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The publication of his Formulary of Union is a gross attack upon the spiritual independence of the Church. He imposes it upon the eastern bishops on pain of expulsion. He puts open heretics into the sees of Alexandria and Antioch. All this is done under the advice and instigation of Acacius, who is the real author of the Henotikon, and who completes his acts by open defiance of Pope Felix.
And it would have triumphed while the instrument of its triumph, the Henotikon, would have inflicted a deadly blow upon the government of the Church by taking away the independence of her teaching office. This struggle continued during the reign of Zeno; and Anastasius, as soon as he became emperor, used all the absolute power which he possessed to enforce the reception of the same document.
Macedonius called an upright council, and expressly ratified the decrees of faith passed at Chalcedon; but through fear of Anastasius he passed over in silence the Henotikon of Zeno." "When now Peter the Fuller was cast out of Antioch, Palladius succeeded to the see.
Let this letter from beginning to end be considered as written by a Pope just after his election, the validity of which had been disputed by another candidate whom the emperor had favoured by a Pope living actually under the unlimited power of an Arian sovereign, who was in possession of Italy, and who ruled in right of a conqueror, though he used his power generally with moderation and equity; further, that it was addressed to one who had become the sole Roman emperor, the over-lord of the king, who had just besought of him the royal title; that it required him to cast aside his patronage of Eutychean heretics; to rescind from the public records of the Church the name of that bishop who had composed the document called the Henotikon, the very document which the emperor was compelling his eastern bishops to accept and promulgate as the confession of the Christian faith.
These two deeds, the Encyclikon of Basiliscus and the Henotikon of Zeno, are to be marked for ever as the first instances of the temporal sovereign infringing the independence of the Church in spiritual matters, which to that time even the emperors in Constantine's city had respected.
Also the orthodox monks at Constantinople, and eastern bishops expelled for not signing the Henotikon, begged for the Pope's assistance, and denounced Acacius as the author of all the trouble. Amongst these expelled bishops who appealed to Rome were bishops of Chalcedon, Samosata, Mopsuestia, Constantina, Hemeria, Theodosiopolis.
At length the emperor, having ended his Isaurian wars and sufficiently strengthened the Monophysite party, succeeded in deposing him in 496. His instruments in this were the cowardly court bishops, ready to be moved to anything, who had also on this occasion to confirm the Henotikon of Zeno. Euphemius was banished to Paphlagonia.
The whole structure which lasted through this earthquake of nations had its cohesion in him a fact seen even more clearly in the time of the third Valentinian than in that of the conquering Constantine. But looking to that East, which dates from the Encyclikon of a Basiliscus and the Henotikon of a Zeno, here the Pope appears as the sole check to a despotic power.
And when he died Flavian accepted the Henotikon of Zeno; and he expressly confirmed the three holy Ecumenical Councils, but to please the emperor he passed over in silence that of Chalcedon. Now the emperor Anastasius sent order by the tribune Eutropius to Flavian and Elias of Jerusalem to hold a council in Sidon, and to anathematise the holy Council of Chalcedon.
But Faustus had hoped to gain the approval of Pope Anastasius to the Henotikon set up by the emperor Zeno at the instance of Acacius, and forced by the emperor Anastasius on his eastern bishops, and specially on three successive bishops of Constantinople Fravita, Euphemius, and Macedonius who took the place of the second, when he had been expelled by the emperor.
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