Constitutum Silvestri

Professor Wirbelauer provides a side-by-side comparison of the Latin texts with German, and he puts the date of the Constitutum Silvestri (SK1 and SK2) at 324,^[3] while the Council of 275 Bishops deliberately used 325 as a means of retroactively providing Roman sanction for the Council of Nicaea, which Sylvester did not attend.^[46]

Professor Tessa Canella suggests that the Constitutum Silvestri supposedly took place in 315 based on the similarities to the Council of the Twelve Jews used in the Acts of Sylvester.^[47] Francesco Scorza Barcellona makes the same connection to 315 in the entry for Sylvester in the Encyclopedia of the Popes (2000). This would seem to be an unlikely assertion given the discrepancies in the day and month explicitly stated, in addition to the vastly different topics of discussion at each:

Council of the Twelve Jews - 15 March in the year [315] Constantine and Licinius were in their fourth terms as consuls:

Constantino itaque Augusto et Licinio quater consulibus idibus martiis facta est congregatio chrictianorum et ludaeorum in urbe Roma.^[48]

Constitutum Silvestri (SK1) - 3 June in the year [324] Constantine and Prisco [Crispus] were in their third terms as consuls:

Actum in Traianas thermas III Kal. Iunias domno Constantino augusto III et Prisco consule.

There are two problems with this dating. First, Constantine was in his third term as consul in 313, which would predate the Council of the Twelve Jews. Second, it was not Constantine the Great but his son, Constantine II, along with his brother Crispus (Prisco), who were both in their third consular terms in 324. It seems most likely that the forgers did mean 324, and were correct to cite the third terms of Constantine and Crispus, but made the mistake of listing Constantine Augustus instead of his son, the second of his name.

Further, SK2 is slightly different, as it states Constantine's fourth consular term, which did take place in 315:

SK2: 3 June in the year Constantine in this fourth term and Prisco [Crispus] as consuls:

Actum in Traianas thermas III Kal. Iunias domno Constantino augusto IIII et Prisco consule.

Given that Prisco was mentioned again, rather than Licinius who was the co-consul in 315, this makes the change to Constantine's fourth term seem like a perpetuation of the original error, while itself adding more mistakes, and not a deliberate attempt to correct the dating to 315 by moving the narrative in-line with the Council of the Twelve Jews. Had it been a genuine effort on behalf of the forgers to correct the date to 315, then they should have stated the fourth terms for both Constantine and Licinius. More likely the use of the fourth consulship was another in the series of scribal mistakes, not an intentional change, particularly as it makes no mention of which term Prisco was serving as it did in SK1; the first term of Crispus was in 318.

Mistakes are common in the manuscript tradition when it was easy to make a dating error without ready and easy access to chronicles, or for a later scribe to confuse a hastily scribbled and illegible III with IIII. Further, these forgeries were done very quickly and the pamphlets distributed in a rush. The Synod of Palmaris in October 502 returned a verdict that a pope could only be tried by God, which agreed with the sentiments passed in the Macellino, Sixtus, and Sylvester forgeries. Townsend speculates then that the forgeries must therefore have been completed during the first three earlier series of trials in 501 and 502, compounded by the poor Latin, 'terrible, unreadable in places,' and likely written in the vernacular of the street.^[49]

In favor of Canella's argument for 315, are the references to the same people officiating the two events, Constantine and Helena who are listed twice as having signed the canons of the council,^[50] and a mention of a pagan who later became a fictional city prefect, Calpurnius.^[51][52] This is clearly a link with the mention of these people at the Council of the Twelve Jews.^[53] However, the inclusion of Helena and Calpurnius more likely indicated a creative use by the forgers to borrow these elements for the Constitutum Silvestri and not an attempt to place the events in the same year.

The fourth term of Constantine given in SK2 and the same people attending the Constitutum Silvestri and the Council of the Twelve Jews in the Acts are the only clues to 315 being a potential date, and here the similarities end. Instead of Sylvester debating twelve Jewish scholars over the Judeo-Christian scriptures and the power of the Jewish versus Christian gods, Constantine assembles the bishops to discuss the proper dating of the Easter observation and rules for trying clerics, in addition to the different day and month stated and the years implied.

The biggest clue to 324 being the most likely year, is citing the consulship of Prisco. Wirbelauer mentions Prosper of Aquitaine and his influential history up to 455, Epitoma Chronicon. Prosper is frequently referred to as the chief secretary for Pope Leo, which would have helped make his history popular and widely available, especially to the Symmachian forgers.^[54] In the entry for 324, Prosper states: Crispo III et Constantino III, and there is no designation given to distinguish which Constantine (father or son) he means. Additionally, considering it was a major event in Church history, it seems strange that Prosper made no mention of the Council of Nicaea for his entry in 325.^[55]

On the issue of the usage of Prisco in place of Crispo, as given in Prosper, Wirbelauer notes that the forgers engaged in wordplay in other examples throughout the forgeries.^[56] The changes from Crispus to Priscus, Crispus meaning 'curly/twisted' in Latin and Priscus meaning 'ancient,' may then be a deliberate change made by the author(s) of SK1 and SK2.

The Constitutum Silvestri and its fictions came to be so authoritative that the Laurentian version (LK) was included in the entry for Sylvester in the Liber Pontificalis.^[57][58] Loomis writes in the footnote: 'The records of the council and of the canons promulgated by it and by Sylvester at this time are fabrications of the age of Symmachus, intended to provide sanction for episcopal claims and to exalt the episcopal office in general.'^[59] In a further example of the errors which proliferated around the Constitutum Silvestri, this entry in the Liber Pontificalis, which also retroactively sanctioned the Council of Nicaea through its usage of LK, then went on to produce yet another discrepancy: stating 277 bishops, rather than 275.^[60][61] Davis notes that the councils created in the Symmachian forgeries, their original forged pedigree forgotten, are depicted in murals at the Basilica of San Sebastiano in Rome.^[62]

Demacopoulos notes that the Liber Pontificalis emerged around 530, shortly after the Symmachus affair, building upon the fictitious papal biographies created during this period by the two factions, and the 'heroes of these papal biographies . . . demonstrate a new form of papal rhetoric.' Specifically, the Constitutum Silvestri would 'insulate the papacy from both secular and rival ecclesiastical interference.'^[63]

In an interesting footnote, Demacopoulos notes that canon four of the Constitutum Silvestri would have been a particular threat to the Laurentians, as it stated that the property of priests, including those not beholden to papal interests, was to be turned over to the Roman Church upon their death. The titular churches, supported by aristocrats in the camp of Laurentius, had been established by the cults of earlier Christian martyrs and had remained independent of the cult of Peter based in the Lateran and Vatican basilicas. While the Council of 275 Bishops version was used for the Liber Pontificalis, canon four of the Constitutum Silvestri also came to be included in service of subordinating these other cults to the Vatican 'by fabricating a papal role in the creation and organization of the tituli churches.'^[64]

The repercussions of the Constitutum Silvestri extended far beyond their simple inclusion in the Liber Pontificalis, as three hundred years later the concept of papal immunity would be put to the test under Pope Leo III. Mirroring the situation of Symmachus in 501, Leo was accused by the supporters of his predecessor, Adrian I, of adultery and perjury. Leo sought shelter from his accusers in the court of Charlemagne who convened a council in December 800 to hear the charges. Leo, in the first instance of prima sedes a nemine iudicatur, invoked the immunity of the accusatorial canon and swore an oath of innocence before Charlemagne on December 23—and two days later, Leo crowned Charlemagne the first Holy Roman Emperor. Thereafter, prima sedes a nemine iudicatur would enter the texts of Catholic canon law.^[65]

Elliot expands on the importance of this development, noting it became of 'great importance to the history of canon law in the West.' Elliot notes that the Sylvester Accusatorial Canon (3)—the first see is judged by none—was 'frequently transmitted in systematic canon law collections separately from the rest of the Symmachiana, and even from the rest of the [Constitutum Silvestri].'^[66] Elliot continues:

By the ninth century the canon had entered into pseudo-Isidore . . . . From the ninth-century onwards, the accusatorial canon's claim that no bishop shall be deposed without the endorsement of seventy-two of his peers was frequently cited by popes as an established canonical principle. It had, in effect, made the journey from outright forgery to accepted canonical text in the space of little over four centuries. From pseudo-Isidore it entered Burchard, from Burchard Ivo, and from Ivo Gratian.
It is no surprise that the Symmachian forgers chose Pope Sylvester as the figure to pronounce their apocryphal canons. Sylvester's celebrity had grown enormously following the fourth century, for it was he who, by baptising Constantine and (supposedly) curing him of his leprosy, was seen as having delivered Christians from a condition of persecution to one of state sponsorship. . . . It was doubtless this canon's perceived origin at this special moment in Christian history that explains why the [Silvestri Constitutum], and the accusatorial canon in particular, came to gain such popularity among medieval canonists.^[67]

By 1162, the issue of clerics being subject to secular law came to a head in England in the face-off between Henry II and Thomas Becket. The Constitutum Silvestri, while not playing a direct role in the dispute, may have influenced the canonists who fought back against what they saw as the secular encroachment of the state into what canon law states was the domain of the Church.^{[citation needed]}

The Sylvester Accusatorial Canon continued its journey from forgery into medieval canon, and onwards to become enshrined in the current Vatican canon law (1404), which still proclaims: 'The First See is judged by no one.

The concept of papal immunity is separate from that of papal infallibility, itself a new concept that would not emerge until over one thousand years after the Symmachian forgeries. Just as Demacopoulos points out that the original declarations of primacy that had begun to emerge with Damasus I and Leo I in the fourth and fifth centuries were a manifestation of bluster which had no bearing in reality but nevertheless 'became an important rhetorical and polemical feature of all subsequent papal and Petrine narratives,'^[68] the proclamation of papal infallibility was also tied to inherent weakness. Following the collapse of the Papal States to the new Italian state and the loss of all his temporal power, Pius IX retreated into the Vatican in 1870 and declared himself a prisoner—no pope would leave the Vatican until 1929 after Pius XI signed the Lateran Treaty.^[69] To deal with the frustrations he faced in the modern, liberal world that increasingly demanded democracy (see Quanta cura and the Syllabus of Errors for the reactionary dogmatism against modernism), Pius IX called the First Vatican Council in which the doctrine of papal infallibility was created to compensate for the existential crisis of lost earthly power.

In 1971, Swiss priest and theologian Hans Küng challenged this doctrine in his book, Infallible?: An Inquiry. He was stripped of his ability to teach as a Catholic theologian in 1979 for his opposition to Catholic dogma of papal infallibility.

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