The See of Peter

The Early Church and Peter's Primacy

Letter XI, from Pope Gelasius to the Bishops of Dardania and Illyricum

Synopsis: Gelasius writes to the bishops of Dardania and Illyricum to commend their orthodox constancy amid the Eutychian contagion — grounding his pastoral care in the primacy of the Apostolic See, whose solicitude, divinely delegated, is owed to all the Churches — and rules that Eutyches, Dioscorus, Timothy Aelurus, Peter Mongus, Acacius of Constantinople, and Peter the Fuller of Antioch must all be shunned together with their partakers; that the bishop of Thessalonica, having refused to condemn their names, has not received communion with the Apostolic See; that the judgment directed to the Dalmatian bishops is extended also to Illyricum; and that Acacius, having died in excommunication, cannot now be absolved, since the power of binding and loosing was given by Christ to the apostles with reference to the present life.

Gelasius, bishop, to all the bishops established throughout Dardania or Illyricum.

Chapter I: The Apostolic See’s Divinely Delegated Solicitude Rejoices in the Illyrian Bishops’ Constancy

Hearing of the orthodox constancy of your charity in Christ — and that you so cleave to the traditions of the ancient faith and of sincere communion that the neighboring contagions of the transgressors have in no way infected your mind, devoted as it is to Christian truth — We magnified the Lord, and with all avidity of heart have taken care to address your charity by letters sent through Our religious sons the deacons Cyprian and Macarius: for, in virtue of the primacy of the Apostolic See, whose solicitude, divinely delegated, is owed to all the Churches, We live if you stand in the Lord, and We triumph with great joys when We recognize that the Lord of Sabaoth has left throughout the whole world a seed of pure confession — which did not fall on stony ground to wither from the guile of temptation, nor fall along the road to be exposed to idle enemies, nor rush among thorns to be choked, but, scattered by heavenly sowing upon the good earth of your pious devotion, has advanced into thirtyfold and sixtyfold and hundredfold fruit (Matt. 13:8, 23) — designating in mystical speech the growth of the Lord’s wheat.

Chapter II: Those to Be Shunned with Their Partakers — Eutyches, Dioscorus, Timothy Aelurus, Peter Mongus, Acacius, Peter the Fuller; The Diptychs Principle

Wherefore with exultant spirits We more confidently urge you to keep your hearts wisely unviolated from the incursion of the Eutychian plague: for indeed, he who perseveres unto the end shall be saved (Matt. 10:22). The Lord is near, be anxious for nothing (Phil. 4:5–6); since He who is in us is greater than he who is in this world (1 John 4:4), and it is certain — as Scripture itself bears witness (Luke 17:21) — that the Kingdom of the Lord is within us.

But, that you may be on guard against the harmful society of those who are placed in error, receive no one communicating with such persons into your fellowship by any stealth: for just as Catholic integrity must avoid, in each heresy, not only the condemned author of the wickedness but also his successors and accomplices, and those mingled in polluted communion with such followers, so with Eutyches must Dioscorus, and at the same time Timothy Aelurus, and Peter of Alexandria, and his communicant Acacius, and likewise also Peter of Antioch be entirely renounced, together with their partakers. Nor should anyone — even if he promises to lay aside the wickedness — be permitted in any way to enter the sheepfolds unstained by sacrileges while he consents to the recitation of the names of the perished, or is in no way separated in communion from those who recite the same, that the Church of our God — which bears no spot or wrinkle (Eph. 5:27) — may remain inviolate. Let the dread commerce of the viper’s head therefore be far from the faithful of Christ, and the deadly poisons be driven far from the heavenly pastures, so that the saving nourishment of that bread which came down from heaven (John 6:41) may lead the faithful who receive it to eternal life.

Chapter III: Mutual Exhortation; The Judgment to Be Made Known Through the Neighboring Provinces

That We may be able to provide for these matters by mutual exhortation, let your charity take pains that the desired hospitality of your love, and the pressing intent of the common faith, not cease to be opened to Us more frequently — so that, rousing one another by alternating instructions, we may be able to find the reward of the legitimate priests of the Lord. Let your charity also vigilantly insist on making these same matters known through the neighboring provinces, so that both those who abide in the sincerity of Catholic communion may be strengthened by fitting addresses, and those who perhaps have deviated from this rectitude may be brought back by wholesome admonitions to the integrity of Christian doctrine.

Chapter IV: The Bishop of Thessalonica Has Not Received Communion with the Apostolic See; Our Authority to the Dalmatians Is Directed Also to You

Let your brotherhood know, moreover, that the bishop of the Church of Thessalonica, though repeatedly urged by Our exhortations, has never been willing to withdraw from the contagions of external communion, nor has he before Us, by a fitting profession, condemned the name of Acacius, or of the others of like perfidy, or of those communicating with them. Wherefore it is manifest that he has not received communion with the Apostolic See, since We neither can nor ought to grant the fellowship of the Church of the blessed Apostle Peter except to pure minds separated from every nefarious society. Therefore more cautious action must be taken with the aforesaid, lest — as may come to pass — he creep upon Catholic minds by the pretense of reconciliation with the Apostolic See: which, just as he does not prevail by deceitful arts to feign or circumvent, so under her authority he cannot obtain. We believe therefore that Our authority, which has been directed to the bishops of the Dalmatias, must also be directed to you, that you may know that We hold a consonant judgment everywhere in Catholic truth, according to the form of ancient tradition. And if you should learn that any new stirrings arise, you ought to disclose them to Us with fraternal solicitude, so that We may thereupon procure, the Lord granting, the remedies that accord with the rules of the Fathers.

Chapter V: Acacius, Dying in Condemnation, Cannot Now Be Absolved; The Lord’s Table Must Be Kept Separate from Heretical Pollution

And let no one at all persuade you that the crime of Acacius’s transgression has been relaxed — for he who, after relapsing into the society of wickedness, rightly deserved to be excluded from apostolic communion, died persisting in this same condemnation. The absolution which, while living, he neither sought nor merited, now dead he cannot obtain, since it was delegated to the apostles themselves by Christ’s voice: Whatever you shall bind upon earth, and whatever you shall loose upon earth (Matt. 18:18). Moreover, concerning him who has now been placed in divine judgment, it is not permitted to Us to decree anything other than that in which his last day found him; and therefore — unless his name be repudiated, and those of the other partakers of this error — with no one of them at all ought you to share the purity of the Lord’s table, which Our forebears always carefully preserved separated from heretical pollution.

Chapter VI: The Apostolic See Defends the Faith, Not Her Own Honor; Returning Penitents Are Received in Full Charity

But let no one attempt to deceive you by saying that the contest is not about religion but about morals, or that the Apostolic See is not treating the cause of Catholic communion and faith but grieving over its own injury, because it seems to have been despised by Acacius — for those who are placed in error do not cease to spread these things and the like, to deceive the simple as well. For you see, as has already been said above, that through the names of the transgressors — if (which may it not be!) they are believed to be recited in the church — the contagion of transgression is introduced at the same time. But the Apostolic See so far from grieving over insult, rather defends the faith and sincere communion, that today she would — if all those who have been seen to rush forth into her despite should return to the integrity of the faith and to Catholic communion, coming according to the course of the paternal rules with all affection of heart — receive them in full charity.

Given on the Nones of August, Asterius and Praesidius, most illustrious men, being consuls.

Source/Reference

PL 59:57

Notes / Historical Commentary

Letter XI is addressed to the bishops of Dardania and Illyricum in August 494, two years into Gelasius’s pontificate and ten years after Pope Felix III had formally excommunicated Acacius of Constantinople for his communion with Peter Mongus of Alexandria. The occasion is the progress of the Acacian Schism in the East — particularly the danger that Eastern communities in Rome’s ecclesiastical orbit might drift into communion with Constantinople while keeping the names of the excommunicated bishops in the diptychs. The most striking feature of this letter, for the primacy question, is not that Gelasius is writing in this mode but how completely the framework he uses is continuous with what earlier popes had established. The reader who is familiar with Leo’s Letter V to the metropolitan bishops of Illyricum will recognize both the language and the structure. Gelasius opens with the very formula Leo had used: the primacy of the Apostolic See, whose solicitude is divinely delegated to all the Churches. Half a century of inheritance sits between these two letters, and the continuity is not incidental — it is the premise of Gelasius’s right to address the Illyrian bishops at all.

The opening clause of the letter should be read with particular care. Pro sedis apostolicæ principatu, cujus sollicitudo delegata divinitus cunctis debetur Ecclesiis — “in virtue of the primacy of the Apostolic See, whose solicitude, divinely delegated, is owed to all the Churches” — carries two claims at once. The first is that the Roman See holds a principatus — a primacy that is not honorific but governing, the same term Leo had used when writing to Alexandria (Letter IX). The second is that this primacy expresses itself as sollicitudo, a pastoral solicitude that is owed to every local church because it has been delegated not by conciliar concession or imperial grant but divinitus — divinely. This is the theological ground Gelasius lays before he speaks of Acacius, Thessalonica, or the diptychs. Everything that follows is the exercise of that solicitude, and the reader who wants to understand what Gelasius is doing should begin here.

The center of the letter, for the question of jurisdiction, is Chapter IV. Here Gelasius declares that the bishop of Thessalonica has not received communion with the Apostolic See because he has refused to condemn the name of Acacius in Gelasius’s presence. The declaration carries particular weight because Thessalonica was the traditional seat of the papal vicariate for Illyricum — established by Damasus, formalized by Siricius, and renewed by Leo (Letters V and VI). The vicar’s office was to mediate Roman authority to the Illyrian bishops. Here the vicar has refused to mediate Rome’s judgment against Acacius; and so Gelasius bypasses him and addresses the suffragan bishops directly, explicitly noting that the same ruling he sent to the bishops of the Dalmatias he is now sending to them. The pattern is significant. When a local bishop — even one holding a delegated Roman office — fails to transmit Rome’s judgment, the judgment is not diminished; Rome simply extends its voice past the obstructing intermediary. The authority is not conditional on the vicar’s cooperation, and the obligation of the suffragans to the Apostolic See is not mediated through the vicar in such a way that the vicar’s disobedience could sever it.

Chapter V contains one of the most juridically significant statements in the letter. Some parties in the East had begun to argue — as Gelasius notes and rejects — that Acacius’s death in 489 might itself have terminated the excommunication, and that commemorating him in the diptychs should resume. Gelasius rules against this in explicit terms: the binding power given to the apostles (Matt. 18:18) was given with reference to the present life; once a man has passed into divine judgment, the ecclesiastical sentence that stood at his last day stands forever. Whatever Acacius’s posthumous status with God may be, the Apostolic See’s sentence cannot be loosed for one who did not seek loosing while alive. The ruling matters not only for Acacius but for the structure of the keys: the binding-and-loosing power is exercised by the living Church on living persons. An ecclesiastical verdict is not therefore something that can be overturned later by changing majority opinion or by the passage of time. Gelasius is working out, in a concrete case, an implication of the Petrine power that will have a long subsequent history.

The letter closes, in Chapter VI, with a defense of the Apostolic See’s motive — a defense Gelasius needed to make because contemporary Easterners were arguing that Rome was persisting in schism over wounded pride rather than over any substantive doctrinal issue. Gelasius insists that the issue is faith and communion, not personal honor, and that the Apostolic See would receive any who returned in full orthodoxy. The argument is not merely defensive rhetoric; it is a statement of how Roman discipline has always understood itself. The refusal to absolve Acacius is not a refusal to forgive — it is a refusal to declare loosed what was not loosed while there was yet time to seek loosing. The reader who wishes to understand how the Roman See understood its own work — as guardian of faith and communion rather than as a political power acting on its own prerogatives — will find this closing paragraph a particularly clear statement of that self-understanding.

Letter XI also belongs to a broader pattern visible across the Gelasian corpus: the pope writing not to a single recipient but to a regional college of bishops, distributing authoritative rulings across a province by common word. The same pattern will be found in Gelasius’s letters to the bishops of Picenum and to the bishops of Lucania, and it is visible further back in Felix III and in Leo himself. What appears in Letter XI as an extension — the ruling directed to the Dalmatians is now directed also to Illyricum — is the ordinary mode of the Apostolic See’s governance: a single judgment communicated through many letters to many provinces, each letter carrying the same authority because each is an exercise of the same solicitude.