The Pathos of Salvation

    One thing that seems to me rather odd: pictures of the crucified Christ rarely depict it as the great event of spiritual liberation, which the basic logic of Christianity suggests it is.
    After the fall and before the atoning act of Christ, every and all were damned for the mere sin of being born to a fallen world. The son was punished for the sins of the father. The men of the Middle Ages did not consider this just, simply true; it was just another aspect of reality that one takes in passively, not asking why and wherefore.   
    The death of Christ marked the end of the world without heaven, and freed men’s souls from the torment of previously inescapable damnation. But when these serious medieval men set down to record their thoughts of the crucifixion, the lamentation, the pieta, etc. in pictures, the dominant note is unfailingly that of pathos. As best I can tell, the new spiritual freedom is never even hinted at.
    I suppose this contradiction owes something to the odd masochism of a religion that has humanity “redeemed” by the death of the greatest man who ever lived.
    (I tend to trust what I hear in pop songs, at least that they are an honest expression, and so I come to the curious case of Rivers Cuomo, singer of Weezer. The self-declared greatest man that ever lived, Cuomo's songs are oftentimes ironical explorations of the pathos of self-obsession. Blasphemous? Perhaps. Christly?  Of course. Thomas a Kempis has gone camp.)