6 - The Graphic Cross as Salvific Mark and Organizing Principle: Making, Marking, Shaping

Summary

Although the cross of the early Middle Ages is often considered to have carried apotropaic force, in this essay I wish to emphasize its other powers. That is, I would argue that the sign of the cross does not just ward off evil, it also is actively engaged with the Christian devotee in shaping a space within which to welcome salvation as a thing/not-thing. In one aspect of such force, I have previously called the sign of the cross a ‘lively sign’, just as Paulinus of Nola called it in relic form the ‘invulnerable sign’; here I will extend its attributes, arguing that this is an object and graphic mark that has the capacity to seal and close space, but also to create, open, and activate it.

I take inspiration from the artistic oeuvre of Joseph Beuys (1921–86), who recognized all of these qualities of the cross. Beuys’s earliest commissions as a sculptor in postwar Germany were physical crosses; in later work he both structured performances with crosses and cross shapes, and marked multiples and drawings with a stamp-like use of the braunkreuz (a designation that evoked dried blood), indicating that he considered them significant elements of his overall artistic project. Beuys also used the cross in partial form, almost like a letter, a sideways tau. Following Beuys’s lead, we recognize another aspect of the cross, this time discovered in the artistic action of making the sign: the cross both as a gesture and as a materially manufactured object. Given the anonymity of most early medieval artists, this last quality has been all too easy to overlook.

In the earliest Christian textual sources, the cross found a somewhat limited characterization as a sign, semion or signum. This terminology can be found in the narratives of the Greek New Testament, in Eusebius’s account concerning the political and historical importance of the cross to Constantine, and in the commentary and theology of the early Christian Fathers. Gerhard Ladner has argued that the medieval world generally preferred the word ‘sign’ to ‘symbol’, but the status of the cross as sign rather than as object or symbol illustrates more than a general principle of medieval culture: considered as a sign, the cross was able to develop tremendous flexibility of meaning.