Classifying the Cross: Justus Lipsius’s Forensic History of Crucifixion
Classifying the Cross: Justus Lipsius’s Forensic History of Crucifixion J. Neil Daniels In 1593, the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) published a work unlike anything his contemporaries had seen. De Cruce, libri tres (“Three Books on the Cross”) was not a devotional meditation nor a theological treatise in the conventional sense. Rather, it was a meticulous, almost forensic investigation into crucifixion in the ancient world, an unflinching study of the mechanics, the variations, and the sheer brutality of Rome’s most infamous execution method. Classifying the Cross Lipsius began by untangling the terminology. The crux simplex was the simplest form—an upright stake, bare and unadorned. More complex was the crux compacta , composed of two beams joined in several possible configurations: the decussata (X-shaped, as in the cross of St. Andrew), the commissa (T-shaped), and the immissa (†-shaped). Drawing on both Roman authors and early Christian witnesses such as Irenae...