On the 8th of May 2025, Pope Leo XIV was elected by the cardinals in the Vatican. That was neat. Many people are already speculating on his future tenure as Pope, and I suppose that I, at the very least, might be adding fuel to the fire, though I generally care little about the governance of embodied rulers insofar as they do not pose an exceptional threat to people’s well-being, which I think is a bad thing to do. (One might go so far as to say that the Philosopher was right in saying, “but [the exit] bellowed whenever one of the incurably wicked [of whom most were tyrants] … tried to go up.”1) This post, however, will not trifle with such important matters; in fact, it will be of use to almost no-one. I will simply briefly discuss the provenance and context of the newly elected Pope’s motto.
We might start by introducing the motto itself and its out-of-context translation––however unidiomatic it may be.
In illo uno unum,
the motto says. In English we might translate this as literally as possible as “In that one, one.” Many websites helpfully explain that ille unus refers to the Christ, and that the phrase is taken from St. Augustine’s sermon on Psalm 127 (though my own Bible, translated to Norwegian in 1978 by Det Norske Bibelselskaps Forlag, has it as Psalm 128, as did the Septuagint I conferred with online––I am not knowledgeable enough about the Bible to say why), held on the feast day of the martyr Felix, which is supposed to be on the 6th of November.2 The psalm goes through the blessings enjoyed by those who fear the Lord (Vulgate: qui timent dominum): their wives will be fertile and their progeny will be many.
This is, understandably, not something St. Augustine, who was living at a time when asceticism, and therefore chastity, was all the rage, could see as a blessing. He also raises the natural problems with such a materialistic conception of divine blessings. To quote him,
I know an impious man, a pagan, sacrilegious, an idolater
…whom they brought to the grave––old, spent, dead in his bed, with a whole throng of sons and grandsons. Look: he didn’t fear the Lord, and yet the fertile offspring of his house closed his eyes.3
He goes on to say that no-one fears the Lord if they are not in the limbs of “the man himself,” by which he obviously means Christ Jesus, whose body is the Church. This is where the motto is taken from, for he says,
He is not one and we many, but we, while we are many, are one in him, who is one.4
He thereafter, very predictably, though not necessarily wrongly, expresses that it does not matter if the sons survive the impious father, because they will die some day, unless they become part of the Christ’s body;
because those goods are in the land of the dying, these are in the land of the living,
he says.
The rest of the sermon is largely unrelated to the motto or is basically a rewording of what we have already looked at.
Conclusion
Pope Leo choosing this motto emphasises, in my most humble opinion, two things: first, his relationship to Augustine, as he describes himself as “a son of Saint Augustine,”5 being an Augustinian; and second, his desire to foment unity within the Church, as limbs of Christ’s body, all of it one in one.
It seems that we can conclude this brief exposition, I hope, felicitously. May the following years pass under good auspices and the guidance of some propitious daemon.
- The Inspired Plato, the Polity 10 (615e) ↩︎
- This according to the footnote to Augustine, On the Psalms 127.6 in the Patrologia Latina edition by Migne, available at Opera Catholica Omnia (http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/04z/z_0354-0430__Augustinus__Enarrationes_In_Psalmos_%5B080-144%5D__MLT.pdf.html) when it was accessed on the 8th of May 2025, but currently unavailable to me. Hopefully that gets fixed. ↩︎
- St. Augustine, On the Psalms 127.2 (Augustine’s Latin is, as usual, rather inelegant, and my contempt for his style may shine through in my translations.) ↩︎
- Ibidem 127.3 (This part is genuinely gold in the dung heap, as Vergil said.) ↩︎
- Vatican News, Pope Leo XIV: ‘Peace be with all of you’ (Published 8th of May 2025; accessed 9th of May 2025): https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/pope-leo-xvi-peace-be-with-you-first-words.html ↩︎
Conjectanea 