by Evelyn Waugh
“Certainly. This is it.”
“And you had this made in camp.”
“Yes. Isn’t it interesting?”
“But it must have taken months to make.”
“Two or three hours, I assure you. The jewelers were inspired. Everything was miraculous that day.”
“And whose are the portraits?”
“My own and my children’s.”
“But, my dear boy, they weren’t all born then.”
“I tell you it was a miracle,” said Constantine huffily. “If you’re not interested I’ll put it away.”
*
“Take the place,” said Constantine to Pope Sylvester. “It’s all yours. I am leaving and I shan’t come back—ever. You can pack whoever you like into my sarcophagus. I shall leave my bones in the East when I die… if I do die. You know, one can never be sure; I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately and reading it up; there are quite a number of authenticated cases—are there not?—when God for His own good reasons has dispensed with all that degrading business of getting ill and dying and decaying. Sometimes I feel that in His bountiful mercy He may have something of the kind in store for me. I can’t quite imagine myself dying in the ordinary way. Perhaps He will send a chariot, as He did for the prophet Elias… It wouldn’t really surprise me at all—nor anyone else, I daresay.”
Helena here caught Sylvester’s eye. They understood one another.
The Emperor’s musing ceased and he continued, more practically. “But not, in any case, for many years. There is so much to be done. When the time comes my sarcophagus empty or—er—occupied must lie in Christian surroundings. Rome is heathen and always will be. Yes, I know, you’ve got the tombs of Peter and Paul. I hope I have not shown myself insensible to that distinction. But why are they here? Simply because the Romans murdered them. That’s the plain truth. Why, they even thought of murdering me. It’s an ungodly place, your holiness, and you’re welcome to it.
“One must start something new. I’ve got the site, very central; it will make a sublime port. The plans are drawn. Work will start at once on a great Christian capital, in the very center of Christendom; a city built round two great new churches dedicated to—what do you think?—Wisdom and Peace. The idea came quite suddenly the other day, as my best ideas do come to me. Some might call it ‘Inspiration.’ To me it merely seems natural. You can have your old Rome, Holy Father, with its Peter and Paul and its tunnels full of martyrs. We start with no unpleasant associations; in innocence, with Divine Wisdom and Peace. I shall set up my Labarum there,” he added, with a severe look at his mother, “where it will be appreciated. As for the old Rome, it’s yours.”
“To quote the judicious Gaius, ‘a ruinous legacy,’ ” remarked one domestic prelate to another.
“But I rather wish we had it in writing all the same.”
“We will, monsignor. We will.”
*
“Unpleasant associations are the seed of the Church,” said Pope Sylvester.
“Lactantius used to say something like that.”
“Oh, there’s nothing new about it. I never try to be original. That sort of thing’s better left to the Levantines.”
“I don’t like new things,” said Helena. “No one does in the land I come from. I don’t like Constantine’s idea of a New Rome. It sounds so empty and clean, like the newly swept house in the Gospel that was filled with devils.”
They were getting along together famously, these two admirable old people. Helena had stayed behind after Constantine’s departure, and the Pope had seemed to expect it.
“You can’t just send for Peace and Wisdom, can you?” Helena continued, “and build houses for them and shut them in. Why, they don’t exist at all except in people, do they? Give me real bones every time.”
They were in a small loggia overlooking what had once been the park, now almost filled by Constantine’s new church.
“It’s odd to think that poor Fausta once lived here.”
In Fausta’s day these neat clerical offices had been festooned with silk. Nothing of it survived. Here and there in the palace the Laterans might be remembered by a section of cornice or by an ivy-grown satyr in the park. But there was nothing of Fausta’s. She had passed with a winking gold fin and a line of bubbles. Even the two Eusebiuses had struck her name from their prayers.
Helena followed the thread of unhappy recent memories and said: “Not that Rome has been all I expected.”
“I hear that so often. I can’t judge. I am pure Roman myself. I can’t imagine what it would be like to come here for the first time.”
“I knew a man once—he was my tutor at home—who used to tell me about the holy cities of Asia. They are so holy, he said, that their walls shut out all the evil passions of the world. You have only to set foot there to become like the saints.”
“Had he been to those places?”
“Oh, no, he was just a slave.”
“I don’t suppose he would have found them so very different from anywhere else. Slaves like to imagine such cities. I daresay they always will. To a Roman there can only be one City and that a very imperfect place indeed.”
“It is imperfect, isn’t it?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Getting worse?”
“No, I think a little better. We look back already to the time of the persecution as though it were the heroic age, but have you ever thought how awfully few martyrs there were, compared with how many there ought to have been? The Church isn’t a cult for a few heroes. It is the whole of fallen mankind redeemed. And of course just at the moment we’re getting a lot of rather shady characters rolling in, just to be on the winning side.”
“What do they believe, these shady characters? What goes on in their minds?”
“God alone knows.”
“It’s the one question I’ve been asking all my life,” said Helena. “I can’t get a straight answer even here in Rome.”
“There are people in this City,” said Sylvester quite cheerfully, “who believe that the Emperor was preparing a bath of children’s blood to cure himself of the measles. I cured him instead and that is why he has been so generous to me. People believe that here and now while the Emperor and I are alive and going about in front of their faces. What will they believe in a thousand years’ time?”
“And some of them don’t seem to believe anything at all,” said Helena. “It’s all a game of words.”
“I know,” said Sylvester, “I know.”
And then Helena said something which seemed to have no relevance. “Where is the cross, anyway?” she asked.
“What cross, my dear?”
“The only one. The real one.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. I don’t think anyone has ever asked before.”
“It must be somewhere. Wood doesn’t just melt like snow. It’s not three hundred years old. The temples here are full of beams and paneling twice that age. It stands to reason God would take more care of the cross than of them.”
“Nothing ‘stands to reason’ with God. If He had wanted us to have it, no doubt He would have given it to us. But He hasn’t chosen to. He gives us enough.”
“But how do you know He doesn’t want us to have it—the cross, I mean? I bet He’s just waiting for one of us to go and find it—just at this moment when it’s most needed. Just at this moment when everyone is forgetting it and chattering about the hypostatic union, there’s a solid chunk of wood waiting for them to have their silly heads knocked against. I’m going off to find it,” said Helena.
The Empress Dowager was an old woman, almost of an age with Pope Sylvester, but he regarded her fondly as though she were a child, an impetuous young princess who went well to hounds, and he said with the gentlest irony: “You’ll tell me won’t you?—if you are successful.”
“I’ll tell the world,” said Helena.
Ten
The Innocence of Bishop Macarius
Helena
started on her pilgrimage in the early autumn of the year 326. Nicomedia was the starting-point. There, at that time, the communications of the Empire converged. There the limitless resources of the Treasury were put at her disposal. The official machine smoothly prepared her way and equipped her caravan.
She moved at an easy pace, going out of her way and pausing at Drepanum to order a church for St. Lucian, then turning inland to the trunk road through Ancyra, Tarsus, Antioch and Lydda. Wherever she went with her mixed task-force of guards and her train of bullion, she was greeted by clergy and officials and populace, prostrating themselves and applauding. She endowed convents, freed prisoners, dowered orphans, directed the buildings of shrines and basilicas. She saw the sights and she venerated the scenes of Christian history. She gave huge tips to the hierarchy. She moved in a golden haze of benefaction, welcomed, it seemed, and dearly beloved of all. She could not know the dismay which her approach was causing in one innocent breast.
For Macarius, Bishop of Aelia Capitolina, was most certainly innocent. He well knew that false accusations were as distasteful to God as evasions and concealments. He had been into the whole matter, again and again, minutely, and found no breath of impure motive anywhere in his whole conduct.
When Macarius examined his conscience it was with the method and trained observation of a field-naturalist in a later age studying the life of a pond. Less scientific penitents noted merely the few big fish; the squeamish recoiled from the weed and scum and with closed eyes blurted out an emotional, inaccurate tale of self-reproach. But through all his long life the Bishop had refined his knowledge of the soul until each opacity, each microscopic germ had a peculiar significance for him. He knew what was noxious, what was harmless, what was of value. So, now, in the great matter of the Holy Sepulcher he gazed through fathoms of limpid sweet water and pronounced himself blameless.
And yet he was being blamed, by the Prefect among others. It was the Prefect who first brought the news, coming to call on the Bishop one warm September morning and spoiling a day of promised calm.
“You see what you’ve done now,” said the Prefect. “I hope you’re satisfied.”
The very fact of the Prefect coming to call showed how things had changed for Macarius in the last eighteen months. Two years ago the Prefect would have sent for him to Government House. A few years before that he would either have denied all knowledge of Macarius’s existence or clapped him in jail.
“How in God’s name,” asked the Prefect, “do you think I can put up the Empress Dowager? It was a miserable enough place even before you started messing about with it. Now what with builders and pilgrims and half the streets up, it simply isn’t habitable. How am I going to protect her? The only thing they haven’t increased is my establishment.”
“Believe me,” said Bishop Macarius, “I really am very sorry about it. I never intended anything like this to happen.”
*
It had begun at Nicaea the summer before. That opportunity was unique. For the first time in history the Church appeared in her majesty—the Papal legates, the Emperor, the assembled hierarchy of all Christendom. Many of the higher clergy had complaints against one another of heresy, treachery and magic. Constantine burned these, ostensibly unread. But Macarius had a petition of another order. Small-minded men might impute self-seeking to him, but Macarius knew better. He willed nothing except the greater glory of God and this high purpose was being frustrated by a vexatious anomaly in the position of his own see.
For his Aelia Capitolina was nothing less than the ancient, holy city of Jerusalem, the very umbilical point of Christian devotion. In and about this little garrison town God’s chosen people had fulfilled their destiny. Here Our Lord and His Blessed Mother were born, had died and ascended to Heaven. Here the Holy Ghost had fallen in tongues of fire upon the newborn Church. Macarius was hourly appalled by his own unworthiness to set up his throne on the scene of these events. He would gladly have made way for a more powerful man if by that means he could secure for the holy city the honor due to it. But, in fact, it was scarcely honored at all. A quirk of the civil administration made it a suffragan see and, what was the more bitter, suffragan to Caesarea, a place of little history and that little, bad; the creation of Herod, a commercial port reeking of idolatry, officialdom and vice. That anomaly must be righted sooner or later. But Macarius might have shrunk from pressing his own claims and left the matter to time, had there not been a reason for extreme urgency. Eusebius of Caesarea was not a man he could serve with a good conscience. He was a politician and man-of-letters, a supercilious, unscrupulous man, a fit ally for his namesake of Nicomedia and, like him, deep in the black heart of the Arian conspiracy. There were maimed veterans of the persecution in Caesarea who, when they saw their bishop going about his high affairs, remarked that they had seen him passing in and out of the prison compound in just that way, elegant, self-possessed, bearing neat little rolls of manuscript, when they lay in chains; an apostate, perhaps an informer.
Macarius could not expose his clergy and his people to that malign influence. But he stated his claim at Nicaea on the first consideration alone.
The Council was sympathetic and passed a non-committal resolution. He was given the pallium and a private audience. The Emperor was positively affable. Macarius reminded him of the glories of Zion. The Emperor seemed captivated. Was it then perhaps that his shadowy mind saw in a first reflected gleam the opposed faces of history and myth? The new religion with which he busied himself had many attractions; it inculcated a convenient ethic of brotherhood, peace and obedience; it offered powerful magical rewards of protection, forgiveness and immortality. But had Constantine ever made a distinction between the stories that were told of Galilee and those of Olympus? Now for the first time he was talking face to face with a man who handled, who held in his particular charge, the identical wreath of thorn which had crowned the dying God three hundred years ago.
“Can you be sure?”
“But, of course, sir. Ever since that day the Church of Jerusalem has guarded it. Mary herself picked it up and carried it home. It went with them to Pella and returned with them when the laws were relaxed. We have the spear, too, you know, which pierced His side, and many other things of the kind.”
“Extraordinary,” said the Emperor, adding the eternal querulous protest of baffled authority. “Why was I never told?”
Macarius told him: all about Jerusalem; of how through all its vicissitudes the Christian haunted it, ruined or rebuilt, and so kept continuous and alive the secret tradition of the holy places; of the Garden of Gethsemane, the upper room of the Last Supper, the sorrowful way from court-house to Calvary.
Thus quite naturally, inevitably, he was led on to speak of the project nearest his heart. He had come to Nicaea hoping to interest somebody in it, never hoping for this golden propitious moment of confidence.
“And then,” he said, “there is, of course, the holiest of all places—the sepulcher itself.”
“You know where that is?”
“Within a few yards. The Emperor Hadrian buried it two hundred years ago when he laid out the new city. People say he did so deliberately to suppress the cult and built the temple of Venus on it as an insult. But I doubt very much whether he knew of its existence. The Christians used to go there in ones and twos after dark. It was all kept very quiet for fear the authorities would destroy it. What they did in effect was to preserve it. I expect that the engineers just drew their plans from the map without considering the matter at all. It was providential that they covered it up. They might so easily have cut it clean away. It wouldn’t be at all a big task to uncover it again.”
Not at all a big task! How often Macarius had looked at that broad, crowded terrace, sick at heart for what was below. The trees in the little garden were gnarled, the paving had been worn and renewed and worn again, the statue, even, had mellowed in two centuries and lost something of its impudicity. The whole place proclaimed its permanence. Oh for the Fai
th that moved mountains! This was something quite beyond the hope of human accomplishment. Not till the end of the world, perhaps, would that treasure come to light.
So Macarius had thought during the days of persecution. But now the trumpets everywhere were sounding for victory, and here was he talking with the Emperor, the source of all material power. The thing was quite easy. Just the shoveling up of a heap of dust. And thus Constantine saw it. He gave the order like a housewife having a cupboard cleared.
“Certainly,” he said. “Start at once, as soon as you get back. I’ll see you get all the labor you need. Do the thing properly. Make a decent job of it.”
*
Was it a decent job? That was the question which drove Macarius back and back again into his own innocent conscience, to learn how things had gone wrong. It was a year, now, since the interview at Nicaea. Wonders had indeed been performed but Macarius was not happy.
The first excavations were easy enough. The site which the Christians had always pointed out as the scene of the Crucifixion and Resurrection lay almost in the center of the new town. There was no trace now above ground of the walls which had once run near it. Aelia Capitolina lay flat across them, half out of what had once been the old city; a rectangle set down by the planners among hills and valleys and ruins and dry waterworks. It might have lain in Britain or Africa; a standard, second-century garrison town. The temple of Venus, the garden and the cross-roads stood on what had once been a little gulley between rocky hills. Hadrian’s engineers had filled it with rubble—there was no lack of that—and leveled it. Constantine’s engineers now swept it clear. There was no difficulty in distinguishing the natural rock when they struck it. In a few months the whole site lay exposed, the two little hills plainly evident and the dip between them. The smaller hill was Golgotha. Thirty yards distant, half-way up the opposing slope was the tomb, a step down, a perpendicular rock face cut in the hillside, a low door, a vestibule and the inner chamber where the sacred body had lain; all just as Macarius had pictured it.