The Antiochian Orthodox Church in the United Kingdom and Ireland

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EQUALS TO THE APOSTLES:

COLCHESTER'S CLAIM TO FAME

St Helen, Saint for East and West

St Helen is one of the best-loved Saints of the Christian community, both in East and West. Over many centuries in England her name has been much used for our daughters, in various forms - Ellen and Eleanor being favourite variants. No doubt this has been partly due to much-loved Queens of England, but certainly the Saint herself has been greatly venerated, and 135 ancient English churches are said to be dedicated in her honour.

Eastern Christians love her too, and this has meant she can draw together modern western converts to Orthodoxy and the cradle-Orthodox who have moved to Britain from the East.

Many widely venerated eastern Saints have been unknown in the West, and only gradually will British converts to Orthodoxy be able to absorb them deep into their consciousness. Conversely, many Saints from Britain’s Orthodox past - i.e. before the Great Schism commonly dated to 1054, and the Norman Conquest of Saxon England in 1066 - are unknown to easterners. These western but entirely Orthodox Saints will take some time to become really loved by Orthodox who have come here from the East.

Yet we can all, from East and West, without difficulty love and admire St Helen.

St Constantine and the West

St Constantine her son is a rather different case. Much honoured in the East, he has been neglected in the West. It seems he has never been venerated as a Saint in the West at all. To the contrary indeed, sometimes today he is positively sneered at and despised.

Converts to Holy Orthodoxy must therefore rediscover him, and find out why that common western attitude is totally unjust to his memory. We must discover why the Orthodox Faith venerates him deeply, along with his mother St Helen, as "Equal to the Apostles". We need to rethink our inherited attitude to him, as we enter more deeply into Orthodoxy.

The Legacy of St Constantine the Great

The fact is that his reign transformed both the Roman Empire and the Christian religion. His actions have had an enormous and lasting influence. Seventeen hundred years after his time, his influence is clearly perceptible still.

We must perhaps admit that, in some respects, the effect of his actions has been regrettable. For example, in places there has resulted too close a link between Church and State, to the disadvantage of either society at large or of the Church and her interests.

Thus, sometimes Christians find it hard to distinguish between Christian and secular ways. They do not realise that that modern western society is largely secular, and that we must now be careful to distinguish between what society accepts and believes and what the Church believes and teaches. They do not understand what is the Christian understanding in a particular respect, or how the Christian is to be behave in a particular situation.

But, on the whole, Constantine’s legacy has been for the good, and the Orthodox Church is right to recognise a sanctity in him. First he made Christianity legal, after centuries of much persecution. Then he made it the Empire’s official religion.

He perceived that Christianity was the way the Empire could be united. He saw the resulting need to establish the truths of our religion by calling the first Ecumenical Council in 325. He recognised the tiredness of Old Rome - built on its classical, pagan, past - and founded the exuberant New Rome at Byzantium on the Bosphorus, founded on the Christian Faith and its principles - even if neither he nor the Empire always lived out those principles. Thus he ensured the future of Orthodox Christianity.

The "down-side" of Constantine’s actions in the sphere of ecclesiastical affairs is that the very transfer of power and influence from Old Rome to New Rome also provided the possibility of, and the fertile soil for, the growth of the monarchical Papacy, and of Papal claims. Over the following centuries this distorted the Christian faith in the West.

Yet if he had not moved the seat of government from Rome to Byzantium, it is conceivable that, under pressure from the barbarians, Christianity may not have survived - or at least, not as we know and believe it.

For while the Western Roman Empire came to an end a hundred or so years later and much of Europe entered the "Dark Ages", the Byzantine Empire carried on that Roman tradition for another thousand years.

This was recognised even in the West, and the Byzantine Roman Empire continued to illuminate the world with the Orthodox Faith even after Constantinople’s fall in the fifteenth century.

That is part of the reason why everywhere he is Constantine the Great. He was certainly no fool, and essentially he was a good and devout man who desired to honour Christ in both his personal and public life.

We can say this in spite of several wicked acts he committed. We are wise in any case to recognise that numbers of canonised Saints have committed unworthy deeds at various times in their lives, and not only before a conversion.

Indeed, he deliberately delayed his Baptism until the end of his life - to cover any mis-doings, as it were. This was apparently the unhappy fashion of his day. But at least, it displays a certain humility before God; an acknowledgement of the awe and reverence with which we should approach the Holy Mysteries.

Orthodox Christians have very good reason to thank God for Saint Constantine, and to ask his prayers. And indeed so have all Christians.

Colchester’s Living Tradition about Saints Helen and Constantine

None more so than the Orthodox people of Colchester - "Britain’s Oldest Recorded Town", say the sign boards proudly - and particularly the Orthodox of the new Antiochian parish.

For ancient tradition, widely accepted until comparatively recently, is that St Helen was a British princess, born in Colchester.

So, Colchester’s mediaeval Oath Book or Red Parchment Book records:

AD 242 Helen, daughter of Coel [King of the Britons], born in Colchester.

And we would even dare to identify exactly where she would have been born - "King Coel’s Palace" of course (so the legend would run), which is the old name for the celebrated Castle (actually a Norman castle keep). Or perhaps she was born in "Coelkyngscastle", and old name for the Roman "Balkerne Gate", as it is known.

Naturally, then, the town of Colchester boasts St Helen as its Patron. About the year 326, when she was in her seventies, she made a great, in some ways world transforming, journey to the Holy Land and Jerusalem. There, her story tells us, she discovered the Cross of Christ, and the Nails that fixed him to it. Colchester’s coat of arms is therefore the Life-giving Holy Cross (green and budding, on a Blood-red field), together with the Three Holy Nails. Also depicted on the shield are the crowns of the Three Holy Kings - for her story tells us that on her pilgrimage she also discovered the remains of the Three Kings, with their crowns.

Not only that, but Colchester boasts a small, ancient church dedicated to St Helen. It stands right beside Colchester’s grand Castle. The Oath Book claims of this chapel, It is said she herself built it.

It was renovated in the eleventh, thirteenth, and nineteenth centuries. But, alas! it is now used only as a museum store. Local people now seem largely unaware of the long-accepted claim, and it is not even recorded on a notice.

Yes, some points in the local tradition are indeed wrong. Helen, for example, was not the mistress of Constantius Chlorus as it records [actually the Latin says she was his concubina, but it is always translated as mistress]. She was his first wife, whom he divorced for reasons of politics. And the dates in the Oath Book are wrong - interestingly, mostly early by some eight or nine years. And, yes, some of the facts themselves may be wrong.

But the claim of most "authorities" today that Helen was born at Drepanum, in Bithynia, an area of Asia Minor near the Bosphorus, is no more proven than the British and Colchester ones. It seems to rest merely on evidence that is just as flimsy. It argues it from the fact that Constantine renamed Drepanum "Helenopolis", after his mother. Yet, though he renamed the city of Byzantium "Constantinople" after himself, nobody ever claims that Constantine was born there. Surely he could also call a town across the straits from his new capital after his mother without any necessary implication that she was born there. He clearly adored his mother, and had already declared her "Empress", though she had not had that title in his father’s lifetime. It should be no surprise therefore that he decided he could rename Drepanum in her honour.

St Constantine and his Birthplace

But local tradition goes further than claiming just St Helen as a native of Colchester. The Oath Book makes the claim that her son, the first and great Christian Emperor, was himself born here.

AD 266 Constantine, son of Constantius, born in Colchester of Helen.

So it proudly calls Helen’s son, whether or not considering him a Saint,

Constantine the Great, Most Christian Emperor, Flower of Britain, Citizen of Colchester.

Beat that !

In any case, no one denies a definite connection between Britain and both Constantius Chlorus and Constantine: It is uncontested that Constantius was Governor of Britain, that he died at York, that there Constantine was acclaimed Emperor.

If tradition counts for anything - as in Orthodoxy it certainly does - will you not allow Colchester, even now, to think of both St Helen and St Constantine as in a special way her "own"?

Justified a claim it may or may not be, perhaps "merely a claim". But that "claim" springs from the natural, oft-found, longing that many individuals and many towns have for a small place in history, the desire to be linked to some individual or event celebrated on the national or world stage.

Britain’s and Colchester’s "claims" in this matter are in fact probably quite as strong as the claims of other countries and towns. And we may point out that it is surely the cynical, over-scholarly, cerebral, "de-mythologising" approach that so often actually "de-natures" much of contemporary Christianity.

In Colchester at least we guard this particular tradition, and pass it on as part of our ecclesiastical and civic story to future generations of the Faithful.

A Hymn to St Helen of Colchester

Native of our land, according to our fathers, Colchester’s Daughter,

after quiet retirement, and at the pinnacle of earthly fame,

fair Mother Helen, venerable and most pious Empress,

in the cause of our holy Faith thou didst hasten to Jerusalem,

and gloriously finding, as treasure buried, the life-giving Cross of our Saviour,

didst raise it high among the rulers of this world:

Now, Holy Equal to the Apostles,

with the most Christian Emperor Great Constantine, thy son,

flower of Britain, citizen of Colchester,

pray for us to Christ our God, that he will save our souls.

Father Alexander Haig