ACEFALI. - I. HERESY. - Name given to those Monophysites who refused to accept the formula of faith promulgated by the emperor Zeno in the year 482 with the Henotikon. They were so called because for some time they were not in communion with any of the five patriarchs who divided the high jurisdiction over all the bishops of Christendom: they were therefore without a head (ἀκέφαλοι), that is, without a patriarch, although they were not without bishops. They gave rise to the first important schism among the opponents of the Council of Chalcedon. But this schism was of brief duration; indeed, one may say that it ceased even before the Henotikon was officially revoked by the emperor Justin I in 518, because, at that time, the A. were no longer without a head, having conquered the three patriarchates of Alexandria, Constantinople and Antioch, while the patriarchate of Jerusalem alone continued to remain attached to the henotizing formula.
After the death of the emperor Zeno, Anastasius, his successor (491-518), skillfully outmaneuvered by the monk Severus, the principal exponent of the A., became clearly favorable to them. In 511 an acephale priest, Timothy, took the place of the henotizing Macedonius II on the chair of Constantinople, who had been deposed. The following year, Severus was elected patriarch of Antioch, while Alexandria was already in the possession of an A. By now the name no longer had any reason to exist, but the Catholics continued to use it to designate the autonomous dissident Monophysites in Egypt and in Syria. In the 8th and 9th centuries St. John Damascene and St. Theodore Studite still composed treatises against the A.
The history of the A. movement between the years 482 and 518 presents many complications, especially in Egypt and in Palestine. The great majority of the monks of these countries with their archimandrites were A. Besides Severus of Antioch, the principal leaders of the movement were Philoxenus of Mabbug, Peter the Iberian, bishop of Maiuma, and the Nubian Nephalios, who later passed over to the henotic party (v. also MONOPHYSITES).
Bibliography6 works
Martino Jugie
2. CANON LAW
In the language of canonists, those secular clerics who are not incardinated in any diocese or similar circumscription are sometimes called A.; such clerics are also called, more commonly, clerici vagi or vagantes (v. INCARDINATION).