The Donation of Constantine

 I first heard of The Donation of Constantine in a course on Byzantine history decades ago. The text tells this story:

In 315 of the Common Era, the Emperor Constantine, sick with leprosy, was cured by the pope. Constantine was so grateful that he left the Italian Peninsula to the pope to govern — he gave half his kingdom for the cure.

It’s a good story, but this was a history course, and so the best part was how The Donation of Constantine was exposed as a medieval forgery.

First, historians were puzzled that no one else in Constantine’s era seemed to know anything about the story. The donation of half an empire would seem to have been an earth shaker. But chroniclers and other authors seemed to have been in the dark.

Then scholars of language pointed out that certain words in The Donation hadn’t been in use in Constantine’s time. These words entered the language later. If someone wanted to sell you an authentic letter, signed by George Washington, but it included some lyrics from the Broadway hit “Hamilton,” you might get suspicious.

Historians often say that questions about motive are always tricky — and interesting. But this case is straightforward. Almost anyone could see why someone in the Vatican might want to forge such a document.

My history professor made a point: This is the kind of thing that historians do.

I was reminded of all this while reading Sarah Bakewell’s account of how humanists tackled the problem in the 15^th century. 

For me, this is the first story of humanism. The early humanists scoured the earth for Ancient texts. They compared variants in the copies and developed critical skills to determine which were most likely authentic. But of course critical thinking skills are developed to divide the wheat from the chaff.

The story turns when those skills, developed because of a love and admiration for those ancient authorities, were used to question the authorities themselves.

It’s one thing to have a critical edition of Plato or Aristotle. When people began to think about a critical edition of the New Testament, that was something else. 

Phrases like “The Age of Faith” and “The Age of Reason” strike me as being more trouble than they’re worth. But if I were going to play that game, I’d say Erasmus’s critical edition of the New Testament, published in 1516, is a guidepost, a marker that indicates a fundamental change of thinking. Scholars were looking critically at the role human hands had played in the making of what many people had assumed to be the word of God.

• Souce: Sarah Bakewell, Humanly Possible; New York: Penguin Press, 2023. I am a Bakewell fan.