Equals-to-the-Apostles

Why the Orthodox Church honors Constantine and Helena with the highest of the non-martyr honorifics — isapostoloi, Equals-to-the-Apostles — and what that title means and does not mean. This file sets out the apostolic title, the providential reading of the Constantinian turn in the Church’s own memory, the joint feast, the cohort of Equal-to-the-Apostles saints, and the idea of symphonia born in this reign, with its critics reported accurately.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles; feast 21 May O.S. / 3 June)

The Title

The Orthodox Church commemorates “the holy, glorious, God-crowned and Equal-to-the-Apostles Constantine and his mother Helena,” giving them the title ἰσαπόστολος (isapostolos), “equal to the apostles” — the honorific reserved for those who, though not of the Twelve, turned a people or a realm to Christ (the title in the liturgical books; The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church, and the service for 21 May). Their joint feast is kept on 21 May (Old Style; 3 June on the New Calendar) (the menaion for 21 May). The title is precise about what it honors and what it does not. It does not claim that Constantine preached, wrote theology, or lived a spotless life — plainly he did none of these. It honors the apostolic effect of his and his mother’s work: that under them the persecuted Church of the catacombs became the free Church of the councils, the faith was carried to the ends of the empire, and the sites of the Gospel were adorned and the Cross exalted. As with the other bearers of the title, isapostolos names a role in the spread of the faith, not a personal perfection (see the same logic in St. Nina of Georgia and St. Vladimir of Kiev).

The Constantinian Turn as Providential

The heart of the Orthodox veneration is a reading of history: that the Constantinian turn was, in the Church’s own memory, providential — the peace that ended three centuries of martyrdom and gave the Church the freedom in which she defined the faith at the ecumenical councils. This reading is not naïve about the man (the whole compendium has refused to be), and it is not the claim that empire is the Gospel’s natural form; it is the claim that God used this emperor, with all his hardness and ambiguity, to bring the age of the martyrs to its close (see The Great Persecution). The Church measures Constantine against Diocletian: within one lifetime, to confess Christ went from a capital crime to the faith of the emperor. The martyrs of the edicts and the Fathers of Nicaea stand on either side of a single threshold, and Constantine is the man in the doorway. That is what the Church glorifies — not his virtue, which was mixed, but his place in the economy of salvation, which was decisive. It is the same providential reading the tradition applies to every isapostolos: God raised up an unlikely instrument — an inn-servant’s son, a violent soldier, a deferred convert — and through him gave the Church peace.

Without Whitewashing the Man

The strength of the Orthodox veneration is that it does not require the man to be other than he was, and the compendium has taken pains to keep him whole. The Church that calls Constantine isapostolos is the same Church whose own account, followed here, records that he fought his way to power through eighteen years of civil war (Section 02), that the vision before his decisive battle reaches us in two irreconcilable forms (Section 03), that he executed his son and his wife in 326 (Section 04), that his church policy after Nicaea wavered toward the Arians and exiled Athanasius (Section 05), and that he was baptized only on his deathbed, by an Arian bishop (Section 05). The tradition’s instinct is not to deny any of this but to set it under repentance — to read the pilgrimages, the churches, and the deathbed washing as the turning of a hard soul toward God over a long life (see The Arian Aftermath and the Deathbed Baptism). This is exactly how the Church venerates its other ruler-saints: St. David the Builder, who had a conspirator blinded; St. Vladimir, a fratricide before his baptism (see St. David the Builder and St. Vladimir of Kiev). Glorification receives a life as, on the whole and in its orientation, given to God; it does not certify every deed as righteous (METHODOLOGY §3.5, §4).

The Equal-to-the-Apostles Cohort

Constantine and Helena stand within a company the Church honors with the apostolic title — men and women who turned peoples to Christ. Helena is one of a group of great Equal-to-the-Apostles women: with her are honored St. Mary Magdalene, “apostle to the apostles,” the first witness of the Resurrection (St. Mary Magdalene); St. Thecla, the proto-martyr and companion of St. Paul (St. Thecla); St. Nina (Nino) of Georgia, the enlightener of Iberia in this same fourth century (St. Nina of Georgia); and St. Olga of Kiev, grandmother of St. Vladimir and forerunner of the baptism of Rus’ (St. Olga of Kiev). Among the men, the type Constantine founded reappears in the holy rulers who turned their nations: above all St. Vladimir of Kiev, whom the Rus’ tradition explicitly named “the new Constantine,” reading the baptism of Rus’ through the lens of Constantine’s peace (see St. Vladimir of Kiev). Constantine is the archetype of this whole class of sanctity — the ruler whose apostolate is exercised through the vocation of rule — and the later holy kings are venerated in his image.

Symphonia and Its Critics

Constantine’s reign gave birth to the idea the Byzantines would call symphonia — the harmony of the two God-given powers, priesthood and empire, “proceeding from one and the same source” (classically stated in Justinian’s Sixth Novel of 535; see The Byzantine Church). The Orthodox reading, argued fully in the Byzantine Church hub, is that symphonia is a theory of distinct but cooperating spheres, not of imperial mastery over the Church: doctrine was settled by councils and the reception of the faithful, not by imperial fiat, and the Church repeatedly resisted emperors who tried to impose heresy — the iconoclasts, the unionists of Lyons and Florence — and prevailed. The critics of this ideal must be reported accurately (METHODOLOGY §4.1–4.2). Western historiography long charged Byzantium with “caesaropapism” — the subordination of Church to emperor — and pointed to Constantine’s own conduct (convening Nicaea, exiling bishops, enforcing creeds) as its origin (the charge is surveyed and contested in Dagron, Emperor and Priest, 2003). The Orthodox response does not deny that emperors often overreached and sometimes gravely — Constantine’s exile of Athanasius is a case in point — but holds that the principle was cooperation, not control, and that the Church’s ultimate independence in matters of faith is proved precisely by the reversals: the faith of Nicaea survived Constantine’s own drift and his sons’ Arianism, vindicated by the Church at Constantinople in 381 (see Constantine at Nicaea). Symphonia is thus honored as an ideal often betrayed and never simply identical with imperial power — and its first, imperfect embodiment is the reign of the emperor the Church calls Equal-to-the-Apostles.

See Also

References

  • Dagron, Gilbert. Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium. Trans. Jean Birrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. (Symphonia, the imperial ideal, the caesaropapism debate.)
  • The Festal Menaion and the menaion for 21 May; The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church. (The title isapostolos and the feast.)
  • Justinian. Novel 6 (535). In The Civil Law, trans. Samuel P. Scott. Cincinnati, 1932. (The classic statement of symphonia.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, §4, this repository. (Ecclesial reception; the both-sides scope; the confessional standpoint.)