Anastasius I

Pope Anastasius I was Bishop of Rome from November 399 until his death in December 401. The Liber Pontificalis records that he was a Roman by birth and that his father was named Maximus. Almost nothing else can be established about his family, education, or career before he succeeded Pope Siricius. His election took place in a church already marked by the disciplinary decrees of Damasus I and Siricius and by growing Roman involvement in theological disputes that originated in the Greek East. The Western Empire was then ruled by Honorius, while the see of Rome remained the principal ecclesiastical authority in Italy and claimed a wider appellate role in the churches of the West.

The defining act of Anastasius's short pontificate was his response to the Origenist controversy as it reached Latin readers. Rufinus of Aquileia had translated Origen's De Principiis, and the translation, together with Rufinus's apologetic writings, alarmed those who regarded Origen's views on the pre-existence of souls, the resurrection body, and the ultimate restoration of rational creatures as incompatible with the rule of faith. Anastasius condemned Origen's teaching. A letter of his to Venerius, bishop of Milan, survives in which he states that Origen's doctrines had been rejected and that he wished the Milanese church to be informed of the Roman judgment. Saint Jerome, by then a fierce opponent of Rufinus and of Origenist speculation, praised Anastasius as a man of outstanding holiness who was not afraid to strike at heresy; Jerome's notices are the most important contemporary comments on the pope's character. The condemnation did not end the literary feud between Jerome and Rufinus, but it placed the Roman see clearly against the more speculative side of the Origenist tradition in the Latin West.

In Eastern affairs Anastasius continued Roman policy in the long schism at Antioch. He declined to recognize Paulinus II and instead treated Flavian I as the legitimate bishop of Antioch, a stance consistent with the line taken by his predecessors after the Council of Constantinople in 381. He also maintained contact with the church in Africa, where the Donatist schism remained unresolved and where Augustine of Hippo, already bishop of Hippo Regius, was becoming the leading Catholic voice. Direct papal leadership in the Donatist struggle and in the later Pelagian controversy belonged mainly to Anastasius's successor, but African bishops already looked to Rome for confirmation of their synods. No sermons or extensive theological treatises by Anastasius himself are preserved; his surviving profile is that of a disciplinarian and a guardian of received doctrine rather than an original theologian.

Anastasius died in Rome on 19 December 401 and, according to the Liber Pontificalis, was buried in the Catacomb of Pontian on the Via Portuensis. He was succeeded by Innocent I, whose long pontificate would overshadow Anastasius's brief reign. A tradition, connected with a statement of Jerome and with some readings of the papal biographies, held that Innocent was Anastasius's son; other recensions of the Liber Pontificalis give Innocent a different father, and the relationship is not regarded as historically certain. Anastasius has been venerated as a saint since late antiquity. The Roman Martyrology assigns him the feast day of 19 December. He is not associated with a religious order, and no securely documented patronage, marriage, or children can be claimed on the basis of the surviving evidence. His historical importance lies less in the length of his reign than in the firmness with which, in a few years, the Roman church under his leadership rejected Origenist speculation and restated its position in the Antiochene schism.