Pope Gelasius I

 As the discussion of the proper relationship of pope and king (or, more specifically, pope and president) continues to gain attention in the US, it seems appropriate to discuss Pope Gelasius I. After all, he is responsible for the Gelasian framing of the issue.  (Um, yeah, I hear you saying. Don't worry.  All is about to become clear.)

Gelasius I (pope 492-496) was only in office for four years, but he made them count. A native of North Africa while it was still firmly under the Roman emperors (though some scholars think his parents may have moved to the city of Rome before he was born), he is best known for his extensive pronouncements on church governance and on heresy vs. orthodoxy, many contained in letters that were copied and circulated.

Indeed, he was so well known for his writings that a number of works by other authors, written more or less around the time of his life, became attributed to him. Modern scholars have spent a good deal of energy trying to sort them out. He is indeed sometimes credited with determining which books actually belonged in the Christian Bible out of all the accounts written in the first centuries AD, because he composed a treatise defending the list, although it had in fact been determined a century earlier (at least for western Christendom) at the 397 Council of Carthage.

And now we come to the Gelasian framing of church and state, or more specifically church and empire. Let's have some background.  Gelasius argued that the emperor (now in Byzantium) and the patriarch of Constantinople were completely wrong on doctrine. Although the Nicene creed of a century and a half earlier had emphasized the dual nature of Christ, both fully human and fully divine, the emperor and patriarch insisted that Christ only had a single divine nature. Rank heresy! said the pope, who was also trying to assert that popes were over all Christians. The patriarch did not count as equal to the pope, because, as Gelasius pointed out, he himself was the heir to Peter, chief of the apostles, and who knows what the patriarch was heir to.

(Interestingly, Gelasius was able to carry on cordial relations with the Ostrogoths, a Germanic group who had taken over political rule in much of Italy, and who were Christian but followed the Arian version, which made Jesus essentially a totally-human-though-inspired prophet.  The Ostrogoths were after all right there, not like the emperor and patriarch off in Constantinople. You gotta pick your battles.)

When the emperor tried to reply to Gelasius that he, as emperor, was over everybody (including pesky popes), Gelasius came up with his famous formulation, "There are two."  Basically (paraphrasing here), he said that there were two that governed the world, the priests and bishops on the one hand (this included popes), and on the other hand princes and kings (which included emperors).

Interestingly, although he said there were "two," he did not specify if this meant two authorities, two powers, two principles, or what, but his meaning was clear. He went on to clarify that  the worldly power was inferior to the priestly power in matters of religion and the spirit (take that! mistaken idea of the nature of Christ), though the priestly power was inferior to the temporal (worldly) in temporal matters.

This idea of two powers/authorities was tremendously influential in the Middle Ages, with popes and emperors claiming every issue that came up was either (respectively) religious or worldly/political.  It was also connected to the passage in the Bible where the apostles are wondering if they might have to take up arms to protect Jesus from the Romans and say, "Lord, here are two swords," and Jesus replies, "It is enough." (In the event Jesus did not fight when the Romans came for him.). The "two swords" became attached to the "there are two" Gelasian framing.

(For those who've read my Yurt fantasy novels, you may recall that a common saying was "There are three who rule the world," where I've added the wizards to the priests and the kings.)

Although the "two" doctrine was Pope Gelasius's chief long-term contribution, he also is noted for having shut down the Lupercalia. This was a pagan Roman festival, held in February.  Indeed, the name for the month comes from the Latin februum, meaning a purification or cleansing.  Romans had long celebrated this festival, but Pope Gelasius did not feel it fit well with Christianity, being pagan and all.  Perhaps to lead people away from the Lupercalia, new emphasis was given to the feast of the Purification of the Virgin, established on February 2, commemorating Mary's official "purification" at the Temple in Jerusalem according to Jewish law, 40 days after giving birth.  (This is way, way pre-groundhog day.)

Fun fact: The Roman calendar originally had ten months, as their number system (like ours) was base-10.  Ever wonder why the months September through December have names that sound like Seventh through Tenth?  That's why. The year ended at the end of December, essentially at the winter solstice, then there was "winter," and months started up again with March (named for Mars), getting underway for the equinox.  At a certain point, well BC, the Romans decided that winter might as well have months as well, January named for Janus, the doorkeeper god who stands between last year and the new year, and February for Lupercalia-time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval Christianity, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

 

Sylvester I

 With the American president now feuding (verbally) with the pope, and people in his orbit even threatening to pull an "Avignon papacy" on Pope Leo, it seems appropriate to dip back into early Christian history for some context on church and state and a glimpse of the ways that secular and religious rulers interacted.

Popes are first and foremost bishops of Rome, the head Christian in their city. Bishops as rulers of their flock go back to the early days of Christianity.  Most Christian denominations have bishops, including the Amish.  In the first thousand years or so AD, bishops were locally elected (as they still are in Amish communities), and they ran the Church between them.  The sense gradually increased that the bishop of Rome should be over all other bishops, just as the Roman emperors were over all kings and governors.  It helped that the bishop of Rome was supposed to be heir of Saint Peter, who was the leader of the apostles.

(The Bible makes Peter the leader of the apostles, but it doesn't put him in Rome.  Rather, he preached in Antioch. Let's not worry about that now.  After all, the basilica of Saint Peter's has his bones.  Shouldn't that be good enough?)

 

This idea of the supremacy of the Roman pontiff really started with Sylvester I (pope 314-335 AD, pictured above in a later medieval image).  He was bishop of Rome at the time of Constantine, first Roman emperor to be baptized.  His feast day is December 31, so as you celebrate New Year's Eve, be sure to dedicate a glass of champagne to Saint Sylvester, as he is now known. (Germans sometimes refer to New Year's Eve as "Silvester" in his honor.)

Pope Sylvester presided over the Council of Nicaea, called in 325 to debate the true nature of the Trinity, resulting in the Nicene Creed, still the basis of Catholic teaching (and a lot of Protestant teaching as well).  Once Constantine made it acceptable to be Christian in the Roman Empire (formerly officially pagan, in spite of including a lot of Jews, Christians, and those with various other beliefs), Sylvester started the construction of the great church now known as Old Saint Peter's, which stood until the sixteenth century, when the current Saint Peter's basilica was built in its place.

Once Christianity was tolerated out in the open, and indeed soon became the official religion of the Empire, there began to be hints of a debate that was never fully resolved:  in a Christian empire, who is the ultimate authority? the primary Christian (the pope) or the emperor?  As I've discussed before, popes really only became the effective heads of organized Christendom in the eleventh century and promptly became involved in a knock-down drag-out battle with emperors and kings which lasted on and off for four centuries.  ("Oh yeah? I depose you!" "You can't! I excommunicate you!" "So what! You're a heretic!" "No, you're the heretic!" "Oh yeah?" etc.) The squabbles between president and pope going on now have a long historical background.

Efforts by the popes to establish supremacy within the Empire did not wait for the eleventh century (much less the twenty-first).  When Constantine moved his political capitol to Constantinople in the fourth century, Pope Sylvester stayed behind in Rome.  He was probably just as glad not to have the emperor there.  Constantine after all had ordered that the Council of Nicaea be held to settle questions of the Trinity, even though he himself was not yet baptized (that happened only as he was dying). Although he didn't influence the council's outcome, he sat right there observing.

With no emperor on hand, Sylvester and his successors became the effective rulers of the city of Rome and surrounding territory, including defending against Goths, Huns, and the like.  But that wasn't enough.  By the sixth century, an elaborate story had grown up in which Constantine contacted leprosy but was healed by Pope Sylvester.  In gratitude the emperor gave Sylvester his own crown and other imperial insignia, led the pope's horse by the bridle (acting as groom), and declared that the bishop of Rome was above all other bishops.  Sylvester, not to be outdone in generosity and humility, gave the crown back -- but note the implication, the pope is the one who gets to decide if a man deserves to be crowned.

In the eighth century this story was improved further by the "discovery" of the Donation of Constantine, a supposed letter in which Constantine, on his way out the door to Constantinople, gave rule of the whole western half of the Empire to the pope.  Both popes and emperors believed this document to real, not a forgery, until the Renaissance, but the emperors always had some good reason to argue it didn't apply.  ("At least not now. Besides, the pope was a heretic.")

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval Christianity, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Kings

 After last weekend's "No Kings" rallies, it seems appropriate to blog about kings.

Kings have been the default for most societies, once a group of people gets above a certain size. Greece and Rome, seen by American founding fathers as inspiring democracy and a republican form of government, had kings before Athens decided on democracy (unlike the other Greek city-states) and Rome decided to become a republic (and remember Rome later became ruled by emperors).  The ancient Mesopotamian city-states all had kings, and the pharaohs in Egypt were kings under a different name.

Medieval Europe took kings for granted. As new people settled in the old Roman Empire, whether Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Visigoths, or whatever, they were under the rule of kings.  A lot of these kingdoms were very small, but the idea of a single ruler being in charge of a territory seemed self-evident. Scandinavia had never been under Roman rule, but they too were ruled by kings.

Christianity also took kings for granted. After all, the Old Testament had been full of the doings of Hebrew kings, going back to Saul, David, and Solomon. Churches depicted these kings on their facades, as in the example of the royal head below, which was on the front of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris from the twelfth century until knocked off in the French Revolution (a new "improved" head replaced it in the nineteenth century).

 God and Jesus were often referred to as kings.  With the heavenly hierarchy organized with one central person in charge (or actually three persons united in one, let's not get distracted here), it made sense that earth too should have kings.

Kings have usually been hereditary, but there were always exceptions.  We might think of a king's oldest son as automatically being the royal heir, but it didn't have to be that way. William the Conqueror of England's oldest son, Robert, became duke of Normandy, and his second son, William II, king of England.  (Since the Conqueror had been duke of Normandy himself originally, that was the true family property, suitable for an oldest son.)

William the Conqueror himself, of course, as his nickname suggests, really became king by conquest, not by heredity, though he had a family connection to the last Anglo-Saxon kings.  In the Merovingian era, kings had routinely tried to conquer their brothers' or cousins' kingdoms. All early medieval kings were wary of marrying off their daughters to men who might see this connection as a justification for going for the throne themselves. And Charlemagne's own father became king by announcing he was a better man for the position than the current (Merovingian) king,whom he unceremoniously dumped into a monastery.

Medieval kings were never absolute. They were supposed to act with the advice of a council, which became formalized in England around the end of the thirteenth century with the establishment of Parliament.  Other countries set up similar bodies, representatives of the country as a whole (in practice the wealthy and powerful) to advise on important matters.  Even before Parliament, King John of England was reined in by Magna Carta (1215) when he seemed to be acting too much like a tyrant.

Kings of course would have liked to be absolute.  James I of England (James VI of Scotland) first spelled out the theoretical justification of divine-right monarchy.  But this was post-medieval, and his son, Charles I (seventeenth century) was beheaded when Parliament decided he was acting too much like a tyrant.  By the time his son was restored to the throne, England had decided it was going to continue to have kings, but that Parliament would have the final say on important matters (as they do now, when their kings have become essentially powerless).

In France the Estates General was much weaker during this time, and you get kings like Louis XIV declaring that he himself embodied France. ("L'état, c'est moi!") Kings and princes and dukes ruled small states in what is now Germany and Italy, their ambition to be absolute rulers checked primarily by the small size of their territory.

The American colonies were very unusual in deciding to become a country without a king.  George Washington in fact was offered a chance to be king and turned it down.  The colonies had had governors but, with a king over them in England, they'd never had kings on-site, so doing without kings was not too big a leap.  Towns and villages had been run locally ("town hall meetings"), so citizen participation seemed obvious.

Today few kings are.still in power worldwide. Those called king (or queen) have symbolic and ceremonial power for the most part but cannot dictate policy.  Presidents, elected men and women, may on occasion be seen eyeing the power that kings had in the post-medieval period and wishing some for themselves.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

For more on medieval government, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback