After the death of Leo the Great, the Manichaeans again inhabit the City. The zeal of Pope Gelasius in detecting them. The erroneous judgment of William Cave concerning communion under both species. The same St. Gelasius at last eliminates these wicked men from the City, disperses their books, and adds the sentence of anathema. 1. What other heresy is bolder and craftier than the Manichaean, or what more confident than it? For, since it was so sacrilegious in religion, so corrupted in abominable morals, and so profane in its rites, it ought at least to have taken care not to dwell in those places where above all the civil and ecclesiastical laws cried out against it, and where the judges of both forums had strenuously armed themselves to coerce it, to eliminate it, and to abolish it utterly.
To behold this audacity, there will be no need to depart far from the city of Rome itself. For although in it the Manichaeans had been harassed in many and various ways, and, by the agency of Leo the Great, had been sufficiently exhausted by penalties and banished into exile far from all the other shores; nevertheless not long after the death of so great a pontiff, it was found that they again inhabited Rome. Now when I had turned this over with myself, I fell into this vehement suspicion: that the Manichaeans existing at Rome, now terrified by Leo's general inquisition against them, had employed every art of most wicked dissimulation in order to lie hidden;
and therefore, lest their abominations should be disclosed, they had always sacrilegiously taken part with catholic men in the sacred assemblies and the divine mysteries—as the same St. Leo, execrating this most grievous crime, had complained. But if such a suspicion of ours be not approved by learned men, then without doubt it will behoove them to affirm the other alternative: namely, that the Manichaeans, banished beyond the shores of Italy while Leo was acting, having afterwards heard of the holy pontiff's death, had turned their steps toward Rome, to seek out for themselves their old hiding places. But since neither of these two things can be defined without a witness worthy of credit, we hasten merely to describe how the Manichaeans, after the death of St. Leo, again inhabited the City. 2. St.
Leo the Great had closed his last day in the year 461, and Hilary was appointed in his place, who, taken from the living in the sixth year of his pontificate, had Simplicius as his successor. But whether under these two pontiffs the Manichaean sect inhabited the City is made known by no sacred or profane testimony. Wherefore, lest we cling to uncertain monuments and matters, we shall at once appeal to the pontificate of Pope Gelasius and his deeds. From the Pontifical Book, therefore, and from Anastasius, in the Lives of the Roman Pontiffs, these things occur to be read: 'In the times of Gelasius, Manichaeans were found in the City, whom he ordered to be deported into exile, whose books also he burned to ashes in a fire before the doors of the basilica of Holy Mary.'
Now for detecting these men, the same Gelasius employed no other method of arrangement besides that which, by the decree of the great pontiff Leo, had prevailed in the Roman Church. For he ordered that as many as approached the sacred synaxis should partake of the mysteries of both species, so that, namely, the Manichaeans—who out of excessive superstition altogether abhorred wine, declining to take the communion of the chalice—might more easily be distinguished from the true faithful. William Cave, giving heed to this decree of Gelasius, praises the holy pontiff's manner of acting, by which, namely, he stripped from the wicked Manichaeans the mask of catholics under which they strove to lie hidden.
Then gradually he seeks to attack the rite of the Roman Church concerning communion under only one species, as smacking of novelty; adding besides that Gelasius by his decree confirmed an ancient custom received in the Church from its very beginnings, that no one in the sacred collects (gatherings) should communicate except under both species. But it behooved a man of the Reformed sect, who was indulgent to his own party and desirous of accommodating the Greeks, to utter such things. Yet let Cave, I pray, tell us: when did the Roman Church follow this custom? Let him bring forward the monuments from which it may be drawn that laymen, not consecrating the eucharist, when in the beginnings of the Church the collects were held, ought to have communicated under both species.
Assuredly, if Leo the Great and Gelasius, the Roman pontiffs, had confirmed this custom by their decrees, then already before their age it would not have been permitted to any of the catholics to abstain from the use of the chalice. And therefore the priests who consecrated the eucharist would have had to consecrate in their gatherings as great a quantity of wine as could have sufficed for themselves and for the people who took part in the sacred mysteries. But given this usage, then only the Manichaeans would have been absent from the communion of the chalice. What need, then, was there to compel the faithful to the communion of both species? What need to confirm by decree that which already prevailed among all catholic laymen?
For if the Roman Church—which always wished to rest upon the doctrine received from the apostles—had understood that this custom was necessarily to be pursued from its very beginnings by divine institution, it would never have defrauded laymen not consecrating the eucharist of the use of the chalice, it would never have omitted this rite. But that the rite of offering the chalice to laymen was not in use in Leo's age is proved by the decree of the same holy pontiff, who therefore, for reasons of arrangement, bound catholics to the use of the chalice in order that he might detect the Manichaeans. But when the Manichaeans had been expelled from the City, why should it be doubted that this custom or arrangement was at once discontinued?
Is it not the case that, on Cave's own authority, Pope Gelasius—who was appointed pontiff one year over thirty after the death of Leo the Great—when he had found Manichaeans, in order to strip from them the mask of catholics, by his decree compelled the catholics themselves to communicate under both species? He assuredly would not have compelled them, if that custom or rite had not, at least after Leo's death, been discontinued. 3. Yet I judge it superfluous to linger longer in these trifles. For that Gelasius followed Leo's arrangement is revealed not only by that decree of which we have thus far treated, but also by the zeal employed by him, that the Manichaeans discovered in the city of Rome, compelled by judicial power and apprehended, should be deported into exile.
But Gelasius himself judged that he had not sufficiently provided for the safety of the catholic faith, if, when those wicked men had already been banished far from the City, the books or codices of their sacrilegious doctrine had still survived. Wherefore, desiring in this matter too to imitate the holy pontiff Leo, he attempted utterly to destroy and abolish their volumes, which were being thumbed by the hands of many, and which were being carried about hither and thither to deceive many. For which cause, all the books of the Manichaeans that he was able to find having been collected, and the same carefully examined, lest they should furnish a stumbling-block to anyone thereafter, he ordered them to be burned to ashes in a fire before the doors of the basilica of St. Mary.
On which occasion it is highly probable that Gelasius wished then to hold that celebrated council of seventy bishops, in which—the decrees of his predecessors having first been recalled to memory—he drew up a catalogue of the divine books of both Testaments, and, the writers of these having been designated, distinguished the authentic Scriptures from the apocryphal. Into this latter order he chiefly rejected those codices which the heretics used, and which the Manichaeans, Montanists, Marcionites, and others had dared to introduce into the world falsely under the names of the apostles.
Those books, therefore, together with the other volumes which many of the heretics had composed either to destroy or to undermine the Catholic religion, Pope Gelasius not only repudiated, but also cast out from the whole Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, and, together with the whole council, he decreed that they, along with their authors and the followers of those authors, were condemned forever under the indissoluble bond of anathema. But which and of what sort were the books of the Manichaeans that Pope Gelasius proscribed by his decree as false and spurious, I think it is not necessary to report at present. For, first of all, that catalogue of apocryphal books, illustrated many times over by the labour of most distinguished men, has come to light: