The Crucifixion of Our Lord

Chapter IX

Why We Cross Ourselves

The oldest Christian gesture, and the case for it

Most Protestants first meet the sign of the cross in a stadium, where a batter touches his forehead and chest and shoulders and points at the sky, and the whole thing looks like superstition in a uniform. It is easy to file away as a Roman Catholic mannerism that leaked into professional sports. What almost nobody is told is that this gesture is described in Christian writing more than a century before anyone drew up a list of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, that St. Basil the Great named it first among the things the Church received from the apostles without a written command, and that Martin Luther told German households to make it every morning and every night.

The first thing to clear away is the assumption that this belongs to Rome. Many Protestants carry a mental map on which Christianity divides into two territories, Catholic and Protestant, with everything ceremonial assigned to the first and the Orthodox appearing as an eastern annex to Rome that kept the ceremonies and lost the Pope. Consider, then, who actually makes this sign. Roman Catholics do, and Eastern Orthodox do. So do the Copts, the Syriac Orthodox, the Armenians and the Ethiopians, whose churches broke communion with both Rome and Constantinople after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and so does the Assyrian Church of the East, out of communion with everyone since the Council of Ephesus in 431. These are not churches that borrow from one another; they have spent most of Christian history anathematizing one another over the person of Christ. A practice common to all of them is not a Roman peculiarity. It is an inheritance older than the divisions, which is to say older than 431.

Then there is the awkward matter of the Reformers. Luther's Small Catechism of 1529, written to be taught in ordinary German homes, gives a morning and an evening prayer, and both begin with an instruction about the body before any words at all: “In the morning, when you get up, make the sign of the holy cross and say: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Luther demolished a great deal of medieval practice; this he kept and taught to children. The 1549 Book of Common Prayer retained the signing of the child's forehead at baptism and retains it still, and when the Puritans petitioned James I in 1603 to have it removed, the English Church defended it in Canon 30 of the Canons of 1604 by direct appeal to the usage of the primitive Church. The rejection came from the Reformed stream, and their concern was not imaginary, since late medieval popular religion had accumulated much that functioned as folk magic.

Notice what a Protestant is being asked to believe if the sign of the cross is a corruption. He has to believe it is a corruption that Luther kept and taught to children, that the English Reformers defended in canon law by appeal to antiquity, and that four separate families of ancient churches, which excommunicated one another over Christology, all preserved independently for fifteen hundred years.

An Orthodox Christian signs himself with the right hand. The thumb, the index finger and the middle finger are brought together so their tips touch; the ring finger and the little finger are folded down into the palm. The three joined fingers confess the Trinity: three Persons, one God, one point. The two folded fingers confess the two natures of Christ, divine and human, and their being pressed down against the palm is part of the confession, since the Son came down from heaven and took flesh. Before the hand has moved an inch it has said the two things the ecumenical councils spent four centuries defining, and a Christian who has never opened a book can say them accurately.

The hand then goes to the forehead, down to the stomach or the lower chest, across to the right shoulder, across to the left, and is lowered. The forehead is the mind, and the first touch is read as the sanctifying of thought and as the descent of the Son from the Father; the lower point stands for the body and for the Incarnation; the shoulders are strength, and the work of the hands. What has been traced is a cross over the whole person, which is Paul's instruction in 1 Corinthians 6:20 to glorify God in your body. The counsel is to make it large and unhurried: a cross whose vertical stroke stops high on the breastbone is not much of a cross, and one flicked out in half a second is a mannerism rather than a confession.

Then the direction. The East goes right shoulder to left; the West goes left to right. The explanations offered in the Orthodox tradition are worth hearing: Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father (Mark 16:19, and Psalm 109 [110]:1); in the judgment of Matthew 25:33 the sheep are set at the right hand and the goats at the left, so the hand begins where the blessed stand and crosses over asking to be brought there; and the movement follows the priest's hand when he blesses, seen from the other side. These are explanations offered for a practice, not the reason it began, because the Fathers do not tell us why.

The Western reversal is genuinely obscure. Pope Innocent III, writing around the end of the twelfth century, describes the sign made with two fingers or three, moving from above to below and from the right to the left, and notes that some make it from left to right instead. Around 1200, then, a Pope could describe the eastern direction as the ordinary one; within roughly three centuries the left-to-right form had become universal in the West, with no council commanding the change and no document recording a decision. The usual reconstruction is that lay people imitated the blessing they watched the priest give from the front, since a priest's right-to-left is the viewer's left-to-right. That is plausible, and it is only a reconstruction.

Nothing is strictly required in words. Most commonly it is “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen”; many say the Jesus Prayer, or simply “Lord, have mercy.” In the services most crossing is silent, because the words are already being sung. Details vary between Greek and Slavic practice — where the lower point falls, whether one crosses oneself when censed, how many times at the Gospel.

The earliest clear description comes from Carthage, in a short and bad-tempered treatise of Tertullian's called De Corona. He is defending a Christian soldier who refused the military garland, and his opponents have pointed out that no Scripture forbids a garland. His reply is an argument about the many things the Church does that Scripture does not legislate, and in listing them he hands us the sign of the cross in its ordinary second-century use.

At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign.Tertullian, De Corona 3

The striking thing is not that Tertullian defends the practice but that he does not have to introduce it. He cites it as one item in a list of things his readers already do, alongside the milk and honey given to the newly baptized and the custom of praying facing east. A practice unremarkable in Carthage in 211 was not invented in Carthage in 210. And in the next chapter, asked for the scriptural authority behind these customs, he answers plainly.

If, for these and other such rules, you insist upon having positive Scripture injunction, you will find none. Tradition will be held forth to you as the originator of them, custom as their strengthener, and faith as their observer.Tertullian, De Corona 4

That is the Protestant objection, raised and conceded in the year 211, by a man who would later leave the catholic Church over what he judged to be its laxity. He stated it as sharply as any Reformer would and concluded that received practice carried authority anyway. Elsewhere, arguing against Marcion, he identifies the mark set on the forehead in Ezekiel's vision with the Greek letter Tau and with the shape of the cross, so the scriptural link was being drawn already.

De Corona is usually dated to 211 from the imperial donative it appears to refer to; some place it slightly earlier. A second early witness is the document conventionally called the Apostolic Tradition, long attributed to Hippolytus of Rome around 215, which tells the believer to sign his forehead and says the sign is proven against the devil when made with faith. But Bradshaw, Johnson and Phillips have argued that the text is a composite assembled in layers from perhaps the second century to the fourth. It is honest to cite it as evidence of early practice; it is not honest to stamp it 215 and move on.

By the middle of the fourth century the evidence is thick and geographically spread. St. Cyril of Jerusalem delivered his Catechetical Lectures to candidates for baptism around the year 350, in the church built over the site of the Crucifixion. This is not speculation but the basic formation given to converts, and note both that the sign is still made with the fingers on the brow rather than over the whole body, and that his word for it is boldness.

Let us not then be ashamed to confess the Crucified. Be the Cross our seal made with boldness by our fingers on our brow, and on everything; over the bread we eat, and the cups we drink; in our comings in, and goings out; before our sleep, when we lie down and when we rise up; when we are on the way, and when we are still.St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 13.36

Elsewhere in the same course Cyril tells the catechumens that even if another man hides the Cross, they should openly seal it on their foreheads. The framing throughout is public confession, at a point in history when confessing Christ publicly had lately been fatal. The most important passage, however, is St. Basil the Great's, in his treatise On the Holy Spirit, written in 375. Basil is under attack for using a doxology his opponents complained could not be found in Scripture, and rather than hunt for a proof text he answers with an argument about where the Church's practice comes from at all.

Of the beliefs and practices… preserved in the Church some we possess derived from written teaching; others we have received delivered to us “in a mystery” by the tradition of the apostles; and both of these in relation to true religion have the same force… For instance, to take the first and most general example, who is there who has taught us in writing to sign with the sign of the cross those who have trusted in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ?St. Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit 27.66

Two things here are beyond dispute: Basil distinguishes what the Church received in writing from what it received from the apostles without writing, and says both have the same force for true religion; and the first example he reaches for is the sign of the cross. One qualification should be made out loud, because it is real. His example is signing “those who have trusted in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” which in context most likely means the signing of catechumens and the newly baptized rather than a Christian signing himself, so the passage does not prove that every detail of the modern gesture is apostolic. What it does establish is heavier: that in 375 a bishop of Basil's stature could name the sign of the cross first on a list of apostolic traditions received in silence, before hostile readers, and expect no one to contradict him.

By the eighth century the argument is over. St. John of Damascus devotes a chapter of his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith to the Cross, quotes 1 Corinthians 1:18 on the word of the cross being the power of God to those who are being saved, and says the Cross has been given to us as a sign on our forehead exactly as circumcision was given to Israel.

The gesture has a history, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The earliest evidence, from Tertullian through Cyril, is of a small cross traced on the forehead with a single finger or the thumb; the large cross over the whole body is a later development, and the stages by which it grew are not documented in a way that permits a date. As it grew larger, the arrangement of the fingers began to carry doctrinal weight, because a hand held a particular way could be made to say something in a street where most people could not read. What it was made to say was Christology: after Chalcedon defined in 451 that Christ is one Person in two natures, the East spent centuries divided over that formula, and two extended fingers came to confess the two natures.

The three-finger form — thumb, index and middle joined for the Trinity, the last two folded for the two natures — gathers both doctrines into one gesture, and became the general Greek usage in the later medieval period. The timeline is not crisp and should not be presented as though it were. The transition can be traced in icons and in polemical writing, but no council legislated it and no source records when or why it changed. Innocent III, describing Latin practice around 1200, still records the sign being made with two fingers or with three.

What happened in Russia

Russia received the faith from Byzantium in 988, when the two-finger form was current Greek usage, and kept it with conviction; the Stoglav Council in Moscow in 1551 explicitly mandated it and pronounced against those who signed themselves otherwise. Greek usage meanwhile had moved on, and Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, who took office in 1652, set out to conform Russian practice to it: three fingers instead of two, the spelling of the name of Jesus, three alleluias rather than two, the direction of processions, the number of prostrations at the Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian, and a correction of the service books. The opposition, led by the Archpriest Avvakum Petrov, was neither stupid nor empty. His case was that Moscow was being ordered to abandon, on the authority of foreigners, what it had received as holy and what its own council had commanded within living memory; and on the narrow point of the two fingers he was not simply wrong, since that form is the older of the two. Behind the liturgical questions lay a much larger one about whether a patriarch and a tsar could alter what the people had received.

The Great Moscow Council of 1666 and 1667, sitting with the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch present, confirmed the reforms, deposed Nikon himself over his conflict with the Tsar, and anathematized those who held to the old rites. What followed was carried out by the state with the Church's sanction and cannot be softened. Avvakum was held for years in a pit at Pustozersk and burned at the stake in 1682, together with the priest Lazar, the deacon Feodor and the monk Epiphanius, who had already had their tongues cut out and their hands mutilated. The noblewoman Feodosia Morozova, who refused the three-finger sign, was imprisoned at Borovsk and died of starvation in 1675. The Solovetsky Monastery refused the new books, held out against a siege for eight years, and was taken by storm in 1676, after which most of its monks were killed. In the decades that followed, groups of Old Believers who believed the end had come burned themselves alive in their own churches; the numbers in older literature are almost certainly inflated, but the fires were real.

There is no Orthodox way of telling this story that makes it acceptable. Men were tortured and killed over the arrangement of three fingers, by a Church that had itself, a century earlier, commanded two. The Russian Church has since said so: from 1800 it permitted old-rite parishes within its communion under the arrangement called Edinoverie, and in 1971 its Local Council formally revoked the anathemas of 1656 and 1667, declaring them to be as though they had never been, and the old rites equally honorable and equally salvific.

Old Believer communities descended from that break exist today, and the wound has never fully closed. What the episode shows is not that anyone was right to kill over a gesture. It shows that nobody in that world regarded it as a decoration: it was a confession of faith made with the body, and both sides believed that changing it changed what was confessed.

Begin with the concession, because an argument that opens by overreaching deserves to be dismissed. There is no verse in the Bible that commands the sign of the cross, and no passage describing a Christian making it; any attempt to find it hiding in a text is special pleading. No Orthodox Christian is required to believe the gesture is explicitly commanded, since the tradition has never claimed it and Tertullian and Basil both said the opposite in so many words. Scripture also nowhere forbids it, and the whole disagreement lives in that gap. The regulative principle answers that whatever is not commanded in worship is forbidden — a position held with great seriousness by the Westminster divines — but applied consistently it removes an enormous amount no modern Protestant intends to remove: pews, hymnals, four-part harmony, Sunday school, the altar call, the sinner's prayer, and the phrase “accept Jesus into your heart,” which appears nowhere in the New Testament.

Where Scripture puts a mark on the forehead

A procession, crosses carried and traced

In Ezekiel's vision of the judgment of Jerusalem, the Lord sends a man clothed in linen through the city to set a mark on the foreheads of those who groan and grieve over the abominations committed there, and the destroyers who follow are forbidden to touch anyone who bears it (Ezekiel 9:4–6). The Hebrew is more specific than English can show: the word for the mark is tav, the last letter of the alphabet, and in the older Hebrew and Samaritan script that letter was written as a cross — an observation Jerome makes in his commentary on Ezekiel. The Revelation takes up the image: in 7:3 the angel says, “Do not harm the earth, the sea, or the trees till we have sealed the servants of our God on their foreheads,” and in 14:1 the hundred and forty-four thousand stand with the Lamb “having His Father's name written on their foreheads.” Sealing is a category in Paul as well, since the Ephesians “were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise” (Ephesians 1:13). The Church's response was not a doctrine but a gesture: it put the sign of the Cross on the exact place where Scripture says the servants of God are marked. That is not a proof. It is a reason, and a better one than most objectors have been told exists.

Nor does Scripture treat the body as an irrelevance in prayer. Hands are lifted (1 Timothy 2:8), knees are bent (Ephesians 3:14; Acts 20:36), faces go to the ground (Matthew 26:39; Revelation 7:11), and hands are laid on heads to bless and to ordain (Mark 10:16; Luke 24:50; Acts 13:3) — and in Genesis 48:14 the dying Jacob deliberately crosses his arms to bless Joseph's sons, which the Fathers read very early as a figure of the Cross. Galatians 6:17 needs care. “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” uses the word stigmata, and Paul means the scars left by beatings and stonings, not a gesture; citing it as a reference to the sign of the cross is a misreading. But the theology in it is precisely the theology of the sign, that a Christian's body carries the mark of the Crucified and that this mark is his credential. Galatians 6:14 and 1 Corinthians 1:18, that the message of the cross “is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God,” supply the rest: the Cross is the thing a Christian is publicly identified with and not ashamed of.

What a Protestant has to believe about the second century

The Church tracing the cross on its forehead in Carthage in 211 is the same Church whose bishops sorted out which books were Scripture. The first surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament is in the Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter of St. Athanasius of Alexandria, written in 367; the African councils at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 ratified lists. The sign of the cross is attested more than a century and a half before anyone produced the table of contents that every Protestant Bible still uses, and a person who says the Church of Tertullian's day was already corrupting the faith with unbiblical ritual has to explain why he then trusts that same Church's judgment about which books God inspired. There is a quieter argument as well. When the early Church introduced something genuinely new it fought about it, and the paper survives: the controversy of the 190s over the date of Pascha, the exchange in the 250s between Cyprian of Carthage and Stephen of Rome over heretical baptism, the disputes over readmitting those who denied Christ under persecution. There is no such controversy anywhere in the record about the sign of the cross — no council condemning it, no bishop complaining that a new thing has crept in. This should not be overstated, since an argument from silence is not a proof and the second-century record is thin. But the pattern runs one way, and none of the writers who mention the practice appears to notice it arriving.

It is vain repetition

“And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Matthew 6:7). The answer begins with the Greek word, battalogēsēte, which means babbling or heaping up syllables, and with the reason Christ gives in the very next clause: the heathen think they will be heard for their many words. The fault is the belief that quantity compels God. It is not repetition as such, and it cannot be, because Christ Himself prayed the same words three times in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:44), because the four living creatures in Revelation 4:8 do not rest day or night from saying “Holy, holy, holy,” and because Psalm 135 [136] repeats the line “for His mercy endures forever” twenty-six consecutive times and is Scripture. Repetition is not the problem. Emptiness is, and that charge lands on Orthodox and Protestant equally.

Monastic habits covered in crosses and inscriptions

It is superstition, a good-luck charm

This should be conceded before it is answered, and conceded fully. Yes, it can become that, and frequently does. A gesture made to ward off bad luck, or because a room felt eerie, or because a car swerved, has stopped being a confession and become a charm, and there is no point pretending this does not happen in Orthodox countries constantly. The remarkable thing is that the tradition has been saying so from the beginning. The earliest instruction we have attaches the condition that it be made with faith; Cyril's framing is public confession, not power over circumstance; and St. John Chrysostom warns his people at the end of the fourth century that tracing the cross with the finger accomplishes nothing unless it is first made in the mind, with faith and deliberate intent. He is plainly warning people he can see doing it absently. The ascetic tradition does speak of the Cross as a weapon, and a reader of the Desert Fathers will meet accounts of demons fleeing at the sign; what is claimed there is that the power is the Cross of Christ and the faith of the one signing, not the gesture working as a mechanism — the distinction Scripture makes when the sons of Sceva use the name of Jesus as a technique and are beaten for it (Acts 19:13–16).

Athletes do it, and so do criminals

A boxer crosses himself before a fight he intends to win by concussion; a man crosses himself before a robbery. The objection is that this exposes the practice as empty, but the argument is about abuse and proves only what abuse ever proves. The Corinthians were receiving the Lord's Supper drunk, and Paul's response was to correct the manner of reception rather than abolish the supper (1 Corinthians 11:27–32). Preaching can be vanity, fasting can be theater, and Bible reading can be a way of avoiding obedience. The counterfeit always presupposes the genuine article, which is the interesting thing about the boxer: he reaches for that gesture and not another because he knows perfectly well Whose it is.

It is outward show

“Take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men, to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1), and what follows about praying in the closet rather than on the street corner. This is the most serious objection. What Christ condemns is stated exactly: righteousness performed in order to be seen. He is not forbidding visible piety, and He cannot be, because in the same Sermon He says, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16), and in the same Gospel He says that whoever confesses Him before men will be confessed before the Father (Matthew 10:32–33). Baptism is public; the Lord's Supper is public. The line Christ draws is not between visible and invisible but between confession and display, and it runs through the heart, where no observer can see it. Which means the objection cuts both ways: a man can cross himself so that others will see he is devout, and a man can also pointedly decline to cross himself, in a room where everyone else is doing it, so that those around him understand he is not that sort of Christian. That is the same sin wearing the opposite clothes.

Everything above is argument, and argument is not why Orthodox Christians do this. The sign of the cross is, in ordinary practice, a habit of referring things to God — a way of not letting the day divide into a religious part and a part where God is not consulted. Look again at Tertullian's list. It is not a list of solemn occasions. It is shoes, meals, the bath, sitting down, lighting the lamps in the evening. The claim implicit in it is that the Cross is not an emblem for religious moments but the shape of a whole life.

In the services it has natural homes: at the beginning and end of prayer, and at every invocation of the Trinity, which in an Orthodox service is constant, since nearly every prayer ends by glorifying the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It comes at the Trisagion, three times; before venerating an icon or the Gospel book; at the Gospel reading; on entering and leaving the church. One practical caution that every convert needs and few are given: at communion one crosses oneself before approaching, then folds the arms across the chest and does not cross at the chalice, for the obvious reason that an elbow and a spoon holding the Body and Blood of Christ should not meet.

Bowing belongs with it. The cross is normally completed with a bow — the poklon, from the waist, often with the fingers touching the floor — and on certain days with a full prostration, to the knees with the forehead to the ground. A convert notices these as separate gestures and then realizes they are one: the hand confesses and the body follows it down. The full prostration belongs especially to Great Lent, above all at the Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian. And there is a canon governing it that almost no Protestant has heard of: Canon 20 of the First Ecumenical Council, at Nicaea in 325, forbids kneeling on the Lord's Day and through the fifty days of Pentecost, on the grounds that these are days of resurrection, and Canon 90 of the Council in Trullo in 692 repeats it. That is why prostrations stop on Sundays, and why from Pascha to Pentecost a church full of people who were on the floor a fortnight earlier is standing upright.

Outside the services the sign goes where life goes: in temptation, in fear, at sudden bad news; before and after meals; on rising and before sleep, which is where Luther put it; passing a church or a cemetery. And, most tenderly, over another person — a parent tracing the cross on a child's forehead at bedtime, which is not a modern sentimentality but the oldest form of the gesture there is, and which connects a bedroom in the present to Carthage in the third century.

A reader who wants to begin should begin small, and let it become his own rather than performing it. Start with the beginning and end of prayer, and at the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Make it slowly and make it large. Do not add the rest by rule, and do not count. The hand learns this the way it learned to shake hands, by doing it in company until it stops being a decision.

Beginning and end of prayer: Aloud or silent, alone or with others.
At the Trinitarian formula: Whenever Father, Son and Holy Spirit are named together.
At the Trisagion: “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal” — at each of the three.
Entering and leaving a church: Usually with a bow, and often on passing a church in the street.
Before venerating: Before kissing an icon or the Gospel book; traditionally twice before, once after.
At the Gospel reading: At the announcement and at the end; the number varies by tradition.
At communion: Before approaching; then arms folded, never at the chalice; again after stepping away.
Before and after meals: Over yourself and over the food, whether or not grace is said aloud.
On rising and before sleep: The oldest domestic use, and the one Luther kept.
In temptation or fear: At an evil thought, at anger, at sudden bad news, at danger.
Over another person: Over a child at bedtime, or over the sick — traced on the forehead.

Customs differ. Greek parishes commonly cross themselves when censed; many Slavic parishes bow instead. Some traditions cross themselves when the priest blesses with his hand; others receive the blessing with cupped hands and do not. None of this is a test, and a convert who spends the Liturgy watching his neighbors to get it right has already missed what it is for.