Leontius of Byzantium

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LEONTIUS OF BYZANTIUM

LEONTIUS OF BYZANTIUM (c. 500–c. 543), Orthodox Christian monk and theologian, was the author of a brief corpus in the Christological controversies of the Greek East just before the Second Council of Constantinople (553). The manuscript tradition calls Leontius only "monk" and "eremite," but modern scholarship identifies him as Leontius of Byzantium, an Origenist monk of Palestine, who appears in the Life of Sabas by the sixth-century hagiographer Cyril of Scythopolis. This Leontius, born probably in Constantinople, entered the monastery called the New Laura near Tekoa in Palestine around 520 with his spiritual master Nonnus, a disciple of the Origenist monk Evagrios of Pontus (345–399). Coming to Constantinople in 531, he became the nucleus of an Origenist party led by his friend Theodore Askidas (d. 558), which defended the Council of Chalcedon against the Monophysites. Back in Palestine in 537, Leontius returned to Constantinople around 540 to defend the Origenists against charges of heresy. In 543 the emperor Justinian condemned Origenism. Leontius's polemic against Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350–428) probably initiated the campaign that led to Justinian's publication of the "Three Chapters" edict (a collection of condemned texts attributed to three representatives of the school of Antioch: Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa), which persuaded the Second Council of Constantinople (553) to condemn the school as teaching the heresy of Nestorius (that in Jesus exist two distinct "sons" or persons, the one divine, the other human).

Three of Leontius's works survive, all defending and interpreting the Christological formula of Chalcedon. The first work collects three different treatises but is usually called by the name of the first: Against the Nestorians and Eutychians. This treatise, the best known of Leontius's works, defends the formula of Chalcedon both against those who "divide" or "separate" (and not simply "distinguish") Christ's divine and human natures (that is, the Nestorians) and against those who collapse the two natures into "one incarnate nature of God the Word" (the formula of the Orthodox father Cyril of Alexandria adopted by the Monophysites). Leontius represents Chalcedon as a middle way between heresies, defending it by means of a common metaphor: Just as soul and body, although different by nature, are united to form a single human being, so also the Son of God (bearing the divine nature) is united with human nature to form Jesus Christ.

The second treatise, Dialogue against the Aphthartodocetists, attacks the Monophysite Julian of Halicarnassus (d. after 518), who had taught that the body of Jesus had become incorruptible not at his resurrection (the Orthodox view) but at the very moment of the Son's entering it. The third treatise, Critique and Triumph over the Nestorians, argues that Theodore of Mopsuestia was the spiritual father of the heretic Nestorius. Leontius's other works include Resolution of the Arguments Opposed by Severus, Thirty Propositions against Severus, and Against the Frauds of the Apollinarists, the last work attested to be genuine (on the strength of only a single manuscript).

The Origenism ascribed to Leontius of Byzantium by Cyril of Scythopolis derived not from Origen (c. 185–c. 254) himself but from Evagrios of Pontus, who taught that Jesus was not, strictly speaking, the Son of God, but rather an eternally spiritual intellect (nous) who had, without losing his primordial unity with the Son, transformed himself into a soul capable of uniting its flesh to the Son. Modern scholarly interpretations divide over the question whether the Christology of Leontius reflects this Origenism. The best-known of Leontius's teachings is the formula "one person in two natures," in which the term nature is understood as an "enhypostasized nature." The traditional scholarly view maintains that for Leontius only the human nature of Jesus is enhypostasized; it exists only in the hypostasis or person of the Son of God. Leontius is therefore a "strict Chalcedonian" who rejected the extremes of both Alexandria and Antioch. Others interpret Leontius as an Origenist: Both natures of Christ are enhypostasized in a third entity, the "intellect" Jesus.

Although known to Maximos the Confessor (c. 580–662) and John of Damascus (c. 679–c. 749), Leontius's works exercised almost no influence in the later Byzantine tradition and were unknown in the Latin West until Heinrich Canisius published a Latin translation by Francisco Torres in 1603.