Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Mother of Constantine & Protector of the Holy Places
May 21 · d. 330
also known as Saint Helena, Helen, Holy Helena
Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, was born about the year 250 in the eastern empire, of low birth, and was set aside by Constantius Chlorus when his advancement to Caesar in 293 required a dynastic marriage. Her son's accession in 306 restored her to the court, and in 324 she was raised to Augusta. In her late seventies she travelled to Palestine, distributed alms across the eastern provinces, freed prisoners, and founded churches at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. Christian tradition remembers her as the finder of the True Cross. She died about 330.
Helena began at the bottom. The only ancient writer who says anything at all about her origins is Ambrose of Milan, and what he says is that she was a stabularia, a stable-maid, a woman who worked at an inn on a road. She was born somewhere around the year 250, probably at Drepanum in Bithynia, and nobody wrote down the names of her parents, because nobody thought a girl in a stable-yard would ever need a record.
An officer named Constantius took her, and she bore him a son at Naissus, probably in the year 272. They called the boy Constantine. Then Constantius rose, and on the first of March in 293 he was made Caesar, one of the four men who ruled the Roman world, and the price of that rank was a marriage into the ruling house. So Helena was put away. Roman law would not even have let a man of his standing marry a woman of her birth. She simply disappears out of the record for about twenty years, an aging discarded woman in a world with no use for her.
On the twenty-fifth of July in the year 306, at York in Britain, Constantius died, and the soldiers put the purple on his son. Almost the first thing Constantine did was send for his mother. She came back into a palace, and the woman who had been set aside outranked everyone who had ever looked past her. By 324, when Constantine ruled the whole empire alone, she was Augusta, empress, with mints and treasuries at her disposal, and he had statue bases set up across the provinces that called her the most chaste wife of the late emperor Constantius, which was his way of answering, in stone, everyone who had ever whispered that his mother had been nobody's wife at all.
Now here is what she did with it. She was nearly eighty years old. She could have stayed where the fires were lit and the food was carried in. Instead she went east, to Palestine, to walk on the ground where the Lord had walked. Eusebius of Caesarea, who very likely met her there and who wrote within a few years of her death, says she was, in Richardson's translation, "though now advanced in years, yet gifted with no common degree of wisdom, had hastened with youthful alacrity to survey this venerable land." She went through the eastern provinces handing out money and clothing to the poor. She opened prisons. She had men brought up out of the mines, which was a sentence men did not usually come back from. And she built: a church over the cave at Bethlehem where Christ was born, and a church on the Mount of Olives where he ascended. One of those two buildings is standing today, and people are praying in it.
The Church has held ever since that she did one thing more. It has held that Helena searched Jerusalem for the wood of the Cross, that the ground was opened at Golgotha where a pagan temple had been raised over it, and that three crosses were brought up out of the earth, and that the Cross of Christ was known from the other two. That is the memory the whole Church east and west has kept, and the calendars still keep, and the painters have painted for fifteen hundred years. What the earliest writers say, and where the story is first written down, belongs to the next section of this page, and it is worth reading carefully. But a mother of an emperor did go to Jerusalem in her old age, and after her the whole world knew where Golgotha was.
She died about the year 330, in her eightieth year, having first made her will. Eusebius says that she "died in the presence of her illustrious son, who was in attendance at her side, caring for her and held her hands." The stable-maid who had been thrown away died an empress with her son holding her hands, and Eusebius, who was there in that world and knew what he was writing, said she did not seem to die at all, but to pass over from an earthly to a heavenly existence.
You will probably not be handed an empire, and you may well have been passed over by one. Helena was, for about twenty years, and there is no record of what she did with them, because nobody was watching. When the watching finally started she was almost eighty, and what she did with the money and the power was buy passage east, hand out clothing, open prisons, and build two churches on ground she thought worth kneeling on. She did not wait until she was young enough, or important enough, or vindicated enough. She went when she could go, which was late. What are you postponing until the season when it would be easier, that could be begun, in a smaller way, this week?
Almost everything solid about Helena comes from one contemporary source, and almost everything famous about her comes from sources written two to three generations after her death. Sorting the two is the whole task.
The contemporary source is Eusebius of Caesarea, whose Life of Constantine was written and revised up to his own death in 339. He knew the court, and he very probably met Helena in Palestine. Book III, chapters 42 to 47, gives her age, the eastern circuit with its almsgiving and its release of prisoners and men condemned to the mines, the two church foundations at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives, and her death at Constantine's side. It is the only near-eyewitness account there is. Two things about it must be said plainly. Eusebius was a court panegyrist writing to glorify the dynasty, so his praise is not disinterested. And Eusebius never once connects Helena to the Cross. In the same book, at chapters 25 to 28, he describes the uncovering of the Holy Sepulchre and credits it to Constantine's own initiative and the emperor's workmen. The two threads lie side by side in one book and he never joins them. A second contemporary, the pilgrim from Bordeaux who walked the Jerusalem sites in 333, lists the rock of Golgotha, the Sepulchre and Constantine's new basilica, and mentions no relic of the Cross either.
The Cross tradition then appears in stages that can be dated. About 350, Cyril of Jerusalem, bishop on the very site some twenty years after Helena's visit, testifies that relics of the wood were already dispersed: "the whole world has since been filled with pieces of the wood of the Cross." Cyril does not name Helena. Neither does John Chrysostom, preaching on John 19 about 390, who says the true cross was known among the three by Pilate's inscription. The first surviving text that names Helena as the discoverer is the funeral oration Ambrose of Milan preached for the emperor Theodosius on 25 February 395, sixty-five years after her death; it is Ambrose who gives the stable-maid detail, the opening of the earth, the identification of the Cross by the titulus, and the nails made into a diadem and a bridle. Seven or eight years later, in 402 or 403, Rufinus of Aquileia gave the first full narrative in his Latin continuation of Eusebius: the vision, the demolition of the temple of Venus, Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem, and the test by which the true wood healed a dying woman. That test is Rufinus's; Ambrose has the inscription instead. The difference between those two mechanisms is the plainest available sign that the story was still growing as it passed from hand to hand. Socrates Scholasticus (about 439 to 450), Sozomen and Theodoret then give the developed form, and it should be said that these three are one chain of transmission and not three independent witnesses. Socrates, in Zenos's translation, is the version most repeated: "when the third, which was the true cross, touched her, she was immediately healed, and recovered her former strength."
Helena was never formally canonized, and could not have been; she died nearly a thousand years before the processes that would have produced a paper trail. Her sainthood rests on ancient and immemorial observance, formalized simply by her appearance in the calendars. She stands in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, the oldest general martyrology of the Latin West, compiled in the fifth century and surviving in copies of the seventh and eighth.
The dates differ by tradition, and all of them are correct in their own place. The Church of England keeps her alone on 21 May as Helena, Protector of the Holy Places; the Roman Martyrology keeps her on 18 August; the Byzantine churches keep 21 May as the joint feast of Saints Constantine and Helen, Equal to the Apostles.
The early western centres of devotion were Trier and, from the ninth century, Reims. Rome, the city most people associate with her, shows very few signs of venerating Helena before the late fifteenth century, after which her observance became one of the most prominent in the city. Relics are claimed in several places at once: a portion of her body taken from Rome to Hautvillers Abbey in Champagne in the ninth century and moved in 1819 to Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles in Paris, where it remains; further relics at Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome, of unrecorded provenance; and a skull relic in the Helena crypt at Trier Cathedral, which also keeps the Holy Coat that tradition says she sent from Jerusalem. The one site with a continuous architectural link to her own lifetime is Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, built into her own Sessorian palace to hold the Passion relics, where a fragment of the titulus was found sealed in a lead box in the chapel wall in 1492.
In art she is unmistakable: a crowned woman with a tall plain cross, often holding nails as well. Veronese painted her vision of the Cross; the Stavelot Triptych of about 1156 sets her and Constantine in enamel around an actual fragment of the wood. An Episcopal women's monastic community, the Order of Saint Helena, was founded in her name in 1945 at Versailles, Kentucky, and is now at North Augusta, South Carolina.
The one near-contemporary witness is Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine, Book III. The pilgrimage, the almsgiving and the release of prisoners are at chapters 42 to 44, the death at chapter 46, and the uncovering of the Sepulchre, which credits Constantine and not Helena, at chapters 25 to 28. Both quotations above are from Ernest Cushing Richardson's translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 1 (1890), available in full at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/25023.htm.
For the earliest evidence of relics of the Cross at Jerusalem, see Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 4.10 (with 13.4), delivered about 350; the sentence quoted above is from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310104.htm. The developed narrative, including the healing test quoted above, is Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History I.17, in A. C. Zenos's translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 2, best consulted at https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf202.ii.iv.xvii.html. Sozomen II.1 and Theodoret I.18 give the same account in the same family of texts.
Ambrose of Milan's De obitu Theodosii, of 25 February 395, is the earliest text naming Helena as the finder of the Cross; the Latin is in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum volume 73, and the standard English is Roy J. Deferrari's in Funeral Orations, Fathers of the Church volume 22 (Catholic University of America Press, 1953), pages 325 to 331. Readers should know that the first-person speech Ambrose gives Helena at Golgotha is his own composition in the manner of ancient funeral oratory, and is not a record of anything she said. For the Judas Cyriacus legend in the form most medieval readers met it, see the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, "The Invention of the Holy Cross," in William Caxton's translation of 1483, at https://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/inventionHolyCross.htm.
Among modern accounts, A. R. Birley's "St. Helena, Discoverer of the True Cross" (Joukowsky Institute, Brown University) sequences the whole chain of witnesses, and Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross (Brill, 1992) is the standard critical treatment. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article on St. Helena, at https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07202b.htm, is the source of the phrase quoted above about the British descent, and is candid in calling the discovery narrative the legend first recorded by Rufinus.
Later still comes the strand most readers half remember. A legend surviving oldest in Syriac, about the year 500, adds a Jewish informant named Judas who is starved in a dry pit until he reveals the site, is baptized Cyriacus, and becomes bishop of Jerusalem. He is absent from Ambrose, from Rufinus, and from all three fifth-century historians. Gregory of Tours carried the story into the Latin West in the 590s, and the thirteenth-century Golden Legend fixed it for the later Middle Ages. Modern scholarship has drawn attention to what that episode does with its Jewish character, staging a conversion through torture; it is a late accretion, and nothing in the Church's veneration of Helena depends on it. The tradition that she was a British princess, daughter of Coel of Colchester, is later again: it comes from Geoffrey of Monmouth about 1136, and the Catholic Encyclopedia itself calls it "entirely without historical foundation."
Several ordinary facts are genuinely contested. Whether Helena was Constantius's wife or his concubine was disputed in antiquity, and Jerome uses both words; the Lex Julia et Papia Poppaea barred a man of rank from marrying a woman of her birth, which is why many modern scholars favour concubinage, while the inscription of 324 calling her the most chaste wife of Constantius is the imperial answer to the same question. Constantine's birth year is given as 272 by some and 274 by others. Her burial is disputed as well: the better-evidenced account puts her in the mausoleum on the Via Labicana outside Rome, known as Tor Pignattara, in the great porphyry sarcophagus now standing in the Vatican, while the Catholic Encyclopedia has her taken to Constantinople, with relics later translated to Hautvillers. Those need not be rival claims, since partial translation of relics was ordinary practice. Her conversion is attested and undated: Eusebius credits it to her son's influence and gives no year for it, and no year should be printed. She left no writing, and no source close to her lifetime reports a single word she said.
British (Received Pronunciation): Helenopolis /ˌhɛlɪˈnɒpəlɪs/; Chlorus /ˈklɔːrəs/
Readings for a Commemoration
Micah 6:6–8Psalm 11 Corinthians 1:18–31John 3:16–21
Almighty God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servant Helena, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, with him, we attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.