Chi-Rho
The Name in Two Letters
A name made into a sign: Christ, and victory over death — first famed as a standard carried into battle.
The stem of the rho rises through the centre of the chi, so the two letters read as one figure. The pair was scribal shorthand before it was Christian: Greek scribes used it for words beginning with those letters, and as a margin mark for chreston, 'good'. Its life as a public Christian emblem begins with Constantine and the battle at the Milvian Bridge in 312. Lactantius, writing within a few years, has him mark the shields with a sideways X whose top is bent round — a description that fits this monogram and also its cousin the staurogram. Eusebius, a quarter-century later, describes a cross of light and the labarum. The two accounts do not agree, and the familiar story is a blend of them.
Light
Signifies the name of Christ itself, and with it victory over death: wreathed on fourth-century sarcophagi it stood for resurrection. Also a mark of identification among believers, and of the sacred in a text.
Shadow
Its first fame was as a war standard, and it carries that shadow: a sign of faith pressed into the service of empire, blessing a battle and hardening into a badge of allegiance rather than a name.
