On the other hand, the language of the document is so barbarous that it can hardly have been written before the close of the fifth century. And thus we are directed to those troubled sixteen years (498-514), in which the pontificate of Symmachus ran its course. At that time the two parties of Laurentius and Symmachus stood opposed to one another in Rome ast foes. People, senate, and clergy were divided; they fought and murdered in the streets, and Laurentius maintained himself for several years in possession of part of the churches. Symmachus was accused by his opponents of grave offences. He had to answer for himself before a synod, which King Theodoric summoned; if he should be found guilty he must be deposed, cried the one party; while the other party maintained that for a pope there was no earthly tribunal. This was the time at which Eunodius wrote his apology for Symmachus, and this accordingly was also the time at which the synod of Sinuessa, as well as the Constitutum of Sylvester, was 1 "Hos (his, viz., nonnullis episcopis et senatoribus) palam pro "ejus defensione clamantibus, quod a nullo possit Romanus Ponti"fex, etiamsi talis sit, qualis accusatur, audiri." Vita Symmachi in Muratori, SS Ital., iii., ., 46. ["In sacerdotibus cæteris potest si "quid forte nutaverit, reformari: at si papa urbis vocatur in dubium, "episcopatus videbitur, non jam episcopus, vacillare."-Avitus ad Seratt. apud Labbe, p. 1365. He adds further on, "Non est gregis pastorem terrere, sed judicis."] fabricated. The hostile party were numerous and influential, their opposition was tenacious and unremitting, their demand for an inquiry and examination of witnesses seemed natural and fair; and therefore the adherents of Symmachus caught at this means of showing that the inviolability of the pope had been long since recognised as a fact, and enounced as a rule. A third fabrication, the Gesta de Xysti purgatione et Polychronii Ierosolymitani episcopi accusatione, was produced by the same hand, and for the same purpose. As in the Apology of Eunodius, so also in the Constitutum and the Gesta, the principle is inculcated that a pope has no earthly judge over him. If he lies under grave suspicion, or if charges are brought against him, he must himself declare his own guilt, himself pronounce his own deposition, as Marcellinus, or he must clear himself by the simple asseveration of his own innocence, as Xystus III., according to the Gesta, is said to have done, when a charge of unchastity was brought against him by Bassus. Besides all this, the prosecution of a bishop for anything whatever was rendered difficult or impossible according to the three fictitious documents; 1 They are all to be found in the Appendix to Constant's edition of the Epistolæ Pontificum Rom. for seventy-two (or, according to the Gesta, at any rate forty) witnesses were to be required in such. cases. In later times the fable was made use of for altogether different purposes. Pope Nicolas I. quoted it in his letter to the Greek emperor Michael [A.D. 862], because it showed that the deposition of Ignatius was contrary to ecclesiastical discipline, since he had been sentenced by his inferiors. Gerson made use of it, on the other hand, together with the lapse of Liberius, in order, by means of these instances of heresy in popes (this word, as is well known, was specially used at that time in the wider sense of a denial of the faith), to prove the legitimacy of a council assembled either without or against the authority of the pope. Gerbert also appealed to it with a similar object. 1 In Harduin, Conc. Coll., v., 155. 2 Serm, coram Alex. v. 11., 136, ed. Dupin. IV. CONSTANTINE AND SYLVESTER. IF the mere number of witnesses could make a statement credible, there would be no fact more certain or irrefutable than that the Emperor Constantine, more than twenty years before his death, was baptized at Rome by pope Sylvester, and at the same time cured of leprosy. For nearly eight hundred years the whole of western Europe had no other belief, and for just as long a period people laboured in vain to explain the fact how, nevertheless, the sources from which every one acquired his knowledge of the fourth century on other points, viz., the Historia Tripartita, the Chronicle of Jerome, and the Chronicle of Isidore, could be unanimous in stating that Constantine was baptized, not in Rome, but in a castle near Nicomedia, not by the pope, but by the Arian bishop Eusebius, not immediately on his conversion from heathenism, but only just before his death. It cannot be denied that according to the mode of thought and historic sentiment of the Middle Ages, the real facts must have appeared inconceivable, while the fabulous version, on the other hand, seemed perfectly natural and intelligible. The most impor tant and decisive event of antiquity, the transition of the ruler of the world from heathenism to Christianity, -where else could this take place but in the capital. of the world? It must have been the Head of the of the Church to the And that the pious Church who opened the doors Head of earthly sovereigns. Constantine, the son of the sainted Helena, the founder of the Christian empire of Rome, should of his own accord have remained all his life long unbaptized, not receiving the sacraments, and in reality having no claim even to the name of Christian,—that was a thing which it was utterly impossible to believe. A baptistery which bore the name of Constantine at a very early period, possibly because it was really built by his order, and at his cost, may have given the first occasion to the myth, in that people thought that it was so called because Constantine was baptized in it. For in later times it was considered as an irrefragable and monumental witness to the truth of a circumstance which all were eager to believe. The legend of Sylvester, manifestly fabricated in order to attest the fact of Constantine's having been baptized in Rome, cannot have been composed later than the close of the fifth century. It is all of one casting, and bears no traces of later |