By Constant Mews
HISTORY
The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy
Robin M. Jensen
Harvard University Press, $74.99
The cross has always been the most controversial of symbols. In the Roman Empire, it provided a horrendously protracted punishment, intended to assert the power of the State and to humiliate those who threatened its authority. Robin Jensen's study reminds us of its horrific origins and of the continuing controversy it has evoked. Her theme is that the cross, superficially so simple to recreate, has, over the centuries, continued to trouble believers and non-believers alike.
The Cross by Robin M. Jensen.
Surviving graffiti of crucifixions from the Roman world imply that prisoners, male and female, were crucified naked, their arms bound to a crossbeam. As Jensen observes, the cross is not specifically mentioned in the oldest text in the New Testament, Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians (nor, one might add in the letters assigned to James and John). By the time he wrote to the Galatians, however, Paul had made "the scandal of the cross" a central image in his preaching – of particular relevance to those suffering the hostility of an uncomprehending world.
The tension within the Jesus movement between those who dwelt more on his teaching and those who focused more on his death and resurrection is manifest in the variety of early images of Christ. Because Jensen is concerned with the cross, she does not dwell on those other images, such as of the god-like good shepherd favoured in the catacombs.
Nonetheless, she provides a masterly overview of frequent allusions in early Christian literature to reverence for the cross, even when few such images have survived. The Acts of Peter, from the mid-2nd century, speaks of the cross as "the hidden mystery" and "unspeakable mercy".
It was one of a number of early Christian texts that linked the cross to that great mythic image of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, adjacent to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The cross provided a brilliant image of how life and death, good and evil, could come together.
There was no agreement, however, about how Jesus' body should be presented, or if it should be represented at all. While it is often assumed that the Emperor Constantine imposed the cross as the dominant public image of Christianity, Jensen observes that the mystical sign he is reported as having seen prior to going into battle, was not the cross, but the Chi-Ro sign (written as X and P in Latin).
Constantine, masterly in the way he rejuvenated Roman imperial propaganda with imagery of both the sun God and the Jesus movement, certainly played a role in promoting reverence for the cross. He sent (or was pushed into sending) his mother, Helen, to recover Christian sites and relics in and around Jerusalem, a city largely destroyed by Roman military authorities in the late first and early 2nd centuries.
In the artistic and architectural flowering made possible by Constantine, surviving depictions of the crucified Jesus are extremely rare. The first clear representation of Jesus on the cross does not surface until the early 5th century, a few decades after Christianity had moved from being one of many religions tolerated by Constantine, to the only legal religion permitted in the Roman Empire. A symbol of punishment was becoming the symbol of an officially Christian empire.
The many glorious images reproduced in this book, which succeeds in communicating much recent scholarly endeavour to a wider audience, show how the cross succeeded in combining imagery of death and life.
Its cover, taken from the Apse Mosaic in the great Ravenna church of Sant'Apollinare, c. 540 CE, shows the cross surrounded by the stars of heaven, as the tree of life within the garden of Paradise, where St Apollinaris is gathering his sheep. Not reproducing Christ's body suited the theological optimism of those Christian emperors who wished to demonstrate how their buildings could lift the faithful to Paradise, and to forget the military force on which they relied.
Jensen has a big story to tell. In the same century as Islam was rejecting visual imagery of the Godhead as blasphemous, there were Christians in the Latin West (like Claudius of Turin) who were troubled by tendencies to quasi-pagan adulation of Christian imagery. While her narrative inevitably focuses on the Latin West, she reminds us that Byzantine art, never as stereotyped as Western art historians have often claimed, anticipated Latin art in its representation of a dead Jesus.
Between the 9th and the 12th centuries, the suffering of Jesus increasingly attracted attention in both East and West. This development has often been explained as anticipating the naturalism and humanism of the Renaissance. By bringing a theological perspective to bear on the image of the suffering Jesus, she emphasises how the evolution of this devotion to the suffering Jesus was itself part of a deepening of Christian awareness of its own tradition.
One implication of Jensen's narrative, sober and informed rather than polemical in style, is that the image of the cross could be interpreted in very different ways. In the 12th and 13th centuries, we see a more positive attitude to the natural world as also to human nature than Augustine had promoted seven centuries earlier. Political collapse in the Latin West had encouraged Augustine to focus on the sinfulness of human nature and thus on Christ's death as redeeming a world in thrall to the devil. This is a line of thought that has never disappeared, particularly in some more fundamentalist versions of Christianity.
By contrast, Francis of Assisi would combine awareness of the wounds of Jesus with celebration of the natural world. Francis focused much more intensely than Augustine on the commitment of Jesus to poverty and humility, a self-emptying that defined the saviour's life and death. The art of Cimabue, so brilliant in its evocation of the suffering Jesus, is itself defined by a Franciscan distrust of reverence for a grandiose and imperialistic vision of Christianity. It came to define Christian culture in urban Europe between the 13th and 15th centuries, as religious devotion mutated from a primarily monastic discipline into an urban experience.
Preachers varied as to whether they focused on Christ's death or on his message of repentance and moral renewal, exemplified in the encounter of the risen Jesus with Mary Magdalene. They came to appreciate that, according to all four evangelists, she was the
Throughout her book, Jensen underlines the continually provocative character of the cross, still a controversial image in our own society. While it may no longer function as a symbol of colonial authority and anti-Jewish rhetoric as it did for many centuries in the West, it still serves not just as a marker of collective identity, but as a sacred symbol, evoking victory over unimaginable suffering.
Even if we no longer see the cross as an instrument by which Roman imperial authority terrorised its subjects, our society has found its own ways of victimising those who are perceived to be a threat to its authority, whether they be refugees or other minority groups.
As Jensen observes, the cross still has the power to remind us of the paradoxical victory of selfless love within the world in which we live.
Constant J. Mews is director of the Centre for Religious Studies at Monash University.