Cities
From Palaeolithic cave paintings to cruciform churches and Sydney’s Kings Cross, this deceptively primitive intersection of two lines has enduring symbolic power. By Elizabeth Farrelly.
Meditations on the cross
Each Easter my local bakery sells Not Cross Buns in sixpacks. They look slightly naked, sans the traditional embossed pictogram, but they’re delicious. With every bite, though, I’m conscious that the messaging – no doubt intended as a badge of the secular pluralism that largely defines my tribe – is also a loss. We live in the world of things, but to shear those things of their numinosity, even for all the right political reasons, is also to sacrifice spiritual and imaginative depth.
At its most banal, the cross as pictogram is the box-marker of bureaucratic form-filling: tick, cross, blue ink, black ink, et cetera. Even within theology, most so-called meditations on the Cross consider not the cross itself but the act it so literally supported. Unpicking the crucifixion as a parable of unselfing, radical empathy, sacrifice and rebirth, they ignore the cross itself, apparently seeing it as a mere enabler, a favourite Roman killing instrument whose shape happened to echo both the outstretched human form and the tree to which it might be nailed.
The Cross was never just a cross. Even as a base pictogram, this deceptively primitive intersection of two lines or sticks has power. Appearing in an estimated 13 per cent of Europe’s Palaeolithic cave paintings, it manifested many forms, including the ancient Vedic swastika, symbolising prosperity and good fortune – until hijacked by the Nazis – the Jainist symbol of spiritual teaching and the Egyptian loop-headed cross, the ankh, a symbol of life.
By Roman times, it was an already ancient symbol, replete with richly layered meanings that nourished the new Christian mythos. This “archaic and universally disseminated symbol … made from the wood of the Tree of Good and Evil,” noted philosopher Mircea Eliade, was also “the Tree of Life planted on Calvary.”
These days, of course, the symbolic resonance of the cross is still pervasive – as we have just witnessed in the funeral rites of Pope Francis. Moreover, splinters of this enduring and global Christian signifier – remnants of “the true Cross”– are still revered as sacred relics in Rome, Jerusalem, Spain and Serbia. What is it, then, about the cross?
For a start, there’s the sheer utility of X-marked precision. As architecture students (back when drawing was still a thing), we were required to make sure our lines always crossed, just a few microns, at exactly the right spot. It gave our plans and elevations the soft-spiked look of young cacti, but it was from that crossing point that dimensions would be taken, bricks laid, concrete poured. Without the crossing, your design was a foggy dream.
This locational concision is the basis of all graphs, navigation and cartography, from treasure islands to drone warfare, with intersections of longitude and latitude showing where the hole must be dug, the sailor rescued or the bomb dropped.
A similar quadrilateral construct frames our idea of the “four winds” and four cardinal points – which may derive from the rising and setting of the sun – and underpinned ancient cosmology, navigation and city-planning throughout Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. The Romans, says historian Joseph Rykwert, saw the heavens as a circular, domed, quadripartite templum and set out their towns and even army camps to reflect the same diagram. Walls, gates and streets were oriented to each of the four directions, with straight inroads crossed at the centre to yield what we still call “city quarters”. He compared this with Eastern cities tending more to the mandala plan. The biblical New Jerusalem is described in Revelations as organised towards each of the four directions, and churches, too, traditionally have a cruciform plan, with the altar facing east.
A cruciform plan is one thing. To erect it, though, as on Calvary, reorients the cross as an intersection of vertical and horizontal, intensifying both its practical efficiency and its symbolic power. First, the vertical. We know that the pathology of crucifixion involves gravity-based asphyxiation. More interesting, though, is the symbolic association of the vertical with nobility.
The Buddhist chakras, for example, sit vertically atop one another rising from the base chakras to the highest or most enlightened, like some sort of moral cairn. Western tradition has a similar tendency to see “the upright gait as a moral orthopedics of human dignity”, according to cultural historian Sander L. Gilman in his wonderful book Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture. An erect carriage is credited with “strengthening the backbone against humiliation, dependency, and subjugation”.
In theology, too, the vertical is seen to represent the transcendent aspect of god; the striving for enlightenment, the yearning towards the divine – hence the light from on high in the Gothic church. The horizontal, meanwhile, represents the immanent deity – the god-in-all-things. The horizontal, therefore, has a social aspect, a grassroots outreach that fuels the drive to empathy, charity and good works. At a secular level, architect Frank Lloyd Wright always saw his emphatically horizontal “prairie houses” in Wisconsin as egalitarian and democratic.
Then there’s the intersection. That point, as you’ll recall from school algebra, has location but no size, no spatial extension. So the crossing point implied in all these schemata is real but also unreal – it has power without materiality. This gives it a kind of magic, a charisma that draws us in.
In the Roman town, for example, the crossing of the four main roads became the pivot of both sacred and temporal power. Even now, a crossroads is often a gathering place. In Sydney, almost everything we call a “square” is actually a crossroads – not to mention Kings Cross, the city’s erstwhile sex-and-drugs mecca.
The crossing of a traditional cruciform church, where nave and transept intersect, is especially interesting. It has no particular function. All the parts of ritual – choir, priests, altar, font, pulpit and congregation – are located elsewhere. The crossing itself is empty. Yet it is typically celebrated by a dome or lantern – as in Christopher Wren’s design for St Paul’s Cathedral in London – for this is the dwelling place of the divine.
Jung tells us that the early Christian cross was the Greek equilateral cross, which gradually morphed into the now-familiar dominant vertical with crossbeam. Either way, there are significant departures from the Sanskrit swastika, with its serifed feet all pointing clockwise, and the loop-headed ankh, both of which imply a more circular, Eastern world view. The Christian cross, by contrast, is always open-ended, suggesting both infinite extension and an irreducible centre.
This can be read either of two ways. The centred expansiveness could imply the imperialism that has characterised Christian millennia to date. On the other hand, as British–American philosopher Larry Siedentop argues, abstract universalism and the notion of fundamental equality of souls contained in “do unto others” can be seen to underpin the advent of the individual, of democracy and of the inquiry-based university. Perhaps, indeed, these two developments were co-symptomatic, both arising from the Christian idea of conscience.
Siedentop’s core thesis is that in this way contemporary secular liberalism was uniquely created by the very religion it rejects. Perhaps, then, my neighbourhood Not Cross Buns should really be called Once Were Crossed or Post-Cross buns. Or maybe just the amnesiac truth: Forgot Cross Buns.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 3, 2025 as "Meditations on the cross".
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