The Silvester Legend

The Actus Silvestri — the legend that Constantine, stricken with leprosy, was instructed in a vision to seek Pope Sylvester I of Rome, who baptized him and thereby cured him — is a Roman hagiographical fiction of the fifth or sixth century. It supplied the narrative frame for the forged Donation of Constantine, and it flatly contradicts the well-attested historical fact: Constantine was baptized on his deathbed at Nicomedia in 337 by Eusebius of Nicomedia. This file gives the legend its disposition — [Apocryphal:] — and treats the later Byzantine legends of Constantine.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Legend

The Actus (or Gesta) Silvestri — the “Acts of Sylvester” — is a Roman legend that grew up around Pope Sylvester I (bishop of Rome 314–335), of whose actual pontificate very little is known. In its developed form the legend relates that the Emperor Constantine, still a persecutor and now afflicted with leprosy as a divine punishment, was advised by pagan priests to bathe in the blood of slaughtered infants; that, moved by pity, he refused; that the apostles Peter and Paul then appeared to him in a vision, directing him to Pope Sylvester, who was hiding from persecution on Mount Soracte; and that Sylvester instructed, baptized, and thereby miraculously healed him of his leprosy, whereupon Constantine became a Christian and the great benefactor of the Church (the Actus Silvestri; summarized and dated in Pohlsander, The Emperor Constantine, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2004, ch. on the legends; and see the ODB, s.v. “Silvester I” and “Constantine I”). It is this legend that the forged Donation of Constantine presupposes as its backstory — the grateful emperor’s grant follows the pope’s healing baptism (see The Donation of Constantine).

Why It Is Apocryphal

[Apocryphal: the baptism of Constantine by Pope Sylvester at Rome, and the cure of leprosy, are legendary and contradicted by the historical record. (1) The *Actus Silvestri* is a hagiographical composition of the 5th–6th century, not a contemporary account (Pohlsander, *The Emperor Constantine*, 2004; ODB, s.v. "Silvester I"). (2) The well-attested historical fact is that Constantine was baptized only at the very end of his life, in 337, near Nicomedia in the East, by Eusebius of Nicomedia — a fact reported by Constantine's own contemporary biographer Eusebius of Caesarea (*Life of Constantine* 4.61–62) and confirmed by Jerome (*Chronicle*, s.a. 337) and Socrates (*Ecclesiastical History* 1.39); see [The Arian Aftermath and the Deathbed Baptism](../05-nicaea-and-the-church/the-arian-aftermath-and-the-deathbed-baptism.md). A baptism at Rome by Sylvester (who in any case died in 335, before Constantine) is therefore impossible. (3) The leprosy-and-cure motif is a hagiographical topos with no historical foundation.]

The legend’s origin is not hard to understand. The historical truth was, to the later Western Church, doubly awkward: Constantine had deferred his baptism until his deathbed (which could look like impiety), and the bishop who administered it, Eusebius of Nicomedia, was a leader of the Arian party the Church had condemned (see The Arian Aftermath and the Deathbed Baptism). The Sylvester legend resolved both embarrassments at a stroke: it moved the baptism early (removing the scandal of delay), to Rome (enhancing the Roman see), and into the hands of an impeccably orthodox pope (removing the Arian stain) — and added a miracle for good measure. It is a legend with a motive, and the motive is legible.

The Honest Disposition

The Orthodox tradition, following the earliest and best sources, holds to the historical baptism: deferred, at Nicomedia, in 337, by Eusebius of Nicomedia (see The Arian Aftermath and the Deathbed Baptism). The Sylvester baptism is set aside as apocryphal — not received into the historical account, however widely it circulated in the medieval West and however it shaped Western art and the Donation. This is not a point scored against Rome: the leading Roman Catholic reference literature likewise recognizes the Actus Silvestri as legend and the Nicomedia baptism as the historical fact. The disposition is simply the truth all serious scholarship acknowledges, and the repository states it plainly (METHODOLOGY §3, §4.1). What the honest account loses in edifying tidiness it gains in truth: the real Constantine died a deferred and, in its minister, doctrinally compromised baptism — and the Church venerates him anyway, for the whole orientation of his life, exactly as it does the man with the deaths of 326 on his conscience (see Crispus and Fausta). The legend gilds; the tradition, at its most honest, does not need the gilding.

The Later Byzantine Legends

The West’s Sylvester legend has an Eastern counterpart in the rich later Byzantine legendary tradition about Constantine, which likewise embellished the historical emperor. Byzantine and Slavic hagiography and chronicle developed elaborate accounts of his conversion, his vision, and his sanctity; joined his cult inseparably to his mother Helena’s; and made “the New Constantine” the standing type of the ideal Christian emperor, invoked in the coronation and acclamation of Byzantine and later Slavic rulers (Dagron, Emperor and Priest, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, on the Constantinian imperial ideal; and the ravnoapostol’ny typology in St. Vladimir of Kiev, where the Rus’ tradition explicitly names Vladimir “the new Constantine”). These traditions are not forgeries in the manner of the Donation, nor deliberate substitutions like the Sylvester baptism; they are the ordinary growth of hagiographical memory around a foundational figure, and the repository treats them as it treats all such material — pinning the historical core, honoring the veneration, and not confusing the two (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The historical Constantine is remarkable enough; the legends, East and West, are the measure of how large he loomed in the Christian imagination, and are read as that.

See Also

References

  • Dagron, Gilbert. Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium. Trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine 4.61–62. Trans. Cameron and Hall. Oxford: Clarendon, 1999. (The historical Nicomedia baptism.)
  • Jerome. Chronicle, s.a. 337; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.39. Trans. NPNF II/2. (Confirming the deathbed baptism and its Arian minister.)
  • Pohlsander, Hans A. The Emperor Constantine. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004. (The Actus Silvestri and the legends.)
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. A. Kazhdan et al. Oxford, 1991 (s.v. “Silvester I,” “Constantine I”).