Chapter 18

Why We Should Honor the Precious Cross

The Cross of Christ is to be honored for two reasons.

First: because on it Christ the Lord shed His precious blood and died, and saved us, according to the divine Apostle who says: “For the word of the Cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God”. Gregory of Nyssa likewise says, in Volume 2, Against Eunomius, Discourse 13: “God forbid that I should boast of anything else, except in the Cross of Christ.” And to the Corinthians he says: that the word of the Cross is the power of God to those who are being saved, and to the Ephesians he describes the power that governs and holds all things together by the figure of the Cross: in which he wishes them, having been exalted, to know the surpassing glory of this power, height, and depth, and breadth and length, naming each beam of those contemplated in the figure of the cross by its own proper name, so as to call the upper part “height,” and the part lying beneath at the intersection “depth,” and the transverse beam on either side he designated by the name of “length and breadth”; so that through this the great mystery might be made manifest. For the heavenly and the subterranean, and all the ends of existing things, are held together and sustained by the one who has manifested this ineffable and great power in the figure of the Cross.