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Acacius was considered an excellent bishop when Basiliscus rose against Zeno. In all this contest Acacius took part against the attempt which Basiliscus made to overthrow the faith of the Church. He had issued a document termed the Encyclikon or Circular, in which for the first time in the history of the Church an emperor had assumed the right, as emperor, to lay down the terms of the faith.
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.
So low was the eastern Church already fallen that not the Eutycheans only, but five hundred Catholic bishops subscribed this Encyclikon, and a Council at Ephesus praised it as divine and apostolical. Basiliscus, termed by Pope Gelasius the tyrant and heretic, was swept away.
Basiliscus, during the short time he occupied the eastern throne, issued, at the prompting of a heretic whom he had pushed into the see of St. Athanasius and it is the first example known in history a formal decree upon faith, the so-called Encyclikon, in which only the Nicene, Constantinopolitan, and Ephesine Councils were accepted, but the fourth, that of Chalcedon, condemned.
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.
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