To the Same. Peter the Fuller Is Deposed and Anathematized.
Chapter I: The Indictment — Peter’s Novelty in Ignatius’s See; His Refusal of the Fathers and of Rome’s Letters
Because you have chattered impiously with unbearable words, and have not judged it fitting to yield to the aforesaid holy Fathers who adorned the see of the thrice-triumphant martyr Ignatius of blessed memory — of whom you are an unworthy [occupant], having somehow leapt up to initiate novelty in the Catholic Church by your profane laws and impious dogmas; and [because] you have judged that it is not fitting to say Christ was crucified for us, but have impiously introduced passion upon the Impassible and imposed death upon the immortal Father, and have not shrunk from twisting, with most wicked sophistry, those things which you did not receive from the divine Gospels and the apostles and the most approved and glorious Fathers, so as to impose your own pestilence of meaning upon the simpler-minded — a scandal of heresy that would not merely flourish equally with prior heresies but surpass them in manifold ways; and because you have not resolved to believe the truth, and [because] two letters of ours have been written to you [which you have disregarded]: now I have begun to pronounce sentence against you.
Chapter II: Peter the Apostle, Summit of All Pastoral Sees, Sentences Through Rome; the Sentence Binds His Followers Also
Rather, it is He who is the summit of all pastoral sees, flourishing in holy praises — truly the best of the apostles, Peter — whose name you share, but not in judgment nor in faith, since you have greatly departed from his right intention and undefiled faith. And I pronounce sentence not only against you, but also against those who have not blushed to twist the writings of the venerable evangelists and of the apostles who followed them, and the discourses of the perfect doctors, and who, by unstable judgment, have been strengthened out of your iniquitous exposition — as though it were sweetest to follow along in evil opinion (which is truly most bitter) — and have not turned away from such impiety.
Chapter III: Psalm 51 Applied; the Formal Deposition Issued from the Apostolic Throne with Constantinople Concurring
We shall therefore say to you, as also against those [who follow you]: Since you have loved iniquity more than to speak righteousness, you have loved above all a deceitful tongue of precipitation (according to the Greek: above all words of precipitation, a deceitful tongue): for this reason God shall destroy you forever (Ps. 51 [52]:5–7). And He shall depose [you] not only from the Antiochene Church, but from every city.
And let this deposition of yours be firm — from me, and from those who together with me govern the apostolic throne, and from Acacius the pastor of the Church of Constantinople, and from the venerable bishops subject to him — since you have not borne their admonitions.
Chapter IV: The Catalog of Peter’s Drifting Heresies — Patripassian, Manichaean, Nestorian, Sabellian
For sometimes you say the Trinity was crucified for us, not Christ; sometimes the immortal Spirit [was crucified], manichaeizing; sometimes, fleeing from these [positions], rebuked by my arguments and discourses, you have said that Christ, as distinct from the immortal Spirit, endured the passion — like Paul of Samosata and Nestorius, dividing one Son into a duality of sons. And sometimes you have yielded on these [points] not by correcting [yourself], and come to worse: not glorifying the cherubic hymn by referring [it], with expectant trembling, unhesitatingly (ἀνενδοιάστως), and reverently, to the Son and equally to the Trinity — but referring the whole hymn to the Son [alone], wishing to confirm the disease of the gnawing cancer which you have inflicted upon the innocent.
And thence, hurled headlong on every side by the snares of every kind of heresy, going forth from the truth, you do not preach Christ crucified for us, nor do you piously glorify the only-begotten Son of God, who is in the midst between the Father and the Holy Spirit. For what is more forbidden than this — that the Father and the Holy Spirit are not glorified by you? For you bring calumny against the seraphim, you who do not say the Trinity is to be glorified, Holy, holy, holy (Isa. 6:3), but the Son alone personally. And what precipitation of heresies has so confounded — that is, acted so shamelessly — as you [have]?
Yet even running through this, you have climbed to something still more harmful, and you add infamies deserving to be strangled by God: namely, judging to fuse together the Son, the Father, and the Holy Spirit — sabellianizing. You deny to confess the Trinity, in which we are baptized, and believe, and confess.
Chapter V: Excluded from the Communion of the Apostle Peter, Who Received the Keys; Rome’s Communion Offered to Those Who Flee the Deposed’s
Who, then, would not weep over those speaking thus concerning the inviolate Trisagion? — which it most befits me to refute, and deservedly to give weeping over these cavilers of simple souls, who fabricate impious crimes; whom we have judged alienated from the orthodox faith and the Catholic Church, and from the communion of our leader, the glorious predecessor Peter, who received the keys of the kingdom from our Savior? But those who wish to be partakers of the Apostle are led also by his own doctrine — [the Apostle] who says and believes that Christ was crucified for us, and does not deny this — as Peter, now deposed, has [denied], since he has illegitimately and uncharitably innovated in the Trisagion [the words] Who was crucified for us — knowing that you did not receive from the apostles [the teaching of] the Trinity crucified, not the Father, not the Holy Spirit, but only the only-begotten Son of God, in the flesh.
Flee, therefore, from this uncharitable communion, and I will be in communion with you, insofar as you are also with me — deceitful fallacy being driven far from our orthodoxy. Guard, O disciples of Christ — my sons — the traditions which you have received from the divine Scriptures.
Footnotes
- ↩ This letter must be dated before July 28, 484, since Acacius of Constantinople is named as a legitimate co-depositor; it therefore belongs to 483 or the first half of 484. Peter the Fuller had been deposed since 477 and was maneuvering to return to Antioch under the terms of Zeno’s Henoticon (482); Felix’s letter confirms the deposition formally and preemptively, with Acacius still collaborating. Letter IV is therefore chronologically earlier than Letter III (485): the PL groups them topically, both addressing Peter the Fuller, but the formal deposition preceded the synodical Trisagion condemnation by approximately a year. The phrase qui una mecum apostolicum thronum regunt (“who together with me govern the apostolic throne”) refers to the Roman presbyterium — the clergy of the Roman Church who assist the pope in juridical acts. Rome’s deposition of a patriarch is framed as a corporate act of the Roman Church, with the pope as its principal but not its sole agent.
- ↩ The see of Ignatius is Antioch. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch in the early second century and martyred at Rome under Trajan (c. 107), is one of the great apostolic-age figures of the Antiochene church — in traditional reckoning the second or third bishop after Peter himself. By invoking Ignatius’s see as “thrice-triumphant” (multum triumphantis), Felix frames Antioch as one of the great apostolic and martyrial foundations of Christendom, and Peter the Fuller’s heretical occupancy as a desecration of what the Fathers had adorned. The rhetorical point is not that Antioch is peripheral to Rome but that its dignity is being squandered by its present occupant.
- ↩ The phrase vertex omnium pastoralium sedium — “summit of all pastoral sees” — is one of Felix’s most concentrated primacy formulae. Peter the Apostle is named not as first among equals but as the apex from which all pastoral authority derives. The construction moves seamlessly from Felix’s “now I have begun to pronounce sentence” (nunc incœpi sententiare contra te) to “rather, it is [Peter] who [sentences],” making explicit what is implicit throughout the corpus: the Roman bishop’s juridical act is the Apostle’s own act, continued through his successor. The pattern is analogous to Leo’s formula in Letter X (Deo inspirante et beatissimo Petro apostolo), and to the prosopopoeia of Peter speaking through Felix in his own Letter II to Zeno.
- ↩ The formula a communione ducis nostri gloriosi præcessoris Petri, qui claves regni a Salvatore nostro recepit — “from the communion of our leader, the glorious predecessor Peter, who received the keys of the kingdom from our Savior” — combines the Matt. 16:19 charter of the keys with the Roman episcopal succession. Peter is named as “our leader” (ducis nostri) and as “our predecessor” (præcessoris) — both terms asserting that the Roman bishop stands in living continuity with the Apostle. Exclusion from Rome’s communion is framed not as a sanction of a local bishop but as exclusion from the communion of the Apostle himself. The construction is standard Leonine ecclesiology (compare Letter VI to Anastasius of Thessalonica: “in that see [Peter] lives and judges”), here applied by Felix in a formal deposition.
Historical Commentary