Emperors Arcadius, Honorius, and Theodosius Augustuses to Hadrianus, Praetorian Prefect.
Just as veneration is due to innocent priests, so also proportionate punishment is due to priests who create disturbance and to those who have been deposed.2 For just as those priests who serve God and who shine with the integrity of their divine priesthood offer their own lives not only as an adornment to themselves, but also as an example to the common people who are subject and obedient to them, so those priests whose sins are even more unseemly in view of their profession of integrity, if they should be proved to have been excluded from the priesthood and degraded by the bishops3 and should bear a haughty spirit against such decisions, shall be segregated from those cities which they held4 by their own false doctrine, and they shall be discovered to be a source of terror both to themselves5 and to others because of the exile which has been established. For both the veneration for the best priests and the notable reprehension of the worst ones make very many people good. From the reports of the bishops We learn that certain priests of the Christian faith, whose delicts have been apprehended by an assemblage of bishops and have been punished by their decision, are remaining in the bosom of the cities in which such crimes were committed, are seeking riotous mobs of the people, are convoking disturbers of the public peace, are acting as the authors of popular disturb; aces, are saying that they are innocent after their judgment, are collecting the common people and are being saluted as though they were still bishops, and are petitioning the sacred imperial court and obtaining responses and furtive rescripts by their mendacity. Therefore We sanction by this law that if priests sitting in council should depose any person from the position and title of bishop, and if the person deposed should be apprehended in making any attempts either against such decision or against the public peace, or in seeking again the priesthood from which he appears to have been excluded, he shall according to the law1 of Gratian of sainted memory, spend his life a hundred miles away from that city which he has unworthily corrupted. He shall be separated from the assemblage of those persons from whose association he has been expelled; he shall be deprived of the city which he held; he shall be segregated from the common people whom he polluted as a false teacher of the way of life. According to the tenor of this law, it shall be unlawful for such persons to approach Our sacred imperial private council chambers and to impetrate rescripts. If any rescripts have been or should hereafter be impetrated by any persons deposed through their own fault from the priesthood, all such rescripts shall remain of no effect, and those persons on whose defense the aforesaid offenders depend shall know that they will not be free from censure if they promise such patronage to those persons who appear not to have deserved divine approval, O Hadrianus, dearest and most beloved Father.6
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Author: Code of Theodosius
Keywords: Theodosius, Theodosian code, Code of Theodosius, spoke like a dragon, speak like a dragon, Church and State, heresy, heretic, heretical, excommunication, excommunicated, Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholicism, banish, banishment, rebuking an elder
Bible reference(s): Revelation 13:11-15
Source: Clyde Pharr, trans., The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions, Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton Univ. Press, 1952).
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