opposition, a creed which Catholic and Monophysite might sign together. St. Leo's legates would have none of it. Either the Tome of St. Leo -- or they would go back to Rome, and another council there would decide the matter. Whereupon a tremendous eagerness to conciliate the legates, and a commission to arrange a compromise. Finally there came forth a lengthy formulary indeed. The creeds of Nicea and Constantinople (381) to begin it, then an acceptance of the letters of St. Cyril to Nestorius so that no Alexandrian could say that Chalcedon in condemning the heresy of St. Cyril’s successor had condemned St. Cyril himself, and finally, for the theological dispute which had occasioned the Council, an explicit acceptance of the Tome of St. Leo, now declared to be “in harmony with the confession of the great apostle Peter, a barrier against all evil thinkers, the bulwark of orthodox faith. " Then followed the formulary stating the faith -- it was in the terminology of St. Leo's letter. #### Rome then, in St. Leo, had triumphed once more, the faith over heresy, thanks to Rome; and it was in the clarity of the Roman phraseology that the belief was proclaimed. But this had not been achieved easily, nor was the majority in the council wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the last part of the business-which involved the victory of a non-Alexandrian manner of speech over the terminology dear to St. Cyril. The greater part of the bishops had been, for a lifetime, too sympathetic to St. Cyril’s way of describing the mystery to accept another way easily or wholeheartedly -- even though they accepted that it was a true way of describing it. Already during the very council, in this spirit in which so many of the bishops accepted the formulary of the faith, the dissension was evident that was presently to inaugurate two centuries of acute disturbance and the loss of whole races to the Church. It was only at the emperor's insistence, that these bishops had finally consented to promulgate, in a terminology so repugnant to them, the faith which they held in common with the rest. Had it not been for the emperor, the question would never have arisen; the doctrinal work of the council would have ended - - as the pope intended -- with its acceptance of the Tome as the Catholic faith. #### In a lengthy letter to St. Leo the council gave an account of its work. Our Lord, they said, had commissioned the Apostles to teach all nations. “Thou then hast come even to us. To us thou hast been the interpreter of the voice of the blessed Peter, to 211 thou hast brought the blessing of his faith.” Five hundred and twenty bishops were met in Council; “Thou didst guide us, as doth the head the body's limbs. " Dioscoros has been fitly punished. Who more criminal than he, who, to the wickedness of reinstating Eutyches, “dared in his folly to menace him to whom the Saviour made over the care of His vineyard, Your Holiness we mean, to excommunicate him whose charge it is to unite the Church's body.” #### St. Leo had seen orthodoxy vindicated and the privilege of his see proclaimed as never so strikingly before. But not all the council’s proceedings were likely to please him. And the council knew it. The council had, once more, following the unhappy precedent of 381, set itself to heighten the prestige of the see where now the imperial capital was established. To the famous “primacy of honour" voted Constantinople in 381 Chalcedon recognised considerable extensions. By its ninth, seventeenth and twenty-eighth canons the council gave legal consecration to all the jurisdiction which had accrued to Constantinople, since 381, though the illegal usurpations of its bishops. The bishops of Constantinople had for seventy years been the spiritual pirates of the Eastern Church. One after another the different metropolitan sees had seen their rights of jurisdiction invaded and captured. Now Chalcedon ratified all that had been done, blessed the spoiler, and gave him, for the future, the right to spoil as he would. The new rights, too, would develop; and to Constantinople would accrue, on this unecclesiastical principle of the city's worldly importance, such an importance in the Church that, by the side of it, the ancient traditional apostolic prestige of Alexandria and Antioch would be as nothing, and the Roman See, in appearance, hardly be more than an equal. #### It had clearly been law since 381 that suits between a bishop and his metropolitan should be judged by the primate of the civil diocese in which the litigating prelates lived. The innovation was now made that the judge was either the primate or the Bishop of Constantinople. This was to hold good for the three (civil) dioceses of Thrace, Pontus and Asia. The "primacy of honour " was now recognised as one of jurisdiction in all those regions where the perseverance of the capital’s bishops had already established this as a fact. #### The twenty-eighth canon begins by confirming the canon of 381. It goes on to say that Rome owes its traditional primacy to the city's one-time civil importance, and that Constantinople being now the imperial city, to that see too certain privileges are due. Wherefore the council grants to the see of Constantinople the right to ordain the metropolitans of the (civil) dioceses of Pontus, Asia and Thrace, and of all the missionary bishops depending on them. Constantinople is to be in these regions what Alexandria is in Egypt, what Rome is in the West, the effective supervisor of all the other sees. The Roman legates protested, but the council approved, and in its synodal letter to St. Leo made a special request for the confirmation of the novelty. The emperor wrote in the same sense, and the Bishop of Constantinople too. #### But St. Leo held firm. In a series of letters to the emperor and to the empress, to the Bishop of Constantinople too, he complained sadly of the spirit of ambition which bade fair to trouble anew the peace of the Church, and suggested that the Bishop of Constantinople should be content that his see, "which no power could make an apostolic see", was indeed the see of the empire's capital. The new canons are contrary to the only rule the pope knows, that of Nicea, and he will not consent to any innovation so injurious to the rights of ancient, undoubted apostolic sees such as Antioch and Alexandria. Let the Bishop of Constantinople obey the Law as he knows it, or he too may find himself cut off from the Church. The innovations then are void, of no effect and "by the authority of blessed Peter the Apostle, in sentence altogether final, once and for all, we quash them. " #### Nor was this the end of the pope's protests. To safeguard ancient rights against further encroachment on the part of the parvenu authority at Constantinople, and to keep himself informed as to the reception of the faith of his Tome throughout the East, St. Leo now installed at the imperial court a permanent representative. This was Julian, Bishop of Kos, skilled in both Latin and Greek, Italian by birth, Roman by education, Bishop of a Greek see. #### Finally March 21, 453, St. Leo replied to the synodal letter of the council. He notes the work accomplished by the council as twofold. First of all the acceptance of the defined faith and the revision of the outrages of 449. This was the purpose for which the council had been called and to the council’s proceedings in this respect the pope gives all possible confirmation and praise. But the council had gone further, taken upon itself to make other decisions and regulations. Now no matter what the authority invoked to sanction these proceedings, no matter what the council, anything in them that contravenes the canons of Nicea is null and void. Of these canons as implying a derogation from the rights of his own see, there is not in all these letters a word: not a hint that St. Leo so construed the innovations. But such innovations are inspired by worldly ambition, and this, if not checked, must open the way to endless new troubles among the bishops. Therefore St. Leo stands by the old order, the traditional rule. The emperor assented, and finally, by a disavowal of his own share in the measure, and by a letter which implied submission to the papal ruling, the Bishop of Constantinople, too, made his peace. " Better certainly had the Bishop of Constantinople said plainly 'We'll say no more about the decision of Chalcedon which the Apostolic See will not confirm. ' He does not say it. He contents himself with the protestation that he has done nothing in this matter to deserve the reproach of insincerity or ambition. St. Leo believed the cause safe for which he had battled so gallantly, so tenaciously: he asked nothing more, neither of the Bishop of Constantinople whose disavowal seemed to suffice, nor of the emperor whose sincerity was beyond doubt. " [ ] |