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

40 meet in Italy on ecclesiastical matters, especially when they touch the faith, the custom is maintained that the successor of those who preside in the Apostolic See, as representing all the bishops of the whole of Italy, according to the care of all churches which lies upon him, appoints all things, being the head of all, as the Lord said to Peter, 'Thou art Peter,' &c. The three hundred and eighteen holy fathers assembled at Nicæa acted in obedience to this word, and left the confirmation and authority of what they treated to the holy Roman Church; both of which things all successions to our own time by the grace of Christ maintain. What, therefore, the holy council assembled at St. Peter's decreed, and the most blessed Felix, our Head, Pope, and Archbishop, ratified, that is sent to you by Tutus, defensor of the Church."

      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.

41

Jaffé, 365; Mansi, vii. 1065.

42

iv. 16.

43

Silentiarius, in the Greek court, officers who kept silence in the emperor's presence.

44

Ep. x.; Mansi, vii. 1067.

45

"The recital of a name in the diptychs was a formal declaration of Church fellowship, or even a sort of canonisation and invocation. It was contrary to all Church principles to permit in them the name of anyone condemned by the Church." —Life of Photius, i. 133, by Card. Hergenröther.