Theological Reflections on the Stations of the Cross
Pilgrimage, Imagination, and Imitation
Throughout the season of Lent, and particularly on Good Friday, Catholics around the world participate in the devotion known as the Stations of the Cross. In this devotion, a group of participants stop, pray, and meditate at fourteen “stations,” visual representations (like paintings or statues) of fourteen moments in the Passion of Christ, starting with Jesus’ condemnation to death by Pontius Pilate and ending with his burial in the tomb. Overall, the devotion is scripturally-based, although some of the events associated with specific stations, like Veronica wiping Jesus’ face as he carries his cross (the sixth station), or three instances in which Jesus stumbles and falls under the weight of the cross (the third, seventh, and ninth stations) are extra-biblical.
The stations of the cross are a theologically rich devotion that emphasizes the themes of Lent and Holy Week, particularly penance and the suffering of Christ. Understanding the historical development of the devotion brings out this theological richness even more clearly, focusing in particular on how God speaks in history, the need to intentionally place ourselves in the Gospel narrative, and the call to be imitators of Christ.
Pilgrimage
The stations of the cross devotion is rooted in the ancient Christian practice of pilgrimage. After the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312, an increasing number of Christians undertook pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and by the Middle Ages, Rome and certain sites associated with saints, like Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury, became important pilgrimage destinations, as well. As the theologian Lawrence Cunningham points out, Christian pilgrimage served three main purposes: to visit the tombs of the martyrs, and later the saints; to meet with the great ascetics and other wise men and women; and to experience the places associated with the events of the Bible, particularly the life of Jesus.
This third reason is the one most relevant for understanding the later development of the stations of the cross. Why was it important for Christians to visit places from the Bible? As Cunningham explains:
Christianity is a religion founded on a person who existed at a particular place in a particular time. Christianity did not begin its story “once upon a time” but “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar.” As a consequence the events and places surrounding Jesus are palpable. For that reason Christians could visit the places where the central events of their religion took place: It was here that the Eucharist was instituted; there that Jesus died; over yonder is where he was buried. The going to places made the stories of the Gospels, heard in the liturgy, take on a peculiar reality: “We understood sacred scripture better,” Jerome once wrote, “when we have seen Judea with our own eyes.” (The Catholic Heritage, 2002)
Pilgrimage, therefore, and particularly pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was testimony that God’s revelation takes place in concrete history. To indulge in a cliché, however, medieval pilgrims found meaning not just in the destination, but in the journey itself. To go on a pilgrimage was an arduous task that required self-sacrifice and determination. As the theologian William Cavanaugh points out:
Pilgrimage was a kenotic [i.e., self-emptying] movement, a stripping away of the external sources of stability in one’s life. The pilgrim’s way was the way of the cross: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). The journey required a disorientation from the trappings of one’s quotidian identity in order to respond to a call from the source of one’s deeper identity. (Migrations of the Holy, 2011)
By the Middle Ages, pilgrimage had also come to be seen as a form of penance. Cavanaugh explains:
The primary motive of pilgrimage was transformation of the self through the forgiveness of sin. This transformation of the self was not self-transformation as such, because it responded to a discipline that had its source outside the self: God. Pilgrims traveled to obtain indulgences and to complete penances that had been assigned to them, meaning that pilgrimages were not always voluntary and self-initiated.
With the popularity of pilgrimages, houses of hospitality emerged along popular routes to host and tend to the needs of pilgrims, and in the Holy Land, various sites were established as pilgrimage destinations. Constantine had built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site of Christ’s tomb in the fourth century, and other sites were established in later centuries. By the eighth century, pilgrims were following the “Via Dolorosa,” a pilgrimage route leading from Gethsemane to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with various stops along the way.
By that time, Jerusalem had fallen under Muslim control, but Muslim rulers intermittently allowed Christians to continue pilgrimages to the Holy Land. Early in the thirteenth century, the Sultan, Al-Kamil, gave the Franciscans custody over the pilgrimage sites, and in 1342 Pope Clement VI made the Franciscans the exclusive custodians of these sites. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land were nevertheless increasingly difficult under Muslim control, and when the Ottoman Turks took control of Jerusalem early in the sixteenth century, they became nearly impossible.
As a result, beginning in the fifteenth century, throughout Europe Franciscans began establishing outdoor shrines that replicated the pilgrimage sites in Jerusalem, sometimes even mimicking the exact distances between the different “stations.” Although the number of stations and the scenes portrayed varied, these shrines represent the origins of the stations of the cross devotion. A vast devotional literature grew up around these shrines. By the seventeenth century, the stations began to also be placed inside churches, where they are most commonly found today.
The theology behind the stations, then, was rooted in the practice of pilgrimage and in turn shaped by Franciscan spirituality. There is, first, the emphasis on Christ’s humanity, expressed in the sacredness of specific times and places, as well as in the focus on Christ’s suffering. Second, unlike with some other devotions, there is a sense of journey, of movement through time and place toward a final destination. And the stations, like pilgrimage, are connected with penitence and forgiveness.
Imagination
When explaining the appeal of pilgrimages, Cunningham explains:
For the people of the fourth century [and onward] the places associated with Jesus were sources of sacred power. One prayed at the church of the Holy Sepulchre more piously because it had a sacred aura; it was there, at that spot, that the work of salvation was effected.
With the decline in pilgrimages in the fifteenth century, that sense of a “sacred aura” was lost since the faithful could no longer be physically present in the sacred places of Jesus’ life and death. The stations of the cross, rather, depend on the power of the imagination. Participants mentally place themselves in the locations where the events of Jesus’ life and death occurred and imagine what it would have been like to experience those events.
This method of prayer, sometimes called immersion or projection, had earlier roots but was systematically developed by the fourteenth-century monk Ludolph of Saxony in his work Vita Christi (Life of Christ). Ludolph’s method of prayer became central to the Devotio Moderna movement, a movement of reform and renewal in the Low Countries and Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Adherents to Devotio Moderna, who included lay people as well as priests, emphasized simplicity of life, moral rigorism, and the importance of interior devotion rather than outward ritual. Devotio Moderna called for a methodical approach to prayer to develop the interior life, including the use of immersive prayer. Ludolph’s Vita Christi, and the Devotio Moderna generally, also had a deep influence on St. Ignatius of Loyola, who encourages the use of immersive prayer in his Spiritual Exercises.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the stations of the cross devotion was particularly popular in those regions most influenced by the Devotio Moderna, the Low Countries and Germany, and shows the influence of that movement by calling on participants to project themselves into the scenes of Christ’s Passion. Although the devotion requires the outward movement of the participant from station to station, tracing the steps of Jesus, it also encourages interior meditation and prayer.
The use of immersive prayer and other times of meditative prayer became widespread at a time when European urban centers were growing and lay townspeople were eager for a form of spiritual life comparable to, but different from, that available to monks and nuns. The sacred rhythms of early medieval rural life no longer held meaning for this population, and so one’s relationship to the sacred had to be developed through more intentional, methodical methods. To use the language of more contemporary theologians, the adherents of the Devotio Moderna desired to be more deeply drawn into the Christian narrative. The growth of the stations of the cross devotion in the late medieval period is a strong reflection of this desire, and this aspect of the devotion, its ability to draw participants into the Christian narrative, makes it appealing in our own day, as well, when Christians are faced with a host of competing narratives.
Imitation
One interesting feature of the stations of the cross is that, while it is centered on the Passion of Christ, the focus of attention is not exclusively on the Crucifixion, which is portrayed in only two of the stations (the eleventh, in which Christ is nailed to the cross, and the twelfth, in which he dies on the cross), but rather on Christ’s journey toward death. In theological terms, Jesus’ salvific work is understood not just in terms of his atoning death, but also, and perhaps even more so, in terms of his obediential love of the Father, even to the point of suffering and death.
This emphasis on Christ as a Man of Sorrows obedient to the Father throughout his life was common in late medieval spirituality and theology. The writings of Gabriel Biel, perhaps the most prominent theologian of the late fifteenth century, offers a good example. Biel was a Canon Regular of the Congregation of Windesheim, the clerical branch of the Devotio Moderna movement, and also deeply influenced by Franciscan theology and spirituality, and so his thinking is representative of the spirituality behind the emergence of the stations of the cross devotion. In his magisterial study of Biel’s thought, the historian Heiko Oberman writes that, for Biel:
The passion of Christ is a continual suffering that began at the moment of his birth, the flight to Egypt, and the poverty of his youth. Christ’s death on the cross is only the culmination of a whole life dedicated to obedience and fulfillment of the law.
Why is this significant? Christ’s atoning death was something only the Son could do, but Christ’s obedience to the Father is something all of us can imitate. There is an active dimension to this spirituality. Rooted in the writings of the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, this theme of imitating Christ was also central to the Devotio Moderna movement, most notably in Thomas à Kempis’s classic The Imitation of Christ.
For Biel, according to Oberman, there is a certain paradox in Christ’s salvific work, which can be understood in two senses:
In the first sense, Christ as victor, the work of Christ is complete and sufficient. In the second sense, Christ as example or as dux [leader], the work of Christ awaits completion pending the decision of the freed viator [pilgrim or traveler, a term used in late medieval theology to refer to human beings in this life] to follow and imitate him.
As long as the decision to follow and imitate Christ is understood as itself a cooperation with God’s grace, this is consistent with the teaching of the Council of Trent, which met a few decades after Biel’s death.
Biel goes on to say that Christ’s life and passion serve as a testimony to Christ’s love for God the Father above all else that inspires in the viator a similar love. Here we can see how the stations of the cross reflect the spirituality of which Biel is representative. By emphasizing the entirety of Christ’s Passion, the stations of the cross don’t just point us toward what Christ has done for us, but also call us to be imitators of Christ.
The late medieval spirituality behind the stations of the cross devotion is not without problems. For example, although the imitation of Christ certainly entails suffering (Christ bids us to “take up our crosses”), the tendency to think of suffering as valuable or redemptive for its own sake can be harmful, particularly for those whose suffering arises from systematic injustices. Likewise, the notion of “obedience” was understood by the late medievals in too legalistic terms. Perhaps today we might instead point to Christ’s faithfulness to the Father as what we are called to imitate.
Even so, I think understanding the late medieval roots of the devotion can enrich the stations of the cross, particularly its call for us to recognize both what Christ has done for us through his Passion and what we are called to do as imitators of Christ. Rooted in the ancient practice of pilgrimage, it also reminds us that God speaks to us in history, as we journey through time and place. And asking us to use our imaginations and project ourselves into the events of Christ’s passion, the devotion encourages us to be intentional about forming ourselves in the Christian narrative.
Of Interest…
El País (Spain) reports that the government of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua has prohibited public Holy Week processions, limiting them to within churches or on grounds adjacent to church buildings. These processions are important expressions of faith throughout Latin America, including Nicaragua. This prohibition comes after several months of hostile actions by the government toward the Church in Nicaragua, including the arrest and detention of Bishop Rolando Álvarez of Matagalpa. Kevin Clarke at America had a good summary of events in Nicaragua back in January.
Also on the international scene, last Tuesday the Vatican announced that China had unilaterally appointed a new bishop for Shanghai, in apparent violation of the agreement on the status of the Catholic Church in China, including the appointment of bishops, signed by China and the Vatican in 2018 and renewed last October. The appointment will likely increase tensions between the Vatican and the Chinese government and puts a strain on the controversial agreement.
In the March 24 episode of the Jesuitical podcast, co-host Zac Davis and Vivian Richards, S.J. of the Jesuits’ Karnataka province in India discuss the Digital Pilgrimage app, which provides audio and visual aids to help users meditate on important places in the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola and the history of the Jesuits. The discussion touches on the themes of pilgrimage and immersive prayer discussed in this newsletter!
Coming Up…
Thanks to everyone who listened to or read the interview with M. Therese Lysaught and Jason King from the Journal of Moral Theology earlier this week! As I have noted before, I have more interviews in the works, details available next week.
Last week, Pope Francis gave an address in which he offered some reflections on ethics and artificial intelligence. That is a topic that I have written and spoken on in the past, and so some time in the next week or two, I hope to engage with Francis’s comments and the broader public discussion of AI.
Wonderfully informed and balanced. Appreciate it.