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

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!

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Nova Patrum bibliotheca , p. vi.: In Pontificum reapse epistolis tota ecclesiæ administratio cognoscitur.

See p. 351 below; also Church and State , pp. 198-200, for the full statement of this passage.

"Episcopatus unus est cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur." – S. Cyprian, De Unitate Ecclesiæ .

Gregorovius, i. 286. "Das Papstthum, vom Kaiser des Abendlandes befreit, erstand, und die Kirche Roms wuchs unter Trümmern mächtig empor. Sie trat an die Stelle des Reichs."

Gregorovius, i. 200.

St. Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans .

Gregorovius, i. 208.

Gregorovius, i. 215.

Sidonius Apollinaris, Epist. , i. 9. "Hi in amplissimo ordine, seposita prærogativa partis armatæ, facile post purpuratum principem principes erant."

"Sed si forte placet veteres sopire querelas

Anthemium concede mihi; sit partibus istis

Augustus longumque Leo; mea jura gubernet

Quem petii." — Carmen , ii.

Reumont, i. 700.

He says at the end of 500 hendecasyllabics (jam te veniam loquacitati Quingenti hendecasyllabi precantur):

For a well-told account of this expedition and its failure, see Thierry, Derniers Temps de l'Empire d'Occident , pp. 77-101.

There is a strange occurrence recorded by St. Gregory in his Dialogues as having taken place in this church, which would seem to point at Ricimer's burial in it.

This account has been shortened from that of Gregorovius, i. 231-5.

Giesebrecht, quoted by Hergenröther, K.G. , i. 449.

Hergenröther, i. 449-453.

Reumont, ii. 6.

Reumont, ii. 9.

Reumont (ii. 29-42) gives an admirable sketch of the government of Theodorich, by which I have profited in what follows.

Montalembert, Gregorovius, Kurth. Philips (vol. iii., p. 51, sec. 119), remarks: "Wäre Theodorich der Grosse nicht Arianer gewesen, so würde, wenn er es sonst gewollt, ihm wohl nichts weiter im Wege gestanden haben, als sich zum Römischen kaiser im Abendlande ausrufen lassen".

Gregorovius, i. 312, 315.

Orosius, Hist. , vii. 43.

Photius, i. 111.

Photius, i. 120.

Guizot, Sur la Civilisation en Europe , deuxième leçon.

Edict of Valentinian III., in 447.

See Philips, Kirchenrecht , vol. iii., sec. 119.