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St. Helena and the Finding of the True Cross of Christ
00:30:50
Dr. Ben Akers and Dr. John Sehorn discuss how St. Helena discovered the True Cross of Christ.
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A
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.
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B
Welcome to form. Now, My name is Dr. Ben Akers. I'm the executive director of formed and professor at the Graduate School. Joining with me today is Dr. John Seehorn, a colleague and friend. We've taught here for the last five years together at the Augusta Institute, teaching theology and scripture. And Dr. Gray is on vacation. He's asked me to guest host. And today's topic, today's theme. We're going to be talking about St. Helena, and you may or may not know anything about St. Helena, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. St. Helena was the mother of Constantine. So you may have heard of the name Constantine in history. We're going to unpack this and some of the story. But this story is almost like an Indiana Jones film. There's. There's going to be excavations, there's archeology, and it's going to all end up in the finding of the true cross. And that's one of the themes we're going to be talking about today, is the finding of the true cross in Israel, but also in the finding of the cross in our own lives. And so St. Helena, you may have. She's been popularized in a book by Evelyn Waugh, and Evelyn Waugh has. It's a nice short book. He was very proud of that book. Most people haven't read it. If you've read some Evelyn Wall, it's considered one of his minor works, but he tells a little bit of the history. And a lot of this is speculation. Some of this is shrouded in mystery. But one of the things he talks about with St. Helena is that she was a stable maid, a virtuous stable maid that was wooed by Constantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine seems to have maybe divorced her. Evelyn Waugh and Louis de Wal and some other writers in England projected the theory that she was British. So this is actually interesting. After Evelyn Waugh's book in England in the 1950s, over 100 churches were dedicated to her memory. So he repopularized her in England. But, John, what do we know about St. Helena in her early life?
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C
Yeah, almost nothing, actually. Ben. Yeah. The association with Britain probably comes from the fact that Constantius Chlorus, whom you mentioned a minute ago, actually died on campaign in Britain. And that's where his son Constantine was acclaimed as emperor by. By the troops. But we can go back Maybe in Helen's life, Helena, same thing, and kind of come back to that time period. So she does seem to have come from an impoverished background, a fairly obscure background, at some point, married this guy, Constantius Cloris, and she had the misfortune of marrying someone who was kind of up and coming. Because what happened was in. In the year 284, the Emperor Diocletian, who needed to really effect a lot of reforms in the Roman Empire, split the empire into two, into an eastern half and a western half in order to make it a bit more manageable. Nine years later, in 293, he actually split the empire once again so that you had a system with essentially four different emperors. You had two senior emperors who had the title Augustus, and you had two junior emperors who had the title Caesar. And Constantius Chlorus was one of these Caesars. And at some point along the way, in order to kind of advance his own career, he wanted to marry the daughter of one of the senior emperors. And so he cast St. Helen aside. Yeah.
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B
So if you thought our political system was tricky, it sounds like there's a lot of history that. It's fascinating. And so was she. He meets her, they get together. Is she Christian? Do we know anything about her origins? Was she raised Christian?
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C
No. That's a great question. We don't know 100%. But according to Eusebius of Caesarea, who's a great early church bishop and historian and from whom we get a lot of our information about Constantine and his family, he actually says that it was Constantine himself who brought his mother to the face. So that wasn't until later. Again, we don't know a lot about kind of where she was during this time. She kind of comes back into the scene in the year 306. So this is the year when, as I mentioned, Constantius was killed in Britain. His son Constantine was acclaimed as emperor by his troops. This is going to launch him into several years of conflict before he's kind of actually recognized as emperor by all the other interested parties. But it's at this time, it seems, that he kind of brings her back out of obscurity and brings her into this noble life again at his court, which at that time was in Trier in France. So Helen is really kind of on the scene with Constantine from the beginning of his political career.
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B
I'm sure he had a great affection and love for his mother, and he's bringing her around. And one of the things, when Constantine then becomes the sole emperor or makes this final assertion of his power. There's a famous battle in Rome, and can you talk about that? But there's a sign in the sky, and it leads to what Helen is going to be able to do in finding the cross.
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C
Yeah, no, it's a great question. It's one of the most famous things about Constantine. And as with many things in ancient history, it's very difficult to kind of get to the bottom of the historical record. So I mentioned that in 306, Constantine was acclaimed as an emperor, and he ended up having to fight against some rivals in order to assert that. And this took him a total of about six years. And so leading up to this famous battle, he'd had a couple of victories against the forces of a guy named Maxentius. Don't worry, there won't be a test on any of this. And Maxentius troops had withdrawn to Rome and Constantine was coming up and they were getting ready to have this battle. And I believe it was October of the year 312, and in actually the earliest account that we have. And so I like to privilege this as a historian, it comes from the pen of a theologian named Lactantius, who was a North African Christian and who'd been in the imperial court actually for quite some time and was a confidant and kind of spiritual advisor to Constantine eventually. And so his account of it comes from just like a couple years after the event. And he actually says that it was the night before the battle, Constantine had a dream in which Christ instructed him to put this particular sign on his men's shields. And the sign was. It would look kind of like an X, the English letter X with a line down the middle and a kind of loop at the top. And you may be familiar with that from maybe altar. The altar at your parish, that's a common place where you might see that it's known as the key row symbol, and it's the first two letters of Christ in Greek. Now, a little bit later, there's another version of the story. This comes from Eusebius, and he wrote it down maybe 25 years after the fact. And he talks about Constantine also having had a vision of the cross in the sky, but he didn't quite know what it meant. And that was cleared up in the dream. And it's interesting, and maybe we can kind of come back to this point because it raises interesting questions. Eusebius says that when he saw the sign, it was accompanied with a message that in Greek it said tuto nika, which literally means conquer in this. And that's all I kind of said. Constantine took it literally. I'm kind of reminded of the wonderful story about St. Francis of Assisi, when our Lord speaks to him from the crucifix in the chapel of San Damiano and says, rebuild my church. And Francis begins by just taking that literally and actually stone by stone, rebuilding that church. So Constantine takes this as kind of marching orders for this battle and actually enjoys what many regarded as a miraculous victory the following day, and so is able to assert himself as emperor.
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B
So I also heard that. I've heard that the spoken in Greek, because that would have been the language that they would have spoken. I've also heard a kind of a Latin translation of this or a Latin spin on it, that in this sign you will conquer.
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C
Yeah, in hoc signo vinces. It is interesting because the Greek version we have, it's a command conquer in this. And it doesn't actually say sign in Greek. It says, you will conquer it.
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B
It's fascinating to me that he would take paint and mark the shields of the men with this sign. And I mean, really an act of faith. If he thinks that this is the Christian God, would he have known about the Christian God? Would he have heard of this? Or is this coming out of the blue and this is a miraculous, divine intervention in his life?
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C
Yeah, well, once again, Ben, we have conflicting traditions. So according to some of the ancient historians, his father, Constantius Chloris, had been a worshiper of the one God. I think certainly Constantine would have heard of Christians. He would have known enough to kind of understand a little bit about what this sign might mean.
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B
Would there have been the worship of the Sol Invictus as well? And there's something about, like, the Christ standing in front of the unconquerable sun?
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C
Yeah, the unconquered sun. Yeah. It's really actually kind of complex to understand exactly what's going on with the cult of the unconquered sun in Rome. That really was, if I understand correctly, originally a title of the God Apollo. But you can kind of see a movement toward monotheism, and it was very common in the ancient world. A lot of people don't realize this for maybe more sophisticated pagans to recognize that there was one true supreme God, and they often did recognize this one supreme God as the God of the Hebrews. In fact, that we have ancient pagan philosophers who would say that the Jews were an entire race of philosophers precisely because they recognized only one God. So I think that when we think about Constantine's conversion, of course he wasn't baptized until he was on his deathbed in the year 337, even though he became a great promoter of the Christian faith and gave a whole lot. And we'll talk more about this. Right. Institutional support to the church began reforming Roman law in really positive ways and in ways that tended to foster the life of the Church. But I think we need to think about his conversion to Christianity as a kind of gradual growth in his understanding. Certainly in 312, he understood that Christians worship one God and that this was the God under whose sign he was going to proceed with.
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B
Thank you. This history, all the history surrounding this is fascinating. And I think his conversion of a slow conversion is like many people in our life, that even if we might have been baptized Christian, baptized Catholic, that it takes slow degrees in growth of our discipleship. And Teresa of Avila talks about that, that why do we grow so slowly in the spiritual life? It's because we only give ourselves to God slowly, in degrees. And so Constantine is on the trajectory towards recognizing the Christian God. He's won this victory. And his mother has this inspiration that she. So she's a devout Christian at this time, that she wants to raise the cross from the dust. She wants to go to the lands that Christ walked in, and she wants to go and find the cross. Now we might think, well, yeah, actually, what did happen to the cross? What happens to the Holy Land, as we call it? What happens to the holy land in 70 A.D. because there's going to be a lot of. Of history that's preceding this movement towards where she's going to go.
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C
Yeah. So actually, Ben, before we jump back a couple centuries to talk about that, because that's a really important thing to talk about and maybe something a lot of people don't, you know, haven't had a chance to learn about too much. I think one thing we want to mention about Constantine's conversion, and then I'll indulge in a little speculation, is the fact that with Constantine, Constantine is able to bring to an end the following year, in the year 313, actually, the worst persecution that the Roman Empire ever perpetrated on the Church. I mentioned Diocletian earlier. The great, in many ways, great from a kind of secular point of view. But the emperor who had split the empire and so forth, he had eventually initiated in the year 303, what's often known simply as the Great Persecution, which produced a huge number of martyrs. That especially happened in the East. There was persecution in the west as well, but not nearly as much as in the East. And so Constantine's conversion and now having such a highly placed ally in the Roman government was just, it seemed miraculous to a lot of Christians who suddenly went from, in a very real way, living the cross to having that cross exalted and honored publicly.
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B
Thank you for bringing that. I had forgotten about the Edict of Milan, which then now legalizes Christianity. And what a surprise it would be to the emperor. You become the number one hunted group by the emperor in many ways, with his persecution as Christians. And all of a sudden, the emperor is friendly to Christians, makes it legal, and then Constantine even donates land, gives money to Christian things. I mean, what a worldview shift in just a short amount of time for the Christians.
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C
Absolutely, absolutely. And of course, as with all things, there will be some special temptations that come with that. But maybe we should come back to that later on. You brought up the kind of question of the history of the Holy Land after the time of Christ. So as you mentioned, the year 70 was very significant. In the year 66, there was a Jewish rebellion that began against the Roman government. There was a protracted war. It didn't actually end until the year 73. And it was by all accounts, a really brutal and tragic affair. It's something our Lord had predicted would happen. I always think, by the way, as a little sidebar, that it's profoundly moving to think about the fact that it was just before the Jewish uprising that would lead to the sacking of Jerusalem, the slaughter of so many of so many Israelites, and the destruction of the temple. It was just before that that Nero launched the first Roman persecution of Christians in Rome. And especially if we adhere to the tradition that St. Mark's gospel is really the preaching of Peter to Christians in Rome. And thinking about Mark's emphasis on taking up the cross and discipleship, following the Lord on the path of the cross and realizing that Christians were asked to join their Lord in suffering destruction at the hands of the Romans, even before the brothers and sisters of Christ, according to the flesh, the Jews were going to suffer that in Israel. It's a powerful thing to meditate on.
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B
It is. And the fact that Jesus himself suffered destruction at the hands of the Romans.
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C
Exactly.
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Jesus is never going to ask us to do something in our life of discipleship that he hasn't led the way in to set an example for us. And so in 60, so Jesus dies, he ascends into heaven. He gives this what we call the great Commission, the sending forth of, you know, go and make disciples of all nations in Acts of the Apostles in the very beginning, he gives them the plan of how to move from Jerusalem to Judea, to Samaria and to the ends of the earth. So that's how the outline of Acts of the Apostles goes. It begins in Jerusalem, but ends with Paul preaching in the capital city of the emperor, the Roman emperors in Rome. And so we have the command of Christ, but we also have his history kind of pushing the Christians out to the ends of the earth as well, because Jerusalem is going to be destroyed, so they can't use it as a center anymore.
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C
Yeah. So, you know, the Lord, as I said, predicted what was going to happen to Jerusalem in the year 70. This is recorded. You can see it in Matthew chapter 24, in Mark chapter 13, and in Luke chapter 21. And it seems to be the case that the early Christians got the message. There's a tradition that many of the that early Christian community we see in Jerusalem was able to flee from the city and go up north to a city called Pella and kind of hunker down until it was safe to return. You also see, by the way, the divine wisdom and providence in the structure of the Jerusalem community, where they actually gave up all of their earthly possessions so that they were ready to travel light when it was time to flee from a city that was under the sign of destruction.
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B
So you got this great real estate tip from our Lord.
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C
That's right.
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The city will not stand. Sell everything you have. So when we see the community in act selling things, what they're doing is they're helping the elderly, the poor, everyone get out of town eventually.
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C
Yeah, yeah. By the time you get to the 60s and they have to take off. So they seem to have returned. And according to Eusebius, whom I mentioned earlier as one of our earliest church historians, the first, I think it was, 10 bishops of Jerusalem were actually all Jewish Christians. And we see the kind of centrality of again, the Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem. Well, all that came to a really sad end in the 130s when there was another. It's actually really a third. There was a kind of scattered Jewish uprising at the very beginning of the 2nd century, sometimes called the Kitos War. Again, don't worry, there's no test unless you take my course, which I encourage you to do. In 132, there was another uprising that centered on an individual named Simon Bar Kosiba, but whom they called Simon. They called him Bar Kochba, son of the Star, which seems to be a reference to the Messianic prophecy in numbers. 24. Many Jews thought that this was the Messiah who was going to liberate them at last from Rome. Unfortunately, they were mistaken. And this rebellion was put down quite decisively by the Emperor Hadrian. Now when Hadrian conquered the city, he decided that he was just done with the these Jewish rebellions. And so he actually expelled all Jews from the city. Which is the reason why from this time forward, the Christian bishops of Jerusalem were Gentiles. And Eusebius points this out that since the Jewish Christian community was pushed out, they had Gentile bishops kind of taking over. Well, Hadrian didn't stop there by kicking the Jews out. He refounded the city as a kind of Greco Roman city state along the lines of many of the other Hellenized Romanized cities in the area. He renamed it Alia Capitolina. Alia was a little nod to himself. One of his names was Alius A E L I U S. So and then Capitolina in honor of Capitoline Zeus, who was one of the main gods of the city of Rome. So he really wanted to stamp Jerusalem with this kind of new pagan identity built around the veneration of the pagan gods and to kind of push that program forward. It seems to be the case that he intentionally covered Jewish and Christian sites with new pagan structures of worship. And that included where the Jerusalem Temple had been, but then also Golgotha, where the Lord was crucified, which is right next to the tomb. You get that most clearly in the Gospel of John, just how close the tomb and the cross were to one another. And also the cave in Bethlehem where our Lord was born, these were covered with pagan shrines.
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B
So would that indicate to us, looking back in history, that these are also pilgrimage sites already that Christians were visiting these sites because they were connected to the life of Christ?
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C
Yeah, this, like with many things in those very early decades of the Church is really hard to prove. But there does seem to be some good evidence of this. Certainly the Gospels themselves suggest that the tomb was a site of some interest among Christians. Right. We have so many stories about Mary Magdalene and the myrrh bearing women going to the tomb, the apostles visiting the tomb. It stands to reason that the Christians in that Jerusalem community would have remembered where that tomb was. One of the earliest references we have to that specific place after the New Testament. This is actually a really important one. It comes from a bishop in Sardis in Asia Minor named Melito, Saint Melito of Sardis. And he talks about having visited Jerusalem. Now again, this is after Hadrian has rebuilt the city, but he Says that he saw the place where the Lord was crucified, suggesting that even after this refounding of Jerusalem as a pagan city, the. The local Christians kept alive a tradition of where these sites were. And actually, if we go to the third century, there is one text that suggests that maybe the top of the spur of Golgotha was still visible. But we're getting a little technical there.
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B
Yeah, sure. No, this is fascinating. I love it. So you gotta take Dr. Seehorn's class. What's it called again?
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C
The Church in the Ancient Medieval World.
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B
The Church in the Ancient Medieval World. So we're so Hadrian, by a gift of divine providence, he had no intention to do this. Inadvertently saves kind of marks the places that are important to the Christian community.
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C
That's right.
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B
St. Helena goes to Jerusalem, has complete access to her son's treasury, and she decides to tear down these pagan temples. What a shock to that community. And then starts digging and looking for these foundations.
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C
Yeah. So in around 324 or so, St Helena goes to the Holy Land and wants to. She asks the Christians, like, where are these places? And it's really interesting, as I said, Melito and there are others, Origen and others who show that there was. There were local traditions about these sites. And to me, one of the most compelling little facts here is this the spot where Golgotha is. And you can visit Etay in Jerusalem. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is actually built over both the small little hill of Calvary of Golgotha, where the Lord was crucified, and it houses the tomb of Christ. And that spot was actually under a kind of retaining wall. And so it was really difficult in terms of the labor required. It was expensive to dig there. And actually, if you look at the layout of Jerusalem at the time, there were big open places nearby where it would have been very easy. If we had to just come up with a site to build a new church, they could have done it much less expensively, much more easily. But the Christians in Jerusalem said no. Right here, your highness. This is where we got to dig.
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B
So my understanding of the story is that they start digging and she's hoping to find the cross of Christ, hopefully preserved. Because now that it's been preserved from the elements, because it's been been buried in the ground, the Romans thinking these things are these instruments of death, are unclean, and just what do you do with them? You just throw them in the ground. They dig a hole. And she has this act of faith to start digging and she digs and digs and digs and she strikes a piece of wood, the title, the Titulus, on which would have been written Jesus, the son of Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. And then she discovers more wood and discovers three crosses. How is she going to figure out which one's the Cross of Christ? Did they label it like this one was Jesus, this one was Dismas, this was Gorgon, or whatever the name of the bad thief was.
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C
Right, right. Yeah. Well, once again, we have conflicting stories. Right. They do start quite early. The first reference that we have to St. Helena finding the cross, it actually comes from St. Ambrose, so a few decades.
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Spiritual Father of St. Augustine.
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Spiritual Father of St. Augustine. So he's very dear to us here at the Augustine Institute. So Ambrose mentions that it starts showing up in other reports from other fathers. And when it comes to this question of how do they know which one was the Cross of Christ? Again, we have kind of different stories. Some seem to suggest that it was enough to find that Titulus and that it was kind of connected to the cross. So they knew which one it was. Others say that St. Helena called for three sick people and that one of the crosses was touched to each of them. And the one who became well was identified as the Cross of Christ. Even a little bit later, you can maybe see the story getting embellished. Now, it's actually three corpses that she asks for, or rather one corpse of someone who was recently dead. And so they touch the wood of each of the crosses to the corpse and one of them comes back to life. Now, whatever historical value is there, it is clear that by the year 351 or so, we have references from the Bishop of Jerusalem to the wood of the Holy Cross. It becomes a big part of the Jerusalem liturgy, especially during Holy Week. The bishop. Yeah. Would hold. And this is the. The kind of origin of the Adoration of the Holy Cross that we still do on Good Friday that started in Jerusalem because of the finding of the cross. And what I was going to say is, you know, whatever the precise historical truth behind these things, look at the faith that it reveals in the early church. How do we know the Cross of Christ? We know the Cross of Christ because it is life giving. The Cross of Christ, the instrument of his death is life giving as the great. In the east, they have that wonderful line at Easter that they sing that Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by his death. Right.
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B
That is beautiful. That's the extent to which he goes to discover this Cross. And I know she brings. There's still marks of the cross that are in the Holy Land that she leaves. And she also fills the bottom of her boat. This is where I was able to see the relic of the true cross was in Rome. How did it get to Rome? Well, she fills the bottom of her boat that makes the ballast dirt from the Holy Land. And she. Then she brings back the nails that she finds the titulus, she finds the title, and she. Part of the Spear of Longinus, and she brings them to Rome and she makes them as part of her chapel. So she's like, I can't stay in the Holy Land, but I can bring the dirt from the Holy Land with me and worship. So if you go to Rome, it's Santa Croce. It's a church right down the street from St. John Lateran. There's a. The floor of the chapel that where the relics are is dirt from the Holy Land. And then you see part of the true cross. You see a nail from the. From the. From Christ, part of the crown of thorns, some of the thorns there. It's a beautiful act of faith that she wants that we need these tangible signs that she wanted these tangible signs that she discovered the cross and wanted to bring it back and have other people adore it and remember what Christ did for us on the cross. And so if you go to Rome, I encourage you to go to Santa Croce in Jerusalem. It's called the Holy Cross in Jerusalem because it's dirt from the Holy Land. And Another thing that St. Helena does is she gives us an example of never giving up and persevering, because she was in her 80s when she went to the Holy Land. She was in the 80s when she went to go and find the true Cross, so that the world might see the cross and the world may know it. And so we're very grateful to St. Helena on this, her feast day. So if you've never heard of that story, hope you enjoyed it. Also, take Dr. Seehorn's class. Come and join us in the graduate school. And it's a chance for us to reflect, too, that she is now a saint in heaven. She's beholding our Lord, and she was a great example to her son. Her son ends up being baptized and being made a Christian on his deathbed. So what a wonderful testimony that parents have for their children. And, you know, this is a lesson for all of us. And the lesson is, the cross is going to come to our life. Suffering always comes to our life. But do we see as an opportunity to bear the cross with Christ. There's so much suffering that's wasted in our lives, suffering that we don't unite to Christ's suffering on the cross. This is how we can make what we call a Christians redemptive suffering or participating in the suffering of Christ on the cross. And so this is St. Helen. The great historical story also gives us a great example of how do we find the cross in our own life because the cross comes and when we find the cross we find Jesus and we find life. Thank you for watching and joining us. Thank you for your support in the mission circle and may the Lord bless you.
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A
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