The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross: History

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross: History

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, kept on the fourteenth of September, unites in a single liturgical commemoration the memory of the discovery of the Cross by St Helena, the dedication of the great Constantinian basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the triumphant recovery of the relic from the Persians by Emperor Heraclius. Its history is rooted in the dramatic events of the fourth and seventh centuries, though its significance reaches far beyond the past into the very heart of Christian identity.

According to tradition, Helena Augusta, the mother of Constantine, undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land around the year 326. Guided by piety, she sought the relics of the Passion, and excavations at Golgotha uncovered three crosses. To discern which was the Lord’s, the Bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, brought forward a dying woman whose sudden cure upon touching one of the beams revealed the True Cross. St Cyril of Jerusalem, writing later in the fourth century, attests to the presence and veneration of the “saving wood” and to its relics being distributed throughout Christendom¹. Rufinus of Aquileia and Socrates Scholasticus would later preserve the fuller legends that fixed this discovery in Christian memory².

Constantine himself ordered that a basilica be erected over the sacred sites of Calvary and the Lord’s tomb. This Church of the Holy Sepulchre was solemnly dedicated on 13 September 335, and the following day the Cross was brought forth for public veneration. From that year the fourteenth of September became a day marked out for the exaltation of the Cross in Jerusalem³.

In 614, disaster struck when King Chosroes II of Persia captured Jerusalem and carried away many holy relics, including the True Cross. The humiliation of the Church was compounded by years of conflict until the Emperor Heraclius defeated the Persians and recovered the relic. In 628 or 629 he returned it to Jerusalem. Tradition recounts that when he sought to enter the Holy City in imperial finery, he found himself unable to proceed until he laid aside his splendour and walked barefoot in imitation of Christ’s humility. In this way the Cross was restored to the faithful, and its exaltation took on a new meaning: the triumph of humility over pride, and of Christ crucified over worldly power⁴.

From these beginnings the feast spread rapidly throughout the East. The Byzantine rite developed solemn ceremonies of elevation, blessing the people with the Cross in all directions. In the West, the feast was adopted after the recovery under Heraclius and established universally by the early Middle Ages under the title In Exaltatione Sanctae Crucis. Alongside the separate commemoration of the Finding of the Cross on 3 May, it kept alive in Latin Christendom the memory of both discovery and restoration. Later reforms reduced the number of such observances, but the fourteenth of September retained its primacy as the ancient and universal celebration⁵.

The history of the feast is not without scholarly debate. Eusebius of Caesarea, contemporary of Constantine, describes the demolition of the pagan temple on Golgotha and the building of the basilica, but does not mention the miraculous finding of three crosses or the healing of the sick woman, details which appear only in later writers⁶. Likewise, accounts of the recovery under Heraclius vary in detail and dating, some placing the restoration in 628, others in 629 or 630, reflecting the complex chronology of the Byzantine–Sassanid wars. Yet the tradition, shaped by both history and liturgy, fixed upon 14 September as the day when the faithful glorify the Cross, not as a mere object of wood but as the sign of salvation and the pledge of victory.

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References

1. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, IV, in F. L. Cross (ed.), St Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Christian Sacraments (London: SPCK, 1951).
2. Rufinus of Aquileia, Historia Ecclesiastica, X.7–8; Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, I.17.
3. Eusebius of Caesarea, Vita Constantini (trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart Hall, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), III.25–40.
4. Chronicon Paschale (Easter Chronicle), ed. L. Dindorf, Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae (Bonn, 1832), pp. 720–721.
5. Breviarium Romanum (editio typica 1568; rubrical reform of John XXIII, 1960); cf. A. Adam, The Liturgical Year: Its History and Its Meaning after the Reform of the Liturgy (New York: Pueblo, 1981), pp. 171–173.
6. Eusebius, Vita Constantini, III.25–40; cf. P. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 86–87.