The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation

Episode 120 - Leo The Great, The Magi, And The Fight Against a Boring Christmas

• Paul

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Wonder thrives where truth is told straight. We kick off a Magi series by refusing the flat, joyless habit of “debunking Christmas” and turning instead to Scripture, Church memory, and a fierce defence of the incarnation. With PJ from the Global Church History Project, we bring Leo the Great out from under the shadow of misreadings and show how his Epiphany sermon can restore both awe and clarity to the season.

We trace how a bad translation of Leo’s Tome fed Nestorian confusion, splitting Christ’s works into “human only” suffering and “divine only” miracles. Then we set the record right: one person, two natures without division or confusion, acting inseparably in every moment—from hunger and tears to healing and resurrection. That lens unlocks Leo’s beautiful reading of Matthew 2. The Magi respond to a double witness: Balaam’s ancient oracle of a rising star and the startling sign in the heavens. Their journey ends in true worship before a very real child, where gold honours a king, incense adores God, and myrrh acknowledges mortality. The gifts become a creed in action.

Along the way, we face down Manichaeism’s denial of real flesh. Leo insists the infancy of Jesus is not a holy illusion but the concrete assumption of our nature. If the Son does not truly take what is ours, he cannot heal what is broken; if the cross is not theandric, it is just a tragedy. We also appreciate Leo’s pastoral heart: reject error, yes, but pray with tears for those misled, hoping for restoration. That balance—doctrinal steel and tender mercy—models how to guard the gospel without losing love.

If you’re hungry for a Christmas that keeps both the poetry and the precision, this deep dive is for you. Listen, share with a friend who loves Church history and mystery, and leave a review telling us the moment that surprised you most.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

SPEAKER_01:

Well, welcome to the Christ Center Cosmic Civilization Podcast, and we are now gonna run into a series all about the Magi, the wise men kings who came to visit God when God was born as a human being of the Virgin Mary. Now, the this is gonna be quite a roller coaster. I'm gonna be honest with you all. Let's just say it will be mind-expanding and hopefully heartwarming, also, with this vast vision of the incarnation with respect to these visitors from the nations of the world. Now, I I want to say up front, um, we on this podcast, P PJ from the Global Church History Project's gonna be with me throughout this series, and we take a kind of, if anything, a sort of maximalist approach to Christmas and the traditions, and this flows into Epiphany and then candle mass and all these kind of things. And we are hoping that partly this will be a therapy, in that I know that some many of us, you there are sermons that maybe they're dying out a little bit, but up until recently, as soon as you got into the Advent series, there were loads of these kind of humbug Scrooge preachers of one kind and another who thought that it was immensely helpful to pour scorn upon as many different aspects of Christmas traditions and histories and things as they possibly could. And then we in our family have this whole Christmas bingo thing where we we're looking for examples of this where people will say, Oh, there weren't really three magi, or the they the they the Jesus wasn't born in a stable or an inn, it was like a luxury middle class house, and he had his own bedroom and cot, and there's all these kind of things, and oh, there was no snow, and there was no donkey, and there were no angels, and there was no unicorn, or there was no animals, and it probably happened at 40 BC or 20 AD, or they're all and and literally, if you're a very unfortunate, you may have one of those sermons every week, all the way up to and including Christmas Day itself. And in the minds of some of the people that do this ghastly thing, in their minds, I think they think, oh, if only I clear away any of the fun, any of the magic from the story of Christmas, will be left with this kernel of such purity, I guess, in their minds that finally people will go, ah, what was holding me back from believing in Jesus as the incarnate God was this idea that it was fun and magical and full of these crazy stories and what all this sort of thing. But now I finally see it in its full neoplatonic burnous. Now I can believe, because you have made it so attractive now that you have spent your sermons dismantling all the all the ways in which people have had Christmas trees and baubles and crackers and feasts and festivals and carols and Christmas cards with pictures of animals and angels and shepherds and stables, and we can get rid of all of that, and finally we'll be left with something that will be worth celebrating, and this is the thing that's gonna really do it for everybody. Now, I'm not aware that anybody's ever become a Christian because that what was holding them back was they were clutching on to the idea of you know, I don't know, that they they felt it's just not credible to me that there were angels and animals and magi and shepherds simultaneously in a stable. That's the thing. That's why I don't believe it. And if only some preacher would pour scorn on all that and dismantle it, then I will be able to embrace this Christian faith wholeheartedly. But look, we don't digress. The point is we ain't gonna be doing any of that rubbish on the uh if you've been through with us for this long in this podcast, you know we we are very against that kind of boring, banal, and unbelieving outlook in general. For us, we love all the wonderful magic of the Bible, all the wonders and mysteries and mythology, which is true, true mythology that's in the Bible. We love all that, and then we love the way Christian history, church history, is full of many, many more tales that are like that. Eyewitness accounts and testimonies that are weird and wonderful, and yeah, we are prepared to kind of accept them and listen to them and enjoy them. And yeah, sometimes we might say, I don't know, that one may not be uh entirely true, but it's kind of wonderful that people kind of wanted it to be true at times, and that the stories maybe, as some of the stories were handed down, maybe they did get elaborated a little bit, if some of them, I don't know, maybe. But I like the fact that people in the past did that in kind of good faith sometimes, where they're saying, Oh, the appearance of the angel was like this, and then they maybe added details, I don't know. Look, the point being we want to come to it with this joy and wonder, and being prepared to accept the stories of church history with at least a certain amount of good faith, and to take to try to take them seriously first, and then later we can always analyse them more and see how they all match up together and things like that, but at least to come at them with some good faith rather than that boring, banal, unbelieving flatness. So, with all that being said, we're gonna plunge into the Magi. Now, next episode I'm gonna tell you what we're gonna do in the next episode. We're gonna we're gonna start looking at a document that's been largely ignored, certainly in the Western world, Western church, called the Revelations of the Magi. And that's gonna be a roller coaster, I warn you, so in advance. But before that, this week, we're gonna handle somebody who is a in here, he's gonna it's his epiphany sermon all about the visit of the Magi. And this is somebody who's very much of a Western church leader, and it's Leo the Great, and he's from Well, what is his date? So let's have PJ tell us some little basic facts about Leo the Great, and then we'll get into why we're gonna look at his sermon.

SPEAKER_00:

So he's a big deal in the Council of Chalcedon, so that's like uh the 5th century, isn't it? The early 5th century.

SPEAKER_01:

Mid-fifth century, 451, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. No, yeah, that's true. But yeah, in the lead up to it and everything, he's that, and then afterwards. That's kind of what he's known most for, maybe. Though he also is known for dealing with Attila the Hun diplomatically. That's another very famous thing he did. That you got Attila the Hun devastates all these other provinces, and then Leo just boldly goes out to meet him, says something to him, we don't know what, and Attila just turns back and doesn't attack Rome or Italy or anything. So he there's a few things he's famous for, but I think he often people just talk about that now, the Council of Chalcedon. But it's interesting, he didn't like the Council of Chalcedon, so there was initially a clause in Chalcedon that said basically the ecumenical patriarch's just as good as the Pope, and so obviously he wouldn't like that. But also he felt, and he explained this in this letter later called the Letter to the Palestinian monks. The Council of Chalcedon used a work he wrote, which is often known as Leo's tome, and they used a certain translation of it, and they said everyone's got to agree with basically just exactly what this translation of the tome says, and they impose it on all these people, and all these people are like, No, we reject it, we hate it, especially the Palestinian monks, that's the way he writes it. But loads of the people there reject it, and then they just kind of go ahead and they impose it, and it causes this horrible schism, and loads of people die. And Leo's like, he's like, nah, that's not what I wanted, obviously. He's this peacemaker with the till of the hunter and everything. He didn't want that, but also he felt the translation was so poor, the translation they used at Chalcedon.

SPEAKER_01:

He felt it was the translation of his tome, yeah. Okay. Let me just clarify now before PJ tells us about that. The the tome of Leo is normally understood to be saying, I'll tell you what it's normally understood to be saying, and then PJ can tell us why it wasn't. But it's it's the document, like I've read loads and loads of church history documents throughout my life, and I remember this when I was a teenager and going through the church councils and reading all about them, and then often I'd read the creed the creed or the confession that comes out at the end, and I'm like, oh right, yeah, I get that, that's really good, I understand. Because I often was reading all the kind of build-up to it, and I didn't know what the the answer was at that stage in my life, and I'm like thinking, Oh, what is gonna be the best way to resolve this and say that, and then when I'd read the what they actually came up with, I was always like, Oh, that's brilliant, that's a really good solution to this problem or this heresy or something. But in this case, and I remember it vividly, I read the Council of Chalcinon stuff and I understood it, and I was like, Okay, I see what they're doing there, yeah, okay, okay. But there was this thing called the tomb of Leo, and I and when I read that, or at least the way it was presented to me, it was the first time anything in church history had made me think, oh no, no, not that. That sounds terrible, because the way it was presented to me is he'd added this kind of appendix to the Council of Chalcedon, and in it he seemed to be saying Jesus was operating with these two kind of agencies within him, and that like when he does something, like if he's hungry or he's weak or tired or die or dies, that is his human bit doing those things. And then what if he doesn't know the date of the end of the world, that's his human bit doesn't know. So that it was like as if there was a human person who did so half the thing, and then when he then it the tone, this is how again, this is how the tone was presented to me. Like when Jesus was doing like miracles, raising the dead, knowing what people were thinking, resurrection, the resurrection bit, all those kind of things. Well, that was the divine agent kind of inside him acting. So it looked to me, I came at the time was like, oh no, this sounds terrible. This sounds like Jesus is two people, really, a human person who knows certain things and acts in a certain way, who's adjacent to a divine person who has unlimited power, unlimited knowledge, isn't even confined to Jesus of Nazareth. Like this divine person is running the universe, sitting in heaven, chatting to people in heaven, things like that. And a very small portion of this divine person is occupied with this Jesus of Nazareth thing, where he's adjacent to a human. But can you say I hope um well no? I was gonna say I hope that makes sense. I hope it doesn't make sense. I hope when you're listen listening, you're reacting as I was, thinking that's terrible, what a disgraceful because then then it suddenly you haven't got this one person, Jesus Christ, who is divine and human. What you've got is a human operative and a divine operative adjacent to one another, squeezed inside this like holder that is called Jesus, but inside the holder of Jesus, there's kind of two agents a divine agent that does the power stuff, and a human agent that has to handle all the all the depressing and weak stuff. And I remember like that's how it was presented to me, and I thought, oh my days, why have they appended this? Because Chalcedon seemed to be saying the opposite of that. The way at the time, I mean, I know like not everyone was happy with Chalcedon, but uh the way it was presented to me, what Chalcedon was trying to say is Jesus is one person who is simultaneously completely human and completely divine in everything he does. And I'm like, yeah, that makes sense to me. Everything he does is fully divine and fully human. But if if a person say, no, no, when he's weak, that's just that's he's only acting there as a human. So he's fully human when he's hungry, and he's fully human when he's dying, but when he's doing a miracle, though, that's when he's fully divine. Do you see? And now and that was to me, so that was how he presented to me, but is that a fair view of Pope Leo?

SPEAKER_00:

Go. So I think he in this letter seems to think that's a fair view of the translation they used. He says it was so poor he felt it was malicious actors, Nestorian heretics had gotten a hold of it to try and reinstate their heresy. And Nestorius, when he read this translation himself, he said, Ah, so the Pope now agrees with me. I'm fine, they finally came to the light.

SPEAKER_01:

So even the archheretic Nestorius, though, read it, and he kind he he understood it the way I understood it, but for him he liked it. Yeah, wow.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. So he writes this letter of clarification and he does this Greek in his own Greek, so now he's seen it. He's not letting some other malicious actor translate it for him, this is his own words, to the Palestinian monks. So what he says is like that you don't have a humanity who does anything without the divinity, and you don't have a divinity that does anything without the humanity. Everything is just one action, but I felt it was necessary to distinguish what a human could have done without being divine, without a divine nature, and what the divine could have done without, you know, a human nature. So he he adds that clarification in the hope that all these Palestinians so it's a lot of people who rejected Chalcedon because especially when the tome was read out in its translation. Yeah. Uh like with all of Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, the Illyrians, and Illyria was huge at the time. Sermium might have had like two million people or more in it. Like it was a today that would be a a big city. So that's a big deal that they hated it, and you know, they they had other big cities, but also the Palestinian monks and loads of people all around the world hated this council. So he's trying to write to them and he's trying to bring them back into sort of unity.

SPEAKER_01:

Like I was saying, it is possible to interpret Chalcedon in a way that makes sense. But if you have been told this thing, you read it and you're like, ah, it's a document I always feel that can be read in two ways. It can be read, I think, in a biblical way, but if you just read it with the other view, with any Nestorianism at all, Chalcedon sounds terrible.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And especially they're trying to. The council's called to try and deal with a guy called Eutaches, who's not really a heritage, he just kind of did one sermon, then people are like, oh, you've said that a bit of the wrong way, and then it just spirals out. Because he said he said, like, he imagined the human nature of Jesus to be like a drop of vinegar that lands into the ocean, and then it just like so it just gets sort of subscribed to diluted and lost really effectively, the humanity, yeah. And so for all these people that ended up not agreeing with Calsoum, but even a lot of people that did, the problem with this is that it's just Nestorianism pretending to have one nature and one person, because it's like you do actually distinguish between the vinegar and the divinity, it's just that the divinity overwhelms it, so you're like, oh, let's only really talk about one person and nature, but then it's like you're actually Nestorian, and yeah, and you have an incredibly low view of Jesus, so it's not even that you've got two uh natures that stand side by side, it's like you've got one that's incredibly small, so it's like you've gone the wrong way. Even though that probably isn't what Yu Tis said, he probably just came up with a metaphor on the cuff and it was wrong. But nevertheless, that's so it was called to deal with that, and then when you deal with that saying, as if the problem was the closeness between the vinegar and the ocean, or the you know, the human and divine natures, and it's like, whoa, you're we're clearly on the wrong page about what was wrong here. You're you're coming up with the wrong answer.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, they're like saying, Oh, what we need to do is make sure the two natures are kept far apart, not mixed together. It's like, whoa, hang on, that's not the problem. That's not yeah. So Leo was under he it he was very badly translated because he was trying to simply explain that humanity has certain capacities, divinity has certain capacities, but in Jesus they're all united together. He was just trying to say that. But the put the translation of his tone made it sound as if he he was sometimes things were done in a human capacity, and then some of his actions were done in a divine capacity, and none of them were done as a united person. That's what it sounded like. So of course, millions and millions and millions of Christians, particularly in Africa and Western Asia and so on, they were all like, nah, they were out. This is not answering the heretics, it's a new heresy. So they were out. So Pope, the Pope Leo then goes, Well, hang on, what you what do you think I meant? And then they tell him, and he's like, No, I don't mean that. So then he writes a clarification letter, and in the clarification letter, he's like, No, no, I wasn't saying that at all. I'm trying to articulate that there's this one person who is always, in all his actions, fully divine and fully human. And then so that should be all good. The only problem is people don't read his clarification letter, even to today, even to today. And I regularly hear people describing what happened at Christmas in a Nestorian way. Regularly. It's the one heresy that I think is just routinely accepted and spoken all the time. Often people say things that are Nestorian, and they'll say things like, on the cross, that isn't God doing that's not divinity, that's just just as humanity. I often have I often hear actual sermons that say that sort of thing, that it's only the humanity. Uh so again, as if like the divinity steps away and doesn't get involved in the cross. And if the divinity isn't involved in the cross, there is no salvation, it's just a dude dying. That's nothing. So all of that is by way of introducing Leo because you, if you're like me, are thinking, oh, we don't want nothing from Leo. He's not, you don't want him at Christmas, he's like one of the Scrooge characters who's gonna ruin it. No, he isn't like, and this is we're trying to kind of rehabilitate him a little bit. And he has a sermon that he preaches at the Feast of Epiphany, and let's get we'll get into it by this massive 20-odd-minute introduction. He said, he's excited about it, and he says, it's a great time of true devotion to wholeheartedly celebrate and honour the days that testify to God's merciful deeds. So he begins by just saying how much he it's very, very helpful to have these sacred holidays regularly because they stir us up back to these fundamental things. And then he says this is a good one because it comes straight after Christmas and it's all about the reality of his divine and human divinity and humanity. He says this: this is what makes the ungodly righteous, and this is what makes sinners holy. The belief in the true divinity and true humanity of one Jesus Christ our Lord. His Godhood, his divinity, means he existed before all time, equal with the Father in the form of God. His humanity means that in this final age he's joined to humanity in the form of a servant. Therefore, to confirm this faith and to safeguard it against all errors, the divine plan was this wonderful provision which was a nation from the distant east, skilled in reading the stars, would receive the sign of the infant's birth who was destined to reign over all Israel. And so a brilliant new star of unusual splendour appeared to the wise men, filling their minds with such awe as they gazed upon its light that they felt they could not ignore such a clear announcement. And as the event proved, the grace of God was the guiding force behind this miracle. Even while all of Bethlehem was still unaware of Christ's birth, God brought it to the knowledge of the nations who would come to believe, proclaiming through the heavens what human words could not yet explain. So that's his his intro there. That's his intro to the sermon, giving us this big vision of this brilliant star, the wise men seeing it, and it's like he's preaching the birth of Jesus. God is preaching the birth of Jesus to all the nations of the world, but then you see Pope Leo makes this point that though the nations could see about the birth of Jesus, and some of them were aware of the meaning of it, people back in Bethlehem or Jerusalem, anyway, were ignorant about it. So there's a kind of um nice contrast, and we'll see that quite a lot in accounts of the Magi. The contrast between the enlightenment of the Magi and the darkened minds of Herod and his staff. So it was the role of divine kindness to make the saviour's nativity. This is Leo again now, and then I'll bring PJ in in a minute to help us understand what he's saying. But here it was: it was the role of divine kindness to make the saviour's nativity known to the nations. The wise men could have had a hint about the wondrous sign from the ancient prophecies of Balaam. Knowing it had been foretold long ago and widely repeated, this, you ready? A star shall rise out of Jacob, and a man shall rise out of Israel and shall rule the nations. Let's just stop there. What did you make of that? The Balaam prophecy, PJ.

SPEAKER_00:

There are lo like uh every century, you know, people try and think, oh, they they keep finding new verses in the Old Testament that show how knowledge of the incarnation was known to people of the East, especially the Magi. But the most common one is Stephanie Balaam, because you've got the star there, you've got the king, and they want to see the king, the these wise men. They you've so you've kind of got everything, and it's from Judah, so isn't it? So like when Moses was writing it, they weren't even called Jews and everything then. Judah was just one tribe, and then it becomes a kind of name for all believing Israelites later. But that so they even know to look for a king of the Jews, a king of Judah. This has all been prepared before any of these sort of intricacies was there. So there's definitely and then Balaam's obviously just this prophet in the east, that's kind of what he's famous for.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, because he's where's he based again?

SPEAKER_00:

He well, he he moves around in in numbers a lot, so he works for Moab at one point and he's like Midian and he he's becomes a bit of a mercenary towards the biggest.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, he does, soever will pay him the most, basically.

SPEAKER_00:

But yeah, he's really associated with the Moabites, isn't he? Yeah. Yeah, that that guy he well, he does end up with them and then he fights with them, so he's literally like a mercenary at that point, and then he dies in that battle. So he yeah, he does, and that's it's to the king of Moab he gives that prophecy. And then you get all these great Moabit saints like Ruth, and you know, that obviously comes from that, that they've been aware of Jesus, and and you think, especially Ruth, she wants to marry into the line of Bethlehem so that she becomes an ancestor of Jesus.

SPEAKER_01:

So the idea there is in a way that Balaam, as a prophet who's kind of outside of Israel to the east, that his writings are or his prophecies are kind of preserved and disseminated in an eastward direction. So that the idea being that these that the Balaam prophecies are kind of absorbed into this Magi tradition that's in Persia, Syria, be on further away, as we'll see in later weeks, they may they may be coming from much further away than just Persia. Okay, so that's Balaam. Now let's see. Pope Leo goes on. That basically the Magi follow this star and and get to Jerusalem, and then they consult the they've got two witnesses. He says that you know, when he gets to Jerusalem, that when they get to Jerusalem, they of course run up against the stupidity and unbelief of the scribes and teachers. But they, he says, confirmed by a double witness, they sought with even more fervent faith, the one revealed by. So what's the double witness? Leo says, the star's brilliance and the reliable word of prophecy. So he does feel they've got Balaam's prophecy, but they also have the brilliance of the star in the sky, and they are and with these two testimonies that absolutely well, he says they're full of fervent faith in Christ. And then, of course, Micah 5.2, they learn that he's born in Bethlehem, and off they go. And the problem with Herod. And then what Leo does is he preaches to Herod in a kind of, it's kind of almost like a theatrical moment in his sermon, where it's like, it seems that the Magi shared earthly notions with Herod, viewing Christ's kingdom on the same level as the powers of this world. Consequently, they perhaps hoped for a temporary human leader. While oh no, this is not, this is not the oh, is it the major? No, it's the chief priest, sorry. That's not the major. The chief priests and Herod think of Christ's kingdom on the same level as the powers of this world, and they hope for a temporary leader, while Herod dreaded an earthly rival. But listen this, he he now preaches to Herod Leo, uh, you know, nearly 500 years on. He says, Your fear, Herod, is pointless. You try in vain to unleash your anger on the infant you suspect. But your realm cannot contain Christ. The Lord of the world is not satisfied with the narrow boundaries of your authority. He, whom you do not wish to reign in Judea, reigns everywhere. You yourself would rule more happily if you were to submit to his command. Why don't you sincerely do what you treacherously promise? Actually come with the wise men and really worship the true king in humble adoration. But you, out of too great an attachment to religious blindness, will not imitate the faith of the nations, and you direct your stubborn heart toward cruel schemes. There it is, it's a quite powerful, isn't it? Leo kind of dramatically is preaching back to Herod. So off they go, and in then he's his text now in the next section, Leo's text is goes to Matthew 2, verses 10 and 11, where they enter the house, find the child with Mary, his mother, fall down, worship him, and open the treasures. And then Leo says, What wonderful faith and perfect understanding taught to them, not by earthly wisdom, but by the instruction of the Holy Spirit. How is it that these men who had left their country without having seen Jesus and had noticed nothing in his appearance to demand this level of adoration? Offered how come they offered these gifts? It must be because, in addition to the star's appearance that attracted their physical eyes, the more brilliant rays of truth taught their hearts. Even before they started on their difficult journey, they must have understood what was owed to this one. Royal honour in gold, divine worship in incense, and the acknowledgement of mortality in myrrh. Such a belief and understanding might have been sufficient in themselves to prevent them using their physical eyes to investigate what required the fullest gaze of their minds. So there he's contrasting what they saw with what they could know in their minds. We'll see when we come to the revelation of the Magi book next week. They approach that very differently. Leo, there, you feel there's a little bit of maybe Platonism, is there?

SPEAKER_00:

Do you think that's fair, PJ? Well, perhaps it's Philonic. I think we can occasionally find things like this in the works of St. Philo. Uh, and and we continue to love Philo for all of that. So I think uh we can give him the same sort of grace there that you know, and we've even given that sort of grace to Augustine, and he probably is platonic.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Um yeah, so I I think, but yeah, I suppose there's that where you're just thinking at the plain reading, and and we'll think as we get into these other traditions, they are kind of based on scripture. You just have to read around a lot and really sort of think about a lot of consequences of some prophecies or the others, but just essentially a plain reading of Matthew 2 doesn't provide all that much remarkable about what Jesus is doing and looking like.

SPEAKER_01:

And Leo makes this point. The reason he emphasizes it, and I'm only being a little bit provocative, he emphasizes it that the magi see a very human, physical, lowly, fleshly baby. And for Leo, that's super important because, as we'll see just in our conclusion in a moment, the heresy that he is having to contend with is a heresy that denied the reality of his flesh and humanity. So he's he's emphasizing here that and he puts it like this it benefits us that the Apostle Thomas, after the Lord's resurrection, touched the marks of the wounds in his flesh, so too, it is an advantage to us that his real infancy was attested by the visit of the wise men. So he has it like the very fact that these outsiders see a very solid, fleshly human, and that there's nothing in the descriptions that doubt that, that he is very physical, real human is actually hugely important. And he says they saw and worshipped the child, small in size, powerless to help others, incapable of speech, and in no way different from human children in general, but because of the testimonies about him, the prophecies and the star, they knew that he had the majesty of invisible divinity, and so they knew the word had become flesh, and that he, the eternal essence of the Son of God, took on man's true nature. So for him, now notice there that Leo asserts that this baby is incapable of human speech, and for him in his day, the rest of his sermon is he wades into the devilish blasphemies of the Manichaeans, because they, he says, have insane ideas that Christ had a fictitious body, a pretend body, and that you know, that they were saying it's God could not actually have become flesh. So what he did was pretended and had an illusionary human body, and so he like Pope Leo rages against it, this insane idea, and he says that like the light of the sun shines and can shine onto say dirty mud, but the light is not corrupted by the fact it shines on something base, and in just the same way, the true divinity of Christ can be joined to mortal flesh, and it does not re it does not undermine or or defile the divinity because the divinity is this pure light that shines you know from the father into in and through the sun eternally and so on, and therefore that divinity cannot be compromised just because he takes on flesh. So he gives that a whole explanation in his sermon, it's powerful, but he's notice for him it's super important that the Magi bore witness to the solidity, but and this is the little point, he wants to assert the baby is incapable of speech because he's very, very keen in the heresies he's combating to ensure that this baby is very ordinary, very ordinary, physical, solid, not in any way weird or possibly not real humanity or something. So for him, he keeps emphasizing that the humiliation of the incarnation kind of thing, but we'll see. Remember that Leo's like he definitely isn't capable of speaking. Well, we'll see. There's the there's different views on that. I'll I'll prepare you for it. So that's the maniches. Just tell us a little bit, just briefly, why is he why why is he spending so much of his sermon raging against manarchees?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, in one sense, like manichaeism is from Persia, so it's kind of from the same. Area. So as he's bigging up, he wants us so he spends most of us most of this telling us how awesome Persia is, that the Persians believed in Jesus before even the Jews to whom Jesus came did, and then above all these other nations, Persia knew and came to him. But then that there has been this other this other leader from Persia who's not been quite so good. And he's had a continuing effect, especially in the West. So he it's not even actually it got quite big in China, but in Persia, it's been overtaken by proper Christianity, you know, like that's remained big. But in the West, manichism's huge. In Italy, in North Africa, in Spain, in France, or you know, Gaul as it is then. It's so it's kind of everywhere in kind of Leo's area, all the places that are kind of looking to him for leadership, that it's really taking hold. So there's a bit of that where he's just talking about another sort of Persian thing, and it you know, uh, that's sort of it's nice to have things all thematic, but then it's also serious. This is one, and so he's reminding them of what the true Persian teaching is, and this Manichi guy, uh Manny, the so-called prophet Manny, is a pretender, and he's you know, he's he's not teaching the true ancient wisdom. Because this is a common theme. The reason people always latched on to Persian religions was there's this feeling that oh, they've got this ancient stuff going back to like Babylon, and then that's been handed down from this sort of thing. And then to just be like, no, no, what the actual Persian sages did was go straight to Jesus and testify to his incarnate divinity. So this that if you're going to Maniche stuff to try and get a bit of like cool Persian kind of like, no, that's the fake stuff. You want the real the the actual Magi did this.

SPEAKER_01:

And we're gonna see next week, we it M-A-N-I, that's Marni, but we want to go to the M-A-G-I, the Magi, and it's interesting that we're gonna see that the Magi do claim to have had things passed down to them from the most ancient times, hidden mysteries and secrets, but they're not at all what Marnie claimed was handed down. They have something that's much more like Leo, like absolutely focused on Jesus and his true incarnation, fully divine, fully human, all of that.

SPEAKER_00:

Maybe that's why he begins with Balaam passing down his prophecy to the Magi, so that he is kind of refuting that idea of theirs. He begins with that. Yeah, to say, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, there it is, and Leo ends the sermon by saying, Let today's festival help you all, and let the universal confession be strengthened by this manifestation of the Saviour's birth and infancy, while we condemn the blasphemy of those who deny the flesh of our nature in Christ. But he ends the sermon in a quite a sweet way, and he says, Look, we can't have anything to do with this kind of people, don't have any alliance or interaction with them. But he says, What you should do is pray for them. He says, I'm I'm encouraging you to pray to the Lord for these such people, these heretics and things. Because he says, We with tears and sorrow feel pity for the destruction of cheated souls. So, following the apostle's example of loving kindness, let's be weak with those who are weak and weak with those that weep, for we hope that God's mercy can be won by the many tears and due amendment of the fallen. Because as long as life remains in the body, nobody's restoration must be despaired of, but the reform of all we should hope for, desired with the Lord's help, who raises up those that are crushed, and looses them that are chained, and gives light to the blind, to whom is honour and glory forever and ever. Amen. So I love that. He's saying, What they believe is is insane, devilish, demonic disaster. But pray for them, because even in their blind foolishness, the Lord can open blind eyes and set them free and pray for them, he says. Don't have anything to do with them, don't mix with them because you don't want to get dragged into their stuff, but pray for them that the Lord will open their eyes and save them. It's a lovely ending of a lovely sermon.