To the Clergy and People of Constantinople

Leo the bishop to the clergy, the dignitaries and the people living at Constantinople.

We are greatly grieved at what is reported to have been done recently in the council of priests at Ephesus, because, as is constantly rumored and as the results also show, neither due moderation nor the strictness of the faith was kept there. Yet we rejoice in your devoted piety and in the acclamations of the holy people, examples of which have been brought to our notice, and we have approved the right feeling of you all. For in good sons there lives and abides due affection for their excellent father, and you do not allow the fullness of catholic teaching to be corrupted in any part. For undoubtedly, as the Holy Spirit has made plain to you, these men are joined with the error of the Manichaeans, who deny that the only Son of God took the true manhood of our nature, and who maintain that all his bodily actions were the actions of a false appearance. So that you may not give your assent to this blasphemy in any way, we have now sent you, beloved, letters of encouragement by my son Epiphanius and by Dionysius, notary of the Roman church. In them we have of our own accord given you the help you asked for, so that you may not doubt that we are giving you all a father’s care, and laboring in every way, by the help of God’s mercy, to destroy all the stumbling blocks which ignorant and foolish men have raised. And let no one who can be convicted of holding such detestably blasphemous opinions venture to parade his priestly dignity. For if ignorance seems hardly tolerable in laymen, how much less excusable or pardonable is it in those who govern, especially when they even dare to defend their false and perverse views, and persuade the unsteady to agree with them either by intimidation or by flattery. [a]

Let such men be rejected by the holy members of Christ’s body, and let catholic freedom not allow the yoke of the unfaithful to be laid on it. For those who deny the nature of our flesh in Christ contradict the gospel and oppose the creed, and they are to be counted outside divine grace and outside the mystery of man’s salvation. Nor do they see that their blindness leads them into such an abyss that they have no sure footing in the reality either of the Lord’s suffering or of his resurrection, because both are discredited in the Savior if our fleshly nature is not believed to be in him. In what thick ignorance, in what utter sloth must they have lain until now, not to have learned by hearing, nor understood by reading, what is so constantly on people’s lips in God’s church that even the tongues of infants do not keep silent about the truth of Christ’s body and blood at the rite of Holy Communion? For in that mystical distribution of spiritual nourishment, what is given and taken is of such a kind that, receiving the power of the heavenly food, we pass into the flesh of him who became our flesh. So, to confirm you, beloved, in your praiseworthy and faithful resistance to the enemies of the truth, I will fully and fittingly use the language and thoughts of the apostle, and say: “So I too, having heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, the eyes of your hearts being enlightened, so that you may know what is the hope of his calling, and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance among the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power in us who believed, according to the working of his mighty power, which he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and set him at his right hand in the heavenly places, above every principality and power and strength and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he has put all things under his feet, and has given him to be head over all the church, which is his body, and the fullness of him who fills all in all.” [c]

In this passage, let the enemies of the truth say when, or in what nature, the almighty Father exalted his Son above all things, or to what substance he made all things subject. For the Godhead of the Word is equal in all things and of one substance with the Father, and the power of the one who begets and of the one begotten is one and the same, always and eternally. Certainly the Creator of all natures, since “through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made,” is above all the things he created. Nor were the things he made ever not subject to their Creator, whose eternal property it is to be from no other than the Father, and in no way different from the Father. If greater power, grander dignity, more exalted loftiness was granted to him, then he who was so increased was less than the one who promoted him, and did not have the full riches of the nature of the one from whose fullness he received. But anyone who thinks this way is swept off into the company of Arius. His heresy is greatly helped by this blasphemy which denies the existence of human nature in the Word of God. In rejecting the joining of lowliness with majesty in God, it either asserts a false phantom body in Christ, or says that all his bodily actions and sufferings belonged to the Godhead rather than to the flesh. But everything such a man ventures to maintain is utterly foolish, because neither our religious belief nor the purpose of the mystery allows either that the Godhead suffered anything or that the Truth was false to itself in anything. So the Son of God, who cannot suffer, to whom it belongs eternally, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, to be what he is in the one essence of the unchangeable Trinity, became man when the fullness of time had come, which had been foreordained by an eternal purpose and promised by the prophetic meaning of words and deeds. He became man not by changing his substance but by taking on our nature, and “came to seek and to save what was lost.” Yet he did not come by moving from place to place or by bodily motion, as if to be present where he had been absent, or to leave the place he came from. He came to be shown to those who looked on by what was visible and common to others: that is, by receiving human flesh and soul in the womb of the virgin mother. So, remaining in the form of God, he united to himself the form of a slave and the likeness of sinful flesh. By this he did not lessen the divine by the human, but increased the human by the divine. [e]

For such was the condition of all mortals, coming from our first parents, that after original sin had been passed on to their descendants, no one would have escaped the punishment of condemnation, had not the Word become flesh and dwelt in us, that is, in the nature that belonged to our blood and race. And so the apostle says: “As through one man’s sin judgment passed upon all to condemnation, so also through one man’s righteousness it passed upon all to justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one man’s obedience many will be made righteous.” And again: “For since death came by man, by man also came the resurrection of the dead. And as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.” All, that is, who, though they are born in Adam, are found born again in Christ, having a sure testimony both to their justification by grace and to Christ’s sharing in their nature. For whoever does not believe that God’s only Son took our nature in the womb of the virgin daughter of David has no share in the mystery of the Christian religion. And since he neither recognizes the Bridegroom nor knows the Bride, he can have no place at the wedding banquet. For the flesh of Christ is the veil of the Word, with which everyone who confesses him wholeheartedly is clothed. But whoever is ashamed of it and rejects it as unworthy will receive no adornment from him. Though he present himself at the king’s feast and join the sacred banquet out of season, the intruder will not be able to escape the king’s notice. As the Lord himself declared, he will be taken, bound hand and foot, and cast into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. So whoever does not confess the human body in Christ must know that he is unworthy of the mystery of the incarnation, and has no share in that sacred union of which the apostle speaks when he says: “For we are his members, of his flesh and of his bones. For this reason a man will leave father and mother and will cling to his wife, and there will be two in one flesh.” And explaining what this meant, he added: “This mystery is great, but I speak with regard to Christ and the church.” Therefore, from the very beginning of the human race, Christ is announced to all people as coming in the flesh. In this, as it was said, “there will be two in one flesh,” there are undoubtedly two: God and man, Christ and the church. The church came forth from the Bridegroom’s flesh when it received the mystery of redemption and new birth, as water and blood flowed from the side of the crucified one. For the very state of a new creature, which at baptism puts off not the covering of true flesh but the taint of the old condemnation, is this: that a man is made the body of Christ, because Christ too is the body of a man. [f]

So we do not call Christ God only, as the Manichaean heretics do, nor man only, as the Photinian heretics do. Nor do we call him man in such a way that he lacks anything that certainly belongs to human nature: that he has no soul, or no rational mind, or that his flesh was not taken from a woman but made from the Word, turned and changed into flesh. These three false and empty claims have been put forward in various ways by the three parties of the Apollinarian heretics. Nor do we say that the blessed virgin Mary conceived a man without Godhead, who was created by the Holy Spirit and afterward taken up by the Word; for preaching this we rightly and properly condemned Nestorius. But we call Christ the Son of God, true God, born of God the Father without any beginning in time, and likewise true man, born of a human mother at the appointed fullness of time. And we say that his manhood, in which the Father is greater, does not in any way lessen the nature in which he is equal with the Father. These two natures form one Christ, who has said most truly, according to his Godhead, “I and the Father are one,” and according to his manhood, “The Father is greater than I.” This true and indestructible faith, dearly beloved, which alone makes us true Christians, and which, as we hear with approval, you are defending with loyal zeal and praiseworthy affection: hold it fast and maintain it boldly. And since, besides God’s help, you must also win the favor of catholic princes, make your request humbly and wisely that the most gracious emperor be pleased to grant our petition, in which we have asked for a full synod to be called. Then, with the help of God’s mercy, the sound may grow in courage, and the sick, if they consent to be treated, may have the remedy applied. Dated the 15th of October, in the consulship of the illustrious Asturius and Protogenes (in the year 449). [h]