Helena

  The Edict of Milan, giving toleration to the Church, was promulgated at Trèves.

  “Why all the excitement?” said Helena. “No one has interfered with the Christians here since my husband’s day.For weeks you have been going about as if you had seen a vision, Lactantius. You, a historian who thinks in centuries?”

  “As a historian, ma’am, I think we are living in a unique age. This little battle at the Milvian Bridge may one day count with Thermopylae and Actium.”

  “Because of the Praetorians? I can’t help being rather sorry for them, you know, even though they were on the wrong side. I never saw them on parade. It was one of the things I used to look forward to.”

  “The Praetorian Guard has had no importance, ma’am, for a hundred years.”

  “I’m only teasing, Lactantius. Of course I know why you are all so excited. I confess I am a little uneasy myself. It’s this story that’s going round that my boy has turned Christian. Has he?”

  “Not exactly, ma’am, as far as we can learn. But he has put himself under the protection of Christ.”

  “Why will no one ever talk plain sense to me? Am I too stupid? It is all I have ever asked, all my life, a straight answer to a straight question; and I never get one. Was there a cross in the sky? Did my son see it? How did it get there? If it was there and he saw it, how did he know what it meant? I don’t profess to know much about omens but I cannot conceive of a more obvious sign of disaster. All I want is the simple truth. Why don’t you answer me?”

  After a pause Lactantius said: “Perhaps because I have read too much. I’m not the person to come to with straight, simple questions, ma’am. I don’t know the answers. There are those who do, the sort of people who stayed behind in the East. They will be coming out of prison now, what’s left of them. They’ll be able to answer you, but I doubt even their being quite as straight and simple as you want. All I can say is: it may have happened just as the people say. Such things do happen. We all have the chance to choose the Truth and I daresay Emperors sometimes have the chance offered them in a more spectacular way than humbler folk. All we know is that the Emperor is behaving as though he had seen a vision. As you know, he has brought the Church into the open.”

  “Beside Jupiter and Isis and the Phrygian Venus.”

  “Christianity is not that sort of religion, ma’am. It cannot share anything with anybody. Whenever it is free, it will conquer.”

  “Perhaps there was some point in the persecutions then.”

  “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

  “You get it both ways, then.”

  “Both ways. We have that promise, ma’am.”

  “It is always the same, Lactantius, when we talk about religion. You never quite answer my questions but you always leave me with the feeling that somehow the answer was there all the time if we had only taken a little more trouble to find it. It all seems to make sense up to a point, and again beyond that point. And yet one can’t pass the point… Well, I am an old woman, too old to change now.”

  But in that unique springtide there was no escape from change, not even in Trèves, most polite of cities, not even for Helena, most secluded of women. The huge boredom which from its dead center in Diocletian’s heart had sodden and demented the world, had passed like the plague. New green life was pricking and unfolding and entwining everywhere among the masonry and the ruts. In that dawn, reflected Lactantius, to be old was very heaven; to have lived in a Hope which defied reason; which existed, rather, only in the reason and in the affections, quite unattached to common experience or calculation; to see that Hope take substantial and homely form near at hand and on all sides, as a fog, lifting, may suddenly reveal to a ship’s company that, through no skill of theirs, they have silently drifted into safe anchorage; to catch a glimpse of simple unity in a life that had seemed all vicissitude—this, thought Lactantius, was something to match the exuberance of Pentecost; something indeed in which Christmas, Easter and Pentecost had their royal celebration.

  He, if anyone, should have understood what was going on round him, but he was left breathless, quite outrun, with all his fine vocabulary exhausted and only the clichés of court eulogy ready to mind. Events were no longer following their humdrum human pace. There was a disproportion everywhere between cause and effect, between motive and movement, an intervening impetus and increase beyond normal calculation. In his dream a man may put his horse at a sizeable obstacle and without design, take wing and soar far above it, or seek to move a rock and find it weightless in his hands. Lactantius had never learned to subdue his sympathies as the critics prescribed. What was left to him now but to accept the mystery and glorify the proximate cause, the distant, ambiguous Emperor?

  In terms of documented history Constantine had done little. In most of the West the Edict of Milan merely regularized the existing practice; in the East it comprised a precarious truce, swiftly repudiated. The Supreme Deity recognized by Constantine was something far wide of the Christian Trinity; the Labarum a highly heraldic rendering of the cross of the martyrs. It was all very vague, very plainly designed to please; the lucky thought of a man too busy to worry about niceties or profundities. Constantine had made terms with a new ally of unknown strength; he had shelved a problem. So it might seem to the strategists of the East who counted the order of battle, legion by legion, granary by granary; so, perhaps, it seemed to Constantine. But as the news spread everywhere in Christendom, from every altar a great wind of prayer gathered and mounted, lifted the whole squat smoky dome of the Ancient World, swept it off and up like the thatch of a stable, and threw open the calm and brilliant prospect of measureless space.

  The oblivious Caesars fought on. They marched across frontiers, made treaties and broke them, decreed marriages and divorces and legitimizations, murdered their prisoners, betrayed their allies, deserted their dead and dying armies, boasted and despaired, fell on their swords or sued for mercy. All the tiny mechanism of Power regularly revolved, like a watch still ticking on the wrist of a dead man.

  Far behind the fighting the royal women beguiled the time with their eunuchs and chaplains; they acquired engaging young clergymen from Africa, well bred, well read, who taught all manner of variations of the orthodox creed. One week they talked of Donatus; of Arius the next.

  Everywhere Constantine prospered until he became blandly aware that he was invincible. Here and there amid the chop and push of the times there were glimpses of a nobler figure; young Crispus, all dash and fidelity, last warrior of the high Roman tradition on whose shield the fanciful might descry the fading blazon of Hector. Reports of him came to Helena, as once of his father, and were as fondly welcomed. His name was remembered always at her palace Mass. For Helena had been baptized.

  None knows when or where. No record was made. Nothing was built or founded. There was no public holiday. Privately and humbly, like thousands of others, she stepped down into the font and emerged a new woman. Were there regrets for her earlier loyalty? Was she persuaded point by point? Did she merely conform to the prevailing fashion, lie open unresisting to Divine Grace and so without design become its brimming vehicle? We do not know. She was one seed in a vast germination.

  Surely, now, she needed all the last years left to her to grow undisturbed? The strong, questing will had found its object; the exile her home. The Empire was united and at peace. The Faith was established. All that remained for the Dowager Empress was to nestle down in her cradle of universal respect and prepare her soul for the day when she would find herself wafted to Heaven and royally received there.

  Those who spoke thus did not know the new Helena. She was past seventy when Constantine invited her to his Jubilee celebrations at Rome. And off she went at once for her first visit.

  Eight

  Constantine’s Great Treat

  No one had really expected the Empress Dowager to come to the Jubilee. The invitation had been sent as a matter of form. The acceptance caused perturbation among the cha
mberlains. None of them had ever seen her but one thing was certain; there were far too many women about the court already. There was the Empress Fausta, always a trouble maker. It had been a bad day when Constantine gave the Lateran Palace to the Pope and moved her with all her children to the Palatine. There was Constantia, the Emperor’s half-sister, the widow of Licinius; her presence and her son’s was a continual, painful reminder of the circumstances of his death. There were Anastasia and Eutropia and the wives of Julius Constantius and Dalmatius, four ladies who set problems of precedence. There was no room at the Palatine Palace for the Empress Helena.

  After much discussion they hit on the Sessorian Palace, a splendid old house with a large garden, on the walls, near the Theater Royal. The neighborhood was slummy but it was not to be expected that a woman of her years would go out much. The chamberlains set to work filling it with valuable furniture.

  To reach this dower-house from the Flaminian Gate Helena had to cross the whole of Rome, up the Corso, under the slope of the Capitol, through the Forum, past the Colosseum, out through the old walls to the Celian hill, through the arches of the Claudian aqueduct, at last to her grand and lonely lodging. The way was cleared for her on her first arrival but everywhere from balconies and side streets rose the hum and chatter of a million and a half Romans, and everywhere behind the façades of the temples and the historic buildings of the Republic stood the huge, new shabby apartment houses, island-blocks ten stories high made of rubble and timber, sublet and sub-divided, tottering with the weight of humanity.

  It was spring and everywhere fountains were playing among the falling smuts. But Rome was not beautiful. Compared with Trèves it seemed gross and haphazard. Beauty would come later. For centuries the spoils of the world had flowed into the City, piled up and lost themselves there. For centuries to come they would be dispersed and disfigured. The City would be burned and pillaged and deserted, and the marble stripped for the kiln. The streets would silt up, gypsies would bivouac under her broken arches, and goats pick their path between thorn and fallen statuary. Then Beauty would come. She was on the way, far distant still, saddling under the paling stars for the huge journey of more than a thousand years. Beauty would come in her own time, capricious, adorable wanderer, and briefly make her home on the seven hills.

  Meanwhile there was the mob. Not on her first arrival in the curtained litter, but later when, contrary to expectation, she tirelessly followed the tourists’ round, Helena daily saw more men and women than ever before in the total sum of her lifetime.

  The Romans emerged at first dawn filling the streets and seeming to live there until sundown. After dark came the carriers’ carts and farm wagons rolling to market by torchlight all the night through. The City was always overcrowded but now for the Jubilee there was added a huge press of officials and sightseers, hucksters and crooks, paying anything for a roof, sleeping anywhere; a motley lot, grasping and pushing and peering everywhere, Levantines, Berbers, blacks, amid the etiolated and stunted progeny of the slums. A few years earlier Helena would have shrunk from them, would have had a posse of guards whacking and barging to clear a little cloister for her to move and breathe in. “Odi profanum volgus et arceo.” That was an echo from the old empty world. There was no hate in her now and nothing round her was quite profane. She could not dispense with her guard but she mitigated their roughness, and always her heart was beyond them, over their big shoulders, in the crowd. When she heard Mass at the Lateran basilica—as she often did in preference to her private chapel—she went without ostentation and stood simply in the congregation. She was in Rome as a pilgrim and she was surrounded by friends. There was no way of telling them. There was nothing in their faces. A Thracian or a Teuton might stop a fellow countryman in the streets, embrace him and speak of home in his own language. Not so Helena and the Christians. The intimate family circle of which she was a member bore no mark of kinship. The barrow-man grilling his garlic sausages in the gutter, the fuller behind his reeking public pots, the lawyer or the lawyer’s clerk, might each and all be one with the Empress Dowager in the Mystical Body. And the abounding heathen might in any hour become one with them. There was no mob, only a vast multitude of souls, clothed in a vast variety of body, milling about in the Holy City, in the See of Peter.

  Helena had not traveled light. A great caravan preceded her, a great household accompanied her on the road. More stores, more furniture and a second complete household awaited her at the Sessorian Palace. It took some time to settle in and, meanwhile, before order was properly established, visitors began to arrive.

  Constantine did not come himself. He sent the Lord-Chamberlain to greet her outside the gates. He sent a daily message of inquiry and duty. He expressed the hope of calling on her as soon as she was composed after her journey. But he did not come. Nor did Crispus. Nor did Pope Sylvester who was a near neighbor. She sent the Pope gifts. He sent a blessing but remained at home. It was not a very easy time for him. If he emerged he would have to take part in the celebrations, and it was never quite certain beforehand whether Constantine’s celebrations would be Christian or pagan. Augurs cropped up. There was no recognized protocol for the treatment of an unbaptized convert—one indeed who was not yet formally admitted as a catechumen—who was at the same time a stupendous benefactor, an amateur of the theology and the pagan Pontifex Maximus. Moreover, preposterous and highly embarrassing rumors were going about that Sylvester had recently cured the Emperor of leprosy. So the Pope pleaded ill-health and stayed at home conferring with his architects about the new basilicas.

  The Empress Fausta was the first to call. She came indeed all too early, on the very evening of Helena’s arrival, laden with fragile, expensive gifts, her eyes bulging with curiosity. It was not her habit to consider the convenience of others. Her mother-in-law might be weary from the journey, the house might be in disorder, but Fausta intended to be there first, to size up the old lady.

  Helena greeted her rather distantly. There were many stories in circulation about Fausta’s moral character, but stories of that kind did not reach Helena. She saw her, rather, as the symbol of something even more unlovely; an epitome of the high politics of the age.

  Fausta’s grandfather had been a nameless illiterate; her father, the odious Maximian. It was for an older sister of hers that Constantius had divorced Helena. For Fausta Constantine had divorced Minervina. There had been one motive only in that marriage, to solemnize the friendship of Constantine with her father and her brother Maxentius. Maximian he had strangled at Marseilles; Maxentius, a little later, he drowned in the Tiber. And somehow out of all that ritual of peace-making there survived one relic, this fat common little woman, Empress of the world; like a doll floating on the water where a ship had foundered.

  She stood a full head shorter than Helena and dimpled when she smiled. Left alone she would have been unremarkably plain, but the beauty specialists had been to work on her. She glittered and pouted, “like a great gold-fish,” Helena thought. But Fausta smiled, unconscious of the impression she gave. She was determined to be agreeable. She had her vices and her plans. At the moment she had a mission. The craze was theology and things had not gone well for her protégés in theological circles. The Empress Dowager might be a valuable ally. It was essential to put the whole question to her in the right light, before anyone else got at her.

  “Sylvester?” she said with a wave of her plump white hand. “Oh yes, of course you’ll have to meet him. It’s only polite. And of course we all respect his office. But he’s not a man of any personal distinction, I assure you. If he’s ever declared a saint they ought to commemorate him on the last day of the year. A thoroughly holy, simple old man. No one has a word against him except that, frankly, between ourselves, he is something of a bore. I’m all for holiness, of course. Everyone is now. But after all, one is human. I’m sure in Heaven, when we’re all holy, I shall be very pleased to spend hours on end with Sylvester. Here on earth one does want a little something besides, do
n’t you think? Now take the Eusebiuses. They’re some sort of cousin and absolute pets, both of them. I mean you feel they are one of us. I’ve got Nicomedia with me here. He’s under a sort of cloud and has to keep away from his diocese for the time being. Such luck for us. I’ll bring him round to see you. Caesarea couldn’t come. He’s the literary one and terribly busy. They’re both very much upset at the moment. You see everything went wrong last year at Nicaea. It was terribly important. I don’t exactly know why. Sylvester isn’t interested in that sort of thing. He didn’t even trouble to go himself, just sent deputies, and they were no help. You see none of the Western bishops have got a new idea in their heads. They just say: ‘This is the faith we were taught. It is what’s always been taught. And that’s that.’ I mean they don’t realize they’ve got to move with the times. It’s no use trying to puncture the horologium. The Church isn’t a hole and corner thing any more. It’s the official imperial religion. What they were taught may have been all very well in the catacombs, but now we have to deal with a much more sophisticated type of mind altogether. I don’t pretend to understand what it’s all about but I know the Council was a great disappointment even to Gracchus.”

  “Gracchus?”

  “My dear, we always call Him Gracchus. Security, you know. Walls have ears. One can’t be too careful after that last silly proclamation positively encouraging informers. It just isn’t done to use His name. It makes everyone feel so awkward. Of course you and I could, but one gets out of the habit.

  “Well, you know what Gracchus’s Greek is like. He can get along all right giving orders and all that kind of thing—garrison Greek as they call it—but when the professional rhetoricians get going, the poor boy is quite lost. He hadn’t the least idea what was going on at Nicaea. All he wanted was a unanimous vote. Well, half the Council wouldn’t argue and wouldn’t listen. Eusebius told me all about it. He said the moment he saw them sitting there he realized it wasn’t worth reasoning with them. ‘That’s the faith we’ve been taught,’ they said. ‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ said Arius. ‘A son must be younger than his father.’ ‘It’s a mystery,’ said the orthodox, perfectly satisfied, as if that explained everything. And then there was the Resistance Group. Of course everyone admires them tremendously. It’s wonderful what they went through. But, I mean, just having one eye out and a foot off doesn’t qualify one in theology, does it? And of course Gracchus being a soldier had a sort of extra respect for the Resistance. So what with them, and the solid Middle-West and the frontier bishops—there weren’t many of them but they are the most pig-headed of the lot—the stupid old diehards won hands down and Gracchus got his unanimous vote and went off happy. Only now he realizes that nothing has really been settled at all. A General Council was just the worst way to tackle a problem of this kind. It ought to have been settled quietly in the Palace and then announced in an Imperial decree. Then no one could have objected. As it is we shall have all sorts of technical difficulties in putting things right. All that invoking of the Holy Ghost put things on the wrong footing. It was purely a question of practical convenience to be settled by Gracchus. I mean, we must have Progress. Homoousian is definitely dated. Everyone who really counts is for Homoousian—or is it the other way round? If Eusebius were here he would tell us. He always makes everything so clear. Theology’s terribly exciting but a little muddling. Sometimes I almost feel nostalgic for the old taurobolium, don’t you?”