§ 64. THE PAPACY FROM LEO I. TO GKEGOET I. 325
called upon by the senate for a decision, summoned a council at Home, to which Symmachus gave his consent ; and a synod, convoked by a heretical king, must decide upon the pope In the course of the controversy several councils were held in rapid succession, the chronology of which is disputed.' The most important was the synodus palmaris^ the fourth council under Symmachus, held in October, 501. It acquitted this pope without investigation, on the presumption that it did not behove the council to pass judgment respecting the successor of St. Peter. In his vindication of this comieil — for the opposition was not satisfied with it — the deacon Ennodius, afterward bishop of Pavia (f 521), gave the first clear expression to the absolutism upon which Leo had already acted : that the Roman bishop is above every human tribunal, and is responsible only to God himself.' J^evertheless, even in the middle age, popes were deposed and set up by emperors and general councils. This is one of the points of dispute between the absolute papal system and the constitutional episcopal system in the Roman church, which was left unsettled even bj" the council of Trent.
Under Hoemisdas (514-523) the Monophysite party in the Greek church was destroyed by the energetic zeal of the orthodox emperor Justin, and in 519 the union of that church with Rome was restored, after a scliism of five-and-thirty years.
Theodoric offered no hinderance to the transactions and >;mbassies, and allowed his most distinguished subject to assert Ms ecclesiastical supremacy over Constantinople. This semibarbarous and heretical prince was tolerant in general, and very liberal toward the Catholic church ; even rising to the principle, which has waited till the modern age for its recognition, that the power of the prince should be restricted to
' Comp. Hefele, ii. p. 615 sqq.
' So named from the building in Rome, in which it was held : " A porticu beati Petri Apostcli, quae appellatur ad Palmaria," as Anastasius says. In the histories of councils it is erroneously given as Synodus III. Many historians, Gieseler amon'^ them, place it in the year 503.
* Libellus apologeticus pro Synodo IV. Romana, in Mansi, viii. 274. This vindication was solemnly adopted by the sixth Roman council under Symmachus, in 503, and made equivalent to a decree of counciL
326 THIRD PEKIOD. A.D. 311-590.
civil government, and should pennit no trespass on the con science of its subjects. " No one," savs he, " shal'j be forced to believe against his will." Yet, toward the close of his reign, on mere political suspicion, he ordered the execution of the celebrated philosopher Boethius, with whom the old Roman literature far more worthily closes, than the Roman empire Avith Augustulus ; and on the same ground he caused the death of the senator Symmachus and the incarceration of Popo John I. (523-526).
Almost the last act of his reign was the nomination of the worthy Felix III. (IV.) to the papal chair, after a protracted struggle of contending parties. With the appointment he issued the order that hereafter, as heretofore, the pope should be elected by clergy and people, but should be confirmed by the temporal prince before assuming his office; and with this understanding the clergy and the city gave their consent to the nomination.
Yet, in spite of this arrangement, in the election of Boniface 11. (530-532) and John II. (532-535) the same disgraceful quarrelling and briberies occurred ; — a sort of chronic disease in the history of the papacy.
Soon after the death of Theodoric (526) the Gothic empire fell to pieces through internal distraction and imperial weakness. Italy was conquered by Belisarius (535), and, with Africa, again incorporated with the East Roman empire, which renewed under Justinian its ancient splendor, and enjoyed a transient after-summer. And yet this powerful, orthodox emperor was a slave to the intriguing, heretical Theodora, whom he had raised from the theatre to the throne ; and Belisarius likewise, his victorious general, was completely under the power of his wife Antonina.
With the conquest of Italy the popes fell into a periloua and unworthy dependence on the emperor at Constantinople, who reverenced, indeed, the Roman chair, but not less that of Constantinople, and in reality sought to use both as tools of his own state-church despotism. Agapetus (535-536) offered fearless resistance to the arbitrary course of Justinian, and