Spaightwood Galleries

For Catholics during the middle ages and the Renaissance, the Crucifixion was an ever-recurring event: with each newly-committed human sin, Jesus suffered and died yet again (for an early twentieth-century version of this belief, click here to see Georges Rouault's Miserere 35, "Jésus sera en agonie jusqu'a la fin du monde" / "Jesus will be in agony, even to the end of the world"; the title, significantly, comes from the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascals' Pensées). The image of Christ on the cross is everywhere in Medieval and Renaissance art, yet the use of those images could be suspect. If it was intended merely to raise pathos, the images should be rebuked (as Michelangelo, who himself made some ravishing drawings of the Crucifixion, rebuked the all-too-realstic depictions of the Crucifixion in 15th- and early 16th-century Netherlandish art) and as Protestant iconoclasts in those parts of Germany where Lutheranism triumphed, in the Netherlands, and in England, demonstrated when they attempted to purge their churches of these relics of superstitious adoration. Yet at the same time these lovers of St. Paul's Epistles were also fixated on what was for them the meaning of the Crucifixion and for what we need to learn about ourselves from contemplating it: As St. Paul wrote in his first epistle to the Corinthians, "the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.'  Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one  might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, 'Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.' (I Corinthians 1: 18-31). In the "fact" of the Crucifixion–for Protestants an act in historical time that happened for a purpose and has fulfilled its purpose–to repair the rent in humanity's relationship with God and thus to accomplish the salvation of those who are called to believe. God, to reconcile man to God, died the death promised in Genesis to those who disobeyed God's command not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and thus enabled eternal life to be restored to those chosen by God. The use of the Cross, for Erasmus, especially in his most popular work, the Encomium Moriae or The Praise of Folly was to force readers to set aside reason and turn to God through faith, something that explains its great popularity in Protestant countries (John Milton in a letter from college to his father tells him that everyone at Cambridge written in the early 1620s is reading the work) contrasts with its presence, post Council of Trent, on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.