The Sign of the Cross Casts Long Shadows

Scholars are distinguished by their labors in the field, and we never dare call them miracle-workers, but in The Sign of the Cross Rancour-Laferriere has pulled off something of a minor miracle. He has found a solution to organizing a vast array of histories, both religious and secular, along with his own scholarship and insightful interpretations by balancing all of the material on the single figure of the cross.

For Christians, the cross signifies the intersection of the human and the divine through the defining event of the crucifixion. This Incarnation of God into man turns oppositions into a paradox ultimately of the victim’s victory through defeat. But while its otherworldly power of redemption from sin through suffering with the promise of life everlasting is affirmed, the author applies this unifying image to the disconcerting ways it has been misappropriated for unsavory and all-too worldly ends at odds with its original mission. Thus enormously complex materials— psychological, cultural, and historical—converge on these two crossed lines.

Here, I can only touch on three main areas: the cross as crucifixion on Golgotha; the cross as melted down and re-forged into the sword of Crusades and empire; and the cross as reconfigured in Nazism and vehicle of anti-Semitism.

The cross is ultimately rooted in the life of Jesus and the early Church from whence it draws its personal inspiration, religious authority,

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and political hegemony. We recall that with Adam’s sin the human race fell and thereby suffered alienation from their creator. Whatever credibility this account still claims, it is stretched by the vast populations dispersed over the planet since that original couple. Talk about psychic over determinism. The disproportion is mind-boggling, and let’s not even try to factor in the scientists’ multiverse where countless planets may support living beings who may also be in need of redemption. However, in biblical times, the earth was the center of the known universe, and it was due to one person’s fall that God offered up his only son to redeem us.

Among the Savior’s admonitions was to share in his sacrifice, to embrace our cross and follow in his footsteps. Thereby, we validate our faith through suffering (pp. 92, 104). In the present reconstruction, Jesus set his actions on a deliberate course of grandiose claims to divinity that inexorably led to his non-resistance to earthly powers in order to achieve atonement on the cross. Judas’s lament in Jesus Christ Superstar, “I only did what you wanted me to,” is apt. Christ is thus defined as a grandiose masochist/narcissist (pp. 9, 109, 141, 151), and the cross is the “paradigmatic signifier of moral masochism” (p. 160).

This oddly self-destructive, but highly potent, mix of passivity and grandiosity is adopted by his followers as moral masochism (as opposed to the sexual forms of perversion, 59). In general, self-inflicted pain serves various psychic functions—as compromise against more drastic forms of self-hatred, a cry for help, an attempt to alleviate guilt, an affirmation of group affiliation, and a gesture toward identification with the aggressor, or in this case ostensibly with an exalted ideal of brutal sacrifice.

I’m digressing here to offer an allied psychodynamic view. I view the cruciform image as a new cultural ideal in which aggression is turned inward. Perhaps it played off a collective conviction that violence had gotten so out of control that we may end up destroying ourselves in total. This redirection drives and affects also implies the negative Oedipus complex, in which the son submits totally to paternal authority rather than striving to overthrow it, and accordingly the male replaces the female as a future love-object (once put forth as an etiology of homosexuality).

Regardless of the two scenarios, Freud foregrounds guilt as internalized aggression that continues to exert its influence both as conscience and as punishment for harboring dangerous (erotic, hostile) wishes. Guilt, like Freud, is on the side of civilization. Thus, along with displacements, transformations, and sublimations, we can factor in moral perversions as issuing from affective frustrations, guilt, and feelings of unwor-

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thiness.

We know the strictures of self-denial and mortification of the flesh, but one piece of clerical echoed here resonates powerfully: It’s your cross to bear. This is typically given in the context of a wife’s complaining about her husband’s drinking or abuse or infidelity or of a child in an abusive situation, and it serves to silence the victim while perpetuating the harmful behavior. Still, we also know violence is not resisted and even welcomed in all the turmoil of crusades, pillage, rape, genocide, the Inquisition, heresy trials, of witch hunts all proclaim the triumph of aggression a return of the repressed with a vengeance. Anti-Semitism was endemic to Christianity from early on as shown in the writings of Church fathers, saints, and theologians. The charge against Jews as Christ killers, guilty of deicide, despite evidence to the contrary, so gripped Europe that when Hitler instated a “hooked cross,” translated as the swastika, the ground was already laid for the Holocaust. Some of this is already familiar, but the author often synthesizes it all to the next level.

Along with his bold consistency, I would offer a caveat, plus a psychodynamic tool for further probing moral masochism, and two psychohistorical paths for further investigation. The caveat is that while the author supports his thesis of Jesus as grandiose masochist, he drives this model pretty hard, given the unstable source material, and oversteps when he dismisses Jesus’s driving the money-changers from the temple as a “temper tantrum,” an act of “grandiose personal provocation” (p. 140). Beneath the clinical labels, we may yet glimpse a troubled individual worth our continuing interest.

Psychoanalytic writings on suicide, notably dating from Karl Menninger’s 1938 Man Against Himself, implicate two other parties in the suicide: reunion with a former loved one and revenge against an enemy for forcing this extreme recourse. These fantasies or symbolic gestures may influence the troubled religious mind already immersed in emotional dilemmas and add dimensions to moral masochism.

For psychohistory, the author contrasts the observances of ordinary church-goers with a second category of more exemplary moral masochism of saints and martyrs as well as the authorized sadism of crusaders and inquisitors (pp. 71-72, 106-109). I would consider this second grouping as delegates for enacting the wishes and desires of the relatively normal rank and file (the author uses the concept of proxy, 87f). Secondly, the prospect of believers relentlessly seeking new ways to gain the divinity’s attention suggests the dynamic of a withholding parent whose favor the child struggles vainly to win by repeatedly raising the stakes of self-inflicted pain. The silence of God has entered theological discourses es-

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pecially since the Holocaust, and even Mother Theresa lamented the loneliness of loving a God who did not reciprocate. Undoubtedly, the book will excite many different responses among its readers.

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