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.