The Sign of the Cross

The right hand itself is arranged as a sermon. The thumb and first two fingertips are pressed together — three, equal, joined in one point: the Holy Trinity. The remaining two fingers are folded down to the palm: the two natures of Christ, God and man, and — as the catechists like to say — His coming down from heaven to the earth. With the hand so shaped, the worshipper touches forehead, breast, right shoulder, left shoulder — mind, heart, and strength gathered under the Cross — and then, very often, bows (bows and prostrations have their own entry).

Orthodox Christians cross themselves from right to left; Western Christians who make the sign today move from left to right. The difference is custom rather than doctrine — Western service books as late as about 1200 still describe the right-to-left movement, and the now-familiar Catholic order became general there later — but within Orthodox practice the right-to-left order is universal. One more distinction is worth knowing: when a priest blesses, his hand is held differently, the fingers traditionally arranged to form the Greek letters IC XC, the monogram of Jesus Christ — so that even the blessing hand spells the Name it blesses with.

The sign of the cross is among the oldest attested practices of Christian life. Around the year 200 Tertullian could already describe it as a reflex of daily existence: "At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign." In the fourth century St. Basil the Great counted signing believers with the cross among the unwritten traditions received from the apostles, and St. Cyril of Jerusalem taught his catechumens to make it boldly, on the brow and on everything, at meals and journeys and sleep. The earliest form was that small tracing on the forehead; the large sign — hand to brow, breast, and shoulders — grew from it over the following centuries.

The fingers, too, have a history. Russia before the mid-1600s signed with two fingers extended, confessing the two natures of Christ, with the other three joined for the Trinity — the same dogmas, distributed differently across the hand. Patriarch Nikon's reforms brought Russian practice into line with the Greek three-finger use, and those who kept the older form became the Old Believers, for whom the two-fingered sign remains a treasured mark to this day. The dispute was long and bitter, but what both hands confess — Trinity, Incarnation, Cross — has never been in dispute.

There is no rulebook that counts the occasions, and practice varies by jurisdiction, parish, and person, but the rhythm is easy to absorb: Orthodox Christians cross themselves at every naming of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; at the beginning and end of prayer; on entering and leaving the church; before venerating an icon or the Cross; at key moments of the services; before meals; and spontaneously — setting out on a journey, hearing sudden news, passing a church, sitting down to an exam. The gesture is the punctuation of a believing life: it marks where God enters the sentence.

It is not a charm, and the Church has no theory of it as a technique. It is a prayer of the body and a confession compressed past the need for words: the three fingers say who God is, the two say what He became, the tracing says what it cost Him — "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Galatians 6:14). The word of the cross, St. Paul says, is the power of God to those being saved (1 Corinthians 1:18), and the Fathers did not hesitate to speak of the sign's power over the powers of darkness: "It is the Sign of the faithful, and the dread of devils," St. Cyril told his converts. A Christian who cannot yet say a single prayer aloud can still make this one move of the hand — and in it, everything has already been said.