The Edict is the public face of the sentence that Letter VI pronounced juridically. Rome’s disciplinary procedure in this period consistently distinguished two moments: the juridical act, addressed to the accused in formal terms and laying out the grounds of the sentence; and the public edict, addressed to the universal Church and promulgating that sentence for reception throughout the body of the faithful. Letter VI is addressed to Acacius; the Edict is addressed to everyone. Letter VI runs to several chapters; the Edict is a single paragraph. Letter VI is argument; the Edict is promulgation. Both are necessary to the full disciplinary act, and the distinction between them is the distinction between a court’s decision and its publication.

The primacy content of the Edict is concentrated and strong. Three formulae deserve close attention. First, meque in meis credidit carcerizandum — “he thought to imprison Me in My own.” The reference is to the legates Vitalis and Misenus, whom Acacius’s party had detained during their mission to Constantinople. Felix treats this detention as a personal imprisonment of himself: the legate is the pope in a second body, and what is done to the legate is done to the pope. Second, the sentence is attributed to God directly: hunc Deus, cœlitus prolata sententia, de sacerdotio fecit extorrem — “this man God, by a sentence brought forth from heaven, has made an outcast from the priesthood.” Felix does not say that he himself has deposed Acacius; he says that God has done so, and Rome’s role is to declare and publish what heaven has already decided. Third, sancto Spiritu exsequente — “with the Holy Spirit executing [the sentence].” Apostolic authority and divine agency work together. The Edict is not a human penalty overreaching its scope; it is the formal declaration in the Church of a sentence that the Spirit Himself ratifies and carries out.

The historical weight of this brief document is immense. When its text reached Acacius in Constantinople — by the hand, tradition holds, of a monk of the Akoimetai who pinned it to the Patriarch’s pallium during the liturgy — it opened a breach between Rome and Constantinople that would not be healed until the Formula of Hormisdas in 519. Thirty-five years of formal schism would follow the few lines the reader has just read. What is most worth noticing, however, is that the Edict itself presents this rupture not as Rome cutting Constantinople off but as Rome proclaiming that God has done so. The pope’s office is to declare the judgment; the anathema is then maintained by the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church. The reader who wishes to understand how Rome in the fifth century understood her own disciplinary authority will find no briefer or more concentrated expression than this Edict.