XTHORNS
Thornsand thorn branches signify in general grief and tribulation, the word tribulation itself being derived from a Latin root signifying thistles or briars. But, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, thorn bushes signify the minor sins, and growing briars or brambles those greater ones, ‘quæ pungunt conscientiam propriam,’ etc.
He is supported in his opinion by Saint Anselm, and both saints explain in this sense the words of Saint Paul, who wrote to the Hebrews:
‘That which beareth thorns and briars is rejected and is nigh unto cursing, whose end is to be burned.’
The crown of thorns with which jesting soldiers crowned the Christ was in itself an emblem, or at least a parody, of an emperor’s festal rose-crown. According toThe Historyof the Crown of Thorns of the Holy One,136the first crown with which Jesus Christ was crowned was made of white-thorn and was removed before the Crucifixion and replaced by a secondde juncis marinis.
But in the great majority of scenes from the Passion the crown is merely formed of large thorns without any attempt to realize any particular natural growth. In Germany, where Entombments and Pietàs were more often painted than in other countries, the crown is frequently green, in allusion, it is suggested, to the words: ‘If these things be done in the green wood, what shall be done in the dry?’
In these pictures the crown of thorns, if not still upon the Saviour’s head, is usually placed very prominently in the foreground, marking to some extent the divinity of the dead Christ, for, since life had fled, there could be no halo.
In Northern art the crown of thorns remains always unchanged, the symbol of Christ’s sufferings, but in at least one Italian Pietà,137the dry prickles round the dead Christ’s brow havebloomed with delicate white briar-roses—an exquisite figure of Love’s triumph over Pain.
Sometimes, in pathetic forecast, the Child Christ has the crown of thorns hung on His tiny wrist138or plays with it as with a toy, and in a very charming picture,139with less poignant and more pleasing symbolism, a waiting child-angel stands by with a wreath of the blue sea-holly.
In Spain the Christian faith was stern. Faith and suffering were more closely allied than faith and joy. They had no ‘jesters of the Lord,’ and their saints glorified God by self-inflicted pain rather than by acts of mercy. So their Christ in childhood was not a smiling, unconsciousbambino, but a sad-faced child who wounds Himself with the rose-twigs which He twists into a crown. The rose-thorn tears His flesh but the roses lie beside Him and round His feet, for His griefs and sufferings were the outcome of His divine love. Both Zurburan140and Alonzo Cano141painted fine pictures on this theme.
ZurburanPhoto AndersonTHE CROWN OF THORNS(Museo Provinciale, Seville)
ZurburanPhoto AndersonTHE CROWN OF THORNS(Museo Provinciale, Seville)
Zurburan
Photo Anderson
THE CROWN OF THORNS
(Museo Provinciale, Seville)
There is a ‘Coronation of the Virgin’ byHans Burgkmair,142painted in 1507, where beneath a cross-surmounted imperial crown Christ wears the Crown of Thorns. In several of the French fifteenth-century miniatures of the Trinity in Glory, God the Son still wears the Crown of Thorns, but this combination of the two crowns is rare. It was, however, in reverent remembrance of the thorn-crowned King of the Jews that the Crusader, Godfrey de Bouillon, twisted a thorn-branch round his coronet when he was crowned King of Jerusalem. His bronze statue, wearing this double crown, stands with those of the other Christian kings guarding the tomb of Maximilian in Innsbruck Cathedral.
Among modern symbolists, Holman Hunt has used thorns with finest effect. In his ‘Light of the World’ the Saviour wears again the double crown, the thorns which symbolize His sufferings intertwisted with the golden crown of His divinity. He stands with the lantern, which is the light of His Gospel, before the closed door of the human heart, a door all overgrown and blocked by the weeds and briarswhich are the symbols of sin and things evil. There is the poisonous hemlock, the ivy which kills the tree that it embraces, thorns denoting the lesser sins, and the brambles which are the emblems of the greater ones. According to Raban Maur the bramble is also an emblem of the riches which destroy the soul.
In several modern pictures of ‘The Good Shepherd’ Christ is depicted as rescuing a lamb caught by its wool in the briars of the wilderness. The lamb, of course, is the emblem of an erring soul, and the briars represent those sins which hold it back from answering the Shepherd’s call.
In connection with the saints, the Crown of Thorns is not used symbolically, except when placed upon the head of Saint Catharine of Siena,143to indicate her austerities. According to the legend, Christ in a vision offered her a crown of roses or a crown of thorns and she chose the thorns. When it is carried by Saint Louis of France it is to recall the fact that it was he who brought to France, as her most precious relic, the Holy Crown itself.
The tonsure was originally instituted to keep fresh in the memory the Saviour’s Crown of Thorns. And in the ‘Paradise’ of Fra Angelico144the monks are crowned with roses. Thus the emblem reverted to the original symbol. The Crown of Thorns was the parody of the rose-crown, symbol of rejoicing; the tonsure the reverent imitation of the thorny wreath, and angels at the entrance of Paradise change the tonsure for a wreath of roses.
In early German art the Virgin is often found seated in a garden of which each flower has its significance. Behind and around her there is usually a sort of trellis or bower covered with roses. The roses have very pronounced thorns, and the thorns are accentuated to recall that Mary is the lily and the bride of the Canticles, the ‘Lily among thorns.’ In an Assumption of Seghers145one of the attendantputtiflies towards her with a single lily enclosed in branches covered with long-spiked thorns.
On the other hand, when the rose is the direct emblem, not the attribute of the Madonna, ithas no thorns, for then it illustrates her title, ‘rosa sine spina.’
The Roman Breviary likens the Virgin to the burning thorn bush in which Jehovah revealed Himself to Moses and the simile was cited by Bishop Proclus in a Mary-sermon preached in the fifth century. Though enwrapped in the all-consuming flame of divine love, she yet remains unharmed. It is only in German art that this simile has been pictorially translated. German artists were familiar with the idea through Conrad von Würtzburg’s apostrophe to the Virgin:
‘In the thorn bush on the bare fieldMoses, the hero of GodSaw in a glow of bright fireThe birth of our Saviour foreshadowed.In the blast of the flameIt remained unalteredAs if neither leaf nor twigPerceived the death-giving blaze.In this we may recognizeThe full magnificence of thy maidenhood.’146
‘In the thorn bush on the bare fieldMoses, the hero of GodSaw in a glow of bright fireThe birth of our Saviour foreshadowed.In the blast of the flameIt remained unalteredAs if neither leaf nor twigPerceived the death-giving blaze.In this we may recognizeThe full magnificence of thy maidenhood.’146
‘In the thorn bush on the bare fieldMoses, the hero of GodSaw in a glow of bright fireThe birth of our Saviour foreshadowed.In the blast of the flameIt remained unalteredAs if neither leaf nor twigPerceived the death-giving blaze.In this we may recognizeThe full magnificence of thy maidenhood.’146
‘In the thorn bush on the bare field
Moses, the hero of God
Saw in a glow of bright fire
The birth of our Saviour foreshadowed.
In the blast of the flame
It remained unaltered
As if neither leaf nor twig
Perceived the death-giving blaze.
In this we may recognize
The full magnificence of thy maidenhood.’146
And we find this burning Thorn Bush with the Ivory Tower, the Sealed Fountain, the Fleeceof Gideon and other emblems of the Virgin, in the fifteenth-century renderings of theHortus Inclususand in the background of the essentially German allegory of the Incarnation, known as the ‘Hunting of the Unicorn.’ There are some fine embroideries and tapestries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Bavarian National Museum,147in which the burning thorn bush, with the other symbols of the Virgin’s purity, are worked with most careful detail.
The burning bush, not particularly a thorn bush, but the ‘bush’ of our Authorized Version, is now the chosen emblem of the Church of Scotland.
There were neither thorns nor thistles in Eden. It was not till the day when Adam fell that God laid a curse upon the ground: ‘Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.’ Therefore thorns and thistles are in general the symbols of sin and death. A little German woodcut expresses eternal death with gruesome completeness: a skull, with the apple of damnation between its bare jaws, has round its brow a wreath of twisted thorns.