The Meaning of the Cross

Catholics around the world have entered the Holy Week, the seven days before Easter. Their Orthodox brothers and sisters shall follow them in a week’s time. Easter is the celebration of the resurrection of Christ whom, according to Dostoevsky, “[…] there is nothing as profound, as compassionate, as rational and yet humane, as perfect and more to be loved than Christ…If someone were to prove that Christ is outside the truth and if the truth truly closes him out, I would rather remain with Christ than with the truth.”

The Easter holiday begins with forty days of lent, the last seven days being the Holy Week which brings together three ancient ceremonies: the Last Supper, the Good Friday and Easter (which ends with the Easter Sunday when the resurrection is celebrated). Following the Resurrection, Christ spent another forty days on earth teaching his disciples and at the end of this period, He ascended to Heaven – this is known as the Ascension Day and marks the end of Easter as a holiday.

The celebration of the resurrection of Christ, as a real and mystical event, is theologically, philosophically and psychologically complex, with numerous symbols and lessons about God, human nature and our relationship with life and death. Easter is the most profound moment for the Christian faith for it contains its entire essence. The symbolic significance and complexity can be seen in the images displayed below.

I cannot hope to even attempt to give an explanation to this most profound of mysteries. Therefore, I will confine myself to offer an interpretation, and a rather straightforward one, of a single symbol which, as we shall see, is not as easy to read as it may seem at first. We will focus on trying to understand the meaning of the Cross. In particular, there are three interpretations of the Cross which we shall explore: a symbol of the moment of death, a symbol of ultimate sacrifice and a symbol of what Nietzsche would call amor fati (or love one’s fate). These three meanings are depicted in the prayer which Christians say throughout lent, including on Good Friday, known as The Way of the Cross.

Consisting of fourteen stations (or meditations) which depict fourteen episodes from the moment when Christ was condemned to death to the moment that He was placed in the tomb, The Way of the Cross shows Christ, the Son of God, at His most human and thus most vulnerable and painful moments which include: falling three times on the way to Golgotha (or Calvary, which is the place outside Jerusalem where Christ was crucified alongside two thugs) and each time picking up his cross, one time with the help of a man known as Simon of Cyrene, seeing His devastating mother as Christ carries his cross through the shouting crowds, doubting about God’s will as He hangs on the cross (shouting “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”), dying, being taken down from the cross and placed in His mother’s arms (the inspiration for Pietà) and then buried. The last day of saying The Way of the Cross is the Good Friday, for on the third day after He was buried, Christ rose from the dead.

The three meanings of the Cross which we have highlighted above are ingrained in The Way of the Cross prayer. However, what we aim to do here is to provide these explanations in a more concrete and thus less mystical manner, for the purpose is to show the complexity, importance and power of this symbol in our daily lives. The theological significance of the Cross is, of course, given by the fact that it was the object on which Christ died. However, there are psychological, philosophical and even social aspects to this symbol, aspects that we encountered in and around ourselves.

A Symbol of the Moment of Death

The moment of death is depicted in station twelve of The Way of the Cross – “Jesus dies on the Cross”. The scene is sober and dramatic: “And when the sixth hour had come there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?”, which means: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. When the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that he thus breathed his last, he said: “Truly this man was the Son of God”.”

As I wrote in In Defence of Death, death itself does not exist, but the moment of death is real: “Make no mistake, the moment of death is real, but death itself is not.” I then attempted to demonstrate this to be the case for religious and non-religious people alike, but in different ways. This truth is depicted in Christianity by the resurrection of Christ (an event which nullified death). However, this perspective is perhaps older than or as old as the Abrahamic faith, as Terence McKenna stated: “nothing lasts but nothing is lost” or that “death has no sting”, referring to the wisdom of the old religions of the shamans.

The moment of death is real, but death is not. Thus, the symbol of the Cross represents something real and tangible, something inevitable in our lives: the ultimate cross that we have to carry is to face the moment of death, which is the moment of transition between this world and that realm of the soul, eternal and unchanging. As Father Tryphon said recently: “Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.” This is one of the most profound and difficult truths to acknowledge and accept, especially for the post-modern Western society of today for which truth, objectivity and spirituality are vulgar, even threatening, notions. Why? Because it means that our obsession with material things, with fame and money, with power and politics, as well as the dominant moral relativism and rule of and by science are all dust. Are we brave enough to face this fact?

To thinkers like Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche the idea of a world that exists beyond this one is abhorrent, even evil; they thought that to live with such a notion – as the spirit or the soul – is to deny life itself (in the case of Nietzsche) or to live in perpetual hypocrisy (in the case of Stirner). But philosophy cannot penetrated the world of the soul and therefore, it is only natural that we, as human beings, when we try to illegitimately extrapolate our thoughts into the realm where only faith has access to that we get stuck in the anti-chamber of knowledge. Even the consummate nihilists, who proclaim that they have placed the self on nothing but the self itself, again and again in an infinite loop, remain in that anti-chamber, no matter how wide the ocean of Existence seems to extend before them, it ends in the point of nothingness and this is repeated again, creating that limit which only faith can break – if you get to the door (at which Zarathustra arrived) and upon which the word “Moment” is inscribed, and the past unites with the future in front of you right under the door, look vertically, not horizontally.

As the symbol of the moment of death, the Cross represents pain, agony and despair. Upon the wooden frame, the dying Christ, in His most human hour, cried out: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” When faced with the Unknown, life after death, while experiencing the letting go of everything that made up one’s conscious self, some feeling of anxiety may well overcome the person in their moment of death. What Christ shows is that even those whose faith is unshakable, that even those who are ready to die for their faith, even they are only human and therefore, they are not immune to the emotions that make us all kneel when facing the moment of death.

The Cross therefore can be seen as the death bed of humanity. One of the most vivid representations of this interpretation of the symbol of the Cross comes from the Polish painter, Zdzisław Beksiński. Witnessing the horrors of the second world war, Beksiński was deeply moved by the violent and destructive events; his paintings depict the most hidden and profound representations of our subconscious part of the psyche, where the soul lies silent and speaks through dreams and visions, like in the case of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov who dreamed up in a moment of inspiration the story known as The Grand Inquisitor. Beksiński’s artwork, which seems to come from that quiet but very active part of our psyche, blends death with the symbol of the Cross in the most unique way, as shown below.

When Christ was crucified, it was up on the hill of Golgotha. Some paintings depict the scene of the crucifixion with the three crosses standing tall over the witnesses and against the landscape of ancient Jerusalem. Perhaps the meaning behind this sort of imagery is to suggest that the moment of death is the inescapable and unignorable face of our reality as human beings. The Cross, even if we try to ignore it, is always there, for each one of us as individuals and then for humanity as a whole.

Although the Cross can be seen as a symbol of the moment of death, imbued with suffering, tragedy and shattering lament that dissolves into the despair behind the words of the three crucified that day, fear is not a main element of the symbol. Quite the opposite: there are displays of strength, based solely on faith, when Christ faced death. One such display was His prayer for the people who were mocking Him, saying “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” – to see the people who condemned one to death, a death that was meant to insult the person (such as crucifixion was), and after all the pain and despair, to be able to not hate but instead to look at them and their actions with pity is a powerful embodiment of spiritual strength. Here we see Christ affirming life with all its suffering, here we see what Nietzsche denied that is possible in Christianity, namely, to find the inner strength to face the nihility of life, which seems to had been present as a sentiment during the moments of the crucifixion, to see that nihility and overcome it through will to faith: Christ’s actions on the cross are examples of overcoming the abyss of existence through faith.

Therefore, the Cross is the symbol of the moment of death and the symbol with which Christ conquered the nihility of existence by affirming life in the face of the moment of death.

A Symbol of Ultimate Sacrifice

The second interpretation of the Cross is that of a symbol of ultimate sacrifice. In a strict sense, this is still related to death – the ultimate sacrifice is to give one’s life for a higher goal, in this case for the atonement of mankind. Indeed, Christ’s death on the cross can be seen as suicide; this perspective, which veils a subtle but acidic criticism, is not new; however, its essence is to devalue the meaning of the Cross as a symbol of ultimate sacrifice and to turn it into a mere symbol of useless death.

We will not delve into the moral nuances of suicide here in any detail. What we must state however is what distinguishes a sacrificial death from suicide, and the difference consists in the following: suicide happens due to the lack of higher values (higher than the self) which causes such despair that conquers the fear of pain and of the next world, while sacrificial death is to die for higher values (higher than the self) as one has already conquered the fear of pain not through despair but with the knowledge of the afterlife.

But sacrifice for what? For the entire humanity. Christ, the Son of God, put above His own holy Self, the whole of humanity, in an act that demonstrated our value as individuals – which, contrary to today’s attitude towards life (which is a blend of radical postmodernism and exaggerated modernism), it is not quantifiable and it is qualitatively beyond words, i.e. it is invaluable.

Moreover, the sacrifice of Christ – who took upon Himself the sins of the world (achieving what Starets Zosima’s older brother uttered in the days before his death: “‘[…] each of us is truly guilty of other’s sin, only people don’t want to acknowledge it, but if they were to acknowledge it – there’d be paradise on earth immediately!’”) – set forth a model to follow, a path which all people can embark upon: “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me,” Christ said to his disciples.

What does it mean to follow Christ, under the sign of the Cross? In this sense it means to face up reality, your fate, to listen to your calling, to the voice of your soul, embrace it, follow it and embark on the path of truth. However, as we saw in the first paragraph of this essay, in the words of Dostoyevsky, the truth of man may not be the truth of God, hence why we must also “give up our own way” to find truth with capital T – this is not a contradiction, although it appears so. The muddled perception comes from the fact that we think, imagine and feel with the ego (the image that we create in ourselves based on how we think we should be, or on whom we think we should become), rather than allowing our soul to speak to us and us to listen quietly to the path set forth by our soul.

This process of meditation requires tranquillity which, in turn, demands a rhythm of life that is not possible to live out in today’s “advanced” world of giant cities and global webs of information. Nature, monasticism, the work of the field, to look in the eyes of your fellow man or woman who works besides you under the sky, in heat or freezing conditions, to touch the earth, to stop and think of God, here the soul speaks to us and we can hear it. To follow Christ by taking up our own cross means therefore first to identify and understand what is our own cross (by listening to the voice of our soul, not to that of our ego) and then by following it, even if it leads to the end of our life on earth.

In our age, we seem to be obsessed with superheroes: with characters that give their all for a higher goal, often to save humanity from some mortal threat. Movies, books, cartoons, songs are made for the glory of these imaginary superheroes. They may be imaginary, but that does not mean that they totally surreal: behind their creation lies a deep and rather common human need: to sacrifice ourselves for something greater than our own self. This does not mean that we want to die necessarily but that we want to give our own self up for higher purposes. Marriage is one example. Here, one pledges (gives oneself) to another person, until death separates them. “I give myself to you and you give yourself to me, until death parts us”. Some people even commit to their pledge after they have been widowed to the end of their days on earth: a sacrifice for love that transcends the ephemerality of this world. Oh! In this we find our humanity!

Another example of sacrifice is in the actions taken by many parents for their children: those who leave behind their homeland, those who leave behind their own interests and passions, those who do what is necessary no matter the level of discomfort (psychological or physical) because their children represent something that is above their own selves. We were created to sacrifice for one another. However, one of the greatest sacrifices is to surrender to God: this act consists of the acknowledgement of the illusion of one’s autonomy (i.e. that we belong to God) while, at the same time, admitting the free will (the awareness of morality) that was acquired through the original sin and setting forth in life with the sole desire to follow God’s will for one’s fate, no matter the fate.

However, such view is not encouraged in the advanced and very enlightened society of today. Rather, it is ignored or, worse, mocked. The world we have inherited after World War II, especially in rich and developed nations which have outsourced most of their hard working jobs to cheap labour pools created by globalisation, is quite alien to the notion of sacrifice: comfort, pleasure, fast results, hedonistic lifestyles supported by a nihilism that remains temporarily patched by materialism but which swallows the person entirely when one asks the dreadful question of “why live” or “what is this all for”, this sickly existence of man in a world characterised by hyper technology, overflow of information and a desperate lack of spiritual wisdom, is incompatible with the idea and process of sacrifice, unless it is for the same things: material gains (monetary success, properties, gadgets etc.), information and technological supremacy (political capital and military might), more pleasure (comfort) or scientific progress (meaning little more than corporate / government funded research that results in more of the same things already repeated). Sacrifice for anything else – for virtues, for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, for art for the sake of art, for God, for love – is seen with suspicion and ridicule.

However, the desire to sacrifice one’s self, to give up the self for higher ideals, it is the call to a meaningful life and therefore, in the absence of “taking the cross” and following Christ’s model (to become who we are irrespective of the end – bearing in mind that Christ knew that He will die), we are not only spiritual orphans, but we regress psychologically trapped in the prison of sciences, pseudo-philosophy and kitsch or propaganda that passes for art.

A Symbol of Amor Fati

Closely related to the above interpretation of the Cross is this final one – the idea of embracing, even loving, one’s fate with all that it has been written for one to carry. This idea of amor fati has been a feature of many philosophers (both Eastern and Western) since ancient times. It was made more popular by Fredrick Nietzsche who wrote: “amor fati: the fact that a man wishes nothing to be different, either in front of him or behind him, or for all eternity. Not only must the necessary be borne, and on no account concealed,—all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity,—but it must also be loved….”.

As stated above, Christ picked up His cross and walked to Golgotha knowing that He would die. He knew this all His life and still went through – amor fati. Christ acted in accordance with the will of the Father, He surrendered to God, the Father. Before one mocks this act of courage by saying “and look where that got Him – to His death!”, assuming that one ignores the wisdom of the world’s religions that death is an illusion, one must consider that by taking up His cross and following His destiny through to the end, Christ was resurrected and ascended to Heaven (both events are celebrated during Pashca).

This resurrection, psychologically speaking, represents the birth of a new self. Again, despite Nietzsche’s clear and strong criticism of Christianity, his views on “how one becomes what one is” present parallels with this notion of the death and resurrection of Christ: by loving one’s fate and affirming life as it is, the old self, tricked by religion, socialism and humanism (“all idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity”), made room for the consummate nihilist, the new self, which for the German philosopher represented the true self. Similarly, Christ followed His fate to the point of the moment of death, affirmed life while nailed to the cross (in the very moment of death), and was reborn a new Self, the Lamb of God.

This process, especially when it concerns the ego, happens to us multiple times during our lives if and only if we take our own cross and follow the path of the Truth: if we lie to ourselves, and thus the ego still lives, fed by insincerity, then this transformation can never occur. Only when one is possessed by a thirst for the Truth, by what Dostoyevsky called a “yearning for faith”, so acute, so strong, that one cannot do anything else but to allow the ego to die, again, and again, until one becomes who one is! But only when one is driven by faith, under God, to return to God – not for any other “law”, of nature or man, for if one shall let the ego die in the absence of faith, the “contemplative inertia” of the underground described by Dostoevsky will swallow one whole and despair and humiliation shall overwhelm the person until they turn to pure pleasures.

Therefore, the symbol of the Cross becomes the symbol of resurrection of the self through the acceptance and love of one’s fate when faith is embraced as the guiding light of life in the abyss of Existence.

Conclusion

This short essay looked to interpret the symbol of the Cross, within the theological framework of Easter, in a philosophical, psychological and social way. The purpose was to highlight the relevance of this symbol in our daily lives. Thus, the Cross represents the moment of death (the inevitable end that we must face in this life), with the knowledge that “death has no sting”, the symbol of ultimate sacrifice (to give one’s self in the pursuit and protection of higher values, even if this leads to one’s demise on earth) and, last but not least, the representation of amor fati through which the new self is reborn.

Conversely, an inverted cross represents the opposite of these things: it negates the moment of death (the inevitable), thus representing falsehood, it negates the human need to sacrifice, thus representing an empty life and it negates the rebirth of the self by accepting and loving one’s fate, thus representing the triumph of ego over the thirst for faith and the prevention of “becoming who one is”.

I hope that this essay, above all, has showed that a symbol is not just a shape or a sign – it has profound meaning behind it. Therefore, when it becomes an object of commercial use, a tool for political purposes, a device of propaganda, when it loses its true meaning, that symbol is denigrated. The Cross is a symbol which is universal to the human condition and should therefore be used in the appropriate context – that of the spirit.

Thank you for reading.