Soon after he became sole emperor, Constantine decided to erect a church over the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. According to Eusebius,[720] the heathen had filled up the place with rubbish, raised the level of the ground, and built a temple to Venus on the site. This was now destroyed, the rubbish removed, and deep under the surface the cave of the Holy Sepulchre was discovered.[721] The emperor’s letter to Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem concerning the building of the church is given in full by Eusebius. The erection of the building was undertaken at once, and Eusebius has given us a full description of it.[722] At this point Eusebius begins to speak of Helena, and relates how she came to the East and visited the holy places, and on this occasion she gave rich presents to the churches which her son had built both in Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives.[723] Whereupon Eusebius relates the death of Helena, but of her discovery of the Holy Cross he says not one word; it is only in his Commentary on the Psalms (lxxxvii. 11; cviii. 29) that certain mysterious expressions are found which may refer to it.[724] This silence is all the more remarkable since Jerusalem belonged to the ecclesiastical province of Cæsarea, and Eusebius must in any case have known of the event.
Later historians and writers, beginning with Socrates and Sozomen,[725] have a great deal to say upon the subject. According to them, the cross of our Lord, and those also of the two thieves, along with the title written by Pilate, were all found deep under the surface of the ground; but the cross on which our Lord suffered could not be distinguished from the other two. Bishop Macarius solved the difficulty by obtaining a miracle from God, in answer to his prayers; the three crosses were laid, one after another, upon a sick woman, in the belief that she must be cured when touched by our Lord’s cross. And so it happened, as the third cross touched her body, she recovered. This healing of a sick person has become in later writers, as, for example, in Paulinus of Nola,[726] a resurrection from the dead, showing in this, as in other cases, the development of the legend. In addition, the nails of the cross were also found, and these, along with half of the cross, were sent by Helena to her son in Constantinople; the other half was preserved in Jerusalem in a silver shrine in a chapel specially built for its reception.
Socrates, from whom these details are taken, places these events after his account of the Nicene Council; many writers place them in the year after the Council, but this is incorrect, since in that year Helena died; the Alexandrine Chronicle alone, which in such matters is very reliable, gives the day and the year for these events, i.e. 14th September 320.[727] Other authorities give a yet earlier date; indeed, a Syrian legend relates that a certain Protonika had discovered the Holy Cross during the reign of Tiberius.[728]
The day of the discovery of the Holy Cross was kept annually at Jerusalem with great ceremony, all the more as the consecration of the church was kept on the same day. The two principal churches in Jerusalem, the one on Golgotha, which bore the title of Martyrium and Ad Crucem, and the other, also built by Constantine, and called the Anastasis, were both consecrated on the same date, i.e. the 14th September.[729] Already in the fourth century numbers of pilgrims came to Jerusalem to celebrate this festival; they came from distant countries, from Mesopotamia and Egypt, and among them several bishops were to be found. The Gallic pilgrim, of whom we have so often spoken, was present at this festival, and has left an interesting description of it, and a later pilgrim, the penitent Mary of Egypt, was converted on the occasion of the festival. We have already related how the Holy Cross was exposed for the veneration of the faithful every year in Jerusalem on Good Friday.
The 14th September was at first only a local festival at Jerusalem and in those other towns which possessed portions of the Holy Cross, such as Constantinople and Apamea; it spread afterwards to other places, and soon became universal in the East. It is called in the East the Exaltation of the Cross (ὕψωσις τοῦ τιμίου καὶ ζωοποιοῦ σταυραῦ, or τῶν ἁγίων ξύλων), from which is taken its Western name, Exaltatio Crucis, but the pilgrim Theodosius, who visited the Holy Land about 530, employs the correct term, the Finding of the Cross (inventio crucis).[730] According to the menology of Constantinople, the festival was preceded by a preparation of four days (10th to 13th September). On the three last days of Holy Week the court and all the high officials took part in the public worship of the Holy Cross, as we learn from a writer[731] of the seventh century. The Coptic calendars usually prolong the celebration during three days.
In the seventh century the relic of the Holy Cross was connected with an event of great importance. Chosroes II., King of Persia, began to make war against the Eastern Empire at the time when Heraclius ascended the throne; he captured the cities of Apamea and Edessa, and defeated the Greeks in several engagements; in June 614 his general Salbarus took Jerusalem with great slaughter. He laid waste the churches, and carried off to Persia, with the rest of the booty, the portion of the Holy Cross which was preserved there. The course of the war still remained unfavourable to the Greeks until Heraclius, having made peace with the Bulgarians, himself led the full strength of his army against the Persians in 621. The fortune of war changed, and the Greeks reconquered their lost territory, being aided in this by internal discord among the Persians. Chosroes was deposed and murdered in 628; his successor, Siroes, hastened to make peace with the Greeks, and restored to them the wood of the Holy Cross. At the end of the year Heraclius returned as victor to his capital, and at the beginning of the following year he set out for Syria, taking the Holy Cross with him. He brought it himself from Tiberias to Jerusalem,[732] where he handed it over to the Patriarch Zacharias on the 3rd May, if the traditional date be correct. Tradition further adds that, arrayed in his royal robes, he essayed to carry it upon his shoulders, but at the foot of the hill of Calvary he found himself unable to proceed further until, upon the advice of Zacharias, he laid aside his royal apparel. No festival in commemoration of the event was introduced in the East, although it was in the West.[733]
With regard to the spread of these two festivals throughout the Church, we must call attention to a remarkable fact; the day of the discovery of the Holy Cross by Helena (14th September) naturally existed as a festival from the first in Jerusalem, from whence it soon spread throughout the entire eastern half of the Church, but in the West, although the discovery of the cross was already well known in the fourth century, the festival in honour of the event was not adopted, at least not at once.
It was just the opposite with regard to the recovery of the cross by Heraclius; the grief at the news of its loss was equalled by the joy which the whole Christian world felt at its recovery. While in the East people remained content with the already existing feast, in the West the day of the recovery of the cross was kept as a solemn commemoration, and was placed in the calendars and martyrologies at an early date; we find it mentioned by the name “Day of the Holy Cross” (dies sanctæ crucis) in the lectionary of Silos, which belongs to about 650—probably the earliest mention of the festival. The ancient Gallic liturgies published by Mabillon, both the lectionary and sacramentary, contain the Festival of the Holy Cross in spring, but call it “The Finding of the Cross” (Inventio Sanctæ Crucis).[734] None of these service-books mention the feast of the 14th September. The Gregorianum has both feasts, so has the Gelasianum, at all events in Thomasi’s edition, but the second is a later addition.[735]
The way in which the Martyrologium Hieronymianum treats these feasts is worthy of notice. The Weissenburg Codex, written about 750, has both days; the Echternach Codex, which represents the oldest form of the text, has neither, and the Bern Codex, the latest of the three recensions, has only one, i.e. the 3rd May, which, in common with all Latin authorities, it calls the Finding of the Cross.[736] The authentic text of Bede has only the 3rd May, so too has the sacramentary of Padua, belonging to the first half of the ninth century.[737]
These notices might easily be increased, but they are sufficient to show how that in the West, when it was known that the Holy Cross had been recovered from the Saracens, the feast of the 3rd May was, in the seventh century, immediately introduced, but the feast of the 14th September only became known in the eighth century, and won its way to acceptance slowly and partially. In many churches it was received quite late, as for example in Milan in 1035.[738]