George Demacopoulos: ANTIQUITYAre All Universalist Politics Local?: Pope Gelasius’ International Ambition as a Tonic for Local Humiliation

Are All Universalist Politics Local?:  Pope Gelasius’ International Ambition as a Tonic for Local Humiliation

Pope Gelasius I’s letter, Ad Anastasium, famously distinguishes between priestly and imperial authority, subordinating the latter because even emperors are in need of priests for their salvation.  Since the middle ages, papal advocates pointed to this letter as evidence of Roman ecclesiastical and political authority stretching back to antiquity.  Quite surprisingly, most modern scholarship has equally interpreted the letter (and Gelasius’ career in general) as an important moment in the development of papal strength and ambition.  This paper proposes an alternate thesis—that the assertions to preeminence in the Ad Anastasium were designed to mask both domestic and international humiliation and that its famous statements of Church/State interaction have as much to do with local concerns as geo-political ones.  Additionally, the paper argues that it is a testament to Gelasius’ rhetorical skill that subsequent generations have understood the pontiff to possess a measure of domestic and international influence that he never actually enjoyed.

This paper is understood to relate directly to the Workshop “The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity” in that it differentiates the way the way that Roman ecclesiastical authority actually functioned in late antiquity from the way that has been mistakenly understood to have functioned since the middle ages.