Sanctus Callistus I, Papa et Martyr — for his feast on the fourteenth day of October, III classis
Sinite utraque crescere usque ad messem. “Suffer both to grow until the harvest.” — Matthew 13:30, the parable Callistus set against those who would have uprooted the sinners from the Church
I. A witness who hated him
Almost everything we know of the early life of Callistus comes from a man who wished the world to despise him. About a decade after Callistus’s death, the Roman priest Hippolytus, the most learned theologian of the Roman Church in his generation and its most severe, wrote a long refutation of all the heresies, and in its ninth book he set down the life of the Pope whom he had refused to obey (Refutatio omnium haeresium IX.11–12). He wrote it as an indictment. He calls Callistus a man cunning in wickedness and subtle in deceit, and he arranges every fact so that it accuses.
That is a strange foundation for a hagiography, and it ought to be stated at the outset, because it changes how the story must be read. When an enemy reports that a man was a slave, a bankrupt, a fugitive and a convict, we may believe him, since he had every motive to say so and his readers in Rome could have contradicted him. When the same enemy tells us what was in the man’s heart, we may set his testimony aside. Read in this way, Hippolytus becomes an unwilling witness to something remarkable: the Roman Church, within living memory, raised to the Chair of Peter a man with exactly such a past, and kept his memory as a martyr.
II. The slave of Carpophorus
Callistus was born a slave, probably in the later years of the second century, in the household of a Christian named Carpophorus, who was himself a member of the imperial household, de domo Caesaris. That Carpophorus was a Christian and Callistus apparently one also tells us something of the Roman Church in that age: the faith had reached into the palace by way of its servants, as St. Paul had already noted when he sent greetings from “them that are of Caesar’s household” (Phil. 4:22).
Carpophorus, trusting his slave, gave him money to run a bank, near the old public bathing-pool in the south of the city called the Piscina Publica. Christian widows and brethren deposited their savings with him, on the credit of his master’s name. The bank failed. Hippolytus says that Callistus lost the money through his own dishonesty; it may as easily have been incompetence or misfortune, and we cannot now know which. What is certain is the consequence. Fearing his master, Callistus fled to the harbour at Portus and boarded a ship. Carpophorus followed him to the quay; Callistus, seeing him, threw himself into the sea, was pulled out by the sailors, and was handed back to his master, who set him to work at the treadmill, the punishment of the household slave.
After a time the brethren interceded for him, saying that he claimed to have money owed to him by others, and Carpophorus released him to collect it. What happened next is obscure. Hippolytus says that Callistus, unable to pay and wishing to die, went on a Sabbath to a synagogue of the Jews and disturbed their worship; the Jews beat him and dragged him before the prefect of the city, Fuscianus. Carpophorus came to court and declared that his slave was no Christian and only sought death. The prefect had him scourged and sentenced him to the mines of Sardinia.
There is another way to read this episode, and it has been proposed by sober historians: that a Christian who went into a synagogue and spoke there was doing what St. Paul had done in every city, and that the charge on which he was condemned, whatever Hippolytus says, was the faith. We do not know. But Rome afterward counted him among the confessors who had suffered in the mines, and Rome was in a position to know.
III. The mines of Sardinia
To be condemned ad metalla was a death sentence carried out slowly. The convicts were branded, chained, half-starved, and worked until they died. Christians sent there under the persecutions were honoured by the Church as confessors, and their names were kept.
Release came from an unlikely quarter. Marcia, the concubine of the emperor Commodus, was well disposed to the Christians; Hippolytus calls her philotheos, a lover of God, and some have thought her a catechumen. Wishing to do some good work, she sent for Pope St. Victor and asked for the names of the Christian martyrs in Sardinia. Victor gave her a list. He left Callistus off it. A priest named Hyacinthus, a eunuch of the palace who had reared Marcia, carried the letter of release to the governor of the island; Callistus, kneeling and weeping, begged to be included, and Hyacinthus, on his own authority, obtained his freedom with the rest.
Victor was not pleased to see him return. He sent him to Antium on the coast, with a monthly allowance, and there Callistus lived for some years, out of Rome and out of sight.
Notice what the story is, even in the mouth of an enemy. A man forgotten on a list, released by the charity of a stranger, received back by a Pope who did not want him and provided for anyway. Before Callistus ever loosed anyone, he had himself been loosed, twice, by an act of mercy he had done nothing to earn.
IV. The deacon of Zephyrinus and the cemetery on the Appian Way
When Victor died about the year 199, his successor Zephyrinus called Callistus back from Antium, made him his deacon, set him over the clergy, and placed him in charge of the cemetery, as Hippolytus puts it: the first burial ground owned and administered by the Roman Church as a community, on the Via Appia outside the walls.
Callistus held that charge for nearly twenty years, and he enlarged it into something new. Christians had until then been buried in family tombs or on the land of wealthy patrons. Under Callistus the Roman Church acquired and organised a common burial ground in which the poorest Christian, the slave, the freedman, the widow, could lie in the same earth as the bishop. He extended its galleries and arranged within it the chamber that would become the Crypt of the Popes, where the Roman pontiffs of the third century were laid: Pontian, Anteros, Fabian, Lucius, Eutychian, and Sixtus II, who was taken there by the soldiers of Valerian while presiding in the cemetery and beheaded in his chair. The whole complex still bears his name: the Catacomb of St. Callistus.
It is a fitting monument for a former slave. The cemetery was a confession of faith dug into the tufa: that in Christ there is neither bond nor free, and that the bodies of all the baptized, whatever they had been in the world, were temples of the Holy Ghost awaiting the resurrection.
V. The Chair of Peter, 217
When Zephyrinus died, about 217, the Roman clergy and people elected Callistus to succeed him. The ex-slave, ex-bankrupt and ex-convict sat in the Chair of Peter. Hippolytus never forgave it.
The first great business of his pontificate was doctrinal. In Rome at that time circulated the teaching associated with Noetus and Sabellius, which so emphasized the unity of God that it dissolved the distinction of Persons: Father, Son and Holy Ghost were for them three names or three modes of one and the same divine Person, so that it was the Father who was born of the Virgin and suffered on the Cross. Callistus excommunicated Sabellius.
Hippolytus, who held a theology of the Logos in which the Son’s distinction from the Father was pressed hard, was not satisfied. He accused Callistus of compromising with the error he had condemned, of teaching a confused formula of his own, and of excommunicating Sabellius only out of fear. Callistus, for his part, accused Hippolytus and his party of being ditheoi, worshippers of two gods. It was a quarrel in which each side saw the other’s danger more clearly than its own, and which the Church would not finally settle until the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople gave her the language of one nature and three Persons. What can be said with confidence is that the Roman Church did not judge her bishop a heretic; and that the condemnation of Sabellius, the one certain doctrinal act of his pontificate, has stood ever since.
VI. The quarrel over the keys
The deeper quarrel, and the one that makes Callistus a figure of permanent importance, was over the forgiveness of sins.
Hippolytus lists the charges (Ref. IX.12), and every one of them is a measure of mercy. Callistus, he complains, was the first to permit the forgiveness of sins of the flesh to those who did penance. He held that a bishop was not to be deposed for every sin, even a grave one. He admitted to the clergy men who had been married twice or three times. He recognized as true marriages before God the unions of Christian women of senatorial rank with men of lower or servile condition, unions which Roman law refused to recognize and which forced such women otherwise to choose between losing their rank and marrying pagans. Hippolytus says that men flocked to Callistus because he gave them licence, and that his followers were proud of their numbers.
And Hippolytus, fortunately for us, also reports the arguments with which Callistus defended himself. He appealed to the parable of the wheat and the cockle: Suffer both to grow until the harvest (Matt. 13:30). It is not for the servants to uproot the cockle; the separation belongs to the Lord at the end. He appealed to the ark of Noah, which carried clean and unclean beasts alike through the flood: so the Church carries saints and sinners together, and the ark is no less the ark for what it contains. He appealed to St. Paul: Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? To his own lord he standeth or falleth (Rom. 14:4).
Hippolytus meant these reports as evidence against him. They are, in fact, the earliest recorded statement by a Roman pontiff of a principle the Church has never since abandoned: that her holiness consists not in the absence of sinners from her communion but in the presence of Christ within her, and in the power He gave to Peter to loose whatsoever is bound on earth (Matt. 16:19).
At about the same time, Tertullian, who had passed over to the rigorist sect of the Montanists, wrote with bitter irony of an edict issued by some pontifex maximus, some “bishop of bishops”, who announced that he forgave adultery and fornication to those who had done penance (De pudicitia 1). Whether Tertullian meant Callistus or a bishop of Carthage is disputed among scholars and cannot be settled. But the controversy is the same, and it shows how sharply the question was felt in both churches at once.
Hippolytus broke communion with Callistus and set himself up as rival bishop of Rome, the first antipope in the history of the Church. The schism outlived Callistus and continued under his successors.
The question did not die with him. A generation later, after the persecution of Decius, the Church had to decide what to do with the thousands who had sacrificed to the idols and now begged readmission. The rigorist Novatian refused them and founded a schism; the Roman Church under St. Cornelius, with St. Cyprian at Carthage, received them after penance, and the Church has held to that answer ever since. Callistus had walked the road first.
VII. Death on the Via Aurelia
Callistus died about the year 222, after a pontificate of some five years. The emperor of the moment, Alexander Severus, did not persecute the Church as a matter of policy, and the manner of the Pope’s death is not known with certainty.
What is certain is old and plain. The Depositio Martyrum, the list of the martyrs whose anniversaries the Roman Church kept, preserved in the Chronograph of the year 354, records on the day before the Ides of October the deposition of Callistus on the Via Aurelia at the third milestone. He was numbered among the martyrs by the Roman Church within little more than a century of his death, and he was buried not in the cemetery that bore his name on the Appian Way, but across the river to the west, in the cemetery of Calepodius.
The later Passio gives a fuller account, and it should be received as pious tradition rather than as history. It tells that during a tumult in Trastevere the Pope was seized in the house where he was hiding, thrown from a window into a well with a stone about his neck, and that the priest Calepodius was martyred with him. The well is still shown beneath the little church of San Callisto in Trastevere. The tradition may preserve the memory of a death by violence at the hands of a mob rather than by sentence of a court, which would explain both his title of martyr and the silence of the imperial record; but the details cannot be verified.
The Liber Pontificalis, compiled centuries later, attributes to Callistus two further works: the institution of a fast on the Saturday in three seasons of the year, for the harvests of grain, wine and oil, which later Roman tradition associated with the origin of the Ember Days; and the foundation of a basilica in Trastevere, which Roman tradition identifies with Santa Maria in Trastevere. Both attributions belong to the venerable but late tradition of the Roman Church and are offered here as such. In the Middle Ages his relics were translated to Santa Maria in Trastevere, where they rest beneath the high altar.
VIII. The reconciliation of Hippolytus
The story does not end with Callistus’s death, and its ending is the strongest testimony to the rightness of his cause.
The schism of Hippolytus continued through the pontificates of Urban and Pontian. In 235 the emperor Maximinus Thrax struck at the leadership of the Roman Church, and Pope Pontian and the antipope Hippolytus were deported together to the mines of Sardinia, the same mines from which Callistus had been ransomed. There, in the same chains, the two rival bishops of Rome were reconciled. Pontian resigned his office so that the Church at Rome might elect a successor; Hippolytus, according to the tradition preserved in the epitaph composed for him by Pope St. Damasus, exhorted his followers to return to the Catholic communion. Both died in exile. Their bodies were brought back to Rome together, Pontian to the Crypt of the Popes in the cemetery Callistus had built, Hippolytus to the Via Tiburtina, and the Church venerates both as martyrs on the thirteenth of August.
The man who had written the life of Callistus as an accusation died in the mines Callistus had survived, reconciled to the Church Callistus had governed. The wheat and the cockle were left to grow together until the harvest, and at the harvest the Lord of the field showed which was which, and showed that the rigorist himself had needed the very mercy he had refused to allow.
IX. Why the Church remembers him
The 1962 Missal keeps his feast on the fourteenth of October, the day of his deposition, with the Mass Si diligis me of the Common of the Supreme Pontiffs and a Collect proper to him. It is worth noticing what that Collect asks. Nothing in it speaks of authority or of government. It begins with a confession of failure, ex nostra infirmitate deficere, and asks God to restore us, restaura, to His love by the examples of His saints. For the feast of a man whose whole early life was failure and whose whole later life was restoration, no prayer could be more exact.
X. What the life teaches
That a past is not a sentence. A slave, a failed banker, a fugitive and a convict became the successor of St. Peter. The Church did not ask whether Callistus had been respectable; she asked whether he was faithful. St. Peter himself had denied his Lord three times before he was told three times to feed His sheep. The power of the keys was first entrusted to a man who knew from the inside what it is to need them.
That mercy is not laxity. Hippolytus was a holy man, and his zeal for the purity of the Church was real. His error was to believe that the Church’s holiness depended on her members rather than on her Head. Callistus did not deny sin or excuse it; he required penance. What he refused was to declare that any sin, repented, lay beyond the power Christ gave to Peter. The Church has judged between them, and she judged for the keys.
That a man is often best known by his enemies. We know Callistus chiefly through the man who most opposed him, and the opposition has served him better than any panegyric could have. The charges of his enemy are the list of his mercies. Few saints have had so strange or so eloquent a witness.
Practice
Examine. Is there someone whose past I continue to hold against him, whose name I have, like Pope Victor, left off my list? And is there anything in my own past that I still treat as a sentence rather than as something Christ has loosed?
Do. Make a good confession this week, and receive the absolution as what it is: the same power of the keys that Callistus defended. Then perform one concrete act of mercy toward a person who has failed, the kind of act Marcia and Hyacinthus performed for a convict they did not know.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, qui nos conspicis ex nostra infirmitate deficere: ad amorem tuum nos misericorditer per Sanctorum tuorum exempla restaura.
“O God, who seest that we fail through our own weakness: in Thy mercy restore us to Thy love by the examples of Thy Saints.”
Aspiration. Domine, tu omnia nosti: tu scis quia amo te. “Lord, thou knowest all things: thou knowest that I love thee” (John 21:17).
Devote. It is October, the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Sorrowful Mysteries, and at the fifth, the Crucifixion, remember the thief who was received into Paradise in the last hour of a ruined life: the first soul Our Lord loosed from the Cross.
If you wish to go deeper: the Church History path takes up the penitential controversies of the third century, from Callistus and Hippolytus through Cornelius, Cyprian and the Novatian schism, and the Trinitarian disputes that ran from Sabellius to Nicaea. The Lives of the Saints path continues with Hippolytus and Pontian, reconciled in the mines, and with the Popes laid in the Crypt of the Popes. The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Ember Days and the development of the discipline of Penance.
Sancte Calliste, Papa et Martyr, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: St. Hippolytus, Refutatio omnium haeresium IX.11–12; Tertullian, De pudicitia 1; the Depositio Martyrum of the Chronograph of 354; the Liber Pontificalis (ed. Duchesne), s.v. Callistus; the epigram of Pope St. Damasus on Hippolytus; the Roman Martyrology; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), s.v. “Pope St. Callistus I” and “St. Hippolytus of Rome”; and Butler’s Lives of the Saints. Hippolytus and the other ancient authors are given in paraphrase throughout.