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ACACIUS while the anathemas of Cyril were accepted. The teaching of Chalcedon was not so much repudiated as passed over in silence; Jesus Christ was described as the "only-begotten Son of God … one and not two" and there was no explicit reference to the two Natures. Mongus naturally accepted this accomodatingly vague teaching. Talaia refused to subscribe to it and set out for Rome, where his cause was taken up with great vigour by Pope Simplicius. The controversy dragged on under Felix II (or III) who sent two legatine bishops, Vitalis and Misenus, to Constantinople, to summon Acacius before the Roman See for trial. Never was the masterfulness of Acacius so strikingly illustrated as in the ascendancy he acquired over this luckless pair of bishops. He induced them to communicate publicly with him and sent them back stultified to Rome, where they were promptly condemned by an indignant synod which reviewed their conduct. Acacius was branded by Pope Felix as one who had sinned against the Holy Ghost and apostolic authority (Habe ergo cum his … portionem S. Spiritus judicio et apostolica auctoritate damnatus); and he was declared to be perpetually excommunicate—nunquamque anathematis vinculis exuendus. Another envoy, inappropriately named Tutus, was sent to carry the decree of this double excommunication to Acacius in person: and he, too, like his hapless predecessors, fell under the strange charm of the courtly prelate, who enticed him from his allegiance. Acacius refused to accept the documents brought by Tutus and showed his sense of the authority of the Roman See, and of the synod which had condemned him, by erasing the name of Pope Felix from the diptychs. Talaia equivalently gave up the fight by consenting to become Bishop of Nola, and Acacius began by a brutal policy of violence and persecution, directed chiefly against his old opponents the monks, to work with Zeno for the general adoption of the Henoticon throughout the East. He thus managed to secure a political semblance of the prize for which he had worked from the beginning. He was practically the first prelate throughout Eastern Christendom until his death in 489. His schism outlived him some thirty years, and was ended only by the return of the Emperor Justin to unity, under Pope Hormisdas in 519.

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Acacius,, Bishop of Melitene in the third century. The Greeks venerate him on different days, but especially on 31 March. He lived in the time of the persecution of Decius, and although it is certain that he was cited before the tribunal of Marcian to give an account of his faith, it is not sure that he died for it. He was indeed condemned to death, but the Emperor released him from prison after he had undergone considerable suffering. He was famous both for the splendour of his doctrinal teaching and the miracles he wrought. There was a younger Acacius, who was also Bishop of Melitene, and who was conspicuous in the Council of Ephesus, but it is not certain that he is to be ranked among the saints.

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Academies, —The Italian Renaissance at its apogee [from the close of the Western Schism (1418) to the middle of the sixteenth century] found two intellectual centres, Florence and Rome. Scientific, literary, and artistic culture attained in them a development as intense as it was multiform, and the earlier Roman and Florentine academies were typical examples of this variety. We shall restrict our attention to the Roman academies, beginning with a general survey of them, and adding historical and bibliographical notes concerning the more important of these associations of learned men, for the Italian "Academies" were that and not institutes for instruction. The Middle Ages did not bequeath to Rome any institutions that could be called scientific or literary academies. As a rule, there was slight inclination for such institutions. The Academy of Charlemagne and the Floral Academy at Toulouse were princely courts at which literary meetings were held. A special reason why literature did not get a stronger footing at Rome is to be found in the constant politico-religious disturbances of the Middle Ages. Owing to the oppression of the papacy under the Hohenstaufen emperors, to the struggles for ecclesiastical liberty begun by Gregory VII, to the epic conflict between Guelph and Ghibelline, to the intrusion of a French domination which gave birth to papal Avignon and the Western Schism, medieval Rome was certainly no place for learned academies. But when papal unity was restored, and the popes returned to Rome, the Renaissance was at its height, and the city welcomed and encouraged every kind of intellectual culture. At this favourable moment begins the history of the Roman academies. At Rome, as at Florence, the academies reproduced to a considerable extent the traditions of the Academy of Plato; i.e. they were centres for the cultivation of philosophy in that larger sense dear to Greek and Roman antiquity, according to which it meant the broadest kind of culture. From the earliest days of the Renaissance the Church was the highest type of such an academy and the most prolific source of culture. The neo-Platonic movement was an extremely powerful factor in the Renaissance, implying as it did, a return to classical thought and a reaction against the decadent (Aristotelean) Scholasticism of that age. At the head of this movement in the above named "capitals of thought" were two Greeks, Gemistus Plethon at Florence, and Cardinal Bessarion (d. 1472) at Rome. About 1450 the house of the latter was the centre of a flourishing Academy of Platonic philosophy and of a varied intellectual culture. His valuable library (which he bequeathed to the city of Venice) was at the disposal of the academicians, among whom were the most intellectual Italians and foreigners resident in Rome. This Platonic propaganda (directed vigorously against the "peripatetic" restoration and the anti-Platonic attacks of the neo-Aristotelean school) had an echo in a small Latin folio of Bessarion, "Against the Calumniators of Plato" (Rome, 1469). Bessarion, in the latter years of his life, retired from Rome to Ravenna, but he left behind him ardent adherents of the classic philosophy. Unfortunately, in Rome the Renaissance took on more and more of a pagan character, and fell into the hands of humanists without faith and without morals. This imparted to the academic movement a tendency to pagan humanism, one evidence of which is found in the celebrated Roman Academy of Pomponio Leto.

Giulio, the natural son of a nobleman of the Sanseverino family, born in Calabria in 1425, and known by his academic name of "Pomponius Lætus", came to Rome, where he devoted his energies to the enthusiastic study of classical antiquity, and attracted a great number of disciples and admirers. He was a worshipper not merely of the literary and artistic form, but also of the ideas and spirit of classic paganism, and therefore a contemner of Christianity and an enemy of the Church. The initial step of his programme was the foundation of the Roman Academy in which every member assumed a classical