Pope Simplicius served as bishop of Rome from March 3, 468 until his death on March 10, 483. Born at Tivoli to a father named Castinus, he succeeded Pope Hilarius and governed the Roman Church through the collapse of the Western Roman Empire — Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476, two years before the most active period of Simplicius’s surviving correspondence — and through the opening stages of the crisis that would produce the Acacian Schism.
Simplicius’s surviving letters, preserved in Patrologia Latina volume 58, constitute the most complete record of how the Acacian Schism became inevitable. The correspondence falls into two phases. In the first (468–478), Simplicius establishes a Spanish vicariate at Hispalis, rebukes the archbishop of Ravenna for unauthorized ordinations, resists the Emperor Basiliscus’s attempt to reverse the Council of Chalcedon, and — upon the restoration of the Emperor Zeno — works in close cooperation with Acacius of Constantinople to restore the Catholic bishop Timothy Salofaciolus to Alexandria, to secure the condemnation of Timothy Aelurus and Peter Mongus, and to maintain the Nicene order of provincial ordinations against Constantinople’s jurisdictional expansion. In the second phase (478–483), the cooperation breaks down: Simplicius’s repeated requests for the exile of Peter Mongus go unanswered, Acacius stops reporting to Rome, and the emperor proposes Peter Mongus — the man Simplicius had spent years trying to exile — as bishop of Alexandria. Simplicius’s last letters are marked by escalating rebukes of Acacius’s silence, direct commands (mandamus) rather than fraternal requests, and the explicit warning that neglecting the Christian people makes a bishop a hireling rather than a shepherd.
The letters are rich in evidence for the Roman bishop’s self-understanding of his office. Simplicius grounds his authority in the Pauline formula of 2 Corinthians 11:28 — the sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum, the solicitude of all the Churches — and exercises it through confirmatory jurisdiction over episcopal elections (the apostolic assent that gives an election its “desired firmness”), appellate jurisdiction over canonical disputes, delegation of oversight to Constantinople as Rome’s intermediary with the imperial court, and the imposition of reporting obligations on the patriarch of Constantinople. He names the blessed Apostle Peter as the guarantor of the emperor’s pledge to preserve the Nicene canons, articulates the canonical principle that a returning heretic must pass through satisfactio before any question of promotion, and declares that whatever the universal assembly of priests has established at Chalcedon is held with inviolable observance throughout the world.
The Simplicius corpus on this site is the only complete English translation of these letters. The NPNF (Schaff) does not include Simplicius; no other public-domain English edition exists.
