To the Emperor Basiliscus, Simplicius, bishop.
Simplicius Protests the Return of Timothy Aelurus, Invokes the Examples of Marcian and Leo, and Appeals to the Apostolic Norm of Doctrine That Persists in the Successors of Peter
I would indeed desire, so far as it rests on the judgment of My devotion — with which I receive Christian princes with unbroken veneration — to offer to Your Piety the continual services of conversation, as is due. But since to the increase of this intention there is added also the sacred care of religion, a weightier business claims Me: that I may both render honor to you with a willing mind and faithfully make known the causes at stake. For the ever-dedicated affection of Your Clemency draws Me to both, or the regard for My order and the solicitude of the apostolic governance compels Me.
Having therefore fulfilled, most glorious and most clement son, Emperor Augustus, the duty of greeting: concerning the scandals which are said to be stirred up again in the Churches of the East through the renewed brigandage of heretics, I ought not and cannot keep silence. For, as the writings of the monks fervent for the Catholic faith have brought to My notice, I have learned that Timothy the parricide — who long ago, the devastator of the Egyptian Church, was cast out (in the manner of Cain, as the divine reading of Genesis 4 witnesses) from the face of God, that is, excluded from the dignity of the Church, and already wandering through the deserts, about to bear for a long time the torments of his criminal conscience, was carried off into the exile of his own error — has now, with the fires of his former fury rekindled, gathered together the bands of the lost, and has invaded the Church of the city of Alexandria, which he had earlier stained with the blood of the priest, himself now again bloodied by the expulsion of the lawful pontiff: so that, to him on whom that banishment ought to have imposed the goad of repentance from the things he had impiously done, it appears instead to have granted the leisure to nourish a more atrocious madness — by which he is without doubt proved far more detestable than Cain himself. For Cain at least, condemned after committing the deed once, refrained; this man has advanced to greater crimes after his punishment.
Not even content, however, with this limit of his crimes, he is reported to have entered boldly even into the city of Constantinople — always burning with love for right doctrine (lest the ravager of human salvation leave anything inviolate) — and to have heard gladly from his partners in depravity the voice due to Christ alone, by which he has been shown plainly not to come blessed in the name of the Lord but as usurper of divine supremacy, evidently manifested as Antichrist. And when he had been so laudably excluded from Catholic communion, he is recorded to have celebrated — through certain persons’ private houses, with hands spattered with human blood — not divine sacrifices but sacrileges; in which his reception is certainly not confirmed, but the treachery of his accomplices is made public. And they will surely fall together with him from that seat of iniquity, unless they repent — the seat which the faithless one does not cease to build for himself eternally unto ruin, just like the devil his father, who makes himself like the Most High.
These things, venerable Emperor, though My mind shudders that they were even attempted by so great a gladiator, nevertheless with the greatest astonishment (I confess) I am held that they could have been committed in view of Your Piety’s gaze. For who would be ignorant or in doubt about the mind of Your Clemency, always devoted to God and given over to orthodox rules? You indeed, by the arrangement of heavenly providence — as you were formed for the public benefit after the pattern of the virtues of Marcian and Leo of august memory — have likewise been shaped after their thinking toward Catholic truth. Nor should it be in doubt to anyone at all that Your Piety is the follower of the faith of those whose rule you have inherited. Since these things are held certain and fixed by all concerning the mind of Your Tranquility, far be it that in your times the integrity of divine worship and the sincerity of the Catholic faith, strengthened from antiquity, should be thought open to challenge.
Consider, I beseech you, the divine benefits, and weigh what things have been bestowed upon you; and, that these prosperous things may be able to endure, judge that the Author of the gift must be propitiated, not injured. For amid any public occupations, by a religious prince great care must be taken for that which protects his principate — and the rectitude of heavenly observance must be preferred to all things, without which nothing stands rightly. Your Clemency has abundantly at hand (if you order them to be sought in the archives of your palace) copious documents in agreement with the definitions of Our fathers. Nor should it be thought that Your Knowledge is unaware of what has been spread through all the provinces of the East from the citadel of your empire: those things, namely, which My predecessor of blessed memory, Leo, directed, whether to Marcian and likewise to Leo of august memory or to the Council of Chalcedon of blessed memory — in which he expounded the mystery of the Lord’s incarnation so fully and lucidly that not only can no one be called Catholic, but not even a Christian, who does not plainly recognize there also the causes of his own redemption.
Certainly, that the necessary instruction may not be wanting to you easily at hand, I have sent copies of those same letters to Our brother and fellow bishop Acacius, to be offered to your awareness. If then Your Piety deigns to review these — or what the bishops of the whole East wrote back concerning their consent with this preaching — you will see that they have been diligently examined and truthfully promulgated, and therefore ought by no means to be shaken by the windings of pestilent falsehood. For truly, those things which have flowed sincere and clear from the purest fountain of the Scriptures can be disturbed by no clouded arguments of deceit. For in His successors there persists this same apostolic norm of doctrine — [the norm belonging] to him to whom the Lord enjoined the care of the whole flock, to whom He promised that He Himself would in no way fail to the end of the age, to whom He promised that the gates of hell would never prevail, whose sentence — that things bound on earth — He testified cannot be loosed even in heaven (Matt. 16).
Wherefore I pray and beseech Your Clemency — to whom Our brother and fellow bishop Acacius will more earnestly supplicate in My stead — that, becoming imitators of such great and noble predecessors, spurning with a Catholic heart the workers of nefarious presumption, you may judge them to be restrained by royal power. Whoever strives to sow (as the Apostle foretold) anything other than what we have received, let him be anathema (Gal. 1:8). Let no access be opened to your ears to those who would creep in with pernicious minds; let no confidence be granted for reconsidering anything from the ancient decrees. For (as must be repeated often) what has been rightly cut off by apostolic hands — the universal Church likewise assenting — by the edge of the evangelist’s scythe, cannot take on the vigor of rebirth: nor can what stands consigned to eternal fire return as a fruitful branch into the Lord’s vine.
Finally, since the devices of all the heresies, once cast down by ecclesiastical decrees, are never allowed to restart the struggles they have lost: I beseech above all else that the see of the blessed evangelist Mark (I speak of the Church of Alexandria), liberated from the infestation of the most bloody thief, be restored to a Catholic bishop and recover at once its freedom and its peace. And let the impious parricide — who stands guilty of both divine and human laws, returned by the same right by which he had been cast down before — be drawn back from the slaughter of innocent souls; let the poisons of that deadly head depart far from the kingdom of Your Piety. And since, with the ears of salvific preaching closed, they could not receive the healing words, let them, removed from human company by their own ruin, waste away in their virulence in a fitting solitude: all the more do I implore you with the voice of the blessed Apostle Peter, as a minister of his see, however unworthy, that you not allow the enemies of the ancient faith to rage with impunity — you who desire to keep your subjects your own; that you decree all the Churches of the Lord to preserve the peace of true confession — you who desire to hold the whole world of your empire at peace; and that you suffer no part of the one hope of salvation — which leads the human race to the heavenly kingdoms and to eternal life — to be violated, you who desire God to be appeased both for your kingdom and for your salvation.
Given on the fourth day before the Ides of January (A.D. 476), in the consulship of Basiliscus Augustus and Armatus.
Footnotes
- ↩ The PL main text reads Zenoni Augusto (“to Zeno Augustus”), but the Codex Virdunensis preserves Basilisco, which is almost certainly the original reading. The letter is dated January 10, 476, when Basiliscus — not Zeno — was the reigning Eastern emperor. Basiliscus had deposed Zeno in January 475 and would himself be overthrown in August 476; Zeno was in exile in Isauria throughout this period. The content of the letter confirms Basiliscus as the addressee: it is Basiliscus who had recalled Timothy Aelurus from exile, Basiliscus who had issued the anti-Chalcedonian Encyclical in 475, and Basiliscus whose support for the Monophysite party had created the crisis Simplicius is protesting. The majority-manuscript reading Zenoni Augusto almost certainly reflects a later scribal alteration after Basiliscus’s fall, when his name was replaced by that of the legitimate emperor. The reader should understand this letter as addressed to the very emperor responsible for the disorder Simplicius describes — which accounts for the letter’s diplomatic restraint: rather than blaming Basiliscus directly, Simplicius holds up Marcian and Leo as the models Basiliscus should imitate.
- ↩ The Latin is respectus ordinis mei et apostolici moderaminis sollicitudo compellit — “the regard for my order and the solicitude of apostolic governance compels [me].” The pairing is deliberate. Ordo designates the papal rank — the ecclesiastical office itself — while sollicitudo is the characteristic term for the universal pastoral responsibility that Leo had used repeatedly (the sollicitudo belonging to all the churches). The genitive apostolici moderaminis — “of the apostolic governance” or “of apostolic guidance” — ties that solicitude directly to the governing function of the Apostolic See. Simplicius is invoking two grounds for his intervention: first, that his office requires it, and second, that the solicitude belonging to apostolic governance compels it. The construction echoes Leo’s standard formula, now taken up by his successor a generation later and deployed in the same way.
- ↩ Timothy Aelurus (“the Cat”), the Monophysite claimant to the see of Alexandria, had been installed as bishop in 457 following the murder of Proterius — the canonically elected successor to Dioscorus — who had been killed by a mob during Holy Week and whose body had been dragged through the streets. Timothy’s implication in that murder, together with the fact that Proterius was his bishop-father, grounds Simplicius’s charge of parricide here (the murder of a father in the ecclesiastical sense — parricida in the killing of a bishop). Leo I exiled Timothy in 460, first to Gangra and then to Cherson. Basiliscus recalled him in 475 and restored him to Alexandria. It is this restoration that Simplicius is protesting.
- ↩ The Latin is praedecessor meus Leo — “my predecessor, Leo” — followed by beatae recordationis (“of blessed memory”). Simplicius is invoking Leo as his direct predecessor in the Roman see, and treating Leo’s correspondence and the Tome itself as a continuing standing authority that cannot be revisited. The appeal is the continuity argument in its purest form: what Simplicius asks Basiliscus to honor is not Simplicius’s own authority but what Leo had established — the same Leo whose Tome had been received by Marcian and Chalcedon, and whose definitions Simplicius treats as binding on Basiliscus now precisely because Basiliscus is the successor of Marcian and Leo (the emperor Leo, not the pope). Simplicius is not claiming new authority; he is asking Basiliscus to remain within the authority his predecessors acknowledged.
- ↩ This is the central primacy passage of the letter, and one of the strongest assertions of Petrine-succession theology in the fifth-century papal correspondence. Simplicius identifies four promises made by the Lord to Peter in Matthew 16 and John 21: the care of the whole flock (John 21:15–17), the Lord’s unfailing presence to the end of the age (Matt. 28:20, here applied to Peter’s office), the assurance that the gates of hell will never prevail (Matt. 16:18), and the binding-and-loosing authority (Matt. 16:19). He then asserts that the same apostolic norm of doctrine — grounded in these four promises — persists in his successors. The argument is not that the successors inherit some portion of Peter’s authority or a partial reflection of the promises, but that the entire Petrine commission continues in its full force in those who hold Peter’s see. The paraphrase of Matt. 16:19 — “whose sentence, what is bound on earth, He testified cannot be loosed even in heaven” — is particularly striking: Simplicius renders the heavenly ratification of Peter’s judgment as an assertion that what Peter’s sentence binds on earth is not loosable even in heaven, giving the binding-and-loosing authority a perpetual heavenly warrant. The Petrine-succession doctrine is not an invention of Simplicius here; it is visible already in Leo (whose formula Deo inspirante et beatissimo Petro apostolo in Letter X names Peter as present co-agent of papal decrees, and whose Letter VI to Anastasius of Thessalonica speaks of the perpetual presence of Peter in his see). Simplicius’s formulation extends and concentrates what Leo had already articulated: the fourfold Petrine promise, applied directly and in its entirety to the successors.
- ↩ The principle stated here — nulla retractandi quidpiam de veteribus constitutis fiducia concedatur, “let no confidence be granted for reconsidering anything from the ancient decrees” — is the principle that Leo had articulated in his nulla penitus disputatione cujusquam retractationis admissa formula in the pre-Chalcedon correspondence. What Rome has established is not to be revisited: not by imperial convocation, not by a new council, not by any quarter. Simplicius is invoking this Leonine principle directly against Basiliscus’s Encyclical, which had purported to reopen the Chalcedonian settlement. The claim is continuous with Leo’s and stated in the same terms.
- ↩ The phrase cum Ecclesiae universalis assensu — literally “with the assent of the universal Church” — describes the historical reception of the Chalcedonian settlement, not a condition on which its validity depended. Simplicius’s argument pairs two distinct facts: the heresies were cut off by apostolic authority (Rome, speaking through Leo’s Tome), and the universal Church received that judgment. The two together produce practical irreversibility — once Rome has defined and the Church has received, the matter cannot be reopened — but the reception confirms rather than constitutes the authority. Simplicius’s own self-description later in this letter as “minister of Peter’s see” speaking “with the voice of the blessed Apostle Peter” names the source of authority he invokes: Peter through his successor. The Church’s assent is the confirming echo of what Rome has defined, not the validating ground of it. The preposition cum in Latin here denotes attendant circumstance — “alongside” or “accompanied by” — not causality.
- ↩ The Latin is B. Petri apostoli voce, qualiscunque sedis ejus minister, obtestor — “with the voice of the blessed Apostle Peter, as minister of whatever sort of his see, I implore.” The self-description is compact and extraordinary. Simplicius speaks in Peter’s voice — not in his own voice citing Peter, but speaking Peter’s voice himself — and describes himself as minister of Peter’s see (sedis ejus, “his [Peter’s] see”). The qualifier qualiscunque — “of whatever sort,” often rendered “however unworthy” — is a formula of humility that does not weaken the claim but locates it properly: Simplicius is saying that whoever holds this office, whatever his personal merit, speaks with Peter’s voice because he is Peter’s minister in Peter’s see. Compare Leo’s Letter VI to Anastasius: “the most blessed Peter ceases not to preside over his own see, and perseveres in unbroken fellowship with the eternal Priest.” Simplicius is deploying the same theology: the Roman bishop is the minister of a see that is Peter’s own, and speaks in Peter’s voice precisely because Peter continues to act through his ministers.
- ↩ January 10, 476. The consuls of 476 were Basiliscus Augustus (himself) and his nephew Armatus. The PL text reads Basilisco Augusto consule (singular), which is a scribal error; Binius corrects it: the proper reading is Basilisco Augusto et Armato coss. — “Basiliscus Augustus and Armatus, consuls” (plural). The letter is issued in the last year of Basiliscus’s brief reign; Zeno would return in August 476 and Basiliscus would be executed shortly after. The letter thus belongs to an extraordinary historical moment: the Eastern empire is in the hands of an anti-Chalcedonian usurper, Alexandria has been given back to Timothy Aelurus by imperial decree, and the papal appeal must be directed to the very emperor responsible for the crisis. Zeno’s return later the same year would change the situation — and Simplicius’s correspondence with Acacius over the following years (Letters V–XVII) tracks the gradual drift of Constantinople that would, within a decade, produce the Acacian Schism.
Historical Commentary