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Updated: June 7, 2025
For the power of the stauros of Christ is so great that if it be set before a man's eyes and kept faithfully in his mind so that he look with steadfast eyes of the mind upon that same death of Christ, no concupiscence, no sensuality, no natural passion, and no envious desire, is able to overcome him."
For it is clear that if even he knew so little about the execution of Jesus, the details of that execution cannot have been particularly well known; and the affirmation that the stauros to which Jesus was affixed had a transverse bar attached may have had no foundation in fact, and may have arisen from a wish to connect Jesus with that well-known and widely-venerated Symbol of Life, the pre-Christian cross.
Another fact worthy of special note is that, whether the Fathers wrote in Greek and used the word stauros, or wrote in Latin and translated that word as crux, they often seem to have had in their mind's eye a tree; a tree which moreover was closely connected in meaning with the forbidden tree of the Garden of Eden, an allegorical figure of undoubtedly phallic signification which had its counterpart in the Tree of the Hesperides, from which the Sun-God Hercules after killing the Serpent was fabled to have picked the Golden Apples of Love, one of which became the symbol of Venus, the Goddess of Love.
As results of his studies we hear of him correcting the abbey service-books, where for stauros, a scribe with no Greek had written scayros, and explaining to the Abbot mistaken interpretations in the passages read aloud in the refectory during meals. Of Ellenbog's official duties occasional mention is made in his letters.
The fact of course is that the Dean here and elsewhere, like other Christian writers, does not take the trouble to distinguish between the symbol of the cross and the death caused by execution upon a stauros; which instrument, by the way, was, as has been shown, not necessarily in the shape of a cross, and appears to have been in most cases a stake without a transverse rail.
The references in question commence with the enquiry, "Let us further ask whether the Lord took any care to foreshadow the Water and the Stauros?" Afterwards we have a quotation of Psalm i. 3-6 which likens the good man to a tree planted by the side of a river and yielding his fruit in due season and the pronouncement, "Mark how he has described at once both the Water and the Stauros.
Elsewhere we read that "The King of Glory stretched out his right hand, and took hold of our forefather Adam, and raised him: then, turning also to the rest, he said, 'Come with me as many as have died through the Tree which he touched, for behold I again raise you all up through the Tree of the Stauros." Some see in this peculiar pronouncement a reference to the doctrine of re-incarnation.
He moreover discovered that no one has ever written a complete history of the symbol, showing the possibility that the stauros or post to which Jesus was affixed was not cross-shaped, and the certainty that, in any case, what eventually became the symbol of our faith owed some of its prestige as a Christian symbol of Victory and Life to the position it occupied in pre-Christian days.
For various as are the different forms of 'death by the stauros' of which descriptions have come down to us from pre-Christian ages and the first three centuries of our era, no relic of that date bears a representation of an instrument of execution such as we cause to appear in our sacred pictures, and even if, regardless of the more exact meaning of the word stauros, we suppose the term staurosis to have included every form of carrying out the extreme penalty by means of affixion or suspension, we meet with no description of such an instrument of execution as we picture.
A reference is then made to the Brazen Serpent, and to the pole upon which it was placed; and it is stated that this lifeless imitation of a serpent was a type of Jesus. In the Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians we read that the stauros of the Christ is indeed a stumbling block to those who do not believe.
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