Elevation of the Precious and Life-giving Cross

The finding of the Cross

After the peace of the Church, the empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, journeyed to Palestine — the received dating is about the year 326 — to seek out the holy places of the Lord's life and Passion. At Jerusalem the site of Golgotha and the tomb lay buried under a pagan terrace; the tradition relates that a temple of Aphrodite had been raised over the place, whether by design to efface the Christian memory or not. At Helena's direction and with the concurrence of Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, the terrace was torn down and the ground opened, and there were found the tomb, and near it three crosses, together with the nails and, separately, the titulus — the board inscribed by Pilate's order "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews" — which lay apart from the crosses, so that it could not certify which of the three was the Lord's.

The question was resolved, the fifth-century historians relate, by a test of power. At Macarius's proposal the three crosses were brought to the bedside of a noblewoman lying near death (the account best known in the Byzantine tradition; Rufinus and the church historians Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret all carry it); prayer was made, and the touch of two crosses availed nothing, but at the touch of the third the woman rose healed. Later retellings add that a dead man being carried to burial was raised by the same touch — the form of the test most often shown in the icons. By these signs the true Cross was known.

The multitude that pressed around could not come near enough to venerate the wood, and begged at least to see it. Then Macarius, standing upon a raised place, lifted the Cross high with both hands and showed it to the people, turning it about, while they cried out repeatedly Kyrie eleison — "Lord, have mercy." This is the first hypsosis, the "elevation" or "exaltation" from which the feast takes its name and whose gesture its rite reproduces to this day.

The Encaenia of 335 and the birth of the feast

Over the holy places Constantine raised a great complex of buildings — the Martyrium basilica, the courtyard of Golgotha, and the rotunda of the Anastasis over the tomb itself. Their consecration, the Encaenia ("dedication"), was celebrated with immense solemnity on September 13 of the year 335, with bishops gathered from the whole East; and on the following day, September 14, the wood of the Cross was brought out and elevated before the assembled people. The anniversary of the Encaenia became one of the greatest feasts of the Jerusalem church — the pilgrim Egeria, toward the end of the fourth century, describes it as an eight-day festival ranking with Pascha and Epiphany, drawing crowds of monks and bishops from as far as Mesopotamia and Egypt, and notes that the day of the Cross's finding was kept together with it. The feast of the Elevation is thus, in origin, the second day of the Encaenia: the Church still keeps the two together, commemorating the Dedication of the Church of the Resurrection on September 13 as the forefeast of the Cross.

From Jerusalem the observance of September 14 spread through the whole East, carried in part by the fame of the relic itself. In Constantinople the feast is attested from the sixth century and grew steadily in solemnity; by the time of the Typikon of the Great Church (ninth–tenth century) the Elevation was a fixture of the capital's year, celebrated in Hagia Sophia with the patriarchal rite of elevation described below. In the West the feast appears at Rome in the seventh century — the veneration of the Cross on this day is associated with Pope Sergius I (687–701), a Syrian by descent — under the title Exaltatio Sanctae Crucis, while the older Western feast of the finding itself ("the Invention of the Cross") was kept on May 3.

The Persian captivity and the return under Heraclius

In 614, in the great war of the Persian king Chosroes (Khosrow) II against the empire, the general Shahrbaraz took Jerusalem by storm. The city was sacked, thousands of Christians were massacred or deported, the churches of the holy places were burned, and the relic of the Cross was carried away into Persia together with the captive patriarch Zacharias. The captivity of the Cross lasted some fourteen years, while the emperor Heraclius, in the campaigns of 622–628, fought the war that broke the Persian power. After the overthrow and death of Chosroes in 628, the peace concluded with his successor restored the relic, and Heraclius returned the Cross in triumph to Jerusalem — the traditional date of the restoration is March 21 of the year 630, though the sources permit 629 and the chronology is debated.

The received account of the return, carried in the synaxaria of the East and the legendaries of the West alike, relates that the emperor, entering the city in the imperial purple and diadem and bearing the Cross on his shoulders, was halted by an unseen power at the gate leading to Golgotha and could not advance a step. The patriarch Zacharias, walking beside him, perceived the cause: the Lord had carried his Cross by that way in poverty and humiliation, not in splendour. The emperor put off the diadem and the purple, and, barefoot and in a simple garment, took up the Cross again and carried it unhindered to its place. The Cross was then elevated once more before the people — the memory of this second great elevation fused with the first in the meaning of the feast, and it was in the generation after Heraclius that the feast's observance became truly universal, its title "the Universal Elevation" (παγκόσμιος Ὕψωσις) reflecting both its spread through the whole Church and its proclamation of the Cross to the whole world.

Within a few years of the restoration the Arab conquest overwhelmed Palestine; the chronicles record that the relic was removed from Jerusalem to Constantinople in the 630s, before the city's fall, though portions remained in or returned to Jerusalem, where a relic of the Cross is attested for centuries afterward.

The relic and its fragmentation

The history of the relic itself is one of continual division. Helena, the tradition relates, left the greater part of the Cross at Jerusalem, enshrined in a silver casket in the keeping of the bishop, and sent a portion with the nails to Constantine at Constantinople; the titulus was taken to Rome, where it is claimed by the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Division began at once and never ceased. Cyril of Jerusalem, catechising in the city about 348 — the earliest unambiguous witness to the relic — says already that fragments of the wood of the Cross, distributed piecemeal from Jerusalem, had filled nearly the whole world. Egeria, describing the Good Friday veneration at Jerusalem in the 380s, records that the bishop held the relic firmly at both ends while the faithful filed past to kiss it, deacons standing guard, because a pilgrim had once bitten off a piece to steal it. Paulinus of Nola, sending a fragment to a friend about 403, repeats the pious belief that the wood, though daily divided, was never diminished.

The Jerusalem portion perished from history in 1187, when the relic carried into battle by the Latin kingdom was captured by Saladin at the Horns of Hattin and never recovered. The Constantinopolitan treasury of relics of the Cross and Passion was dispersed after the Latin sack of 1204, seeding the churches of western Europe. Among the fragments venerated today, the largest in the Orthodox world is held by the monastery of Xeropotamou on Mount Athos. The scattering itself became an argument against the relics — the jibe that the fragments together would make a forest — but the celebrated survey of Charles Rohault de Fleury (1870), measuring the known surviving fragments, found their combined volume a small fraction of a single cross: the legend of the "forest" is itself the fiction.

The finding narrative and historical criticism

The historical record of the finding is layered, and the entry records it honestly. Eusebius of Caesarea, the contemporary of the events, describes Helena's pilgrimage, the excavation of the tomb, and the building of the churches, but says nothing of the finding of the Cross — a silence much discussed. Cyril of Jerusalem attests the relic in the city by the 340s and, in his letter to the emperor Constantius, says the wood was found at Jerusalem in Constantine's days; but the earliest surviving source to name Helena as the finder is Ambrose of Milan, in his funeral oration for Theodosius (395), followed by Rufinus, the fifth-century church historians (Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret), and Paulinus of Nola, with the test-miracle in varying forms. Beside this account stand two other ancient narrative traditions: the Syriac Protonike legend, which ascribes a first finding to a fictitious first-century empress, and the widely copied legend of Judas Kyriakos, the Jew who under duress revealed the site to Helena, believed, and became bishop of Jerusalem. Modern scholarship generally holds that a relic venerated as the Cross was present at Jerusalem within some twenty years of the excavations of 325–326, that the connection with Helena's pilgrimage cannot be verified from the earliest witnesses, and that the feast's date derives from the Encaenia of 335 rather than from the day of any finding. The Church's calendar commits itself to the veneration of the Cross, not to a critical chronology.