Empress Helena, Equal-to-the-Apostles, Mother of Constantine

Saint Helena of Constantinople

My daughter Eleanore’s name day is today, the twenty-first of May. It’s the feast of her patron saint, Saint Helena the mother of Constantine. Actually, my wife’s first preference was to name her Helen, and it was me who insisted on naming her after Eleanor Roosevelt and Éléonore d’Aquitaine… and this, while she was still an atheist and I an Episcopalian. Ah well. Some things are just serendipitous. I have indeed written about Saint Helena before, but in such a cursory and unsatisfactory way that I feel I need to make another assay.

Helena was, according to the historian Procopius, an Ionian Greek from the city of Drepana in Asia Minor. His evidence seems to have been that her son, in order to do her honour when he acceded to the Imperium, named her home village after her: Helenopolis. However, there is also a Helenopolis in Palestine, and a Helenopolis in the Pontus – and all of these are likely named for the Empress. We do know, on the evidence of Saint Ambrose of Milan, that her origins were humble and working-class: she was a stabularia, or an inn-keeper. There is a later legend in Britain that Saint Helena was a Romano-Briton, the daughter of Coel Hen; though this may or may not be true, Saint Helena is nonetheless regarded as the patron saint of Colchester, and a number of holy wells in Yorkshire and Lancashire particularly are dedicated to her name: at Holbeck, at Eshton, at Sefton and at Kirkby Overblow.

She was a fairly attractive woman by all accounts, and she caught the eye of a general named Konstantios Khloros, a general from the province of Dardania (what is now North Macedonia) in the Eastern Roman Empire. It’s possible they met in her home province of Bithynia; the tradition has it that they were wearing identical silver bracelets, and Konstantios took this as a sign. He either married her or took her as his concubine, and they had a son together: the future emperor and saint, Konstantinos. Konstantios Khloros was an ambitious man, however, and he put Helena roughly aside, divorcing her in 289, in favour of a richer and more eminent woman: Theodōra the daughter of Maximian. Helena and her son moved to Nicomedia, and Konstantios Khloros was declared Cæsar shortly before he died, at the city of Eboracum in Britain (now York). Her son Konstantinos kept her in great affection and respected her deeply.

After Konstantinos became Cæsar of Rome, he favoured his mother with the imperial title of Augusta, which gave her a place of near equal honour to his own in the Empire. He also issued the Edict of Milan in 313, which for the first time officially proclaimed a policy of state toleration of Christianity, which was his mother’s faith. Saint Helena used her influence and authority for various charitable works of public philanthrōpia. It may be that she felt a sense of noblesse oblige, or a sense of Christian obligation; or it may have been the case that she never forgot her working-class roots and sought to give back out of her own substance to the people who lived hard lives at the bottom of the Roman social order.

She also used the public moneys to which she had access by virtue of her family connexion to the Cæsar, to mount expeditions into the Holy Land in search of relics of Jesus Christ and His Apostles. She gave great sums of money in particular to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, in particular funding the hospital and wayhouse for pilgrims associated with the church. At the behest of her son, who deeply revered the sign of the Cross, she went to the Holy Land herself in 326 – when she was already eighty years old! – in order to lead a search for the True Cross upon which our Lord was crucified at Golgotha. She searched without success until she was informed by a Jew named Jude that the Cross lay under the Temple of Venus built by Hadrian. Saint Helena had the temple demolished and excavated, and found the True Cross by a wonder of God. The precious article was led out and placed in a state of honour in a church Saint Helena dedicated for the purpose.

As one of the last acts of her long life, Saint Helena also funded one of the first free public hospitals in the world, in her son’s new city of Constantinople: an example which would be followed with admirable zeal by Saint Basil the Great. These were not mere last-minute worries for the state of her soul, either – all of her works of love and corporal mercy for the destitute proceeded from the same simple goodness of character which she possessed. As Eusebius put it in Chapter XLIV of his Life of Constantine:

Especially abundant were the gifts she bestowed on the naked and unprotected poor. To some she gave money, to others an ample supply of clothing: she liberated some from imprisonment, or from the bitter servitude of the mines; others she delivered from unjust oppression, and others again, she restored from exile.

In the following chapter, Eusebius writes:

She might be seen continually frequenting the Church, while at the same time she adorned the houses of prayer with splendid offerings, not overlooking the churches of the smallest cities. In short, this admirable woman was to be seen, in simple and modest attire, mingling with the crowd of worshippers, and testifying her devotion to God by a uniform course of pious conduct.

Eusebius even offers us a touching picture of her death. Saint Constantine attended his mother at her deathbed, as did her several grandchildren; and he even held her hands and comforted her as he attended her blessed passing. She was subsequently remembered as one of the great saints in the East, both on account of her ‘practical piety’ and on account of having ‘given birth to so extraordinary and admirable an offspring’.

Saint Helena truly is an exemplar of noblesse oblige and public philanthrōpia as mentioned above, and this largely out of public funds to which her position as the emperor’s mother entitled her. She is, in her own person, a standing rebuke to those who want to erect an artificial ethical boundary between the charity of private individuals and the organised public works which benefit everyone. She is also a remarkable bridge between Christians East and West. Regardless of whether she was, as later English legend claimed, a British chieftain’s daughter, or (more likely) a Greek stabularia, even if her only connexion with Roman Britain was her husband’s and son’s stationing at Eboracum, the attachment the mediæval English felt to this Equal-to-the-Apostles was considerable. Righteous and august empress Helena, holy mother of Constantine and devout follower of the True Cross, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

The Empress Helena, mother of Constantine,
Was with us before she sought the Cross in Jerusalem.
Thus, becoming like unto the apostles,
She calls us also to honour the Cross,
For in this sign, the standard of victory over the enemy.
We are granted salvation and resurrection
And the triumph of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
Wherefore, O holy Helena, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem