Pope Gelasius I, Against Andromachus the Senator and the Other Romans Who Resolved to Practice the Lupercalia According to the Old Custom.
He condemns the superstitious celebration of the Lupercalia, and proves that the misfortunes of Rome have come about not from the discontinuance of the Lupercalia, but from her own crimes.
Chapter I: That Those Who Charge the Church with Public Calamity Speak Without Knowledge, and That the Bishop’s Solicitude Obliges Him to Address Even the Offenses of the Powerful
Certain men sit in their houses, not knowing what they say or about what they make their assertions, striving to judge others when they themselves are not judged, willing to accuse before they know, and to teach before they have learned, and — without examining the matter, without investigating its causes, without seeking out its principle — to spew forth without consideration whatever has come to their lips, and to vomit it out headlong; not weighing what they say in the assertion of truth, but proving what they do not know with the zeal of evil-speaking. And they have so far advanced as to strive to tear apart even rightly-done deeds with a malevolent purpose — who, if they were wise, would not at all rush headlong into a verdict, but, having first searched out the matters, would bring forth what was to be said.
But because they accuse Us of being slothful censors in the correction of the vices of the Church, let them consequently acknowledge from Us that not only is bodily adultery a sin which ought to be discussed and rightly punished, but that there is a far greater kind of fornication and adultery — which in any Christian whatsoever, since every Christian is a member of the Church, ought competently to be vindicated; for by so much is the offense of sacrilege the greater, by so much as the fornication of the soul is worse than that of the body. For through the fornication of the soul one departs from union with God Himself, and passes over to unclean spirits by a kind of spiritual adultery.
How, therefore, does he not fall into this very category — who, while wishing himself to be seen as a Christian, and professing it, and saying it, nevertheless does not shrink to preach openly and publicly, does not flee, does not tremble, that diseases are produced because demons are not worshiped, and because to the god February sacrifice is not offered? I see whence these ravings have arisen. How is he not a prevaricator who incurs into these blasphemous profanities? How is he not to be reckoned a sacrilegious man — who, having abjured the providence and power of the one God which he confessed, is led aside to monstrous superstitions and empty figments? According to the Apostle, far worse a guilty man, and rightly to be condemned, is he who deserts a confessed truth, than one who had in no way ever believed in it; for although the figments which he proposes may be ridiculous, nevertheless his very disposition and will is criminal, and his profession and preaching rightly to be condemned. And on this account, he who wishes a sentence of condemnation to be brought forth without delay against another, in the matter in which he judges another, may know that he is condemning himself.
For ought not the bishop to vindicate against those who commit bodily adultery, and yet not vindicate against those who commit sacrilege — that is, the spiritual fornication and adultery? Did not the Lord Himself, when the adulteress was brought to Him, say to her accusers: If any of you is without sin, let him first cast a stone at her (John 8:7)? He did not say, “If any of you is not likewise an adulterer,” but, “If any of you is without sin”: meaning that anyone bound by sin in any matter would not dare to cast a stone at another for the offense of his sin. To these, then, departing in their own consciences, the Saviour of the world added: Woman, where are thy accusers? Has no one condemned thee? Neither will I condemn thee. Go, and now sin no more (John 8:10–11). You hold and are held; you press and are pressed; you bind and are bound; you demand the bishop’s discussion and you exact the verdict. Remember that every offense must be brought forward against itself. Do not even the human laws say that a guilty man cannot make a guilty man? Why do you see the mote in your brother’s eye, and you do not see the beam in your own eye? (Matt. 7:3) You who accuse adulterers commit adultery, and you make spiritual adulterers out of bodily ones — adulterers indeed!
Do you really demand a discussion? The diligent man, mature, religious, does not wish anyone in the Church to sin; the one who sins, he wishes to be discussed and rightly condemned to penalty; whatever you promise toward another, you will be compelled to bring forth in yourself: for it is this that brings it about that, by the bishop’s negligence, the Church is not accused and stained. Therefore the bishop’s solicitude and severity ought not to be lacking in any wickedness, and the Church’s reputation must be cleansed of every charge. But you may say perhaps that you are a layman, and he a minister of the Church, and so you exaggerate the crime as graver. You speak truly, nor do I deny it: by so much more is he to be carefully examined, by how much more closely placed [in office]; by so much more guilty he is, by how much more he was constituted in that ministry, and ought least to have done these things. Behold, the censure is not lacking: hear thou, and if he be convicted, he will be consequently delivered to vengeance.
Chapter II: That the Layman, Being a Member of the Body of Christ, Shares in the Holy People and Is Not Exempt from the Censure of Sacrilege; and That He Who Has Professed Christ and Returns to the Figments of Paganism Must Abstain from the Sacred Body
Come now: what do you wish concerning yourself? Surely it is not the case that, because you are not in the sacred ministry, you are therefore not in the sacred people? Do you not know that you also are a member of the supreme Pontiff? Are you ignorant that the whole Church is called the Church of priests? Lastly, if he is guilty who, going to the Church’s ministry, transgresses, are you not yourself also guilty, who, after the confession of truth, lead yourself back to depraved and perverse and profane and diabolical things — to which you have professed yourself to renounce — and reduce yourself to figments?
And so even you, after blasphemies openly and publicly poured forth, must in every way abstain from the sacred body. For you cannot share in the table of the Lord and the table of demons; nor can you drink the chalice of the Lord and the chalice of demons (1 Cor. 10:21). Nor can you be the temple of God and the temple of the devil: light and darkness cannot meet together in you. I shall see whether you press, and call to vindicate against another’s malefice. You, however, cannot decline the weight of your own sin: and by how much you do not allow the offense to pass unpunished in another, by so much you must show that, by the same measure, the same is to be done in you.
Yet in your blasphemies themselves, by which you are justly to be struck, I plainly recognize your ignorance — for, as the saying goes, “to have the will to lie, but not the art of feigning” — that, since you understand yourself to have an evil disposition and a perverse purpose of apostasy, in such a way that nothing whatsoever may supply you with the matter of that vanity, nor are you able to construct what you conceive in your heart and bring forth from your mouth. Tell me, when it is read often enough in the Roman histories — Livy being the author — that very often in this same city, with pestilence arising, infinite thousands of men perished, and that for that reason it was so frequent that scarcely could there be found those of whom in those warlike times the army might be made up: was it then that sacrifice was least offered to your god February? Or did this one cult here profit nothing at all in those times when the Lupercalia was being celebrated? Nor indeed will you say that this rite did not yet then exist, since it is reported to have been brought from Evander into Italy before Romulus.
Why the Lupercalia were instituted, however — to the extent that pertains to the figments of that very superstition — Livy speaks of it in the second decade. He does not record that they were instituted for the purpose of warding off diseases, but on account of the sterility of women, which had then occurred — to be exhibited (as he thinks) — or rather, perhaps, to be exacted. Wherefore, if it should avail anything for this — when this has been discontinued — it is not against diseases that diseases will have come about, against which the Lupercalia were not invented, but for the sterility of women, on account of whose fecundity these things were devised. Tell me, what will you say of pestilence, of sterility, of the continual storm of wars? Have these things therefore come to pass on account of the Lupercalia being abolished? But if the Lupercalia were not given for these things, either to be averted or to be remedied, why are you tossed about in vain agitation?
Chapter III: That the Lupercalia Did Not Protect Rome from Plague Even in the Days of Its Celebration; That the Provinces Which Never Practiced It Have Suffered the Same Calamities; and That the Misfortunes of the Roman People Have Come from the Corruption of Their Morals, Not from the Discontinuance of a Pagan Rite
If indeed it had any such power, when it was discontinued, no disease would have arisen against which the Lupercalia were not invented; rather, women would by no means have been able to bear children, for whose fecundity these things have been devised. What will you say about plague, about sterility, about the continual storm of wars? Have these things therefore come to pass on account of the Lupercalia having been abolished? But if the Lupercalia were not given for these things — neither to be averted, nor to be remedied — why are you tossed about in vain agitation?
What of Tuscia, what of Aemilia, and the other provinces, in which scarcely any man at all has remained, that they have been consumed by the necessity of war? Was it the discontinuance of the Lupercalia that caused this — those provinces which were laid waste long before the Lupercalia were taken away? When the Emperor Anthemius came to Rome, the Lupercalia was indeed being celebrated; and yet so great a pestilence crept in that it was scarcely to be borne. Was it through Campania that the Lupercalia was conducted, where, when it was taken away, diseases and pestilence were generated there? But you will say that all things pertain to Rome as to the head, and what was not done here, was felt in the various provinces pertaining to her. Why then, before these provinces pertained to Rome, did they flourish by their own resources, without the Lupercalia? That sterility of the lands, you say, the abolished Lupercalia has caused — or has it come from the merits of our sins? Of which it has been said long ago, that whatever the Romans had deserved, they would lose by their morals; and the sterility of women, in some certain manner, was bound to come about — on account of which the Lupercalia is said to have been instituted, not the sterility of the lands, on account of which the Lupercalia was not instituted, to be removed.
What of Africa, whence sterility comes? What of Gaul? Did the Lupercalia institute these things — or our own habits, thefts, homicides, adulteries, injustices, iniquities, ambitions, cupidities, perjuries, false testimonies, oppressions of the wretched, the assault on good causes and the defense of bad ones, and in all these unheard-of perversities; lastly — and what is above all — minds devoted to demons, sacrileges, and even the magic arts dreadful to pagans themselves? Behold what does all things adverse and hostile to us — not the Lupercalia, which were taken away for your salvation. But what do you say, you yourselves, who defend the Lupercalia and propose that they ought to be celebrated? You yourselves cheapen them; you yourselves render their cult and celebration vile and common.
If the showing of the Lupercalia has procured what is contrary to us, the fault is yours; for what you suppose to be of singular benefit to you, you most negligently — and not with a cult and devotion approaching even the unequal — you have led down to vile and trivial persons, base and abject. Apud illos enim — among them, the ancients — the noble men themselves used to run, and the matrons publicly were beaten with their bodies bared. You therefore are the first to have offended in the Lupercalia: it would have been better not to act than to celebrate these things with such an injury; but you have led down the cult that is to be venerated by you — which you think to be salutary — to vile and trivial persons, abject and lowly.
If you really, then, profess this rite to be sacred — or rather an execrable thing — to be salutary to you, do you yourselves run, do you yourselves run naked with the goatskin loincloth in the manner of your forefathers, that you may rightly perform the laughingstocks of your salvation. If they are great, if they are divine, if they are salutary, if upon these the integrity of your life depends, why are you ashamed to do them through your own selves? If it is shameful and a disgrace, are you not yourselves confessing that the very thing you say is salutary and is destined to be of divine profit, is itself a disgrace? No man professes a religion which by itself, when carried out to its end, he blushes at and flees from; your very shame ought to teach you that this thing is a public crime, not a salvation. And it is not a worship of the Divinity, of which no wise man is ashamed, but the instruments of depravity — by which your minds, bringing forth a testimony against themselves, blush to fulfill what they profess ought to be done.
Chapter IV: That the Lupercalia Are an Open Worship of Demons; That the Castors Did Not Save Their Patrons from Calamity Either; and That Patronage of the Festival Is a Pretext for Refusing Moral Accountability by Ascribing Sin to Fate
If it shames you to celebrate such things — is what is said to be salutiferous and divinely profitable that very thing which you yourselves confess to be a disgrace? No one professes a religion which by itself, when carried out to its end, he blushes at and flees from; let your very modesty teach you that this is a public crime, not a salvation, and not a worship of the Divinity (of which no wise man is ashamed), but the instruments of depravities — by which your minds, bringing forth a testimony against themselves, blush to fulfill what they profess ought to be performed.
Your Castors, certainly, from whose cult you were unwilling to desist — why have they not provided you favorable seas, that in the time of winter ships with grain might come here, and the city be not laboring under want? Or, if it is to come about in the days following — that this is to be of the summer — is it a benefit constituted by God, not the empty persuasion of the Castors?
Tell us, neither Christians nor pagans, perfidious everywhere, faithful nowhere, corrupt everywhere, sound nowhere — you who can hold neither one nor the other, when each is contrary to the other!
Tell me, I say, you patrons of the Lupercalia — and indeed, defenders of the laughingstock of the Divinity, of base songs, fitting masters of unsoundness, who not without cause have minds that are not sound — worthy of this religion, which is celebrated with the words of obscenities and crimes. You shall yourselves see what salvation is at hand for you, which proposes such a stain and pernicion to morals. Nor is it the case that you should say “by doing these things and broadcasting the crimes of every man we deter minds from such commissions, and we restrain them by shame, lest these things be sung in the public voice”; when, as that one says, these laughingstocks are seen not so much to deter as to admonish minds, and as he himself said: they take rage and souls from the crime; thence made more shameless, by the fact of the publicized crime, and modesty exposed, nothing remains at all of which one might be ashamed, nor has he what he might fear to have made public — but he now confidently sets himself forth, whatever he is, in the open, not by the act of correction, but rather by a kind of joy and celebration: now of every name, every person, every standing of life, every religion, however infamous, the deeds are told in song; and unless they be accompanied by the chanting of crimes, festal occasions are not held.
Tell us, therefore, you who hold the will of profanity, the causes of which you cannot allege — you who have proposed yourselves to defend the falsity that you cannot defend: what will you say of drought, of hail, of whirlwind, of storms, and the various calamities, which come about for the quality of our morals? Have these things also come about because the Lupercalia have been taken away — or are they inflicted on evil habits to be chastened by deserved retributions? But what is not strange about men is that they wish these things to come about not by divine judgment but by the inroads of vain superstition — so that they may cover their crimes and misdeeds with their authority, and bring forth the heavens, the stars, and a fated error to be applied; and a necessity of sinning, and a malefic conduct, may proceed not from the perversity of their own heart, but depend on heaven as its author. Set forth, therefore, for what evils to be removed, or for what goods to be merited, your Lupercalia have been instituted; and let us see what those goods may have come about, when the Lupercalia were carried on, and what evils have come, when the Lupercalia have been taken away.
Chapter V: That Rome Was Captured by the Gauls, Sacked by Alaric, and Overthrown by the Civil Strife of Anthemius and Ricimer All While the Lupercalia Was Being Celebrated; That the Festival Therefore Cannot Have Been the Cause of Recent Calamities; and That the Question Is Not the Image but the Reality of Pagan Worship
Let it be reckoned, and what evils have come about when the Lupercalia is seen to have been taken away. Stand firm: at what destruction of yours do you say these prodigies were discovered? Worthy is he who, knowing not what monstrous mixture of beast and man (compounded I know not how, whether truly or feignedly published) is to be celebrated.
If, to pass over older things, you say that the pestilence ought to be removed by the Lupercalia — behold, before they were taken away in my own times, that there was a grievous pestilence of men and beasts in the City and in the fields is not in doubt. If you boast about sterility, why do these things happen in Africa or in the Gauls, where neither were the Lupercalia ever, nor is it certain that they were taken away? Why does the East now abound and overflow with the supplies of all things, which neither has ever celebrated the Lupercalia, nor celebrates them? Or do you say that they injured there, where for very many ages they had been celebrated, and were taken away suddenly?
Let us see, therefore, whether in those times in which you say it was practiced rightly and in its full vigor, as it appears to you — when devotion was complete, never has there been famine, never has pestilence at all existed. But if it has very often come to the extremity of peril by these calamities, it appears that the Lupercalia have profited nothing in the warding off of these evils; and even at that time when, as you say, it was carried on with proper order: thus it has been provided in each particular need that you say it has been provided for. If, however, it has not stood thus, the persuasion of this remedy is shown to be vain.
Why now do you experience whether they may avail anything, even rightly celebrated? And do you yourselves run about through these laughingstocks, after the manner of your forefathers, that as a divine and salutary thing — as you yourselves say — by celebrating it more devoutly, you may better and better look to your own salvation? When these things were being celebrated, was Rome not captured by the Gauls? And did she not very often come to extremes? Did she not collapse during civil wars under this same celebration? Were the Lupercalia lacking when Alaric overthrew the City? And recently, when she was overthrown by the civil fury of Anthemius and Ricimer — where were the Lupercalia? Why have they least of all profited these men?
Surely it is divine: if it is salutary to you, why is it not done by you yourselves, that your forefathers may do these things? Why do you diminish the causes of your salvation? Why do you discolor it? Why do you wear it down? Why do you reduce it to whatever vile things? Why do you reproach us when you yourselves trample on your own remedies? It is better not to attempt than to perform contemptuously: certainly your forefathers, if it appeared to them in vicious form, were leading the matter to be that some sacred thing might be celebrated, restored. Why have you not led it back to that standard, but have brought it down to a vicious cult, executing it through unworthy persons of every kind, with corrupt restoration, that you might more fully and more perfectly handle the causes of your salvation? Why are you ashamed to act, if it is salutary? If it is divine, what disgrace is it to have handled it?
But you say that even the image of the thing itself ought not to be disturbed. If it profits, if it is salutary, why not the thing itself rather than its image? But if it certainly profited nothing then, when it was carried on by the entire rite — as you say it was — and is now being treated, and you ask of what use the image of it is, of which you yourselves recognize that the very thing did not profit: stand firm at the place to which you say your destruction has come, that you should call these prodigies to have been discovered, worthy that one know not what mixed compound of beast and man — whether truly or falsely brought forth — you should celebrate.
Chapter VI: That No Christian May Celebrate the Lupercalia, but Pagans Alone (If Any) May Perform It; That Many Pagan Practices Have Been Abolished by Successive Pontiffs at Various Times; and That the Recent Failures of the Empire Are Themselves Evidence That Toleration of These Rites Has Not Protected Rome
But you say that a matter carried on for so many ages ought not to be excluded. None the less, the superstition of paganism has been ventilated for many ages: let sacrifice be offered in the temples of demons, and a profane vanity be celebrated in the Capitol! Why do you defend a portion, when greater things are passed over? If many kinds of vain practices are proven to have been abolished by various ages, why may not even a portion, ventilated for any length of time, be taken away? If the matter is settled by length of time, since the time imputed to your forebears, who have not lived by this prescription of time, can be brought up — then it is possible that what is superfluous and ought to be removed is to be set aside, even when greater and more numerous things have already been removed. Indeed they have shown this themselves.
But you say that even in Christian times these things have been done; nay rather, that for a long time among the Christians they have been celebrated. Surely they have not been removed under the first bishops of the Christian religion, and on this account ought not to have been taken away under their successors? Many things have been abolished by various pontiffs at different times as harmful, or cast aside. Not all things at once does the medicine of the body cure the languors, but what it sees the more dangerous to be threatening; lest either the matter of the body should not suffice for the medicine, or for the mortal condition all things at once cannot be averted.
Inquire of what kind it is whence you act: if it is good, if it is divine, if it is salutary, deservedly whensoever it ought not to have been taken away. If it is neither salutary, nor divine, the cause must rather be alleged for you why it is taken away more slowly, when what is superstitious is established, and what is empty, ought not to suit Christian profession — manifestly is it. Lastly, as far as pertains to me: let no baptized person, no Christian celebrate this; let only the pagans, whose rite this is, perform it. It befits Christians to declare that these things are pernicious and pestilential, undoubtedly to be regarded as existing.
Why do you charge me, if I declare that what you profess to be hostile must be removed from the partners of the Christian profession? I, certainly, shall absolve my conscience: let those see to it who shall have neglected to obey just admonitions. What — that even my predecessors perhaps did this, I do not doubt; and they attempted to act upon it before the imperial ears: but that they were not heard is clear, since these evils still endure. And on this account those very imperial governments have failed; even the name of the Romans, with the Lupercalia not yet removed, has come to the most extreme calamities. And therefore now I urge that those things be removed which I know to have been of no profit, and indeed to have existed as harmful, contrary to the true religion. Lastly, if from the persona of my predecessors you should reckon that prescription is to be made, each one of us shall render account of his own administration, even as is provided for in public dignities.
I do not dare to accuse the negligence of my predecessors, since I rather believe perhaps that they attempted that this depravity be removed, and that there existed certain causes and contrary wills, which should impede their intentions — even as also you do not now consider that you shall desist from these insane endeavors.
Footnotes
- ↩ The Lupercalia was an ancient Roman fertility festival celebrated annually on 15 February. In its classical form young men called Luperci, naked or clothed only in a goatskin loincloth, ran through the streets of Rome striking bystanders — particularly women — with thongs cut from sacrificed goats, in the belief that the blows would induce fertility and ward off sterility. The festival was associated in Roman tradition with the cave of the Lupercal where the she-wolf was said to have suckled Romulus and Remus, and Livy records that it was instituted in connection with public calamities. By Gelasius’s pontificate (492–496) Rome had been Christian in name for a century, but a circle of senatorial aristocrats — led by one Andromachus — had revived or sought to revive the Lupercalia, on the explicit ground that recent public misfortunes (plague, sterility, military defeat at the hands of Anthemius and Ricimer, even the sack of the city by Alaric in 410) had followed upon its neglect. Gelasius’s response is the present tractatus, addressed not as a private letter but as a public refutation of the senatorial circle’s position. The PL editor’s note on this work is candid: Hunc Gelasii tractatum cum editione Mansi diligenter collatum damus, in multis tamen intricatum, et perobscurum, ut ipse lector facile sentiet — “We give this tractate of Gelasius diligently collated with the Mansi edition, although in many places it is intricate and very obscure, as the reader will easily perceive.” The reader is therefore advised that some passages in the work are acknowledged-difficult in the Latin tradition itself.
- ↩ The italicized sentence is the editor’s synopsis prefixed to the work in the PL edition. It is preserved here in italics because it usefully orients the reader to the work’s two-pronged thesis: that the Lupercalia is a superstitious observance that no Christian may patronize, and that the public calamities the senatorial circle blames on its abolition have in fact been earned by Rome’s own moral corruption.
- ↩ The opening is a sharp rhetorical assault. The Latin cacologiae — literally “evil-speaking” — is unusual; it is a Greek loanword (κακολογία) and is used here for its acid quality. Gelasius is identifying the senatorial critics not as men who have made a mistake of fact, but as men who have committed a moral fault: they have undertaken the office of judge without first having undertaken the labor of inquiry. The threefold parallel — accuse before knowing, teach before learning, judge without examining — is the moral structure of cacologia, and it is what Gelasius is about to dismantle.
- ↩ Quia nos arguunt segnes esse censores in vitiis Ecclesiae coercendis. The accusation Andromachus and his circle have made against the Roman bishop is striking and reveals what they thought they were doing: not advocating an outright pagan revival, but reproaching the Roman Church for failing to suppress vice. Their argument was apparently that since the Church (so they claimed) had not in fact corrected the moral disorders of the city, those disorders had multiplied; the Lupercalia was therefore necessary as a supplementary means of moral hygiene. Gelasius takes up the charge directly. He does not deny that he is responsible for the Church’s discipline; he asserts that he is, and that this is precisely why he is now writing.
- ↩ Gelasius identifies the religious content of what Andromachus and his circle are advocating. The argument they have made is not “the Lupercalia is a harmless cultural inheritance”; it is that diseases are produced because demons are not worshiped. To argue that the abolition of a sacrifice causes plague is to argue that the sacrifice was efficacious — and the sacrifice the Lupercalia rendered was, in plain pagan terms, to Faunus or to “the god February.” Gelasius will not allow the Christian camouflage to obscure what is actually being asserted. The reader will note that the senatorial circle has, by Gelasius’s reading, already conceded the substance of paganism in attempting to defend the festival.
- ↩ The reading of John 8:7–11 here is precise. Gelasius is not arguing that the bishop must himself be sinless before he can correct others; he is arguing that the accusers in this case — Andromachus and his circle — are themselves entangled in the very sins they pretend to address by reviving the Lupercalia. The point of the citation is that the would-be reformer, having undertaken to instruct the bishop, has by that very undertaking made himself liable to the bishop’s instruction.
- ↩ The careful structure of the sentence is worth noting. Gelasius is laying out the standard a serious man holds: he does not desire that the Church be a refuge for vice; he desires that vice in the Church be discussed and corrected. But the bishop’s solicitude is the integrity of the Church as a whole, not the satisfaction of any single party’s complaint; and the very person who demands the bishop’s correction will find himself standing in need of it.
- ↩ Membrum esse summi pontificis. The “supreme Pontiff” here is not the Roman bishop but Christ Himself — the great High Priest of Hebrews. The argument relies on the New Testament doctrine that all the baptized share, by participation, in Christ’s priestly dignity (1 Peter 2:9, “a royal priesthood”). The reader will note that Gelasius is using the same theological premise here that he uses in the Tomus de anathematis vinculo (Chapter V) when he writes that the members of the true King and Priest “are said, by participation in His nature, to have magnificently received both in their sacred lineage, so that they subsist as both royal race and priestly.” There the doctrine grounds the distinction of the two powers; here it grounds the laity’s accountability to ecclesiastical discipline. In both cases the underlying premise is the same: baptism makes the Christian a member of Christ’s body, and as such he is not exempt from what concerns the body.
- ↩ The claim that the whole Church is called sacerdotum — “of priests” — is again grounded in 1 Peter 2:9 (“a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people”) and in Revelation 1:6 (“hath made us kings and priests to God”). The doctrine is a commonplace of patristic exegesis. Its specific use here is to deflect the rhetorical move Andromachus has tried: “I am only a layman, the bishop is the minister.” Gelasius will not allow the laity to claim exemption from the discipline that follows from membership in the body of Christ.
- ↩ A sacro corpore modis omnibus abstinendus es. The substantive claim is canonical and disciplinary. Gelasius is not merely warning Andromachus that his conduct is inconsistent with Christian profession; he is declaring, in his episcopal capacity, that Andromachus is to abstain from the Eucharist for so long as he persists in patronizing the Lupercalia. The ground is provided by 1 Corinthians 10:21, which Gelasius cites immediately following: one cannot share both the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Note the word abstinendus — the gerundive of obligation: “must be made to abstain” or “is to be abstained” from. This is the language of discipline imposed, not advice offered.
- ↩ Voluntatem habere te mentiendi, artem fingendi non habere. The phrase has the form of a proverb and was apparently a recognized barb in the late-antique rhetorical tradition. Gelasius applies it cuttingly: Andromachus and his circle have the desire to assert pagan claims, but they do not have the skill to make their case stand up to inspection. The substance of the charge is that their argument is poorly constructed even on its own terms — they cannot defend the falsehood they are advocating, because the falsehood will not bear defense.
- ↩ Livy, the great Augustan historian, recorded numerous outbreaks of pestilence in republican Rome. Gelasius’s argument here is straightforward and devastating: if the Lupercalia was efficacious in warding off plague, why then did Rome suffer pestilence repeatedly during the very centuries when the Lupercalia was being celebrated? The festival, by Livy’s own historical witness, did not in fact protect the city from the calamities Andromachus’s circle now claims that its abolition has caused. The historical example — drawn from the pagan Romans’ own historian — exposes the senatorial argument as not merely impious but factually false. The reference to Evander as the source of the Lupercalia is the Roman antiquarian tradition (preserved in Livy I.5 and elsewhere) that the Arcadian Evander brought the rites of Faunus to the site of Rome before Romulus’s foundation of the city.
- ↩ Livy in the lost second decade (cited from secondary tradition and patristic citations such as the present passage) had treated the historical institution of the Lupercalia as a remedy for female sterility, not as a remedy for plague. Gelasius’s two-edged argument: the Lupercalia neither is nor was a remedy for the diseases Andromachus’s circle blames the bishops for failing to ward off; and even on its own terms — as a remedy for sterility — it has nothing to do with the present case. The phrase forte exigendam (“perhaps to be exacted”) is Gelasius’s editorial insertion, suggesting that the festival was not the spontaneous answer to a public need but something imposed for darker reasons. The PL apparatus notes forte exigendam as bracketed in the manuscript, indicating it as a possibly variant or marginal reading; I have followed the PL text in including it.
- ↩ Gelasius is responding to the precise charge Andromachus and his circle have made: that recent calamities — pestilence, sterility, and the constant warfare that marked the fifth century in Italy — have followed upon the abolition of the Lupercalia. The argumentative move he is about to make is empirical: he will show that these same calamities afflicted Rome during the centuries when the Lupercalia was celebrated, and have afflicted regions where the Lupercalia was never celebrated. The festival therefore cannot be the operative cause of the calamities, by any normal canon of evidence.
- ↩ Tuscia (Tuscany) and Aemilia (the region around modern Bologna and Ravenna) had been devastated repeatedly during the fifth century — by the Visigoths under Alaric, by Attila’s Huns, by Odoacer’s Heruli, and by the wars of Theodoric’s Ostrogothic conquest. By Gelasius’s pontificate (492–496) these provinces were sparsely populated and economically ruined. Gelasius’s point is regional: these areas suffered as much as Rome did, but they had not been the centers of the Lupercalia cult. The festival was specifically Roman, tied to the cave of the Lupercal at the foot of the Palatine. If its abolition had caused calamity, the calamity should have been Roman; it has in fact been general.
- ↩ Anthemius was Western Roman emperor from 467 to 472, brought from Constantinople by the Eastern emperor Leo I to stabilize the failing West. His reign saw the catastrophic naval expedition against the Vandals in 468, the breakdown of imperial authority in Gaul, and the war between Anthemius and his Master of Soldiers Ricimer that ended with Anthemius’s death in 472. The plague Gelasius mentions is otherwise attested in the chronicles of the period. The point is precise: when Anthemius came to Rome, the Lupercalia was being observed in its full traditional form — and yet the city suffered grievously. The festival did not avert what its proponents now claim its absence has caused.
- ↩ Gelasius is acknowledging a piece of imperial-Roman ideology — that the calamities of the provinces fall on Rome as the head of the empire — only to turn it back on the senatorial circle. If the provinces flourished before they came under Rome’s rule (and therefore before the Lupercalia could conceivably have benefited them), then the Lupercalia cannot be the explanation. The calamities have a different cause. The reader will note the moral move at the end of the paragraph: de quibus olim dictum est — “of which it has been said long ago” — leading to the explanation that the calamities are due to Rome’s own sins, not to the absence of pagan ritual.
- ↩ The catalogue of vices is comprehensive and rhetorically deliberate. Gelasius is naming the actual moral collapse of late-imperial Roman society: violence, sexual disorder, judicial corruption, financial cupidity, false witness, oppression of the poor — and, climactically, the patronage of demonic and magical practices that even pagans would have shrunk from. The argument is that these are the causes of the calamities Andromachus’s circle blames on the Lupercalia. The reader will note that Gelasius is claiming the moral high ground from the pagans themselves: even a pagan, by the standards of pagan religion, would shrink from what these professed Christians are doing.
- ↩ The reference is to the classical practice of the Lupercalia, in which the Luperci were patrician young men of the highest standing — including in earlier periods even men of the senatorial class — and the women whom they struck included Roman matrons of the same rank, who exposed themselves deliberately to the blows in the belief that fertility would follow. By Gelasius’s day, this had degenerated: the runners were now drawn from the lowest social classes, and the festival had become a kind of carnival of the urban poor watched and patronized by the senatorial elite. Gelasius’s point is sardonic: even on its own terms, what these senators are now patronizing is not the Lupercalia of the ancient nobility but a debased imitation. They have already cheapened what they pretend to revere.
- ↩ Gelasius drives the rhetorical point home: the senatorial circle wishes to claim that the Lupercalia is a sacred and salutary rite — but they will not themselves participate in it as their ancestors did. They have hired the lowest classes to run on their behalf. If the rite is genuinely salutary, why is it beneath their dignity? And if it is beneath their dignity, are they not by that very embarrassment confessing that the rite is itself disgraceful? The argument is a classic tu quoque: the senators’ own behavior toward the festival proves their own assessment of it. They know it is not sacred; they only wish to use it as a stick to beat the bishop.
- ↩ Gelasius is closing the rhetorical door on the senatorial defense. The senators have wished to claim simultaneously that the Lupercalia is salutary and that they themselves are too dignified to perform it. Gelasius will not allow both claims to stand together. Either the rite is salutary — in which case the senators ought to perform it — or it is shameful, in which case it is no remedy. The argument is what we would call argument from moral coherence: a man’s claims about a religious practice and his behavior toward that practice cannot be at war with each other.
- ↩ The Castors are Castor and Pollux — the Dioscuri, the divine twins of Greek and Roman mythology, traditionally the patrons of sailors and those traveling by sea. Their cult had been observed by Roman senators and merchants who depended on the corn fleets from Africa, Sicily, and Egypt. Gelasius’s tone — a quorum cultu desistere noluistis (“from whose cult you were unwilling to desist”) — indicates that some in the senatorial class had clung to the Castor-and-Pollux cult as a respectable pagan continuation even after nominal Christianization. The argument that follows is exactly parallel to the Lupercalia argument: if the Castors are protectors of sea voyages, why has the corn supply failed?
- ↩ The reasoning is sharp. If the corn supply is interrupted in winter and restored in summer, that is the natural order of seasons established by God; it has nothing to do with the Castors, whose protection of seafarers (if they had any) would presumably be available at all seasons equally. The senators wish to credit pagan deities for a beneficial outcome that is in fact the work of God’s providence operating through the natural order. Gelasius is, in effect, pulling the credit back from the demons and restoring it to the Creator.
- ↩ Dicite nobis nec Christiani, nec pagani, ubique perfidi, nusquam fideles, ubique corrupti, nusquam integri. The sentence is one of the most memorable in the treatise and one of the most cited by later commentators. Gelasius diagnoses the senatorial circle as theologically nothing — neither pagan enough to be honest pagans nor Christian enough to be honest Christians, but using the externals of each as it suits them. The accusation is that they have made a religion of personal convenience by combining the dignities of Christian society with the patronage of pagan rites. The reader will note that Gelasius does not allow them the comforting category of “religious moderate” or “civic Romans”; he names the position as perfidia — faithlessness, the betrayal of every commitment they have made.
- ↩ The intensity of the rhetoric escalates here. Gelasius is no longer arguing with the senators; he is denouncing them. The phrase cantilenarum turpium defensores — “defenders of base songs” — refers to the obscene songs that accompanied the Lupercalia procession through the streets. Late-Roman literary sources confirm that the festival had become an occasion for explicit ribaldry directed at named persons in the crowd. Gelasius is identifying the cultural reality: the Lupercalia by his time was a public obscenity festival held under religious pretext, and the senators who patronized it had no moral standing to lecture the bishop on the discipline of the Church.
- ↩ The “as that one says” / “as he himself said” formula appears to refer to a literary source — possibly a satirist like Persius or Juvenal, or a moral philosopher in the Stoic-Cynic tradition. The PL editor does not identify the citation. The substance of the embedded matter is the moral observation that the public broadcast of vice does not deter but normalizes: men who once would have been ashamed of their misdeeds now display them openly, since the festival itself has made shame impossible. The argument is that the Lupercalia, far from being a remedy for the moral decay of Rome, is one of the principal occasions of that decay. This passage is one that the PL editor flags as among those where the text is intricatum et perobscurum — “intricate and very obscure” — and the rendering here preserves the difficulty rather than smoothing it conjecturally.
- ↩ Gelasius forces the question: every kind of natural calamity follows on moral disorder, and to deny the moral causation is to demand the supernatural causation. The senators cannot have it both ways. If the calamities are random, the Lupercalia is no remedy. If the calamities are caused by the moral state of the people, then the Lupercalia, which itself worsens the moral state, is the cause and not the cure.
- ↩ The closing rhetorical demand. Gelasius is challenging the senators to name what specific good the Lupercalia has produced, and what specific evil its absence has produced. The argument is preparing the ground for the closing chapter, where Gelasius will systematically take up the calamities of recent Roman history and show that none of them can be ascribed to the abolition of the festival. The reader will note Gelasius’s careful identification of the underlying motive of the senatorial position: the desire to attribute personal moral failure to fate and the stars, so that the soul’s perversity is excused as an external necessity. This is, in effect, a doctrine of astrological determinism functioning as moral exoneration.
- ↩ Gelasius is identifying the half-man, half-goat figure of Faunus / Pan as the supposed divinity at the heart of the Lupercalia — a “monstrous mixture of beast and man” worthy only of contempt. The phrase compositum, sive vere, sive false editum celebretis (“composed, whether truly or falsely brought forth”) is dismissive: Gelasius does not even concede the existence of the deity in question; he treats it as a fiction. This is one of the passages where the PL editor’s intricatum et perobscurum note may apply — the syntax of dignique qui monstrum nescio quod pecudis hominisque mixtura compositum is genuinely awkward in the Latin, and the rendering preserves the difficulty without smoothing it conjecturally.
- ↩ The argument is now made comprehensive across the geography of the late-fifth-century Mediterranean. The East — the territories under Constantinople — never observed the Lupercalia, yet enjoys economic prosperity and abundance. The senators’ position is that the festival is necessary for civic welfare; the East’s flourishing without it refutes the claim. Africa and Gaul, where the festival was either never observed or long since ended, suffer the same calamities as Rome. The conclusion is that the festival has nothing to do with the calamities, in either direction.
- ↩ Gelasius is exposing the logical structure of the senatorial argument and finding it self-defeating. If the Lupercalia worked, the calamities of antiquity should not have happened. If the calamities of antiquity did happen, the Lupercalia did not work. The senators cannot have it both ways: they cannot claim both that the festival has historically protected Rome and that recent calamities are due to its abolition, because the historical record refutes the first claim and therefore the second cannot stand on the foundation of the first.
- ↩ This is the rhetorical climax of the historical argument. Gelasius lists the three great Roman catastrophes: the Gallic sack of 387 B.C. under Brennus (an event still vivid in Roman memory eight centuries later); the civil wars of the late Republic; the sack of 410 by Alaric and the Visigoths; and the recent (472) civil war between the Emperor Anthemius and his Master of Soldiers Ricimer, which ended with the death of Anthemius and the sack of Rome by Ricimer’s troops. Every single one of these catastrophes occurred while the Lupercalia was being observed in its full traditional form. The festival has, on the historical record, never once protected Rome from any major calamity. The argument leaves the senatorial position with no historical ground on which to stand.
- ↩ Gelasius returns to the argument made in Stage 3: even on its own terms, the senators do not honor the Lupercalia, but have degraded it. If their own forebears thought a sacred rite needed restoration when it had become degraded, why have these senators not restored it — but rather entrusted it to the lowest social classes? They themselves do not believe what they claim to believe. The pretense of religious seriousness is exposed by their own conduct toward the festival.
- ↩ Sed inquis vel imaginem ipsius rei non debere moveri. The objection imagined here is subtle: the senators might respond that even if the substantive worship of pagan deities has properly ended, the public observance — the *image* or *figure* of the rite, kept as cultural memory or civic ceremony — should not be disturbed, because of its long historical association with Rome. This is the move that would later be called “civic religion”: the form is retained without the substance. Gelasius will not allow it. The form of pagan worship, kept as form, still functions as worship; and the soul that participates in the form is implicated in what the form represents.
- ↩ Gelasius doubles down on the argument: if the senators are willing to admit (as their own historical evidence forces them to admit) that the Lupercalia did not protect Rome from calamity even when celebrated in its proper rite, then they cannot now defend the watered-down imitation that they themselves admit is not the original. The “image” they wish to preserve is, on their own showing, not even the thing that historically failed; it is the failure’s degraded shadow. This passage is among those the PL editor flags as intricatum et perobscurum; the syntax of the Latin is strained and the argument compressed almost to opacity. The rendering preserves the difficulty without conjectural smoothing.
- ↩ The sentence is sarcastic. Gelasius is taking the senatorial argument to its logical conclusion: if antiquity is the warrant for retaining the Lupercalia, then by the same logic the entire pagan cult should be restored — sacrifice in the temples of demons, profane festivals in the Capitol. The argument from antiquity proves either too much or nothing, and Gelasius forces the senators to confront which alternative they prefer.
- ↩ The argument is precisely structured. Gelasius invokes the principle of praescriptio — long custom acquiring legal standing — only to turn it back on the senators. Their own forebears, when they undertook to abolish other parts of pagan worship, did not allow the antiquity of the rites to stand as a defense against abolition. The senators are now invoking a principle of long custom that their forebears expressly rejected; they cannot have it both ways. The reader will note that Gelasius is presupposing — in passing — the work of his predecessors in the Roman see, who have over the preceding two centuries dismantled the public structures of paganism in the city. The continuity-with-predecessors theme is implicit but unmistakable.
- ↩ Multa sunt quae a singulis pontificibus diverso tempore sublata sunt noxia, vel abjecta. This sentence is the Petrine-continuity argument made explicit. Gelasius is invoking the sustained, generational labor of the Roman bishops in the work of removing pagan practices from the Christian polity of Rome. The work was not the achievement of any one bishop but the cumulative work of many. The reader will note that Gelasius is here positioning himself in a chain of pastoral action that began with his predecessors and that he is continuing: the abolition of the Lupercalia is not his innovation but his fulfillment of a task long under way.
- ↩ Postremo quod ad me pertinet, nullus baptizatus, nullus Christianus hoc celebret, et soli hoc pagani, quorum ritus est, exsequantur. This is the formal disciplinary conclusion. Gelasius is exercising his episcopal authority in his own city to forbid the Lupercalia to all baptized persons — that is, to every member of the Roman Church without exception, whatever his social rank. The phrase quod ad me pertinet (“as far as pertains to me”) frames the prohibition as the exercise of the bishop’s pastoral office over those entrusted to him; the bishop will not allow what falls within his competence to allow or disallow. The provision that pagans alone (if any remain) may perform the rite is a sharp piece of irony: Gelasius is in effect saying, “If you wish to perform this, you must first apostatize, because no Christian can.” The reader will note that the personal interdict imposed on Andromachus in Chapter II has now been generalized to the whole Christian community of Rome.
- ↩ Ego certe absolvam conscientiam meam: ipsi videant, qui justis admonitionibus obedire neglexerint. One of the most famous sentences in the entire Gelasian corpus, and one of the foundational formulae of Roman pastoral discipline as exercised by the bishop. The structure is precise: the bishop has done what his office required of him; if those admonished refuse to obey, the responsibility falls on them, not on him. The verb absolvam — “I shall absolve” — does not mean “I shall give absolution” in the sacramental sense but “I shall discharge” or “complete the obligations of”; the bishop’s conscience is discharged by the faithful performance of his pastoral duty, regardless of the response of those admonished. This is the principle that would later be formalized in the canonical maxim monitus, et iterum monitus, et tertio monitus — admonished, and again admonished, and a third time admonished — beyond which the responsibility lies with the recipient. The reader will note the resonance with Acts 20:26 (Paul: “I am pure from the blood of all men”) and with Ezekiel 33:1–9 (the watchman who has given warning is innocent of the blood of those who do not heed the warning).
- ↩ A striking historical-providential argument. Gelasius is asserting that earlier Roman bishops attempted to persuade the imperial authorities to abolish the Lupercalia, and that the failure of those attempts — and therefore the continued tolerance of the festival — has accompanied the failure of the empire itself. The argument is not strictly causal; he says ideo (“therefore”) but does not claim that the Lupercalia caused the imperial collapse. He is saying that the persistence of the festival is a piece of evidence about the moral and religious state that did cause the collapse. The empire that could not bring itself to reform its public religion was the empire that could not save itself. The reader will note the implicit critique of the imperial authorities: the Roman bishops did their part by raising the issue; the emperors failed to act, and the consequences of that failure have been visible.
- ↩ The principle Gelasius invokes — “each shall render account of his own administration” — is drawn from Roman administrative law (the magistrate’s accountability for his term of office at rationes reddere) and applied to the episcopal office. Each bishop is answerable for what was done in his own pontificate, not for what his predecessors did or failed to do. Gelasius will not allow the senators to invoke earlier bishops’ silence as a binding precedent against him; whatever earlier bishops did or did not do, he is responsible now for his own pontificate. This is a careful piece of canonical theology: the bishop’s duty is personal and present, not derivative from his predecessors’ practice.
- ↩ A delicate piece of pastoral diplomacy. Gelasius does not accuse his predecessors of failure or negligence; he supposes — charitably — that they tried, and that the obstacles they faced were the same kind of senatorial obstinacy that he now faces. The argument is that the senators’ present resistance is itself evidence that resistance was the obstacle in earlier times. The closing — “even as also you do not now consider that you shall desist from these insane endeavors” — is the final indictment: the senators are themselves the proof of why earlier reforms failed, and they are now the obstacle to be overcome.
Historical Commentary