Gelasius I

Pope Gelasius I was Bishop of Rome from 1 March 492 until his death on 19 November 496, succeeding Felix III. The Liber Pontificalis describes him as natione Afer, of African origin, and names his father Valerius. Later tradition has often counted him as the third pope of African descent, after Victor I and Miltiades. A precise year of birth is not recorded, and the sources do not settle whether he was born in Roman North Africa or in Rome to a family of African origin. By the pontificate of Felix III he was already a leading deacon of the Roman Church, and the close continuity of style and policy between Felix and Gelasius has led historians to conclude that Gelasius drafted important papal letters while still a deacon. He was thus formed entirely within the Roman clerical tradition of the later fifth century, even if his family roots lay in Africa.

His brief pontificate fell in a politically fractured Italy. The Western imperial government had ended in 476; Odoacer ruled until Theodoric the Ostrogoth established control of Italy in 493. In the East, Emperor Zeno was succeeded in 491 by Anastasius I. The Acacian schism, opened in 484 when Felix III excommunicated Patriarch Acacius of Constantinople over Zeno’s Henotikon, remained the central ecclesiastical crisis of the age. Gelasius refused any restoration of communion with Constantinople that did not include the erasure of Acacius and his successors from the diptychs and a clear rejection of compromise formulas that, in Rome’s judgment, endangered the definition of Chalcedon. He dealt practically with Theodoric, an Arian ruler, on questions of order and property in Italy, while insisting that the bishop of Rome could not surrender doctrine to imperial pressure from the East.

Gelasius’s best-known statement on spiritual and temporal power is the letter conventionally called Duo sunt, addressed to Emperor Anastasius in 494. There he distinguished the sacred authority of priests from royal power and argued that the priestly charge is the weightier of the two, because priests must give account before God even for the souls of kings. The formulation drew on earlier Latin tradition and later became a classic reference in Western debates about church and empire. In disciplinary and doctrinal letters he also opposed lingering Pelagian teaching in Dalmatia and Italy, required communion under both kinds as a means of exposing Manichaean refusal of wine, and attacked the continued celebration of the Lupercalia in Rome as a pagan survival unfit for a Christian city. He asserted that the apostolic see is judged by no other see, a claim consistent with the Roman position developed across the fifth century.

For a fifth-century pope he left a comparatively large body of writing: decretals, tractates, and letters survive in substantial number and show a dense, sometimes harsh Latin style. A decree listing received and rejected books, the Decretum Gelasianum, has long been attached to his name, though modern scholarship treats the text as composite and at least partly later. The so-called Gelasian Sacramentary likewise bears his name but is preserved in an eighth-century Frankish form; it may contain older Roman prayers rather than a book he personally issued. Near-contemporary notices, including the Liber Pontificalis, stress his care for the poor during scarcity. He died in Rome on 19 November 496 and was buried at St. Peter’s. The Roman Martyrology keeps his feast on 21 November. He was succeeded by Anastasius II. Gelasius has been venerated as a saint in the Latin Church from an early date; there was no later papal canonization of the medieval or modern type.