ACEMETI. — That is, the “sleepless ones” (ἀκολούθητοι): ascetics so called because, divided into various shifts, they took turns uninterruptedly in the recitation of liturgical prayers. They were founded by St. Alexander the Acemete of Constantinople. They first resided in the Irenaiion (now Çibuklu) on the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus, then in Constantinople in the monastery of Studios.
The most illustrious of them was St. Marcellus, a disciple of Alexander. The A. played an effective part in the theological controversies of the 5th and 6th centuries, as defenders of orthodoxy especially against Emperor Anastasius and Empress Theodora.
It was indeed the A. who denounced to Pope Felix III the patriarch Acacius for daring to read the name of the Monophysite Peter Mongus on the diptychs during the liturgy, in the presence of the papal legates, who were consequently excommunicated by the Pope, who deposed the patriarch (484).
Another occasion for defending orthodoxy presented itself to the A. when some monks of Scythia Minor (now Dobruja) proposed in Constantinople (519) the formula “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh,” which was orthodox in itself and which, according to them, should have reconciled the Tome of Leo and the anathemas of Cyril. The formula, however, aroused the suspicions of the A., who attacked the Scythian monks, who went to Rome to present their ideas to Pope Hormisdas. After fourteen months (June 519–Aug. 520) of their not tranquil stay in Rome, he sent them back to the East, declaring in a letter to Emperor Justinian and Patriarch Epiphanius that the Christological formula they advocated was superfluous in the face of that adopted by the Council of Chalcedon.
The anti-Monophysite stance of the A. ultimately pushed them toward Nestorian heresy, inasmuch as in vindicating the two natures, divine and human, in Christ, they came to obscure the divine character of His single Person; which they implicitly did by also denying, like the Nestorians, to the Virgin the title of Mother of God (Θεοτόκος). Pope John II, at the formal request of Justinian, pronounced a sentence of condemnation against them (24 March 534).
After this time the A. disappear from history. They were succeeded in the monastery of Studios and in the reform of monastic life by the Studite monks under the guidance of the hegumen St. Theodore.