SCHRODINGER'S CROSS

   Last night I emerged from a dream of an utterly confusing party in Oxford, full of lean intelligent women talking loudly, into its opposite, which presented itself as the Carthusian motto STAT CRUX DUM VOLVITUR ORBIS. The Cross stands – remains, stands still – while the world turns (lit. is turned). It’s a marvellous motto, and in my mind I saw the Nazareth Village cross, surprisingly small, maybe 7’ high, of unsquared logs, very crude, and on the other hand the Universe as we now know it via Hubble, immense, crowded with heavenly bodies, most of which turn. And the centre of that immensity is that little crude cross, which alone does not move – like Vladimir and Estragon.

      

     As I moved gradually from dreaming to thinking, all this came together with Benedict XVI’s passages, in Jesus of Nazareth, on the Cross as the centre of our faith, Christ the King who reigns from the Cross, etc. Yet then something in my mind asked, ‘But which Cross? The crucifix, the cross with a man on it? Or the empty cross of the Resurrection?’ This, I remembered, was one of the controversies I grew up with, between Catholics and Protestants: the latter refused the crucifix, saying that after the Resurrection any cross imaging our faith should be an empty one.

     The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is a true aporia. On the one hand the Protestants are right: the Resurrection empties the Cross. On the other, the Catholics are right: Christ reigns from the Cross. One needs to imagine the Cross as both occupied and empty at the same time. Schrödinger’s Cross.

     Stat crux dum volvitur orbis. The Cross is central. And yet, was it planned? Only a rigid predestinationist could assert that. When Jesus walked in Galilee, when he taught and healed, was the Cross already inevitable? So many were converted, among them some of the religious ruling class, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. And he spoke ‘with authority’. It would have taken only a few more converts, like Caiphas and Annas, for his message to have succeeded.

     Uh, oh. That sends us straight back to Peter saying stoutly that no, that horror was damn well not going to happen, implying that he wouldn’t let it. And what did Jesus answer? “Get thee behind me, Satan!” So yes, it did have to happen. In the first place, it was really inevitable – which tells us something about Jesus’ message. As someone Benedict XVI quotes put it, a man merely proclaiming that people should love one another would not have been crucified. It was his clear announcement that he was God that made the Cross inevitable.

     So the Cross was necessary. Was it also sufficient? No: it had to be completed by the Resurrection. It had to happen for the New Covenenant to be activated. For only the Cross could lead to the Resurrection; and the Resurrection is the very basis of the New Alliance. ‘If Christ did not rise from the dead, all we preach is stuff and nonsense,’ said St Paul unambiguously (I Cor. 15:14; the whole passage is salutary).

     So the Cross that stands while the world turns is Schrödinger’s Cross. It is to that the Carthusians have turned. It is Eliot’s ‘still point of the turning world’. So what about that turning world? Have they turned their back upon it? Yes, because a Carthusian lives in cell, having died to the world. No, because his whole life is spent in unimaginably intense prayer for that world – which, after all, is the orbis for love of which God Himself took flesh and offered Himself as the sacrifice for sin.

     We are not Carthusians; yet we might usefully carry Schrödinger’s Cross in our hearts, to remind us of both that immense love that was, and is, given to and for us, and of the victory over Death that has made us free, free to love, for ever.

     The text at my baptism was “Stand then in the freedom wherewith Christ has made you free.”  (Gal. 5:1)