From its inception, Christianity has been known as the religion of the cross. Among Christians, the cross is a symbol of Christ’s passion and its part in the economy of salvation. To non-Christians, it is what St. Paul termed it: a scandal and a folly. How did a token of degradation inflicted largely on slaves, violent criminals, and insurgents evolve into the purest symbol of Christian faith? What transformed an emblem of vile death and suffering into an exalted object and a prompt to great monuments of Western art? That metamorphosis, enacted in theology and the arts, is interwoven with the history of Western civilization. Accordingly, the saga of this symbol, of its uses and reactions to it, from patristic times to the present, is essential. The telling of it requires rigor and breadth. A theologically complex subject with wide historical reach does not reduce easily to a pocket reference.
Nevertheless, The Cross offers itself as one. Without intending to, Robin M. Jensen concedes the difficulty of her task by relying conspicuously on the work of Richard Viladesau, a systematic theologian recognized in the rising field of theological aesthetics. His themes, narrative structure, and wealth of citations point Jensen’s way through her own excursion on the place of the cross in Western culture and the life of faith. The Cross is an accessible variant of a distinguished theologian’s refined reprise of his own work.
Let me explain.
Theology does not rank on bestseller lists. However much lip service is paid, the subject remains a specialty among academics intent on making a vocation of it. Career channels broadened after the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar published his influential seven-volume The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetic in the 1960s. Eight more volumes followed over the next 20 years. Since then, theological aesthetics has grown into a cottage industry within the larger discipline. Younger theologians compete to advance the field and grant pride of place to its particular perspective: that an encounter with beauty is analogous to an encounter with God.
Viladesau’s Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, & Art (1999) was addressed to the guild. To make the abundance of his subject available to a general audience, he streamlined that earlier work into The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance (2005). A few years later he published a sequel, The Triumph of the Cross, which carried the theme through the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
Jensen follows Viladesau’s sources, adds others, and mirrors his alignment of theological motifs with corresponding expressions in visual and literary arts. It is a valid path, one that her predecessor anticipated and welcomed, even suggesting “further lines of thought” to lay readers and fellow scholars alike. But there is a problem: Viladesau enjoys remarkable command of the pertinent literature—philosophical as well as theological—plus a keen and supple intimacy with the range of arts that support his arguments. He is the equal of his sources; Jensen, less so.
The result is a drive-thru history of the cross from Golgotha to the Ku Klux Klan. The itinerary spins through art history, church history, archeology, anthropology, art appreciation, the Koran, literature, hymnology, devotional practices, pre-Columbian designs, Wikipedia entries, and contemporary iconography with feminist, ethnic, and social justice memes. It decelerates in front of Andres Serrano’s 1987 provocation Piss Christ and reference to crosses made of cigarettes or chocolate, with no attempt to weigh the stuff against the claims of art. Or of faith.
Jensen opens where Viladesau does, with a glance at the purpose and grim perfections of these calculated crucifixions common in the ancient world. She seizes the same 2nd-century graffito from the Palatine Museum to illustrate Roman disdain for this new religio crucis. Called the Alexamenos graffito, it shows a crudely drawn crucified man with the head of an ass accompanied by the inscription “Alexamenos worships his god.”
Viladesau breathes life into the ancient cartoon to revive the spirit of its making:
By contrast, Jensen’s description comes in the tones of a service manual:
That tonal indifference carries throughout. Jensen’s predecessor crafts an argument for engaging Christian tradition in terms of the art it generated; Jensen plucks allusions from scholarly monographs to fit the handbook topic. Two theologians in possession of the same material could not be more contrary in their capacity to quicken the responses of thoughtful readers.
Attractively illustrated, The Cross looks better than it reads. As history, it miscarries: Its approach to the Crusades, one of the most misunderstood movements in history, is a mortal defect. The timbre of Jensen’s summary conforms to the half-knowledge of popular culture and academic fashion. The indiscriminate slaughter and historic suffering of Christians—and Jews—under Islam is off the table. The book offers no challenge to the reigning tropes that identify the totality of the Crusades with their excesses (as they appear in retrospect) in an age of siege warfare.
The movement’s defining features were penitential and defensive. Yet The Cross accepts the popular view of them as inherently anti-Semitic. Thus, the cross has become “a symbol for military conquest abroad and persecution of Jews and other non-Christians at home.” It is “an emblem of oppression and violence.” Jensen’s Crusades-in-a-nutshell crumple into an example of “the long history of Christian anti-Jewish actions.”
The Cross turns upside-down centuries of Islamic efforts to colonize the West. Jensen allows that Muslims “may” view the cross as a symbol of Christian aggression. She is tentative about affirming without ambivalence that, whatever else they were, the uniquely medieval Crusades were protective in purpose.
Most significantly, the Crusades were unsuccessful. Consequently, they were irrelevant to Muslims until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Thomas Madden was in sync with other recent historians when he wrote that “the Crusades were virtually unknown in the Muslim world even a century ago. .  .  . In the grand sweep of Islamic history the Crusades simply did not matter.” They did not matter, that is, until they became useful to 20th-century nationalists and Islamists, who used them to bludgeon Israel and the West.
Contests between the bare cross and the crucifix (with its corpus) cut to the bone of theological dispute during the Reformation, the convulsion that marked the end of medieval Christendom. Idolatry and iconoclasm, the veneration of saints and relics, were—literally—burning issues. Jensen’s précis of the conflicts makes an efficient companion to her sources, as does her outline of the transfer of the power of images from the Roman Catholic emphasis on the visual to the Protestant preference for hymnody. Still, handbook concision works against the scale and heat of the most theologically and liturgically consequential era in Christian history.
All truly sacred art implies a collective sensibility. Richard Viladesau held open a door to religious kitsch for the single reason that it could express a shared cultural language. He had in mind such things as those sentimental products of Saint-Sulpicien piety cherished by Thérèse of Lisieux in her day. He was not referring to our contemporary sequence of nihilisms that bend the cross to the service of puerile provocation or identity politics. Jensen fumbles the distinction.
The Cross reads best where the author sticks close to her points of supply. But with no guide to the contemporary landscape, Jensen founders. Here was an opportunity to determine distinctions between crosses made for liturgical uses and those baited for profane, primarily political, ends. Instead, several ethnic and feminist cruciform statements earn mention while divorced from any stance on vulgarity or gratuitous profanity. Of Andres Serrano’s attention-grabbing crucifix in urine there is this:
A retrospective shot at Jesse Helms is safer than risking a purposeful opinion on the nature of sacred art or an aesthetic appraisal of the wasteland under foot. Jensen’s uncommitted glance is carefully divorced from any standpoint beyond a tepid dodge:
The most significant 20th-century controversy over a cross, however, was not local clamor over Piss Christ. It was the virulent polemics, reaching to the Vatican, over Germaine Richier’s bronze Crucifix, cast for the altar of the Church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce at Assy. It is reasonable to expect mention of it, given its prominence within the scope of Jensen’s subject. Yet it is missing.
The church of Assy was a renowned mid-century experiment by the Dominican-led Sacred Art Movement, based in France, to reconcile religious imagination with modern art. Richier’s crucifix, a hallucinatory scream of pain, prompted Pope Pius XII’s 1950 exhortation Menti nostrae, which took aim at “works which astonishingly deform art and yet pretend to be Christian.” The Dominicans were pressured to remove the crucifix from the altar. Calls were made for an Index of modern art. Journalists around the world covered the disputes.
At stake in the contention was modernity’s capacity to enlarge Christian iconography. The church’s capacity to enkindle a renewal of sacred art was also in play. So were questions about the role of faith in the creation of religious art. (Richier was an atheist.)
Richier’s Crucifix created a tempest from which the cross as a work of art has not yet recovered, whether created for liturgical use or not. The paintings of Stanley Spencer (Crucifixion, 1921) and Max Beckmann (Crucifixion, 1909); Graham Sutherland’s series of crucifixions from the mid-1940s; the bas reliefs of Giacomo Manzù—these and others merit attention in any serious overview of the cross in the modern era. But feminist angst over patriarchal values and the cross’s possible contribution to abuse of women fit more readily into Jensen’s reach for contemporary relevance. She erases from memory 20th-century expressions of a crucifixion that might stir modern souls.
In the end, much comes down to sensibility no less than remembrance. In all academic work, there is a difference between scholars who love their sources and those who simply collect them. In Augustine’s lovely phrasing, only the lover sings.
Maureen Mullarkey is a senior contributor to the Federalist and keeps the weblog Studio Matters.
