Chapter Eight

chapter eight

THE ‘CITY OF GOD’ UNFOLDS IN HISTORY

Although the post-Chalcedon world witnessed the secession of the non- Chalcedonian churches, the ideology of Christian unity persisted, Leo having championed it through his correspondence with the western and eastern imperial courts and churches and through the sermons he delivered. It would be no exaggeration to say that his abiding concep- tion of a unified church survived the physical reality of its separation. The threat to Roman identity and state security posed by his recent experiences with Attila the Hun and the Vandal King Geiseric did not overshadow the problem of post-Chalcedon unity, but brought it into sharper focus. From these encounters with barbarians Leo understood that the ideology of unity, along with the virtues of Christian romanitas that it implied, would have to survive not only the secession of so many eastern churches, but also the political demise of the western empire. Amid a pervasive sense of chaos, borne of civil disorder and emotional anxiety, the barbarian problem was addressed through the lens of this ideology. His solution did not postpone the ‘city of God’ to the endtime, as Augustine had proposed, but transformed the secular Roman world of Romulus and Remus into the Christian world ushered in by Peter and Paul.1 That transformation was meant to imbue his ideology of Christian unity with moral content. There was the overwhelming sense in which the model of the world to which the Augustinian view responded, and that Leo and the West inherited, needed to be revised in the light of the more recent and continuing threat posed by Attila the Hun, the Vandals, and the con- tinuing barbarian aggression. Because the old solution (which I shall consider in the following section) was viewed as only a provisional

1 According to Roman mythology, Romulus and Remus were the twin founders of Rome. On the crimes of Romulus, see P. Bruggisser, “City of the outcast and the city of the elect: the Romulean asylum in Augustine’s ‘City of God’,” Augustinian Studies 30 (1999), pp. 75–76. Against the philanthropic interpretation of Romulus found in pagan scholarship, Augustine defended the more negative view of Romulus that was to prevail among Christians. The asylum of Romulus was seen by Augustine as merely a preliminary phase in the emergence of the heavenly city. Ibid., pp. 100–101. 346 chapter eight answer to a more distant threat, many thought that it did not satisfacto- rily address the renewed barbarian presence. The possibility of political chaos invited Leo, and those who thought like him, to develop an ide- ology that had the capacity to survive what might seem paradoxically to herald its inevitable demise.2 The idea of unity outlived the reality of separation because Leo understood that transforming the secular world into a Christian ‘city’ infused the suffering caused by the imperfection of human justice and the cruelty of the barbarian invasions with moral and ethical meaning. His confidence that this world was governed by human relationships that were divinely guided, that the imperfection of human justice could be transformed through the principles of mercy and compassion, and that the experience of suffering should be viewed in the light of Jesus’ suffering on the Cross sustained his idea of Chris- tian unity. It gave, as Markus has observed more generally, “moral and religious content to the ideology of Rome’s Christian renewal.”3

1. Christian intellectuals respond to the sack of Rome in 410

To understand what precisely Leo was reacting to, it is useful to exam- ine the model of the world that he inherited. After contemporary pagans attributed the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410 to the decline of the traditional pagan rites, late Roman Christian intellectuals were concerned to separate the fate of the church from the political destiny of Rome.4 Prior to that time, such church historians as the fourth-century Greek ecclesiastical historian Eusebius (d. 339) and his Latin transla- tor Rufinus (d. 410) were confident in their view that the empire and church were destined to follow an intertwined path to terrestrial and

2 i.e., because the idea of unity was conceived of in such a way that it might outlive the fact of separation. 3 Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity,p.126. See ibid., pp. 126–128. 4 See generally R.P.C. Hanson, “The Reaction of the Church to the Collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the Fifth Century,” VC 26 (1972), pp. 272–287.See also C. Lepelley, “Saint Léon le Grand et la cité Romaine,” RevSR 35 (1961), pp. 130– 150; G.F. Chesnut, “Eusebius, Augustine, Orosius, and the Later Patristic and Medieval Christian Historians,” in eds. H.W. Attridge, G. Hata, Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism (Leiden, 1992), p. 695.ForAugustine,however,De civitate Dei also described the relation- ship of the earthly society to the heavenly kingdom. J.A. Maxfield, “Divine Providence, History, and Progress in Saint Augustine’s City of God,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 66 (2002), pp. 339–360,esp.p.358.