Innocent I

Innocent I was Bishop of Rome in the early fifth century, from about 401 until 417. The Liber Pontificalis describes him as a native of Albano in Latium and the son of a man named Innocentius. Jerome, who knew the Roman church of that generation, instead identified his father as Pope Anastasius I, the immediate predecessor whom Innocent was elected to succeed. No contemporary source records a year of birth, and modern historians treat both the Albano origin and the Anastasian paternity as traditional rather than independently proven. His election is conventionally dated to December 401. The pontificate unfolded under the Western emperor Honorius, while the imperial court resided at Ravenna and Italy faced repeated Gothic incursions.

Innocent advanced a high view of the authority of the Roman see. He wrote to bishops in Gaul, Spain, and Illyricum that the Roman church preserved apostolic tradition and that weighty doctrinal and disciplinary cases (causae maiores) ought to be referred to the apostolic see. He treated the bishop of Thessalonica as a vicar for the prefecture of Illyricum, a region claimed by both Rome and Constantinople. After John Chrysostom was deposed from Constantinople in 404, Innocent declined to accept the sentence, corresponded in Chrysostom's favour, and severed communion with the Eastern bishops responsible until Chrysostom's memory was restored to the diptychs. In 405 he replied to Exuperius of Toulouse with a list of the canonical scriptures received at Rome and instructions on which apocryphal books were not to be read publicly in church. In March 416 he sent Decentius of Gubbio a detailed letter on Roman liturgical custom, covering the fermentum sent from the papal Mass to the titular churches, confirmation, the kiss of peace, and the respective roles of bishop and presbyter. That letter remains an important witness to the early Roman rite.

In August 410 the Visigoths under Alaric captured and plundered Rome. Innocent was absent, having travelled to Ravenna to intercede with Honorius for the city and to seek terms that might avert the catastrophe. The sack, though not the wholesale annihilation sometimes imagined in later memory, was a profound shock to the Roman world and formed part of the background to Augustine of Hippo's City of God. Innocent returned to a capital whose churches and aristocratic households had been despoiled and continued to govern the Roman church during the subsequent years of imperial weakness in the West.

Toward the end of his life Innocent was drawn into the dispute over Pelagius and Caelestius. Councils at Carthage and Milevis in Africa condemned their teaching on grace and original sin and asked Rome to confirm the sentence. In January 417 Innocent wrote to the African bishops, endorsing the condemnation and declaring Pelagius and Caelestius out of communion unless they recanted. Augustine regarded this Roman judgment as closing the case for the African church. Innocent died in Rome on 12 March 417, before Pelagius's subsequent appeal had been fully heard; his successor Zosimus at first adopted a more cautious line. Innocent was buried in the cemetery of Pontianus on the Via Portuensis. The Latin church has honoured him as a saint, and his feast is kept on 28 July.