Sylvester I

Sylvester I Tessa Canella The pontificate of Sylvester I dated from Jan 31, 314 to Dec 31, 335 CE (according to the Catalogus Liberianus and, regarding his death in particular, to the Depositio episcoporum and to western martyrologies, while in Byzantine synaxaria it is commemorated on Jan 2). These were a crucial two decades for Roman-Christian history as they coincided with the supremacy of Constantine, who defeated Maxentius in 312 CE and from 324 to 337 CE was the sole emperor, having defeated his colleague Licinius in the Battles of Adrianople and Chrysopolis (324 CE). The same period of Christianity, having recently emerged from the age of persecutions, was marred by serious internal conflicts such as the Donatist and Arian crises, which Constantine sought to resolve by convening the Councils of Arles (314 CE) and Nicaea (325 CE). Despite the importance of this historical period, there is very little information about Sylvester, which prevents us from clearly understanding his pontificate. We know nothing about his way of thinking, and none of his writings has survived. In order to reconstruct this figure, we will have to proceed with an argumentum ex silentio. We know that he was not present either at the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, or at the Council of Arles, which was convened a few months after his ordination as a general synod of the western church and reunited all the bishops in the territory over which Constantine ruled. In both cases he sent representatives who acted as mere observers (the two priests Claudian and Vito and the two deacons Eugenius and Ciriacus to Arles, and Vito again with the priest Vincent, the future bishop of Capua, to Nicaea). Sylvester's absence at both councils naturally did not go unnoticed and caused much debate among his contemporaries. In a letter sent to the pope, the bishops who convened at Arles informed him of the work of the council and lamented his absence, stating that had he been present the condemnation of Donatus and his followers would have been more severe (Opt. App. 4 or Concilium Arelatense s.a. 314 CE, Epistula ad Silvestrum: in eos severior fuisset sententia). In fact, the main purpose of the Council of Arles was to resolve the conflict that arose in the African church on the validity of the ordinations of those who had succumbed to imperial pressure during the persecutions and handed over the holy texts. While Constantine sought a peaceful outcome, the rigorous party headed by Donatus campaigned for them to be annulled and declared invalid. While Sylvester's presence at the synod would have made the reconciliation that the emperor was seeking more difficult, we must assume that he had to share the position of the most rigorous ones. It may therefore have been the difference of opinion between the bishop and the emperor on this subject that explains Sylvester's absence at the synod. In fact, Constantine himself was present at Arles, perhaps to oversee the progress of the council. Nonetheless the resolutions, while they were unable to pacify spirits, somehow fulfilled the requests of the Donatists, establishing the condemnation of the traditores (“betrayers”) when they were denounced with clear evidence. It could also confirm the interpretation that attributes Sylvester's absence to a difference of opinion with the emperor to the news, as handed down by Augustine of Hippo in De unico baptismo contra Petilianum (16.27), that Sylvester himself had been accused of traditio (“betrayal”), for having handed in the sacred books and having offered incense when he was priest under Pope Marcellinus. This news would seem to be confirmed by a synodal letter of a Roman council in the age of Pope Damasus, addressed to the emperors Gratian and Valentinian, which reads, “In fact, even Pope Sylvester, accused by unholy people, instructed his case to your predecessor Constantine” (Nam et Sylvester papa a sacrilegis accusatus, apud parentem vestrum Constantinum causam propriam prosecutus est: Relatio Romani Concili ad Gratianum et Valentinianum imperatores directa, see Ambr. Epist. EC 7.11; CSEL 82.3, 191–197). Sylvester, therefore, accused of traditio, could not help but drastically oppose the Donatist requests and thereby prevent the reconciliation program desired by Constantine (Aiello, 2013, 8–10). Critics have also assumed that Sylvester did not wish to take part in the conference convened by the emperor so as not to diminish the authority of the bishop of Rome. In 313 CE under his predecessor Miltiades, there was already a Roman council when the Donatists had been condemned and participating in a new synod would have invalidated the first in some way. It should be noted, however, that the Catholic bishops who were present at Arles, in reformulating the condemnation of the Donatists, did not reference the previous Roman council (Scorza Barcellona, 2000, 322). Whichever interpretation one wishes to attribute to these events, what is certain is that Sylvester must have found himself in an isolated position compared to the other bishops, who clearly had more of a voice in the events of the beginning of the 4th century CE. Subsequently in fact, faced with the raging Arian crisis, the emperor convened a council once again, this time to be held in Nicaea, and handed the presidency of it to his trusted bishop Ossius of Cordoba, who presided over the work of the council again. Once again Sylvester did not participate in the council, despite having been informed about the seriousness of the Arian crisis a few years before 325 CE with a letter from Alexander of Alexandria (Frgm. series A.7.4). In this case it is Eusebius of Caesarea, in the Vita Constantini, who would justify the absence of the Roman pontiff, attributing it to Sylvester's advancing years (Eus. Vita Const. 3.7.1–2). Thereafter, for the next ten years, there is no further information about the bishop of Rome, until his being laid to rest in the cemetery of Priscilla. It would be fascinating to think that Sylvester's elusive nature is due to the fact that he led his life as an ascetic on Mount Soratte, the "holy mountain" on the outskirts of Rome, as suggested by the Actus Silvestri, an anonymous hagiographic text that was widespread in Rome at the end of the 5th century CE (the text is available in the 16th-century edition prepared by Boninus Mombritius, now in Leo, 1974, 153–221). In fact, despite the lack of information about Sylvester's pontificate, the contemporary coincidence with the so-called Constantinian shift charged his pontificate with a symbolic significance, causing legendary stories to form about his life over time, through which Sylvester would acquire a fundamental role in the political-religious events of the first 30 years of the 4th century CE, especially in relation to the emperor Constantine. The hagiographic text known as Actus Silvestri was started in the early decades of the 5th century CE with the intention of ennobling the memory of the Roman seat in such a crucial phase of Christian history. Its purpose was also to hand down another version of Constantine's conversion, one that was different to that disseminated by pagan sources, and especially to amend the historical memory of the Arian baptism that the emperor received at the end of his life, and instead to attribute an unequivocally orthodox baptism to him, imparted by Sylvester himself to a leprous and persecuting Constantine. Despite this clearly being a reversal of historical memory, still recalled by Jerome in his Chronicon (s.a. 337 CE), the legend of the Actus replaced very promptly the official version and enjoyed enormous fortune throughout the Middle Ages. There are reports of its dissemination in Rome at the end of the 5th century CE (Decr. Gel. 4.4.3), handed down between the end of the 5th century and the 6th century CE through the Symmachian apocrypha (the Constitutum Silvestri in particular, see Wirbelauer, 1993, 228) and later by the Liber pontificalis(Duchesne, 1886–1892, 170), but it gained more and more credibility in relation to the development of the cult of Sylvester. Its authority particularly increased between the end of the 5th century and the start of the 6th century CE through the interventions of Pope Symmachus, who dedicated the titulus Equitii on the Esquiline (the current San Martino ai Monti) to Sylvester and Martin, and probably encouraged the frequent and exemplary mention of Sylvester in the Symmachian texts. The cult of Sylvester experienced further developments in the 7th century CE. Testament to this is the monastery dedicated to him on Mount Soratte, which Gregory the Great is the first to tell us about (Greg. M. Dial. 1.7) and donated by Pope Zacharias to Carloman in 747 CE; the oratory at the Lateran, planned by Sergius I; and the Greek monastery of Saint Sylvester in capite sponsored by Paul I. The text of the Actus was mostly considered as the juxtaposition of three originally independent sections, assembled in Rome in the second half of the 5th century CE: the first, on the birth and virtues of Sylvester; the second, called conversio Constantini, narrated the relationship between Sylvester and Constantine, since the emperor contracted leprosy to baptism, edicts in favor of the Christian church, and the third dedicated to the altercatio, or a public dispute between 12 priests Jews and Sylvester, followed by the story of Sylvester's victory over a pestilential dragon in the city of Rome. Recently, reconstructions have been proposed that tend to recognize a coherent origin to the different sections. But speculation on the geographical and chronological origin of the Actus continues, also due to the fact that it has not been possible so far to provide a critical edition, given the abundance and variety of the manuscript tradition: we have about 300 Latinos codes, 90 Greeks and many also for the Syriac version, not all coincident. Nevertheless, the pioneering studies of W. Levison first, and of W. Pohlkamp then, provided solid ground for the history of the text, cataloguing about three 350 versions, classified into three main versions, and most recent works have greatly advanced research on the sources and contexts of reception of the legend (see Historiography). The legend of the Actus Silvestri constitutes the first act of the Sylvester-legende, a series of stories where the pope becomes a confessor, a hero of orthodoxy, of the exemplary life and miraculous deeds, a victory in verbal disputes and dangerous confrontations with demonic animals (the dragon), responsible for the conversion and baptism of Constantine the leper and persecutor, the inspiration for the religious politics of the emperor and finally the beneficiary of the so-called Donation of Constantine (Das Constitutum Constantini, see Fuhrmann, 1968): the famous fake that in the 8th century CE brought together the heritage of the Actus Silvestri, generally acknowledged as falsehood only from the contestations of Nicholas of Cusa and Lorenzo Valla in the 15th century. The legend was officially consecrated by the Roman papacy in the time of Adrian I (772–795 CE: Mansi, vol. XII, 1055ff.) and was handed down as such until after the 16th century. At an iconographic level, the famous frescoes of the chapel of Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome and those of the Church of Saint Sylvester in Tivoli bear witness to his widespread presence. Historiography: Sylvester I There are not many studies on Sylvester, and all point to the lack of sources about his pontificate (see Caspar, 1933, 103–130; Pietri, 1976, 168–187; also important Fowden, 1994, 146–170; a summary of the status quaestionis in Scorza Barcellona, 2000, 321–333; Aiello, 2000, 229–248, focuses on the isolation of Sylvester; more recently also see Wirbelauer, 2015, 319–332). According to V. Monachino (1964, 16–21), the absence of Sylvester at the Council of Arles depended on the fact that he had been called by Emperor Constantine, an act that was judged as a serious form of interference by political authority in internal church matters. A.H.M. Jones (1973, 132–133) and F. Scorza Barcellona (2000) do not believe in the church’s opposition to Constantine’s interference. P. Battifol (1924, 355), E. Caspar (1933, 122–123) and J.-R. Palanque (1961, 17–46) differently believe that the role of Miltiades and Sylvester was strongly limited by the absolutist attitude of Constantine. On the letter of the Fathers present to the Council of Arles to Sylvester and the debate about its authenticity, see I. Mazzini (1973, 282–300). Historiography: Actus Silvestri On the origins, the dating and the sources of the text the hypotheses have been multiple. W. Pohlkamp (1983; 1984; 1992) assumed an origin at the end of the 4th century CE; A.L. Frothingham and A. Ehrhardt taught differently at the first half of the century (Frothingham, 1883, 167–242; Ehrhardt, 1959–1960, 288–312). Leaning towards a lower dating were F.J. Dölger (1913), W. Levison (1924; 1948) and R.J. Loenertz (1975), who proposed that the legend was first partially elaborated in the first half of the 4th century CE and then was accompanied by all the elements concerning the life of Sylvester in the first half of the 6th century CE, under the impulse of the canonization of the pope and the fortune that titulus Equitii had at that time. With regard to geographical location, a western origin has been attributed by J.J. Döllinger (1863), A. Graf (1915), V. Burch (1927), A. Linder (1975) and J.H. Lavagne (1977); on the contrary, bring back to the East important elements of the legend A.L. Frothingham (1883), I. Duchesne (1886–1892), H. Leclercq (1948,) E. Ewig (1956) and F. Parente (1978); A. Fraschetti (1999, 114), enhanced the elements that indicate the will of the author to place the narrative in the Roman environment; V Aiello (1992; 2000) has dealt in particular with the section of the Actus defined conversio Constantini, proposing to pinpoint its origin in the Catholic reaction to the anti-Constantinian pagan controversies revitalized after 410 CE; G. Fowden (1994) outlined the interferences between the pagan versions of Constantine’s baptism and that offered by the Actus Silvestri. T. Canella (2006; 2013) made a specific study on the sources of the text and on the Judeo-Christian debate, leading them back to some eastern tales, adapted to the Roman and pro-Roman context. The legend certainly has been spread at a time of strong revitalization of the cult of Sylvester by Pope Simmacus and in the years of the Ostrogothic kingdom, when the issue of religious tolerance was visited by sources. W. Pohlkamp (2007) reiterated its arguments in favor of a higher dating, while P. Liverani (2008) recognized in an inscription of a mosaic in the Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican, attributed to the time of Pope Leo I (440–461 CE), the first reference clearly attesting this legend, alluding to Constantine’s miraculous recovery from leprosy and to his baptism. E. Wirbelauer (2015) has instead hypothesized that the Sylvester legend was already widespread at the time of Siricius and Celestine, who were the first popes to want a burial next to Sylvester, in the cemetery of Priscilla. Recently, K. Sessa (2016) has devoted particular attention to the hagiographic section dedicated to the life of Sylvester and Constantine’s baptism, pointing out the idea of the embodied religious conversion and adherence transmitted by the text. Aiello, V., “Costantino, la lebbra e il battesimo di Silvestro,” in: G. Bonamente & F. 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