Pope Innocent I

Pope Innocent I (pope from 401 to 417 AD) was the bishop of Rome whose letters to bishops across Gaul, Spain, Italy, Africa, and the Eastern churches pressed the ruling of the Roman see as the decisive answer on questions of church discipline, liturgy, and doctrine. He succeeded Anastasius I in 401 AD and held the office until his death in March 417 AD, a stretch that covered the sack of Rome by Alaric, the deposition of John Chrysostom at Constantinople, and the outbreak of the Pelagian controversy in Africa. The surviving correspondence gathered under the title Epistolae et Decreta is the primary record of how he governed.

Much of that correspondence takes the form of decretals — written rulings sent in answer to bishops who put disciplinary questions to Rome. In 404 AD he replied to Victricius of Rouen with a set of canons on clerical marriage, ordination, and the handling of penitents, and instructed that difficult cases be referred to the apostolic see. In 405 AD he answered Exsuperius of Toulouse on similar matters and closed the letter with a list of the books to be received as canonical Scripture, one of the early Western statements of the canon. In these letters Innocent argued that Roman custom carried authority because the churches of the West traced their foundation to Peter and his successors, and that local practice should therefore conform to the usage of Rome.

The best-known of these rulings is the letter to Decentius, bishop of Gubbio, dated 416 AD, which answers a series of questions about liturgical practice. Innocent set out Roman usage on the placing of the kiss of peace within the Mass, the reservation of confirmation to bishops, the discipline of public penance, the anointing of the sick, and the days of fasting, and he grounded each answer in the claim that congregations founded from Rome ought to keep Roman custom. The letter became a standard source for later students of the early Latin liturgy because of the concrete detail it records about how the Roman Mass was celebrated in the early fifth century.

Innocent also intervened in the Eastern conflict over John Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople who had been deposed and exiled after the Synod of the Oak in 403 AD. Chrysostom and his supporters appealed to Rome, and Innocent refused to recognize the deposition, wrote in Chrysostom's defense, and pressed for a general council to review the case, breaking communion with those who had acted against him. The effort failed to restore Chrysostom, who died in exile in 407 AD, but it recorded Rome's claim to judge a disputed Eastern see.

The Pelagian controversy reached Innocent at the end of his pontificate. In 416 AD the African councils meeting at Carthage and Milevis, with Augustine among the bishops, condemned the teaching of Pelagius and Caelestius on grace and original sin and sent their acts to Rome for confirmation. In January 417 AD Innocent replied, endorsing the African condemnation and excommunicating the two men unless they recanted; Augustine, preaching on the matter, noted that the two councils had sent their case to the apostolic see and that rescripts had come back, so that "the case is finished." Innocent had earlier been away from Rome, at the imperial court in Ravenna, when Alaric's Goths sacked the city in 410 AD. He died on 12 March 417 AD and was succeeded by Zosimus, who briefly reopened the Pelagian case before again condemning it.