Augustine Sokolovski
On June 3, the Orthodox Church celebrates the memory of Saints Constantine and Helena. Constantine was Emperor of the Roman Empire, and Helena was his mother. In 337, on the eve of his death, Constantine was baptized in one of the ancient imperial capitals, the city of Nicomedia. The date of Constantine's memorial in the liturgical calendar refers specifically to this day.
Even today, the Church lives in a world whose many characteristics and postulates were established by Constantine. From the principle of religious tolerance to the custom of entrusting the care of the poor and needy to ecclesiastical structures, to the law that the first day of the week, and not the last, nor any other day, that is, Sunday, must be free. Sunday is a day off in China and other countries far removed from Christian Europe. And most recently, it became a holiday even in one of the wealthy countries of the Persian Gulf.
In his will, Constantine ordered that he be buried in the Basilica of the Holy Apostles, which he himself had built in the new Christian capital of the Empire, Constantinople, founded by him exactly seven years earlier. The temple contained twelve symbolic tombstones of the Apostles. The inhabitants of the capital, in response to this, with a certain irony—for jokes about rulers existed long before the end of the Soviet era “under Brezhnev”—would say: "Now Constantine himself is among the Apostles." Thus, the name "Equal to the Apostles" was first given to him, gradually losing its ironic connotation, and then began to be applied by the Church to saints who worked especially in the Mission.
Since, in the last years of his life, Constantine strongly supported the Arian heretics and even contributed to the admission of Arius himself into church communion, although the latter died suddenly in Constantinople at the very moment of his return, Constantine initially became an "Arian saint." It was they who venerated him and considered him a saint. But soon the Eastern Orthodox deprived the heretics of this cult. In the West, on the other hand, Constantine was simply viewed positively, without canonization. In contrast to the Fathers of the Eastern Church, the Western Fathers and Saint Augustine "preferred" Emperor Theodosius the Great, who reigned in Constantinople forty years later and at the Second Ecumenical Council in 381, led the Arian party to final defeat. By the order of Saint Ambrose of Milan, Theodosius publicly repented of the cruelty he had shown towards the rebels and thus set a decisive example. Historians claim that only the establishment of ecclesiastical unions between Catholicism and Orthodoxy during the Counter-Reformation "forced" Catholics to accept Constantine into their liturgical calendar as a saint. Such were the paths of the emperor-apostle, who became a strange wandering saint of “itinerant holiness”.
Constantine's baptism was celebrated by the local bishop Eusebius, a fervent representative of the heretical Arian party. Unlike other heretics, and themselves in a later era, the Arians did not then create their own Church. Therefore, the validity of Constantine's baptism was not questioned by anyone.
Moreover, Constantine himself had long considered himself a Christian and, at the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, exactly twelve years before his death, he had called himself "bishop of the external affairs of the Church." Historians and theologians still debate the meaning of this previously unknown title. The troparion sung by the Orthodox Church during the liturgy on his Memorial Day calls him "Apostle among emperors." French, English, and other modern European languages use the word "kings" instead of "emperors." In fact, to ensure the accuracy of "transsemantic translation," as Umberto Eco called such complexities, one should write: "Constantine is an apostle among politicians." Perhaps this is Constantine's main testament to all subsequent generations of believers, and especially to our generation of Orthodox Christians in the postmodern era: to be an apostle among his own. Otherwise, personal Christian witness will not be authentic. And without the witness of Jesus Christ, neither holiness nor salvation can be achieved.