You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
We belong to the Crucified.
The core of Christian dogma may be expressed as follows: nearly two thousand years ago a man named Jesus permitted himself to be tortured to death on a wooden cross. This act is supposed to have “saved” or “redeemed” humankind from an earlier “fall” into sin. We were “redeemed” because we were all sinful to begin with, and because the man who accepted this torture and death was none other than God himself, in the person of God the Son. As Saint John of Damascus wrote in the eighth century: “… from the time that God, the Son of God, who is unchangeable by reason of His Godhead, chose to suffer voluntarily, He wiped out our debt, by paying for us a most admirable and precious ransom” (29).
This redemption of debt is the central story of the gospels, but it may be represented visually as well. Icons depicting Christ's crucifixion often show humankind in the image of the skull of sinful Adam (Russian “adamova golova”) at the foot of the cross, thereby directly connecting Christ's suffering to human sinfulness (Averintsev 65). Psychoanalytically speaking, God's self-willed crucifixion has had the effect of at least conditionally relieving us from guilt.1 This relief comes, however, only if we accept Jesus as God, our savior and redeemer. Exactly what terrible sin was committed by the occupants of the garden of Eden in the first place has been the subject of endless debate.2 Whatever it was, it left a legacy of monstrous guilt, hence the need for a redemption which only the God-human (“Bogochelovek”) Christ could effect.
Some icons represent the crucifixion of Christ with painful explicitness. Theologically speaking, such icons represent Christ's “kenosis,” that is, his self-emptying, his temporary relinquishment of divinity, his descent to the human level (Philippians 2:7). Unlike other visual and somewhat abstract representations of Christ, such as a simple cross or a lamb, the representation of Christ as a real human being nail