Leo the Great

“ All this did Leo, and his immediate successors. And when he superadded to the functions of a great religious magistrate the virtues of the humblest Christian,--parting with his magnificent patrimony to feed the poor, and proclaiming (with an eloquence unusual in his time) the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, and setting himself as an example of the virtues which he preached,--we concede his claim to be numbered among the great benefactors of mankind. How much worse Roman Catholicism would have been but for his august example and authority! ”

“ Leo, Great Pontiff of the age, thou mayest well lay down the burden of thy four score years and ten! Thou deservest well of humanity. You have been a great leader in the Church of God. The weary pilgrimage of a desert land is over, and from Nebo's height there stretches before you the Promised Land of rest and joy and everlasting bliss. ”

“ Leo the Thirteenth probably approaches as nearly to such superiority as any great man now living. As a statesman, his abilities are admitted to be of the [Pg 237] highest order; as a scholar he is undisputedly one of the first Latinists of our time, and one of the most accomplished writers in Latin and Italian prose and verse; as a man, he possesses the simplicity of character which almost always accompanies greatness, together with a healthy sobriety of temper, habit and individual taste rarely found in those beings whom we might call 'motors' among men. ”

“ Better still, Leo, the Leo he had at last found out, was worth while. He was a great man, a man head and shoulders above all his fellows in the world's affairs, and his ultimate fall would be something worth while having brought about.
His delight was manifest as he rode along the trail in the direction of Everton. His good humor left his narrow eyes smiling his satisfied thought. His men had worked well; and he—well, he had never worked harder, or with a more satisfactory result. These men of the soil were far easier to influence than town-bred workers. ”

“ Leo did his best to restore peace to Italy, and raised Rome to the dignity of a great capital. Few princes have ever been more richly endowed than he with the qualities which make princedom popular; a liberality which bordered on profuseness, a generous readiness to reward merit, and a charming urbanity of manners, which made every one who approached his person believe himself the object of the Pope’s particular regard. Erasmus felt the magical influence of his presence, and wrote to his friends, saying, that Leo was as far superior to the rest of men, as men are superior, to beasts. ”

“ Spain was in the hands of Arians; Gaul torn between contending races and beliefs; Britain had relapsed into heathenism. The one thing needful at the moment seemed to be Unity, and for this unity Leo sacrificed, strove, and toiled. And his own soul being a city at unity within itself, with primitive simplicity of character, Roman strength of will, Christian singleness of heart, this unity he succeeded in preserving through that distracted age. But always with him unity was a means and not an end, the essential condition of life, valued for the sake of the life it guarded ”

“ While Leo is conceded to have been a devout Christian and a noble defender of the faith as we receive it,--one of the lights of the early Christian Church, numbered even among the Fathers of the Church, with Augustine and Chrysostom,--his special claim to greatness is that to him we trace some of the first great developments of the Roman Catholic power as an institution. More than any other one man, he laid the foundation-stone of that edifice which alike sheltered and imprisoned the European nations for more than a thousand years. ”

“ All this probably wrought for Leo, and also the kinship one great man feels for another; the weight of a spirit accustomed to rule, the force of that “saving common-sense” which often has a persuasiveness stronger than genius, and was the genius of Leo.
But it was something mightier than all this, we may be sure, which conquered Attila. The very best and deepest in us all, however seldom it is reached, is after all the strongest. ”

“ Leo X (1513-21) has given his name to this age of papal culture, but he was not entitled to the honour; he had the inborn Medicean interest and enjoyment in intellectual matters, a nice taste, and some delicacy of perception, but it needs no more than a look at his fat jowl in Raphael's portrait to see that he could not have been a motive force in a great period. He stands on an historic eminence as the last Pope to wield the Italian sceptre over all Europe, the last to send his tax-collectors from Sicily to England, from Spain to Norway, the last to enjoy the full heritage of Imperial Rome. ”

“ His prayers are eating into his soul like flame, and in time this fire of pity and sorrow will become a serious menace to his peace. Besides, I see in Leo a great power of sympathy and understanding. He has in him the gift of ruling other souls. He is very young to rule his own soul, and yet he rules it. ”

“ It seems to me so much like the old disputes among the disciples which should be the greatest. We know Leo never wants to be greatest for himself. If he wants it for his city and his Church, I suppose it is because he thinks it best for all the rest. These tribes you call barbarian seem to change and migrate about so much, whilst your Rome seems to stay ”

“ Leo died on the 10th of November 461, the liturgical anniversary being the 11th of April. His successor was Hilarius or Hilarus, who had been one of the papal legates at the “robber” synod in 449.
The title of doctor ecclesiae was given to Leo by Benedict XIV. As bishop of the diocese of Rome, Leo distinguished himself above all his predecessors by his preaching, to which he devoted himself with great zeal and success. ”

“ It was not long before Rome had a Saxon colony in the neighbourhood of the Vatican.
Sergius raised a monument to St. Leo the Great in St. Peter's itself. It was the first example, as hitherto the Popes had either been buried in the cemeteries outside the walls or in the atrium of the Basilica. But from the time that in 688 Pope Sergius had translated the body of St. Leo into the transept itself, and raised an altar over it, other very distinguished Popes received the like honour. ”

“ But the destruction of the armament by a storm decided the issue against him; his south Italian subjects successfully defied his religious edicts, and the province of Ravenna became detached from the empire. In spite of this partial failure Leo must be reckoned as one of the greatest of the later Roman emperors. By his resolute stand against the Saracens he delivered all eastern Europe from a great danger, and by his thorough-going reforms he not only saved the empire from collapse, but invested it with a stability which enabled it to survive all further shocks for a space of five centuries. ”

“ Thenceforth Rome and her Pope were identified. The magic of her old Imperial name was transferred to him; the granite of his ancient Roman character guarded her. Leo spoke “to the City”; the city still spoke, as no other voice could speak, to the world. The “ad Urbem” and “ad Orbem” were thenceforth not to be dissociated.
We do not hear of any pomp and ovation to do him homage on his return. The city was saved; but the salvation was from a humiliation only possible through the degradation and corruption of the city itself. And this moral degradation continued. ”

“ They did not live to hear the great proclamation of freedom go forth from the lips of the great Leo’s successor, the great Gregory, at the manumission of his own slaves, basing the freedom of all men on the creation of man in the image of God, and the Incarnation of the Son in the form of man. They did not indeed live to see the living waters from the two fountains flow forth throughout Western Christendom till they met in our English land, from the great missions of the Benedictines and of the monks of Iona ”

“ Leo’s first ordinance of 726 forbade any kind of reverence to be paid to images or pictures, and any prostration or kneeling. One bishop in defence attributed miracles which were wrought to these images, and said he knew from his personal experience this was not a delusion; moreover, an image of Mary at Sozopolis, in Posidia, distilled balsam, as was well attested. In short, party spirit ran high, and at last a great champion of images arose, named John of Damascus. Leo waged war against images for twelve years, until his death. His son Constantine was as zealous an iconoclast as his father ”

“ When the synod of Chalcedon assembled in 451, the papal legates were treated with great respect, and Leo’s former letter to Flavian was adopted by acclamation as formulating the creed of the universal church on the subject of the person of Christ. Among the reasons urged by Leo for holding this council in Italy had been the threatening attitude of the Huns; the dreaded irruption took place in the following year (452) . After Aquileia had succumbed to Attila’s long siege, the conqueror set out for Rome. ”

“ Humanity is too broad to be put under a microscope, too strong to be treated like a little child. No one man, today, in this day of many Cæsars, can say surely and exactly what should be rendered to each of them.
Leo the Thirteenth is the leader of a great organization of Christian men and women spreading all over the world; the leader of a vast body of human thought ”

“ When the old order had been completely changed, in the rearranging of the new elements and in the re-establishing of new forces there was need of one with more than human wisdom to guide our ways and to direct our feet. If ever in the world there was need of a providential man; of one whose feet, while planted on the earth, yet whose head was above the clouds, and whose heart was in touch with divine things, it was during this marvellous age of ours; and Leo has been such an interpreter of divine wisdom to the children of men. His long life has covered the nineteenth century ”

“ Not only had Leo III., in his wrath at being foiled by the elements, confiscated the patrimonies of the Church in the southern provinces of Italy which he possessed, and in Sicily, and in his realm generally, but he interfered with the immemorial spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope as patriarch, and assigned to his own patriarch at Constantinople the privileges which by the appointment of St. Leo had been given to the great metropolis, Thessalonica. This jurisdiction the patriarchs of Constantinople had coveted for centuries. ”

“ Not the objective historian, but the flattering politician, spoke in Erasmus when he lauded the three great benefits which Leo had conferred on humanity: the restoration of peace, of the sciences, and of the fear of God. It was a groundless suspicion that overshot the mark, when Martin Luther accused Leo of disbelief in the immortality of the soul; and John Bale (1574) spread abroad the supposed remark of the Pope to Bembo: "All ages can testifye enough, how profitable that fable of Christ has been to us and our compagnie." ”

“ It was at Rome, among the great ecclesiastics, that these Pagan fashions principally flourished. Eminence of all kinds found a home with Leo X., assuming the purple of the prelate and the scarlet of the cardinal at his indulgent hands. The genius of the Renaissance seemed to have followed this first-291- Medicean Pope from Florence. Though Leo was a man of merely pleasure-loving and receptive temperament, who left no lasting impress on his age, he knew at least how to appreciate ability, and found the height of his enjoyment in the arts and letters he enthusiastically patronised. ”

“ The pope was greatly alarmed, and although he was then involved in war with France he sent about 30,000 ducats to the Hungarians. Leo treated the Uniate Greeks with great loyalty, and by bull of the 18th of May 1521 forbade Latin clergy to celebrate mass in Greek churches and Latin bishops to ordain Greek clergy. ”

“ During the last fortnight the gaze of all the world has been eagerly fixed on the death-bed of the expiring Pope, and under the white light of the public gaze he has loomed up, the great man he is, in all his gigantic proportions. The world saw the corporal feebleness of age and the ravaging hand of disease, but it saw also the conquering and unconquered spirit of the greatest man of his age—the noblest Roman of them all.
It is not time as yet to write his eulogy. We are too near the massive proportions of a great life to give a proper estimate of its greatness. ”

“ But Leo stood firm, a rock of strength because he stood on the Rock. Still his protecting presence and his words of power were there—“Christ Himself has not abandoned the care of His beloved flock.”
“Throughout the universal Church Peter is still saying day by day, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God;’ and every tongue which confesses the Lord is clothed with the majesty of this voice. This faith overcomes the devil and dissolves the fetters of his captives; those who are torn away from the world it engrafts into heaven, and the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.” ”

“ Not a few of the bravest even ventured to suggest that the host should return beyond the Danube to enjoy their spoils and employ the captives they had already won.
“And then,” he concluded, “as you all know, came the embassy from suppliant Rome. Every ambition of Attila’s for the recognition of his power and glory was gratified in this appeal for mercy from the humbled Empire, from the helpless City which had so long been mistress of the nations. Leo was at the head of the procession, simple and stately, representative of the great Christian Church. ”