15 February 2024
Lent must be kept not only by avoiding bodily impurity but also by
avoiding errors of thought and faith. We know indeed, dearly-beloved, your
devotion to be so warm that in the fasting, which is the forerunner of the
Lord's Easter, many of you will have forestalled our exhortations. But because
the right practice of abstinence is needful not only to the mortification of
the flesh but also to the purification of the mind, we desire your observance
to be so complete that, as you cut down the pleasures that belong to the lusts
of the flesh, so you should banish the errors that proceed from the
imaginations of the heart. For he whose heart is polluted with no misbelief
prepares himself with true and reasonable purification for the Paschal Feast,
in which all the mysteries of our religion meet together. For, as the Apostle
says, that all that is not of faith is sin Romans 14:23, the fasting of those
will be unprofitable and vain, whom the father of lying deceives with his
delusions, and who are not fed by Christ's true flesh. As then we must with the
whole heart obey the Divine commands and sound doctrine, so we must use all
foresight in abstaining from wicked imaginations. For the mind then only keeps
holy and spiritual fast when it rejects the food of error and the poison of
falsehood, which our crafty and wily foe plies us with more treacherously now,
when by the very return of the venerable Festival, the whole church generally
is admonished to understand the mysteries of its salvation. For he is the true
confessor and worshipper of Christ's resurrection, who is not confused about
His passion, nor deceived about His bodily nativity. For some are so ashamed of
the Gospel of the Cross of Christ, as to impudently nullify the punishment
which He underwent for the world's redemption, and have denied the very nature
of true flesh in the Lord, not understanding how the impassible and
unchangeable Deity of God's Word could have so far condescended for man's
salvation, as by His power not to lose His own properties, and in His mercy to
take on Him ours. And so in Christ, there is a twofold form but one person, and
the Son of God, who is at the same time Son of Man, is one Lord, accepting the
condition of a slave by the design of loving-kindness, not by the law of
necessity, because by His power He became humble, by His power passible, by His
power mortal; that for the destruction of the tyranny of sin and death, the
weak nature in Him might be capable of punishment, and the strong nature not
lose anything of its glory.
St. Leo the Great
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