pope leo the great--12/3/24

03 Dec 2024

pope leo the great--12/3/24

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Today's selection--from Ten Popes Who Shook The World by Eamon Duffy. Leo the Great (440 to 461 CE) was the central force in transforming Rome into the center of Christianity:

“Rome lies at the heart of Roman Catholicism. Not just the city itself, the ancient capital of the world and the residence of the popes, but the Rome of the imagination, the spiritual centre to which all roads lead. Roman Catholicism is the largest of all Christian churches, and so Rome is in some sense the spiritual home of more than a billion Christians, scattered across the globe.

“Given the origins of Christianity, this religious centrality of Rome is a very surprising development. Not only did Jesus never set foot there, but he was crucified by a Roman imperial army of occupation. In the First Epistle of St Peter and in the last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, Rome features under the code-name 'Babylon' as the great whore, the idolatrous murderer of the saints. Peter himself was one of the saints whom Rome murdered, along with his colleague Paul. Their graves there might easily have become a standing witness to the incompatibility between the pagan Empire and the followers of Jesus. Instead, they became the foundation stones of a Rome reshaped and re-imagined as a Christian Holy City.

Miniature which depicts Leo I, contained in the Menologion of Basil II

“Leo the Great, Pope from 440 to 461, was the key figure in this transformation. The Emperor Constantine had adopted Christianity early in the fourth century, hoping its strong religious and moral teaching would be an ideological glue to bind together the scattered people of an empire stretching from Britain in the west to Syria in the east. Constantine himself abandoned the city of Rome and moved the capital of Empire to Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, on the Black Sea, but over the next century or so the bishops of Rome, the popes, became the city's most important citizens, leading the way in reshaping it as the capital of the emerging Christian world. Wealthy citizens were buried in stone coffins decorated with bible stories instead of scenes from pagan mythology. Church buildings invaded the ancient pagan civic spaces, the praises of the martyrs recorded on them using the monumental script once used to celebrate the victories of emperors and armies. Their mosaics portrayed the Apostles as senators in togas; Christ was depicted with the features and attributes of Apollo or Jupiter. The most brilliant scholar of the fourth century, St Jerome, was commissioned to produce a new translation of the bible in up-to-date Latin, so that God and his holy Apostles could speak out plainly, as Romans to the Romans.”

“But all this might have remained a matter of mere surface and presentation, an oriental religion got up in Roman dress, if Leo the Great had not developed a distinctively Roman theology, an account of why Rome mattered that made sense in specifically Christian terms.

“Leo had been elected Pope after proving himself as a brilliant ecclesiastical administrator and diplomat, but he was far more than a pious bureaucrat. He emerged as a great preacher in sermons for the feast days that had replaced the old pagan festivals, above all at the midsummer feast day of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June. In them, Leo gathered together the ideas about the meaning of history and of Rome itself which had been evolving for more than a century, and welded them into a powerful new theology.

“Rome was beloved of God, he told his congregations, not merely because it had once been the capital of the Empire, but because it had been the centre of God's plan for the salvation of the world. Yes, the pagan empire had been founded in blood and deceit and the worship of false gods, but God had permitted Rome to become great so that the Christian Gospel might journey down the roads of Empire. Ancient Rome, Rome of the fables, had been founded by the heaven-blessed twins, Romulus and Remus. Christian Rome, Rome of the truth, had been re-founded on a far greater pair of heavenly twins, the Apostles Peter and Paul. They had baptised the city in their blood, and now in heaven they were still Rome's teachers and protectors. Unlike the old Rome, this Rome could never die, for its power and authority were rooted not in brutality, but in the grace and truth of God.”