The Sign of the Cross

I have spoken of his humiliation, his frailty and his suffering, and of why God thought it right to undergo them. Now I must give an account of the cross itself and explain what it means. What the Most High Father arranged from the beginning, and how he ordained everything that was carried out, is taught not only by the prophets’ foretelling, which came first and was proved true in Christ, but by the very manner of his suffering. For nothing he suffered was empty of meaning. Each thing carried a figure and a great significance, as did the divine works he performed: their strength and power counted for something at the time, but they also declared something about what was coming. [a]

Heavenly power opened the eyes of the blind and gave light to those who could not see; and by that act he was saying that he would turn to the nations, which did not know God, and light up the hearts of the foolish with the light of wisdom, and open the eyes of their understanding to look on the truth. For they are truly blind who do not see heavenly things, and who, hemmed in by the darkness of ignorance, worship what is earthly and frail. He opened the ears of the deaf. Plainly the divine power did not stop at that; he was declaring that people who had no truth would soon both hear and understand the divine words of God. For you may truly call those deaf who do not hear what is heavenly and true and worth doing. He loosed the tongues of the mute so that they spoke plainly — a power worth wondering at even simply as it worked. But there was another meaning contained in that display of power. It showed that people who until lately knew nothing of heavenly things would soon receive the training of wisdom and be able to speak about God and the truth. For a man who does not know the divine nature is truly speechless and mute, however eloquent he may be. When the tongue has begun to speak the truth — that is, to set out the excellence and majesty of the one God — only then is it doing the work its own nature is for; as long as it says what is false, it is not being put to its proper use. So a man who cannot say divine things must necessarily be speechless. He also restored the feet of the lame to the work of walking — a strength of divine action worth praising. But the figure meant this: that the wanderings of a worldly and straying life would be checked, and the path of truth opened, so that people might walk it and come to God’s favor. For a man is truly to be counted lame who, wrapped in the gloom and darkness of folly and not knowing which way to go, walks the road of death with feet ready to stumble and fall.

In the same way he cleansed the stains and blemishes of diseased bodies — no small exercise of immortal power. But that strength was a picture of this: that by the training of righteousness his teaching would purify people defiled by the stains of sins and the blemishes of vices. For those ought truly to be reckoned leprous and unclean whom boundless lusts drive to crimes, or insatiable pleasures to disgraceful deeds, and whom the marks of dishonorable acts brand with a stain that never comes out. He raised up the bodies of the dead as they lay, and calling them aloud by name he brought them back from death. What is more fitting for God, what more worthy of every age’s wonder, than to have called back a life that had run its course, to have added time to a man’s completed time, to have unsealed the secrets of death? But this unspeakable power was the image of a greater energy. It showed that his teaching would have such might that the nations throughout the world, estranged from God and subject to death, would be brought to life by the knowledge of the true light and would arrive at the rewards of immortality. For you may rightly judge those to be dead who, not knowing God the giver of life, press their souls down from heaven to earth and run into the traps of eternal death. So the actions he performed at the time, for the present, were representations of things to come. What he displayed in injured and diseased bodies was a figure of spiritual things — for the present, showing us works of a power that was not of earth; for the future, showing the power of his heavenly majesty.

So, just as his works signified a greater power as well, his suffering did not go before us as something plain, or unnecessary, or accidental. As the things he did signified the great effect and power of his teaching, so the things he suffered announced that wisdom would be hated. The vinegar they gave him to drink and the gall they gave him to eat held out hardship and bitterness in this life to those who follow the truth. And although his suffering, harsh and severe in itself, gave us a sample of the torments to come that virtue itself sets before those who linger in this world, still drink and food of that kind, coming into the mouth of our teacher, gave us an example of the pressures and labors and miseries that everyone who follows the truth must undergo and endure. For the truth is bitter, and detested by all who, having no virtue, give up their life to deadly pleasures. The placing of a crown of thorns on his head declared that he would gather to himself a holy people out of people who were guilty. For a ring of people standing around is also called a corona. And we, who before we knew God were unjust, were thorns — that is, evil and guilty, not knowing what was good, strangers to the very idea of righteousness and to the works of it, fouling everything with wickedness and lust. So, taken from briars and thorns, we surround the sacred head of God; for, called by him and spread around him, we stand beside God, our Master and Teacher, and crown him King of the world and Lord of all the living.

But as for the cross, it has great force and meaning, which I will now try to show. As I explained earlier, when God had determined to set humanity free he sent to the earth, as his ambassador, a teacher of virtue — one who could both train people to innocence by saving instructions and open the way of righteousness by works and deeds done in front of their eyes, so that by walking that way and following his teacher a person might reach eternal life. So he took a body and was clothed in a garment of flesh, in order to hold out to the people he had come to teach both examples of virtue and reasons to practice it. And when he had given an example of righteousness in every duty of life, he came into the hands of a godless nation, in order to teach people also the patient endurance of pain and the contempt of death, by which virtue is made perfect and complete. He could have avoided them, since he knew what was coming; he could have driven them off by the same power with which he did his wonderful works. Instead he endured tortures and lashes and thorns. At the last he did not even refuse to undergo death, so that under his leadership humanity might triumph over death, beaten and led away in chains with all its terrors. But here is the reason the Most High Father chose that kind of death for him, in preference to the others he might have let him be visited with. For someone may perhaps say: “Why, if he was God and chose to die, did he not at least suffer by some honorable kind of death? Why the cross in particular? Why a shameful punishment, one that seems unworthy even of a man who is free, guilty though he may be?” First of all, because the one who had come in humility to bring help to the humble and the lowly, and to hold out to everyone the hope of safety, was to suffer by the kind of punishment the humble and the lowly usually suffer, so that there might be no one at all who could not imitate him. In the next place, it was so that his body might be kept whole, since he had to rise from the dead on the third day.

And no one should be unaware of this: he himself, speaking beforehand about his suffering, made it known that he had the power, when he chose, to lay down his life and to take it up again. So, because he had already laid down his life while fastened to the cross, the men who executed him did not think it necessary to break his bones, as their usual practice was; they only pierced his side. So his unbroken body was taken down from the cross and carefully laid in a tomb. All of this was done so that his body would not be injured and broken and made unfit for rising again. That also was a main reason God chose the cross: he had to be lifted up on it, and God’s suffering had to become known to all nations. For a man hung on a cross is both visible to everyone and higher than the rest. So the cross was chosen above all, to signify that he would be so visible and so lifted up that all the nations of the whole world would come together at once to know and worship him. In the end there is no nation so uncivilized, no region so remote, that his suffering and the height of his majesty are unknown there. So in his suffering he stretched out his hands and measured out the world, to show even then that a great crowd gathered together out of every language and tribe, from the sun’s rising to its setting, was about to come under his wings and to receive on their foreheads that great and lofty sign.

And the Jews even now display a figure of this same thing when they mark their doorways with the blood of a lamb. When God was about to strike the Egyptians, in order to keep the Hebrews safe from that blow he had ordered them to kill a white lamb without a blemish and to put a mark from its blood on their doorways. And so, when the firstborn of the Egyptians had died in a single night, the Hebrews alone were saved by the sign of the blood — not that the blood of a sheep had such power in itself as to be the safety of human beings, but it was an image of things to come. For Christ was the white lamb without a blemish; that is, he was innocent and just and holy. Killed by those same Jews, he is the salvation of everyone who has written on his forehead the sign of blood — that is, the sign of the cross, on which he shed his blood. For the forehead is the top of the doorway in a human being, and the wood sprinkled with blood is the emblem of the cross. Finally, the killing of the lamb, by the very people who perform it, is called the Pascha, from the word paschein, because it is a figure of the suffering, which God, foreknowing what was to come, handed down through Moses for his people to keep. At that time the figure was effective in the present for turning aside the danger — so that it may be clear how great an effect the truth itself is going to have for the protection of God’s people in the last extremity of the whole world. But in what way, and in what region, all will be safe who have marked this sign of the true and divine blood on the highest part of their body, I will show in the last book.

For the present it is enough to show how great an effect the power of this sign has. Anyone who has seen how the demons, when they are put on oath by Christ, flee out of the bodies they had laid siege to, knows what a terror this sign is to them. For just as he himself, when he was living among people, put every demon to flight by his word and restored to their right minds the men whose minds had been stirred up and driven mad by the demons’ dreadful attacks, so now his followers, in their Master’s name and by the sign of his suffering, drive the same polluted spirits out of people. And it is not hard to prove it. For when they sacrifice to their gods, if anyone with a marked forehead is standing by, the sacrifices give no favorable sign. [q]

And this has often been the cause of punishment for wicked kings. Some of their attendants who belonged to our religion were standing beside their masters as they sacrificed, with the sign placed on their foreheads, and they made their masters’ gods run away, so that the gods could not mark out what was to come in the entrails of the victims. When the soothsayers realized it, at the prompting of the same demons they had been sacrificing to, they complained that profane men were present at the sacrifices, and so they drove their princes into a rage. The princes then attacked the temple of God and defiled themselves with real sacrilege — which was paid for by the harshest punishments on the persecutors’ side. And not even from this can blind men understand either that this is the true religion, since it holds such great power for overcoming, or that the other one is false, since it cannot hold its ground or even come to the fight.

But they say the gods do this out of hatred, not out of fear — as though anyone could hate another person unless it were someone who harms him, or who has the power to harm him. On the contrary, it would fit their majesty better to visit those they hated with punishment on the spot, rather than to run away from them. But since they can neither come near the people in whom they will see the heavenly mark, nor harm those whom the immortal sign guards like an unbreachable wall, they wear them down by means of other people and persecute them by other men’s hands. And if they admit that these demons exist, we have won. For the true religion must be the one that both understands what demons are and understands their cunning, and that forces them, beaten and subdued, to give way to it. If they deny that demons exist, they will be refuted by the testimony of poets and philosophers. But if they do not deny that demons exist and are malignant, what is left except for them to claim that there is a difference between gods and demons? Then let them explain to us the difference between the two kinds, so that we may know what is to be worshipped and what is to be cursed, and whether the two have any agreement with each other or are genuinely opposed. If some necessity unites them, how shall we tell them apart? Or how shall we combine the honor and worship owed to each kind? If on the other hand they are enemies, how is it that the demons do not fear the gods, or that the gods cannot put the demons to flight?

Look: here is a man stirred up by a demon’s driving, out of his senses, raving, mad. Let us bring him into the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest; or, since Jupiter does not know how to cure people, into the shrine of Aesculapius or Apollo. Let the priest of either one, in his god’s name, order the wicked spirit to come out of the man. There is no way it can happen. Then what is the power of the gods, if the demons are not under their control? But in fact the same demons, when they are put on oath by the name of the true God, flee at once. What reason is there why they should fear Christ and not fear Jupiter, unless the ones the crowd reckons to be gods are demons too? Finally, if a man plainly suffering an attack of a demon were set in the middle, and the priest of Delphian Apollo with him, the two will dread the name of God in exactly the same way; Apollo will leave his priest as fast as the demon’s spirit leaves the man; and once his god has been put on oath and driven off, the priest will be silent forever. So the demons they admit are objects of cursing are the same as the gods they offer their prayers to.

If they think we are not to be believed, let them believe Homer, who ranked the supreme Jupiter among the demons; and the other poets and philosophers too, who speak of the same beings sometimes as demons and sometimes as gods — one of the two names being true and the other false. For these most wicked spirits, when they are put on oath, then confess that they are demons; when they are worshipped, then they lie and say they are gods, so that they may send errors in among people and call them away from the knowledge of the true God, which is the only way eternal death can be escaped. These are the same beings who, in order to bring humanity down, have set up various systems of worship for themselves in different regions — under false and borrowed names, though, so that they could deceive. Because they could not rise to divinity by themselves, they took to themselves the names of powerful kings, so that under those titles they might claim divine honors for themselves. That error can be scattered and brought into the light of the truth. For if anyone wants to look further into the matter, let him gather the men who are skilled in calling up spirits from the dead. Let them call up Jupiter, Neptune, Vulcan, Mercury, Apollo, and Saturn the father of them all. All of them will answer from the world below; questioned, they will speak and confess about themselves and about God. After that, let them call up Christ. He will not be there; he will not appear, for he was in the world below no more than two days. What proof can be brought forward more certain than this? I have no doubt that Trismegistus arrived at the truth by some proof of this kind — the man who said many things about God the Son that are contained in the divine secrets.