The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Callistus I of Rome
died c. 223Early Church
A former slave who became bishop of Rome and opened forgiveness wider than his critics could bear.
Summary
- Lived died c. 223.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
Callistus began life as the slave of a Christian named Carpophorus in the imperial household at Rome. His master set him up in banking, and the venture failed, deposits from Christian widows and others went missing. Callistus fled by ship, was caught, and was brought back.
What happened next put him in the mines. In a synagogue on a sabbath he made a scene, apparently trying to collect debts from Jewish creditors, and was hauled before the city prefect Fuscianus, flogged, and sentenced to the lead mines of Sardinia, a sentence most men did not survive.
He got out. Marcia, the influential mistress of the emperor Commodus and a friend to Christians, obtained a release list for the Sardinian prisoners. Callistus's name was not on it. He talked his way onto the boat anyway.
Back in Rome, bishop Zephyrinus made him a deacon and put him in charge of the Christian burial ground on the Appian Way. It became the principal cemetery of the Roman church and it still bears his name: the Catacomb of Callixtus, where a whole row of third-century bishops of Rome lies buried.
Around 217 Callistus was elected bishop of Rome. He served about five years.
Everything above comes from a man who hated him. The presbyter Hippolytus, a formidable scholar, wrote the account in his Refutation of All Heresies, and he lost the election to Callistus. Hippolytus set himself up as a rival bishop rather than submit, the first antipope, and his portrait of Callistus as a swindler and a heretic has to be read as testimony from the losing side.
The real quarrel was about mercy. Callistus ruled that Christians guilty of adultery and fornication could be restored to communion after penance, where the rigorists held such sins were beyond the church's power to forgive. He accepted clergy who had married more than once. And he recognized as marriages the unions of Christian noblewomen with men of lower rank or slaves, which Roman law would not, protecting women who otherwise faced a choice between an unequal marriage the state disowned and no marriage at all.
Hippolytus called this laxity, a school for sin. Callistus called it the church, and cited the parable of the wheat and the tares.
He died about 222 or 223. Tradition says he was killed in a local riot and thrown down a well; the record of his death is not firm. He was buried not in his own great cemetery but on the Aurelian Way.
Sources: Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies IX (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5); Liber Pontificalis; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Pope Callistus I; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.
What was happening while he lived4 moments · AD 100–313
- c. 155Polycarp of Smyrna is burned in the stadiumThe old bishop had been a disciple of the apostle John. When the governor told him to curse Christ and go free, the account written by his own congregation records his answer: "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?" The traditional date is 155 or 156; some scholars argue for as late as 167.
- c. 165Justin Martyr is beheaded at RomeThe philosopher who had written open letters defending Christians to two emperors was tried by the city prefect Rusticus with six companions. The court record survives as the *Acts of Justin*. Asked what teachings he held, he explained them; asked to sacrifice, he refused, and the group was scourged and beheaded.
- 177The martyrs of Lyons and VienneMob violence in Gaul turned into arrests, torture, and days in the amphitheater. The churches there wrote an account that Eusebius preserved (*Church History* 5.1). Two names stayed: Pothinus, the bishop, over ninety years old, who died in prison, and Blandina, a slave woman whose owners feared she would break first and who outlasted them all.
- c. 203Perpetua and Felicity die in the arenaVibia Perpetua, a young mother of good family in Carthage, and Felicity, a pregnant slave woman, were arrested with several companions. Perpetua kept a prison diary that survives inside *The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity*, one of the earliest firsthand writings we have from a Christian woman. Felicity gave birth in prison days before they were sent out to the beasts.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Callistus I of Rome at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
A former slave who became bishop of Rome and opened the door of forgiveness wider than his critics could stand.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Martyrs' Church · 40 on this stretch of wall
A 22-year-old mother who kept a diary in prison and walked into the arena at Carthage singing.
Stayed with his people through plague and persecution, then walked to his own beheading and paid the executioner.
Traced his teaching straight back to the apostle John through Polycarp, and wrote the first great takedown of the gnostics.
Kept wearing his philosopher's cloak after he met Christ, argued the faith to the emperor's face, and was beheaded for it.
Wanted to die with his martyred father as a boy, and spent the rest of his life laying six versions of the Old Testament side by side.
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The lawyer who gave the church the word Trinity and told Rome that the blood of the martyrs is seed.