Pope Zosimus

Pope Zosimus was Bishop of Rome from 18 March 417 until his death on 26 December 418. The Liber Pontificalis describes him as a Greek by origin and the son of a man named Abram; nothing further about his birthplace, birth date, or early career can be established from reliable sources. Later local traditions that place his origin in southern Italy are not corroborated by contemporary evidence. He succeeded Pope Innocent I and held the Roman see for less than two years. Despite the brevity of his pontificate, it was dominated by disputes that tested the reach of Roman authority in Africa and Gaul and that forced a public reversal of his own first judgment in the Pelagian controversy.

The central theological episode of his reign was his treatment of Pelagius and Caelestius. Both men had already been condemned by African councils and by Zosimus’s predecessor. After Caelestius appeared in Rome and Pelagius forwarded a written profession of faith from the East, Zosimus at first found their statements acceptable and wrote to the African bishops in a sense that appeared to clear them. The African episcopate, including Augustine of Hippo and Aurelius of Carthage, rejected that leniency and restated the condemnation of Pelagian teaching. Imperial power then intervened: in 418 the emperor Honorius issued a rescript against the Pelagians. Under this combined ecclesiastical and civil pressure Zosimus changed course. He circulated a letter known as the Tractoria, requiring bishops to subscribe to the condemnation of Pelagius and Caelestius, and thereby brought the Roman see into line with the African and imperial decision against Pelagianism.

Jurisdictional conflict accompanied the doctrinal one. When the African priest Apiarius of Sicca, deposed by his bishop, appealed to Rome, Zosimus ordered his restoration and cited canons that he took to be Nicene but which were in fact canons of the Council of Serdica. The African bishops challenged both the merits of the case and the legal basis of the papal intervention; the dispute outlasted Zosimus himself. In Gaul he granted wide metropolitan rights over the Gallic churches to Patroclus of Arles and tried to make Arles the ordinary channel between Gaul and the apostolic see. That grant was resisted by other Gallic bishops, notably Proculus of Marseille, and did not produce a stable reorganization of the Gallic hierarchy.

Zosimus died in Rome on 26 December 418. According to the Liber Pontificalis he was buried in the cemetery of Cyriaca on the Via Tiburtina, beside the body of Saint Lawrence, the site later associated with the Basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls. He is entered as a saint in the Roman Martyrology and commemorated on 26 December. His short reign confirmed Rome’s eventual rejection of Pelagianism, yet it also displayed the friction that arose when the Roman bishop asserted appellate and metropolitan claims over churches that already possessed strong conciliar traditions of their own.