the key to heaven

[ursula]

I'm trying to figure out whether a seventeenth-century motto, "Crux Christi clavis coeli," is a quotation from someone else. Web-surfing suggests that it may be an adaptation from St. Augustine; can anyone confirm this? Did Augustine ever write that the cross of Christ is the key to Heaven, and if so, where did he do so?

Comments

[jakemainstreet.livejournal.com]

The only useful thing I can tell you about Augustine is that he wrote a whole helluva lot, so it's possible. But the quote is nothing I've ever heard of him saying. But I do know that the cross was not really used as a Christian symbol until the middle ages. At least, it doesn't appear in early Christian iconography or apologetic writings. It's true that to be a martyr was a special honor, but it's not clear that actual or symbolic martyrdom was considered the key to heaven or that Christ's having sacrficed himself played any special role in Ancient Christian theology. On the contrary, I've heard that early Christians were actually embarrassed of Christ's having died in such a dishonorable way and didn't exactly like to advertise it. So the cross as being central to Christian identity/salvation is really a medieval development and not something an Ancient author was likely to have written about. Hope that helps.

[ursula]

You're overstating your case, and I suspect also describing a situation which was current rather earlier than the fourth-century Saint Augustine. Using the PLD which greythistle links above, I get 34 hits on the phrase "crux Christi" in works by or attributed to St. Augustine, including the remark "Postremo quid est, quod omnes noverunt, Signum Christi, nisi crux Christi?" In English, that's "After all, what is it, which everyone knows as the symbol of Christ, if not the cross of Christ?"

[jakemainstreet.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I was overstating a bit. And I wasn't as specific as I should have been about my dates. I must have forgotten whose journal this was that I thought I could get away with that. ;) I had my dates right re: Augustine (I mean I know he is late 4th century), but I was off by a hundred plus years when it comes to the cross and the Church Fathers. The Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04517a.htm) (I don't have any books or notes with me in Brooklyn so this source will have to do) has the earliest known reference to the cross as "the symbol of Christ" in an early 3rd century Clement of Alexandria text. "Undisguised" use of the cross in art and in liturgy isn't evident until a bit later, exactly when depending upon how you interpret the evidence, although the Catholic Encyclopedia says late 4th/early 5th century, after Constantine -- or in other words, what many scholars consider to be the beginning of the Middle Ages.

And I would still put my money on that quote being medieval or early modern rather than ancient. Even if Clement, Tertullian, and Augustine a bit later all refer to the cross, just as you say, as "the symbol of Christ," it seems to me there's a difference between saying something is a "symbol" and saying it's a "key," or the key to heaven. Of course the Gospels use the word "key" and Paul writes a lot about the cross and links it to salvation (e.g. Ephes. 2:16). But I just think the early Christians were more concerned with identity and less with the mysteries of personal soteriology to probe these things as deeply as later Christians did. But I can't back this feeling up with much, if any, proof at this moment.

Augustine is an interesting case because to many he really heralds a major change in Christian thinking (to put it mildly), from ancient to medieval, towards an introspective theology. But I'm pretty familiar with his concept of grace and I just don't remember the cross having a stated significance, symbolic or otherwise. In fact Augustine talks enough about predestination that the talk of a "key to heaven" would seem very out of place to me. This is all just me trying to recall what little I know, of course. I would prefer never to read all of Augustine.

It just occured to me that Martin Luther came up with something called the "Theology of the Cross" that I know next to nothing about, but since your motto is 17th century, that might be worth checking out. I guess you could have a Protestant family still using a Latin motto. Let me know if you turn up anything!

[ursula]

In fact the motto belonged to a family in Wales, so it probably was a Protestant family, and almost certainly not a Lutheran one. So far all the other references I've been able to identify have been from core sources: the Psalms, the Gospels, Ovid, or Vergil. Augustine is a little off the beaten path already, and I'm reluctant to go further afield; after all, this could just be a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century cliche that I'm not familiar with.

[ursula]

Continuing to play the "similar remarks by Augustine" game:

Oratio justi, clavis est coeli. Ascendit precatio, et descendit Dei miseratio.

The prayer of the just is the key of heaven. Prayer ascends, and the compassion of God descends.

He also discusses the Matthew quote that glasseye mentions at length, but largely in the context of justification of the Church as the descendant of Peter.

(This game is harder than it looks, since "key" and "with nails" are the same word in Latin ;) )