Co-Crucifixion and the Ascetic Cross

The New Testament does not present the Cross as an event the believer contemplates from outside but as one he enters: buried with Christ in baptism, crucified with him, taking up a cross daily. This file sets out the Pauline language of co-crucifixion, its sacramental realization in baptism and the Eucharist, its ascetic and martyric forms, and the guardrails that keep “bearing the cross” from becoming a spiritualized endorsement of suffering.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Language of “With”

The Pauline vocabulary of participation is built on a preposition. The believer is co-crucified, co-buried, co-raised, co-glorified.

“I have been crucified with Christ (Χριστῷ συνεσταύρωμαι); it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
“We were buried with him (συνετάφημεν) by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
“We know that our old self was crucified with him (συνεσταυρώθη) so that the sinful body might be destroyed” (Romans 6:6).
“If children, then heirs… provided we suffer with him (συμπάσχομεν) in order that we may also be glorified with him (συνδοξασθῶμεν)” (Romans 8:17).
“Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14).
“Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24).

And the Lord’s own words, in all three Synoptics: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34; Matthew 16:24; Luke 9:23, which adds “daily”).

St. Gregory the Theologian turns the whole set into a paschal exclamation: “Yesterday I was crucified with him; today I am glorified with him; yesterday I died with him; today I am quickened with him; yesterday I was buried with him; today I rise with him” (Oration 1.4; trans. NPNF II/7).

This vocabulary is not decoration on a doctrine of the atonement; it is the doctrine’s operative form. If the Cross were a transaction completed on the believer’s behalf, the appropriate response would be gratitude and trust. That the New Testament instead speaks of the believer being crucified indicates a different structure: what happened in Christ’s humanity is entered, not merely credited (see The Unassumed Is the Unhealed).

Baptism: Where Co-Crucifixion Happens

Romans 6 locates the co-crucifixion in a rite, and the Church has always read it that way.

The triple immersion is a burial; the emergence is a resurrection; the exorcisms and renunciations that precede it are the breaking with the tyranny; the chrismation that follows is the seal of the Spirit; and the newly baptized is clothed in white and given a cross. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, catechizing at the site of the events, tells the newly illumined that in the three immersions they imitated the three days, and that “you died and were born, and that saving water was at once your grave and your mother” (Mystagogical Catecheses 2.4; trans. NPNF II/7).

The consequence is that the ascetic life is not a means of achieving union with the Cross but the working-out of a union already given. This is why the Fathers ground the moral exhortation in the indicative: “reckon yourselves dead to sin” (Romans 6:11) follows from “you were buried with him,” not the other way round (see The Theology of Baptism; The Mysteries and Theosis).

The Eucharist continues what baptism begins: “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). The councils of 1156–1157 defined that the sacrifice on the altar is not a different sacrifice from that of the Cross but the same one — which means that the faithful are not remembering an absent event but participating in a present one (see Sacrifice, Ransom, and Propitiation in the Fathers; The Mystery of the Body and Blood).

The Martyr

The primary and paradigmatic form of co-crucifixion is martyrdom, and the Church’s language for it is unambiguous. St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing to the Romans on his way to execution around 107, asks them not to intervene: “I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread of Christ… Permit me to be an imitator of the passion of my God” (Ignatius, To the Romans 4, 6; trans. ANF I).

The Church counts the martyr’s death as a baptism — the “baptism of blood” — and commemorates the day of death as the birthday. The theology is exactly that of Romans 6: the martyr is not earning anything but completing a death already begun in the font.

The martyric vocation did not end with the ancient persecutions. The neomartyrs of the Ottoman centuries and the new martyrs of the Soviet period are commemorated in the same terms, and the Russian tradition adds the category of the strastoterptsy, the passion-bearers — those like the princes Boris and Gleb who were killed not for confessing Christ but who accepted death without resistance in imitation of him (see The New Martyrs of Russia; The Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Era).

The Ascetic Cross

Where martyrdom is not given, the tradition speaks of a daily and voluntary form.

The monastic tonsure is described in the rite itself as a second baptism, and the language is martyric: the monk is “crucified to the world.” The vows of obedience, chastity, and non-possession are read as the cutting off of the three roots of self-will. St. John Climacus organizes the whole Ladder around this: the renunciation of Step 1 is a death, and the obedience of Step 4 is “the tomb of the will” (Climacus, Ladder of Divine Ascent, Steps 1 and 4; see St. John Climacus).

The desert tradition supplies the shorter formulations — “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything”; “unless a man says in his heart, ‘I alone and God are in this world,’ he will not find rest” — in which withdrawal is a form of dying (see The Desert Fathers; Orthodox Monasticism).

Three specific practices are identified in the tradition as the cross in ordinary life.

Obedience, monastic or to a spiritual father, understood as the cutting off of self-will rather than the surrender of judgment; the tradition is emphatic that it is voluntary and that a director who demands it as a right has disqualified himself.

Fasting and the bodily disciplines, which are read not as punishment of the body — a reading the tradition explicitly rejects, since the body is destined for resurrection — but as the retraining of a nature whose desires have been disordered by the fear of death (see The Bondage of the Fear of Death).

The acceptance of what is not chosen: illness, injustice, bereavement, and the ordinary grinding difficulties of a life. This is the form in which most Christians in most centuries have encountered the counsel to take up a cross, and the tradition treats it as the fullest form rather than the lowest.

St. Silouan the Athonite gives the counsel that has become the best-known modern statement of this vocation: “Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not” — the acceptance of self-condemnation held together with unbroken hope, a formula whose two halves must be kept together (see St. Silouan the Athonite; St. Sophrony of Essex).

Guardrails

This material is unusually easy to misuse, and the tradition itself supplies the corrections.

The Cross is not sought. Christ prayed for the cup to pass. The tradition is uniform that self-chosen suffering, undertaken to prove something or to earn something, is a form of pride and often of prelest. The Fathers warn constantly against ascetic feats undertaken without blessing, and the desert literature is full of stories of monks destroyed by austerities they chose themselves.

Suffering is not good. Pain does not sanctify of itself, and the Church has never taught that it does. What sanctifies is Christ, and suffering becomes a cross only insofar as it is united to his. The Church’s rites are full of prayers for healing and deliverance; she anoints the sick, and she does not regard their recovery as a spiritual loss.

It is not a warrant for enduring abuse. This must be said plainly. Counsel to “bear one’s cross” has been used to keep people in situations of violence and coercion, and that use is a corruption. The Cross was freely accepted by one who could have refused it; a suffering imposed by another’s sin and endured under compulsion is not thereby sanctified, and the pastoral duty toward a person in danger is protection, not exhortation. The Church’s canonical tradition on the dissolution of marriages in cases of violence, and her provision of oikonomia, exist precisely because she does not require the endurance of harm (see Marriage, Divorce, and Oikonomia).

It is not a substitute for medical or psychological care. The ascetic literature is a monastic literature about the passions, not a diagnostic manual, and treating grief, illness, or mental disorder as failures of the ascetic will is a category error with real casualties.

And it is not gloomy. The tradition’s own register is paschal. The Ladder calls mourning “joy-creating sorrow” (charopoion penthos); the Great Lent that culminates in the veneration of the Cross is called “the springtime of the soul”; and the Cross is venerated at mid-Lent in order to encourage, not to sober. A spirituality of the Cross that never arrives at Pascha has stopped halfway through the doctrine (see The Orthodox Assessment).

Why This Belongs to the Doctrine

Because it is the point at which the doctrine of the atonement becomes checkable.

An account of the Cross in which the work is done entirely outside the believer and applied to him forensically has a certain difficulty explaining why the New Testament speaks of him as crucified. An account in which salvation is the healing of a nature by its assumption has no such difficulty: what was accomplished in the humanity of Christ is entered by those who share that humanity, through the Mysteries and through a life conformed to his. The ascetic tradition is therefore not an addendum to the doctrine of the atonement but its verification — the form in which the claim “death has been defeated” is tested in particular lives.

That is what the Church means when she calls her saints the evidence (see The Saints as Evidence and a Sober Assessment).

References

Ignatius of Antioch. To the Romans 4, 6. Translated in ANF I.
Cyril of Jerusalem. Mystagogical Catecheses 2.4. Translated in NPNF II/7.
Gregory the Theologian. Oration 1.4. Translated in NPNF II/7.
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Steps 1, 4, 7. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
Sophrony (Sakharov), Archimandrite. Saint Silouan the Athonite. Trans. Rosemary Edmonds. Tolleshunt Knights: Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 1991.
The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978.
Schmemann, Alexander. Great Lent: Journey to Pascha. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969.