The Moral Masochism at the Heart of Christianity: Evidence from Russian Orthodox Iconography and Icon Veneration

Abstract

he core of Christian dogma may be expressed as follows: nearly two thousand years ago a man named Jesus permitted himself to be tortured to death on a wooden cross. This act is supposed to have saved or redeemed humankind from an earlier fall into sin. We were redeemed because we were all sinful to begin with, and because the man who ac- cepted this torture and death was none other than God himself, in the person of God the Son. As Saint John of Damascus wrote in the eighth century: . . from the time that God, the Son of God, who is unchangeable by reason of His Godhead, chose to suffer voluntarily, He wiped out our debt, by paying for us a most ad- mirable and precious ransom (29). This redemption of debt is the central story of the gospels, but it may be represented visually as well. Icons depicting Christ's crucifixion often show hu- mankind in the image of the skull of sinful Adam (Russian adamova golova) at the foot of the cross, thereby directly connecting Christ's suffering to human sinfulness (Averintsev 65). Psychoanalytically speaking, God's self-willed crucifixion has had the ef- fect of at least conditionally relieving us from guilt. 1