A history of the Holy Wood, for the feast on the fourteenth day of September — II classis
Nos autem gloriari oportet in Cruce Domini nostri Iesu Christi: in quo est salus, vita et resurrectio nostra: per quem salvati et liberati sumus. “But it behoves us to glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ: in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection: by whom we are saved and delivered.” — Introit of the Mass, from Galatians 6:14
I. A life without a man
The Church keeps this day as she keeps the day of a saint, and the parallel is exact enough to be worth pressing. There is a birth here, and a hiddenness, and a public finding; there is labour, dispersion, a theft, a captivity, a vindication, and a scattering of relics. What follows is therefore a life — not of a man but of a piece of wood, and of the glory God chose to attach to it.
Two cautions are owed at the outset, because this is a subject on which Catholics have been careless and Protestants have been unjust, and neither serves the truth.
The first: the feast is not the wood. What the Church exalts on the fourteenth of September is the Cross of Christ, the instrument and the mysterium of our redemption, which would be no less exalted if not a splinter of the original had survived Calvary. The relic is a consequence of the mystery, not its foundation.
The second: the documentary record of this relic is uneven, and a good deal of what is popularly told of it is legend. We shall take the legends for what they are and the history for what it is, and the faith will be found to require nothing from the legends.
II. The wood buried
After the Crucifixion the beams disappear from the record. The Evangelists have no further use for them; their interest is in the empty tomb, not the empty gibbet.
Then in the year 135, after the revolt of Bar Kokhba, the Emperor Hadrian razed Jerusalem, refounded it as the colony of Aelia Capitolina, and ordered the site of Golgotha and the sepulchre buried under a platform of fill on which he raised a temple to Venus. He meant to obliterate a Christian memory. He preserved it. For two centuries the Christians of Jerusalem knew precisely where their Lord had died, because a pagan sanctuary was standing on the spot and could not be mislaid.
This is the first of several occasions on which the enemies of the Cross did its work for it, and the pattern is instructive enough that the Fathers noticed it.
III. Helena
In the year 326, or thereabouts, the Empress Helena — mother of Constantine, a woman then near eighty, converted in middle life and by every account more devout than her son — came to Palestine. Constantine had already ordered the temple thrown down and the rock of Calvary and the sepulchre excavated.
What the tradition relates is this: that beneath the fill three crosses were found, with the nails and the titulus separately; that St. Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, distinguished the Lord’s Cross from those of the thieves by bringing the three to a dying woman, who was healed at the touch of one of them; and that Helena raised a basilica over the place.
Honesty requires two observations. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing within a decade and with every motive to record it, describes the uncovering of the tomb in detail and says nothing of the Cross. The narrative of Helena’s discovery appears first some sixty years later, in St. Ambrose’s funeral oration for Theodosius (395), and then in Rufinus, Socrates and Sozomen. What is not in doubt is that by the middle of the fourth century the wood was in Jerusalem and was being venerated: St. Cyril, bishop of that city, preaching his catechetical lectures around the year 348 to people who could walk to the place and contradict him, speaks of the saving wood as present among them and of its fragments as already filling the world. That is testimony of the strongest kind, and it stands whatever one makes of the dying woman.
St. Ambrose, in that same oration, adds the sentence that ought to govern every later controversy about relics. Helena, he says, found the titulus; and she adored the King, not the wood — regem adoravit, non lignum — for the worship of the wood is the error of the heathen. The whole Catholic doctrine of relics is in that clause, spoken by a Doctor of the Church within living memory of the event.
IV. The fourteenth of September, 335
Here we reach the actual origin of today’s feast, and it is not the finding.
Constantine’s great complex over the holy places — the Martyrium basilica and the rotunda of the Anastasis, what we now call the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — was solemnly dedicated on the thirteenth of September, 335, before a council of bishops assembled from across the East. On the following day the wood of the Cross was brought out and shown to the people.
The dedication festival, the Encaenia, was thereafter kept annually, and the pilgrim Egeria, writing of the Jerusalem liturgy at the end of the fourth century, describes it as ranking with Easter and Epiphany, with crowds coming up from Mesopotamia and Egypt for eight days of solemnities. She also records, with the flat particularity that makes her precious, how the wood was venerated on Good Friday: the faithful came one by one to bow and kiss it, while deacons stood on either side holding it and keeping close watch — because someone had once got his teeth on the relic and bitten off a fragment.
That is the feast. It began as a dedication anniversary in Jerusalem and took its name from the exaltatio, the lifting up of the wood before the assembled people, which is still the ritual heart of the day in the East.
V. The wood scattered
From Jerusalem the fragments went out, and quickly. Cyril’s remark that the pieces had already filled the world is made barely twenty years after the finding.
A great portion was set in the Sessorian palace at Rome, in the basilica we call Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where Helena’s relics — including the board of the titulus, of which a fragment survives and was examined in the last century — are venerated still. Another passed to Constantinople. Portions went to Antioch, to Apamea, to Gaul, to Africa; St. Paulinus of Nola sent one to a friend and wrote of it that the wood, though daily divided, suffered no diminution.
One of these gifts gave the Latin Church two of her greatest hymns. In the year 569 the Emperor Justin II sent a relic of the Cross to St. Radegund, the Thuringian queen who had left her husband’s court to found the monastery of the Holy Cross at Poitiers. For the reception of that relic the poet-bishop Venantius Fortunatus composed the Vexilla Regis prodeunt and the Pange lingua gloriosi lauream certaminis — the hymns of Passiontide and of Good Friday, sung for fourteen centuries since, written for a September procession in a provincial French town.
Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis. “Faithful Cross, above all other, one and only noble tree.”
VI. Chosroes
In the year 614 the armies of Chosroes II of Persia took Jerusalem. The city was sacked, the churches burned, the population slaughtered or deported. The Patriarch Zacharias was carried off into captivity, and with him the relic of the Cross.
The Christian East understood the loss as the Old Testament understood the capture of the Ark: not merely a theft but a judgment. For fourteen years the wood remained in Persia.
VII. Heraclius, and the gate
The Emperor Heraclius, who had inherited an empire in collapse, spent the better part of a decade in the field against the Persians and broke them at last at Nineveh in 627. Chosroes was murdered by his own son, and the treaty that followed required the restoration of the relic.
Heraclius brought it back in triumph — first to Constantinople, and then in person to Jerusalem, where he restored it to the Patriarch Zacharias. The chronology is disputed: the Breviary lessons and the Roman tradition attach the restoration to the fourteenth of September, while the Byzantine chroniclers and most modern historians place the entry into Jerusalem on the twenty-first of March, in 629 or 630, the September date marking the older dedication feast onto which the memory was grafted. The disagreement touches the calendar, not the fact.
And here belongs the story that every medieval painter knew. Heraclius, it is related, took up the Cross on his own shoulders to carry it up to Calvary, robed in the purple and the gold of an emperor — and at the gate he could not move; the way was shut against him. The Patriarch turned and told him that he was carrying the wood of poverty in the ornaments of a triumph, and that Christ had gone that way barefoot. The Emperor stripped off the imperial robes and the diadem, put on a common tunic, went unshod, and passed through without difficulty.
The account is legend, in the strict sense: it appears in the later Greek homilies and reaches the West in the Golden Legend, not in the contemporary chronicles. It is also, as legends sometimes are, a better piece of theology than most treatises, and the Church has never been in a hurry to lose it. The Cross does not fit through the gate of pride. It never has.
The relic’s wanderings did not end there. Before Jerusalem fell to the Arab armies in 638 the principal portion had been withdrawn to Constantinople. A remnant returned to the Holy Land in the Crusader kingdom and was carried into battle at the Horns of Hattin in 1187, where the Frankish army was destroyed and the relic was lost to Saladin and never recovered. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 scattered what remained of the Byzantine portion across the treasuries of the West.
The wood has been buried, stolen, ransomed, lost in battle and looted by Christians. The feast survives all of it, which is rather the point.
VIII. The feast comes to Rome
The West received the observance late. The Liber Pontificalis relates that Pope St. Sergius I (687–701) found in a dark corner of the sacristy of St. Peter’s a silver casket containing a relic of the Cross, and that he established its solemn veneration by the people on the fourteenth of September. From Rome the feast passed into the calendars of the Latin Church.
In time the Roman calendar carried two feasts of the Cross: the Invention on the third of May, commemorating Helena’s finding, and the Exaltation on the fourteenth of September. In the reform of the rubrics under John XXIII in 1960 the May feast was suppressed as a duplication, and the fourteenth of September remained alone, ranked II classis. Those who keep the older books will find both; those who keep the 1962 books keep one. The Ember Days of September — the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday of fasting that open the autumn — are reckoned from this day, falling this year on the sixteenth, eighteenth and nineteenth. And tomorrow the Church places the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin, who stood at the foot of what was exalted today.
IX. What is venerated, and how
Two questions are always put, and both have settled answers.
Is the wood adored? The Church’s language is startling here and should not be softened. St. Thomas teaches that the Cross of Christ is venerated with the adoration of latria — the worship due to God alone — and gives the reason: not because the wood is God, but because the honour paid to an image or a relic passes to the one it represents, and the Cross is honoured as it is Christ’s, in the very act by which we adore Him (Summa Theologiae III, q. 25, a. 4). Take away the relation to Christ and the wood is a plank. This is what Ambrose meant in saying that Helena adored the King and not the wood; the Second Council of Nicaea and the Council of Trent say the same in their own terms. The man who kisses the crucifix on Good Friday is not worshipping cedar.
Is there not too much of it? Calvin wrote that the surviving fragments would load a ship, and the jest has outlived his treatise. It was tested. In 1870 Charles Rohault de Fleury published a catalogue of every relic of the Cross he could document in the churches and treasuries of Europe and the East, with measurements. Reckoning the original cross as of pine, some three or four metres in height with a two-metre beam, he put its volume at about 178,000,000 cubic millimetres. The total volume of all the relics he could find and verify came to something over 4,000,000 — under a fortieth part of the whole. Multiply his figure many times over for fragments lost, hidden or never recorded, and the ship remains unbuilt.
This proves nothing about the authenticity of any particular splinter, and some are certainly spurious; provenance matters, and the Church has never asked anyone to believe otherwise. It does dispose of the sneer.
And the pious legends? That the Cross was grown from a seed of the Tree of Paradise planted in Adam’s mouth by Seth; that the Queen of Sheba knelt before its timber; that it was buried in the pool of Bethesda — these are from the Golden Legend and the medieval Holy Rood poems. They are not history and the Church has never proposed them as such. They are the mind of Christendom meditating on a real conviction: that the tree which killed us and the tree which saved us belong to one story. Read them as poetry and they are true. Read them as chronicle and they are false, and they make the faith look foolish to men who deserve better.
X. The Mass of the day
The Church’s own commentary on the feast is her Mass, and it is austere and magnificent.
The Introit is Galatians 6:14: we glory in nothing else. The Epistle is the great hymn of Philippians 2:5-11 — He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, and became obedient unto death, even to the death of the Cross; for which cause God hath exalted Him, and given Him a name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow. The word exaltavit is the hinge: the exaltation of the Cross is the exaltation of Christ, and the Epistle tells us the order of operations. Descent first. The Gradual is the same text continued, Christus factus est pro nobis obediens usque ad mortem, sung otherwise only in the Triduum. The Alleluia verse addresses the wood directly as dulce lignum, sweet wood, sweet nails, alone worthy to bear the King of heaven.
The Gospel is John 12:31-36, spoken by Our Lord in the week of His Passion: Nunc iudicium est mundi — now is the judgment of the world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out; and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself. St. John adds the note that He said this signifying what death He should die. The exaltatio of the title is in the first instance this one: the lifting up on the gibbet. Every other exaltation of the Cross — Helena’s, Heraclius’s, the deacon’s at the ambo, the priest’s on Good Friday — is a commemoration of that single elevation, which was a judgment seat disguised as an execution.
The Communion antiphon is a soldier’s prayer: Per signum Crucis de inimicis nostris libera nos, Deus noster. By the sign of the Cross deliver us from our enemies.
XI. What the feast teaches
Three things, chiefly.
That glory is located. St. Paul does not say that he accepts the Cross, or endures it, or has come to terms with it. He says he glories in it and in nothing else, and the Church puts his sentence in her mouth as the first word of the day. A Catholicism that treats the Cross as an unfortunate necessity on the way to the Resurrection has not understood either. The wounds are still in the risen body.
That the descent is the cause of the ascent. Humiliavit semetipsum… propter quod et Deus exaltavit illum. The Epistle states a causal relation, not a sequence of unrelated events. Whatever is true of the Head is to be true of the members: there is no exaltation available to us on other terms, and the search for one is the whole substance of the spiritual life gone wrong.
That God vindicates slowly and in His own manner. The wood was buried under a temple of Venus for two hundred years, carried into Persia for fourteen, lost at Hattin for good. None of this was prevented. And the sign that the Roman state used for the killing of slaves is now cut into the altars, set on the crowns of kings, traced on the foreheads of infants, and raised over half the graves on earth. Nothing was done to bring that about except that a man consented to be nailed to it.
Practice
Examine. Make the sign of the Cross the examination itself. For one day, notice every time you make it — rising, at meals, entering a church, beginning a prayer — and ask whether it was a gesture or a profession. The Communion antiphon calls it a weapon. Most of us have let it become a punctuation mark.
Do. Keep the Ember Days this week — Wednesday, Friday and Saturday — with some real fast or abstinence, offered for the intentions the Church attaches to them: for the clergy she is about to ordain and for the fruits of the earth. The Exaltation of the Cross and a fast on the same calendar page are not a coincidence.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, qui nos hodierna die Exaltationis sanctae Crucis annua solemnitate laetificas: praesta, quaesumus; ut, cuius mysterium in terra cognovimus, eius redemptionis praemia in caelo mereamur.
“O God, who on this day dost gladden us by the yearly solemnity of the Exaltation of the holy Cross: grant, we beseech Thee, that we who have known its mystery upon earth may be found worthy of the rewards of its redemption in heaven.”
Or, briefly, the versicle of Passiontide: Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi: quia per sanctam Crucem tuam redemisti mundum.
Devote. The Sorrowful Mysteries, with attention to the fourth — the Carrying of the Cross — and Heraclius at the gate. Or the Stations, made slowly. If there is a relic of the True Cross in a church near you, go and venerate it; if there is not, the crucifix on your own wall is venerated with the same latria, for the same reason.
If you wish to go deeper: the Sacred Liturgy path takes up the Mass of the Exaltation alongside the Good Friday Adoration of the Cross and the Improperia, and the theology of the liturgical sign. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the question raised in section IX — the distinction of latria, hyperdulia and dulia, and the Church’s teaching on images and relics against the iconoclasts and the Reformers. The Church History path follows Helena, Constantine and the building of the holy places into the age of Heraclius and the loss of the Christian East.
O Crux, ave, spes unica.
Sources consulted: Eusebius, Vita Constantini III; St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses IV, X, XIII, and the letter to Constantius; St. Ambrose, De obitu Theodosii; the Itinerarium Egeriae, cc. 37 and 48-49; Rufinus, Socrates and Sozomen; the Liber Pontificalis, s.v. Sergius I; the Roman Breviary lessons for 14 September; Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea (for the legends, as legends); St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 25, a. 4 and q. 46; Charles Rohault de Fleury, Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion (Paris, 1870), pp. 97-179; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.vv. “Cross and Crucifix,” “Archaeology of the Cross and Crucifix,” and “True Cross.” The date of Heraclius’s restoration follows the Roman liturgical tradition for the feast, with the March 629/630 dating of the Byzantine chroniclers noted where it differs.