By JAMES MONTI
Along the highways here in the American Northeast, it is quite a common but sobering sight to spot on the side of the road a makeshift cross to mark the place where a tragic accident claimed the life of one or more occupants of the vehicles involved. The cross may be from a recent accident, or from one that happened years ago.
Fresh flowers at the foot of the cross testify that those who perished there have not been forgotten. For when a family loses a loved one, it is not only their final resting place that will be remembered, but also where their soul departed from this world. For a person of faith, the choice of a cross to mark such a place, or even an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, comes almost instinctively. Yet the bereaved who express their grief in this manner perhaps do not realize that they are actually continuing a tradition that is many centuries old — the tradition of the wayside cross.
In a 2012 study of Europe’s extant medieval and Renaissance wayside crosses, the art historian Achim Timmermann estimates that the total number of these crosses across the landscape of Christian Europe and the Christianized regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America must be in the hundreds of thousands.
The custom is at least as old as the thirteenth century. The reasons for building these crosses are considerably more varied than simply memorializing a departed soul. What follows here is largely based upon the findings of Achim Timmermann as presented by him in a series of fairly recent scholarly publications. Our intent is to bring his findings to bear upon our own faith journey.
Some wayside crosses functioned as stopping places for the outdoor processions of a parish in the course of the liturgical year. Others delineated the route to a pilgrims’ shrine. Still others were erected in expiation for a crime or sin of the donor. There were even crosses built to help condemned prisoners to make their peace with God on the way to their execution.
The particular form of the wayside crosses has varied considerably. Achim Timmermann found that they could be divided into four overall categories according to their design. Some are simply free-standing crosses or crucifixes made of wood, metal, or stone. Others constitute a miniature shrine, often with a roof, featuring a painted or sculpted image of the Crucifixion or some other scene of the Passion mounted atop a column or shaft. Still others take the form of a monument resembling a tall tombstone, with a cruciform shape, or with an essentially two-dimensional, sometimes oval, image of the Passion toward the top.
The fourth category, of which there are relatively few examples, is built in the form of a gothic tower or spire that can reach a height of almost fifty feet (Achim Timmermann, “Highways to Heaven (and Hell): Wayside Crosses and the Making of Late Medieval Landscape,” in Celeste Brusati et al., The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400-1700, Leiden, Belgium and Boston, 2012, pp. 390-391).
The erection of countless wayside crosses along roads that everyone had to travel upon to go just about anywhere served as a potent sacralization of daily life. Wherever one turned, there were these constant visual reminders of God and what He has done to save us from our sins. They afforded the viewer an opportunity to place oneself mentally in the presence of God, to see the daily tasks of one’s state of life in the context of eternity as chores to be carried out for the love and service of God.
Moreover, the foolish traveler who in his or her thoughts was beginning to consider yielding to an evil temptation would be confronted by these images as a warning not to stray from the path of virtue. And insofar as some of the crosses were “fatality crosses,” memorials of a person who had died on the road, often inscribed with the specifics of when and how the person had died, there was the added dimension of being reminded of one’s own very real mortality.
Timmermann astutely observes that these wayside crosses would have served as a sort of “portal” by which the traveler would find himself journeying side by side with Christ Crucified, a point of contact between the traveler’s own time and place and that of the Gospels, whereby at one and the same time the traveler would be transported in spirit to the streets of Jerusalem to witness the Passion of Christ and Christ in His sorrows would be transported into the traveler’s own daily life (Timmermann, “Highways to Heaven,” pp. 390, 431, 435).
Stemming directly from this visual sacralization of daily travel comes what is perhaps the most striking purpose for such a profusion of wayside crosses: to turn the act of travel into a living metaphor of that ultimate “journey of a lifetime,” the journey to God, of which the Letter to the Hebrews speaks: “…they are seeking a homeland…they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:14, 16). Like the road signs along our highways that tell us where we are or where the road will take us, the wayside crosses of centuries past served as spiritual guideposts to remind the traveler where every roadway and path must ultimately lead him, to eternal life with God, our Lady, and the saints.
Even in the absence of such wayside crosses, the perceptive soul can sense this analogy, as the great Catholic philosopher and writer Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977) observes:
“. . . a street has a deeper meaning in a very general sense. A street as such is furnished with a certain poetry of life, both in a landscape and in a city. It embodies the primal element of walking, of moving onward, in our life. It constitutes an analogy to our life as a whole, which is a continual moving onward from one moment to the next, from one hour to another, from today to tomorrow. Above all, our life as a whole is a pilgrimage, a status viae” (Aesthetics: Volume II, Steubenville, OH, Hildebrand Project, 2018, p. 87).
One could say that the wayside crosses were a visual embodiment of our Lord’s reply to the question of St. Thomas, “Lord…how can we know the way?”: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:5-6). The crosses also would have served as a recurrent reminder to passersby by of that continual communion with Christ to which we are all called by Him: “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is who bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Hence our journey through life must be a walk with Christ, as the wayside crosses proclaim, for to walk without Christ, to walk away from Him, is to journey in vain and to walk toward eternal damnation.
Devotional literature and artwork provided an interpretative key for seeing the wayside crosses in this metaphorical manner. Achim Timmermann highlights one book in particular, Christenlich bilgerschafft (1512), a compilation of the sermons of Johannes Geiler van Kaysersberg (+1510), which exemplifies the pedagogical interpretation of wayside crosses as symbolic guideposts for the spiritual life. Geiler envisions man as a perpetual wanderer upon this Earth, made so by Eve’s lethal curiosity to taste the forbidden fruit, ever in search of the paternal homeland of Heaven. As an experienced pilgrim himself, Geiler develops the wayside cross analogy in the homiletic presentation given in chapter eleven of Christenlich bilgerschafft, wherein he speaks specifically of the crosses and stone piles that were erected to guide a pilgrim to a particular shrine, as summarized by Timmermann:
“Metaphorically planted by the roadside by the arch-pilgrim Christ himself, and increased in size and number by an endless procession of self-denying saints, the stone piles and wayside crosses embody all the agonies, sorrows and privations life’s pilgrim must endure on his earthly voyage to the celestial fatherland” (Timmermann, “Highways to Heaven,” p. 414).
Artwork of the period echoed this metaphor of the spiritual life as a pilgrimage guided by wayside crosses. Timmermann cites the quite straightforward example of the title page for the 1512 first edition of Christenlich bilgerschafft. The woodcut image of the frontispiece depicts a pilgrim on the left, with his pilgrim staff in one hand and his Rosary beads in the other, striding forward toward the Gate of Heaven on the right, where Christ awaits him with a gesture of welcome. But there is still the last bit of distance to be traveled by the pilgrim before reaching Our Lord, so above the pilgrim hovers an angel, clearly his guardian angel, instructively pointing to a wayside cross as the pilgrim’s unfailing guidepost to the Heavenly Jerusalem. Adding a merry touch to this serious scene is the pilgrim’s pet dog, eagerly leaping forward ahead of his master, as if to join in leading him to his sacred destination.
Wayside crosses also served as guideposts along the ascent routes to mountaintop or mountainside pilgrimage shrines. The steep ascent to Spain’s Catalonian mountainside monastery of Montserrat was delineated by seven such crosses upon which were carved images depicting the seven joys of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Such a journey of ascent was full of symbolic religious meaning, for the spiritual life was commonly likened to the ascent of a mountain, or of stairs, or of a ladder, mounting toward Heaven.
Wayside crosses served as silent sentinels to guard the soul as the body journeyed on its way. For the Cross does indeed give us safety, as prophesied in Psalm 23:
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, / I fear no evil; / for thou art with me; / thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4).
Likewise, the wayside crosses were a compelling visualization of our Lord’s comparison of Himself on the Cross to the bronze serpent that Moses mounted on a pole, that “if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live” (Numbers 21:9):
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15).
For the traveler facing a moment of temptation or physical danger, the raising of his eyes to the wayside cross must have similarly rallied his courage and given him the spiritual strength to persevere. In all our journeys, may we too look to the Cross: “Hail, O Cross, our one hope” (Vexilla Regis).
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