Legend tells us that the conversion of St Constantine to the Christian faith came after a vision he had of the cross, whereupon seeing it, he heard these fateful words:
Ἐν τούτῳ νίκα
In hoc signo vinces
In this sign, you will conquer
He took the words to heart, and believed they meant that he would gain the empire he wanted by the power of the cross; that is, through the cross, he shall have find the means to gain supreme authority over Rome. And in many ways, one can read the legend this way, and leave it at that. Certainly it appears that he was correct. By taking on the mantle of the cross, his armies were victorious. Afterwards, partly through the guidance of his Christian advisors, he was able to reform the empire from within, and bring back to the empire a sense of unity which it had lost when the Christians were being persecuted. The Church prospered through his advocacy of the Christian faith, and his power over Rome became supreme. As a reward, he restored to the Christians the property which previous emperors had confiscated from them, and helped build great monuments to the martyrs, making sure that their spiritual victories would not be forgotten. His mother, St Helen, even went on a mission to find the true cross, found it, brought it back to Rome, housing it in a church specifically built in its honor. The glory of the cross was joined with the glory of the empire, and when the two came together, Christians had at last experienced the full triumph of cross over all their enemies. Or so they thought.
Looking at the cross, we must wonder, what does the sign of the cross really mean? Should we ever associate it with military might? And what kind of victory did St Constantine really have when, even during his reign, Christians ended up dividing the empire with their theological conflicts, forming the lines of demarcation which would break the empire apart at the time of his death? We do not need to doubt the legend itself; it is one thing to be shown a sign, it is another to understand its true meaning: “not all revelations turn out according to what we understand by the words.”[1] For St Constantine, what was revealed to him was his great moment with God, and it truly had an effect on his soul; it was by this means that his conversion to God could begin. That, of course, was the primary intent of the locution: to work for St Constantine’s conversion. The words, while important, were secondary to the event itself. Yet the words, since they come from God, must be words of truth, and there must be some significance to them, otherwise they would not have been uttered. So how do we go about understanding their meaning? What was God telling St Constantine (and through Constantine, to us) by this locution?
To find the answer, we should turn to St Paul who tells us who it is we are fighting against, and therefore, who it is we should seek to conquer. “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). The cross is the sign of victory, the victory of life over death, God’s kingdom of love over the demonic powers of hate, and even the victory of self-giving over self-seeking egoism. And St Constantine, before the end of his life, would finally understand and find that victory as he truly put himself under the power of the cross.
St Constantine was right in thinking that the cross is a weapon. But it is a special kind of weapon, the kind which the world had never known before its elevation: it is the weapon of peace, as the Kontakion for the feast proclaims: “O Christ our God, Who was voluntarily lifted up on the Cross, grant your mercies to your new people named after you. Gladden with your power Orthodox Christians and give them victory over their enemies. May they have as ally that invincible trophy, your weapon of peace.” Christ, the prince of peace, can only use weapons of peace to conquer his foes. The sword of truth, when it is used by him, cuts through all falsehood (and what is sin but the presentation of a falsehood as truth, that is, a lesser good as something more than it actually is), leaving the one who was previously encased by sin free to experience his love, to be swayed by his love, to be converted by his love. But there is no greater weapon of peace than the cross. It is on the cross where we see Christ in his full glory. Even when humanity did all it could to destroy him, it could overcome his love. The cross is his sign of victory because it shows hate has an end – when he died, love did not die, but remained, while the hate which was shown to him had come to its conclusion; thus Joseph of Arimathea was allowed to bury him with honor. Love is greater than hate, because love has no bounds and knows no end.
All of Christ’s followers, all Orthodox Christians, all true believing Christians, are called to take up the weapon of peace and carry it with them throughout their life. Even before his own ascent up the cross, he told his followers that they would have to take their own cross and bring it with them as they follow Christ. “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it” (Luke 9:23b-24). The cross is a weapon of victory, but first, to experience that victory, we must mount our very self upon it, crucify the self, and let it and all our selfish desires die, so that we can become pure at heart and see God. We must deny ourselves in the way Jesus did, in the path of love. And all true love is self-sacrificial. For love is found when we denying our self-centeredness, our ego, and all that would close us off from the world around us. Only when we are not tied to ourselves can we look upon the other in love. Love can only be found in the sign of victory, in the sign of the cross. We must come to understand this simple point: the cross is the sign of God’s love for humanity. Our cross is our response to God. We give ourselves back to God, in an act of love. Through God, we end up loving all of humanity, for we love that which God loves. And it is such love which triumphs over those who would be our foes, because love is more powerful than hate, as shown in the ultimate contest between the two on Golgotha.
Sadly, many, even Christians, have yet to understand this. They do not believe in the power of the cross, in the weapon of peace. They think ot victory only in earthly terms, and that peace is established by the force. They believe that if a Christian relies upon the power of the cross for peace, they are foolish, and not worthy of respect. Yet, we should not give heed to their laughter. “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).
There appears to be two reasons why we see this kind of reaction to the cross. The first comes from the fact that the word of the cross tells us to deny ourselves, while our instinct tells us to do all we can to affirm ourselves, to preserve all we can about ourselves, to make sure we continue as we are now for another day. To find peace requires true effort on our part; it is easier to lash out at someone else and hope it creates peace than it is to reform ourselves from within. But the only way to bring peace to the world is to demolish the seeds of conflict within ourselves; if we can’t do that, how can we expect others to do it instead? Even if we can force a false sense of peace upon the earth, it is a peace which will not last, and the violence used to enforce that peace will be the grounds by which that peace will be destroyed. The second reason, which is not entirely different from the first, lies in the fact that people are more inclined to live in and through the things of the world as they are found under the structures of sin; they know nothing but life as it exists under the power of sin, and respond to conflicts in the way the structures of sin suggest we should act. Thus, in a world of sin, peace is preserved not by love but by force, not by giving, but by taking. We are led to believe that might makes right.
The cross is the ultimate sign of resistance to the way of sin; it shows us that the end result of our earthly, Promethean charade is the “peace” of death, and nothing else. It is so counter-intuitive. We believe that when we build up ourselves through the ways of the world, we shall have ever-lasting glory, and yet everyone who followed this path ends the same: dead. Yet. Christ, the Son of God, who let himself to be used and abused by all, to become the servant of servants, shows us that the way of self-sacrifice leads not to death, but to resurrection. When we see the Son of God placed high upon the cross, in his greatest moment of weakness, we feel even more attracted to him at that point than at any other. What the ways of the world tells us should not work, does work, for “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor. 1:25). High upon the cross, Christ shows us that victory is found in self-defeat.
Thus, it is true, St Constantine was shown the sign by which he would have victory, but he initially interpreted such victory only within the ways of empire. He understood properly that the cross would lead him to victory, but he didn’t understand what that victory was. He is not alone in this error; too many people have turned the cross into a weapon of violence to be used on others instead of a weapon of peace, to be used upon oneself. He could tell that the cross was a sign of power, but he did not know what that power was. As Christians, we should know the answer: it is the power of love. “The power, fire, and nature of love consist in the fact that love has the character of the cross; and there is no love that does not have the character of the cross. The cross is the self-sacrificial character of love, for love is sacrifice, self-surrender, self-renunciation, voluntary self-depletion for the sake of the loved one.“[2] Victory is found in defeat – where one surrenders oneself to love. Yet St Constantine, in the end, would come to understand this. When he saw his life was near an end, and his plans for the empire failing, he had come to know the uselessness of his pursuit. He eventually had to humiliate himself, and accept that baptism which he had long put off. Finally, at the end, he took on the cross of Christ and applied it to himself. He found true victory in Christ’s peace; the illusion of power was overcome by the reality of God’s love. And that sign, that sign of victory, the sign of the cross, is still there, asking for us to come under its mantle.
Footnotes
[1] St John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel in The Collected Works of St John of the Cross. Trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriquez (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991), II-19.1 (213).
[2] Sergius Bulgakov, Churchly Joy. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2008), 3.
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