Here begins the copy of the letter of the most blessed Pope Felix of the city of Rome to Zeno Augustus, through the Bishops Vitalis and Misenus.

Opening Courtesy; The Legation of Vitalis, Misenus, and Felix the Defensor Sent in the Pope’s Stead

It was truly fitting, venerable Emperor, that after the passing of my predecessor of holy memory — and with Me substituted in his place by divine grace — I should offer to your clemency the tribute of a letter: whether to announce these things, as the course of affairs demanded, or to present the first-fruits of my dutiful service. And with these duties duly discharged, there would likewise be joined those matters which pertain to the defense of your empire and the support of its prosperity: and the greater the zeal with which they ought to be cared for, the worthier the intermediaries through whom they should be accomplished.

Accordingly it was fitting that I should dispatch to you a necessary legation — of My brothers and fellow bishops Vitalis and Misenus, and of your servant Felix, Defender of the Church1 — who would not so much bear these matters in the manner of mere couriers, as, acting in My stead, would in a certain manner render Me present to you.

Through this legation, then, as though joined to your Honor in close discourse, I pray that you receive my supplication with kindly ears, as a Christian Prince. Nor let your piety think that any man loves you with a more sincere mind than one who wishes you to have perpetual peace in God; for you do not doubt, with the mind of faith, that both the power of temporal eminence and the commerce of eternal life hang upon divine favor.

The Long-Unanswered Letter from Simplicius; The See of Mark Cannot Be Separated from His Master

Behold, it has long been the case that the See of the Blessed Apostle — having sent letters through my predecessor of blessed memory to your Serenity — awaits [a response], and has received no answer concerning the Catholic faith, concerning the tranquility of the Easterners: especially since my predecessor had, most glorious Prince, bound your conscience with fearful mysteries, that you not permit the see of the blessed Evangelist Mark to be separated from the doctrine of his master, or from his communion.2 But since the zeal of my aforesaid predecessor — hindered by long infirmity — could not more frequently repeat these same things, through the office of My humility that zeal now does not cease to press them again with yet greater solicitude.

Peter Himself Speaks: The Apostle’s Voice Through the Papal Office

Again therefore the venerable confession of the Apostle Peter presses close with a maternal voice and — not ceasing to address especially the trust of your piety as that of her own sons — cries out:3 ‘Christian Prince, why do you permit Me to be cut off from the course of charity by which the universal Church is bound together? Why do you rupture in Me the assent of the whole world? I beseech you, most pious son, do not suffer the tunic of the Lord — woven from above throughout, by which, with the Holy Spirit everywhere presiding over it as one body, He figured forth His Church as indivisible — to be violated in any manner; nor let that whose integrity remained intact even among those who crucified the Savior appear to be divided in your times. Is it not My faith — which the Lord Himself showed to be one alone, and to be overcome by no adversity — He who promised, of His Church founded on My confession, that the gates of hell would never prevail against it? This [faith] raised you, reborn, to royal dignity; and when your power had been thrust out by its assailants, it opened again for you the way of prevailing, by the defense of that same faith. Truly, I beseech you: set before yourself the examples of past deeds, and return this favor in exchange for My benefits — so that what you have proved true through the examination of events, you may both guard against as dangerous and pursue as the supports of the dignity restored to you.’

These things I ask — which God willed to be spoken through the prelate of the said see, or through the smallness of my order, who with a view to your security judged that such matters should be brought forth thus: so that, admonished not so much through [Peter’s] vicar as such, but as though by the authority of the present Apostle Himself, looking more deeply upon the ways both of divine reverence and of the human condition, you may not (God forbid) appear ungrateful to the Author of the felicity conferred on you.

Zeno’s Own Prior Deeds Set Before Him

Let there return, I beseech, into the integral deliberation of your mind what deeds cast down your enemies; what brought you back to the imperial height with God accompanying you; how they fell with the impious reception of the [heretical] doctrine, and how your glory was restored in the expulsion of the heretics: how they, coming against the venerable constitutions of the Synod of Chalcedon and the writings of the most blessed Pope Leo, collapsed by their own contrivance; and by what means the undoing of their reforms brought your Principate back to its former reverence.

Let me, I pray, set forth confidently before you what it befits me not to keep silent. In you alone remains the unique name of the ancient Emperor. Do not, I beg you, begrudge Us your salvation, pious Emperor, lest you diminish Our confidence in supplicating for you. The causes by which the Lord is propitious are to be sought — not those by which His indignation is provoked. I press, I bear witness, I conjure you; for I fear, I shudder, I dread, lest with a change of causes (God forbid) the outcome also change.

Look with favor upon your predecessors of august memory — Marcian and Leo — and upon the faith of such great princes, as their legitimate successor. You ought to embrace their consensus in religion, to whose memory you owe reverence. Far be it from your devotion, far be it from your power, that you be thought to have rejected the judgment of such men.

The Imperial Archives Will Attest; Zeno’s Own Testimony Condemns the Present Restoration of Peter Mongus

Lastly, I press upon your piety’s senses your own profession and conscience, to be called back to mind. Have the archives of your palace examined, and those writings diligently investigated, which your piety — returning to the height of the highest power — addressed to my predecessor for common rejoicing. In these [writings] you consistently celebrate, with great praise, that you crushed the heretical tyranny by the vigor of Catholic preaching — by which preaching of this truth you labor for nothing else than the utter abolition of the Eutychian error and the exclusion of its followers. These [writings], in the whole series of their text, have piously spoken for the preservation of the definition of the Synod of Chalcedon and for the restoration of Timothy of holy memory, a priest of right faith. These things your Gentleness surely knew: nor could your clemency have brought forth matters unknown [to you]; and they are openly and plainly professed, which you confirmed by the attestation of your own praises.

Let those things also be sought which the pages of your Serenity have spoken to Timothy of holy memory, the orthodox bishop of Alexandria; and consider, from those very acts, that unless Peter — who at that time lay heavily upon that Church — had been shut out of the aforesaid city, the aforesaid Timothy would not have been recalled. You soon gave venerable sacred [letters] to that same pontiff of venerable remembrance, now restored, in which you gloried with faithful heart that — providing for the orthodox faith of the holy Church of the great city of Alexandria — Our Lord and Savior had restored the true priest. Hence it is manifest: that when you pronounce [Timothy] true, you show that the one who was expelled [Peter Mongus] was false; and when you testify that the Lord restored the faith in the venerable orthodox Timothy, you declare that He has refuted in Peter, in all respects, the perverse doctrine — for no other reason than that the one pronounced orthodox and true was in agreement with the Synod of Chalcedon (as his then-sent profession holds), and this other one, cast out as false and perverse, was at variance with the course of the same synod.

The Satisfactio Principle: Reconciliation Does Not Restore the Rank That Was Wrongly Held

Finally, you rebuked all the bishops of Egypt and the entire clergy, decreeing generally by your writs that unless, within two months, they should abstain from those things which they had from the beginning contrived against the canons, against the Churches of God, against the orthodox faith — and should return, through the satisfaction of worthy penance4, to the communion of the blessed Timothy which they had impiously abandoned — they would not only be stripped of their honors, but would lose both the city of Alexandria and the whole Egyptian region. For it seemed unjust to you, as you affirmed as a Christian Emperor, that those who separated themselves from the Church which is throughout the world should have priests, or be reckoned by any sacred name of ministry.

You, bearing indignantly the seditions stirred up by the Alexandrians, judged that those who, for the sake of their clerical order, were held by similar deception, were worthy of such punishment — unless they obeyed the salutary warnings. You, marking Peter with a special declaration that he had illicitly thrust himself upon the Alexandrian Church, ordered that all who had been ordained both by him and by the now-deceased heretic Timothy — if they should repent within the appointed times — be received into the communion of the Catholic Timothy (though you had not decreed that they be admitted also to the privileges of the rank they had wrongly presumed), adding consequently that the rest would undergo worse if they refused to choose better.

You utterly took away, after these terms, any further grounds of satisfaction, by which you reckoned that those departing from the fellowship of unity had already incurred the judgment. You, with wise consideration, kept silent about any further rehearsing of Peter’s person — since you saw him both cast down from the citadel of the Church and stripped of the honor of the pontificate he had invaded; nor could it in any way come to be that one who had been instituted either by no one or by heretics should ever preside even over the orthodox, or that one, so often violent by relapsed temerity, should enter the Lord’s sheepfold as treacherous and envious.

And therefore, what you were purporting to inflict on his followers for their correction, you reasonably reckoned as already inflicted upon him — as, so to speak, the master of the crime: that he by whom the brethren had been plunged to ruin should himself become an example of fearful damnation. And this is so true that you carefully ordered a legion to stand watch over the venerable Timothy, if anything of a human nature should befall him. You undertook to see as shepherd none but one from the college of Catholic clerics and consecrated by Catholics: because nowhere, by no rite under the gaze of your Serenity, could the very chief of Eutychian madness be — or be called — the successor of an orthodox prelate.

With what mind, then, do you suffer the beast which you resolved should be driven from the flocks of Christ to rage again for their destruction? Surely, by the laws which you impose on all, you prefer to be overcome rather than to promulgate contraries to them: how much better that those things remain untouched which yesterday you brought forth for the preservation of the integrity of the whole Church — so that the authority of your Catholic empire may remain unshaken, and nothing may be added which, in your deeds before the Lord, stands in the way of your happiness. For you see, venerable Emperor: as the undoubted defense of the Synod of Chalcedon is the ruin of its enemies, so conversely, by manifest assailing of it, is proved the raising up of the enemies of its venerable protection.

The Royal and Middle Way; The Chalcedonian Form Handed Down from the Apostolic Pontiffs

You remember how the divine words instruct us not to depart from the boundary of right disposition either to the right or to the left, but (as it is written) to walk by the royal and middle way (cf. Num. 20:17; Deut. 17:11, 17:20) — on the one side and on the other detesting the condemned sacrileges of Nestorius and Eutyches, and thus preaching the mystery of great piety: that the consubstantial and eternal Word of the Almighty God the Father — which in immutable Godhead was also made flesh, and from the very beginning of the ineffable conception which He powerfully fashioned for Himself in the womb of the Virgin Mother — one and the same Jesus Christ Our Lord, one and the same Son both of God and of man, one and the same inconfusedly and indivisibly remaining truly God and Man, brought forth by the undefiled law of the Father — was manifest in this world and accomplished at once things divine and human; died and, rising from the dead, sits at the Father’s right hand; and will come thence likewise, as He was seen to go into the heavens.

Thus far would they profess, as the tradition of the divine Books — the Four [Gospels] — relates, and [as] the form of the Council of Nicaea [sets forth], as all the previous pontiffs have preached: so fittingly inserted into the First Council of Ephesus, at which — in the times of the blessed Pope Celestine — the Nestorian plague was extinguished; as also the chapters subjoined testify, in the letters of the holy memory Pope Leo sent to [the Emperor] Leo of august memory5 — by which [letters] that man [the Emperor Leo], consulting also the bishops of the whole East and receiving their responses and subscriptions upon the approval of the Synod of Chalcedon, in no way suffered these [definitions] to be changed.

The more, therefore, did he weigh with Christian mind that this is true: that with the divine assertions of the Catholic teachers of the whole world — long before any such question had arisen — consonant sayings had sounded together everywhere; and therefore that what stood rightly condemned was not to be dug up by any repetition — lest not only this present cause extend ruin upon every Catholic name, but also an occasion for taking up public wars again be opened to all the remaining [heresies], if in any manner what has once been universally decided by the ancients should be reopened — as you now see that the perverter of the Alexandrian Church, long raging in deadly impunity, must nonetheless be driven out by your own precepts, by which he is rightly shown to have been long since ejected.

The Charge Against Peter Mongus and the Final Plea: Return the Disciple to the Master

Is he not himself, for thirty years, a deserter of the Catholic Church, a follower and teacher of her enemies, and always swift and ready to shed blood? Have we come to this dissimulation through some connivance of [his] instructor?6 In whose case, truly, there is no need of subtle discussion, because his crimes are open.

Your piety surely grieves that, through long and grievous conflicts of the one side and the other, many appear to have been taken from this world either without baptism or without communion. Let them not therefore be baptized under this prelate [Peter Mongus] and so be made heretics; let them not pass away without communion and so fail amid the depravity of the lost — as it is written: A blind man giving guidance to a blind man, he shall be plunged into the pit along with him (Matt. 15:14).

Is this not, I beseech you, to have decreed the most dire peril — when no firm healing is administered to the wounded, and a wretched contagion is forced upon the healthy? For how do they say [the matter] can be settled, if they permit his furies in the future? What is it to say that no cause of struggle any longer remains — unless it be that victory has been granted to the heretics?

Accordingly, those upon whom you shudder — as a kindly father — to inflict any bodily chastisement: much more mercifully do not suffer their souls to be cut off, but having put [these usurpers] down by pious deposition, cause them at last to be subjected to a Catholic priest, that they may obtain the effect of true [spiritual] generation, and the secure help of a communion which will profit them. Divine providence has placed in your hands the power by which you may likewise break through the works of the perfidious.

He drove away the destroyer of our religion; do you drive down the robbers’ incursion from the necks of His Church. He pacified the State (as your own speech also testifies) from heretical tyranny; do you, snatching the peoples from the very teachers of heresy, restore liberty to Christians. He restored you to the lawful court, supported by the emperor’s right: do you return the disciple to the master; lead back the see of the blessed Evangelist Mark to the communion of the most blessed Peter, by devotion to the merits of their lives: so that He Himself, perfecting in you the good work which He has begun, you may securely merit to hear: He who perseveres unto the end, this one shall be saved (Matt. 10:22); and that for the crowning of your glory, you may so preside in God’s stead, being in truth a reverend imitator of the Divinity, and — still set in temporal affairs — may even now experience the reward prepared for you for eternal blessedness.

But because not all things could be comprehended in letters which the quality of the business does not allow to be passed over, certain matters have been committed — to be treated with you in their own speech — to Our venerable brothers and fellow bishops, upon whom the care of the legation has been laid. I pray that you deign both to hear these things kindly and readily to assent: both for the observance of Catholic truth, and for the safety of your kingdom.