St. Constantine: More than a Patron

For thirty-one years I carried my name with little thought as to who else it might have belonged to. It wasn’t until I first walked into a Greek parish in 2024 that I learned it was a popular shortening of the name Constantine. A year later, before my baptism, I asked my priest which patron saint I might receive. His response: “I like your name. I want to keep it.”

“Dean” was a family name. It was passed down for generations by men who had no thought of a fourth-century Roman emperor. It was given to me a second time by a man who did. In neither case did I get to choose. Now I had to learn what to do with what I’d been given.

What I found was a man the world cannot make up its mind about. Outside Orthodoxy he is often treated as a punching bag. Inside it, there is a tendency to hurry past his life to the one thing everyone can safely agree on: the power of repentance, even at the eleventh hour. If, as one Greek Archdiocese article puts it, my patron "becomes a true hero/heroine for us to emulate," how was I to honor a saint with so much baggage?

The saint’s conversion story is spectacular. On the eve of battle, Constantine and his whole army beheld a cross of light in the heavens bearing the inscription Ἐν τούτῳ νίκα ("By this, conquer"). That night Christ appeared to him in a dream and commanded him to carry the sign against his enemies. He marked it on the shields of his soldiers, and the next day he won. Christianity was legal within a year. Before he died, he convened the council that gave us the Creed and founded a New Rome at Byzantium. The Church calls him Equal to the Apostles, a title that still turns heads at my parish among those who don't know the story.

Were that all, his sainthood would be beyond doubt.

But, in 326, Constantine had his eldest son Crispus executed. The reasons are unknown to us; the ancient sources that claim to know are hostile and late. Within months his wife Fausta was dead as well. Both were subjected to damnatio memoriae, struck from the records as though they had never lived. He put off baptism until he was dying, receiving it at last from Eusebius of Nicomedia, a bishop who had backed Arius. Though delay was ordinary in that century, the Fathers hated it; St. Gregory of Nazianzus asked his hearers why they would wait for a fever to bring them what God was offering now.

So there was the man. Even his virtues were of no use to me. I will never lead an army, and taking Rome does not figure into my plans. How was this man meant to be my hero? What here was I to emulate?