The Sign of the Cross and the Relic

The Cross is not only preached and venerated but traced on the body and kept as wood. This file treats the gesture — its earliest attestation, the history of its forms, and why the Church treats it as a confession rather than a habit — and the relic, whose fourth-century attestation is unusually good and whose later multiplication is not. Each claim is pinned to its earliest witness.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Gesture

The earliest attestation

The earliest datable Christian reference to signing oneself with the cross is Tertullian, writing in North Africa around 204:

“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; trans. ANF III)

Tertullian is describing a practice he treats as long-established and unwritten — indeed he cites it as an example of custom that Scripture does not command — so the gesture is older than the reference. It is a small sign traced on the forehead with one finger, and the same practice is attested in St. Cyprian, in the Apostolic Tradition material, and in the fourth-century Fathers.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem, catechizing at Golgotha around 350, urges the practice on his candidates in terms that make its confessional character explicit: “Let us not then be ashamed of the Cross of Christ; but though another hide it, do thou openly seal it on thy brow” (Catechetical Lectures 4.14; trans. NPNF II/7), and elsewhere describes it as the sign at which devils tremble.

From one finger to three

The large sign made across the body, and the counting of fingers, developed later, and the history is worth stating accurately because it became a matter of grave consequence in Russia.

The small forehead sign is the earliest form. The larger sign traced from forehead to breast and shoulder to shoulder is attested from the later patristic period. The finger arrangements acquired doctrinal meaning in the Byzantine period: one finger against the Monophysites (signifying the one Christ), then two fingers signifying the two natures, and finally three fingers held together for the Trinity with the remaining two folded to the palm for the two natures of Christ — the arrangement now standard in the Orthodox Church.

The direction of the horizontal stroke differs between East and West: Orthodox Christians move from the right shoulder to the left, Latin Christians from left to right. Both practices are old; the divergence is not doctrinal.

The change from two fingers to three in the Russian Church was one of the points on which Patriarch Nikon’s liturgical reforms of the 1650s foundered, and it is a principal marker of the Old Believer (staroobryadtsy) schism, whose adherents retained the two-fingered sign. Whatever else is to be said about that division, it demonstrates that the Church’s people have never regarded the gesture as a triviality. [Disputed: the antiquity of the two-fingered versus three-fingered sign in Russian practice. The Old Believer position holds that the two-fingered form was the received Russian and earlier Greek usage and that its replacement was an innovation; the position of the reformed Russian Church held that the three-fingered form corresponded to contemporary Greek practice and to the older tradition. Modern scholarship generally accepts that the two-fingered sign was indeed the older Russian usage inherited from Byzantium and that Nikon’s reform imposed a later Greek practice, without thereby endorsing the schism. This repository records the dispute and does not adjudicate the ecclesiological question.]

What the gesture claims

The Church treats the sign as a confession of faith made with the body, and this is not sentimentalism. The fingers confess the Trinity and the two natures; the movement traces the Cross on the person who makes it; and the words that accompany it, where words are used, are the Trinitarian formula. It is therefore a compressed creed, performed hundreds of times a day by people who may not be able to state it in prose — which is one reason the Church has cared about its form.

It is also, in the tradition’s own account, effectual. The Fathers speak of the sign as driving away demons, and the Church employs it in every blessing, at every exorcism in the baptismal rite, and over every object she sets apart. The theology behind that is the theology of the veneration generally: matter and gesture can carry grace, because the Word took flesh (see The Exaltation and the Veneration of the Cross).

The Relic

The fourth-century attestation

The evidence for relics of the Cross in the mid-fourth century is unusually good by the standards of relic history, and it is worth setting out in order, because it is often confused with the later legends of the finding.

St. Cyril of Jerusalem is the earliest and best witness, and he is preaching on the site. In the Catechetical Lectures, delivered around 350:

“the whole world has since been filled with pieces of the wood of the Cross” (Cat. 4.10);
“The holy wood of the Cross bears witness, seen among us to this day, and from this place now almost filling the whole world, by means of those who in faith take portions from it” (Cat. 10.19);
“here is Golgotha to confute me, near which we are now assembled; the wood of the Cross confutes me, which was afterwards distributed piecemeal from hence to all the world” (Cat. 13.4).
(Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 4.10, 10.19, 13.4; trans. NPNF II/7.)

Cyril’s letter to the Emperor Constantius (351) repeats the claim. Two features make this testimony strong: it is contemporary rather than retrospective, and it is addressed to an audience standing in Jerusalem who could check it.

Egeria, the pilgrim whose travel diary dates from about 381–384, describes the veneration of the wood at Jerusalem on Great Friday in circumstantial detail: the relic and the title-board are placed on a cloth-covered table, the bishop holds the ends of the wood with his hands while the deacons stand guard, and the faithful come one by one to bow, touch the wood with forehead and eyes, and kiss it — the guard being necessary, she says, because someone once bit off a fragment and stole it (Egeria, Itinerarium 37; trans. Wilkinson).

St. John Chrysostom and St. Paulinus of Nola attest the wearing of fragments in gold reliquaries by the end of the fourth century.

What this evidence establishes is that by the middle of the fourth century there was at Jerusalem a wood venerated as the Cross, that it was already being distributed, and that its veneration was public and organized. What it does not establish is the historicity of the finding narratives, which are later and divergent, and which the companion collection sets out with each variant pinned to its source (see The Attestation Ledger).

The later history and the honest problem

The relic remained at Jerusalem until the Persian capture of the city in 614, when it was taken to Ctesiphon; the Emperor Heraclius recovered it and restored it to Jerusalem in the years around 629–630, an event associated in some traditions with the 14 September feast, though the feast’s origin lies in the fourth-century dedication of the Anastasis church.

Then the honest problem. Fragments multiplied across medieval Christendom in numbers that cannot correspond to a single cross, and the mockery of that fact is old: the observation that the fragments would build a ship is usually attributed to Erasmus or to Calvin, and the Traité des reliques of Calvin (1543) does press the point at length. The exact quantity has been argued about since the nineteenth century, and no calculation of it is reliable enough to be worth reproducing here.

The Church’s position does not depend on the authenticity of any particular fragment, and it is better stated than avoided. Relics are venerated for what they signify and for the grace the Church confesses to be present in them; the veneration of a piece of wood believed to be from the Cross is directed to Christ crucified, and a mistaken provenance does not make the veneration idolatrous, any more than a correct provenance would make the wood itself holy in its own right. What the tradition does not license is the fabrication of provenances or the treatment of relics as talismans, and the Church’s own canonical tradition is severe about both.

The repository’s practice throughout is to report what the sources attest and to name the attestation, without converting devotional claims into historical ones (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Cross Worn and Given

Two practices deserve mention because they carry the theology into ordinary life.

The baptismal cross. In the Orthodox tradition a cross is placed on the newly baptized and worn thereafter; in Russian usage it is the krest, given at baptism and kept for life, and the phrase “to wear one’s cross” carries both senses at once.

The blessing. Every priestly blessing is made with the sign, and the hand-cross is used to bless the people and the water. What is being conveyed is not a wish but the grace of the Cross, and the gesture is the same one Tertullian’s Christians traced on their foreheads before dressing.

The continuity from the second-century forehead sign to the modern gesture is one of the longest unbroken practices in Christian history, and it says something about the doctrine: the Church has always treated the Cross as something to be put on, not only something to be believed about.

References

Tertullian. De corona 3. Translated in ANF III.
Cyril of Jerusalem. Catechetical Lectures 4.10, 4.14, 10.19, 13.4. Translated in NPNF II/7.
Egeria. Itinerarium 37. In John Wilkinson, Egeria’s Travels. 3rd ed. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1999.
Paulinus of Nola. Letter 31 (to Sulpicius Severus). In Letters of St. Paulinus of Nola, trans. P. G. Walsh, Ancient Christian Writers 35–36. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1966–1967.
Calvin, John. Traité des reliques. Geneva, 1543. (Cited for the polemic against relic multiplication, reported accurately per METHODOLOGY §4.1.)
Second Council of Nicaea (787), Definition. In Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990.
Meyendorff, Paul. Russia, Ritual, and Reform: The Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the 17th Century. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991. (On the Nikonian reforms and the sign of the cross.)