Cross references.

I remember a wooden crucifix that hung in my parent's bedroom. One could slide the top of the crucifix off, stand it in a slot, take the two small candles kept in the inside hollow of the cross, and fix them in holders. There was also a small bottle of holy water and a cloth upon which to set everything. The crucifix could become, on short notice, a small altar ready for a priest who might visit the home when someone was sick. Many Catholic homes had and still have a crucifix: a metal corpus affixed to the cross with the inscription above the inclined and thorn-crowned head of Christ. The nailheads would be seen and his side already pierced. A few more extravagant models might have a small skull at the bottom of the cross to remind us that Jesus died at the "place of the skull" (golgotha in Hebrew, translated into Latin as calvaria).

The crucifix is so common that variations of it can be found everywhere in the Catholic world. A miniature version is on a rosary I possess, and every room at the university where I teach has a crucifix like it hanging over the front chalkboard. What I would suggest, however, is that if one looks at these simple, mass-produced religious objects carefully and with an eye for history, it is easy to detect a history of Catholic theology and piety.

The cross was not depicted at all much before the fourth century. The earliest cross that shows a body on it is a third-century graffito showing a man with the head of a donkey affixed to a cross and under it the sentence: Alexamenos adores his god. Now in a Roman museum, it was obviously scratched on a whitewashed wall to poke fun at the perceived stupidity of an early Christian's faith.

After the fourth-century peace of the church with the state, the cross became more and more common in Christian art. By the fifth century, one began to see a corpus affixed to the cross, but Christian artists only slowly learned to fix bodies on the cross; usually the cross was bodiless and highly adorned to show the cross not as an instrument of shame but as a vehicle for salvation.

By the Middle Ages it was not only common to depict the figure of Christ on the cross but, under the influence of the Cistercians and, later, the Franciscans, deep devotional interest in the suffering Christ flourished. Under a wave of piety and devotion, medieval artists began to showcase the wounded hands, feet, and side of Christ as well as his crown of thorns and the marks of his scourging. This tendency received its most intense expression in "The Crucifixion" by Matthias Grunewald, done on the eve of the Reformation. This painting depicts a horribly contorted Christ, laced with bloody cuts, and literally bending down the crosspiece of his cross under the weight of death and sin.

In the early Renaissance and later, the great painters and sculptors inherited this tradition of emphasizing Christ's suffering and added to it their desire to show Christ as a perfect and beautiful human being. This strain of Christian humanism emphasized, for example, the beauty of his face and his body as an anatomically correct one.

These additions and modifications also quietly testify to different gospel messages: the adorned bodiless crosses of the Byzantine world proclaim Christ overcoming death on the cross; the tortured medieval crucifixes are meant to move people to sorrow and repentance; the beautiful suffering Christs of the young Michelangelo or the mature Velazquez speak of the beautiful human dignity in death of the incarnate Christ.

When we look at a crucifix, then, we are looking at a summary of the church's meditation on the mystery of the cross down through the ages. And that raises a profound question: What does our age contribute (or better, What should it add) to the symbolism of the crucifix?

Should we, like Henri Matisse, make a wired cross like a sculptor's armature and wait for someone to add the body? Should the crucified Jesus have a prayer shawl wrapped around his loins and float over a Jewish village to remind Christians that Jesus was a Jew, as Marc Chagall does in his painting "White Crucifixion"? Why do people get so dreadfully upset when a sculptor puts a female body on a cross and calls it "Christa"? Dante, after all, says that Lady Poverty climbed up on the cross with Jesus and embraced him.

The garden-variety crucifixes one finds on Catholic walls everywhere are the heirs of a long artistic tradition that dates back to the earliest centuries of the church.

By Lawrence S. Cunningham, chair of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame.