PaleoJudaica and Thoughts on Antiquity report that bombing in Iraq may have destroyed ancient Syriac inscriptions. This follows upon news of damage to archeological sites in Lebanon and Israel.

Christians everywhere should mourn the loss of so many lives in the Middle East and beg heaven for the gift of peace. Recall the words of the Prophets as they saw and foresaw so much blood and rubble: “How long, Lord? How long?” So many have died. So many are leaving the region. With the further destruction of their cultural heritage will come an incalculable loss of religious memory, tradition, and identity. This is a deep and painful wound to the Church, the world, and each and every one of these suffering persons. It won’t show up on the newsreels. But it’s real collateral damage. Pray heaven for peace.

If you’ve visited this site even once, you already know I’m an archeology nerd. This is a good season for archeology nerds. Archaeology magazine’s cover story heralds a new golden age in the field, and I’m willing to believe it. Even the mainstream media have picked up on it, with intense reportage on the Gospel of Judas this year.

My particular nerdiness (as you can guess from the title of the blog) hovers around archeological sites related to the patristic era. These don’t attract the media the way classical and biblical digs do. So I’ve got to do my own digging to find the news for you — like the astonishing recent discovery of third-century Christian inscriptions in the Basque region, and the Coptic apocrypha found in an ancient trash heap in Egypt.

Well, today gives me (and my ilk) yet another reason to celebrate with chocolate. It’s the memorial of St. Helena, the patroness and perhaps the foundress of the field of archeology. A few months back, I reviewed Evelyn Waugh’s novel on her life, Helena, a book by turns touching and hilarious. Waugh makes full use of his artistic license, as there are big blank spots in the historical record of Helena’s life.

We probably have a good idea of what she looked like, from coins honoring her. The face on the coin at Wikipedia fits the confident, determined, wry woman we meet in the pages of Waugh’s novel. Waugh manages to make her sexy, too, which gives Helena perhaps a unique status in the lists of novelistic treatments of the canonized. Pious authors usually have these subjects embalmed, or miraculously incorrupt anyway, by page five.

Here’s a summary of what our friend the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say about Helena:

The mother of Constantine the Great, born about the middle of the third century, died about 330. She was of humble parentage; St. Ambrose referred to her as a stabularia, or inn-keeper. Nevertheless, she became the lawful wife of Constantius Chlorus. Her first and only son, Constantine, was born in 274.

In the year 292 Constantius, having become co-Regent of the West, gave himself up to considerations of a political nature and forsook Helena in order to marry Theodora, the stepdaughter of Emperor Maximianus Herculius, his patron. But her son remained faithful and loyal to her. On the death of Constantius Chlorus, in 308, Constantine, who succeeded him, summoned his mother to the imperial court, conferred on her the title of Augusta, ordered that all honor should be paid her as the mother of the sovereign, and had coins struck bearing her effigy. Her son’s influence caused her to embrace Christianity after his victory over Maxentius. This is directly attested by Eusebius: “She became under his influence such a devout servant of God, that one might believe her to have been from her very childhood a disciple of the Redeemer of mankind.”

Tradition links her name with the building of Christian churches in the cities of the West, where the imperial court resided, notably at Rome and Trier. Despite her advanced age she undertook a journey to Palestine when Constantine, through his victory over Licinius, had become sole master of the Roman Empire, subsequently, therefore, to the year 324. She explored Palestine with remarkable discernment and “visited it with the care and solicitude of the emperor himself.” Then, when she “had shown due veneration to the footsteps of the Savior,” she had two churches erected for the worship of God: one was raised in Bethlehem near the Grotto of the Nativity, the other on the Mount of the Ascension, near Jerusalem. She also embellished the sacred grotto with rich ornaments. It is Rufinus who first relates the story that she directed the excavation of the True Cross and Jesus’ tomb.

Her memory in Rome is chiefly identified with the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (Holy Cross in Jerusalem), which was built on soil imported from the Holy Land (thus the name “in Jerusalem”). Pilgrims to this church receive the indulgence assigned to a pilgrimage to the sacred sites.

Constantine was with his mother when she died, at eighty or so, around 330 (the date on the last coins known to have been stamped with her name). Her body was brought to Constantinople and laid to rest in the imperial vault of the church of the Apostles. Her remains were transferred in 849 to the Abbey of Hautvillers, in the French Archdiocese of Reims.

Bread and Circuses gives us a rare close-up of a golden bust of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who reigned 161-180. Marcus was a stoic philosopher and the last of the so-called “Five Good Emperors.” While other pagan philosophers admired the fortitude of the Christian martyrs, Marcus held Christianity, and especially its martyrs, in contempt. In his Meditations, he mentions Christianity only once, disdainfully.

How blessed and happy is the soul that is always ready, even right now (if need be), to be separated from the body, whether by way of extinction, or dispersion, or continuation in another place and state. But its readiness must proceed, not from an obstinate and peremptory resolution of the mind, violently and passionately set upon opposition, as we find in Christians; but from a peculiar judgment, with discretion and gravity, so that others may be persuaded also and drawn to follow the example, without any noise and passionate exclamations.

Marcus was a persecutor of the Church. And, though he issued his executive orders in cold blood, his attitude inspired the non-stoic rabble to form murderous anti-Christian mobs. Between the executions and the riots, it was a difficult time for believers. Christian victims of Marcus’s reign include Justin Martyr, Blandina and Pothinus, and possibly Polycarp. But the same hostile climate also produced a great flowering of Christian apologetic literature, some of it directed at Marcus himself, from great Fathers such as Melito of Sardis. The sociologist Rodney Stark holds that the Church grew at an alarming pace during this period, at least 40% per decade. Further proof of The Tertullian Principle: The blood of the martyrs is seed.

Visit Bread and Circuses and behold the persecutor who inadvertently brought about such blessings in the Church. In spite of Marcus’s contempt for Christians, Christians have harbored a fondness for him. Witness the judgment of the old Catholic Encyclopedia: “Marcus Aurelius was one of the best men of heathen antiquity.”

I own a biography of the American martyr Father Marquette that concludes with a line not from Jesus Christ, but from Marcus Aurelius: “Take pleasure in one thing and rest in it, in passing from one act to another, thinking of God.”