Pope Silvester

Pope Silvester I (also spelled Sylvester) was Bishop of Rome from 314 until his death in 335, a pontificate that coincided with the reign of Emperor Constantine the Great and with Christianity’s passage from a recently persecuted religion to a legally tolerated and increasingly favored cult of the Roman Empire. The Liber Pontificalis describes him as a Roman by birth, the son of a man named Rufinus. No reliable contemporary source records the year of his birth, and almost nothing can be established with certainty about his early life or clerical career before he succeeded Pope Miltiades. He occupied the Roman see in the years immediately after the Edict of Milan of 313, which granted Christians freedom of worship, and he is the pope most closely associated with the Constantinian settlement in the city of Rome.

The principal ecclesiastical event of his reign was the First Council of Nicaea in 325, summoned by Constantine to address the Arian controversy. Silvester did not attend in person; he was represented by the Roman priests Vitus and Vincentius. The council’s definitions, including the original Nicene Creed and the condemnation of Arius, were received and confirmed by the Roman church. Direct contemporary evidence for Silvester’s own theological writing or disciplinary activity is meagre. A later legendary cycle, especially the Actus Silvestri (generally dated to the fifth or sixth century), credited him with baptizing Constantine after curing the emperor of leprosy and with receiving from Constantine a vast grant of temporal power over Rome and the West. Both claims are unhistorical. Constantine was baptized near Nicomedia shortly before his death in 337 by Eusebius of Nicomedia, and the so-called Donation of Constantine is an eighth-century forgery.

During Constantine’s reign a series of monumental churches was erected in Rome, among them the Basilica Constantiniana (the Lateran basilica, later the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran), the Vatican basilica over the tomb of Saint Peter, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and San Lorenzo fuori le mura. The Liber Pontificalis assigns Silvester a substantial role in the foundation, dedication, and endowment of these buildings. Imperial initiative and funding were decisive, but the bishop of Rome would have been involved in the liturgical consecration and in the organization of the new public cult. Silvester’s unusually long pontificate therefore oversaw the transformation of Roman Christianity from a network of house churches and cemeterial shrines into a basilical, legally recognized institution at the centre of the city.

Silvester died on 31 December 335 and was buried in the cemetery of Priscilla on the Via Salaria, north of Rome. He was succeeded by Pope Mark. Veneration of him as a saint is ancient. In the Roman calendar his feast is kept on 31 December, the traditional day of his death; in the Byzantine tradition he is commemorated on 2 January. In the eighth century Pope Paul I translated relics associated with him to the church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome. Because fourth-century documentation is limited, the medieval image of Silvester was shaped more by legend than by contemporary record, but his historical place as the pope of the first generation of imperial Christianity in Rome is secure.