Pope Saint Felix I: The Twenty-Sixth Pope, the Martyrdom He Never Suffered, and the Letter He Never Wrote

The twenty-sixth in a series on the popes.

Almost everything the average reference book will tell you about Pope Saint Felix I is false. It will tell you he died a martyr; he did not. It will tell you he wrote a celebrated letter on the person of Christ, quoted a century and a half after his death by a great saint and read aloud at an ecumenical council; he wrote no such thing. Strip away the martyr’s crown a later age set on his head and the eloquent Christological letter a heretic forged in his name, and what remains of the twenty-sixth pope is very small—two bare sentences in Eusebius, a garbled paragraph in the Roman pope-book, a single line in a burial calendar. And yet the little that remains is solid, and it places Felix at the hinge of one of the first great heresy trials in the Church’s history, at the moment a pagan emperor made communion with the bishop of Rome the legal test of who owned a church. The forgeries turn out to be the most revealing thing about him—not because they are true, but because of what they disclose: what later ages were so certain Felix must have been that they were willing to manufacture the evidence.

This is the twenty-sixth entry in my series on the popes, which has followed the bishops of Rome in order from Peter down to Felix’s immediate predecessor, Dionysius. Felix stands half a century past Callixtus and the world of Hippolytus—a generation into the long mid-third-century ordeal of persecution and recovery, in the short calm before the storm of Diocletian.

The Smallest Dossier in the Series

Begin with what can actually be documented, because it does not take long. Felix succeeded Dionysius as bishop of Rome early in 269 and died on the last day of 274. Even those dates come not from any contemporary who knew him but from the fourth-century Liberian catalogue, which reckons his reign from 5 January 269 to 30 December 274; the sources cannot agree on so basic a fact as how long he held office.⁠¹ Eusebius, our earliest witness, disposes of the whole pontificate in two sentences separated by the affair that gives it its only interest. At the close of his account of Paul of Samosata he notes the changing of the guard at Rome: “Shortly before this, Dionysius, bishop of Rome, after holding office for nine years, died, and was succeeded by Felix.”⁠² Three chapters later he closes the ledger: “At this time, Felix, having presided over the church of Rome for five years, was succeeded by Eutychianus.”⁠³ That is the sum of what the historian of the early Church knew to say about him: a name, a term of office, and a place in the succession.

The Roman Liber Pontificalis—the Book of the Popes, compiled in its first form in the sixth century—adds a short biographical notice, and it is a useful specimen of how legend accretes. Felix, it says, was “by nationality a Roman, son of Constantius”; it credits him with a liturgical decree, records his ordinations, calls him a martyr, and buries him on the Via Aurelia. The trouble is that its two surviving recensions cannot agree on the length of his reign—“2 years and 10 months,” says one; “4 years, 3 months and 25 days,” says the other—and neither matches Eusebius or the Liberian catalogue, while the martyrdom and the Via Aurelia burial are, as we shall see, demonstrably wrong.⁠⁴ This is the paradox of Felix: the more a source claims to know about him, the less of it survives scrutiny. J. N. D. Kelly’s standard dictionary calls him one of the obscurest popes, his very dates conjectural—and then the little that later ages felt sure of turns out to be invention. To find the real Felix, one has to work outward from the single event of his reign that the record actually anchors.

The Bishop Who Preferred to Be Called Ducenarius

That event happened four hundred miles away, at Antioch, and Felix was at most a bystander to its climax; but it is the frame for everything that follows, including the forgery, so it has to be told. The bishop of Antioch in these years was Paul of Samosata, and he was a scandal on two fronts at once. Eusebius, quoting the synod that eventually deposed him, is withering about the first: Paul, he says, “is puffed up, and assumes worldly dignities, preferring to be called ducenarius rather than bishop; and struts in the market-places.”⁠⁵ The gibe has a precise edge. A ducenarius was a senior imperial finance official, a procurator paid two hundred thousand sesterces a year; Paul held the civil post alongside his see, protected—so the old Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes the sources—by “Zenobia, the famous Queen of Palmyra,” under whose breakaway eastern empire Antioch then lay. He was a wealthy man with a retinue and a bodyguard, a bishop who governed like a magnate.⁠⁶

The second scandal was doctrine, and it is the one that matters for Felix. Paul taught, in Eusebius’s blunt phrase, “low and degraded views of Christ, namely, that in his nature he was a common man.”⁠⁷ The technical name for the error is dynamic Monarchianism, or adoptionism, and it descended, his accusers said, from the shoemaker-theologian Theodotus and from a certain Artemas. Its logic ran thus: the Word, the Logos, is not a distinct person but merely God’s own wisdom and power, without subsistence of his own; and this Wisdom came to rest upon the man Jesus of Nazareth—as one account of Paul’s teaching put it, dwelling “in the man Jesus, as we live in houses,” uniting with him not substantially but “qualitatively.” Christ, on this account, was a good man supremely inspired, a temple the divine Wisdom inhabited, not the eternal Son made flesh.⁠⁸ It is the oldest and most persistent of the Christological heresies, and the Church has had to answer it in every century, our own included.

Rome did not answer it directly. The answer came from the East, in a sequence of councils at Antioch that this series has reason to remember, because they are among the earliest great conciliar actions against a bishop for heresy. A first synod, around 264, drew the leading lights of the eastern Church: Firmilian of Caesarea, Gregory the Wonderworker, and—invited, though too old and infirm to travel, so that he sent his judgment by letter—the great Dionysius of Alexandria. Paul, a practiced debater, wriggled free of that first assembly by professing orthodoxy. He could not wriggle free of the second. At the decisive synod of 268 the Church brought in a professional: Malchion, a presbyter of Antioch drawn from its school of rhetoricians, who cornered Paul in a formal disputation taken down by stenographers and exposed the heresy past denying. Paul was deposed and excommunicated, and Domnus installed in his place. Firmilian did not live to see it; he died at Tarsus on his way to the council.⁠⁹

One detail of that synod would echo for a century. To refute Paul, the fathers of Antioch found themselves rejecting the word homoousios—“of one substance”—because Paul had used it in a sense they judged heretical, to mean a single undifferentiated substance shared out between Father and Son. Two generations later, at Nicaea in 325, the Church would enshrine that very word as the touchstone of orthodoxy, and the opponents of Nicaea would gleefully point out that a famous council had once condemned it. “It must be regarded as certain,” the Catholic Encyclopedia concludes, “that the council which condemned Paul rejected the term homoousios; but naturally only in a false sense used by Paul.”⁠¹⁰ The same word can carry a heresy or a creed depending on the mouth that speaks it—a lesson the fourth century learned the hard way, and a first hint of why a later forger would find Felix a useful name to borrow.

The Letter to Dionysius and the Judgment of Aurelian

Here at last is where Rome, and Felix, enter the story. When the synod of 268 deposed Paul, it published its verdict in a circular letter, and Eusebius records its address: the assembled pastors “prepared by common consent an epistle addressed to Dionysius, bishop of Rome, and Maximus of Alexandria, and sent it to all the provinces.”⁠¹¹ The letter went to Rome, to the two great sees whose communion certified a bishop’s legitimacy. But the Dionysius it named was dead, or dying: the bishop of Rome by that name expired on 26 December 268, and Felix took the chair a few days later. Whether the Antiochene letter reached Rome under Dionysius or under his successor is one of the small uncertainties the sources leave open; either way, the pope who now stood in communion with Domnus and against Paul was Felix.⁠¹²

Deposition on paper was one thing; eviction was another. Paul refused to vacate the church building of Antioch, and with Zenobia’s Palmyrene regime behind him, no one in the East could dislodge him. Then, in 272, Aurelian reconquered the East and crushed Palmyra, and the Christians of Antioch seized the moment: they petitioned the pagan emperor himself to settle the ownership of their church. His ruling is one of the most remarkable documents in early papal history, and Eusebius preserves it. Aurelian, he writes, “decided the matter most equitably, ordering the building to be given to those to whom the bishops of Italy and of the city of Rome should adjudge it. Thus this man was driven out of the church, with extreme disgrace, by the worldly power.”⁠¹³

Weigh what that means. A pagan emperor, asked to arbitrate a Christian property dispute, reaches for a test of legitimacy the litigants themselves must have proposed: not who holds the building, not who has the local majority, but who is in communion with the bishops of Italy and of Rome. “Evidently,” as the Catholic Encyclopedia observes, “it had been argued before him that the question of legitimacy depended on communion with Rome.”⁠¹⁴ Here, from the mouth of the emperor who would shortly style himself deus et dominus, is one of the earliest external attestations of the Roman see’s role as the touchstone of catholic communion—offered not by a churchman with an interest in the claim but by an outsider who simply needed a rule that would settle the case. Honesty requires a caution the triumphalist telling omits: Eusebius never names Felix in this passage. He writes only of “the bishops of Italy and of the city of Rome,” and the pope who happened to occupy that chair in 272 was Felix by the calendar’s arithmetic, not by any act of his the historian thought worth recording. Felix’s part in the greatest moment of his reign is real but silent—the office mattered; the man is a cipher. It is the perfect condition, as it turns out, for a legend to grow.

The peace in which Felix governed was thin and did not outlast him by long. Aurelian, Eusebius reports, “in the course of his reign he changed his mind in regard to us, and was moved by certain advisers to institute a persecution.” But the blow never fell: “as he was about to do it, and was, so to speak, in the very act of signing the decrees against us, the divine judgment came upon him and restrained him”—Aurelian was assassinated in 275.⁠¹⁵ Felix had already died, on the last day of 274, in a Church still officially at peace. He did not live to see the persecution Aurelian planned, still less the one Diocletian would launch a generation later. This matters, because it is fatal to the first thing later ages would claim about him.

The First Forgery: The Letter He Never Wrote

Sometime in the early fifth century, in the heat of the controversy over Nestorius, a document began to circulate under the name of Felix. It was a profession of faith on the Incarnation, headed as a letter from Felix—styled bishop of Rome and martyr—to Maximus, bishop of Alexandria, and his clergy. Its burden was the unity of the person of Christ: that the one who was born of the Virgin is himself the eternal Son and Word of God, not a man whom God adopted as a second son beside himself. The old Catholic Encyclopedia describes the surviving fragment precisely: it “lays special emphasis on the unity and identity of the Son of God and the Son of Man in Christ.”⁠¹⁶

It is a fine statement of orthodox Christology. It is also a forgery, and a consequential one. Cyril of Alexandria, marshaling the Fathers against Nestorius, cited it as a witness from the ancient Roman church; it was entered into the dossier of patristic testimonies read at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and it surfaces again in Vincent of Lérins. A pope of the third century seemed to be reaching forward across a hundred and fifty years to settle the Christological quarrel of the fifth.⁠¹⁷ But the reaching was the other way around. The fragment belongs to the notorious body of forgeries produced by the followers of Apollinaris of Laodicea, who—their own master’s teaching having been condemned—circulated their Christology under the borrowed names of unimpeachable authorities: Athanasius, Julius of Rome, Gregory the Wonderworker, and Felix. The fraud was exposed in antiquity by Leontius of Byzantium, and established beyond dispute in modern scholarship by Hans Lietzmann’s critical edition of the Apollinarian school in 1904. The Catholic Encyclopedia states the verdict without flinching: the document “was at a later date interpolated in the interest of his sect by a follower of Apollinaris. This spurious document was submitted to the Council of Ephesus in 431.”⁠¹⁸

Why Felix? Here the forgery becomes almost eloquent. A fabricator wanting a third-century Roman voice against adoptionism could hardly have chosen better. Felix was the pope of the Paul of Samosata affair—the one remembered, however dimly, as having stood in Rome against the teaching that Christ was “a mere man.” A letter insisting that Christ is no adopted man but the eternal Son fit the reputation exactly; the lie was plausible because the truth beneath it was real. Not every scholar is willing to call the whole thing a pure fabrication. The French patrologist Pierre Nautin argued that a genuine letter of Felix may lie under the Apollinarian retouching, reasoning shrewdly that a forger inventing from nothing would more naturally have chosen Dionysius, the actual named recipient of the Antioch synod’s letter, rather than his obscure successor; the ascription to Felix, on this view, preserves a memory of a real Roman reply to the East.⁠¹⁹ Whatever the truth of that, the text as it stands is not Felix’s, and no authentic writing of his survives at all.

And this was not the last time his name would be borrowed. In the ninth century the compilers of the great canonical forgery known as the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals fathered three more letters on him—on the procedures for accusing clerics, on the relation of Father and Son—fabrications in the service of a medieval agenda Felix could not have imagined. He is, in a strange way, the most forged pope of the early Church: an obscure man whose very obscurity made his name a convenient blank on which later centuries wrote what they needed him to have said.⁠²⁰

The Second Forgery: The Martyrdom He Never Suffered

The other thing everyone knew about Felix was that he died for the faith. The Liber Pontificalis states it flatly—“He was crowned with martyrdom”—and the forged Christological fragment, we have seen, already styled him “bishop of Rome and martyr” in the fifth century.⁠²¹ For a thousand years he was Saint Felix, Pope and Martyr, and his feast on 30 May kept that title. But the martyrdom cannot survive the calendar.

The oldest liturgical record of the Roman church is the pair of lists preserved in the Chronograph of 354: the Depositio Martyrum, the calendar of the martyrs’ feasts, and the Depositio Episcoporum, the register of the bishops’ burials. Felix appears in exactly one of them—and it is the wrong one for a martyr. He stands in the list of bishops, not the list of martyrs. The Catholic Encyclopedia draws the necessary conclusion and does not soften it: the martyr claim “is unsupported by any authentic earlier evidence and is manifestly due to a confusion of names… . In the Roman ‘Feriale’ … the name of Felix occurs in the list of Roman bishops (Depositio episcoporum), and not in that of the martyrs.”⁠²² The chronology says the same thing the calendar does. Felix died at the end of 274, in the peace before Aurelian’s aborted turn against the Church; there was no persecution at Rome in his lifetime to make him a martyr.

How, then, did the crown appear? By the same error that misplaced his grave. There really were martyrs named Felix venerated at a basilica on the Via Aurelia—the pilgrim itineraries speak of a shrine of two pontiffs and martyrs named Felix, conflating our pope with others—and the sixth-century compiler of the Liber Pontificalis, finding a Felix honored on the Via Aurelia, simply merged the identities, awarding the pope both a martyr’s death and a Via Aurelia tomb that belonged to someone else. Loomis, translating the Book of the Popes, appends the correction in a footnote: “Pope Felix was not counted a martyr in the early lists and he was buried with his predecessors in the cemetery of Callistus. He is confounded here with two martyrs of the same name who were associated with a basilica on the Via Aurelia.”⁠²³

Even the date of his feast is an accident of transcription. The Depositio Episcoporum records his burial on the third day before the Kalends of January—III Kal. Ian., which is 30 December, his true death-day. Somewhere in the manuscript tradition a copyist read “Ian.” as “Iun.,” turning January into June and moving the commemoration to the third day before the Kalends of June, 30 May. The Catholic Encyclopedia identifies the slip exactly: the false date “is probably an error which could easily occur through a transcriber writing Jun. for Jan.”⁠²⁴ For a millennium the Church kept Felix’s feast on a day generated by a scribe’s misreading of a single abbreviation—a fitting emblem for a pope whose whole later reputation was built out of copyists’ errors and forgers’ inventions.

Where He Actually Lies

Behind the legends is a grave, and the grave is real. The Depositio Episcoporum is exact: “III Kal. Januarii, Felicis in Callisti”—30 December, Felix, in the cemetery of Callixtus. Not the Via Aurelia across the river, but the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia, the official burial ground of the third-century Roman church, in the very Crypt of the Popes that the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi rediscovered in 1854.⁠²⁵ There Felix was laid among his brethren—Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius, and the rest—and there, a century and a half later, Pope Sixtus III set up a marble plaque listing the popes who rested in the crypt, Felix’s name among them, corroborating the fourth-century calendar with a fifth-century inscription cut into the wall of the tomb itself.⁠²⁶ No personal epitaph of Felix survives in place—the original Greek grave-inscriptions recovered from the Crypt of the Popes belong to Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius, and Eutychian—but the collective record leaves no serious doubt that Felix lay there with them.⁠²⁷ His relics were later moved: in the ninth century, in the great translation of catacomb relics into the safety of the city’s churches, Pope Paschal I is said to have carried Felix to the basilica of Santa Prassede, where so many of the ancient martyrs and confessors were reburied.⁠²⁸

The most satisfying vindication came only in our own time, and it came from the Church’s own hand. When the calendar was reformed after the Second Vatican Council, Felix’s feast was removed from the general calendar and his commemoration in the Roman Martyrology was quietly corrected against the oldest evidence: it was moved from the spurious 30 May back to 30 December, his real burial day, and the false martyr’s title was dropped. The current Martyrologium commemorates, on 30 December, “in the cemetery of Callixtus on the Via Appia, the deposition of Saint Felix I, pope, who governed the Church of Rome under the emperor Aurelian.”⁠²⁹ After fifteen hundred years, the reform put the pope back where the men who buried him had recorded he lay, on the day they said he died, with the plain title they gave him: not martyr, but bishop of Rome.

The Liber Pontificalis does credit Felix with one act that has clung to his name: “He instituted the celebration of masses over the memorials of the martyrs,” the first pope, on this telling, to order the Eucharist offered at the tombs of the saints.⁠³⁰ Here too the honest verdict is deflating. The custom of the missa ad corpus, the Mass said at a martyr’s body, is real and well attested by the end of the fourth century; but ascribing its institution to a third-century pope is the Book of the Popes’ characteristic anachronism, retrojecting a later practice onto an early name to give it apostolic dignity. Felix probably decreed no such thing. And yet the instinct behind the false attribution is not foolish. If any impulse belongs to the age of Felix—an age that buried its bishops among its martyrs in the same catacomb, that measured a church’s legitimacy by communion with the tombs of Peter and Paul—it is the impulse to gather the living Eucharist around the honored dead. The decree is legend; the world it imagines is his.

What We Can Actually Say

Reduce Felix to the load-bearing evidence and the portrait is thin but not empty. A Roman, elected bishop of Rome early in 269 in succession to Dionysius; pope for a little under six years, through the reconquest of the East and the fall of Palmyra; in communion with the party that deposed Paul of Samosata, and so the “bishop … of the city of Rome” whose judgment a pagan emperor made the test of who owned the church of Antioch; dead on 30 December 274, in the last peace before Aurelian’s aborted persecution; buried in the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus, and honored ever since among the bishops of Rome. That is the whole of it, and every clause of it can be documented.

What the evidence does not support is nearly everything that made Felix famous: the martyr’s crown (a confusion with other Roman Felixes); the Via Aurelia grave (the same confusion); the 30 May feast (a copyist’s slip of “Jun.” for “Jan.”); the great letter on the person of Christ (an Apollinarian forgery that fooled the Council of Ephesus); the three decretals of the ninth century (Pseudo-Isidore); the decree on Masses over the martyrs (a retrojected custom). Felix is a case study in how the record of an obscure man becomes, over the centuries, a magnet for the things later ages need such a man to have been.

And that, in the end, is why he is worth an entry. The two great forgeries in his name are not random. One made him a champion of the person of Christ against those who would reduce the Son to an adopted man; the other made him a martyr who sealed his witness with his blood. Both are false as history. But both testify, backhandedly, to what the Church remembered a pope was for—right faith in the Incarnate Word, and fidelity unto death—and to its instinct that a bishop of Rome in the age of the martyrs must have embodied them. The one thing about Felix that is neither forged nor legendary is the quiet fact that a pagan emperor, needing a rule to settle a quarrel among Christians, reached for communion with the bishop of Rome. That sentence in Eusebius is worth more than all the manufactured glory heaped on Felix afterward. It is small, and it is silent about the man. But it is true, and in the history of the papacy it is not small at all.

Next in the series: Pope Saint Eutychian (coming soon).

Further Reading

For the early papacy generally, the indispensable reference works are 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). The primary sources for Felix are few and public: Eusebius, The Church History, Book VII, in the translation of Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890), and the Liber Pontificalis in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Columbia University Press, 1916), with the great critical edition of Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis (Paris, 1886–1892), for the notes. On Paul of Samosata and the councils of Antioch, the fullest recent study is Fergus Millar’s classic essay “Paul of Samosata, Zenobia and Aurelian,” Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971). On the Apollinarian forgeries carried under Felix’s name, the standard critical collection remains Hans Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule (Tübingen, 1904); Johannes Quasten treats the fragment in Patrology, vol. 2 (1953). For the Roman calendars and the Crypt of the Popes, the enduring authority is Giovanni Battista de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana (1864–1877).

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, Saint Zephyrinus, the fifteenth pope, Saint Callixtus I, the sixteenth pope, Saint Urban I, the seventeenth pope, Saint Pontian, the eighteenth pope, Saint Anterus, the nineteenth pope, Saint Fabian, the twentieth pope, Saint Cornelius, the twenty-first pope, Saint Lucius I, the twenty-second pope, Saint Stephen I, the twenty-third pope, Saint Sixtus II, the twenty-fourth pope, and Saint Dionysius, the twenty-fifth pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Felix I?

Felix I was the twenty-sixth Bishop of Rome counting Peter as first, reigning from early 269 to 30 December 274. He is one of the most obscure of the early popes: the historian Eusebius gives him only two sentences, and no genuine writing of his survives. The one well-documented event of his reign is the aftermath of the deposition of Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch, for teaching that Christ was a “mere man”—when the emperor Aurelian ruled that the disputed church of Antioch should go to whomever the bishops of Italy and Rome recognized. Two later famous claims about Felix—that he died a martyr, and that he wrote an important letter on the person of Christ—are both fabrications.

Was Pope Felix I really a martyr?

No. The medieval Liber Pontificalis calls him a martyr, and for centuries he was venerated as “Pope and Martyr” on 30 May, but the earliest evidence contradicts it. The oldest Roman calendar, the Depositio Episcoporum of 354, lists Felix among the buried bishops, not among the martyrs, and he died in a time of peace, before the persecution the emperor Aurelian was planning when he was assassinated in 275. The martyr’s title, as the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, “is manifestly due to a confusion of names” with other Roman martyrs called Felix. The modern Roman Martyrology has dropped the martyr title and moved his commemoration to his true burial day, 30 December.

What was the letter of Felix I read at the Council of Ephesus?

It was a forgery. In the fifth-century controversy over Nestorius, a profession of faith on the Incarnation circulated under Felix’s name, addressed to Maximus of Alexandria, stressing the unity of the Son of God and the Son of Man in Christ. Cyril of Alexandria cited it and it was read into the record at the Council of Ephesus in 431 as an ancient Roman witness against Nestorius. In fact it was produced by followers of Apollinaris of Laodicea, who circulated their Christology under the borrowed names of respected authorities; the forgery was established by modern scholarship, definitively in Hans Lietzmann’s 1904 edition of the Apollinarian corpus. No authentic writing of Felix survives.

What did Pope Felix I have to do with Paul of Samosata?

Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch, was deposed by a synod there in 268 for teaching an adoptionist Christology—that Christ was essentially a man on whom God’s Wisdom rested. The synod’s letter announcing the deposition was addressed to the bishops of Rome and Alexandria, and when Paul refused to give up the church building, the emperor Aurelian ruled around 272 that it should be handed to those in communion with “the bishops of Italy and of the city of Rome.” The pope in communion with the lawful bishop of Antioch at that moment was Felix. Eusebius does not name him in the passage, so his personal role is inferred from the dates rather than recorded—but the episode made communion with Rome the legal test of legitimacy, one of the earliest such attestations from an outside source.

When is the feast of Pope Saint Felix I?

His commemoration in the current Roman Martyrology is on 30 December, the day of his burial recorded in the fourth-century Depositio Episcoporum. For most of the Church’s history his feast was kept on 30 May, but that date arose from a copyist’s error—misreading the Latin abbreviation “Ian.” (January) as “Iun.” (June)—and the post–Vatican II reform corrected it back to his true death-day, at the same time removing the erroneous title of martyr.

Where is Pope Felix I buried?

He was buried in the Crypt of the Popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia, the burial place of the third-century Roman bishops, as the Depositio Episcoporum records (“in Callisti”) and as a fifth-century plaque set up by Pope Sixtus III confirms. The Liber Pontificalis’s claim that he built and was buried in a basilica on the Via Aurelia is a mistake, part of the same confusion with other martyrs named Felix that produced his false martyr’s crown. In the ninth century his relics are said to have been translated into the city to the basilica of Santa Prassede.

Footnotes

1. 1. The accepted regnal dates (5 January 269 – 30 December 274) derive from the fourth-century Liberian catalogue and are printed in the Annuario Pontificio; J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. "Felix I," treat Felix as one of the obscurest popes whose dates are partly conjectural. The Liber Pontificalis gives divergent and irreconcilable reign lengths (see n. 4).

2. 2. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.30.23, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890). Available at NewAdvent.org. Dionysius of Rome died 26 December 268.

3. 3. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.32.1, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1: "At this time, Felix, having presided over the church of Rome for five years, was succeeded by Eutychianus, but he in less than ten months left the position to Caius, who lived in our day."

4. 4. Liber Pontificalis, "Felix I," in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 33: "Felix, by nationality a Roman, son of Constantius, occupied the see 2 years and 10 months" (one recension) / "4 years, 3 months and 25 days" (the other). Neither matches Eusebius's five years or the Liberian catalogue. On the general unreliability of the Liber Pontificalis for the third-century popes, see the introduction to Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis (Paris: Thorin, 1886–1892), vol. 1.

5. 5. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.30.8, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1, quoting the synodal letter of Antioch: Paul "is puffed up, and assumes worldly dignities, preferring to be called ducenarius rather than bishop; and struts in the market-places."

6. 6. John Chapman, "Paul of Samosata," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911): "Paul held the civil office of Procurator ducenarius, and was protected by Zenobia, the famous Queen of Palmyra. He was a wealthy man." Available at NewAdvent.org. A procurator ducenarius was a senior imperial fiscal official on a salary of 200,000 sesterces. On the Palmyrene background, see Fergus Millar, "Paul of Samosata, Zenobia and Aurelian: The Church, Local Culture and Political Allegiance in Third-Century Syria," Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 1–17.

7. 7. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.27.2, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1: Paul held, "contrary to the teaching of the Church, low and degraded views of Christ, namely, that in his nature he was a common man."

8. 8. Chapman, "Paul of Samosata," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (1911), summarizing the reconstructed doctrine: "The Logos as Wisdom dwelt in the man Jesus, as we live in houses . . . united with Him not substantially (or essentially, ousiodos), but qualitatively (kata poioteta)." The heresy is dynamic Monarchianism (adoptionism), traced by Paul's accusers to Artemas and Theodotus; Eusebius, HE VII.30.16–17, records the charge that Paul revived "the abominable heresy of Artemas."

9. 9. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.27–30, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1, for the two synods (c. 264 and 268), the invitation and letter of Dionysius of Alexandria, the presbyter Malchion, who "was alone able to detect the man who dissembled and deceived the others" (VII.29.2), the installation of Domnus, and the death of Firmilian of Caesarea at Tarsus on his way to the final council (VII.30.5).

10. 10. Chapman, "Paul of Samosata," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (1911): "It must be regarded as certain that the council which condemned Paul rejected the term homoousios; but naturally only in a false sense used by Paul." That the anti-Nicenes of the fourth century exploited this earlier conciliar rejection is attested by Athanasius, Basil, and Hilary of Poitiers; the point is not in Eusebius.

11. 11. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.30.1, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1: the pastors "prepared by common consent an epistle addressed to Dionysius, bishop of Rome, and Maximus of Alexandria, and sent it to all the provinces." The salutation Eusebius quotes runs, "To Dionysius and Maximus, and to all our fellow-ministers throughout the world, bishops, presbyters, and deacons" (VII.30.2).

12. 12. The synod that deposed Paul is dated by most scholars to 268 (McGiffert and R. A. Lipsius argue "certainly not later than 268"), while Dionysius of Rome died on 26 December 268 and Felix succeeded him early in 269. Eusebius mistakenly narrates the whole affair under Aurelian (270–275); the deposition preceded Aurelian's reign, though its enforcement did not. Whether the Antiochene letter reached Rome under Dionysius or Felix is therefore uncertain.

13. 13. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.30.19, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1. Aurelian's reconquest of the Palmyrene East and destruction of Zenobia's power (272–273) removed Paul's political protection and made the appeal to the emperor possible.

14. 14. John Chapman, "Paul of Samosata," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), glossing Eusebius VII.30.19: "evidently it had been argued before him that the question of legitimacy depended on communion with Rome." Available at NewAdvent.org.

15. 15. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.30.20–21, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1: Aurelian "was moved by certain advisers to institute a persecution against us. . . . But as he was about to do it, and was, so to speak, in the very act of signing the decrees against us, the divine judgment came upon him and restrained him." Aurelian was assassinated in 275.

16. 16. Kirsch, "Pope St. Felix I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (1909): "The fragment preserved in the Acts of the council lays special emphasis on the unity and identity of the Son of God and the Son of Man in Christ." The heading styles it a letter of Felix, as bishop of Rome and martyr, to Maximus of Alexandria; the fuller Greek and Syriac fragments are edited in Hans Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea und seine Schule (Tübingen: Mohr, 1904), and discussed in Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. 2 (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1953). The Catholic Encyclopedia article on Felix I is available at NewAdvent.org.

17. 17. Kirsch, "Pope St. Felix I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (1909), citing Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum . . . Collectio, IV, 1188, for the reading of the fragment at Ephesus (431); it is cited by Cyril of Alexandria and by Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2.30.

18. 18. Kirsch, "Pope St. Felix I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (1909): the letter "was at a later date interpolated in the interest of his sect by a follower of Apollinaris. This spurious document was submitted to the Council of Ephesus in 431." On the Apollinarian forgery-corpus circulated under orthodox names and exposed in antiquity by Leontius of Byzantium (Adversus Fraudes Apollinistarum), and its definitive modern edition, see Lietzmann, Apollinaris von Laodicea (1904).

19. 19. The view that a genuine letter of Felix touching the Paul of Samosata affair may underlie the Apollinarian text—reasoning that a free invention would more plausibly have been fathered on Dionysius (the named recipient of the Antioch letter) than on the obscure Felix—is associated with Pierre Nautin; see the discussion in Giovanni Maria Vian, "Felice I, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000). The 1909 Catholic Encyclopedia similarly posits a genuine base letter "interpolated" by the forger. The dominant view (Lietzmann, Quasten, Bardenhewer) treats the surviving fragment as an Apollinarian fabrication.

20. 20. On the three letters attributed to Felix in the ninth-century Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals (on procedures against accused clerics and on the relation of Father and Son), see Philipp Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1885), and the survey in Giovanni Maria Vian, "Felice I, santo," in Enciclopedia dei Papi (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000).

21. 21. Liber Pontificalis, "Felix I" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 33): "He was crowned with martyrdom." The forged Christological fragment (n. 16) likewise styles Felix a bishop of Rome and martyr, showing the title already attached in the fifth century.

22. 22. Kirsch, "Pope St. Felix I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (1909): the martyr detail "is unsupported by any authentic earlier evidence and is manifestly due to a confusion of names. . . . In the Roman 'Feriale' or calendar of feasts . . . the name of Felix occurs in the list of Roman bishops (Depositio episcoporum), and not in that of the martyrs." The Depositio Episcoporum and Depositio Martyrum are preserved in the Chronograph of 354; ed. Theodor Mommsen, Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892).

23. 23. Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 33 n. 1: "Pope Felix was not counted a martyr in the early lists and he was buried with his predecessors in the cemetery of Callistus. He is confounded here with two martyrs of the same name who were associated with a basilica on the Via Aurelia." Cf. Duchesne, Liber Pontificalis, vol. 1, cxxv, 158 n. 3.

24. 24. Kirsch, "Pope St. Felix I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (1909): the erroneous 30 May date "is probably an error which could easily occur through a transcriber writing Jun. for Jan." In Roman reckoning III Kalendas Ianuarias (counting inclusively back from 1 January) is 30 December; III Kalendas Iunias is 30 May.

25. 25. Kirsch, "Pope St. Felix I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (1909): Felix was "interred in the Catacomb of St. Callistus on the Via Appia ('III Kal. Januarii, Felicis in Callisti', it reads in the 'Depositio episcoporum')." On the Crypt of the Popes and de Rossi's rediscovery of it in 1854, see Giovanni Battista de Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, vol. 2 (Rome, 1867), 98–104.

26. 26. The marble plaque set up by Pope Sixtus III (432–440) in the Crypt of the Popes, listing the bishops buried there, includes Felix among the names (Xystus, Dionysius, Stephanus, Urbanus, Cornelius, Felix, Lucius . . .); see Vian, "Felice I, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000).

27. 27. The original in-situ Greek papal epitaphs recovered from the Crypt of the Popes belong to Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius I, and Eutychian, with Damasus's later metrical inscription for Sixtus II; no personal epitaph of Felix survives, his burial there being attested by the Depositio Episcoporum and the Sixtus III plaque (nn. 25–26).

28. 28. On the ninth-century translation of Felix's relics to Santa Prassede under Pope Paschal I (817–824), part of the wholesale removal of catacomb relics into the city's churches, see Vian, "Felice I, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000).

29. 29. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2004), 30 December, commemorating "in the cemetery of Callixtus on the Via Appia, the deposition of Saint Felix I, pope, who governed the Church of Rome under the emperor Aurelian" (translation from the official Italian Martirologio Romano). The 1969 calendar reform removed Felix from the General Roman Calendar, restored his commemoration to 30 December, and dropped the martyr title; see Giovanni Maria Vian, "Felice I, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000).

30. 30. Liber Pontificalis, "Felix I" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 33): "He instituted the celebration of masses over the memorials of the martyrs" (Latin: "Hic constituit supra memorias martyrum missas celebrare"). The practice of the missa ad corpus is attested by the late fourth century (Prudentius, Peristephanon XI), but its ascription to Felix is generally judged an anachronistic retrojection; Kirsch, "Pope St. Felix I," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (1909), judges that Felix "probably issued no such decree."