A correspondent drew my attention to an English translation online of sermon 25 of Pope Leo I, or Leo the Great. This appears on the Paths of Love blog here. He noticed that it was not among the selection of sermons included in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collection, and asked whether it was genuine.
The sermons of Leo the Great were published in a modern critical edition by A. Chavasse in the Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (CCSL) from Brepols in 1973 (numbers 138 and 138A). This was not titled something normal like “Sermones Leonis Magni” or something of the sort – “Sermons of Leo the Great.” Instead the – evidently deranged – editor chose to call his volume, “Sancti Leonis Magni Romani Pontificis Tractatus Septem et Nonaginta.” The two volumes contain 96 of these “tractatus” (plural), i.e. “sermons;” or at least, 96 is the highest number in the index at the end of the second volume.
An idea of the contents of volume one is as follows:
I. La transmission des sermons de saint Léon
II. Chronologie et circonstances des sermones
III. Établissement du texte
IV. La présente édition
TRACTATVS
I–V: Pour l’ordination de saint Léon et son anniversaire
VI–XI: De collectis
XII–XX: De ieiunio decimi mensis
XXI–XXX: De natale Domini
XXXI–XXXVIII: De epiphania Domini
The lengthy introductory material in French is extremely detailed. But the novice reader had better avoid it until he has some understanding of the manuscript tradition.
It seems that early editions of the Sermons were mainly taken from homiliaries, medieval collections of sermons adapted and reordered for liturgical use. This includes the Ballerini edition. But proper manuscripts do exist, and need to be used. There seem to be three families of manuscripts, labelled A, B and C.
Unfortunately our insane editor begins his volume by assuming that only experts in the field will be reading his book. So instead of giving an introduction, to orient a non-specialist, he plunges straight into immense detail.
I’m sure that many of us remember, from university, reading some massive tome and trying to extract from it the half-page of information that was all we actually required? I certainly do, and indeed occasionally I still have nightmares featuring such a task.
This is one of those unhelpful volumes. On the very first page of text, it dives into detail from the second paragraph onwards, giving no orientation whatever to the newcomer. Indeed this “avant-propos”, “introduction” consists entirely of an attack on the Ballerini edition (Venice, 1755). The Ballerini text is the text reprinted by J.-P. Migne in his Patrologia Latina 54, cols. 141-468, and so this was the standard text before Chavasse. But this should have appeared much later in the volume. The point made is that the Ballerini brothers based their edition on the homiliaries, not on the manuscripts of the “straight” text.
An English translation of the whole series of sermons has appeared in the Fathers of the Church series, 93 (1995), taken from the CCSL text.
There is a French translation in the Sources Chrétiennes series, SC 22, from 1947. At that early date the editors of this now august series had few ambitions beyond producing cheap paperbacks with parallel Latin and French. They reprint the Migne text from the PL. Curiously they reorder and renumber the sermons according to their own scheme.
Sermon 25 is one of the ten sermons delivered at Christmas. It is perfectly authentic.