If you were presented a piece of wood from the true cross, should you worship it? You might respond, “Of course we don’t worship the true cross.”
But here’s the thing: St. Thomas Aquinas disagrees with you. One of the things in the Summa Theologiae that shocked me the most was his claim that we should worship the true cross—and he makes a good argument for it (as well as some really important distinctions). Understanding why you ought to worship is actually critical for understanding Christian worship more broadly.
Aquinas’s position is extreme in that he says that “honor or reverence is due to a rational creature only; while to an insensible creature, no honor or reverence is due save by reason of a rational nature” (Summa Theologiae III, 25, 4, c.). Either the true cross is worth worshiping because of its connection to Christ or it’s not worth honoring at all because it’s a dead tree.
So when and how can we properly honor an inanimate object with the honor due to a rational being? Aquinas says that there are only two possible reasons:
- because it represents a person or
- because it is connected to a person.
He explains, “In the first way men are wont to venerate the king’s image; in the second way, his robe. And both are venerated by men with the same veneration as they show to the king” (ibid.). Or, to take a modern example, imagine a woman whose husband goes away on a trip: she holds on to his photo as well as to his sweater. The photo is because of representation (it is an image of him); the sweater is because of association (it is something he wore).
Those are the two categories. Use whichever examples make that distinction clear. I’ll use the king ones that Aquinas offers and show why those are so central to Christian worship.
The first of these two categories covers religious images, which is why we kneel in worship before icons of Christ. Aquinas makes a critical distinction here: “No reverence is shown to Christ’s image as a thing—for instance, carved or painted wood,” and that “reverence should be shown to it in so far only as it is an image” (ST III, 25, 3, c.).
That distinction between treating an icon as a “thing” and treating it as an “image” sounds subtle, but it’s not really. When my daughter was ten months old, she saw my picture on my Costco card and kissed it and waved to it, because she recognized that it was me. Even as an infant, she knew the difference between me sitting next to her and the grainy, black-and-white image of me on the Costco card. As a thing, it’s a piece of plastic. As an image, it’s her dad. The honor she paid the image wasn’t to the piece of plastic, but to me. And because I’m not a crazy person, I was honored by her doing this, not jealous of the guy on the card.
This explains why Catholics and Orthodox are more comfortable than Protestants are with religious images, and why we honor the images of the saints and worship images of Christ: because we’re honoring (or worshiping) not the painting, but the people depicted.
But this idea is actually much bigger than you may have realized. Aquinas cites St. John Damascene, who says,
On what grounds, then, do we show reverence to each other unless because we are made after God’s image [Gen. 1:26-27]? For as [St.] Basil, that much-versed expounder of divine things, says, the honor given to the image passes over to the prototype (An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 4, 16).
In other words, our love of neighbor is rooted in the fact that our neighbor is an image of God. Jesus makes this point in a subtle way:
“Tell us, then, what you think. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” But Jesus, aware of their malice, said, “Why put me to the test, you hypocrites? Show me the money for the tax.” And they brought him a coin. And Jesus said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” They said, “Caesar’s.” Then he said to them, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:17-21).
Jesus is drawing a parallel between the coin (stamped with the image of Caesar) and the human person (stamped with the image of God). It’s one reason why desecration of currency has been seen historically as an affront to the king depicted on the currency. For instance, the book Culture and Customs of Thailand tells how in 2001, “a Scottish national made the nearly fatal mistake of urinating on a picture of the king, which under Thai law carries the death penalty. Instead, he was deported after a jail term and much international embarrassment” (p. 153).
More positively, it’s why Jesus says that at the Last Judgment, the King of Kings will say, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40). The honor given to our neighbor as an image of God is ultimately paid to God.
So the point here is actually much bigger than whether or not we can use images in worship. It’s at the heart of why it’s okay (and indeed, salvifically necessary) for us to love our neighbor, in a way that it’s not okay to love, say, money.
The first category explains why a painting or statue of the crucifixion is an invitation to worship. But that doesn’t explain why we would worship the true cross even when Jesus is not upon it. That’s because of the second category: the cross is (if you will) a “thing of God,” a thing associated with God in such a way that it’s an invitation to worship.
In this sense, it is like honoring the robes of the king or kissing the king’s shoes. You don’t do that because you are enamored with his fashion choices; you do it out of respect for the king himself. This again is solidly biblical:
And behold, a woman who had suffered from a hemorrhage for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment; for she said to herself, “If I only touch his garment, I shall be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well (Matt. 9:20-22).
Why did the woman believe that touching the hem of Christ’s garment would heal her? It wasn’t superstition, thinking that Jesus wore magical clothing. She also wasn’t tugging on him to get his attention. Rather, she seemed to have in mind the fact that since these were Jesus’ garments, they were a legitimate place to look for a miracle, just as she would from Jesus himself. And Jesus doesn’t condemn this; in fact, he praises her for her faith.
We see this through the things associated with the apostles as well: the early Christians “carried out the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and pallets, that as Peter came by at least his shadow might fall on some of them” (Acts 5:15), and “God did extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them” (19:11-12).
This is why Catholics treat relics seriously: God works through the things associated with the saints, just as he did through those saints while they were on Earth. And that’s even more true of those things associated not just with the saints, but with Jesus himself. St. Augustine points this out in City of God:
For if the dress of a father, or his ring, or anything he wore, be precious to his children, in proportion to the love they bore him, with how much more reason ought we to care for the bodies of those we love, which they wore far more closely and intimately than any clothing! For the body is not an extraneous ornament or aid, but a part of man’s very nature (1, 13).
The point here is actually bigger than relics. Why do we worship the incarnate Jesus? After all, “the King of ages” is “immortal, invisible, the only God” (1 Tim. 1:17). The people of the first century could no more see Jesus’ divine nature than we can see it today. They saw his humanity, and those who believed saw through his humanity (so to speak) to his divinity.
This is what Jesus encourages of the apostle Thomas: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing” (John 20:27). Even though Thomas could see the body of the resurrected Christ, it still took faith for him to say, “My Lord and my God!” (v. 28).
We honor the bodies of the just even when they’re dead. The patriarch Joseph made his sons swear to bring his bones back to the Holy Land (Gen. 50:25), and they did (Exod. 13:19); the prophet from Judah made special provisions about his own tomb (1 Kings 13:31), leading King Josiah to order it not to be disturbed (2 Kings 23:18); and God actually raises a man from the dead when his dead body touches the bones of Elisha (13:21).
This means that it is right and just to continue to give honor and worship to the body of Jesus, even when he is dead. After all, Jesus praises Mary of Bethany for anointing him because “in pouring this ointment on my body she has done it to prepare me for burial” (Matt. 26:12). And as Augustine points out, “the Gospel speaks with commendation of those who were careful to take down his body from the cross, and wrap it lovingly in costly burial cloths, and see to its burial” (see John 19:38-40).
Jesus’ humanity is therefore both an image of his divinity and associated with his divinity. Colossians 1:15 says that Jesus “is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation.” That’s the first reason we worship him in his humanity: his humanity is imprinted with divinity.
But the second reason is that Jesus’ humanity is perfectly united to his divinity and that “we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb. 10:10). In other words, his humanity is the instrument of our salvation. In that sense, it’s like both the king’s coin and the king’s robe. That’s why we worship the Eucharist as the body of Christ.
But if that reasoning holds, it’s also why we worship the true cross, because of “its contact with the limbs of Christ, and from its being saturated with his blood.” Keep in mind the distinction Aquinas makes: we don’t worship the true cross itself as dead wood, or the hem of Jesus’ garment as inanimate cloth, or the body of Christ as flesh. Rather, we worship God in (or through) these things.
The same principle holds in each of these cases, even though the cross isn’t connected to Jesus in the exact same way that either his humanity and divinity are connected or the way that his clothing was connected to him.
Given what I’ve written here, you might be wondering, “Why don’t we worship Mary, then?” After all, as Aquinas says, “Christ’s mother is more akin to him than the cross” (ST III, 25, 5, obj. 3), and we’ve just established that true worship is to be paid to the cross.
The reason is precisely that Mary isn’t an inanimate object. She’s a person, and we honor her for her own sake. To avoid confusing the honor owed to Mary and the honor owed to Christ, we don’t worship Christ in Mary in the same way we worship Christ in images of him or in the true cross.
To go back to our earlier analogy, a woman might kiss her husband’s photo when he’s gone, or spend the night wearing his sweater, because those are inanimate objects that are valued for their connection to him. She doesn’t do anything of the sort with her husband’s father, because he’s a separate human being, and it would therefore be wrong.
There’s some honor due your father-in-law by virtue of his connection to your spouse, but you don’t treat your spouse and father-in-law interchangeably. Likewise, you venerate the king’s image and his robe, but the honor you pay to his mother isn’t the same. As Aquinas says, “The honor due to the king’s mother is not equal to the honor which is due to the king: but is somewhat like it, by reason of a certain excellence on her part” (ST III, 25, 5, ad. 1).
This is also why, even though we hopefully see Christ in our neighbor, we don’t worship our neighbors. So Mary, both as an image of God and the Mother of God, is due high honors, but we don’t give her the singular honor of divine worship. That belongs to God alone.