Callixtus I

Callixtus I (also spelled Callistus) was Bishop of Rome in the early third century, conventionally dated from about 217 or 218 until his death around 222. Almost everything that can be said of his earlier life depends on the hostile narrative of his contemporary Hippolytus of Rome in the Refutation of All Heresies, a source that must be used with caution because Hippolytus was a theological and disciplinary opponent. According to that account, Callixtus was a slave of Carpophorus, a Christian attached to the imperial household in Rome. Fellow Christians deposited money with him in an arrangement that functioned as a bank; the funds were lost, Callixtus fled, and he was recaptured. Hippolytus further relates an attempted suicide by drowning, a sentence to the treadmill, release at the petition of other Christians, and a later disturbance in a synagogue when Callixtus tried to recover debts from Jews. Denounced as a Christian, he was condemned to the mines in Sardinia. Toward the end of the second century he was among prisoners freed through the influence of Marcia, the Christian concubine of the emperor Commodus.

After his return from Sardinia, Pope Victor I is said to have sent him to Antium with a regular allowance. Under Pope Zephyrinus he was brought back to Rome, ordained deacon, and placed in charge of the Christian cemetery on the Appian Way that later took his name, the Catacomb of Callixtus. In that role he organized burial for the Roman church and became Zephyrinus’s principal adviser, a position that already drew Hippolytus’s criticism. When Zephyrinus died, Callixtus was elected Bishop of Rome. Hippolytus rejected the election; later tradition has often treated Hippolytus as the first antipope, though the exact character and duration of the resulting schism remain debated among historians.

The pontificate was dominated by disputes over Trinitarian language and over the church’s penitential discipline. Hippolytus accused Callixtus of modalism or of protecting Sabellius, yet Callixtus in fact excommunicated Sabellius. He also pursued a more merciful policy than Roman rigorists wished: after due penance he admitted to communion those who had committed grave sins such as adultery and even murder, and he recognized as Christian marriages certain unions that Roman civil law did not, including marriages between free women and slaves. These decisions, together with his servile origins and the banking scandal Hippolytus narrated, supplied the material for a bitterly polemical portrait that has colored all subsequent biography.

Independent evidence for the manner of his death is thin. Later Roman tradition, including the Liber Pontificalis and legendary Acts of Callixtus, presents him as a martyr, sometimes claiming that he was killed in a popular rising or thrown down a well on a site later associated with the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Modern historians generally treat those martyrdom narratives as unreliable in detail, while accepting that he died in Rome around 222, during the reign of Alexander Severus. He was buried not in the Appian Way catacomb that bears his name but in the cemetery of Calepodius on the Via Aurelia. Relics associated with him were later translated, notably to Santa Maria in Trastevere.

The Roman Church has long observed his feast on 14 October. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church and in several other Christian traditions; because formal papal canonization did not yet exist in the third century, his cult rests on ancient liturgical veneration rather than a later decree. He is regarded as a patron of cemetery workers, a patronage that reflects his historical association with the Roman Christian cemeteries. The catacomb he administered as deacon became one of the most important burial complexes of early Christian Rome and the resting place of many of his successors, even though he himself was interred elsewhere.