Today the Church raises the Cross in the midst of the temple for veneration, just as Moses once raised the bronze serpent in the wilderness (John 3:14) — not to display death, but so that by beholding Him crucified, the people might live. The feast does not commemorate an instrument of torture turned into decoration; it shows the deepest love the world has ever seen: He who, being in the form of God, emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, and humbled Himself unto death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8). This kenosis — the emptying of Self, not a diminishing of the divine nature but the refusal to use it for one’s own sake — is the only pattern by which man can move from the image given at creation toward the likeness promised. Every man bears the image from birth; likeness is earned through the cross, that is, through love that gives itself, not love that seeks itself.
Saint Maximus the Confessor calls self-love — philautia — the mother of all the passions, the root from which every other passion grows like a branch. It is important to note: this is not natural self-regard, but a deformed love closed in on itself like a circle that never opens outward to another. The Cross is precisely the reverse motion of that circle — an ekstasis, a going-out of self toward the other, all the way, to total gift. Sacrificial love is not a more intense degree of ordinary love, but another direction of it entirely: instead of gathering toward a center, it pours outward, asking nothing in return. Christ does not go to the cross to be seen going there; He has no audience to applaud Him, only soldiers who mock Him, a crowd shouting „crucify Him,” a mother standing silent at the foot of the cross. There is no public won by this gesture — on the contrary, all the world appears to gain, visibly, is confirmation that it has gotten rid of Him. Sacrificial love does not validate itself through a visible result; it is fulfilled even when the world answers with silence or scorn.
Here stands the painfully clear contrast with today’s world. Evagrius Ponticus places vainglory — kenodoxia — before pride precisely because it needs a witness: this passion cannot feed itself alone; it requires eyes to see it, fingers to approve it. Contemporary culture has turned this structural need of the passion into a global infrastructure: every gesture, every thought, even every suffering, can be „posted,” offered up for validation to an unseen public, in exchange for a small dose of recognition that increasingly stands in for meaning itself. Sociologist Erving Goffman described social man as an actor performing on a „front stage,” hiding backstage everything that does not serve the image. The difference between Goffman’s theory and the passion described by Evagrius is merely one of vocabulary: where the sociologist sees a strategy of impression management, the Fathers see a sickness of the soul that has broken from God and, in His absence, seeks any other gaze that might confirm its existence. Self-marketing is not an invention of social media — it is the old passion, only with a new and infinitely more efficient platform.
What makes the trap even subtler is the „very high” level at which it can operate, as rightly observed: not only crude vanity, but displayed generosity, exhibited humility, even spiritual language used as ornament for the self. Saint John Climacus warns exactly here — that whoever praises himself for humility has already lost the humility he thinks he has. Vainglory does not die when a man renounces worldly things; it merely changes clothes and dresses itself in holy things, which makes it harder to recognize and therefore more dangerous. This is why Christ commands that almsgiving be done in secret, so that the left hand does not know what the right hand does (Matthew 6:3) — not out of social discretion, but because a good deed exposed to another’s gaze risks being confiscated by the self, turned from gift into transaction: I give you good, you give me admiration.
Philosophically, this is the limit of great ethical systems built on reason alone: Aristotle can show that virtue is a mean acquired through practice, but he cannot say why man, even having become virtuous, remains tempted to admire himself for it. Kierkegaard named this sickness „the despair of willing to be oneself” — a closed self that builds and watches itself like a work of art, never surrendering to a Power that could ground it from outside. The Cross answers exactly this sickness, because it removes any possibility of the gift remaining mine: Christ does not give Himself to gain anything for Himself, but „that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14) and give life to others. Sacrificial love is the only love that self-interest cannot recover, because it expects nothing back — not even gratitude.
Psychologically speaking, the culture of external validation feeds a self that can only stabilize through repeated approval, in an endless cycle: every „like” demands another, every confirmation fades quickly and needs renewing. This is precisely the structure of idolatry as the Psalmist describes it — idols have eyes and do not see, mouths and do not speak (Psalm 113/115), and „those who make them become like them” (Ps. 113:16/115:8). Whoever seeks his identity in another’s gaze gradually becomes as empty as that gaze — a mirror turned toward another mirror, with no true face between them. Saint Isaac the Syrian says that a heart purified of passions burns with mercy for all creation, unable to bear even the suffering of dumb animals — a sign that love that has reached its own end no longer seeks anything for itself, because it has already emptied itself of self.
This is why the Cross is not merely a historical event to be venerated today with outward piety, but a form of existence offered to each person as a real possibility: to take up the cross (Matthew 16:24) does not mean seeking suffering, but accepting that the center of life is no longer the self that watches and validates itself, but the other to whom life is given, just as the grain of wheat must die to bear fruit (John 12:24). In a world that has turned every gesture into a form of market — even goodness, even suffering, even humility becoming merchandise on display — the Cross remains the one place where nothing is sold, because everything has already been given, once and for all.
