The Life of Pope Sylvester and the search for the ideas of a Christian empire: issues of the manuscript tradition in the context of the formation of the church in the 4th-6th centuries

The article addresses the image of Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who made Christianity the state religion of the empire, in the context of Late Antique transformations of the system of values and representations of power. The emphasis is made on the fact that it was not The Donation of Constantine, but rather The Life of Pope Sylvester that was the better known text whose importance for construction of the Western church's authority was more significant than that of the former. The Life may have been directly linked to the interests of the Roman see because its plot and message legitimized the primacy of the Roman archbishop's power which allowed the latter to exercise moral and religious authority over Constantine the Great, because the leprosy which the emperor contracted was healed by the baptism administered by the prelate of Rome. The main problem for researchers was the comparison and understanding of the differences between the longer redaction A and the shorter redaction B, both of which existed in Latin and Greek variants. The Life of Pope Sylvester was believed to have the Western origin, which had been exported to the East to support the claims of the Roman popes for their primacy in the West. One may agree with this thesis in general, but this article argues, that the text was widely known and disseminated both in the West and in the East from the 4th century and was copied many times. Study of the process by which the main redactions originated one from another shows that while in the West the Papacy immediately accepted the results of the Council of Chacedon of 451, which established the five main metrolopolitan sees, in the East another construction of ecclesiastical authority which consisted only of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch and which may not have been benefical for the Constantinople patriarchate was imagined by educated people and churchmen for a long time. It can be explained only by the fact that the more traditional understanding of the history of the Mediterranean and the church had been widespread for a long time, the understanding which relied more on the tradition and paid less attention to the possible benefits that might have emerged from accepting the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon. These decisions might not have been beneficial for the Constantinople patriarchate which fell in line with the interests of the Roman see. Interestingly, in the 9th century the Greek versions came to be re-written to put their vision of the church hierarchy in line with the decisions of the Chalcedon Council, which a manuscript from Messana tells us. This means that the cultural unity of the Mediterranean did exist and that both the Western and the Eastern Roman empire recognized the continuity of Rome during the principate and later, during the dominate when Christianity became the state religion.

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