>> [Peter Holland] Well I don't need to tell
you the title for today because there it is, up there. But I do want to say just a few words about
Robin Jensen, who is Patrick O'Brien Professor of Theology and a concurrent professor of
art history. She came to Notre Dame now three years ago
from Vanderbilt where she was Luce Chancellor's Professor of the History of Christian Art
and Worship. I didn't so much read her CV as weigh it,
because there are so many items on it. There are not many among us who can count
already seven monographs, three edited books out, two more in press, two other books in
press, an enormous number of chapters in collections and articles and peer review journals. She is an immensely distinguished historian
of Christian art. Her most recent monograph, "The Cross: History,
Art, and Controversy," came out from Harvard University Press last year, and it examines
the way the central religious symbol appears in visual art, in legends and poetry, hymns,
liturgy, and devotional practices through time and space. Other books have titles like "Understanding
Early Christian Art," published in the year 2000; "Living Water: Images, Symbols, and
Settings of Early Christian Baptism," a book coauthored on Christianity and Roman Africa. She was a contributing editor for "Picturing
the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art," which came out from Yale University Press. And she is a co-editor of the "Cambridge History
of Late Antique Archaeology," and the recently published "Routledge Companion to Early Christian
Art." You get a sense of the extent of her concerns. I had to read recently, because I was on a
panel making decisions about it, an application for an extraordinary project that she is running
on baptistries of the early Christian world, a catalog and database, which is trying to
list and identify and record all the baptistries known from early Christian times across the
world. It is a quite amazing project, and I look
forward to seeing the results of that research in due course. Today she turns back to the moment at which
the cross became the symbol of the Church. Please welcome Robin Jensen. [applause]
>> [Robin Jensen] Peter, I think you stole my manuscript! [laughs] Alright. The cross. You know, it is so familiar to us from wall
crucifixes in all of our classrooms to jewelry, to steeple toppers, to, well, to this I hope
very familiar image from our Basilica, the Lady Chapel. Perhaps we tend, I think, to take the cross
for granted. Assuming it's always been there, and not always
very conscious of the fact that it depicts Christ suffering a violent, humiliating, and
excruciating death. That would be an example. Some Lenten seasons back I remember an advertisement,
some kind of television ad that suggested [audience request to speak louder] Is this
better? Okay. Some Lenten seasons back I remember seeing
a television advertisement which suggested that maybe we should be all wearing an electric
chair around our necks. It sort of made the point, I suppose, although
it seemed a very strange idea to me at the time, but it also pointed out to me that this
image of graphic suffering may well be something that many of us feel a little bit too blasé
about. But because it's such a ubiquitous part of
our visual world and so central an image in Christian art throughout the centuries, it
might come as a surprise to many of you that both the cross and the crucifix are missing
from early Christian culture, art, and artifacts until at least the late fourth century, and
probably not very common until the sixth to the eighth. I myself was a little puzzled by this when
I first discovered it many years ago, and over the last decades I've learned that scholars
have tried to explain this lack, this ostensibly missing image in a variety of ways, some even
suggesting that Christ's agonizing death was not particularly central to Christian theology. They would have liked the Good Shepherd and
nice, happy Jesus. But now I had at the time studied at least
enough Church history and theology to know that absolutely wasn't true. The cross and Jesus's death on the cross is
profoundly embedded in Christian teaching from the very beginning, at least from the
writings of the apostle Paul. So this is a manuscript illumination. It comes from the Middle Ages, but I love
this because it actually shows Paul opening up his bible and it's the opening P from the
letter to the Philippians, and out jumps Jesus from the cross. But this is a quotation, a set of quotations
from Paul's letter to the Corinthians, his first letter, and you can just quickly scan
this and it's all very familiar I'm sure to you that this is Paul's writing about the
cross and it is just one example. His letters also to the Galatians is even
more important for his developing a theology around the cross, what it meant, and why Jesus
was crucified. And of course he's famous for saying "I will
preach nothing except Christ crucified." So we put to rest the idea that Christians
didn't give much value to this story of Christ's death on the cross. They did. But they also found that it was a bit difficult
to explain, and they found that they had to justify it, understand it, probe its mysteries,
and that in doing so they ran up against some opposition from Jews and from Roman polytheists
in particular. And that's another long story. But what stepping away momentarily from the
problem of the missing cross, one might ask or you might wonder, if we didn't have a cross,
what did we have instead? And often this is what comes up. Certainly other symbols were extremely prevalent,
so we do have Christian symbols before the cross. We have them back at least to the beginning
of the third century, and what's really common is to see something like this: a fish on an
anchor, which could look a lot like a cross, and sometimes I remind my students, here we
are at the school of the Holy Cross and we find that kind of anchor symbol often in our
visual world, obviously. But there were other sorts of possible common
symbols that might have been used, and there are a number of quotations from early Christian
fathers. This one is sort of helpful. This is Justin, who was a martyr at the end
of the second century, and he says "the cross is visible in a ship's mast, for the sea is
not traversed except that trophy which is called a sail abides safe in the ship. The earth is not plowed without it. Diggers and mechanics do not work except with
tools that have this shape. Even the human form differs from irrational
animals in nothing else than that it reveals the form of the cross." So standing at prayer with your hands up in
the air, in some sense you also become the form of the cross. And one can see in early Christian funerary
plaques or tombstone plaques, often these images like this plow or this ship. And we might suggest that these are actually
perhaps crypto- or crosses that are supposed to be evident to us. >> Still, saying all that, the cross may be
referred to in these images, then we might want to say well, why not the cross then? What's wrong? You know, if you can do a plow or a ship's
mast and say that it's a cross, why not the cross? And I've pondered this question at length,
and I have nothing better to say about that except that perhaps it was so close yet to
the imagination and the experience of people at the time, that the actual cross or even
more, a depiction of Christ's death on the cross, would have been painfully graphic. And so there was a way of stepping back from
it and symbolizing it. It's also possible that Christians under persecution
were fearful about projecting it, although I tend to sort of step back and I'll say more
about that if we want. But let me instead turn to the time and the
reasons why the cross evidently first appeared. Why did this change then come about? And what did it look like when it first turned
up? It looked like this. This, I think, and I know that not everybody
will agree with my of my colleagues, but this I would say is possibly our first surviving
image of clearly the cross of Christ. Not something that's a ship's mast or a scratch
mark or a window pane or something else that might have looked like a cross. But here we have Jesus holding a cross, and
this is about the mid-fourth century, as a kind of scepter. This is not a cross that would hold body for
execution. It's his scepter of power, and it has gems
as you see running up it and so even more so it's a kind of triumphant, glorious symbol. He's standing here, he's actually standing
with these two short guys who are his, the holy apostles Peter and Paul on either side
of him, and on the left hand side is Peter being arrested and carried off, and on the
right hand side is Jesus under arrest. So there's some references here to the passion,
but we're not going to see a crucifixion. We don't see a crucifixion yet. >> Now this is another example of the same
composition, and it also was recently found in Spain and it's a beautiful green glass
paten which is etched with the same images of Peter and Paul, this time with halos, Christ
standing above them and holding this gemmed cross, and passing a book, in this case not
a scroll, to Peter. This is a drawing of it, you may see it a
little better in this image. Now historians, my friends, historians, have
long assumed that the first appearance of the cross in Christian art was connected to
the Emperor Constantine and his vision of a cross emblazoned on the heavens. This is a wonderful painting by Raphael, so
we could talk about this for some length. But it sort of gives you the, see up here
in the upper register of this painting, here it is, this is the thing he is supposed to
see. He's got a lovely medieval crown on, of course
he wouldn't have anything like this, but it's this vision of Constantine, the first Christian
emperor around 312. He had a vision of a cross, according to his
biographers, emblazoned on the noonday sky or in a dream. And so depending on who you read, he was ordered
to place a certain symbol on the shields and the helmets and the standards of his army,
of his troops, and take them into battle against his enemy Maxentius and at Rome's Milvian
bridge, a very famous battle, the turning point for Christian history. Constantine won this battle and we sort of
credit his conversion to Christianity because of God's patronage in this moment, giving
Constantine this great victory over his enemy. >> Now this is another sort of image of that,
a wonderful tapestry coming out of the workshop of Peter Paul Rubens, and kind of a funny
reconstruction of it for some reenactors I think someplace in France. But anyway, we get a sense of this, but you
know, if you look at this carefully, this is what we call a Christogram. It is a monogram for the title Christ, but
the two first letters of that word christos, the chi and the rho in Greek, and so it's
actually not a cross, right? It's another kind of figure. So when I think about this idea that we can
credit Constantine for the first cross, I think that's a little too simplistic. Constantine's symbol, or logo if you wanted
to call it, is like a cross but it's not a cross. It's initially an imperial emblem of military
conquest. And it appears most of all on Roman coinage
of Constantine and his sons, and it primarily does show up on soldiers' helmets, on shields,
on the standards they carried into battle as you can see here. But eventually this Christogram or chi rho
does get associated to the cross in an interesting way. It begins to appear on funerary objects. So this is something we call a sarcophagus,
you just saw one a few minutes ago. It's a great marble coffin in which very wealthy
Romans would bury their dead family members. We don't know who occupied this. What I can tell you is in the middle of the
fourth century, whoever did had a pretty good pile of money to spend on a funerary, on a
nice coffin. Now this is also an interesting object. It's in the Vatican museum, and it's an interesting
object in that it is also the first that I know of of clear depictions of scenes from
the Passion of Christ. So on the far left you see Simon of Cyrene
carrying the cross. It doesn't look like a very substantial cross,
but you know, there we are. And to the next niche over we have a Roman
soldier crowning Jesus, but not with a crown of thorns but with a crown of oak. So we're already saying something new about
the story. We're not absolutely literally depicting the
story here. Over on the right hand side you see a soldier
presenting Jesus, and I can tell you you always see Jesus in Roman art without a beard, so
you can always know which one is Jesus, actually. And he often has this long, curly hair. But he's standing in front here of Pilate,
and Pilate is turned away and there's a little servant holding a jug so that he may wash
his hands. Now that's as far as we get. What we would expect in the middle, what might
seem not natural to us, would be a crucifix. But instead of a crucifix we now have again
this gemmed cross, and if you look carefully you can see that it's got gems on it, surmounted
by a wreath, a wreath of victory like the one that Jesus is receiving here, and the
Constantinian monogram in the center. Two little birds are pecking at berries in
this wreath, and there's a lovely ribbon tied around it and two soldiers sitting at the
base of it, who in ordinary Roman coinage would actually be captive barbarians or somebody
at the base of a Roman trophy. Instead of that, we've transformed the whole
image. So we take Constantine's image of victory,
we put it on a cross, replace two Roman soldiers, perhaps this is the one who announced that
surely this is the son of God, and we put it in a Passion scene. This is no longer a reference to the emperor. It has now become a reference to Christ's
victory over death, and this says to everybody "victory" in the same way that any logo worth
its salt is going to be translated past its own particular meaning. So let me give you a closeup on that one. You can maybe see these gems a little better. They're often, they're obscured here, there's
many examples of this, actually. >> Now let me offer some ideas about when
I begin to see a real cross, not necessarily one like this, starting to appear. Certainly, some of the credit goes back to
the Emperor Constantine, or rather to his mother, Helena, who is said, and there's some
dispute about this I should warn you but I won't go into that, she is said to have discovered
the cross at the site of Golgotha in Jerusalem around the year 324 or 325. This is often depicted in wonderful paintings,
and this is actually a particularly good combination. You can see the Emperor's here, the Emperor's
mother ordering the digging up, and of course she's finding three crosses, right? And so one of the problems that will attend
the legend is how is she to know which of these three crosses is actually Jesus's cross? You don't want to use the wrong cross, right? So what we do is we find a person who's dead
and we bring them to the site of the digging and we try out each cross in order, and we
find the one that resurrects the dead man! So that's how we know which one is Jesus's
cross. It's also possible that one of them had the
plaque, but unfortunately that got detached. She found that too. She also found some nails. So she was actually given credit for finding
this cross, and it's a wonderful story but we probably don't have time to tell you the
whole story. But keep in mind that before her arrival on
this scene, or her son's who actually, he found the tomb, the place where Jesus was
buried, and began to build the big monument we now know as the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Before this time, before the early fourth
century, very few Christian pilgrims ventured to the Holy Land. It wasn't a place of pilgrimage or a destination. This was something that actually happened
around this time. And the combination of Constantine's discovery
of the Holy Sepulcher and his mother's finding the remains of Christ's holy cross prompted
the faithful to travel to these places, to visit where Jesus lived and died and was buried,
resurrected, and ascended. But it also, at the same time, fueled their
desire to bring something home with them, as we all do. And so people began to clamor to obtain small
slivers of the holy wood from the very cross of crucifixion, so much so that by the 360s
or the 380s the Bishop of Jerusalem is already saying it's everywhere in the world. And of course you know we have some of it
here in our Basilica. >> If you weren't a really special person,
if you weren't a VIP pilgrim, you probably had to be content with something secondary:
a little bit of oil poured over the wood of the cross and poured into a little ampule
like this. So if you were kind of a middle-class pilgrim
you got to bring this home, and we have a lot of examples of this. And you can see what's wonderful on these
is we actually have depictions of an empty cross with a bust of Christ, still no crucifix,
hovering over it and two thieves, the two thieves - we do get to see them crucified,
so we know that they can do this image. This is a scene of the women coming to the
empty tomb below, and the inscription says something like "oil from the holy wood of
the holy places of the Lord." This is a different one, and here we have,
I want you to keep this in mind, it's a leafy cross with a bust of Christ overhead. And these little figures here, here, and here
are actually venerating the cross. This is, we have one of these in the museum
in fact, and these are later but these you can see are openings for carrying away pieces
of the cross. And I want you to attend to how Christ is
depicted: as clothed and fairly rigorously presented, very alive. And that is the way that we see the first
image of crucifixion. >> In contrast to almost all these familiar
images to us, these early depictions of crucifixion don't stress Jesus's suffering or his physical
torment or his mental anguish. Rather, they show him alive and alert and
rather vigorous, often. So here, let me give you, this is a wonderful
ivory box. It's in the British Museum, it's taken apart
but it was a casket, either a reliquary casket for a relic of the cross, possibly also maybe
for the consecrated host. Not certain what it was used for, but it has
at least four existing panels. This is Christ, again here is Pilate and here's
Peter. There's Peter's rooster, these are wonderful
images. They're really beautifully rendered and they're
very small ivory panels, really about the size of a 4x6 index card. Here is the crucifixion scene, and you can
see Pilate's plaque or legend here, Rex Iudaeus is here, the Iud. And Christ is here and he's physically, he's
buff, you know? He's really robust. And this is actually the spear holder, but
the spear is missing, he's putting the spear into the side, this is Judas. So you have this wonderful contrast of this
robust, living Christ on the cross, his eyes open, looking rather stoic I admit, and looking
straight out at the viewer, with the hanging Judas and the money is spilling out of his
pouch here, and this tree bringing our eyes right down into the scene. So we're traveling through this and we are
to make that contrast between these two bodies. This is a beautiful early scene of the empty
tomb and it looks a little bit like the tomb that's actually even in the Holy Sepulcher
and that's not accidental. And down here is the doubting Thomas scene. But this is a little closeup on that cross. >> I will tell that - oh, here's another one
for you just to consider. Even into the sixth century we have a little
bit of sadness perhaps on this face, but becomes more and more typical to robe Christ in a
purple robe called a collobium with two golden stripes in contrast to the two thieves who
are half naked, and looking alive as he witnesses, he's aware of the scene. So it will be not until the eighth or ninth
century, quite late, before we start to see Christ dying on the cross, and his eyes beginning
to close. And this is possibly our earliest example,
and even yet it's still very unusual. And so this is an icon, a panel painting from
St. Catherine's monastery in Sinai. What I love about this one is you actually
very clearly see the stream of water and blood coming from the side wound here. Here's one of the thieves, they're getting
names now. We have the dice players at the base of the
cross and so forth. So we start to see the full composition of
the crucifixion as we're most used to us. But notice here, even yet Christ is still
wearing a purple royal robe and is, even in his death which is not according to the text
of course. It's also trying to insist that this is the
Lord of lords. >> Gradually, and this is already to the fourteenth
century, we can start to see this in the eleventh a little bit, much more in the thirteenth
and fourteenth, we start to see what is so much more familiar to us. Christ's arms above his head making this sort
of Y-shape, the sagging belly and body, the turn here of the legs. This is more familiar to our Western eyes,
not so much to Eastern eyes, but yes to our Western eyes this is what we begin to associate
with the crucifix. And instead of standing stoically by, watching
her son die, we start to see Mary beginning to sink, to swoon, to faint, and needing to
be caught by her companions, her female companions. There are signs of grief. Sometimes you'll see angels flying above,
weeping. This is beginning to happen, but it doesn't
happen until the middle of the Middle Ages, the thirteenth, the High Middle Ages, the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And it's associated, I believe, very clearly
with the developing devotion to the cross that begins with the Cistercians but particularly
gets developed with St. Francis and his stigmata, and then the Dominicans and then the others. But the attention to Christ's suffering is
something that we don't see in art and we don't actually see much in text until the
Middle Ages. And this as I said doesn't happen even all
at once, because even in the middle of all of that, we're still seeing this. We're still seeing, yes we have a bleeding
Christ, he's got blood coming from his wounds, and we have an eyes-open, very sturdy Christ
on the cross, and the cross as you see is not a wooden rugged cross. It has stars on it, and it is, you know, this
is the legend here, but it's really quite decorative and beautiful. And what happens is it also becomes part of
the opening of the sacramentary, the first words, "Igitur," you therefore, and becomes
the T of "Te igitur." This is also in the thirteenth century, so
you see it's also still overlapping time in which we have a beautiful Christ who's crowned
quite alive, his eyes are open, he is wearing a royal crown and a royal loincloth, if you
want to call it that. It's something called a perizoma and it actually
has jewels on it. So this was an altar cloth, possibly also
used for processions. >> So just a little bit more, we're getting
close to being done. I want to share with you something that I
find really interesting, and I learned a lot more about as I worked on my book. That for the first millennium, what Christians
tended to see as much as anything else were two fascinating types of crosses that I think
would give us new ways to consider the image. The first are these golden gem-studded crosses
that show up in mosaics, processional crosses, and reliquaries as well as paintings and textiles
from the fifth century onward. It may be a reference to a jeweled and gemmed
golden cross that was set up at the Holy Sepulcher by one of the emperors, possibly Theodosius
I at the end of the fourth century. That's not certain. It's gone, we don't know it. But it's a very interesting thing that this
starts to show up all over in church apses, in mosaics, and it's absolutely gorgeous. And I think it's also a reference to the sign
of the Messiah at the second coming. So this cross is emerging out of a starry
night sky in, this is an apse of a church, is also Transfiguration referenced, here are
three lamps at the base of it, Peter, James, and John as little sheep. And here is Moses and Elijah. So we have, oh and the hand of God coming
out of the sky here. So we have what is a kind of a sunset sky
and yet almost as an oculist opening or a window in the back of the church comes forward
this beautiful gemmed cross with a bust of Christ in the center, surrounded by pearls. This is a gift, the Emperor Justin II to the
people of Rome, or Pope John III, and you can see here again it's a processional cross
studded with gems. And in the center is a relic of the holy cross. So when I show this to my students sometimes
they sort of seem aghast, "it's terrible, they're putting gems on a cross!" I'm going, what better place would you put
your gems? This is a perfect place for gems, right, if
you have an extra gem or two! Let's put them on the cross! And this is actually a Coptic textile, so
it gives you another way in which these gemmed crosses were both real with real gems, and
depicted in art, in mosaic, in paintings, in textiles, all over. >> The second thing that I want to share with
you is what I call the Tree of Life type. And this is a cross that has either blooming
plants at its feet, this is an interesting set of trees here or in fact a palm tree itself. We see this pretty widely. It's supposed to represent, I think, the idea
that the cross of Christ is the new tree of life parallel to the one in the garden of
Eden. If Christ is the new Adam, his cross is the
new Tree of Life. And it brings back life, restores life, it's
verdant, it's leafy, it's life-giving, it's not death-dealing. It becomes filled with possibilities and promise
and hope, and this is so evident to me in this. Maybe many of you know this beautiful mosaic
in Rome, it's at the church of San Clemente and it's just absolutely gorgeous. It does have a crucifix in the middle, but
this crucifix is emerging up out of a leafy acanthus plant, and all these beautiful scrolls
around it and the hand of God holding down a crown. And at the very base of this cross are four
rivers, from the rivers of Eden, and two deer coming to drink at them. And here's a little bit of a detail of that. And there's a serpent, because the deer apparently
also eat serpents and get them out of our world, especially poisonous ones. And the inscription that's around this is,
"we will liken the church of Christ to this vine which the law makes wither, but the cross
makes verdant." And this might be a last sort of text for
you. This is a snippet from Venantius Fortunatus's
Pange Lingua, not Thomas Aquinas's, but this is a little earlier. And he wrote a long poem, I took two verses
from it to show you how this leafy cross theme is really part of the tradition. "Cross so faithful, tree of all trees, glorious,
having no peer, such a tree no forest brought forth with such blossom, leaf, and bud. Sweet the wood with which sweet nails its
sweet burden undergoes. Ah bend your branches, tree so lofty. Lose your tightknit inner core, let that stiffness
grow more supple which your native birth imposed, that you may stretch for the limbs of heaven's
king from gentle trunk." So I put out to you the idea that we could
see these images of the Tree of Life as a counterpart of the tree of Eden, and see the
tree cross as an alternative, maybe, at least a parallel to or partner with our cross of
suffering and death. >> These types are as much a part of our long
tradition, then, as the more familiar medieval crucifix. And I think we should regard them as equally
important to our visual theology insofar as they express the full range of meanings that
the cross and crucifix can convey to us. In closing, I want to mention the Feast of
the Cross. The commemoration of Helena's discovery as
well, especially in the East, as a celebration of the relic's return to Jerusalem after having
been captured by the Persians at the beginning of the seventh century. That feast is pretty soon. It's September 14. I'm sure some of you know that. What you might not know, and some of you in
the room probably will, is how the Orthodox celebrate September 14, the Feast of the Holy
Cross, the Exaltation of the Cross. One of the traditional rituals in this feast
in the Orthodox community includes the priest surrounding the cross with fragrant basil
and carrying it in solemn procession throughout the church. At the end of the service, the faithful are
invited to come forward to venerate the cross, usually with a kiss, and then they receive
a sprig of basil. According to tradition, basil was found by
Helena growing at the site of the cross's discovery. Now I can personally attest, having attended
this service once or twice, that it's a lovely ritual and symbolizes, at least to me, the
connection between the cross and the Tree of Life, a sign of hope and renewal, and I
happen to love the scent of basil. I almost brought you some today, I have a
giant mound of it in my garden! It makes me both happy and hungry! Thank you. [applause]
>> I've left you lots of time for questions. >> [questioner] I'm Father Jim [inaudible],
a Holy Cross priest, and I can't thank you enough. I read your book and I have to ask you all
to buy the book. It explains in detail what she has presented
so beautifully with the same enthusiasm. So thank you very much. [applause]
>> [Jensen] And I didn't pay you for that! Thank you. Other questions? I'm happy to take them. Yes. >> [questioner] I'm so moved by what Father
just said and the image of that. I'm broadening it in the sense of I'm thinking,
well what you said until what millennium we didn't see the cross? >> [Jensen] We didn't see it - well the earliest
Christian art we have, that we can recognize, dates no earlier than about the year 200. We don't have a cross until about 360. We don't have a crucifix, and we only have
two, from the fifth century, beginning about 405 to 412. And then we don't have anything again until
almost the sixth century. >> [questioner] Then my question would be,
what was the theology of that? What would they say to Brock and Parker? >> [Jensen] Ah, yes, it was Brock and Parker
that I was referring to kind of obliquely. >> [questioner] Right. And then, I mean the subtitle there, "How
Christianity traded love for this world from crucifixion and empire." I'm broadening it a bit and seeing what you
think with all the research you've done, that on some level, I mean, that speaks to us. But early on it was speaking of resurrection. It seems to me it was speaking of a more positive
thing, not to take the cross away from us. They make a whole case of a theology, and
I'm wondering whether you think of that. >> [Jensen] I would say this. First of all, the theology is filled with
the cross. Whether we like it or not, it is there. So to say that Christians didn't think much,
didn't have much thought for the cross or the crucifixion is completely belied by everything
that we have written in all of the Church fathers that exist. Now why is the image not there is a different
question. I think that certainly we're discussing it,
we're talking about. Athanasius has a whole treatise on why Jesus
died on the cross, in his De Incarnatione, a whole section of that treatise. It's not that we're not talking about it. One, I think the image is not there, I'm not
sure I know exactly why, except I think it has to do with the difference between text
and image. You can talk about things, but you don't necessarily
want to see them before your eyes. You may even imagine them. I mean, Martin Luther has a great line which
he says at some point, when people are telling him he can't have crucifixes in the church,
and he says "I can't preach this without imagining it! So if I can have it in my mind, why can't
I have it before my eyes?" So I think there's an interesting question
about what makes image different here. We have people saying well, the cross is everywhere
in the world. It's in ships' masts, it's in plows, it's
in farmers' fields, it's in trees, it's everywhere. So I think it is there, and I think what Brock
and Parker want to say is, and I don't think it works, is the cross comes in as people
become violent or as empire happens. And so that's why Constantine gets pinned
with the cross. Somehow he thought of it. But that doesn't make any sense to me, given
what I know about what we have and the texts that we have. So when I think, the reason it appears when
it does has everything to do with the discovery of the cross and the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. I even have a theory, I can't prove it, I
could never prove it, there could be no way to prove it, that the first image of crucifixion
might be actually in the apse at the basilica that Constantine built in Jerusalem. If it was anywhere, that would be the first
place for it. At the site of Golgotha. I don't know if that answers your question
or just makes it more complicated, but I'm not content with sort of saying there wasn't
any and then there was, but it's all to do with empire. >> [questioner] No, thank you. I wasn't saying that the opposite was a happy
Jesus. That's not it. >> [Jensen] Oh, well it's a resurrection. Let me say just one thing. I mean, I'm sorry. We don't have any images of resurrection until
the sixth century. >> [questioner] Well this is kind of where
I'm going at. As an undergraduate I remember a teacher saying
to me, and I'm not pitting Protestant against Catholic, he said you Catholics have the corpus
and we have the cross. So there's kind of, I guess people are putting
meaning and certainly I'm not suggesting that it be taken out of meaning, but that meanings
are very very different for me. >> [Jensen] Oh absolutely. And that common issue, question I get is why
do Protestants have the cross and why do Catholics have the corpus? And Protestants will say, it's because we
don't want him on the cross, we don't want to leave him there. But then once he's off the cross, why have
the cross, you know? The cross is still a reference to his death. There isn't any way around that. And the reason, and I'm not trying to be defensive,
I hope I'm not trying to make an apology, but I think if you are going to have the cross
and what it's going to talk to about, Catholics have it because they believe that this is
the moment in which Jesus overcame death and sin. It isn't the last moment in his story, but
it's the central moment. But we do. And this is what, and Protestants will say
we took him off the cross, we buried him, and he was resurrected, and you Catholics
got stuck with him on the cross, you never took him off! [audience laughter] And you
know, we can think up all the goods on both sides of that, right? We can really think that both of these have
a point. I wouldn't want to say that either one is
wrong. >> [questioner] In the Gospel according to
St. Luke in the passage describing the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, it's often
translated in the English translations where Christ tells them in sequence, at least that's
how it's translated, about his necessary suffering and then he would enter into his glory, which
is implicit, and again this is mainly in Protestant English translations coming from orthodox
[inaudible]. The focus is on the sequence in time, but
the actual Greek grammar is parallel, they're happening at the same time. So in other words he is suffering entering
into his glory. So those very early depictions on the cross
are actually of the glorified Christ who is God who has voluntarily died. And given his life, and he can resuscitate
as well. >> [Jensen] That's, okay, I'm going to summarize
in case that wasn't heard by everybody. So a very important theological point, that
in the Gospel of Luke and especially in the Gospel of John, when Jesus speaks of entering
into his glory, he's not talking about the Ascension! He's talking about the crucifixion. That's what he's turned his face towards,
towards Jerusalem. He's moving to, he says "now the time has
come for me to enter into my glory." It's really hard for us to think of that with
our emphasis on the suffering and maybe even the penitential atonement theories that we
live with, or the substitutionary which is even more, you know, God's angry and has to
punish somebody, and that's not the way that we could read the Gospel of John particularly
and the Gospel of Luke. So these early crucifixes absolutely are emphasizing
the triumph, the victory that's on the cross, not the suffering. And that follows with early patristic atonement
theory or theories of what crucifixion means in which Jesus either has a combat with Satan
and tricks him or beats him, so that he cannot claim, so Jesus earns forgiveness and reconciliation
for the people on the cross. So it's much more of a victory in battle scene. We've got to robe him, you know, we've got
to put him up there with a crown on his head. And it's really later that we get these other
ways of thinking about it. But this is the early one. >> [questioner] The cross is not only a Tree
of Life, it is also a stake driven through Hades and destroys it. >> [Jensen] Or Adam. [laughs] You know, one thing that people don't
know - this is a little trivia moment - is that that skull you see at the base of the
crucifix? That's Adam's skull. People don't often know this. So if you go to the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem,
maybe some of you've been there, and you go up that scary little staircase that I worry
about anybody with mobility problems trying to make it, and you go to the site of the
cross, Calvary. But directly under that, if you were to skirt
that stairway and go around and make a right turn, what would you come to? The chapel of Adam, okay? So in the tradition, the place of the skull,
Golgotha, is the place where Adam was buried. And in the Middle Ages, and I'm going to give
a shout-out to my colleague Gary Anderson for this, he's done a wonderful translation
of this and I used it, in the Middle Ages there's this beautiful legend about the tree
that is the cross, and it actually goes all the way back to Adam's dying. And he sends Eve and Seth back to the Garden
of Eden. Nobody knows what's going on. I mean, other than Abel, nobody's died before,
right? So we don't know what's going on with Adam. And he says to Eve, can you go get me some
of that oil from the Tree of Life? Maybe I need a little medicine. So she and Seth set out and they get as far
as the gates of Paradise and they're turned away. But Gabriel hands a little spring over the
wall and says here, take this back to Adam. And they get there a little bit too late,
Adam dies. They plant this on his grave and of course
it grows up to be the tree that becomes the cross. And lots of other things happen along the
way with it, but that's kind of the beginning and end of the story. And that's why we have the cross. I mean the cross is placed at the base of
Adam's grave, tying together the story, beginning and end. One or two more maybe? >> [questioner] So one of the interesting,
or one of the things I found was fascinating was the discussion of the Constantinian monogram,
I forget the sort of technical name for it -
>> [Jensen] Christogram. >> [questioner] Christogram, thank you. And to me it seems very closely tied to sort
of political events at the time, its rise and fall seem sort of intimately connected
with the political fortunes of the empire. Correct me if I'm wrong on that. But is there sort of other events within these
transformations that sort of give historical context to what the transformations are and
sort of what images are used? Does that make sense as a question? >> [Jensen] I think so. So you're asking for other ways that the Christogram
was used? >> [questioner] What I'm wondering is if,
so the Christogram arises as connected to the empire, and it goes away sort of as the
empire also goes away. Are there other historical, is there other
historical context that gives light to some of these other transformations you discussed? >> [Jensen] You mean like another kind of
cross? >> [questioner] Yeah. Sorry. I know that's like a vast expanse -
>> [Jensen] Well, there isn't any doubt, l think I'm going to work around this sideways. But there isn't any doubt, I think - first
of all, we don't have a Christogram before Constantine. I mean, some people think there might be one,
it seems to be a marginal note, if there is it's really rare, it doesn't mean much. So it does really give a lot of credence to
the fact that something happened with Constantine, that there really was something. And it is a Christian symbol, because it is
the two letters of Christos, of Christ. So it isn't just a military or imperial symbol,
it is a Christian symbol. And he clearly thought that the Christian
god was his patron in war. I mean, this was a guy that helped him win
a battle, and he believed. And his biographer Eusebius says, if you ever
put this on the shields of you soldiers, they're gonna win. And we should probably think about this with
the football team, I mean really. Right now! Give them all the Christogram! [laughter]
So it's both Christian and it's military and it's imperial. And it probably doesn't surprise us that that's
the case. And from that point on, the cross or some
kind of Christian symbol usually appears on the coinage of Roman emperors, Byzantine emperors,
Justinian and others. Usually helped by an angel or something. Another good example, maybe what you're asking
for. Something completely out of the box and different. I'm looking at the clock, I'll stop in about
one minute, is the Christian angel. Okay, so a lady with wings and a long white
dress. She's actually the goddess Victory, you understand,
not unimportant on a football day. So what seems to happen is that in Rome there
was a big battle over the altar of Victory in the Senate house, and it went back and
forth and back and forth, and it's too tedious and long a story to tell you, but eventually
Theodosius II and Ambrose the Bishop of Milan went head to head. And finally I think the compromise agreement
was, we will take out the altar but we'll leave the statue. And she becomes a Christian angel. So why are, you know, up until then the angels
weren't necessarily all women, they didn't wear long white dresses and they didn't all
have wings. And that's why we get, so we just have a translation
of this image type into something else, and it's a really good idea. I sort of like guardian angels who have some
sense of victory. Alright. Thank you for your attention. [applause]
