Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (35 page)

Eusebius says that Helena visited the emperor's soldiers and distributed lavish bonuses to them. She presided over the release of prisoners and gave money from the imperial treasury to the poor. Everywhere she went, she presented the emperor's benevolent face, reinforcing a restive population's devotion to him. And not only that. Perhaps the most visible part of Constantine's Christianizing program was a hurried campaign to build large and resplendent churches everywhere, a strategy of demonstrating the triumph of Christianity over paganism. Constantine constructed the original of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, a deliberate reverencing of the site of the Fisherman's martyrdom. Helena, too, on her son's behalf, funded the construction of churches in the cities she visited. The climax of this effort was her association with the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
⁵

The construction of a lavish basilica shrine on the site of the tomb of Jesus had been undertaken by order of Constantine shortly after Nicaea. He wanted this church to be the most beautiful in the world, and there are records that Helena herself saw to its decoration. The tomb's location had been marked by a temple dedicated to Aphrodite, dating to the early second century when the Romans had renamed Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina. Across generations, the knowledge of the temple site's origin as the tomb of the Lord had been preserved. If anyone was going to look for the actual place of Golgotha, much less for remnants of the True Cross, they'd have begun where such an unbroken tradition pointed.

There are reasons to accept as historical the underlying fact of the legend of the True Cross—namely, that under Constantine, within a short time of Nicaea, something thenceforth revered as the cross on which Jesus died was discovered in Jerusalem. Constantine, writing to the bishop of Jerusalem in 326, refers to a "token of that holiest Passion" that had only recently been rescued from the earth, and he implicitly defined the basilica, to be known as the Martyrium, as a shrine to the True Cross.
⁶
This is a geographical and physical extension of his placing the cross at the center of Christian symbolism at Milvian Bridge, and at the center of theology at Nicaea. As is reflected in the adjustments to the Nicene Creed in these years—"crucified ... suffered, died, and was buried"—the idea of the centrality of the cross spread quickly.

Saint Cyril, a successor bishop of Jerusalem, writing in 351 to a successor emperor, Constantine's son Constantius II, connects the dots by tying the Milvian Bridge vision to the discovered True Cross in Jerusalem. "For if in the days of your imperial father, Constantine of blessed memory, the saving wood of the Cross was found in Jerusalem (divine grace granting the finding of the long hidden holy places to one who nobly aspired to sanctity), now, sire, in the reign of your most godly majesty, as if to mark how far your zeal excels your forebear's piety, not from the earth but from the skies marvels appear: the trophy of victory over death of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Only-begotten Son of God, even the holy Cross, flashing and sparkling with brilliant light, has been seen at Jerusalem."
⁷

According to such sources, there is no reason to accept as historical that Helena herself, despite her certain presence in Jerusalem in 326, had anything to do with the discovery of the True Cross, whatever is referred to by that phrase. When I first learned that, it came as a shock, because the story had been poured into the foundation of my faith—by, of course, my mother. I remember a scene in our yard at that house in Alexandria, Virginia. I might have been seven, the age I was when I met my neighbor Peter Seligman. It was springtime, and she was showing me the white blossom of our dogwood tree. Dogwood, she told me, was the state flower of Virginia. She loved our new tract house as much for the tree the contractor had spared as for anything. It had grown wild in the woods, was mature, but, in the way of dogwoods, was not large. It had a pleasing shape, and when in bloom it was a marvel of white.

"Look here," she said. I peered into the cup of the blossom cradled in her hand, and I followed her gesturing fingers as she touched the four petals, each with its tiny, heart-shaped purple stain. "This is the tree of the cross," she explained. "Once the dogwood blossom had been pure white, without these purple marks. Once the dogwood had been the tallest tree in the forest. But then the killers of Jesus used the wood of the dogwood to make the cross. The wood that Saint Helena found in Jerusalem was carved from a dogwood tree, and that helped her to recognize it as the True Cross, because by then, dogwood blossoms grew to make a cross themselves, showing the wounds of Christ with stains. By then the mighty dogwood no longer grew to be so tall." Our dogwood tree was not so small that its branches did not overhang the Seligmans' yard. I never told the story of the tree to Peter.

When a story falls into such blatant folktale rhythms, it is easy to dismiss it. Those who are inclined to discount the whole business of a found crucifix have an ally in, of all people, Eusebius. As Helena's companion and chronicler, he is the reason to believe that her journey to Jerusalem in 326 was a historical event. No doubt that journey is the source of the legend connecting Helena to the True Cross, even if the connection is first made more than half a century later by Ambrose, who presents both the discovery and Helena's responsibility for it as factual. But in Eusebius's detailed account of Helena's progress through Palestine, there is no mention of the True Cross at all, which is a surprise, if only because the emperor himself referred to it ("token of that holiest Passion") in the same time frame.
⁸
In describing Helena's sojourn, Eusebius is concerned just with the uncovering and celebrating of the ancient tomb of Jesus—the Holy Sepulcher, which to Eusebius is the site of the Resurrection. To him, the Resurrection is what counts. He has no interest in Golgotha, site of the crucifixion. As for the True Cross—like most Christians, he'd have regarded it as a token of shame, not an object to be sought out and revered. The Resurrection was the point.

Eusebius refers to the already begun construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and implies Helena's role of supporting her son's sweeping program of church-building throughout the East. Eusebius's account makes it seem that only one thing was going on here, when, as the design of the church itself indicates, a second strain of the Christian impulse was already being felt, and it had the weight of Constantine behind it. The architecture of the church complex makes the thing clear: The tomb of Jesus was marked by a relatively modest rotunda, called the Anastasis, while the newly uncovered, adjacent site of Golgotha was marked by a much larger basilica, the Martyrium. The basilica resembled, in fact, the audience hall of the palace Constantine had built for himself in Trier, a subtle reference to his origins. The tension apparent in the church-building foreshadowed the difference in emphasis between the Eastern and Latin Churches that continues to this day, the one elevating the victory of the Resurrection, the other elevating the agony of death.

There is, one should add, another reason besides theology that Eusebius would have chosen to ignore any report of a recovered True Cross in Jerusalem. As bishop of Caesarea, he was the primate of Palestine. That he was the region's dominant religious—and now political—figure is shown by his place at the side of Helena Augusta. Jerusalem, until then, was a backwater town from which Jews were still banished and in which Christians had expressed no interest. That was changing. The attention given to Jerusalem by the emperor and his mother had to alarm Eusebius. A shrine containing relics of the True Cross, drawing pilgrims and power, could only undercut the prestige of Caesarea. In the event, with the legend of the True Cross taking hold, Caesarea did fade as the world importance of Jerusalem grew.
⁹
It was an early lesson in the politics of relics, which would not be lost on, among others, the archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne.

Constantine traveled to Jerusalem in 335 to preside at the dedication of the completed Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher.
¹⁰
It was one of the most magnificent churches in the world at the time. He would die two years later, and all would marvel at the new city he had created in Constantinople, but the goal he had set for himself in his first grand basilica, the
Aula Palatina
in Trier, was really achieved here, in his last one. Nothing symbolized the unity he had created more powerfully than the cross, and perhaps nothing had more pointedly enabled that unity than the cross. This was its shrine. The Martyrium would stand until 1009. The Anastasis, many times repaired, stands yet. It is what pilgrims revere today as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, but it is a pale shadow of what Constantine built.

His insistence on the cross, both symbolic and literal, sparked an immediate interest in relics of the True Cross. Fragments of wood appeared across Europe, supposedly from Jerusalem, to be venerated in churches and to be worn as talismans. A vestige of this obsession is preserved in our impulse to "knock on wood," to ward off bad fortune. A piece of the True Cross is contained in the bronze cross atop the obelisk in St. Peter's Square.
¹¹
In the first manifestations of this cult, little attention was paid to the precise circumstances of the discovery of the True Cross, but soon enough—a familiar human pattern—a story began to evolve. Not surprisingly, it was a story featuring Helena. Hadn't she been the one to shower benefactions on soldiers and common people? If Constantine had made himself a godlike figure, didn't that make his mother like the mother who'd stood beside the cross of her divine Son? The cult of Helena would explode in the late fourth century around an elaborately imagined legend—or rather, set of legends
¹²
—that told of her devotion in tracking down not only the True Cross but its nails, the sign Pilate attached to it, various instruments used to torture Jesus, the thorns, the whip, and the Seamless Robe that Jesus wore, a relic to which we will return. How the bodies of the Magi fit into this is not clear, but Helena would also be credited with discovering the site of the Nativity cave in Bethlehem—relics from womb to tomb. Not incidentally, the potent narrative of this legend would assign a new, even more damning role of villainy to the Jews. And the True Cross itself, a fine and final reversal, would justify the Jews' long-overdue punishment.

The one to give first and masterly expression to this legend was Saint Ambrose (339–397), the bishop of Milan. The son of a Roman official, Ambrose had made his first reputation, curiously enough, as the provincial governor of Trier. He was a cultured man, educated in the classics, who had been serving as an imperial governor when the people of Milan spontaneously chose him as their bishop—a signal of the century's volatile mix of religion and politics. Ambrose was a slight man but an eloquent preacher, and he soon became one of the most influential figures in the Church.

Some of the vivid impressions of Ambrose come from the writings of Augustine, whose conversion to the Church is often attributed to Ambrose. We find, for example, this description of Ambrose in
The Confessions:
"When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. All could approach him freely and it was not usual for visitors to be announced, so that often, when we came to see him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud. We would sit there quietly, for no one had the heart to disturb him when he was so engrossed in study."
¹³
From Ambrose, Augustine would learn what the contemplative act of reading enabled in the mind. It was to read without moving one's lips, an activity of the interior life entire.'
¹⁴
From Ambrose, Augustine would learn to see more than what was before the eyes. "I noticed, repeatedly, in the sermons of our bishop ... that when God is thought of, our thoughts should dwell on no material reality whatsoever, nor in the case of the soul, which is the one thing in the universe nearest to God."
¹⁵
Because of Ambrose, Augustine became convinced for the first time of the existence of a spiritual world, and by watching Ambrose, he found a way to enter it. "The story which Augustine tells in the
Confessions,
" says his biographer Peter Brown of this relationship, "...is one of the most dramatic and massive evocations ever written of the evolution of a metaphysician; and his final 'conversion' to the idea of a purely spiritual reality, as held by sophisticated Christians in Milan, is a decisive and fateful step in the evolution of our ideas on spirit and matter."
¹⁶

Despite present-day assumptions about the naivete of a mind susceptible to mere legend, the sophistication of Ambrose is on full display in the use he makes of the story of Helena's discovery of the True Cross. He tells it in the oration he preaches at the funeral of the emperor Theodosius, on February 25, 395, the oldest record of the legend. "The Spirit inspired her to search for the wood of the Cross," Ambrose declared. "She drew near to Golgotha and said: 'Behold the place of combat: where is thy victory?...Why did you labor to hide the wood, O Devil, except to be vanquished a second time? You were vanquished by Mary, who gave the Conqueror birth."
¹⁷

The victory includes the dawning of a Christian empire, but that has been delayed until now—delayed, according to Ambrose, by Satan's surviving agents, the Jews. Because of the discovery by Helena, Ambrose says, "The Church manifests joy, the Jew blushes. Not only does he blush, but he is tormented also, because he himself is the author of his own confusion." The reign of Constantine and the reappearance of the Cross, which indicts them, undoes the Jew, who confesses, '"We thought we had conquered, but we confess that we ourselves are conquered! Christ has risen again, and princes acknowledge that He has risen. He who is not seen lives again.'"
¹⁸
The Cross itself thus becomes a kind of second Incarnation, a salvific turning point by which the will of God is accomplished. Clever Jews knew the Cross had such power. They hid it over the centuries, not just because it was a proof that they had crucified the Lord, but because its revelation would bring about their final defeat.
¹⁹
One version of the Helena legend has a Jew being tortured until he agrees to show her where the Cross is buried. This story is poignantly rendered in the
Legend of the True Cross
fresco in Arezzo, by the fifteenth century's Piero della Francesca. The elaborate painting, in one panel entitled
Torment of the Hebrew,
shows a man with a rope around his neck being lowered into a well. Under such duress, he agrees to give up his people's last secret. When he does, Judaism's last hope is gone.
²⁰