Constantine and Helen

The house of Constantius, and Helen

Flavius Valerius Constantinus was born at Naissus (Niš, in Serbia) about 272–273, the son of the officer Constantius, later called Chlorus, who rose under Diocletian's reorganised empire to be Caesar of the West in 293 and Augustus in 305. His mother was Helena, a woman of no family: Ambrose of Milan, writing some seventy years later, says frankly that she had been a stabularia — a servant in an inn or a post-house, probably at Drepanum on the gulf of Nicomedia in Bithynia, the town her son afterwards rebuilt and renamed Helenopolis in her honour. Whether she was Constantius's lawful wife or his concubine (concubina) was disputed in antiquity and remains so; the sources use both words, and the question mattered to later writers chiefly because Constantine's own legitimacy hung on it. What is not disputed is that when Constantius was raised to the purple in 293 he put her aside to marry Theodora, the stepdaughter of the Augustus Maximian, and that Helen then vanishes from the record for some thirty years, until her son was master of the world and brought her back to court as Augusta.

Constantine spent his youth as a hostage-guest at Diocletian's court at Nicomedia, where he saw the persecution of 303 begin, and then joined his father in the West. When Constantius died at Eboracum (York) on 25 July 306, the army of Britain proclaimed his son Augustus over his body. The eighteen years that followed were a long and violent consolidation: the defeat of Maxentius at Rome in 312, the uneasy partnership with Licinius in the East, and finally the wars of 316–317 and 324 that left Constantine sole ruler of the Roman world.

The vision of the Cross and the Milvian Bridge

The turning-point of his life, and of the Church's history, is the sign given before the battle for Rome. Eusebius of Caesarea, who says he had it from the emperor's own mouth under oath, relates that as Constantine marched south he and his whole army saw about midday a cross of light in the sky above the sun, with the words joined to it, ΤΟΥΤῼ ΝΙΚΑ — "By this, conquer" (in Latin, in hoc signo vinces); and that the following night Christ appeared to him with the same sign and bade him make a standard in its likeness for use against his enemies. That standard is the labarum: a long gilded spear crossed by a bar, with a wreathed monogram of the first two letters of Christos, chi and rho, at its head, and beneath it a jewelled banner bearing the portraits of the emperor and his sons.

On 28 October 312 the armies met at the Milvian Bridge on the Tiber, two miles north of Rome. Maxentius, who held the city and much the larger force, came out beyond the walls and was destroyed; he drowned in the river in the rout, and Constantine entered Rome the next day as its deliverer. He did not go up to the Capitol to sacrifice, as every triumphing emperor before him had done. On the triumphal arch the Senate raised for him three years later the victory is attributed, in words carefully chosen to offend nobody, to instinctu divinitatis — "by the prompting of the Divinity."

The Edict of Milan and the end of the persecutions

The persecution begun by Diocletian in 303 had already been broken off in the East by the deathbed edict of Galerius in 311, which grudgingly permitted Christians to exist again. What Constantine and Licinius agreed at Milan in the winter of 312–313, and published in the rescript issued from Nicomedia in June 313, went much further: it granted liberty of religion to all men, Christians named first and by name, ordered the restitution of every church, cemetery and piece of corporate property confiscated in the persecutions, and provided compensation to the present holders out of the imperial treasury. It is not a declaration that Christianity is the religion of the Empire — that came sixty-seven years later, under Theodosius — but it is the legal end of the age of the martyrs, and the Church has always read it so.

Constantine went on to give the Church a public standing of a wholly new kind. The clergy were exempted from the ruinous civic liturgies; bishops were given jurisdiction and their sentences the force of law; churches were empowered to receive legacies; manumission of slaves could be performed in church before the congregation; Sunday was made a day of rest for the courts and the city trades in 321; crucifixion was abolished as a penalty, the branding of criminals on the face forbidden, the exposure of infants discouraged by public relief, and the games of the gladiators condemned, though not in fact suppressed. He built on a scale nobody had attempted: the Lateran basilica and Old St Peter's at Rome, the churches of the Holy Land, and at Antioch the great octagonal Domus Aurea, the "Golden Church," begun by him and completed and dedicated under his son in 341 — the cathedral of the Antiochian Church for three centuries and the setting of much of its later history.

The founding of Constantinople

After the defeat of Licinius in 324 Constantine determined on a new capital on the Bosphorus, on the site of the old Greek colony of Byzantium. The ground was consecrated on 8 November 324; the city was dedicated with forty days of festival on 11 May 330, and in the act of dedication the emperor committed it and its people to the protection of the Most Holy Theotokos. The Church keeps that dedication as its own commemoration — see the Founding of Constantinople (May 11) — and it is the single act of Constantine's reign with the longest consequences: a capital founded from its foundations as a Christian city, without a temple of the old gods at its centre, which for eleven centuries was the heart of Orthodox Christendom.

Nicaea and the First Ecumenical Council

Constantine found the East, which he had just conquered, torn by the teaching of the Alexandrian presbyter Arius, that the Son of God was a creature made out of nothing before the ages and not of one being with the Father. Having failed to compose the quarrel by letter through Hosius of Cordoba, he did what no emperor had ever done: he summoned a council of the whole Church, put the imperial post at the bishops' disposal to bring them, and lodged and fed them at his own expense in his palace at Nicaea in Bithynia. Rather more than three hundred bishops came — the tradition fixes the number at 318, a figure taken from the servants of Abraham in Genesis 14:14 and treated as symbolic rather than counted — many of them, as the fathers of the council remarked, still bearing in their bodies the marks of the persecution that had ended twelve years before.

The council opened on 20 May 325. Constantine entered the hall last, in purple and gold, and would not sit until the bishops bade him; he addressed them in Latin, urging them to peace, and then took a low seat among them. His role was that of convener, host and executor, not of judge: the presidency in the proceedings belonged to the bishops, and the sources point variously to Hosius of Cordoba and to Eustathius of Antioch, whom the Antiochian tradition remembers as delivering the opening address to the emperor. Among the fathers were Athanasius, then a young deacon of Alexandria, Nicholas of Myra, and Spyridon of Trimythous, and — by the legates Vito and Vincentius — Silvester of Rome.

The council condemned Arius, promulgated the Creed of the first seven articles with the decisive word ὁμοούσιος ("of one being with the Father"), which Constantine himself is said to have urged upon the assembly, settled the computation of Pascha on a rule independent of the Jewish reckoning, ended the Melitian schism in Egypt, and issued twenty canons on the order of the Churches. Constantine then gave the decrees the force of imperial law and sent Arius into exile. It was, for the Church, the first exercise of that conciliar authority on which all her subsequent dogmatic definition rests, and Constantine's part in making it possible is a principal ground of his title isapostolos.

The sequel is less edifying, and the honest sources do not conceal it. Within a few years the emperor, worked on by the party of Eusebius of Nicomedia, had allowed Arius to be received back on an ambiguous confession, permitted the synod of Tyre in 335 to depose Athanasius, and sent the great defender of Nicaea into his first exile at Trier. Constantine's grasp of the theology was never firm; what he wanted was concord, and he was ready to purchase it from whichever party seemed likeliest to keep the peace.

Helen's pilgrimage: the finding of the Cross

Helen, having been proclaimed Augusta about 324 and given her own household, her own coinage and the free disposal of the imperial treasury, went in about 326 — at nearly eighty years of age — on pilgrimage to Palestine. Eusebius, who saw her there, describes her progress through the eastern provinces: she gave alms with both hands, freed prisoners, recalled exiles, relieved whole cities, prayed in the churches with the congregations, and behaved, he says, as if she were a servant of the servants of God rather than the mother of the master of the world.

The tradition of the Church, received from the later fourth century onward, adds the discovery for which she is chiefly remembered. Hadrian, after the Jewish war of 135, had buried the site of Golgotha and the Lord's tomb under a platform and raised over it a temple of Aphrodite; Helen had the fill cleared away and the temple thrown down, and beneath it were found the sepulchre and, in a cistern nearby, three crosses, with the titulus and the nails. Which of the three was the Lord's was determined, in the received account, by a miracle: a sick woman — in other versions a corpse being carried to burial — was touched with each in turn and was healed, or raised, by one only. Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem then lifted the wood up before the people, who cried Kyrie eleison; and that first elevation is the origin of the feast of the Elevation of the Cross on September 14. In the Byzantine expansion of the story a Jew named Judas, who alone knew where the tradition of the place had been kept, is compelled to point out the spot, is converted, and becomes bishop of Jerusalem under the name Cyriacus. Helen left a portion of the wood at Jerusalem, sent a portion with the nails to her son at Constantinople, and carried the titulus to Rome.

The buildings of the Holy Land

Over the cleared site Constantine, at his mother's prompting and by his own order to Macarius, raised the great complex at Golgotha: the rotunda of the Anastasis over the tomb, the courtyard with the rock of Calvary, and the basilica called the Martyrion, dedicated in 335 — a feast the calendar still keeps, the Dedication of the Anastasis (September 13). Helen is credited with the church of the Nativity over the cave at Bethlehem and with the Eleona on the Mount of Olives over the cave of the Lord's teaching and Ascension; Eusebius names these two as her own foundations and says she adorned them at her own charge. With them the whole later pattern of Christian pilgrimage begins: within a generation the anonymous pilgrim of Bordeaux and then Egeria were walking the stations she had marked.

Helen returned to her son and died in his presence about 327–330, in her eightieth year. Her body was brought to Rome and laid in the mausoleum on the Via Labicana, in the great porphyry sarcophagus carved with mounted soldiers which is now in the Vatican Museums; her relics were afterwards divided, and are claimed at Rome (Santa Croce and the Ara Coeli), at Hautvillers in Champagne, and at Venice.

The baptism and repose of Constantine

Constantine, though he had governed the Church's affairs for twenty-five years, built her basilicas, presided at her council and called himself the servant of God, remained through all of it an unbaptised catechumen. This was not unusual in the fourth century — baptism was widely deferred, in the hope of dying soon after it and so of never again defiling the seal — but in an emperor it is startling, and it left him the pagan priesthoods and the title pontifex maximus to the end.

In the spring of 337, at Nicomedia, preparing a campaign against Persia, he fell ill. He went first to the hot springs at Helenopolis, prayed in the church of the martyr Lucian there, and was received as a catechumen with the laying-on of hands; then, moving to the imperial villa of Achyron in the suburbs of Nicomedia, he called the bishops, laid aside the purple for the white robe of the newly illumined, and was baptised. He never wore the purple again. He died on the day of Pentecost, 22 May 337, still in the white garments, having said, in Eusebius's report, that he now knew himself to be truly blessed and counted worthy of immortal life. His body was carried to Constantinople and buried in the church of the Holy Apostles, which he had built for the purpose, in a porphyry sarcophagus set among cenotaphs of the Twelve — a placing that expressed, in the plainest way, what his own age already thought of him.

The bishop who baptised him was Eusebius of Nicomedia, the ablest and most persistent patron of Arius, and therefore the standing embarrassment of the story for every later writer (see Disputed questions).

Veneration and later cultus

The cult of Constantine at Constantinople was immediate: his son struck coins showing him veiled and ascending in a chariot, the City kept his memory on the anniversaries of his death and of the dedication, and by the sixth century the joint feast of mother and son on May 21 is fixed in the calendars. The Byzantines called him the thirteenth apostle and their emperors took his name as a programme; every later Orthodox ruler who converted a people was measured against him, and the title isapostolos passed from him to Nina of Georgia, Naum of Ohrid and the enlighteners of the Slavs, and above all to Vladimir of Kiev, whose service calls him a new Constantine and his grandmother Olga a new Helen. In the West the two were venerated no less, but along a different track, through the legend of the baptism by Pope Silvester and the forged Donation; and the Anglo-Norman chroniclers made Helen a British princess, daughter of a King Coel of Colchester, which is why so many English churches bear her name. Their names are among the commonest baptismal names in the Greek, Slavic, Romanian and Arabic-speaking Orthodox worlds; in Greece and in the Antiochian parishes of the diaspora May 21 is one of the great name-days of the year.