When we come to the termination of the schism this fact is to be borne in mind as being accepted voluntarily by those whom it specially concerned, and whose actions during a hundred years immediately preceding it condemned. For the decree, besides, does not acknowledge the see of Constantinople as patriarchal. Acacius had been appointing those who were really patriarchs: here his own pretended patriarchate is shown to be an infringement on the ancient order of the Church. Here the Pope in synod, as before in his letter to the Illyrian bishops, declares of the see of Constantinople that "it holds no rank among bishops".
And, again, the Roman Council, in all its wording, censures the bishops who had been so weak as to accept a decree upon the faith of the Church from the hand of emperors, first the usurper Basiliscus, then Zeno, and at the time itself Anastasius. And under this censure lay not only Acacius, but the three following bishops of Constantinople—Fravita, Euphemius, and Macedonius. For though the last two were firm enough to suffer deposition, and afterwards death, for the faith of Chalcedon, they were not firm enough to refuse the emperor's imposition of an imperial standard in doctrine, the acceptance of which would have destroyed the essential liberty of the Church.
Two months after the violent deposition of Euphemius at Constantinople, Pope Gelasius closed a pontificate of less than five years, in which he resisted the wickedness and tyranny of Anastasius, as Pope Felix had resisted the like in Zeno. Space has allowed me to quote but a few passages of the noble letters which he has left to the treasury of the Church. It may be noted that with his pontificate closes the period of about twenty years, from 476 to 496, in which no single ruler of East or West, great or small, professed the Catholic faith. The eastern emperors were Eutychean; the new western rulers Arian, save when they were pagan. The next year the conversion of Clovis, with his Franks, opens a new series of events. We may allow Gelasius,[68] in his letter to Rusticus, bishop of Lyons, to express the character of his time. "Your charity, most loving brother, has brought us great consolation in the midst of that whirlwind of calamities and temptations under which we are almost sunk. We will not weary you by writing how straitened we have been. Our brother Epiphanius (bishop of Ticinum or Pavia) will inform you how great is the persecution we bear on account of the most impious Acacius. But we do not faint. Under such pressure neither courage fails nor zeal. Distressed and straitened as we are, we trust in Him who with the trial will find an issue, and if He allows us for a time to be oppressed, will not allow us to be overwhelmed. Dearest brother, see that your affection, and that of yours, to us, or rather to the Apostolic See, fail not, for they who are fixed into the Rock with the Rock shall be exalted."[69]
NOTES:
[29] See Philips, Kirchenrecht, vol. iii., sec. 119.
[30] Tillemont, xvi. 68.
[31] Simplicii, Ep. viii.; Photius, i. 115.
[32] Pope Gelasius, 13th letter.
[33] Mansi, vii. 1032-6; Jaffé, 359.
[34] Mansi, vii. 1028; Jaffé, 360.