Giudei e Manichei nei Sermoni di Leone Magno

This paper focuses on Leo the Great’s sermons that allow to glimpse the intertwining between anti-Judaic and anti-heretical controversies. As part of the formulation of his doctrine, both Trinitarian and Christological, Leo strongly aimed to contrast both Judaism and the different heretical currents circulating at his time. In his dialectical procedure Judaism is often combi ned to other heresies (in particular, Manicheism), considered in a progressive removal from orthodoxy: Leo contested several heresies, for which the controversy against the Jews is proposed as an origin and as a model. He mixes pagans, Jews, and heretics according to polemical strategies functional to his ideological and religious conceptions. In particular, the Jews are considered as a potentially dangerous enemy as Manichaeans. Although, in fact, the devil has exercised his dominion over all heretical doctrines, he has mainly caused the madness of the Manichaeans, in which the worst distortions of the true faith have flowed: the profanity of pagans, the blindness of Jews, the illegal practices of magic and, moreover, sacrilegious and blasphemous elements shared with other heresies.