e for
the bishop of the imperial city to emancipate himself from the control of
the Lateran Patriarcheium. Having gained great renown by his defence of the
Council of Chalcedon against the usurper Basiliscus, having denounced at
Rome the misdeeds and the heresy of the Eutychean who was elected by that
party at Alexandria, and having so been high in the trust of Pope
Simplicius, he turned against both Pope and Council. He set up two heretics
as patriarchs--Peter the Stammerer, the very man he had denounced, at
Alexandria, and Peter the Fuller at Antioch. He composed a doctrinal
statement, called the "Form of Union," which, by the emperor's edict, was
imposed on the eastern bishops. It was a scarcely-veiled Eutychean
document. He called to his aid all the jealousy which Nova Roma felt for
her elder sister, all the pride which she felt for the exaltation of her
own bishop. If he succeeded in maintaining his own nominees in the two
original patriarchates of the East, he succeeded at the same time in
subjecting them to his own see. He crowned that series of encroachments
which had advanced step by step since the 150 bishops of the purely eastern
council held at Constantinople just a hundred years before set the
exaltation of the imperial city on a false foundation. In fact, if this his
enterprise succeeded, he obtained the realisation of the 28th canon, which
Anatolius attempted to pass at Chalcedon, and which Pope Leo had
overthrown. But most of all, both in the government of the Church and in
the supreme magisterium, the determination of the Church's true doctrine,
he deposed the successor of St. Peter, and but one single step remained, to
which all his conduct implied the intention to proceed. For the logical
basis of that conduct was the assertion that, as the bishop of Rome had
been supreme when, and because, Rome was the capital of the empire, so when
Constantinople had succeeded Rome as capital, her bishop also succeeded to
the spiritual rights of the Primacy.

We may sum up the attempt of Acacius in a single word: the denial that the
Pope had succeeded to the universal Pastorship of St. Peter.

This, then, was the point at issue, and when the western emperor was
suppressed, and the overlordship of the eastern emperor acknowledged, the
Pope was deprived of all temporal support, and left to meet the attack of
Acacius in the naked power of his apostolate. From the year 483, when the
deeds of Acacius led to his excommuni