Origin 500 to 600 CE
A cross bearing the figure of Christ, called the corpus. Catholic practice requires one to be visible on or near the altar at Mass, and the distinction from a plain cross is the whole point of the object: it insists on the body, the wounds and the death rather than on the sign of them.
Depictions divide sharply. The Gothic crucifix presents a suffering man, sagging, bleeding, dead. The earlier Christus Rex presents a crowned Christ standing upright and alive on the cross, reigning from it. Eastern Orthodox crucifixes are usually painted rather than sculpted. Which one hangs in a church tells you a good deal about how that church talks about suffering.
Facts
Use
Who May Handle ItAdherents of the tradition 1 ConsecrationBlessed before use, without a rite of consecration 1 Attributions
TraditionChristianity, principally Catholic and Orthodox 1 Physical Form
MaterialWood, metal, ivory, plaster 1 Identity
Category of Sacred Object Origins
Origin Period Learn More
The Oldest Surviving Image of the Crucifixion Is a Joke
The crucifix insists on the body, the wounds and the death where a plain cross shows only the sign of them, and the earliest surviving depiction of the scene it presents was made to mock a Christian.
The Alexamenos graffito
Scratched into a wall on the Palatine Hill around the year 200, the Alexamenos graffito shows a man worshipping a crucified figure with the head of a donkey, and reads, in Greek, that Alexamenos worships his god. It is a piece of ridicule made at the expense of a Christian, and it is the first image of the crucifixion that survives, which is a striking fact about an event that would become the central image of Western art.
How a church talks about suffering
The devotional crucifix divides sharply along a theological line. The Gothic crucifix presents a suffering man, sagging, bleeding, dead; the earlier Christus Rex presents a crowned Christ standing upright and alive on the cross, reigning from it. Which of the two hangs in a church tells a good deal about how that church speaks of suffering, whether as an agony to be entered into or as a victory already won. Catholic practice requires a crucifix to be visible on or near the altar at Mass, which fixes the body, and not merely the sign, at the centre of the rite.
How a Corpus Is Carved, Cast and Attached
A crucifix is two objects assembled as one, the cross itself and the corpus, the figure of Christ fixed to it, and each is usually made separately before being joined.
Corpus and cross as separate crafts
A wooden crucifix typically has a carved corpus, often boxwood or lime, pinned or glued to a cross of the same or a plainer wood. Cast examples use bronze, brass or silver for the corpus, sometimes gilt, fixed with nails through the hands and feet in imitation of the execution itself. Baroque workshops in Spain and its former colonies carried this furthest, producing polychrome corpora with glass eyes, real hair and jointed arms for use in Holy Week processions, figures meant to be dressed and carried, a tradition still active today.
Ownership, blessing and what is not for sale
Any Catholic may own and use a small crucifix without ceremony, but a large altar or processional crucifix belongs to the parish, is blessed for that specific use, and is handled during the liturgy only by clergy and servers. A damaged crucifix follows the same disposal custom as a plain cross, burial or burning rather than the rubbish bin, though where corpus and cross can be separated, a badly damaged figure is sometimes replaced on an otherwise sound cross rather than discarding the whole. Processional figures of unusual age or artistic value are treated as parish patrimony and cannot simply be sold, a rule that has stopped more than one attempted sale of a colonial era Christ figure out of a struggling parish.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Belongs to Tradition
The crucifix, as distinct from a plain cross, carries the body and became standard in the Latin West from around the ninth century.
Rejected Here
The Reformed reading of the second commandment refuses any image of Christ set up to be honoured, and the crucifix was taken out of Reformed churches on that ground.
A figure on a cross compounds what the Witnesses already refuse, since they read the veneration of any image as forbidden outright.
Held Differently
The Orthodox cross carries a painted or low relief figure rather than a carved one. Sculpture in the round is avoided in the churches of the Byzantine rite, which is why the crucifix looks different rather than being absent.
Element Of
The Lutheran reformation kept the crucifix on and above the altar, on the principle that usages not contrary to scripture may be retained.
A cross bearing the figure of Christ crucified is required to be visible to the people at Mass, so the sculpted corpus is not optional in the Roman rite.
Related To
A crucifix is a cross bearing the figure of Christ, the corpus, distinguished from a plain cross by that figure.
Sources
1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition
F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005on the crucifix and its depiction of ChristView the Source The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, Inscriptions
Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti and Danilo Mazzoleni, Schnell und Steiner, 2002on early Christian visual evidenceView the Source Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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