The Cross is the heart of the Christian mystery: a man disfigured by suffering reveals the face of the invisible God. As I wrote in God or Nothing, the Cross is the center of the world, the heart of mankind, and the place where our stability is anchored. Everything else is moving, unstable, changing, ephemeral, and uncertain; as the beautiful motto of the Carthusians says: Stat crux, dum volvitur orbis β βOnly the Cross stands, and the world revolves around it.β Calvary is the highest point in the world, from which we can see everything with new eyes: the eyes of faith and love, the eyes of a child, the eyes of God. We should insist on the central character of the mystery of the Cross, especially in the largely Muslim context of the Church in Africa, which is increasingly becoming the situation in Europe, which is seriously threatened by the progressive domination of Islam. According to the Quran, Jesus did not really die; there was only an appearance of death or crucifixion. To arrive at this statement, Islam (whose ambition is to destroy the tough, specific nucleus of Christianity) has constructed a proof on the basis of a few quranic texts (see Surats 4,156 and 2,149) for the purpose of making the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ useless. Christian evidence for the Cross, however, is massive and historically indisputable. The Cross is the center of everything and manβs only path to the Thrice-Holy God, Who has shown such love. Faith in this mystery separates us radically from the other world religions, particularly from Islam. In an era when a certain religious relativism and an all-too-human preoccupation with βcoexistenceβ at all costs tend to try to camouflage the difference, we should remember with Father Michel Hayek that βthe Church and the mosque do not have everything in common,β and that βwe can even say that the gap between them is immense.β We are not talking about the same faith. The faith, in the Church, is the extension gratuitously granted to the human mind to crown its efforts within the infinite. These efforts consist of repeating the attempt of Zacchaeus who, in order to meet Christ, has to go beyond his own height by climbing a sycamore, a tree, the wood of the Cross. . . . Despite the essential data common to the two religions involving the affirmation of creation and of manβs eternal vocation to blessedness, they by no means describe the fulfillment of this plan in the same terms. For where Christianity presents charity or love as the point of departure and the point of arrival, Islam brings disgrace on the concept of creative love, and even more upon the idea of Godβs communion of love or interior processions. The Church and Islam consider in different ways this twofold notion of God, in himself and in his relations with mankind. This situates the misunderstanding between them sub specie aeternitatis, so to speak, within the perspective of eternity. God, Who is Selfsame and Triune Selfsame [trois fois lui-mΓͺme] because He is a community in eternal love, and entirely Himself [tout lui-mΓͺme] in man because He is love spread through time: this is the foundation of all dogma in the Church and of all authentic Christian life. Islam does not accept this; it has remained where Muhammad left it at the time of his ascension ascension at night (miβrΓ’i) and does not dare to venture into the divine Fire. Being the standard of Godβs love, the Cross is not like a stain on His honor and glory; on the contrary, it is its most splendid jewel. The Fathers of the Church had understood this well, and Saint Theodore the Studite celebrates it in these terms: How precious the gift of the cross, how splendid to contemplate! In the cross there is no mingling of good and evil, as in the tree of paradise: it is wholly beautiful to behold and good to taste. The fruit of this tree is not death but life, not darkness but light. . . .
