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.

 

Late medieval popes

In earlier posts (available here and here), I discussed why popes were not automatically "in charge," taking the story up to the twelfth century.  Here I discuss some late medieval popes.

Although the Investiture Controversy was officially settled in 1130, disputes continued between popes and emperors throughout the twelfth century.  Popes created anti-emperors as the emperors created anti-popes, leaving it hard for people to know who to follow.  The English kings, who had mostly stood on the sidelines during the Investiture Controversy, got into major trouble with Rome when Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered, apparently at the urging of King Henry II.

Probably the height of papal authority came only with Pope Innocent III (1198-1216).  Because the emperor during his time was just a boy, Frederick II, Innocent was able to avoid pope-emperor conflicts and hold councils that, among other important issues, defined "transubstantiation," changed the "forbidden degrees" of incest from seven to four, and recognized the Franciscans and Dominicans.

If Innocent thought that popes were now in charge, however, he was sadly mistaken.  A number of heresies broke out during the thirteenth century, people announcing that they understood Christianity better than did the organized church.  Even worse, Frederick II defied the popes once he grew up, promising all sorts of things (like going on Crusade or giving up control of Sicily) which he had no intention of doing.

After Frederick died in 1250, popes hunted down and killed all his children and grandchildren, legitimate and illegitimate.  Although they had certainly put the emperors "in their place" (future western emperors were very respectful), they had lost much of their moral authority.

Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) became pope after his predecessor, originally a holy hermit, resigned as pope (the first man ever to do so and the only one until Benedict XVI in 2013) and quickly died under suspicious circumstances.  Boniface at one point declared a Crusade against his own cardinals and made the most sweeping statements of papal superiority ever, before or since.

But when he alienated the French king (Philip IV), the king sent people to arrest the pope "to try him for heresy."  Earlier French kings had normally been papal allies, but not anymore.  The pope died before any trial could get underway, but for much of the fourteenth century all subsequent popes sought to demonstrate that they were the helpful little friends of the French kings, not even living in Rome but rather in Avignon (southern France).

When in 1378 the pope finally decided to return to Rome and immediately died, the Roman populace clamored for a Roman pope.  The terrified cardinals elected one, then, declaring that the election was void because they had acted under duress, they went home to Avignon and elected a different man pope.  The Roman pope chose new cardinals of his own.

Now there were two popes, one in Rome and one in Avignon.  Europe was divided.  France of course supported the French pope and Italy the Italian pope.  England, at war with France, supported the Italian pope.  Scotland, distrusting England, supported the French pope.

This Great Schism left people deciding that neither was right.  A council held to resolve the conflict and to choose a "compromise" pope just ended up creating a third pope.  The Schism was resolved finally at the 1415 Council of Constance, but for nearly forty years it had been hard to say who had really been pope, and few people cared anymore.

After 1415, the popes (back in Rome) settled down to become one more Renaissance tyrant.  And only a century later, here came Martin Luther and the Reformation.

(By the way, "papal infallibility" was established only in the nineteenth century, not the Middle Ages.  And popes have to declare something infallible for it to count.  Most of what they say is not infallible.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014