of uniting the Monophysites and the "orthodox" party of Chalcedon.
At Alexandria the Monophysite patriarch Peter Mongus signed, and he was allowed to retain his bishopric on condition that he received the Catholics to his communion. But the result of this concession on his part was that his own party broke off from him and remained in stiff separation from the main body of the Church under the title of the Acephali—"the Headless." So little or nothing was gained in Egypt, the scene of the schism. Meanwhile, the unfortunate document that was meant to be the flag of truce, if not the treaty of peace, developed a new line of cleavage in quite another direction. This cavalier treatment of Chalcedon gave mortal offence at Rome. For Chalcedon was the most Roman in its sympathies of all the general councils, since its elaborate statement of doctrine had been based on the great Leo's venerated Tome. The Henoticon was regarded in Rome as a distinctly heretical document, and it produced a severance between the Eastern and the Western churches which lasted for thirty-six years. Peter Mongus, the one champion of the document, was an unworthy man quite unfit to act as peacemaker, and while he was trying to force his bishops to accept it on pain of deposition, he was privately negotiating with the Pope Sylvester. On the accession of Felix to the papacy (a.d. 484), that pope immediately took strong measures. He cited Acacius to Rome; but Acacius declined to come at the bidding of his brother patriarch. Then Felix, with the support of an Italian synod, "deposed" Acacius; but the patriarch took no notice of his "deposition," and retained his position immolested. Thus the Henoticon was another wedge driven in between the East and the West, and it scarcely wanted a prophet to predict what must be the end with this everwidening fissure in the Catholic Church.
Anastasius, who succeeded Zeno in the year 491, was already well advanced in age, and yet he reigned for twenty-seven years, during the whole of which time Rome stood aloof from the Eastern Church in stern disapproval. The
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