The Question No One Asks
On May 21, we celebrate two saints whom we call great, Constantine the Great and Saint Helen the Empress. Yet if we ask, soberly, by what they are saints, the answer does not come easily.
They are not martyrs — Constantine died an emperor, in peace, in his own palace at Nicomedia, in 337. Helen died at an advanced age, surrounded by honor, after raising churches in the Holy Land. They did not shed their blood for Christ.
They are not confessors in the strict sense — they did not suffer for the faith in the prisons of Diocletian, but came after the persecution, as those who ended it.
They are not hierarchs — they remained laypeople until the end. Constantine received Baptism only near death. Helen never held any ecclesiastical rank.
They are not monastics — they never lived in a monastery, never took the schema, never practiced the monastic ascesis.
What, then, are they? On what grounds do they stand among the saints whose image the Orthodox Christian has kissed for nearly seventeen centuries?
The answer lies in a single Greek word: ἰσαπόστολος — isapóstolos, “equal to the Apostles.”
And this word opens a distinct hagiographical category, one worth understanding, because it tells us something essential about how the Orthodox Church sees holiness in the world.
What “Equal to the Apostles” Means
The word isapóstolos is composed of ἴσος (equal) and ἀπόστολος (sent, apostle). Not “similar to the Apostles,” not “almost like the Apostles,” but equal — in labor. The title does not claim sacramental equality with the Twelve, but a functional equivalence: the work performed by these saints is, in the eyes of the Church, comparable to apostolic labor by its fruits.
Before naming who is equal to the Apostles, a clarification is needed — one that popular articles too easily overlook. The Church clearly distinguishes four degrees of apostolicity:
- The Twelve, chosen by the Lord Himself in His earthly body, are the Apostles in the full and original sense.
- Saint Paul the Apostle, called directly by the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus, “as one untimely born” (1 Cor. 15:8), is placed beside the Twelve — an apostle through direct heavenly calling.
- The Seventy Apostles, sent by the Lord “two by two before His face” (Luke 10:1), are also apostles in the full sense. Their feast is celebrated on January 4. Among them are saints such as Andronicus, Aquila, Philemon, Onesiphorus, Sosipater, Carpus, Aristarchus, Mark, Luke, and the other fellow-workers of Saint Paul, of whom certain apostolic couples we have already discussed in an earlier article on this site.
- **The *Isapostoloi*** — “those equal to the Apostles” — are saints from later centuries, who were not among the historical Apostles, but whose labor in the Church is reckoned, by its fruits, comparable to apostolic work. This is the distinct category we address here.
The distinction is essential. Constantine does not stand alongside Peter, Paul, or Andronicus as a colleague in historical apostleship, but as a bearer of a later apostolic calling, through the Cross, for the Christianization of the Empire. Likewise Nina for Georgia, Vladimir for Rus’, Cosmas for the Greeks under Turkish rule.
Who, then, falls into this category of the isapostoloi? The list of the most widely known saints honored with this title remains relatively short when set against nearly two thousand years of Christian history, and this shows how careful the Church has been in using it:
- Saint Thekla, the first woman martyr, disciple of Saint Paul — an early model of apostolic labor accomplished by a woman.
- Saint Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia (3rd–4th century) — who baptized the Armenian kingdom, the first Christian state in history (301).
- Saint Nina, enlightener of Georgia (4th century).
- Saints Cyril and Methodius, “Apostles to the Slavs” (9th century).
- Saint Olga and Saint Vladimir of Kiev (10th century), through whom the Russian people received Baptism.
- Saint Cosmas of Aetolia (18th century), preacher of Orthodoxy under Ottoman rule.
- And, foremost among them in liturgical honor, Saints Constantine and Helen.
Two special cases require a separate note. Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Photini the Samaritan Woman are honored with the title isapostolos in the Eastern tradition, though they lived in the very age of the Apostles. Mary Magdalene, the first to announce the Resurrection (John 20:17-18), is called in Greek liturgical texts “the first among the Myrrh-bearers” and “equal to the Apostles,” because it was she who sent the Apostles to proclaim the Resurrection — apostle to the Apostles. Photini, the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4), according to tradition preached the Gospel in Carthage. Their status is not that of the later isapostoloi (Constantine, Nina, Vladimir), since they belong to the apostolic age itself; nor is it that of the Seventy, since they are not numbered among them. They are a category sui generis: myrrh-bearers and preachers whose perfected apostolic labor the Church recognized through liturgical title, from the very dawn of Christianity.
The common criterion for all those called isapostoloi, looking closely, is not a single one but an interwoven work: these saints founded Christianity in a people, a culture, or an entire age, without themselves being among the Twelve or the Seventy. They made possible the proclamation of the Gospel where, before them, it had not penetrated or had not taken root.
A further distinction must be made here, one missing from many popular accounts. The title is not isepiskopos (equal to the bishop). This distinction is deliberate. The Church never confuses apostolic work — understood as preaching and founding — with hierarchical and sacramental succession. Constantine never celebrated a Sacrament. He never ordained. He never taught from the ambo. He was never mistaken for a clerical authority. Isapóstolos, yes; isepiskopos, never.
Here too one can clearly see the difference from the Church of Rome: Constantine is not honored in the Church of Rome with a universal liturgical cult comparable to the Eastern one. Schaff, the Protestant historian, observed with some irony that “the Latin Church, with greater tact, has not numbered him among the saints, contenting itself with calling him the Great, in grateful remembrance for services rendered to the cause of Christianity.” The difference is not accidental — it reveals something about the Eastern theology of Christian empire, in which the work of an Orthodox emperor in the service of the Church can reach the very threshold of sanctity. For the East, Constantine is not “good for Christians”; he is God’s instrument for the Christianization of the world.
One detail shows how deep this consciousness ran in Constantine himself: the emperor built at Constantinople the Church of the Holy Apostles (Apostoleion) and, according to Eusebius, prepared in its midst his own tomb, surrounded by twelve reliquaries of the Apostles — six on each side of the imperial sarcophagus. The Byzantine tradition interpreted this gesture as a symbolic affirmation of his apostolic calling: Constantine does not place himself among the Twelve through ordination or succession, but beside them through the historical work of Christianizing the Empire. This is isapostolos-consciousness lived from within — and it explains, better than any external argument, why the Church received the title without hesitation.
Constantine at Nicaea — What a Layman Does at an Ecumenical Council
Here we enter the part most often absent from popular accounts of Saint Constantine. The usual summary goes: “he convened the First Ecumenical Council in 325, which condemned the heresy of Arius.” The formula is true, but it says nothing. What matters is how he did it, what he did there, and why, in the history of the Church, Constantine’s act at Nicaea is reckoned an apostolic labor.
The Letter to Alexander and Arius
Before the Council was convened, Constantine himself attempted to quench the dispute in Alexandria. Eusebius of Caesarea preserved the full text of the letter the emperor sent, through Hosius of Cordoba, to Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, and to the presbyter Arius. The letter is recorded in Vita Constantini, Book II, chapters 64-72. Its date — late 324, after the victory over Licinius.
Two things deserve close attention.
First, the emperor writes not as a ruler but as a Christian troubled by the disturbance of the Church. He begins his letter by calling God “as witness,” declaring he has taken this duty upon himself for two reasons: to bring concord among peoples concerning the divinity, and to heal the imperial body wounded by division.
Second, in this first phase, Constantine did not yet grasp the gravity of the dispute. He treats the quarrel between Alexander and Arius as a “minor philosophical dispute,” as a question “unsuitable for public discussion” — a judgment that, after the Council, would prove mistaken, but one that shows his sincerity: the emperor was not acting from political calculation but from a real desire for ecclesial peace. Understanding the theological depth came at the Council, not before it.
This gesture, in itself, is apostolic. Saint Paul wrote letters to the churches to quench divisions; Constantine writes a letter to the church of Alexandria. He does not ordain, does not consecrate, but he mediates.
Convening the Council
When the letter did not bear the expected fruit, Constantine took the one step that, at that moment of history, could gather the Church: he convened an Ecumenical Council. Eusebius describes the assembly at Nicaea, in May–June 325, in terms that directly recall the Acts of the Apostles: 318 fathers (according to the traditional count), from all parts of the known world — from Persia, Ethiopia, Gothia, Spain, Britain, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Italy. “Like the apostolic assembly,” writes Eusebius, “composed of men of every nation.”
Many of those present still bore on their bodies the marks of Diocletian’s persecution — eyes gouged out, hands maimed, legs broken. Tradition preserved in later sources (among them Theodoret) records that the emperor, on entering the hall, bowed before them and kissed the scars of the confessors. The image is iconic: the emperor of Rome, master of the known world, kissing the wounds of those whom the empire had tortured a generation before. This is the isapostolos moment, not the Milvian Bridge.
Here a distinction must be made, one that Western iconography and popular textbooks tend to obscure. In the widespread imagination, Constantine’s “Christian” moment is the Battle of the Milvian Bridge — the bridge over the Tiber, north of Rome, where, in October 312, Constantine defeated Maxentius after seeing in the sky the sign of the Cross with the words “By this sign you shall conquer.” The episode is recorded by Lactantius and Eusebius, is honored by the Church, and has been depicted countless times in Western art — Raphael made it one of the great frescoes of the Vatican. But the Milvian Bridge is Constantine’s calling, not his apostolic labor. Just as Paul did not become an apostle on the road to Damascus, but in the decades of preaching that followed the vision, so Constantine becomes isapostolos not on the battlefield of 312, but in the council chamber of 325. There, at Nicaea, beside the Fathers, the apostolic labor of his calling at the Bridge finds its fulfillment — and that is the isapostolos moment in its full meaning.
The Formula homoousios
Here the matter requires finesse.
In the Eastern tradition, the entry of the term homoousios (of one essence with the Father) into the Nicene Creed is first of all attributed to Saint Hosius of Cordoba, the emperor’s episcopal advisor — so it is recorded by Saint Athanasius the Great himself (De decretis Nicaenae Synodi, Letter to the Africans), and confirmed by Sozomen. Hosius is the one who, by all signs, brought the term into the assembly and supported it against the misgivings of bishops who suspected it of Sabellian overtones.
The term homoousios was not new — it had been used earlier, but with those troubling overtones; this is precisely why some bishops hesitated to introduce it into a confession of faith. To name the Son “of one essence with the Father,” beyond any scriptural formula, meant cutting the very root of Arianism: if the Son is of the same essence as the Father, He is not a creature, but true God of true God.
Constantine’s role at Nicaea was different, and must be stated exactly. He was not a theologian. He did not propose dogmatic formulas. Eusebius says the emperor supported and explained the proposed term, not that he formulated it. But he did something only he could do: he insisted upon consensus. He urged the bishops to find a formula that would cut the root of Arianism, and he received the formula proposed by Hosius and the orthodox party. Then he guaranteed, through imperial authority, that the decision would be received throughout the Empire.
Yet it must be said, without evasion, what history has recorded: Constantine’s relation to homoousios was more pragmatic than theological. In the years following the Council, the emperor supported Arius’s reinstatement (327-328), exiled Saint Athanasius the Great to Trier (335), and received Baptism, on the eve of his death, from Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia — a former supporter of Arius, exiled by Constantine himself after Nicaea, but later readmitted through a formal rehabilitation in which he had retracted, at least in writing, his Arian support. These facts are not concealed. Constantine was not a dogmatic confessor in the way Saint Athanasius or, later, the Three Holy Hierarchs were. He did not defend homoousios at the cost of exile and suffering — on the contrary, he tolerated, in the years after Nicaea, hesitations and compromises which the great Orthodox conscience, through the voice of Saint Athanasius, would later condemn.
Where, then, does his “isapostolicity” lie? It lies where it has always lain: in his historical labor, not in his personal confession. Constantine made Nicaea possible. Without him, the bishops would have had no imperial framework in which to gather from every part of the known world. Without him, the Council’s decision would have lacked imperial weight. He did not define the dogma — the Fathers did — but he made it possible for the definition to be pronounced in council, received in communion, transmitted onward. This is an apostolic labor par excellence: not preaching, not confessing, but creating the conditions in which the Church can gather in the Holy Spirit and speak with one voice.
The emperor’s holiness, for the East, is not the holiness of the theologian. It is the holiness of the ruler who placed his sovereignty at the service of the Church — with all the hesitations and faults he had, but with the fundamental orientation of his reign directed toward the peace of the Church and her conciliar gathering. The Church, in receiving him into her veneration, does not “whitewash” his biography; she places it under the Cross and judges its ultimate orientation.
The Council as Foreshadowing of an Imperial Pentecost
Eusebius, writing of Nicaea, explicitly compares the assembly to the apostolic Pentecost — all, from every nation, gathered with one mind, praising the same God. Here the consciousness of Orthodox conciliarity is born in visible form. The Church receives, for the first time, an instituted ecumenical expression.
And here one sees clearly what Constantine did not do: he did not legislate within the Church. He did not impose dogmas by imperial decree. He gathered the bishops, took part in the debates, supported the formula when support was needed — but the dogmatic definition was pronounced by the Fathers, not by the emperor. The distinction is fundamental for Orthodox ecclesiology: the emperor, in the Eastern view, is not the head of the Church but her servant. He makes possible the assembly in the Holy Spirit; he himself listens.
This is the apostolic labor. The Apostles, at the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15), did the same: they gathered the Church, listened to the Spirit, formulated the decision — “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” At Nicaea, the pattern repeats, and Constantine participates in the assembly not through hierarchical succession but through direct calling — placed beside the Fathers, not above them.
Saint Helen and the Historical Question of the Finding of the Cross
We turn now to Saint Helen. Here we enter a region in which popular accounts take up the tradition as if it were a uniform given, without setting it within its sources. And the setting within sources does not weaken it — on the contrary, it shows its depth.
What Eusebius Says
Eusebius of Caesarea is Helen’s contemporary. In Vita Constantini (Book III), he describes at length the empress-mother’s pilgrimage to the Holy Places, her devotion, her donations to churches, her almsgiving to the poor, the construction of the three great churches — at the Tomb of the Lord, at Bethlehem (over the cave of the Nativity), and on the Mount of Olives (at the place of the Ascension). These are pages of great spiritual beauty.
But Eusebius does not mention the Finding of the Holy Cross. He is silent.
This fact need not be hidden, because it is not a problem but a lesson about how tradition is transmitted in the Church. Eusebius is a historian, but he is also a man with his limits — a partisan of Constantine’s cause, attentive to some matters, less attentive to others. Moreover, modern scholarship has advanced the hypothesis that Eusebius, being inclined toward the Origenist circles of Caesarea Palaestina, may have had reservations about the material veneration of relics, emphasizing the “heavenly cross” seen by Constantine at the expense of the material Cross found by Helen. This is a hypothesis, but it shows that the silence of one author is never the whole story.
What the 5th-Century Church Historians Say
The tradition of the Finding of the Holy Cross is recorded by the ecclesiastical historians of the 5th century, the immediately following generations: Socrates Scholasticus (Ecclesiastical History I, 17), Sozomen (II, 1), Theodoret of Cyrus (I, 18), and, in the West, Rufinus (I, 7-8). Four independent authors, in the first half of the 5th century, recording a common tradition.
This is important: this tradition does not appear ex nihilo in the 5th century. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, in his Catechetical Lectures from the years 348-350 — only twenty years after Helen’s death — already attests the presence of the wood of the Cross at Jerusalem and its distribution throughout the Christian world (“the whole earth is full of fragments of the Holy Wood”). This is the decisive witness: a generation after Helen, every Christian who came to Jerusalem knew that the Cross was preserved there, and in the Jerusalem Liturgy of Good Friday (described by the pilgrim Egeria around 380) the wood of the Cross was venerated by the faithful.
In other words: the fact of the Finding was known locally at Jerusalem from the moment it happened. Ecclesiastical historiography recorded it a generation later, when the local tradition was set down in writing. This is the normal pattern of apostolic transmission, not a problem.
The Versions Differ in Detail
The details: how was the true Cross recognized among the three pieces of wood found? Socrates and Sozomen say that Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, brought the three pieces in contact with a gravely ill woman; the touch of the true wood healed her. Theodoret records the same tradition in the form that became standard. Sozomen further adds, with a certain reserve of his own, an oral tradition of a Jew who preserved the location through paternal inheritance.
The version of “Judas Cyriacus” — the Jew who, when forced to reveal the place, was converted and took the name Cyriacus — appears in the late Syriac tradition and entered the West through the Legenda Aurea, but is not supported by the early Byzantine sources. The authentic Eastern tradition ignores it. It is one of those Western legends that attached themselves to hagiography and which, if we wish to be patristically rigorous, must be distinguished from the witness recorded in the East.
The Nails of the Holy Cross and the Empire
Socrates and Theodoret record a detail of profound symbolic weight: Helen sent her son in Constantinople a portion of the wood of the Cross and the nails with which the Lord had been crucified. Constantine, upon receiving them, ordered some to be wrought into the bridle of his imperial horse, and others to be set upon the imperial helmet.
The gesture is not one of museum treasuring but of profound theology. The nails that crucified Christ become a bridle over the empire — that is, the nails of the Cross restrain Christian sovereignty. The helmet bearing the nails declares plainly: the emperor’s head is under the Cross, not above it. This is, in material form, the whole theology of Orthodox Christian empire: a power that is saved only by being nailed to the wood of Christ. Though seemingly small, this detail is one of the most powerful summations of the isapostolos pattern — the emperor reigns not over the Cross, but beneath it.
The Witness of Egeria
There is an early confirmation that, at Jerusalem, the cult of the Cross was already established in liturgy and public worship long before ecclesiastical historiography described it at length. The pilgrim Egeria, who visited the Holy Places around the year 380 — about fifty years after Helen’s death — describes in her journal the solemn veneration of the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday: the bishop seated at Golgotha, the deacons guarding the silver casket with the Cross, the faithful coming one by one to kiss it. Egeria does not alone prove all the details of the tradition concerning the Finding of the Cross, but she proves something very important: by around 380, the liturgical cult of the wood of the Cross was already public, solemn, and established at Jerusalem. The practice she describes is a settled, ceremonially regulated one, presupposing an entire generation of prior cult. The fact of the Finding was not merely recorded; it was lived liturgically at Jerusalem — only half a century after Helen.
Helen’s Gesture Matters Not Archaeologically, but Ecclesially
This is the most important point for an Orthodox reader. Saint Helen’s significance does not lie in the discovery of an object, but in the founding of a pattern. Helen founded Orthodox pilgrimage as a form of Christian devotion.
Before Helen, the Holy Places were a geographical point. After Helen, they are the liturgical center of the Christian world. The three churches she raised — the Resurrection, the Nativity, the Ascension — are the mother of all Orthodox churches. The sacred topography of Christendom is Helen’s gift. That a Christian today, going to Jerusalem, may kiss the place where the Cross stood, the place where Christ was born, the place from which He ascended — this is Saint Helen’s legacy. Before her, no one had done it.
And this is an apostolic labor par excellence: not merely being a Christian, but making Christianity visible, rooting it in the world, giving it a material place in which devotion may unfold.
The Typology of the “New Helen”
Saint Helen became, in Eastern hagiography, a permanent model. The title “New Helen” was later given to other Orthodox empresses who labored for the Church:
- Saint Pulcheria (5th century), who made possible the Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon, 451).
- Saint Theodora (9th century), who restored the veneration of the holy icons on the Sunday of Orthodoxy.
- And, much later, Lady Despina Milica (Helen), wife of Neagoe Basarab, co-founder with her husband of the monastery of Curtea de Argeș — herself a bearer of Helen’s name precisely as a sign of the assumed ktitorial work.
“New Helen” is a real typological category in Orthodox hagiography, a sign that the Church recognized in Saint Helen not merely an individual saint, but a paradigm — a model that can be reactualized in history. Just as Saint Vladimir is “the new Constantine” for the Russian people.
Why They Are Living Saints for Us Today
We come to the most important question for the category in which this article is placed. Living saints — the saints who are not museum pieces, but models that speak to the Christian of today. What do Constantine and Helen give us now?
1. The Pattern of the Baptizing Emperor Is the Pattern of All Christian Authority
We no longer have emperors. But we have temporal authority. Those who hold political, economic, administrative, cultural, or familial power — all of them stand in Constantine’s position: they must choose between using power for themselves or placing it at the service of Christ. Constantine, in the Eastern view, is a saint not because he was an emperor, but because he reigned in an Orthodox manner. He placed his sovereignty in the Church’s work.
This is a transferable pattern. The entrepreneur who orders his business according to a Christian conscience. The parent who orders his home as a little church. The teacher who teaches students in a Christian spirit. The politician, the journalist, the doctor, the programmer, who, having authority in some domain, chooses to sanctify it through Christian work. All these stand, each according to his measure, in Constantine’s pattern.
And here, isapostolos becomes a living word: any Christian who, through his labor in a city (a town, a profession, an environment, a generation), causes Christianity to take root there, is performing apostolic work.
2. The Layman’s Sanctity Has a Model
Constantine remained a layman. He did not take the schema, was not ordained, did not withdraw to a monastery. He received Baptism only near the end of his life, near Nicomedia, in 337 — from Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, a former supporter of Arius but formally rehabilitated after the Council. It must be said, without evasion, that the practice of delaying Baptism until the end of life, common in the 4th century, cannot today be taken as a spiritual model; a Christian infant is baptized as an infant. And the reception of the Sacrament from a twice-wavering hand reveals, without hiding it, the full ambiguity of the Constantinian ending — an ambiguity which the Church does not pass over in silence, but entrusts to the judgment of God, who knows the time of each.
Eusebius of Caesarea records a precious detail: after receiving the “seal” of Baptism, Constantine refused ever again to put on the imperial purple, considering himself ready for the passage to the true life. The emperor who, a generation before, had been master of the known world, lays down the imperial signs before the only sign that yet matters: the white robe of the baptized. Constantine’s end is, in this light, a Christian ending par excellence — through the Cross he reigned; beneath the Cross he died.
But this is the point: Constantine offers a model for the Christian engaged in the world, close to the question of the layman and discernment in the Church. Against the pietistic temptation to reduce holiness to the monastery, the Church declares clearly, through her veneration of Constantine: holiness is possible even in a palace, if the palace is placed at the service of Christ. This is a message the Orthodox Christian today urgently needs, in a world where piety tends to close itself within, withdrawing from the city, leaving the world to those who do not love it.
3. Helen, a Model for the Christian Woman Who Matures Late
This detail is for all those who feel “it is too late.” Who returned to faith at 50, at 60, at 70. Who believe that for them only the meager time of the last years remains. Saint Helen says the opposite: a woman of whom the tradition recorded by Saint Ambrose says that she began her life as the daughter of an innkeeper, who became the mother of a future emperor — without this changing her lot immediately, for when Constantius Chlorus was raised to the rank of Caesar in 293, she was put aside for an advantageous political marriage to the daughter of Maximian. She lived almost two decades in the shadows, far from court. Then, when her son ascended the imperial throne in 306 by acclamation of the army — for in those days one became emperor not through inherited blood but through the proclamation of the troops — she was restored to honor, raised to the rank of Augusta, and lived the last twenty years of her life as the founder of Christianity settled in the Holy Land.
Her social status deserves a closer look, for it deepens this spiritual icon. Her origin was modest in an aristocratic world, but no more modest than her husband’s — Constantius Chlorus himself was an Illyrian officer raised through the army, not a descendant of imperial lineage. The Late Roman Empire was not a hereditary monarchy of the medieval type; succession was made through military merit and acclamation, not through blood. Helen’s problem arose only when Constantius was elevated to the rank of Caesar in 293: at that level, the Lex Iulia et Papia Poppaea rendered a union with a woman of lower condition problematic, and Diocletian’s tetrarchy required matrimonial alliances among the imperial families. This is why she was set aside — not for a personal fault, but for a dynastic necessity of the new political system. The ancient sources are uncertain about the legal status of her union with Constantius, some calling her uxor (wife), others using less defined terms. What remains certain: a woman with a difficult past, without rank by birth, raised to the highest dignity of the Empire through the work of God through her son. For any Christian woman who feels the weight of a past, Saint Helen is the icon of the living possibility of holiness.
4. Nicaea as Pattern of Conciliarity
Constantine did not decide at Nicaea — he gathered the Council. The distinction is fundamental for Orthodox ecclesiology, and it speaks to us today more than ever, in a time when the confusion between political authority and ecclesial authority seems to be reinstalling itself in many parts of the Orthodox world.
Constantine’s model is this: the emperor makes possible the Church’s gathering in the Holy Spirit; he himself listens to the confession of the Fathers. He does not impose it. He does not legislate within the Church. He does not place himself in the place of the bishops.
This distinction remains valid for any form of Christian authority: the Orthodox politician does not define dogmas, the sponsor of a church does not dictate to the priest, the president of a Christian association does not substitute himself for the hierarchy. Right Christian authority serves conciliarity; it does not replace it. This is why the question to whom we should offer obedience remains essential in the Church.
5. Veneration in Local Orthodox Traditions: An Observation
In the Greek tradition, Saints Constantine and Helen are venerated with particular intensity. A feast with full vigil. Hundreds of churches bear their name. The names Konstantinos and Eleni are among the most widespread in the Greek world, and they are given with full awareness that they bear an apostolic labor.
In the Slavic tradition (Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian), the veneration is likewise intense, rooted in the awareness that the baptism of one’s own people (Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian) is a continuation of the Constantinian pattern — Vladimir “the new Constantine,” Olga “the new Helen,” Saint Sava of Serbia at the foundation of the Christian Serbian state.
In the Romanian tradition, the veneration is real but often clothed in a layer of popular devotion — “Constantine of the dew,” the weaving of roses, a name-day for millions of Romanians — which, however beautiful, risks overlaying the theological weight of the feast. And yet, in the Romanian space, the name of Constantine has been borne with the consciousness of apostolic continuity: Saint Constantine Brâncoveanu, the martyr-voivode, is clearly “the new Constantine” by name and by his labor for the Church — founder of churches, supporter of Orthodoxy under the Turks, finally a martyr together with his four sons. This shows that the pattern was understood and assumed in our space as well, beyond mere onomastics.
The present article calls for a rediscovery of this weight, wherever the reader may be. To wish “many years” to a person bearing the name Constantine or Helen is beautiful. But to understand what that person bears in his name — the call to an apostolic labor in his own environment — is more than beautiful. It is Orthodox.
6. Why the East Venerates Constantine, and the West Does Not
Here we enter an observation almost entirely absent from popular articles, one that answers a question the attentive reader poses for himself: if Saints Constantine and Helen were venerated already in the first millennium, when the Church was not yet divided, why does the West not today venerate Constantine as a saint? The question presupposes that there was once a common cult, broken by the Schism of 1054. The historical answer is more precise and more interesting: Constantine’s cult was never truly shared. It was always essentially Eastern.
How they were recognized as saints. First, a needed clarification. In the first millennium of Christianity, saints were not proclaimed through a juridical procedure. There was no “canonization” in the modern sense of the word. Saints were recognized through consensus ecclesiae — the spontaneous liturgical veneration of the faithful people, followed by inclusion in the diptychs, the synaxaria, the daily services. So were recognized the Apostles themselves, the martyrs of the early centuries, the Three Holy Hierarchs, the great majority of the patristic Fathers. The modern juridical process of canonization appears in the West only after the 13th century, when Pope Gregory IX (1234) reserved canonization to the Roman pontiff; in the East, its systematization is even later. For first-millennium saints, veneration needed no decree to be real: it was already living in the Liturgy.
Constantine’s case. His cult began immediately after his death. He was buried in 337 at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, among the twelve reliquaries of the Apostles — a fact which, in itself, already expressed the public recognition of an apostolic labor. Eusebius of Caesarea, his contemporary, wrote of him in hagiographical terms already in the 340s (Vita Constantini is, literally, an encomium of a holy emperor). The common liturgical feast of the two on May 21 is firmly attested in the Synaxarion of the Church of Constantinople, which preserves a very early Byzantine tradition. The cult spread throughout the entire Eastern world — Greek, Slavic, Georgian, Arabic — from the first centuries after the emperor’s death.
But this cult, so alive in the East, was never fully received in Latin Rome. This must be said plainly: even before the Schism of 1054, Constantine did not enter the liturgical calendar of the Church of Rome as a saint with his own feast. Several reasons converge to explain this Western reticence:
First, the memory of the exile imposed by Constantine upon Saint Athanasius the Great in 335. Athanasius was the defender par excellence of the Nicene faith against Arianism, and the West received him early and firmly as her great ally in that struggle — Pope Julius I publicly defended Athanasius when he was exiled in Rome, in the years 339-346. Yet the one who had exiled him to Trier was none other than Constantine. The Latin ecclesial conscience preserved the memory that the emperor, in his last years, had wavered concerning homoousios and had sacrificed the saint of Alexandria for political peace. This made the liturgical veneration of Constantine more difficult for the bishops of the West.
Second, the Baptism received on the deathbed from Eusebius of Nicomedia — an Arian bishop, though formally rehabilitated — was viewed in the West with greater reserve than in the East. The East forgave this ambiguous ending, entrusting it to the judgment of God, as we have shown above. The West, more juridical in its ecclesial temperament, perceived it as a stain hard to wash away. So difficult was this problem that in the 5th-6th centuries an alternative legend emerged — the Acts of Saint Sylvester — claiming that Constantine had been baptized by Pope Sylvester in Rome, before his death, in an Orthodox manner. The legend contradicts the explicit testimony of his contemporary Eusebius and of the ecclesiastical historians who followed, but it circulated precisely because the West sought a “salvageable” Constantine for veneration. Despite this attempt, the emperor never entered the Roman Martyrology as a saint with a universal feast.
Third, the transfer of the capital to Constantinople in 330 — Constantine’s act which, as the troparion sings, “placed the care of the Royal City in Your hands” — created over time an affective reticence of Rome toward his figure. Constantine had founded a city which, over the centuries, was to dispute Rome’s primacy. For the East, the founding of Constantinople is one of the great titles of his isapostolicity — the establishment of a new Roma Christiana under the sign of the Cross. For the West, the same act appears differently, as the beginning of a rivalry which, over centuries, would contribute to the Schism.
Fourth, the historical irony of the Donation of Constantine — the false document fabricated in the 8th-9th centuries, by which Constantine was supposed to have ceded to Pope Sylvester and his successors temporal jurisdiction over the West. Medieval Rome used this forgery to justify papal authority over the Western states. The irony is striking: Constantine was useful to Rome politically, as the juridical foundation of a temporal claim, but he was not venerated liturgically, as a saint of the Church. He became a useful figure, not a father of the faith.
With Saint Helen, the matter is otherwise. She has been venerated from the early centuries in both traditions. Roman tradition links the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme with the Sessorianum palace of Saint Helen and with the relics of the Cross she brought from the Holy Land; the church developed from this imperial complex and became, in time, the principal place of preservation of the relics of the Lord’s Passion in the West. Saint Helen remains commemorated in the Roman calendar to this day, on August 18 (in the traditional Tridentine calendar), and her veneration has likewise been preserved in Anglicanism and Lutheranism. For Helen there are none of the impediments that exist for Constantine: she did not exile Saint Athanasius, she was not touched by the question of the baptism from Eusebius of Nicomedia, she did not found Constantinople. She did one thing, single and clear: she went on pilgrimage to the Holy Places and raised churches. This labor was honored unanimously, in the East as in the West.
The historical conclusion, therefore, is exact: the Schism of 1054 did not “break” a common cult of Saint Constantine. His cult was already, by Western choice itself in the first millennium, essentially Byzantine. The West kept the figure of Constantine as founder of imperial Christendom — a historical figure of the first rank, whose importance has never been denied — but did not receive him as a saint in the ordinary liturgical communion of the Church. The Schism confirmed what was already different, and preserved, for the East, what the West had hesitated to receive in full from the beginning.
This observation is not polemical but clarifying. It shows that the East had, from the start, a theological intuition the West refused: that the concrete historical labor of a ruler can be so deep in service of the Church that it touches the threshold of isapostolicity. The West, more cautious, more juridical, more bound to the Roman model of sanctity through ascetic life or martyrdom, kept the Great — Magnus — but did not dare add the Saint. For the Orthodox Christian today, this asymmetry is worth knowing. It shows that the title isapostolos is not a Byzantine exaggeration, but a deliberate ecclesial judgment, assumed in full knowledge of the complexity of Constantine’s biography.
The Troparion as Key
The troparion of Saints Constantine and Helen, tone 8:
“He beheld the image of Your Cross in the Heavens and, as Paul, he too did not receive the call from men. Your Apostle among Kings placed the care of the Royal City in Your hands. Through the intercessions of the Theotokos, O only Loving Lord, keep it ever in peace.”
In this troparion lies the key to the whole article.
The verse that matters most is: “as Paul, he too did not receive the call from men.” The Holy Fathers who composed the service placed Constantine beside Saint Paul. And Paul is the apostle par excellence called directly by Christ, not through the succession of the Twelve. Saint Paul was not among the Twelve, but received his call on the road to Damascus, in light. Constantine, according to the tradition handed down, received his call by seeing the sign of the Cross in the sky before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (In hoc signo vinces — “By this sign you shall conquer”).
The parallel does not remain at the level of the troparion alone. The Orthodox liturgical tradition has chosen for the day of Saints Constantine and Helen, as the apostolic reading, the pericope from Acts 26:12-20 — that is, precisely Saint Paul’s testimony before King Agrippa, in which the Apostle recounts the heavenly light on the road to Damascus and the voice of Christ: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?… Rise, and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you to appoint you a servant and a witness”. The reading is not chosen by chance. The Church says, through the very choice of pericope: Constantine’s vision is of the same kind as Paul’s vision. Both received their call “not from men,” but directly from the risen and glorified Christ; both were appointed “servant and witness”; both turned an entire world toward the Gospel. The reading from Acts 26 is, in eloquent form, the biblical foundation of the title isapóstolos — the liturgical verification of the parallel which the troparion sings.
The parallel is, therefore, theological, not rhetorical. Just as Paul was called directly by the Risen Christ and became Apostle to the Gentiles, Constantine was called directly, through the sign of the Cross, and became isapostolos — equal to the Apostles — for the Christianization of the Empire. The Fathers who composed the troparion and those who ordered the reading knew exactly what they were saying. Here is the theological foundation of the title isapóstolos, inscribed in the very heart of the service that the Church sings on the night of May 20-21.
Saint Helen is not explicitly mentioned in this troparion, but the kontakion places her beside her son, as bearer of the Cross which Constantine saw in image, and which she found in matter at Jerusalem. The two are inseparable in the Church’s veneration: the emperor who saw the Cross in the sky, and the empress who found it in the earth. Seeing and finding. Vision and discovery. Beginning and fulfillment — in the same Cross.
Conclusion
For the Orthodox Christian today, Saints Constantine and Helen are not the memory of an empire past. They are a living model for every Christian who, holding any authority — however small — in this world, be it political, professional, familial, or merely that of his own name, is called to place it at the service of the Church. And they are a witness that God calls isapostoloi in every generation: people through whom the faith penetrates where, before them, it had not penetrated.
The question that remains for each of us, at the end of this article, is simple: where is the city that Christ entrusts to me, that I may place it in His hand?
For one, this city is the family. For another, the workplace. For another, a written page, a school, a workshop, a small community, a friendship. Not all of us are called to change empires — and, glory to God, this is not what we are saved for. But every Christian receives a space — however small it may seem — in which the Cross must become visible. Here is isapostolicity for us: not in the size of the city, but in the clarity with which we set it under the sign of Christ. Saint Helen did it with a palace. Saint Constantine did it with an empire. You and I are called to do it with what has been given to us — and what has been given is enough.
On May 21, when we hear the troparion sung in church, let us not pass lightly over the words “as Paul, he too did not receive the call from men.” The true calling — then, as now — comes from elsewhere.
Holy Saints Equal to the Apostles, Constantine and Helen, pray to God for us.
Principal Sources
- Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine (Vita Constantini), Books II-IV
- Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History I, 17
- Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History II, 1
- Theodoret of Cyrus, Ecclesiastical History I, 18
- Egeria, Itinerarium (Pilgrimage Journal, 4th century) — for the cult of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem
- Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, especially Lectures IV and X
- Saint Athanasius the Great, De decretis Nicaenae Synodi
- Menaion of May, day 21 — Service of the Holy Great Sovereigns Constantine and Helen (troparion, kontakion, synaxarion, canon)
- Apostle of the day: Acts 26:12-20