Abstract

 This essay examines the use of heresiological rhetoric in the letters and tractates of Leo I (bishop of Rome, 440–461) written in defense of the Council of Chalcedon (451). In these texts, Leo claimed the Constantinopolitan monk Eutyches and his supporters, the Eutychians, were an existential threat to the faith. However, Leo’s Eutychians were a heresiological confabulation. Heresiology employs polemical comparison and hostile classification to demarcate the boundaries of authentic Christianity. Because heresiology understands heresy genealogically, contemporary error could be described and condemned thanks to its affiliation with previous heretical sects. This was largely a taxonomic exercise; naming heresies allowed their supposed errors to be categorized and compared, especially with its (imagined) antecedents. Leo employed precisely this kind of comparison to associate Eutyches with earlier heresiarchs. He then reduced all opposition to Chalcedon to ‘Eutychianism,’ the error named for Eutyches, or else to its opposite and equally incorrect counterpart ‘Nestorianism’—both of which were, according to Leo, part of the same diabolically inspired misunderstanding of Christ. In short, Leo transformed Eutyches, the man, into a ‘hermeneutical Eutychian,’ a discursive construct intended to advance Leo’s own theological agenda, especially the creation of an orthodox identity coterminous with adherence to Chalcedon.
Highlights
In September 457, Leo I, bishop of Rome (440–461), wrote a lengthy letter to several eastern [1] bishops including Basil of Antioch, Euxitheus of Thessalonica, and Juvenal of Jerusalem.1 His topic was ostensibly the murder earlier that year of Proterius, bishop of Alexandria
This was largely a taxonomic exercise; naming heresies allowed their supposed errors to be categorized and compared, especially with its antecedents. Leo employed precisely this kind of comparison to associate Eutyches with earlier heresiarchs. He reduced all opposition to Chalcedon to ‘Eutychianism,’ the error named for Eutyches, or else to its opposite and incorrect counterpart ‘Nestorianism’—both of which were, according to Leo, part of the same diabolically inspired misunderstanding of Christ
Antagonism to the council was strong amongst Alexandrian Christians, many of whom refused to recognize the Chalcedonian Proterius as their bishop; instead, they had remained loyal to Dioscorus, who had been deposed at the council, and after his death in 454, to Timothy Aeluros, who succeeded Dioscorus as the non-Chalcedonian Patriarch of the city
Summary
In September 457, Leo I, bishop of Rome (440–461), wrote a lengthy letter to several eastern [1] bishops including Basil of Antioch, Euxitheus of Thessalonica, and Juvenal of Jerusalem. His topic was ostensibly the murder earlier that year of Proterius, bishop of Alexandria. Flavian preserved an air of impartiality; but once Eutyches appeared to defend himself, the patriarch demanded the monk admit the orthodoxy of the phrase “two natures” (duae naturae in the Latin translation of Eutyches’ letter to Leo)—a reference to the belief that Christ existed in two natures after the incarnation, human and divine—and to anathematize anyone who would not likewise agree. Eutyches claimed that he was not sure if this was orthodox. Flavian had misrepresented Eutyches’ beliefs to Leo, and the bishop of Rome appears to have
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