Seeing is believing
A few weeks ago I was in Rome. In the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, my travel companion and I saw an altarpiece with the apostle Thomas, about to touch the wound in Christ’s side. Thomas simply could not believe that someone — Christ, that is — had risen from the dead. Thomas had to see and feel that the person in front of him was real and alive, that this truly was Christ risen! Thomas was doubting.
We discussed the whole story and wondered what the message was to viewers across the centuries. And then my friend, who has a more Buddhist background, said: “It’s human to doubt!” And yes, that is exactly what it is. Doubting is allowed, and even healthy when such an unbelievable event as a resurrection is happening right in front of you.
The Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme contains a chapel dedicated to Saint Thomas the Apostle, the first chapel on the left when entering, with the altarpiece painted by Giuseppe Passeri (1654 – 1714) depicting Thomas inserting his finger into Christ’s side. What makes this chapel even more remarkable is its connection to the nearby Chapel of Relics, which houses a bone of an index finger, believed to be the very finger of Saint Thomas that he placed into Christ’s side. The church literally preserves the finger that doubted.
Let’s dive a bit deeper into the story of the Doubting Thomas and his Incredulity. It is a story held together by a single wound — made by a lance, displayed at the Resurrection, and touched by Thomas’ finger. We will follow this thread through four chapters:
The Crucifixion and Longinus
Let’s start with the wound in Christ’s side; how did it get there? It happened during the Crucifixion of Christ, on the hill Golgotha, just outside Jerusalem. When the soldiers inspected the three crucified ones, it seemed that Jesus was already dead. To make absolutely certain, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance. That soldier was Longinus.
Anthony van Dyck’s monumental Le Coup de Lance (The Lance Thrust) from the KMSKA in Antwerp (1620) and Jan Provoost’s dramatic Crucifixion from the Groeningemuseum in Bruges (c.1503) show the moment of the lance thrust itself, Longinus driving his spear into Christ’s side in the presence of the crowd at Golgotha.
There is a wonderful detail in Van Dyck’s painting that cannot go unnoticed. At the foot of the cross, a woman — Mary Magdalene — is pleading with Longinus not to pierce the body of Christ. “Stop, please don’t do that!” she seems to say, her hands raised in desperate appeal. She knows Christ is already dead, and that this Coup de Lance will be an unnecessary mutilation of his body.
The name Longinus does not appear in the Bible itself. John’s Gospel (19:34) simply speaks of “one of the soldiers.” His name comes from later tradition, most likely derived from the Greek word λόγχη (longche) meaning lance or spear. The story is then richly elaborated in the Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea) by Jacobus de Voragine (c.1260), the great medieval encyclopedia of saints’ lives that was probably the most widely read book in Europe after the Bible itself, and that was the primary source for painters and illuminators for centuries.
According to the Golden Legend, Longinus suffered from a serious eye disease and had very poor sight. As he drove the lance into Christ’s side, blood ran down the shaft and onto his hands. When he raised his hands to his eyes, the blood touched them — and his sight was miraculously restored. At that very moment, Longinus saw clearly, in every sense of the word. He saw the man he had just pierced. He saw who that man truly was. And he believed.
For the Manuscript itself, click here.
Longinus is the first person to experience what we might call empirical faith; faith arrived at through direct, physical, sensory contact with Christ’s wound. His story is an extraordinary “seeing is believing” story in the most literal sense imaginable: he was blind, and then he saw. And in seeing, he believed.
Many scholars and theologians have suggested that Longinus is one and the same as the soldier described in the Gospels of Matthew (27:54) and Mark (15:39), who, standing at the foot of the cross, declared: “Truly this man was the Son of God.” Whether or not this identification is correct, Matthew and Mark share the same moment of conversion: a Roman soldier, a representative of the imperial power that crucified Christ, suddenly and irrevocably transformed into a believer.
The eye-healing miracle is vividly depicted in two works in this section. The illumination above from the manuscript Tratados Varios (1432) in the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid shows the blood splashing directly into Longinus’ eye in a startlingly literal way. Medieval illuminators had no hesitation in depicting the miraculous with absolute clarity. Simone Martini’s exquisite small panel Le Coup de Lance (c.1325), part of the Orsini Polyptych and now also in the KMSKA in Antwerp, shows the same moment, see hereunder.
A detail that is almost impossible to notice at first glance — I only discovered it when visiting the KMSKA in Antwerp and studying this tiny panel up close. The figure with the red-sleeved arm, standing directly behind Longinus, is guiding Longinus’ hand as he strikes Christ’s side. As if Simone Martini wants to make it absolutely clear: Longinus has such poor eyesight that he cannot even aim the lance without help. This detail, combined with the blood that subsequently runs down the shaft of the lance and splashes into Longinus’ eyes — restoring his sight in that very moment — makes the miracle of seeing again even more dramatic and moving. So much story packed into such a tiny panel.
Longinus left the army, was baptised, and according to tradition became a monk in Cappadocia in present-day Turkey, where he was eventually martyred. He is venerated as a saint in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, his feast day celebrated on March 15th.
We close this section with Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s colossal marble statue of Saint Longinus (c.1630), standing nearly four and a half metres tall in the crossing of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.
Bernini shows Longinus at the very moment of his conversion — arms flung wide, head thrown back and looking up, his whole body an expression of overwhelming revelation. In his hand the lance. He no longer needs it. He has already seen.
The Resurrection
Let us pause for a moment and consider what actually happened here, or what the Gospel tells us happened. A man was crucified, died on the cross, was taken down and laid in a sealed tomb. Three days later, that same man walked out of the tomb, alive. This is not a minor miracle. This is an extraordinary and frankly (almost) unbelievable event. A resurrection from the dead; life conquering death. It defies everything we know about the human body and the natural world. And yet, this is precisely what the disciples were asked to believe. But Thomas had his doubts.
But before we get to Thomas, let us look at the man who walked out of that tomb. Because if we trust the painters, Christ did not stumble out pale and exhausted. He emerged triumphant — looking, frankly, magnificent. Strong, athletic, radiant. More sport-star than returning corpse.
Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection (1463) in Sansepolcro is perhaps the most powerful image of the risen Christ ever made. One foot planted on the tomb, banner of victory in hand, his gaze direct and unflinching. And there at his feet, the Roman soldiers posted to guard the tomb are fast asleep. The power of Rome, the same imperial power that crucified Christ and sent Longinus with his lance, is dozing at the feet of the risen Lord. Death has failed. Life has won.
Look carefully at Piero’s Christ and you will see the wound in his side — the same wound that Longinus made with his lance, the same wound that will shortly become the centre of Thomas’ doubt and faith. It is still there, on the body of the risen Christ. He carries it with him out of the tomb. The wound is not erased by the Resurrection; it remains, visible and real, as if to say: yes, this happened. This body suffered. And yet here I stand.
The Incredulity of Thomas
Before we get to Thomas himself, let us look at what happened just before his famous moment of doubt. After the Resurrection, Christ appeared to his disciples, saying “Peace be with you” (John 20:19). He showed them his hands with the holes caused by the nails from the Crucifixion. They saw. They believed. They were overjoyed. But Thomas was absent. He missed it. And when the others told him what they had seen, Thomas refused to believe them. Thomas, being Thomas, was not prepared simply to take their word for it.
Rubens captures this earlier moment beautifully in the central panel of the Rockox Triptych (c.1614), now in the KMSKA or Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Christ appears before three astonished disciples — most likely Peter, John and James, Christ’s three closest followers, who witnessed several of his miracles as well as his Resurrection. They see. They believe. No further evidence required.
Notice what Rubens has deliberately left out: the wound in Christ’s side is not shown. There is no finger in the wound, no moment of physical verification. These three disciples need none of that. They are the easy believers; one look at the risen Christ is enough. Faith comes naturally and immediately to them.
But Thomas had his doubts.
Thomas is a very different kind of person from Peter, John and James. Where they believe instinctively, Thomas needs evidence. He is not weak or faithless, he is rational. He is, in a sense, the first sceptic and enlightened thinker, a man who refuses to accept an almost impossible miracle on someone else’s word alone. He wants to see for himself. He wants to touch. He needs empirical proof.
Thomas’ conditions are mentioned in the Gospel of John (20:25) with remarkable precision: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” You could say that Thomas, standing there among his fellow disciples two thousand years ago, was doing something that we today would recognise as entirely reasonable. He was asking for evidence. He was thinking like a scientist.
And then there is Caravaggio. The Incredulity of Thomas (c.1601), now in the Sanssouci Gemäldegalerie in Potsdam, is one of the most shockingly physical paintings in the history of Western art. There is nothing spiritual here, nothing that softens the raw reality of what is happening. Thomas’ finger is inside the wound. Not near it, not touching it — it’s inside it, pressed into the flesh, the skin folding around it. Christ himself guides Thomas’s hand, almost insistently. Two other disciples crane forward to see, their faces creased with astonished concentration. Everyone in this painting needs to see. Everyone needs to know.
Caravaggio strips the scene of all its theological comfort and confronts us with the human fact of Thomas’ doubt. This is not a failure of faith — it is an act of courage. Thomas does what the others could not bring themselves to do. He reaches out. He touches. He needs to know, and he is not ashamed of that need. And in that moment — finger in the wound, flesh meeting flesh — doubt transforms into the most absolute declaration of faith when Thomas said to Him: “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28).
It is worth noting what Christ says to Thomas immediately afterwards: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). These words are sometimes read as a gentle reproach — as if Thomas’s need for evidence was somehow less admirable than the blind faith of the others. But they can equally be read as simply a statement of fact, even a compassionate one. Christ does not refuse Thomas his evidence. He offers his wound willingly, openly, without condition.
Doubting is human. And even Christ, it seems, understands that.
The Holy Lance
And so we arrive at the object itself — or at least, at the object that for centuries has been believed to be the object itself. The lance. The spear. The weapon that made the wound that started this whole story.
We have followed that wound from Golgotha through the Resurrection to Thomas’ outstretched finger. And here it is — or here it claims to be — a 51 centimetre piece of iron and gold in a glass case in the Imperial Treasury, the Kaiserliche Schatzkammer, in Vienna.
But here is the thing: Vienna is not the only city with a Holy Lance. There is one in Rome, kept in St. Peter’s Basilica — the very church where Bernini’s Longinus stands with his lance, arms flung wide. There is one in Kraków, in the treasury of Wawel Cathedral. The Cathedral of Etchmiadzin in Armenia also claims to possess the Holy Lance, claimed to be among the oldest. They cannot all be the original. They may none of them be the original.
And yet. Does it matter? Does the lance in Vienna or the one in Armenia need to be the actual spear that Longinus drove into Christ’s side in order to be meaningful? Perhaps not. Perhaps what matters is not the object itself but what it represents — the wound, the moment of conversion, the chain of seeing and believing that runs from Golgotha through the Resurrection to Thomas’ outstretched finger. For the pilgrims who knelt before it, for the medieval faithful who believed that merely being in its presence conferred protection and courage — the lance worked. It gave strength. It gave hope. It gave meaning in difficult times.
Thomas would have had serious doubts about every single one of them. Thomas would have wanted to touch it, of course. To run his finger along the blade. To feel the metal, the age, the weight of all those centuries of belief and doubt. He would have examined it carefully, raised an eyebrow, and quite possibly remained unconvinced.
Doubt keeps us sharp; as sharp, perhaps, as the tip of a lance. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”, but blessed too, we might add, are those who keep asking questions.
