Pope Saint Callixtus I: The Sixteenth Pope, the Slave Who Wore the Keys, and the Scandal of Mercy

The sixteenth in a series on the popes.

If the papacy had been designed by a novelist, no one would dare invent Callixtus. A slave entrusted with his master’s money, who lost it and fled; hauled off a ship after jumping into the sea; sentenced to a flour-mill treadmill, then to the death-mines of Sardinia for brawling in a synagogue; freed by an irregularity, pensioned off to the seaside by an embarrassed pope; recalled to run a cemetery—and then elected bishop of Rome, where he excommunicated one heresiarch, was denounced as another, and issued the most controversial act of mercy in the early Church’s history. Nearly every word of that story comes from a man who hated him and wrote it down to destroy him. And the Church’s verdict, delivered across eighteen centuries, has been to canonize the ex-slave, keep his feast on the General Calendar as a martyr, adopt his policy on the forgiveness of sins wholesale—and canonize his enemy too. The sixteenth pope is where the early papacy’s story stops being about lists and dates and becomes, unmistakably, about the Gospel: what the Church is for, whom it can forgive, and whether the keys of Peter open the door from the outside or lock it from within.

This is the sixteenth entry in my series on the popes, following Peter, Linus, Anacletus, Clement, Evaristus, Alexander I, Sixtus I, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius I, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor I, and Zephyrinus.

Reading a Life Written by an Enemy

The methodological warning issued in the Zephyrinus entry applies here with double force. Our one detailed source for Callixtus’s life is Book IX of the Refutation of All Heresies of Hippolytus—the brilliant, embittered rival who regarded Callixtus’s election as a catastrophe and quite possibly allowed himself to be set up as a rival bishop in protest. The Refutation was recovered only in the nineteenth century, and its ninth book handed historians a document unique in early Christian literature: a full hostile biography of a pope, written by a contemporary who knew him.⁠¹

Hostile biography must be read the way a court reads a bitter witness: details against interest stand, insinuations fall, and everything is weighed for spin. Hippolytus’s facts, it turns out, are oddly favorable to his victim once the sneer is filtered out—which is itself a reason to credit them. A polemicist inventing freely would not have given his target a career of such resilience. What follows keeps Hippolytus’s narrative and flags his interpretations.

The Slave of Carpophorus

Callixtus—a Roman, the Liber Pontificalis says, from the Trastevere district, “the district Urbs Ravennantium”—first appears as “a domestic of one Carpophorus, a man of the faith belonging to the household of Caesar.”⁠² A Christian slave of a Christian master in the imperial household: already the social texture of the early Roman church is on display. Carpophorus, Hippolytus says, entrusted Callixtus with “no inconsiderable amount of money” to run a banking operation in the Piscina Publica quarter, “and in process of time were entrusted to him not a few deposits by widows and brethren”—the savings of the Christian community, drawn by his master’s name. The bank failed. Whether by fraud, as Hippolytus insinuates, or by the ordinary catastrophe of ancient finance, “Callistus… made away with all (the moneys committed to him), and became involved in pecuniary difficulties.”⁠³

What follows reads like a picaresque. Callixtus fled for the harbor at Portus and boarded an outbound ship; seeing his master approaching in a boat, “he became reckless of life… and proceeded to cast himself into the sea”—the sailors fished him out. Returned to Carpophorus, he was sentenced to the pistrinum, the domestic treadmill where slaves ground grain. The community’s creditors—widows among them—begged his release, professing that Callixtus claimed money was owed him and could recover their funds. Released, and (on Hippolytus’s telling) unable to make good, he forced his own crisis: on a Sabbath he burst into a synagogue in session and “created a disturbance among them.” The Jews of Rome hauled him before the city prefect, Fuscianus; Carpophorus, remarkably, tried to save his slave from the capital consequences—“do not believe this fellow; for he is not a Christian, but seeks occasion of death, having made away with a quantity of my money”—but the prefect, “swayed by these Jews,” had Callixtus scourged and “gave him to be sent to a mine in Sardinia.”⁠⁴

Sardinia’s mines were where Rome sent men to die slowly—the damnatio ad metalla, the harshest grade of penal servitude; the island itself appears in the Roman lists as the “noxious island.”⁠⁵ Callixtus the failed banker had become Callixtus the confessor: whatever the tangle of debts behind it, he was in the mines as a Christian, condemned with the Christians. His church, as it happened, was about to come for the Christians in the mines.

Marcia’s List

The scene that follows was told from Victor’s side in the previous entry but one; from Callixtus’s side it looks rather different. Marcia, Commodus’s concubine—“a God-loving female,” Hippolytus calls her, and the pagan historian Cassius Dio confirms she “greatly favoured the Christians and rendered them many kindnesses”—resolved to free the confessors in Sardinia. She summoned Pope Victor and asked for the list. Victor supplied every name “but did not give the name of Callistus, knowing the acts he had ventured upon.” The pardon went to Sardinia in the hands of Hyacinthus, an aged churchman of the palace; Callixtus, off the list, fell to his knees and begged, and Hyacinthus—“overcome by the captive’s importunity”—prevailed on the governor to release him too.⁠⁶

So Callixtus came home a freed confessor whom the pope had deliberately left in the mines. Victor, Hippolytus says, “was very much grieved at what had taken place; but since he was a compassionate man, he took no action in the matter”—and instead settled a monthly allowance on Callixtus and sent him to live at Antium, down the coast, out of the way.⁠⁷ Every detail of this paragraph is doing double duty. For Hippolytus, it establishes that Callixtus was a known bad actor whom even sainted Victor distrusted. Read against the grain, it establishes something else: that Callixtus bore in his body the marks of the confessor—scourging, the mines—a status carrying immense prestige in the early Church; that the Roman church supported him for years at its own expense; and that whatever Victor knew of the old financial scandal, the next pope judged the man differently. History offers few better illustrations of the difference between a record and a verdict.

The Deacon of the Cemetery

The rehabilitation came under Zephyrinus, who recalled Callixtus from Antium and “appointed him over the cemetery”—the underground burial complex on the Appian Way that the Roman church had lately taken into corporate administration, the first of its kind.⁠⁸ The appointment proved historic twice over. The complex Callixtus managed and enlarged became the Catacomb of San Callisto—named for its administrator, not its occupants—which grew into the official burial place of the Roman church: in the generations after Callixtus, nine popes were laid in its Crypt of the Popes, the chamber the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi identified in 1854 after rediscovering the complex.⁠⁹ The office was likelier still more historic for what it made of the officeholder. For nearly two decades Callixtus served as Zephyrinus’s right hand—Hippolytus, disgusted, calls him the pope’s “fellow-worker in the management of his clergy” and blames him for everything Zephyrinus said and did—and when Zephyrinus died in 217, the Roman church elected the cemetery administrator its bishop.⁠¹⁰ Eusebius records the succession in a line: “Zephyrinus, having held his office for eighteen years, died, and Callistus received the episcopate. He continued for five years, and was succeeded by Urbanus.”⁠¹¹

An ex-slave, an ex-convict, an ex-bankrupt held the chair of Peter. It is worth pausing on how little scandal the sources register at the fact itself. Hippolytus, who begrudged Callixtus everything, never argues that a former slave could not be pope; his complaints are doctrine and discipline, not birth. The church that had sung for a century that God “has put down the mighty from their seat” elected to its highest office a man who had ground grain in a treadmill with his own arms, and its most aristocratic intellect attacked everything about him except that.

Between Sabellius and Hippolytus

Doctrine first. The Trinitarian crisis described in the Zephyrinus entry came to a head at Callixtus’s accession, and the new pope opened his reign with a decision: he excommunicated Sabellius, the leading modalist teacher—the man whose name became the permanent label for the heresy that Father and Son are one person. Hippolytus reports the act with a sneer he cannot quite make stick: Callixtus “excommunicated Sabellius, as not entertaining orthodox opinions. He acted thus from apprehension of me.”⁠¹² Fear of Hippolytus or not, the fact stands, and it is considerable: the first act of doctrinal discipline in the new pontificate cut off the arch-modalist from the communion of the Roman church—the decisive Roman rejection of the “Father-suffering” theology, pronounced by the very pope Hippolytus accuses of harboring it.

For Hippolytus’s accusation runs the other way too. Callixtus, he claims, held a media-via heresy of his own devising: the Logos and the Father are “one indivisible spirit,” differently named—“I will not profess belief in two Gods, Father and Son, but in one”—so that, while “the Father did not die,” he nonetheless “suffered along with the Son.” And Callixtus, says Hippolytus, turned the charge around, “publicly saying in the way of reproach to us, ‘Ye are Ditheists.’”⁠¹³ Modern assessments of this exchange are more even-handed than Hippolytus intended. Callixtus’s reported formula—one God; the Son truly divine, not a second God; the Father involved in the Passion by compassion, not crucified—reads like a churchman groping toward the balance the Church would eventually strike, against a Logos theology that (in Hippolytus’s own hands) really did grade the Son below the Father in ways Nicaea would later rule out. Neither man possessed the vocabulary the fourth and fifth centuries would forge; each could hear only the other’s error. The standard registry of the Church’s doctrine, as noted in the previous entry, prints the era’s Roman formulas—Denzinger’s editors assign “The Father did not die, but the Son” to Callixtus himself—among its earliest witnesses; Hippolytus’s own Logos theology required, and received, later correction. The pope excommunicated the heretic on his left and absorbed the slanders from his right, and the faith that emerged at Nicaea vindicated the middle he was reaching for, if not every word he reached with—his formula still lacked the clear distinction of persons the later councils would supply, and his “suffered along with the Son” was not language the Church’s mature theology would keep.⁠¹⁴

Hippolytus, for his part, would not communicate with him. Whether he was formally elected a rival bishop—the “first antipope” of the traditional accounting—or led a dissenting school within Rome’s fractionated Christianity, as an influential modern study argues, the sources do not settle; Eusebius says only, with studied vagueness, that Hippolytus “presided over another church.”⁠¹⁵ The sequel, though, belongs to the record, and it is the finest coda in early papal history: in 235 the emperor Maximinus deported Pope Pontian—Callixtus’s second successor—and Hippolytus together to the mines of Sardinia, where Callixtus had once been a convict; tradition holds the two were reconciled there before death, and the Roman church brought both bodies home and buried both men as martyrs on the same day. The Church venerates Saint Hippolytus of Rome to this hour—alongside the popes he fought.⁠¹⁶

The Scandal of Mercy

Discipline second—and here Callixtus made the decision for which his enemies never forgave him and for which the Church owes him most. The question, deferred since the Natalius affair under Zephyrinus showed its edges, was this: can the Church readmit to communion those guilty of the gravest sins—specifically the sins of the flesh, adultery and fornication—after penance? The rigorist answer, held by serious and holy men, was no: the Church is the community of the saints; baptism’s forgiveness is unrepeatable; for the three capital sins—idolatry, murder, unchastity—the lapsed might do penance and hope in God’s mercy, but the Church would not, could not, pronounce them absolved. Callixtus answered yes. Hippolytus states the policy with fury: Callixtus “first invented the device of conniving with men in regard of their indulgence in sensual pleasures, saying that all had their sins forgiven by himself.”⁠¹⁷

Tertullian—by then a Montanist rigorist in Carthage—mocked what appears to be the same policy in the most famous sarcasm of early Christian literature:

I hear that there has even been an edict set forth, and a peremptory one too. The Pontifex Maximus—that is, the bishop of bishops—issues an edict: “I remit, to such as have discharged (the requirements of) repentance, the sins both of adultery and of fornication.” O edict, on which cannot be inscribed, “Good deed!”⁠¹⁸

For a century after the Refutation’s recovery, “the edict of Callixtus” was a fixture of church history—the pope’s decree, Tertullian’s Carthaginian echo, the rigorist storm. The identification has since loosened: many modern scholars argue Tertullian’s target was a bishop of Carthage, not Rome (the mock-titles “Pontifex Maximus” and “bishop of bishops” being sarcasm, not address), and that no formal Roman “edict” need lie behind the polemic at all. The reader should hold the attribution as contested.⁠¹⁹ What is not contested is the substance, because Hippolytus attests it independently and from inside Rome: Callixtus received the gravest sinners back to communion after penance, on the authority of the power of the keys. The old Catholic Encyclopedia states the ground exactly: “It is clear that Callistus based his decree on the power of binding and loosing granted to Peter, to his successors, and to all in communion with them.”⁠²⁰

The rest of Hippolytus’s charge-sheet fills out a consistent pastoral policy. Callixtus held that a bishop guilty even of grave sin “ought not to be deposed”—that orders survive unworthiness—the principle, if not the discipline, the Church would fight for again against the Donatists a century later. In his time, clergy twice and thrice married “began to be allowed to retain their place among the clergy,” and a man marrying while in orders “permitted… to continue in holy orders as if he had not sinned”—relaxations of discipline, notable precisely because they presuppose the discipline. He defended the mixed church against the pure: the ark of Noah, he argued (Hippolytus reports it as scandal), held “both dogs, and wolves, and ravens, and all things clean and unclean”—let the tares grow with the wheat.⁠²¹ And in the most socially radical act of the early papacy, he recognized as marriage before God the unions of free Christian women with enslaved or freed Christian men—unions Roman law refused to dignify as matrimonium. Hippolytus, the theological radical, is here the social conservative, sputtering that Callixtus “permitted females, if they were unwedded, and burned with passion at an age at all events unbecoming… that they might have whomsoever they would choose as a bedfellow, whether a slave or free”; he darkly connects the policy to contraception and worse among noblewomen ashamed of their unions.⁠²² Filter the venom and the policy is plain: the ex-slave pope held that the Church’s law of marriage did not bend to the empire’s law of class—that a slave could be a husband whatever the civil code said. The distinction between the Church’s reckoning of marriage and the empire’s—ancestor of the later distinction between sacramental and civil marriage—makes one of its first recorded appearances here, in the mouth of a pope who had worn the chains himself.

The Church’s eventual verdict on this whole program should be stated without embarrassment, because it is one of the clearest cases in early church history of a development the Church ratified. Every rigorist alternative—Tertullian’s, Hippolytus’s, later Novatian’s and the Donatists’—ended outside the Church’s communion (Hippolytus, by tradition, reconciled before his death); the Callixtan positions—sins forgivable after penance by the Church’s ministry, orders surviving unworthiness, the mixed church of saints and sinners, marriage measured by consent and faith rather than civil class—became simply the Catholic positions. The Catechism’s account of the sacrament of Penance describes the rigorous ancient discipline of the “order of penitents” and its long development toward the Church’s settled practice of repeatable forgiveness; Callixtus stands at the head of that development, the first pope on record to stake the Church’s authority on the wideness of God’s mercy—and to be called a destroyer of the Church for it.⁠²³ The old Catholic Encyclopedia’s summary judgment has aged well: “On the whole, then, it is clear that the Catholic church sides with Callistus against the schismatic Hippolytus and the heretic Tertullian”—and its wistful coda even better: “If we knew more of St. Callistus from Catholic sources, he would probably appear as one of the greatest of the popes.”⁠²⁴

The Martyr of the Depositio

Callixtus reigned about five years and died around 222. What happened is a genuine historical puzzle, with evidence pointing in two directions at once.

On one side stands the best documentary evidence any pope of this era has. The Depositio Martyrum—the martyr-calendar of the Roman church preserved in the Chronograph of 354, the oldest such list in existence—contains exactly one pope between Peter and the persecution victims of the mid-third century: “pri. idus Octob. Callisti in via Aurelia. miliario III”—October 14, Callixtus, on the Via Aurelia at the third milestone.⁠²⁵ Soter, Eleutherius, Victor, Zephyrinus—none of them appears; their martyr titles were later inventions, as this series has documented one by one. Callixtus’s cult is different in kind: within a century and a quarter of his death, the Roman church was liturgically commemorating him as a martyr, at a specific grave, on a specific day. The old Catholic Encyclopedia draws the standard inference: “this is good evidence that he was really a martyr, although he lived in a time of peace under Alexander Severus, whose mother was a Christian.”⁠²⁶

On the other side stands that very peace. Alexander Severus persecuted no one; the era’s one attested anti-Christian violence at Rome is none. The legendary Acts of Callixtus—a passio composed centuries later—supply the missing drama: a riot in Trastevere, the pope thrown from a window of his house, drowned in a well with a stone about his neck, his body recovered after seventeen days by the priest Asterius. The Acts are worthless as history—“His Acts are spurious,” the Catholic Encyclopedia says flatly, and their supporting cast includes a consul the consular lists refute.⁠²⁷ The scholarly mainstream has long squared the circle with a mob: no state persecution, but a local anti-Christian riot in the crowded Trastevere quarter—Eamon Duffy reconstructs the death as a lynching in Trastevere—a local mob probably angered by recent Christian expansion in the crowded district—an irregular death that would explain both the martyr cult and the state’s peace, and even the odd burial: Callixtus alone of the era’s popes was not laid in his own cemetery on the Appian Way but across the river in the catacomb of Calepodius on the Via Aurelia, as though buried in haste near where he died.⁠²⁸ Recent scholarship has pushed back even on the riot, arguing that the violent death is the passio’s invention and that Callixtus—already a confessor of the Sardinian mines, with Victor’s own church supporting him as such—was commemorated as “martyr” in the older, broader sense the word still carried.⁠²⁹ The honest summary: the cult is certain and early; the violent death is probable on the traditional reading and doubted on the revisionist one; the window and the well are legend.

His grave, at least, is no longer conjecture. In April 1960 the archaeologist Aldo Nestori, excavating the ruined catacomb of Calepodius, identified the tomb of Callixtus—a crypt later monumentalized by Pope Julius I, decorated in the early Middle Ages with a fresco cycle of the saint’s legend, the well scene included, and described by seventh-century pilgrim itineraries exactly where the Depositio had said: the Via Aurelia, at the third milestone.⁠³⁰ In the ninth century Pope Gregory IV translated the relics to Santa Maria in Trastevere, where they rest beneath the high altar—in the quarter where Callixtus had been born, and where the legend says he died.⁠³¹ The Liber Pontificalis credits him with building “a basilica beyond the Tiber”; the fourth-century record assigns the great Trastevere basilica to Julius I, built “iuxta Callistum”—next to the Callixtus site—and the little church of San Callisto nearby, with its well still shown in the courtyard, marks the traditional spot of the martyrdom. Whatever the buildings’ exact pedigree, the Roman memory of Callixtus never left Trastevere.⁠³² Alone among the popes of this series’ last dozen entries, Callixtus keeps his place on the General Roman Calendar itself—an optional memorial on October 14, with the martyr title the modern reform confirmed rather than removed—and the current Martyrology commemorates the deacon of the cemetery, the reconciler of the lapsed, “crowning his industrious episcopate,” as the entry has it, with martyrdom.⁠³³

What We Can Actually Say

Strip Callixtus to the load-bearing evidence and the portrait remains, by the standards of this series, astonishingly full—because his enemy preserved it. A Roman of the Trastevere quarter, a slave of a Christian of Caesar’s household; a failed banker who fled, was retrieved from the sea, and was broken at the mill; a convict of the Sardinian mines, freed in Marcia’s amnesty though the pope had left him off the list; pensioned at Antium, recalled by Zephyrinus, set over the Roman church’s first common cemetery, and for nearly two decades the effective second man of the Roman church; elected pope in 217. As pope: the excommunicator of Sabellius, the target of Hippolytus’s charge of heresy and laxity alike, the author—by Hippolytus’s hostile testimony, whatever becomes of Tertullian’s “edict”—of the policy that the Church, by the power of the keys, absolves even adultery and fornication after penance; the defender of clergy whose orders outlasted their worthiness, of the mixed church of wheat and tares, and of the marriages of free women to slave husbands against the law of the empire. Dead about 222; commemorated as a martyr on October 14 in the oldest calendar the Roman church possesses, at a grave archaeology has actually found.

What the evidence does not support: the window, the well, the seventeen days, and the pious consul—the passio is fiction; and even the riot, though the standard reconstruction, is an inference the sources permit rather than state.

Sixteen entries into this series, Callixtus is where its two long arguments—about the office and about its holders—converge. The office: with Callixtus the monarchical development this series has traced from Anicetus through Victor is functionally complete; a pope excommunicates a heresiarch, binds and looses in the gravest cases, legislates on marriage and orders, and is attacked not for lacking authority but for exercising too much of it. That is the papacy, recognizably, in the year 220. And the holder: the office fell to a man whose résumé—slave, bankrupt, convict—was everything the ancient world despised and the Gospel conspicuously is not ashamed of. His enemy was the better theologian, and the Church canonized them both; but on the question they fought over—whether the Church is a museum of the pure or a hospital for sinners, whether the keys lock or unlock—the Church did not split the difference. It sided with the ex-convict who forgave, and it has never gone back. Peter, who denied his Lord three times and wept, and kept the keys anyway, would have understood his sixteenth successor perfectly.

Next in the series: Pope Saint Urban I.

Further Reading

For the early papacy generally: J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (Yale University Press, 2014). On Hippolytus, Callixtus, and the Roman church of the era, Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 31 (Brill, 1995), is fundamental, with Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Fortress Press, 2003), for the social world; the foundational modern study remains J. J. I. von Döllinger, Hippolytus und Kallistus (1853). On the tomb and frescoes, Mara Minasi, La tomba di Callisto (Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, 2009). The hostile primary source is Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, Book IX, trans. J. H. MacMahon, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886); Tertullian’s On Modesty (De pudicitia) is in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4.

This post is part of an ongoing series on the popes. You can read about Saint Peter, the first pope, Saint Linus, the second pope, Saint Anacletus, the third pope, Saint Clement, the fourth pope, Saint Evaristus, the fifth pope, Saint Alexander I, the sixth pope, Saint Sixtus I, the seventh pope, Saint Telesphorus, the eighth pope, Saint Hyginus, the ninth pope, Saint Pius I, the tenth pope, Saint Anicetus, the eleventh pope, Saint Soter, the twelfth pope, Saint Eleutherius, the thirteenth pope, Saint Victor I, the fourteenth pope, and Saint Zephyrinus, the fifteenth pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Callixtus I?

Callixtus I was the sixteenth Bishop of Rome counting Peter as first, reigning c. 217–222. His biography—preserved, ironically, by his enemy Hippolytus—is the most dramatic of any early pope: a slave of a Christian in Caesar’s household, a failed banker, a convict of the Sardinian mines, then administrator of the Roman church’s cemetery on the Appian Way (the future Catacomb of San Callisto) and right hand of Pope Zephyrinus, whom he succeeded. As pope he excommunicated the heretic Sabellius, was accused of heresy and laxity by Hippolytus, readmitted grave sinners to communion after penance, and recognized marriages between free women and enslaved men that Roman law refused to recognize. He is commemorated as a martyr on October 14 in the oldest calendar of the Roman church.

Was Pope Callixtus really a slave?

According to Hippolytus—our one detailed source, and a hostile one—Callixtus began as the slave of Carpophorus, a Christian of the imperial household, who set him up in a banking business that failed. His flight, attempted escape by sea, sentence to the treadmill, and condemnation to the mines of Sardinia all belong to the same hostile account, which historians accept in outline precisely because an enemy had no motive to invent so resilient a survivor. He returned from Sardinia a confessor—one who had suffered for the faith—and rose through the Roman church’s service to its highest office.

What was the “Edict of Callixtus”?

Tertullian mocked a bishop’s decree—“I remit, to such as have discharged repentance, the sins both of adultery and of fornication”—sneering at its author as “the Pontifex Maximus, that is, the bishop of bishops.” For over a century after Hippolytus’s Refutation was rediscovered, scholars identified this “edict” with Callixtus’s penitential policy at Rome; many now argue Tertullian’s target was actually a bishop of Carthage, and the attribution remains contested. What is certain, because Hippolytus attests it independently, is the policy itself: Callixtus readmitted those guilty of the gravest sexual sins to communion after penance—grounding the practice, in the old Catholic Encyclopedia’s reading, in the power of binding and loosing given to Peter. The rigorists never forgave him; the Church’s sacramental practice followed him.

Why did Hippolytus oppose Callixtus?

On two fronts. Doctrinally, Hippolytus—a champion of Logos theology—thought Callixtus’s formula for the Trinity (one God, the Father and Son one indivisible spirit, the Father suffering along with the Son) a disguised modalism, while Callixtus retorted that Hippolytus’s sharp distinction of Father and Son made him a “Ditheist,” a believer in two gods. Disciplinarily, Hippolytus held that the Church could not absolve the gravest sins and could not tolerate sinful clergy, and he catalogued Callixtus’s mercies—forgiving adultery after penance, retaining ordained men who married, recognizing slave-free marriages—as the destruction of discipline. He broke communion and, by the traditional account, was set up as a rival bishop: the first antipope. In 235 he and Pope Pontian were deported together to Sardinia, where tradition holds they were reconciled; the Church venerates both as saints.

Was Pope Callixtus a martyr?

He is the only pope between Peter and Pontian (d. 235) listed in the Depositio Martyrum, the earliest Roman martyr-calendar (October 14, on the Via Aurelia at the third milestone)—the strongest early evidence of a martyr’s cult for any pope of the era, and the current calendar retains his feast, with the martyr title, on October 14. How he died is less certain. His legendary Acts—thrown from a window in Trastevere, drowned in a well—are late fiction; the standard scholarly reconstruction is death in a local anti-Christian riot (his death fell under the tolerant Alexander Severus, so no state persecution explains it); and some recent scholarship argues the violent death itself is legend, the “martyr” title reflecting his sufferings as a confessor of the Sardinian mines. The cult is early and certain; the manner of death is not.

Where is Pope Callixtus buried?

He was buried not in the famous Catacomb of San Callisto that bears his name, but across the Tiber in the catacomb of Calepodius on the Via Aurelia—at the third milestone, exactly as the fourth-century Depositio records. His tomb there was identified by the archaeologist Aldo Nestori in April 1960, decorated with early-medieval frescoes depicting his legend, including the well scene. In the ninth century Pope Gregory IV translated his relics to Santa Maria in Trastevere, where they remain beneath the high altar, in the quarter of his birth.

Footnotes

1. 1. Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies IX.11–12 (ANF chs. 6–7), trans. J. H. MacMahon, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886). Available at NewAdvent.org. On the work's recovery and the Hippolytan question, see the Zephyrinus entry, with Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 31 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), and J. J. I. von Döllinger, Hippolytus und Kallistus (Regensburg, 1853).

2. 2. Liber Pontificalis, "Callistus I," in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 20–21: "Calistus, by nationality a Roman, son of Domitius, from the district Urbs Ravennantium," which Loomis glosses as "a district beyond the Tiber peopled by settlers from Ravenna, the modern Trastevere." Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), for Carpophorus.

3. 3. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5; NewAdvent.org. The Piscina Publica was a district of the Aventine region. Whether the failure was embezzlement (Hippolytus's insinuation) or misfortune the text cannot establish; the deposits of "widows and brethren" are his detail.

4. 4. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5. All quoted phrases verbatim. Fuscianus is attested as urban prefect in the late 180s, which anchors the chronology of the episode to Victor's era or just before it.

5. 5. On damnatio ad metalla, see Fergus Millar, "Condemnation to Hard Labour in the Roman Empire, from the Julio-Claudians to Constantine," Papers of the British School at Rome 52 (1984): 124–147. The "noxious island" (insula nociva) phrase is the Liberian Catalogue's, in its notice of the later deportation of Pontian and Hippolytus to Sardinia (the manuscript's "uocina" being standardly emended to "nociva"): Theodor Mommsen, ed., Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892).

6. 6. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5; all quoted phrases verbatim. Cassius Dio, Roman History, epitome of Book 73 (72 Boissevain), 4.6–7, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 9 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927). On Marcia and the Victor-side telling, see the Victor entry of this series. Hyacinthus is called a eunuch "rather advanced in life" in MacMahon's rendering; the Greek text styles him a presbyter, and modern scholarship discusses him as Marcia's foster-father or spiritual guardian.

7. 7. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5: "Victor was very much grieved at what had taken place; but since he was a compassionate man, he took no action in the matter… Victor sends Callistus to take up his abode in Antium, having settled on him a certain monthly allowance for food."

8. 8. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5: "And after Victor's death, Zephyrinus, having had Callistus as a fellow-worker in the management of his clergy, paid him respect to his own damage; and transferring this person from Antium, appointed him over the cemetery." On the cemetery's institutional significance, see the Zephyrinus entry.

9. 9. On de Rossi's identification of the Crypt of the Popes in 1854 and the nine third-century popes traditionally buried there (Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius I, Stephen I, Sixtus II, Dionysius, Felix I, Eutychian—the attestation resting on surviving Greek epitaphs for five of them, and on the Liber Pontificalis and a fourth-century plaque list for the rest), see the official guide of the Catacombs of St. Callixtus (catacombesancallisto.it) and the standard topographies.

10. 10. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5, which continues: "Callistus, who was in the habit of always associating with Zephyrinus… disclosed, by force of contrast, Zephyrinus to be a person able neither to form a judgment of things said, nor discerning the design of Callistus."

11. 11. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.21.1–2, trans. A. C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890). Available at NewAdvent.org.

12. 12. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5: "he excommunicated Sabellius, as not entertaining orthodox opinions. He acted thus from apprehension of me, and imagining that he could in this manner obliterate the charge against him among the churches, as if he did not entertain strange opinions."

13. 13. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5: "Callistus alleges that the Logos Himself is Son, and that Himself is Father; and that though denominated by a different title, yet that in reality He is one indivisible spirit… For, says (Callistus), I will not profess belief in two Gods, Father and Son, but in one… And in this way Callistus contends that the Father suffered along with the Son; for he does not wish to assert that the Father suffered." The "Ditheists" reproach: same chapter; the print ANF reads "Ye are Ditheists."

14. 14. H. Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, §42a in the older numbering (DH 105), where the English edition's brackets assign "The Father did not die, but the Son" to Callixtus; see the discussion and the attribution wrinkle in the Zephyrinus entry. For the theological assessment of Callixtus's formula and Hippolytus's subordinationist exposure, see J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed. (London: A&C Black, 1977), ch. 5.

15. 15. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.20.2, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1. For the traditional "first antipope" account, see Johann Peter Kirsch, "St. Hippolytus of Rome," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), NewAdvent.org; for the revisionist school-community reading, Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church. Notably, Hippolytus's own polemic never attacks the validity of Callixtus's election—a silence the Catholic Encyclopedia's Callistus article remarks.

16. 16. The Liberian Catalogue records the deportation of Pontian and Hippolytus to Sardinia in 235; the Depositio Martyrum commemorates both on August 13 (Hippolytus on the Via Tiburtina, Pontian in the catacomb of Callixtus). See Kirsch, "St. Hippolytus of Rome," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (1910), and the current Martyrologium Romanum, which keeps the joint commemoration of Pontian and Hippolytus on August 13. The reconciliation before death is the tradition's inference from the joint deportation and joint honor.

17. 17. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5. On the rigorist position and the "order of penitents," see the historical note at Catechism of the Catholic Church §1447, and n. 23 below.

18. 18. Tertullian, De pudicitia (On Modesty) 1, trans. S. Thelwall, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885). Available at NewAdvent.org.

19. 19. The Carthaginian reading goes back to G. Esser (1914) and was widely adopted after T. D. Barnes's Tertullian (1971); Berthold Altaner's standard Patrology (trans. Hilda Graef, 1960) states it flatly: "The frequently held view that the opponent here indicated is Pope Callistus (217-22) should be rejected… Tertullian evidently attacked Bishop Agrippinus of Carthage." The Roman identification retains defenders (among them Brent); for the state of the question, see David E. Wilhite, "Identity, Psychology, and the Psychici: Tertullian's 'Bishop of Bishops,'" Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 5 (2009), art. 9.

20. 20. John Chapman, "Pope Callistus I," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1908). Available at NewAdvent.org.

21. 21. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5: "if a bishop was guilty of any sin, if even a sin unto death, he ought not to be deposed"; "bishops, priests, and deacons, who had been twice married, and thrice married, began to be allowed to retain their place among the clergy"; the ark "in which were both dogs, and wolves, and ravens, and all things clean and unclean," with the tares of Matthew 13:30 alleged in the same passage.

22. 22. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5. Roman law denied conubium (legal capacity for marriage) between the senatorial class and slaves or freedmen; Callixtus's recognition of such unions as marriage within the Church is the point of Hippolytus's outrage. On the passage and its social context, see Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003).

23. 23. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1447: "During the first centuries the reconciliation of Christians who had committed particularly grave sins after their Baptism (for example, idolatry, murder, or adultery) was tied to a very rigorous discipline, according to which penitents had to do public penance for their sins, often for years, before receiving reconciliation. To this 'order of penitents' (which concerned only certain grave sins), one was only rarely admitted and in certain regions only once in a lifetime." Available at vatican.va. The Catechism names no pope; the historical placement of Callixtus at the head of the development is the standard account of the histories of penance.

24. 24. Chapman, "Pope Callistus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (1908); NewAdvent.org. Chapman adds, of the disciplinary charges: "Doubtless Hippolytus and Tertullian were upholding a supposed custom of earlier times, and the pope in decreeing a relaxation was regarded as enacting a new law. On this point it is unnecessary to justify Callistus."

25. 25. Depositio Martyrum, in the Chronograph of 354: Theodor Mommsen, ed., Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892), 71–72; transcription at Tertullian.org. The other popes in the list—Fabian, Pontian, Sixtus II—are all victims of the mid-century persecutions; the companion Depositio Episcoporum begins with Lucius (d. 254).

26. 26. Chapman, "Pope Callistus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (1908).

27. 27. Chapman, "Pope Callistus I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (1908): "His Acts are spurious." The passio (BHL 1523), variously dated from the later fifth to the seventh century, stars an ex-consul "Palmatius" unknown to the consular fasti; its content is catalogued in the Oxford Cult of Saints database, record E02485. The priest Asterius and the seventeen days are its details.

28. 28. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), ch. 1. The same reconstruction—death "probably in a local disturbance in Trastevere, since there is no record of a formal persecution under Emperor Alexander Severus"—is the New Catholic Encyclopedia's.

29. 29. András Handl, "Bishop Callistus I. of Rome (217?–222?): A Martyr or a Confessor?," Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 18 (2014): 390–419, arguing that the violent death is the passio's invention, that no anti-Christian riot under Alexander Severus is otherwise attested, and that Callixtus was honored as "martyr" in the older inclusive sense covering a confessor of the mines.

30. 30. On Aldo Nestori's excavations in the catacomb of Calepodius (campaigns from 1960; the tomb identified April 1960; the funerary basilica attributed to Julius I traced in 1969), published in Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana 47 (1971): 169–278 and 48 (1972): 193–233; the early-medieval fresco cycle of the martyrdom legend, the well scene included, is studied in Mara Minasi, La tomba di Callisto: Appunti sugli affreschi altomedievali della cripta del Papa martire nella catacomba di Calepodio (Vatican City: Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, 2009).

31. 31. The translation under Gregory IV (827–844), with the relics of Callixtus enshrined beneath the high altar of Santa Maria in Trastevere together with those of Pope Julius and the martyr Calepodius, is recorded in the topographical literature of the basilica; the ninth-century date and the confessio location are standard. Cf. Chapman, "Pope Callistus I": the relics were "translated in the ninth century to Sta. Maria in Trastevere."

32. 32. Liber Pontificalis, "Callistus I" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 20–21): "He built a basilica beyond the Tiber," with Loomis's note: "On or near the site of Santa Maria in Trastevere, which was called sometimes the church of Callistus as late as the eighth century." The fourth-century Liberian Catalogue assigns to Julius I a "basilicam trans Tiberim regione XIIII iuxta Callistum"—"across the Tiber, in the fourteenth region, next to Callistus"—and the Catholic Encyclopedia's Callistus article judges the nearby church of San Callisto, with its well, "probably the church he built, rather than the more famous basilica."

33. 33. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2004), 14 October, commemorating the deposition of Callixtus in the cemetery of Calepodius on the Via Aurelia; the General Roman Calendar keeps Saint Callistus I, pope and martyr, as an optional memorial on October 14. The Liber Pontificalis adds its own notices—"He was crowned with martyrdom"; a thrice-yearly Saturday fast "from corn, wine and oil"; burial "in the cemetery of Calipodius on the Via Aurelia at the third milestone, October 14"—and credits him with constructing "another cemetery on the Via Appia, where many priests and martyrs rest, which is called even to this day the cemetery of Calistus" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 20–21).