Helena

Saint Helena looks out over the cathedral in Trier. I wonder what she thinks?

So again, it's been a while. I feel like there's some law of conservation of writing in my life: if I've got a church writing project or a class writing project or a difficult-email writing project I work on that first and then don't find the time to write here. Which is another way of saying it's not high enough on the priority list, I guess. Also, my reading efforts have fallen off again. But last week I Read A Book, yay! And before I get too deep into another I want to say something about it.

My Helena fascination started when I was looking for a farewell gift for Claudia the pastoral assistant at church, who was reluctantly retiring from a job she'd invested a lot of heart in. She likes icons, but which icon should I look for? St. Claudia? Seemed kinda too obvious, and with no connection to our parish, which is Heilig Kreuz. The Holy Cross, then? Not not an icon subject, but not a great one. Ooh but doing research I learned that the parish's feast day is September 14th, the Exultation of the Holy Cross, which celebrates, among other things, Saint Helena finding the "True Cross" in Jerusalem. Connection to Holy Cross, check; woman in church history, check; oh hey did I mention my middle name is Helen, too? Perfect. Helena icon it is.

Fast forward to I'm (STILL) supposed to be writing four papers for my theology classes, and the history lecturer seemed like a kind soul, so I asked for received permission to write a paper on St. Helena and started doing a bit of research. I learned the cross in "Holy Cross" does refer to the relic - supposedly the real thing of course but specifically the wood that was found 300 years after Jesus's death. And Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, was over 80 when she found it...or supervised the finding of it, anyway. She's famous for making a pilgrimage from Rome to Jerusalem to visit the famous locations of Christianity, and also for endowing a bunch of churches along the way. So behind the Konstantinische Wende (apparently this is "Constantinian Shift" in English, but that just doesn't sound as good, does it?) from oppressed-Church to empire-Church, and associated with a whole bunch of things we associate with Middle Ages spirituality (pilgrimage, relics, churches) there's...this woman named Helen? 

I read a bunch of articles, skimmed a couple of seminal works on the matter, went with Christopher on a pilgrimage to Trier (where Helena is supposed to have lived before she joined her son in Rome), and...still haven't written a paper. Partly because it isn't clear to me what I'd want the paper to say. The legends about Helena are just that, and the historical analyses of them are convoluted and frankly over my head. But on the other hand most descriptions of her as a saint are predictably kind of boring, emphasizing her conversion to Christianity or her piety or her charity - or whatever the author wants, really, since she's mostly a legend. I want character! I want nuance! Which is a lot to ask of someone who lived 2,000 years ago, even if she is a saint.

But it turns out I'm not alone in my curiosity and no less a literary personality than Evelyn Waugh wrote a novel, Helena, about her. His preface begins:

        It is reported (and I, for one, believe it) that some few years ago a lady prominent for her hostility to the Church returned from a visit to Palestine in a state of exultation. “I got the real low-down at last,” she told her friends. “The whole story of the crucifixion was made up by a British woman named Ellen. Why, the guide showed me the very place where it happened. Even the priests admit it. They call their chapel ‘the Invention of the Cross’.”
It has not been my primary aim to disillusion this famous lady but to retell an old story.
This is a novel.
The novelist deals with the experiences which excite his imagination. In this case the experience was my desultory reading in History and Archeology. The resulting book, of course, is neither History nor Archaeology. Where the authorities are doubtful, I have often chosen the picturesque in preference to the plausible; I have once or twice, where they are silent, freely invented; but there is nothing, I believe, contrary to authentic history (save for certain willful, obvious anachronisms which are introduced as a literary device) and there is little that has not some support from tradition or from early documents.

And maybe that's the best we can do with Helena - imagine, as Waugh does, who the person behind these legends might have been. Which means we'll be doing all sorts of projection - and unfortunately this still doesn't help me with my paper because as he points out, the result will not be History - but also that we'll have a three-dimensional character to encounter. He imagines Helena as an educated daughter of nobility (an English legend says that she was the daughter of King Cole) who marries into what becomes the Roman aristocracy and lives her life of privilege with a healthy dose of entitlement and a (not coincidentally very British) down-to-earth perspective. She's not impressed by lofty philosophies or complex mythologies - where and when did these things happen, she asks, and how do you know? 

When Constantine was fourteen years old his father took him to the Mithraum.

        “Did you enjoy it, darling?” Helena asked on his return.

        “We don’t speak of these things to women, do we, father?” her son answered.

        “What do they do?” she asked Calpurnia later.

        “My dear, I think they dress up. Men love that. And they act sort of plays to each other and have the usual sacrifices, you know.”

        “Why do they make such a secret of it?”

        “That’s half the attraction. There’s no harm in it.”

        “I hope not. It all sounds very odd to me. Constantine has come home saying he is a Raven.”

        She pressed her husband for information. “There’s no harm in your knowing the general story,” he said. “It’s very beautiful,” and he told her the tale of Mithras. He told it rather well and she listened intently.

        When it was finished she said, “Where?”

        “Where?”

        “Yes, where did it happen? You say the bull hid in a cave and then the world was created out of his blood. Well, where was the cave when there was no earth?”

        “That’s a very childish question.”

        “Is it? And when did this happen? How do you know, if no one was there? And if the bull was first the first thought of Ormazd and he had to be killed in order to make the earth, why didn’t Ormazd just think of the earth straight away? And if the earth is evil, why did Mithras kill the bull at all?”

        “I’m sorry I told you, if you simply wish to be irreverent.”

        “I’m only asking. What I want to know is, do you really believe all this? Believe, I mean, that Mithras killed his bull in the same way you believe Uncle Claudius beat the Goths?”

        “I see it’s no good talking to you about it.”

        So Constantius went his pale way, seeking neither plain truth nor ecstasy, subduing the cloying powers of darkness by continence and a diet of eggs, and Constantine grew to gallant manhood and Helena by imperceptible stages and without regret lost her youth. 

I was entertained by the way Waugh weaved his "willful, obvious anachronisms" into the dialog of the novel. Later in Trier, Helena encounters her old teacher and slave Marcias, now a free man and traveling philosopher.

        “Did you get to Alexandria?”

        “Not yet, but I found what I wanted. Did you reach Troy, highness?”

        “No, oh no.”

        “Or Rome?”

        “Not even there.”

        “But you found what you wanted?”

        “I have accepted what I found, is that the same?”

        “For most people. I think you wanted more.”

        “Once. Now I am past my youth.”

        “But your question just now: ‘When? Where? How do you know?’ –was a child’s question.”

        “That is why your religion would never do for me, Marcias. If I ever found a teacher it would have to be one who called the little children to him.”

        “That, alas, is not the spirit of the time. We live in a very old world today. We know too much. We should have to forget everything and be born again to answer your questions.”

When she finally makes it to Rome she finds her son Constantine all but destroyed by the mechanisms of power and makes friends with the pragmatic Bishop Sylvester.

Helena followed the thread of unhappy recent memories and said: “Not that Rome has been all I expected.”

        “I hear that so often. I can’t judge. I am pure Roman myself. I can’t imagine what it would be like to come here for the first time.”

“I knew a man once—he was my tutor at home—who used to tell me about the holy cities of Asia. They are so holy, he said, that their walls shut out all the evil passions of the world. You have only to set foot there to become like the saints.”

“Had he been to those places?”

“Oh, no, he was just a slave.”

“I don’t suppose he would have found them so very different from anywhere else. Slaves like to imagine such cities. I daresay they always will. To a Roman there can be only one City and that a very imperfect place indeed.”

“It is imperfect, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Getting worse?”

“No, I think a little better. We look back already to the time of the persecution as though it were a heroic age, but have you ever thought how awfully few martyrs there were, compared with how many there ought to have been? The Church isn’t a cult for a few heroes. It is the whole of fallen mankind redeemed. And of course just at the moment we’re getting a lot of rather shady characters rolling in, just to be on the winning side.”

“What do they believe, these shady characters? What goes on in their minds?”

“God alone knows.”

“It’s the one question I’ve been asking all my life,” said Helena. “I can’t get a straight answer even here in Rome.”

“There are people in this city,” said Sylvester quite cheerfully, “who believe that the Emperor was preparing a bath of children’s blood to cure himself of the measles. I cured him instead and that is why he has been so generous to me. People believe that here and now while the Emperor and I are alive and going about in front of their faces. What will they believe in a thousand years’ time?”

“And some of them don’t seem to believe anything at all,” said Helena. “It’s all a game of words.”

“I know,” said Sylvester, “I know.”

And then Helena said something which seemed to have no relevance. “Where is the cross, anyway?” she asked.

“What cross, my dear?”

“The only one. The real one.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. I don’t think anyone has ever asked before.”

“It must be somewhere. Wood doesn’t just melt like snow. It’s not three hundred years old. The temples here are full of beams and panelling twice that age. It stands to reason God would take more care of the cross than of them.”

“Nothing ‘stands to reason’ with God. If He had wanted us to have it, no doubt He would have given it to us. But He hasn’t chosen to. He gives us enough.”

“But how do you know He doesn’t want us to have it—the cross, I mean? I bet He’s just waiting for one of us to go and find it—just at this moment when it’s most needed. Just at this moment when everyone is forgetting it and chattering about the hypostatic union, there’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against. I’m going off to find it,” said Helena.

The Empress Dowager was an old woman, almost of an age with Pope Sylvester, but he regarded her fondly as though she were a child, an impetuous young princess who went well to hounds, and he said with the gentlest irony: “You’ll tell me, won’t you? –if you are successful.”

“I’ll tell the world,” said Helena.

Is that how it happened? Unlikely. But it's a great story. And the idea of knocking certain churchy heads against a solid chunk of wood does sound very tempting.