The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I

Three days after the sentence on Acacius, Pope Felix wrote to the emperor Zeno.⁴¹ He reminded him that, in violation of reverence to God, an embassy to the Holy See had been taken captive, its papers taken away; it had been dragged out of prison to communicate with the officers of the very heretic against whom it had been sent. "Since even barbarous nations, who knew not God, allowed to embassies for the transaction of human affairs a sacred liberty, how much more should that liberty be preserved sacred, especially in divine things, by a Roman emperor and Christian prince? Putting aside the embassy, which even in the case of the Apostle Peter was disregarded, be assured at least by these letters that the see of the Apostle Peter has never granted communion, and will never grant it, to that Alexandrian Peter long ago justly condemned, and again by synodal decree suppressed. But as you have not regarded the words of exhortation I addressed to you, I leave it to your choice to select which you will have, the communion of the blessed Apostle Peter or that of the Alexandrian Peter. You will know by the letters of this man's abettor, Acacius, to my predecessor of holy memory, copies of which I enclose, how even in your own judgment he was condemned. But this Acacius, who has committed many atrocities against the ancient rules, and has come to praise one whom he affirmed to be condemned, and whose condemnation he obtained from the Apostolic See, has been severed from apostolic communion. But I believe that your piety, which prefers to comply even with its own laws rather than to resist them, and which knows that the supreme rule of things human is given to you on condition of admitting that things divine are allotted to dispensers divinely assigned, I believe that it will be undoubtedly of service to you if you permit the Catholic Church in the time of your principate to use its own laws, nor allow anyone to stand in the way of its liberty, which has restored to you the imperial power. For it is certain that this will bring safety to your affairs, if in God's cause, and according to His appointment, you study to subdue the royal will and not to prefer it to the bishops of Christ, and rather to learn holy things by them than to teach them; to follow the form traced out by the Church, not after human fashion to impose rules on it, nor wish to dominate the commands of that power to whom it is God's will that your clemency should devoutly submit, lest, if the measure of the divine disposition be overpast, it may end in the disgrace of the disponent. And from this time I absolve my conscience as to all these things, who have to plead my cause before Christ's tribunal. It will be well for you more and more to reflect that both in the present state of things we are under the divine examination, and that after this life's course we shall according to it come before the divine judgment."

St. Gregory the Great, writing his Dialogues⁴² about one hundred and ten years after this letter, informs us that the writer of it was his great-grandfather, and speaks of his appearing in a vision to his aunt Tarsilla and showing her the habitation of everlasting light. At the time of writing it, Pope Felix was living under the domination of the Arian Herule Odoacer. The great Church of Africa was suffering the most terrible of persecutions under the Arian Vandal Hunneric, the son of his father Genseric. Arian Visigoth rulers were in possession of Spain and France, of whom Euric, as we have seen, was described rather as the chief of a sect than the sovereign of a people. In all the West not a yard of territory was under rule of a Catholic sovereign. And he whom the Pope addressed, with the dignity of the Apostolic See in its reverence for the power which is a delegation of God, as Roman emperor and Christian prince, was in his private life scandalous, in all his public rule shifty and tyrannical, and in belief, if he had any, an Eutychean heretic. It may be added, as a fact of history, that the emperor went before the divine judgment sooner than the Pope; that during the seven years which intervened between the letter and his death he utterly disregarded all that the Pope had done and said. He suffered, or rather made the bishop of Constantinople to be the ruler of the eastern Church; he maintained heretics in the sees of Alexandria and Antioch. After this he died in 491, and the last fact recorded of him is that the empress Ariadne, the daughter of Leo I., who had brought him the empire with her hand, when he fell into an epileptic fit and was supposed to be dead, had him buried at once, and placed guards around his tomb, who were forbidden to allow any approach to it. When the imperial vault was afterwards entered, Zeno was found to have torn his arm with his teeth. The empress widow, forty days after the death of Zeno, conferred her hand, and with it the empire a second time, upon Anastasius, who had been up to that time a sort of gentleman usher⁴³ in the imperial service. Anastasius ruled the eastern empire twenty-seven years, from 491 to 518.

The Pope further sought by a letter⁴⁴ to the clergy and people of Constantinople to remove the scandal caused by the weakness of his legates, and to explain the grounds upon which he had deposed Acacius. "Though we know the zeal of your faith, yet we warn all who desire to share in the Catholic faith to abstain from communion with him, lest, which God forbid, they fall into like penalty."

Acacius did not receive the papal judgment against him, but sought to suppress it. A monk ventured to attach to his mantle as he went to Mass the sentence of excommunication. It cost him his life, and brought heavy persecutions on his brethren. Acacius met the Pope with open defiance, and removed his name from the diptychs.⁴⁵ He rested on the emperor Zeno's support, who did everything at his bidding. Every arm of deceit and of violence he used equally. The monks, called, from their never intermitted worship, the Sleepless, in close connection with Rome, suffered severely. So Acacius passed the remaining five years of his life, dying in the autumn of 489.

His excommunication by the Pope caused a schism between the East and West which lasted thirty-five years, from 484 to 519. He met that supreme act of authority by the counter act of removing the Pope's name from the diptychs. This invites us to consider the position which he assumed.

From the year 482 (that is, four years after Zeno had recovered the empire), Acacius appears in possession of full influence over the emperor. The position of the bishop at Constantinople was, in itself, one of immense dignity. He was undoubtedly the second person in the imperial city, surrounded with a pomp and deference only yielding to that accorded to the emperor, but in some respects superior to it. He was regarded as sacrosanct: all the respect which the Church received in the minds of the good was centred in his person. And as he had risen to all this dignity in virtue of Constantinople being the capital, there was a special connection between the capital and its bishop, which led it to sympathise with every accession of power which he received. There can be no doubt that the right acquired by that bishop over the great sees of Ephesus, Cæsarea in Pontus, and Heraclea in Thrace was extremely popular at Constantinople; and that when he proceeded further to show his hand over the patriarchate of Antioch – as, for instance, in nominating one of its archbishops at Tyre, as the Pope reproached him – the capital was still better pleased. Most of all when, breaking through all the regulations which the Nicene Council had consecrated by its approval, – which, however, it had not created, but found in immemorial subsistence, – he ventured to ordain at Constantinople a patriarch of Antioch. Thus Stephen II., patriarch of Antioch, had been murdered in 479 by the fanatical Monophysites, in the baptistry of the Barlaam Church, and his mangled body thrown into the Orontes. The incensed emperor punished the criminals, and charged his patriarch Acacius to consecrate a new bishop for Antioch. Acacius seized the favourable opportunity, after the example of Anatolius, to advance himself, and appointed Stephen III. Emperor and patriarch both applied to Pope Simplicius to excuse this violation of the rights of the Syrian bishops, alleging the pressure of circumstances, and promising that the example should not occur again. Simplicius, so entreated, excused the fault, recognised the patriarch of Antioch – though he had been consecrated in Constantinople by its bishop – but insisted that such a violation of the canons should not be repeated. Presently Stephen III. died, upon which Acacius committed the same fault anew, and in 482 consecrated Calendion patriarch of Antioch. Calendion brought back from Macedonia the relics of his great and persecuted predecessor, St. Eustathius; but presently Zeno and Acacius displaced Calendion. Acacius was using the power which he possessed over the emperor to advance his own credit in the appointment of patriarchs, and to establish two notorious heretics – Peter the Fuller at Antioch, and Peter the Stammerer at Alexandria. All this meant that the bishop of Constantinople's hand was to be over the East, as the bishop of Rome's hand was over the West. Then, ever since the Council of Chalcedon, the two great eastern patriarchates had been torn to pieces by the conflicts of parties. The Eutychean heresy fought a desperate battle for mastery. As to Antioch, from the time that Eusebius of Nicomedia had brought about the deposition of St. Eustathius, preparatory to that of Athanasius in 330, the great patriarchate of the East had been declining from the unrivalled position which it had held. As to Alexandria, from the time that the 150 fathers at Constantinople, in 381, had attempted to make Constantinople the second see, because it was Nova Roma, the see of St. Mark bore a grudge against the upstart which sought to degrade it. In spite of the unequalled renown of its two great patriarchs, St. Athanasius and St. Cyril, it was sinking. And now heresy, schism, and imperial favour seemed to have joined together to exhibit Acacius as not only the first patriarch of the East, but as exercising jurisdiction even within their bounds, and as nominating those who succeeded to their thrones. All which would only tend to increase the power and popularity of the bishop of Constantinople in his own see.

Acacius had now been eleven years bishop. He had gained at once the emperor Leo; he had appeared to defend the Council of Chalcedon when Basiliscus attacked it; he had further gained mastery over Zeno; but, more than all this, he had seen Rome sink into what to eastern eyes must have seemed an abyss. St. Leo had compelled Anatolius to give up the canons he so much prized; since then northern barbarians had twice sacked Rome, and Ricimer's most cruel host of adventurers had reaped whatever the Vandal Genseric had left. If there was a degradation yet to be endured it would be that a Herule soldier of fortune should compel a Roman senate to send back the robes of empire to Constantinople, and be content to live under a Patricius, sprung from one of the innumerable Teuton hordes, and sanctioned by the emperor of the East; and Acacius would not forget that in the councils of that emperor he was himself chief.

If New Rome held the second rank because the Fathers gave the first rank to Old Rome, in that it was the capital, what was the position of New Rome and its bishop when Old Rome had ceased in fact to be a capital at all? At that moment – thirty years after St. Leo had confirmed the greatest of eastern councils and been greeted by it as the head of the Christian faith – the Rome in which he sat had been reduced to a mere municipal rank, and its bishop, with all its people, lived under what was simply a military government commanded by a foreign adventurer. Odoacer at Ravenna was master of the lives and liberties of the Romans, including the Pope.

Acacius had had this spectacle for some years before him, when Pope Felix, succeeding Pope Simplicius, called him to account for entirely reversing the conduct which he had pursued at the time when Basiliscus had usurped the empire. Then he defended the Council of Chalcedon and its doctrine; then he denounced to the Pope Peter the Stammerer as a heretic and a man of bad life, and had called for his condemnation and obtained it. He had now taken upon himself not even to ask from the Pope this man's absolution, but to absolve himself the very heretic he had caused to be condemned, and to put him into the see of Alexandria, with the rejection of the bishop legitimately elected, and approved at Rome, and to compose for the emperor a doctrinal decree, which he subscribed himself first as the first of the patriarchs, and was compelling all other bishops to sign under pain of deprivation; when, behold, St. Leo's third successor called him to account in exactly the same terms as St. Leo would have used, and required him to meet at Rome the accusation brought against him by John Talaia, a duly elected patriarch of Alexandria, just as St. Julius, a hundred and forty years before, had invited the accusing bishops at Antioch to meet St. Athanasius before his tribunal. He who resided in a state only second to the emperor in the real capital of the empire to go to a city living in durance under the northern barbarians, and submit to the judgment of one whose own tribunal was in captivity to such masters!

But, on the other hand, Pope Felix spoke to the emperor as none but popes have ever spoken. He called him his son, but he required from him filial obedience. Above all he spoke in one character, and in one alone – as the heir of that St. Peter whom the voice of the Lord had set over His Church; he spoke from Rome, not because it was or had been capital of the empire, but because it was St. Peter's See, and precisely because he succeeded St. Peter in his apostolate.

The respective action, therefore, of Pope Felix on one side, and of Acacius on the other, brought to an issue the most absolute of contradictions. The Pope claimed obedience, as a superior, from Acacius. When that obedience was refused, he exerted his authority as superior, and degraded Acacius both from his rank as bishop, and from Christian communion. And a special token of that sentence was to order his name to be removed from the diptychs, and to enjoin the people of his own diocese to hold no communion with him, on pain of incurring a like penalty with him. Acacius answered by practically denying the Pope's authority to do any such act. He asserted himself to be his equal by removing the Pope's name from the diptychs. There could be no more striking denial of any such authority as the claim to inherit Peter's universal pastorship, than to treat the Pope himself as, in virtue of that pastorship, he had treated Acacius.

Even apart from this, the conduct of Acacius carried with it a double denial of the Pope's authority: a denial that he was the supreme judge of faith; and a denial that he was the supreme maintainer of discipline in its highest manifestation, the order of the hierarchy itself.

He denied that the Pope was the supreme judge of faith, by drawing up a formulary of doctrine, which he induced the emperor to promulgate by imperial decree; and this independently of what doctrine that formulary might contain. Further, he did this by supporting two persons judged to be heretical by the Holy See – Peter the Fuller at Antioch, Peter the Stammerer at Alexandria. He denied that the Pope was the supreme maintainer of discipline, by making the two great sees of the East and South subordinate to himself. As the Pope expressed it in his sentence, he had done "nefarious things against the whole Nicene constitution," of which the Pope was special guardian. In fact, his conduct was an imitation of that pursued in the preceding century by Eusebius of Nicomedia, by Eudoxius, and all their party. It was even carried out to its full completion. The emperor was made the head of the Church, on condition of his leading it through the bishop of Constantinople. Acacius put together the canon of the Council of 381, which said that the bishop of New Rome should hold the second rank in the episcopate, because his city is New Rome, with the canon attempted to be passed at Chalcedon, and cashiered by St. Leo, that the fathers gave its privileges to Old Rome because it was the imperial city. Uniting the two, he constructed the conclusion, that as Old Rome had ceased to be the imperial city, which New Rome had actually become, the privileges of Old Rome had passed to the bishop of New Rome.

This he expressed by removing the name of the Pope from the diptychs in answer to his sentence of degradation and excommunication. As the Pope could not suffer the conduct of Acacius, without ceasing to hold the universal pastorship of St. Peter, so Acacius could not submit to it without admitting that pastorship. He denied it in both its heads of faith and government by his conduct. He embodied that denial unmistakably in removing the Pope's name from the diptychs.

To lay down a parity between the ecclesiastical privileges of the two sees, Rome and Constantinople, because their cities were both capitals, is implicitly to deny altogether the divine origin of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. That is, to deny that the Church is a divine polity at all. The conduct of Acacius was to bring that matter to an issue. The end of it will show whether he was right or wrong.

He lived for five years, from 484 to 489, strong in the emperor's support, who did everything which he suggested. And he had his part as a counsellor, as well as a bishop, in one most important transaction, which took place in this interval. The reign of Zeno was disturbed by perpetual insurrections and perils. In these Theodorick the Goth had been of great service to him, so that in this year, 484, Zeno had made him consul at Rome. But Theodorick afterwards thought that Zeno had treated him very ill. He marched upon Constantinople: Zeno trembled on his throne. Something had to be done. What was done was to turn Theodorick's longing eyes upon the land possessing "the hapless dower of beauty".⁴⁶ Zeno commissioned him to turn Odoacer out, and to take his place. In 489, Theodorick led the great mass of his people into Italy, at the suggestion, and with the warrant of, the man whom Pope Felix had appealed to as his son, the Roman emperor and Christian prince. And so, as an emperor and a bishop of Constantinople, a hundred years before, had led the Gothic nation into the Arian heresy, under the belief that it was the Christian faith, another emperor of Constantinople and another bishop turned that Gothic nation upon the Roman mother and the See of Peter, regardless that they would thereby become temporal subjects of those who were possessed by the "Arian perfidy". Beside Eudoxius and Valens in history stand Acacius and Zeno; and beside Alaric, let loose with his warlike host by the younger sister on the elder in 410, stands Theodorick, commissioned, in 489, with all his people, to occupy permanently the birthplace of Roman empire.

The eastern bishops⁴⁷ crouched before the emperor's power and his patriarch's intrigues, who deposed those who were not in his favour, and tyrannised over the greater number, so that many fled to the West. John Talaia himself, the expelled patriarch of Alexandria, received the bishopric of Nola from the Pope, to whom he had appealed. This continued to be the state of things during five years, from 484 to 489, when Acacius died, still under sentence of excommunication. One of the greatest bishops of his time, St. Avitus of Vienna, characterises him with the words, "Rather a timid lover than a public asserter of the opinion broached by Eutyches: he praised, indeed, what he had taken from him, but did not venture to preach it to a people still devout, and therefore unpolluted by it". Another equally great bishop, Ennodius of Ticinum – that is, Pavia – says: "He utterly surrendered the glory which he had gained, in combating Basiliscus, of maintaining the truth"; while the next Pope Gelasius charges him with intense pride; the effect of which was to leave to the Church "cause for the peaceful to mourn and the humble to weep".

But all this evil had been wrought by Acacius, and upon his death it remained to be seen how his successor would act. He was succeeded by Fravita,⁴⁸ who, so far from maintaining the conduct of Acacius in excluding the name of Pope Felix from the diptychs, wished above all things to obtain the Pope's recognition. He would not even assume the government of his see without first receiving it. It was usual for patriarchs and exarchs to enter on their office immediately after election and consecration, before the recognition of the other patriarchs which they afterwards asked for by sending an embassy with their synodal letter. It seems Fravita would make no use of this right, but besought the Pope's confirmation in a very flattering letter. It would seem also that, by the death of Acacius, the emperor Zeno had been delivered from thraldom, and returned to some sentiment of justice. For he supported the letter of the new patriarch by one himself to the Pope, and it is from the Pope's extant answers⁴⁹ to these two writings that we learn some of their contents. To the emperor, the Pope replies that he knows not how to return sufficient thanks to the divine mercy for having inspired him with so great a care for religion as to prefer it to all public affairs, and to consider that the safety of the commonwealth is involved in it. That, desiring to confirm the unity of the Catholic faith and the peace of the churches, he should be anxious for the choice of a bishop who should be remarkable for personal uprightness and, above all things, for affection to the orthodox truth. That the Church has received in him such a son, and that the pontiff, in whose accession he rejoices, has already given an indication of his rule in referring the beginning of his dignity to the See of the Apostle Peter. For the newly-elected pontiff acknowledges in his letter that Peter is the chief of the Apostles and the Rock of the Faith: that the keys of the heavenly mysteries have been entrusted to him, and therefore seeks agreement with the Pope. Then, after enlarging upon the misdeeds of Acacius, and his rejection of the Council of Chalcedon, and his absolution of notorious heretics, the Pope beseeches the emperor to establish peace by giving up the defence of Acacius. "I do not extort this from you – as being, however unworthy, the Vicar of Peter – by the authority of apostolic power; but, as an anxious father earnestly desiring the prosperity of a son, I implore you. In me, his Vicar, how unworthy soever, the Apostle Peter speaks; and in him Christ, who suffers not the division of His own Church, beseeches you. Take from between us him who disturbs us: so may Christ, for the preservation of His Church's laws, multiply to you temporal things and bestow eternal."

In his answer to Fravita, Pope Felix expresses the pleasure which his election gives, and the hope that it will bring about the peace of the Church. He takes his synodal letter as addressed to the Apostolic See, "through which, by the gift of Christ, the dignity of all bishops is made of one mass,"⁵⁰ as a token of good-will, inasmuch as his own letter confesses the Apostle Peter to be the head of the Apostles, the Rock of the Faith, and the dispenser of the heavenly mystery by the keys entrusted to him. He is the more encouraged because the orthodox monks formed part of the embassy. But when the Pope required a pledge from them that Fravita should renounce reciting the names of Peter the Stammerer and Acacius in the church, they replied that they had no instructions on that head. For this reason the Pope delayed to grant communion to Fravita, and he exhorts him, in the rest of the letter, not to let the misdeeds of Acacius stand in the way of the Church's peace. "Inform us then, as soon as possible, on this, that God may conclude what He has begun, and that, fully reconciled, we may agree together in the structure⁵¹ of the body of Christ."

Fravita died before he received the answer of the Pope, having occupied the see of Constantinople only three months, and out of communion with the Pope.

It would seem that the first successor of Acacius as well as the emperor receded both from his act and the position which it involved. They acknowledged in their letters, as we learn from the Pope's recitation of their words, the dignity of the Apostolic See. What they were not willing to do was to give up the person of Acacius. What the subsequent patriarchs, Euphemius and Macedonius, alleged, was that he was so rooted in the minds of the people that they could not venture to condemn him by removing his name from commemoration in the diptychs.

In 490, Euphemius followed in the see of Constantinople. He was devoted to the Council of Chalcedon, and ever honoured in the East as orthodox. He replaced the Pope's name in the diptychs, and renounced communion with Peter the Stammerer, who had again openly anathematised the Council of Chalcedon; only he refused to remove from the diptychs the names of his two predecessors. Pope Felix had written, on the 1st May, 490, to the archimandrite Thalassio,⁵² not to enter into communion with the bishop who should succeed Fravita, even if he satisfied these demands respecting Acacius and Peter the Stammerer, unless with the express permission of the Roman See. This condition he maintained, acknowledging Euphemius as orthodox, but not as bishop, because he would not remove from the diptychs the names of two predecessors who had died outside of communion with the Roman See.

Euphemius had himself subscribed the Henotikon of Zeno, without which the emperor would never have assented to his election; but he confirmed in a synod the Council of Chalcedon. When, in April, 491, Zeno died, and through the favour of his widow, the empress Ariadne, Anastasius obtained the throne in a very disturbed empire, the patriarch long refused to set the crown on his head, because he suspected him to favour the Eutychean heresy. The empress and the senate besought him in vain. He only consented when Anastasius gave him a written promise to accept the decrees of Chalcedon as the rule of faith, and to permit no innovation in Church matters. On this condition he was crowned: but emperor and patriarch continued at variance. The emperor tried to escape from his promise in order to maintain Zeno's Henotikon, which he thought the best policy among the many factions of the East. Euphemius was in the most unhappy position with the monks, who would not acknowledge him because he was out of communion with the Pope on account of Acacius.

Pope Felix, having all but completed nine years of a pontificate, in which he showed the greatest fortitude in the midst of the severest temporal abandonment, died in February, 492. Italy then had been torn to pieces for three years by the conflict between Odoacer and Theodorick. Gondebald, king of the Burgundians, had cruelly ravaged Liguria. Then it was that bishops began to build fortresses for the defence of their peoples. The Church of Africa was in the utmost straits under the cruelty of Hunneric. Pope Gelasius succeeded on the 1st March, 492. His pontificate lasted four years and eight months; during the whole course of which his extant letters show that he was no less exposed to temporal abandonment than Felix, and no less courageous in maintaining the pastorship of Peter.

But the death of the emperor Zeno in 491, and the death of Pope Felix III. ten months afterwards, in 492, require us to make a short retrospect of the temporal condition of empire and Church at this time. Zeno, receiving the empire at the death of his young son by Ariadne, Leo II., in 474, had reigned seventeen years, if we comprise therein the twenty months during which the throne was occupied by the insurgent Basiliscus from 475 to 477, precisely at the moment when Odoacer terminated the western empire. Zeno, recovering the throne in 477, had acted as a Catholic during about four years. Pope Simplicius had warmly congratulated him on the recovery of the empire on the 8th October of that year. In 478, the Pope had thanked Acacius for informing him that the right patriarch, Timotheus Solofaciolus, had been restored at Alexandria. But from 482 all is altered. The chronicle of Zeno's reign becomes a catalogue of misfortunes. The publication of his Formulary of Union is a gross attack upon the spiritual independence of the Church. He imposes it upon the eastern bishops on pain of expulsion. He puts open heretics into the sees of Alexandria and Antioch. All this is done under the advice and instigation of Acacius, who is the real author of the Henotikon, and who completes his acts by open defiance of Pope Felix. When Zeno died he left the empire a prey to every misery. In Italy, Herules and Ostrogoths were desperately contending for the possession of the country. Barbarians beyond the Danube incessantly threatened the north-eastern frontiers. There was no truce with them but at the cost of incessant payments and every sort of degradation. Egypt and Syria were torn to pieces by the Eutychean heresy. The infamous surrender of Italy to Theodorick in 488 has been touched upon. By that the support which the Ostrogothic king had given to keep Zeno on a tottering throne, followed by the terror which his discontent had caused at Constantinople, purchased from the Roman emperor himself the sacrifice of Rome and all the land from the Alps to the sea. Such was the man with whom the Popes Simplicius and Felix had to deal. To him it was that, from a Rome which drew its breath under an Arian Herule, the commander of adventurers who sold their swords for hire, these Popes wrote those letters full of Christian charity and apostolic liberty which have been quoted.