The Tome of Pope Gelasius On the Bond of Anathema.
That the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon are valid only to the extent that the Apostolic See has approved them; that the things established against Acacius are just; and that Peter of Alexandria could only have been absolved by the Apostolic See.
Chapter I: That What the Apostolic See Has Approved at Chalcedon Stands; What It Has Refused Cannot Be Confirmed
Lest perhaps they say, as is their custom, that if the Synod of Chalcedon is admitted, all things that appear to have been brought forth there must equally stand — for either it is fitting that it be admitted in its entirety, or, if it is in part to be repudiated, it cannot stand firm in its entirety —
let them therefore acknowledge this: that according to the holy Scriptures and the tradition of the elders, according to the canons and rules of the Church, for the common faith and the Catholic and Apostolic truth, for which the Apostolic See delegated this [council] to be held, and confirmed it once held — [that this] is to be received without doubt by the whole Church; but that other things which were brought forth there by incompetent presumption, or rather agitated, which the Apostolic See in no way delegated to be conducted, were at once contradicted by the vicars of the Apostolic See, as is manifest; which the Apostolic See, even at the request of the prince Marcian, in no way approved; which the presider of the Church of Constantinople at that time, Anatolius, even confessed that he himself had not presumed, and did not deny had been placed within the power of the bishop of the Apostolic See; which therefore, as has been said, the Apostolic See did not receive, because it sustains by no reasoning what is shown to be contrary to the privileges of the universal Church.
Chapter II: That Selective Reception Is the Apostolic Principle, as Scripture Itself Records the Errors of Holy Men and Heretical Books Contain Truths Worth Preserving
For what then? Because in the holy books, which indeed we venerate and follow — since the profanities of certain persons are also reported in them, and crimes committed are recounted — are these likewise to be venerated by us, or to be followed, because they are contained in those holy and venerable books?
Saint Peter, the first of the apostles, so reckoning the grace of the New Testament to be preached that he should not depart from the institutions of the old law, is read to have done certain things by dissimulation among Jews and Gentiles. Are those things therefore to be followed which his fellow-apostle deservedly rebuked as having been done, and which afterwards he himself consequently avoided — and are these to be received together with those things which (as the first of the apostles) he preached for salvation? Are we then to repudiate his right teaching together with those things which had happened to him by human weakness — or is that yet weak ignorance to be received together with his perfected doctrine?
And in the books of the heretics themselves, are not many things found written that pertain to the truth? Is the truth therefore to be refuted, because the books in which depravity is contained are refuted? Or are the depraved books to be received because the truth which is inserted there is not denied?
The Apostle says: Test all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thess. 5:21). We know that the Apostle (Acts 17) cited certain things even from the books of the pagans. Are all those things therefore to be received which were brought forth together with these? The Apostle himself (Phil. 1) says that many preachers preach Christ in different ways — where, although it is fitting that Christ preached in any manner be admitted, yet for that reason He does not warn that the manner in which He has not been preached rightly is not to be avoided. He himself complains of evil workers (Phil. 3), of whom he teaches that some things are to be refuted and others are to be followed.
These and similar examples teach us, and the divine testimonies confirm, that not all things said anywhere indiscriminately by anyone, or written in any place, are to be accepted indifferently — but that the good things are to be retained, while the things that may harm are to be refuted.
Chapter III: That a Sentence Is Fixed Perpetually Against the Error Itself, and Binds Persons Only Insofar as They Persist in That Error
To the sinning man death was given as the penalty; and yet the death inflicted upon the man Jesus Christ made the devil guilty — because where there was no cause of death (that is, sin), there was not owed the penalty either.
A sentence is fixed in advance, always against an error. The sentence fixed against this error shall never be dissolved. For just as the error itself, insofar as it is error, never ceases to be error, so it shall never be released from the sentence fixed against it — because the error which is acknowledged to have been condemned, so long as it remains error, remains bound. Therefore those who are in the error are bound by the sentence of the error; and so long as they remain in it, they are by no means absolved, just as the error itself in which they remain is not absolved. For the error itself never deserves pardon — but he who has truly been freed of it, and has departed from participation in it, is the one who is loosed. So long therefore as a person remains in the error, the error holds its condemnation and is never dissolved, because error always deserves the penalty.
The participants of the error, however, are either always bound, and partakers of its penalty if they do not cease to persist in it; or, if they have departed from it, just as they have been made foreign to the error and separated from participation in it, so they shall consequently be foreign to its penalty also. When a penalty is fixed against one who errs, then so long as he remains erring he is constrained by it — because one cannot be erring without bearing the penalty for the error. This penalty is perpetual, and never to be dissolved so long as he continues erring. But if he ceases to be erring, the penalty fixed perpetually against the erring, when applied to one who is not erring — that is, to one made other than the person against whom it was fixed — not only cannot be perpetual; it cannot any longer be a penalty at all. For he is not the same one against whom it was fixed. It was fixed against the erring, not against the not-erring.
What is fixed against the erring is perpetual, and constrains the erring perpetually; but it can no longer hold the not-erring. Let it be said to be perpetual against the erring; let it be said never to be dissolved against the erring. It remains altogether and truly fixed against him; nor can it be absolved at all, so long as it is owed to the one who remains erring. But to the not-erring there cannot be a penalty either, since to the not-erring no penalty is owed. Nor is that which is owed to the erring at all changed or dissolved. In its own tenor, therefore, the sentence is fixed — in its own right it cannot be dissolved at all; in a tenor not its own, where it cannot be, it is now seen to have been emptied — and to have no right at all there, where it has no cause of existing.
The holy Scriptures are full of this form of justice. It is said: Let the sinners perish from the earth, so that they shall not be — that is, sinners, that they may cease to be sinners. In this let them perish, so that they may cease to be sinners (Ps. 103[104]:35). For if sinners, according to the prophet’s saying, were to perish substantially altogether — so that they would not subsist substantially — who could have been saved by Our Redeemer, who came not to call the just but sinners (Luke 5:32)? Or concerning whom does the Apostle say: Christ came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the first (1 Tim. 1:15; Rom. 5:8); and: While we were yet sinners, God sent His Son (Gal. 4:4), and the rest of this kind?
Here indeed many also have perished substantially as sinners, remaining in their sins; and the sentence pronounced against them remained truly, and was never dissolved. Yet that same sentence, fixed against such persons, has remained perpetual against them — even as it has come to pass that, for those who do not remain altogether such (that is, who do not endure altogether in their sins), the sentence still remains fixed against the kind of person they had been. For they too perish — but, as has been said, not by way of penalty but by way of remedy. They too in a certain manner have perished; in a certain manner the sentence has remained against them, until — by remaining — it brought them to cease being sinners, or accomplished that sinners no longer be. The sentence is completed in them; and that sentence, with its tenor enacted against perishing sinners, brings it about that they should no longer be sinners. But the sentence could no longer remain among non-sinners, because in those upon whom it had not been inflicted it had no right of remaining at all. Thus the sentence in its own right and course has not been dissolved at all; and the same sentence, remaining against those upon whom it was inflicted, has been made wholly foreign to those who are now separated from its right. Nor would it have warrant of remaining (its own condition preserved) in those upon whom it had not been inflicted.
The Lord said that for those sinning against the Holy Spirit, [the sin] should be remitted neither here nor in the age to come (Matt. 12:32). Yet how many do we know to have offended against the Holy Spirit — heretics of various kinds, Arians, Eunomians, Macedonians — turning to the Catholic faith, who have both received remission of their blasphemy here and have taken up the hope of obtaining indulgence in the future? Nor for that reason is the Lord’s sentence not true, nor is it to be thought to have been dissolved in any way at all — since concerning such persons, if they remain such, [the sentence] remains never to be dissolved at all; but [as applied] to those made not such, it is not imposed.
So also is that consequent saying of the blessed apostle John: There is sin unto death; I do not say that one should pray for it. And there is sin not unto death; I say that one should pray for it (1 John 5:16–17). There is sin unto death — for those remaining in the same sin; there is sin not unto death — for those departing from the same sin. For there is no sin which the Church does not either ask to be remitted, or which, by the power divinely given to her, she cannot absolve from those who have departed from the same, or relax for those who repent — to whom it is said: Whatsoever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also in heaven; and whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven (Matt. 18:18). In whomsoever all things are, however many they may be, and of whatever kind they may be: yet with the true sentence concerning them remaining, [the sentence] which is declared never to be dissolved — [it] consists in their tenor, not also remaining after they recede from this same.
Chapter IV: That Acacius’s “Never to Be Loosed” Was Just, Because He Chose to Remain the Kind of Person Bound; and That the Whole Matter Rests in the Power of the Apostolic See, Which Alone Rescinds What a Synod Has Presumed to Usurp
This same thing is also reasonably to be considered in the sentence of Acacius, in which, even though it was said to him “never to be loosed,” it was nevertheless not added: “even if you should come to your senses, even if you should depart from the error, even if you should cease to be a transgressor.” Wherefore it is openly said “never to be loosed” — but only as such a one, namely, as he is and bound; not as one made other than what he was bound to be, in which case he would have been shown to be absolved. For just as he would be free of obligation when the cause of obligation was absent, so he would stand absolved: as one made not such, no longer bound by the cause, he could not be held by the necessity of the sentence; and the sentence fixed against persons of his kind would in no way thereby have been rendered insoluble.
For did he not strive, did he not seek, did he not demand — and was he not rejected? And so he himself made the sentence to be insoluble in himself, who chose to remain such as could not truly be absolved; and he was unwilling to be made other — for had he done so, the sentence (which remains insoluble against persons of that kind) would no longer have remained against him, since against one who is no longer such it has no license of remaining.
By how much more, then, those who are constrained by the same tenor — admonished by example and by danger, as has been said — ought to make haste, that they not remain such as those against whom that sentence is fixed never to be loosed, and that they begin to be such as those for whom the sentence fixed against them can be dissolved. For when one is made not such — that is, no longer the kind of person against whom the sentence “never to be loosed” was fixed — the sentence can be dissolved with respect to him: just as for Acacius, unwilling to be made other and remaining such to the end, the sentence has remained absolute, so for us, unwilling to be made other than what we are, the sentence cannot be dissolved.
Did Acacius not have the example of so many bishops who, having lapsed into the brigandage at Ephesus, had in some manner relapsed into consent to depravity? Even if it had not been formally said, perpetual condemnation could have been inflicted upon those bishops; yet by coming to their senses, by being made other than they had been, they merited that the condemnation against them be dissolved — departing from the cause of perpetual condemnation, which those who persevered in it rendered insoluble against themselves.
Therefore there is no difference, no distinction, whether the words “never to be loosed” are said or not said: for an ecclesiastical sentence binds the guilty and the transgressors. Just as it cannot avail anyone that “never to be loosed” was not said — for if he persists in the error, the sentence remains insoluble in every way, and he cannot be absolved unless he is made other — so it cannot prejudice anyone that “never to be loosed” was said, when manifest reason shows that he is by no means to be loosed if he persists as he was bound, or rather, never to be loosed as the kind of person he is bound. And without the addition “even if he should come to his senses and correct himself,” let it be utterly clear and free from doubt that, when one is made not such as he is said never to be loosed, but such as he is not said never to be loosed — that is, corrected and amended — he can consequently be loosed.
It is to be noted that for those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit in any manner whatsoever, if they come to their senses and correct themselves, the sin can be remitted to them both here and in the age to come; nor can the Lord’s sentence waver on this account — for that sentence was said to remain against such persons while they remain such, not against those who have been made other. So long as they remain in this state, they are such as those against whom it is fixed that there is to be no remission. But when they depart from this, they are made other than those against whom no remission was pronounced. And therefore, for those made other, the sin can be remitted both here and in the age to come. Otherwise (which God forbid!) it would seem in vain that the Church should receive the reconciliation of such persons. But because the Church cannot act in vain, by every manner of understanding, with the Lord’s sentence preserved, it must be preached — as far as it pertains to us — that reconciliation is altogether possible.
Such therefore was Acacius pronounced — bound, never to be loosed. Such he remained to the end; he did not cease to be such. Thus such he is today as he was pronounced. He cannot now be made not such; therefore, persisting as such, he is never to be loosed. For if he had ceased to be such — if he had not remained the kind of person against whom “never to be loosed” was said — he could have been absolved: as one made not such, he would have departed from the condition of “never to be loosed,” and so, that he might be loosed, he would have drawn near. But to such an absolution the Apostolic See did not consent, nor did the emperor impose it, nor did Anatolius usurp it. And the whole, as has been said, is placed in the power of the Apostolic See. Thus what the Apostolic See has confirmed in synod has obtained force; what it has refused could have no firmness; and the Apostolic See alone rescinds what the synodic gathering had thought fit to usurp beyond order — not as the promulgator of a new sentence, but, with the Apostolic See, as the executor of the ancient one.
What has been said concerning one and the same man — whether persisting as such (in which case he has competently received the sentence), or made not such (in which case the sentence not pronounced against the not-such no longer holds) — is read to have been similarly fixed in each city, and brought forth against people and nation alike; for whatever is in the whole world is but a portion of the same. The same world is said to perish, and the word of God cannot fail; yet in this same world, the sentence is not enforced against those who recede from depraved intentions.
Thus Tyre and Berytus and Gaza (Jer. 47) and Egypt (Jer. 44) were pronounced [destined] to perish, which afterwards through the Gospel we know to have been saved (Luke 10). They perished, therefore, in a twofold manner: either by remaining in the condition in which they received such a sentence; or by defecting from what they had been and beginning to be what they had not been — for whom the sentence was fixed; so that consequently the sentence, never having been fixed against those who had ceased to be such, would no longer pertain to them.
So also concerning the nation of the Jews, by God through the prophet Isaiah it has been pronounced peremptorily, as it were: Close their eyes and stop up their ears; that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not hear, lest they should at any time understand. And harden the heart of this people, that they may never be converted, and I should heal them (Isa. 6:10). Here too correction and amendment are shown to be forbidden, and even the hope of coming to one’s senses is altogether cut off. Yet from this people we know the apostles and the primitive Church to have proceeded, and thousands of men in one day to have been saved by baptism (Acts 2).
Behold also among those persisting [as] such, the sentence pronounced has remained, nor were they admitted to come to correction of soundness at all, but were judged to perish in their wickedness. And, with the divine sentence remaining, they were converted not by their own emendation, nor by their own understanding or motion, nor by their own virtue or possibility — that they might be healed — but they were healed by the grace of God, that they might be converted. Lest they be converted, He says, and I should heal them — lest by their own [will], lest by their own works, in which they were trusting, lest pursuing their own justice they should not be subjected to the justice of God; lest, trusting in their own strength, they should not subject themselves to divine mercy and illumination. And therefore the effect of proud presumption is forbidden to them: lest they be converted by their own intentions, by their own efforts, as they had thought; and I should heal them — lest, as if by their own merits coming from their own faculty, saving grace should be given, and so grace would no longer be grace, if it had not been given freely to the unmerited, but rendered as wages, as if to merits. Therefore not they themselves be converted, and I should heal them; but, healed by grace, let them recognize how to be converted to the humility of Christ.
Thus in both cases — that is, both in those remaining in that in which they received such a sentence, and in those saved from there — the Lord’s sentence has remained fixed; and yet those things remain. So in them by a marvelous manner soundness has been introduced, that the sentence might seem unchanged: but with the same enduring, soundness would come not by their confidence but by divine gift. But if they fear to hold these things, and acknowledge they do not pertain to the measure of their power — to whom only as much has been permitted as to judge concerning human affairs, not also to preside over divine ones — how do they presume to judge concerning these by whom divine things are administered?
Chapter V: That Christ Distinguished the Two Powers, Willing Christian Emperors to Need Bishops for Eternal Life and Bishops to Use Imperial Dispositions for the Course of Temporal Things; and That a Bishop Can Neither Be Bound Nor Loosed by Secular Power
These things were before the coming of Christ, that certain persons figuratively — yet still established in carnal actions — should exist as both kings and priests, [as] sacred History records that holy Melchizedek was (Gen. 14). The devil also imitated this in his own [people] — for he is one who always strives to claim for himself with tyrannical spirit those things which befit divine worship — so that the pagan emperors were called both fideles [the faithful] and maximi pontifices [supreme pontiffs].
But when it came to the true [King and Priest, that is, Christ], no longer did the emperor impose upon himself the name of pontiff, nor did the pontiff claim the royal eminence. For although the members of Him who is 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 — nevertheless Christ, mindful of human fragility, tempering by magnificent dispensation what would befit the salvation of His own, so distinguished the offices of each power by their own actions and dignities, willing His own to be saved by medicinal humility, not again to be intercepted by human pride: so that both Christian emperors should need pontiffs for eternal life, and pontiffs should use imperial dispositions for the course of temporal things — to the end that spiritual action should stand apart from carnal incursions; and therefore he who serves God as a soldier should not entangle himself at all with secular affairs (2 Tim. 2:4); and conversely, he who is entangled with secular affairs should not seem to preside over divine things; so that both the modesty of each order might be cared for, neither extolled by being supported by both, and the appropriate profession should be specifically fitted to the qualities of [each] action.
By all of these things rightly gathered, it is shown evidently enough that a pontiff can in no way be bound or loosed by secular power.
Chapter VI: That Peter of Alexandria Could in No Way Have Been Absolved by Imperial Sentence Alone, and That Only the First See Could Have Loosed the Holder of the Second; for the Inferior Cannot Absolve the Superior
By which it is the more manifestly approved that Peter of Alexandria could in no way at all have been absolved by imperial sentence alone — where, if pontifical assent is also alleged to have joined [the imperial sentence], we ask whether it preceded or followed.
If it followed, nevertheless we return to this point: that an absolution prefaced and principally begun by secular power cannot have force; and the pontifical assent that followed was rather of flattery than of legitimate sanction.
If it preceded, let it be shown by whom and where it was conducted: whether it was celebrated according to the rule of the Church, whether it proceeded from paternal tradition, whether it was brought forth in the manner of the elders, whether it was set forth by competent examination. Where doubtless it must be asked: whether it was celebrated by synodal congregation — which, in the reception of one condemned and the expulsion of a Catholic, since this is a new cause, it is most certain ought to have been done; whether it was referred to the First See, whose sentence it concerned, by which Peter was held bound, according to the rules of the Church; whether the same [authority] which had bound, also loosed; whether [the absolution] could have been dissolved while that [authority] which had bound did not dissolve [it] — nay rather, did not even know [of it]. If these things have not been done, by what manner, by what rite, is Peter of Alexandria alleged to have been absolved? — since he could neither have been legitimately freed by bishops and by ecclesiastical laws, nor could he have been absolved at all by secular power apart from the path of the Church.
But it may perhaps be said: “The emperor did not absolve [him], but asked of the bishops that he be absolved.” All the more should it have been suggested by the bishops to the emperor making the request, that if he wished [Peter] to be legitimately absolved, the legitimate absolution of the ecclesiastical procedure should come about, and all those things which have been said above should be observed according to the path of the Church.
Especially since it concerned the bishop of the Second See — [who] could not be absolved by any inferior whatsoever, but by the First See by right. For indeed the inferior cannot absolve the superior: only the superior, therefore, fittingly absolves the inferior.
Accordingly, the bishops of inferior position, who knew that they could in no way at all loose the one superior to themselves without the First See — especially one whom they knew to be bound by its sentence — did not so much, by a transgressing absolution, strip him entirely [of the bond], but rather entangled themselves by their transgression.
Thus the absolution of Peter does not stand from either source — because they could not have absolved a guilty man by a transgressing absolution, [being themselves] guilty; and with Catholic bishops everywhere driven out, and heretics put in their place, or those who were held polluted by the communion of heretics, also polluted by the insincerity of sacred religion — they were as unable to absolve their partner as they themselves remained unabsolved; and therefore as transgressors of the ecclesiastical rule, and as defilers of the integrity of sacrosanct communion by association with the perfidious, they could pronounce concerning a most similar guilty person whatever judgment they were able [to pronounce, which was none]. For of the Catholic bishops throughout the whole East, whoever stood firm has been ejected; or [if] he remained, [it was because] he consented to the error and did not withdraw himself from the contagion of those erring.
Chapter VII: That Those Whose Conduct Has Confounded Catholic and Apostolic Purity Throughout the East Cannot Be the Judges of Anyone’s Error; and That If Catholic Bishops Were Being Expelled, Only Heretics Could Have Been the Ones Preserved
What judgment then could there have been from such persons concerning anyone’s error — who are shown never to have not erred, and who, with the confession of heretics and Catholics together commingled, [are shown] to have disturbed all the seats of true and sincere religion, and to have confounded Catholic and Apostolic purity?
Behold those who could absolve the guilty, who themselves are taught to have been made guilty before all others! Behold those with whom a synod was to have been entered upon for absolving the guilty!
If the Catholic faith and communion were being preserved, why were Catholic bishops being expelled? If Catholic bishops were being expelled, how were heretics not the only ones being preserved?
Footnotes
- ↩ The genre of tomus in late antique theological usage designates a treatise issued to settle a doctrinal or jurisdictional question — most famously Leo’s Tomus ad Flavianum (Letter XXVIII, the Tome of Leo), which served as the dogmatic charter of the Council of Chalcedon. Gelasius’s Tomus de anathematis vinculo stands in this tradition: it is not a letter to a particular recipient but a doctrinal exposition addressed to the Church at large, defending the Roman position on the Acacian Schism and articulating the principles that make that position sustainable. The work is preserved in two manuscript traditions — the most ancient Frisingen codex bears the title in this form, while the Veronese codex transmits it as Tomus de anathematis vinculo papae Pelasii (sic, with “Pelasius” for “Gelasius”). The textual variants noted by the PL apparatus are minor and do not affect the substance of the argument.
- ↩ This sentence is the editor’s synopsis prefixed to the work in the PL edition, summarizing the three theses the Tomus defends. The synopsis is preserved here in italics because it usefully orients the reader, but the three theses are not separate sections of the work — they are interwoven throughout the argument, with each defended by reference to the others.
- ↩ The objection Gelasius is answering is the standard Eastern argument that the conciliar acts of Chalcedon must be received as a unity: either the whole council is binding, or none of it is. Gelasius’s response will be that this is a false dilemma, because the council itself was constituted under Roman authority and operates only within the scope of what Rome delegated and confirmed.
- ↩ The reference is to Canon 28 of Chalcedon, which the Council fathers attempted to pass at the conclusion of the proceedings, granting Constantinople equal honor with Rome and authority over the dioceses of Asia, Pontus, and Thrace. Leo’s legates protested at the time, and Leo subsequently nullified the canon in Letters CIV (to Marcian), CV (to Pulcheria), and CVI (to Anatolius), all of 22 May 452. The Anatolian admission Gelasius cites here is preserved in Leo’s correspondence at Letter CXXXII (Anatolius’s reply to Leo, March 454), where Anatolius — having previously defended the canon — concedes that the entire force of what had been done at Chalcedon “depended on the authority of Your Beatitude” and that the matter was now placed in Leo’s power to confirm or annul. Gelasius is treating that concession as juridically settling the question: the holder of the Constantinopolitan see himself acknowledged that the canon’s standing rested with Rome, not with the Council. The reader will note that Gelasius is writing some forty years after these events; what was contested at the time has, by his pontificate, become settled Roman doctrine on the limits of conciliar authority — and on the Constantinopolitan side, settled by Anatolius’s own admission.
- ↩ Quia quae privilegiis universalis Ecclesiae contraria probantur, nulla ratione sustinet. The principle is foundational: the Apostolic See’s role in conciliar reception is not arbitrary preference but the defense of the universal Church’s privileges. What contradicts those privileges cannot be sustained by any reasoning, because the privileges themselves are constitutive of the Church’s order. The reader will note the structure: Rome does not stand over the universal Church to override its order; Rome stands for the universal Church to maintain its order against the encroachments of any local body, however large or imperially favored.
- ↩ The reference is to Galatians 2:11–14, the famous incident at Antioch where Peter withdrew from table fellowship with Gentile believers when men “from James” arrived, and was rebuked to his face by Paul for not “walking uprightly according to the truth of the Gospel.” Gelasius’s choice of this example is striking: he uses the senior of the apostles — the very Peter on whose see the Apostolic See’s authority rests — as his illustration that even Apostolic figures can do things in Scripture that are not to be followed. That a Roman bishop should so freely cite Peter’s correction is itself evidence of how secure the Roman position on Petrine primacy was: Gelasius can acknowledge Peter’s dissimulation without any anxiety that the acknowledgment undermines his see’s authority, because the authority does not rest on Peter’s personal impeccability but on the office Christ established in him.
- ↩ Paul’s citation of the Greek poet Aratus on the Areopagus (Acts 17:28: “as also some of your own poets have said”) is the classic instance of Apostolic acknowledgment that pagan authors can be cited in support of truth. The principle Gelasius draws from this is not that all pagan writing is acceptable, but that no source — Scripture, conciliar acts, heretical books, pagan literature — is to be received or rejected wholesale. Each is to be tested, and what is good is to be retained. The principle as applied to conciliar acts in the present case is the same: Chalcedon’s content is to be tested for conformity to the Apostolic deposit, and what conforms is to be received, while what does not is to be refused.
- ↩ The compressed argument of this paragraph deserves unpacking. Paul rejoiced (Phil. 1:18) that Christ was preached even by those whose motives were impure, since the content of their preaching was true; but in Phil. 3:2 he warns sharply against “the dogs, the evil workers, the concision.” The two passages together establish exactly the principle Gelasius needs: from any source, what is true is to be received, what is false is to be refused, and the source itself does not determine which is which. The application to conciliar acts is straightforward: that something was said at Chalcedon does not, by that fact alone, make it binding; nor does the partial corruption of the council’s proceedings (Canon 28) make the whole council void.
- ↩ Non omnia passim a quocunque dicta, vel ubicunque scripta, indifferenter accipere, sed retentis bonis, quae noceant refutare. This is the operative principle of the entire treatise, distilled into a single sentence. The principle is not Gelasius’s invention; it is the Apostolic principle Paul stated in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (“test all things; hold fast what is good”). What Gelasius establishes by the cumulative weight of his examples is that this principle applies not merely to private discernment of teaching but also to the reception of conciliar acts — and that the Apostolic See is the institution that exercises this discernment on behalf of the universal Church. The reader will recognize that this is the explicit articulation of the doctrine that operates throughout the Gelasian corpus: Rome’s confirmatory authority is not a privilege over the Church but the Church’s own Apostolic discernment exercised through her primary see.
- ↩ The opening of this section seems abrupt — a meditation on the death of Christ in relation to the universal sentence of death upon sin — but it is doing precise theological work for the argument. Gelasius needs to establish that a penalty has its proper cause, and that where the cause is absent, the penalty is not properly owed. This will be the conceptual key to the whole subsequent argument: the anathema is owed to the error; where the error is not, the anathema is not owed; and therefore the anathema, though perpetual against the error, does not bind a person who has departed from the error.
- ↩ The argument can be summarized thus: the anathema is fixed against the error itself, perpetually. It is therefore perpetual against the error and remains so absolutely. It binds persons only insofar as those persons participate in the error; the moment a person ceases to participate, the sentence — though still perpetual against the error — no longer applies to that person, because the person is no longer the kind of person to whom the sentence was directed. The reader will note that this is not a doctrine of merely “loosening” the sentence; the sentence is never loosened. It is a doctrine of the relationship between the sentence and its proper subject: when the subject ceases to be what the sentence was directed against, the sentence still stands but no longer holds.
- ↩ Gelasius’s reading of Psalm 103/104:35 — “let sinners perish from the earth, so that they shall not be” — is one of the standard patristic readings of the verse. The verse does not call for the annihilation of sinners as persons but for the destruction of sin as a condition; sinners “perish” by ceasing to be sinners. The reading was already commonplace in the fourth and fifth centuries, attested in Augustine and others.
- ↩ Three of the major fourth-century heresies on the Holy Spirit. Arians: those who held the Son to be a creature, less than the Father; Eunomians: the radical Arians, followers of Eunomius of Cyzicus, who held the Son to be of unlike substance to the Father; Macedonians (also called Pneumatomachi, “Spirit-fighters”): those who, while accepting the Son’s divinity, denied the divinity of the Holy Spirit. All three were repeatedly condemned in the fourth century, and the Council of Constantinople I (381) had received and reconciled penitent members of these communions back into Catholic communion. Gelasius’s invocation of these examples is precise: those who had directly “sinned against the Holy Spirit” by formal heretical denial were nevertheless reconciled when they returned to the Catholic faith — proving that the Lord’s saying about no remission “here or in the age to come” applies to the sin while it persists, not to the persons who have departed from it.
- ↩ The citation of Matthew 18:18 is significant in two ways. First, Gelasius is using the binding-and-loosing logion to establish that the Church’s power to bind extends to its power to loose: what she binds she can loose, in the case of those who depart from the error. Second, the verse he cites is the form addressed to the apostles collectively (Matt. 18:18) rather than the form addressed to Peter alone (Matt. 16:19). This is deliberate: in this passage Gelasius is establishing the general principle of ecclesiastical absolution, applicable to those Easterners who would repent and depart from the error. Later in the treatise, when he comes to establish the specific point about Peter of Alexandria, he will appeal to the structural principle that only the First See can absolve the Second — a doctrine that derives from the Petrine grant. The two registers (general ecclesiastical authority and specific Roman authority) are distinct and Gelasius keeps them distinct.
- ↩ The argument turns on what Gelasius reads as a precise omission in the wording of the original sentence. The sentence said “never to be loosed” — but it did not say “never to be loosed even if you should repent.” The latter formulation would bind Acacius perpetually as a person regardless of his disposition; the former binds him perpetually only as he is — that is, as the unrepentant transgressor he chose to be. The reader will see that this exegetical move depends on the philosophical groundwork of Chapter III: the sentence is fixed against the error, and binds the person only as long as the person participates in the error.
- ↩ The “brigandage at Ephesus” is the Latrocinium, the Second Council of Ephesus of 449, presided over by Dioscorus of Alexandria, which deposed Flavian of Constantinople and rehabilitated Eutyches. Pope Leo I famously called it the latrocinium (“den of robbers”), a name that stuck. Many of the Eastern bishops who had signed the acts of the Latrocinium subsequently repented and were reconciled at Chalcedon (451) by formally recanting their consent. Gelasius’s point: even those who had directly subscribed to a heretical council were able to be reconciled when they ceased to consent to the depravity. Acacius could have done the same; he chose not to.
- ↩ The triple denial is structured: the Apostolic See did not consent to the absolution of Acacius; the emperor did not impose it; Anatolius did not usurp it. The first denies Roman approval; the second denies imperial fiat; the third denies Constantinopolitan presumption. The implication is that the absolution of Acacius (which Eastern parties were claiming or seeking) had no source from which it could legitimately come — no source consented, imposed, or usurped. The principle articulated by elimination is that absolution of a Roman sentence requires Roman action; nothing else suffices.
- ↩ Non promulgatrix iteratae sententiae, sed cum apostolica sede veteris exsecutrix. The formulation is precise and crucial. When the Apostolic See rescinds an irregular conciliar act, it does not pronounce a new sentence; it executes the ancient sentence — the sentence already fixed against the error by the Apostolic deposit and the canons. The reader will note that this is the same principle articulated in Chapter I: the Apostolic See does not stand over the universal Church to override its order, but stands for the universal Church to maintain the Apostolic order against irregular encroachments. The synodic gathering at Chalcedon had presumed to usurp something beyond the order of the Apostolic deposit (Canon 28); the Apostolic See, in refusing to confirm it, was not creating a new sentence but executing the ancient one — the sentence the Apostolic order had already pronounced against any such usurpation.
- ↩ Gelasius cites the prophetic oracles of doom against the cities Tyre, Berytus (Beirut), Gaza, and Egypt from Jeremiah 47 and 44, and pairs them with the Gospel evidence (Luke 10) that these regions were nevertheless evangelized and saved. The point is the same as before: the prophetic sentence of doom was fixed against the cities as they were — pagan, hostile to God, deserving of destruction. When they ceased to be that and embraced the Gospel, they were saved, while the prophetic sentence still stood against the kind of city they had ceased to be. Berytus is particularly poignant for Gelasius’s argument: the city was the seat of one of the great schools of Roman law and a major Christian center by the fifth century; the prophetic sentence had not bound the Christian city, because the Christian city was not the kind of city the sentence was fixed against.
- ↩ Gelasius here weaves an Augustinian theology of grace into the argument about anathema and reception. The reading of Isaiah 6:10 — that the Jews are not converted by their own efforts but healed by grace, so that grace remain grace and not wages — is recognizably the Augustinian reading developed against the Pelagians. Gelasius is integrating it into his Christological/jurisdictional argument: even where a sentence is pronounced against persistence in error, conversion remains possible — but only as grace, not as wages of repentance. The implication for Acacius is sobering: Acacius could have repented, but he would have repented only by grace, and the absence of repentance is itself the absence of grace.
- ↩ The closing question is the rhetorical pivot to Chapter V. Having established that even the most peremptory divine sentence does not bind those whom grace has made not-such, Gelasius now turns to the question of who has authority to administer such matters. The conclusion is foreshadowed: those to whom only human affairs are entrusted have no authority to judge those who administer divine things. This is the doctrine of the two powers, and it is what Chapter V will articulate fully.
- ↩ Melchizedek, “king of Salem” and “priest of God Most High” (Gen. 14:18), is the Old Testament figure who unites the two offices in a single person. The author of Hebrews develops the typology at length (Heb. 5–7), making Melchizedek the prefiguration of Christ as eternal priest-king. Gelasius’s argument depends on this typology: Melchizedek’s combined office was a figure pointing forward to Christ, who fulfilled it. With Christ’s coming, the figure was fulfilled — and what had been combined typologically in the figure was now distributed in the Church between the priestly and royal powers, with neither power claiming the other’s prerogative.
- ↩ The Roman emperors held the title Pontifex Maximus as a matter of state religion from the time of Augustus through the fourth century, when the title was finally renounced by the Christian emperor Gratian in 382. Gelasius’s identification of the pagan emperors’ claim to the title as a satanic imitation of the Melchizedek typology is sharp: the devil, unable to create, imitated the divine ordering by claiming for the secular ruler what belonged properly to the priestly office. The Christian dispensation, by contrast, has restored the proper distinction.
- ↩ The reference is to 1 Peter 2:9, where the baptized are called “a royal priesthood” (regale sacerdotium). Gelasius is acknowledging that the baptized share, by participation in Christ, in both the royal and priestly dignity — but he is about to draw the distinction between this participatory sharing and the offices of governance in the Church.
- ↩ This is the Gelasian two-powers exposition in its fullest form. The reader who knows the Duo Sunt of Letter VIII (the letter to the Emperor Anastasius of 494) will recognize the same architecture, but with a different rhetorical end: the Duo Sunt establishes the asymmetry between the two powers (priestly authority is greater than royal power because it must give account for kings themselves at the divine judgment); the present passage establishes the distinction of offices (each power is fitted to its own kind of action and may not encroach on the other’s). The two formulations are complementary. Severinus Binius, in his early seventeenth-century edition of the councils, treated this passage as the core of Gelasius’s two-powers doctrine, to be read together with the Duo Sunt.
- ↩ A saeculari potestate nec ligari prorsus nec solvi posse pontificem. This is the operative conclusion the entire two-powers exposition exists to establish. The principle it articulates is foundational to Western canonical tradition on the relation of ecclesiastical and civil authority: a bishop, holding office in the spiritual order, cannot be subject to the binding-and-loosing power of secular authority, because secular authority operates in a different order altogether and has no jurisdictional reach into the spiritual one. The reader will note that Gelasius does not say the secular power is invalid in its own sphere; he says that its sphere does not extend to the binding or loosing of a pontiff. The principle protects both the integrity of episcopal order and (by symmetric implication) the integrity of secular government from the inappropriate intrusion of either into the other.
- ↩ Peter Mongus (“the Stammerer”) had been condemned by Pope Simplicius and remained under that sentence at his death. The historical question Gelasius is engaging is whether Peter could be considered to have been absolved by the imperial Henoticon of 482 — the formula promulgated by Emperor Zeno that attempted to reconcile the post-Chalcedonian factions by leaving certain disputed questions undecided, and which Acacius of Constantinople had used as the basis for receiving Peter back into communion. Gelasius’s argument: the Henoticon was an imperial act; imperial action alone cannot absolve a sentence pronounced by the Apostolic See; and any subsequent ecclesiastical assent to it was either flattery (if it followed) or invalid (if it was procured by improper means).
- ↩ The first horn of the dilemma. If pontifical assent followed the imperial act, then the act itself remains an imperial act — and the subsequent ecclesiastical signature on it is not a legitimate canonical sanction but an accommodation to imperial pressure. The reader will note the philosophical precision: the validity of an absolution depends on the order of its causes. An act begun by secular power is a secular act, and no amount of subsequent ecclesiastical signature can transform its origin.
- ↩ Four questions, each a canonical condition that any valid absolution would have had to satisfy. The fourth is the philosophically critical one: the same authority that bound must loose; and an absolution conducted while the binding authority did not even know of it cannot be a legitimate ecclesiastical act. The principle is one Gelasius repeats throughout the corpus — the same authority that binds must be the same authority that looses — and it has its theological grounding in the Petrine binding-and-loosing logion (Matt. 16:19), where the same Peter to whom the keys are given is the one whose successor must be the one who looses.
- ↩ The reply to the imagined objection. Even granting that the emperor only asked rather than commanded, the bishops were obligated to respond to the imperial request not by complying outside the ecclesiastical order but by directing the emperor to the proper canonical procedure. Their failure to do so transformed an imperial request into an irregular ecclesiastical act — which is precisely what makes the entire absolution null. The reader will note that Gelasius is preserving the principle of the two-powers doctrine even in his analysis of the bishops’ failure: the bishops should have used their priestly authority to teach the emperor the proper order, not abandoned that authority by accommodating the emperor’s request outside the order.
- ↩ De secundae sedis ageretur antistite, nec ab inferiore qualibet, sed a prima sede jure possit absolvi. The principle is articulated as a structural-jurisdictional fact: the bishop of the Second See — Alexandria, second by ancient order to Rome itself — can be absolved only by the First See. This is not a privilege of the First See over the Second; it is the structural ordering of the Apostolic Church. The reader who has followed the argument of Letter XV will recognize this as the same principle articulated there: the holder of the Second See cannot be received without the assent of the First. What in Letter XV was articulated to the Eastern bishops in the heat of the Acacian controversy is here articulated as a structural principle of the Apostolic order itself.
- ↩ Inferior quippe potiorem absolvere non potest: sola ergo potior inferiorem convenienter absolvit. This is one of the most quoted sentences in the entire Gelasian corpus, and one of the foundational principles of Western canonical tradition on hierarchical jurisdiction. The principle is not Gelasius’s invention; it is the articulation of an order he understood himself to inherit. Its application here is that no Eastern bishop — neither Acacius of Constantinople nor any group of Eastern colleagues — could absolve Peter of Alexandria, because the sentence binding Peter had been pronounced by the First See, and only the First See could loose it. The principle of structural-jurisdictional asymmetry between the Sees of Rome and Alexandria is here stated not as a consequence of any specific grant but as a structural fact of the Apostolic order.
- ↩ The conclusion is severe. The Eastern bishops who participated in the supposed absolution did not succeed in freeing Peter of Alexandria; they only succeeded in implicating themselves in the same condemnation. The principle is the same one operating throughout the chain-of-communion argument of Letter XV: those who give communion to the unworthy thereby implicate themselves in the unworthiness; those who participate in an irregular absolution thereby become themselves bound by the irregularity. Peter remained bound; the Eastern bishops became bound with him.
- ↩ The Latin syntax of this sentence is genuinely tangled. The substance is: those who themselves are bound by transgressing communion cannot loose another; and those who are themselves heretical or polluted by heretical communion cannot pronounce a valid judgment of absolution upon someone in the same condition. The structure of the argument mirrors the chain-of-communion argument of Letter XV: Catholic absolution requires the absolver to be in Catholic communion; if he is not, he cannot absolve. In the East at the time of the supposed absolution of Peter, the Catholic bishops had been driven from their sees and replaced by those who consented to error or were in communion with those who did. The supposed absolvers were therefore, by the very fact of holding their sees, witnesses to their own incapacity to absolve.
- ↩ The Latin nunquam non errasse monstrantur is a litotes — a double negative used for emphasis. Literally: “are shown never not to have erred.” The construction is more forceful than a simple positive (“are shown always to have erred”); it presents the universality of the error as an ineradicable fact, as if every attempt to find a moment of fidelity must fail. I have preserved the double negative in English because the rhetorical force is genuinely different from the simpler positive form.
- ↩ The two exclamations are sarcastic. Gelasius is asking the reader to look at the very persons who are alleged to have absolved Peter of Alexandria, and to recognize that these are precisely the persons who themselves had been made guilty before any others — by their own participation in heretical communion, by their own toleration of the expulsion of Catholic bishops, by their own confounding of Catholic and Apostolic purity. The notion that a valid synod for absolving the guilty could have been entered upon with such persons is presented as self-refuting: a synod requires Catholic membership to issue a Catholic judgment, and the proposed members were themselves the most guilty of all.
- ↩ The closing two questions are the rhetorical climax of the treatise. They are not abstract questions; they are questions of plain fact, presented as if to a jury. The Eastern situation is described in terms that make only one answer possible. Catholic bishops were in fact being expelled throughout the East — this was a documented historical fact in 484 and the years following, when the Acacian Schism produced its full effects. Therefore, by simple logical inference, those who remained in their sees were either heretics themselves or in communion with heretics. There is no third possibility consistent with the observable facts. The questions are designed not to elicit reflection but to compel acknowledgment of what the facts already show.
Historical Commentary