6
Jottings on Beatus of Liébana
Read today in a secular spirit, the Apocalypse or Revelation of Saint John the Divine can be savored as an exercise in Surrealism, without the reader feeling the urge to reduce its absurd or oneiric elements to a decipherable letter. Or it could be interpreted as an exercise in mystical symbolism, lending itself to every possible interpretation, a stimulus for the most unbridled flights of the imagination, and consequently anyone proposing to assign a precise meaning to the text would be accused of betraying its rich poetic suggestion. The Middle Ages on the other hand, true to the Pauline admonition, knew that, before seeing truth face to face, “videmus per speculum et in aegnigmate” (“we see through a glass darkly”), and enigmas or riddles, ever since the time of the Sphinx, are there to be solved. The Middle Ages, then, was within its rights to interpret the Apocalyse as an allegory; and the keys for interpreting any allegory correctly have to be absolutely precise.
The text certainly employs similes—and metaphors as well—that present no problems of interpretation (“His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow.… and his voice as the sound of many waters.”). Nevertheless, taken as a whole, it is an allegory, a rhetorical figure in which the text may be taken literally (what is to prevent seven stars and seven lamps of fire from manifesting themselves?), though it seems more profitable from the hermeneutical point of view to interpret every character, figure, or event with reference to a key (hence, for example, the seven stars are the angels of the seven Churches and the seven lamps are the seven Churches themselves).1
Once we are in possession of the necessary keys, reading allegory is like solving a puzzle—and etymological wordplay was never so legitimate as it is in this case, if we interpret this riddling as the enigmatic language of a form of mysticism.
Interpreting the Apocalypse allegorically, however, is not all that easy, because the keys are not always supplied by the text. The Seer tells us what the seven stars are, but he does not spell out clearly who the beast rising up out of the sea is. He tells us the dragon is Satan, but he does not tell us immediately who the beast rising up out of the earth is—he will define him later as a false prophet, but he will confound his identity in a Kabbalistic conjuring of numbers and dynastic hocus-pocus. He speaks of a battlefield, Armageddon, recognizable in Hebrew tradition, and then he alludes to two witnesses who according to modern interpreters are Saints Peter and Paul, but whom Saint Bonaventure identifies instead as Enoch and Elijah (Hexaem I, 3, iii).
The vision, then, is in the allegorical mode, but it seems to go only halfway toward out-and-out allegory. When, in describing the procession in the Earthly Paradise toward the end of Purgatory, Dante says: “Beneath the handsome sky I have described, / twenty-four elders moved on, two by two, / and they had wreaths of lilies on their heads” (Pg., XXIX, 82–84), his modern commentators inform us that these are the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. But in more than one modern commentary on the Apocalypse we are told that the four and twenty elders represent the twenty-four priestly classes (Rossano 1963), while equally frequent is the interpretation that would prefer to identify them with the twelve patriarchs and the twelve apostles. Saint Jerome, on the other hand, saw them as the twenty-four books of the Old Testament. Such an identification obliges us to interpret in turn the four beasts (the lion, the calf, the flying eagle, and the beast with the face as a man) as the four Gospels of the New Testament—something the traditional iconography usually does in fact do, on the evidence supplied once more by Saint Jerome. In another, modern commentary on the Apocalypse, however, Angelini (1969) suggests that the four beasts are beings of a superangelic nature. Can we assert that, for its author John, there existed a terminus a quo for this backward flight, from signifier to signified, a point at which they meant something precise?
If we attempt to consider the Apocalypse of Saint John as a text that can be anchored to things, we discover that it too, like the episode in Dante’s Purgatory, is allegory in the second degree, an allegory that cites, as its own meaning, another allegory, namely Ezekiel 1:10; and who is to say that Ezekiel in his turn was not citing figures from Assyrian mythology? And so on and so forth. One signified functions only in the context of other signifieds linked to the same isotopy (books of the Old Testament-books of the New, or Heavenly Senate-cherubic intelligences, etc.), and the text as a whole, organized as it is as an open allegory, defies a univocal reading.
Such is the text that Beatus (730–785)—abbot of Liébana, chaplain to Queen Osinda, wife of Silo, king of Oviedo in northern Spain—finds himself confronted with in his Apocalipsin libri duodecim. Though the Apocalypse itself occupies no more than a few dozen pages, in the Sanders edition (1930) Beatus’s commentary occupies 650, and in the edition published by Italy’s Poligrafico dello Stato more than 1,000, while one of its average manuscripts runs to 300 leaves, written recto and verso and including the illustrations.2
To speak of Beatus is in fact to speak also and above all of the Mozarabic miniatures that illustrate all the so-called Beati produced between the tenth and eleventh centuries, in an amazing spate of fabulously beautiful books, such as the Beatus of Magius (970), the Beatus of San Millan de la Cogolla (920–930), the Beatus of Valcavado (970), the Beatus of Facundo (1047), the Beatus of San Miguel (tenth century), the Beatus of Gerona (975), the Beatus of the Catedral de Urgell, the Beatus of the monastery of the Escorial, and the Beatus of San Pedro de Cardeña (all three between the tenth and eleventh centuries), and the Beatus of Saint-Sever (1028–1072).
In theory, the study of the written commentary and the study of the miniatures constitute two distinct problems (the history of biblical exegesis and the iconography of Christian art),3 which would eventually require us to consider the connection between the boom of the Beati (two or three centuries after the composition of the commentary itself) and the history of millenarianism (see Eco 1973). But, though it is our intention to deal only with Beatus’s commentary, we must constantly bear in mind the miniatures it inspired, since, while not always faithful to the commentary, they are heavily indebted to the fascination it exerted.
6.1.
Apertissime
Beatus is not what we would call a “great” writer, and not simply because he lived in one of the most unsettled centuries of the Early Middle Ages, if we consider that the Venerable Bede—who died when Beatus was still a child—displays far greater intellectual vigor. Naturally Bede lived at the dawn of the English renaissance, while Beatus writes in a Christian Spain entrenched in its isolation at the edges of a hostile world of infidels. But this is not the point, and we must concede that Beatus was a farrago-prone epigone whose Latin syntax would make anyone’s hair stand on end, even somebody accustomed to the piquant corruptions of medieval Latin. It is a miracle that it was not included among the voluptuous readings of Huymans’s Des Esseintes, who might well have savored its “stammering grace, the often exquisite clumsiness of the monks stirring the poetical left-overs of Antiquity into a pious stew.… the workshop turning out verbs of refined sweetness, substantives smelling of incense, and strange adjectives, crudely fashioned out of gold in the delightfully barbaric style of Gothic jewellery.”4
If what distinguishes this “Gothic jewelry” is a taste for accumulation and obsessive verbal entrelacs, Beatus is a past master of the art, combining as he does his lack of originality with an excess of earnestness. He acknowledges his role as compiler—bringing together all of the commentaries that authors more famous than he have previously composed; he lines them up without citing his sources at all or citing them incorrectly, unendingly repeating his own long-winded explanations, getting lost in rambling analyses of one passage while dismissing another with no more than a passing allusion; he borrows or steals wholesale from Augustine or Tyconius, seemingly without stopping to ask himself whether what he filches makes sense (such as when, for example, he speaks of the persecutions of the Christians in Africa as if they were taking place in his own day, whereas in fact the Christians involved were those contemporary with Tyconius, several centuries earlier). And yet, just when you are getting used to the idea that all he is doing is repeating what other people have said, you unexpectedly discover that he has changed a word, eliminated a clause, altered an inflection—and all of a sudden the entire meaning of the commentary has been altered. Without letting it show, Beatus has renewed the tradition.
At the beginning of his commentary, Beatus transcribes an entire passage which he attributes to Saint Jerome, but eleven centuries later we discover it is by Priscillian of Avila (Sanders 1930: XX). He inserts texts several pages long by other writers without any acknowledgment, and then confesses debts of little or no account. He is not agreeable reading, he resists interpretation, he blatantly contradicts himself time and time again, he uses the same Latin citation in two different crucial places, once with the ablative, the other with the accusative (“mille annis” … “mille annos”). His contemporaries could not help noticing his interminable repetitiveness, and yet the success he enjoyed was unprecedented. He influenced generation after generation of readers and spawned a plethora of illuminated manuscripts such as not even the Four Evangelists inspired. His own time probably admired him for his excess of mediocrity—if you utter one banality you sound foolish, if you utter two you’re a bore, but utter 10,000 and in no time you’re Flaubert, the author of that catalogue of clichés, Bouvard et Pécuchet. Or maybe the secret of Beatus’s popularity lies in his ability to transport his reader into a cultural discourse of the past, constructing a world of his own unrelated to the world of reality—something that appealed in general to the people of the Middle Ages, and which must have been even more attractive in a period in which reality was not always easy to take.
Beatus—confronted with a biblical text that defies any rational interpretation—is determined to explain everything, and he insists that everything be made clear and transparent. If the text is ambiguous—and heaven only knows it is—Beatus is dead set on eliminating every last ambiguity.
Camón Aznar (1960) has attempted to present Beatus’s project as a manifestation of Hispanic national culture: as the East, in the guise of the Muslim occupation, was busy invading Visigothic Spain, Beatus, a representative of Spanish Visigothic culture, takes on an Oriental text seething with prophetic imagery, cutting it down to Western size, explaining everything, leaving no image vague or ambiguous. Within the very dichotomies of the text, everything that is confused, undifferentiated, and incomprehensible is attributed to the realm of evil. The people, the beasts, the desert, everything elemental, all are identified with the Devil.
In this way, what we have is the paradox of a text written in the spirit of Western clarity that will act as the inspiration for a series of exercises in Mozarabic art, typical instead of an imagination profoundly permeated with Oriental suggestions. The text can come to grips with the spirit of Oriental prophecy only by establishing every image as a precise cipher that can be translated and adapted to exhortatory ends, while the illustrations themselves are vibrant with expressionistic tensions, straining and contorting themselves to communicate something else, something more (Camón Aznar 1960: 24).
It could be objected that the other commentaries do the same thing, but the point is that Beatus churns out twelve whole books and hundreds and hundreds of pages, while Bede’s commentary, for instance, occupies only seventy-seven columns in the Patrologia Latina, in other words, about 120 normal pages. But Bede, it is immediately obvious, is repeating a number of classical interpretations and moving swiftly on, whereas Beatus leaves no interpretive stone unturned, skips not a single detail, dedicates as many as ten pages to a single verse, in an attempt to find a “rational” (to his mind) solution for every exegetical problem.
Perhaps the appeal to a typically Hispanic culture is not strictly speaking indispensable. Beatus explains everything because the spirit of the Middle Ages inclined writers to want to translate all the hidden senses of a written text. It is just that in Beatus this obsession with exegetical exhaustiveness is more consuming than it is in others.
In his commentary on Apocalypse 4:1–6, having referred to the elders, he continues without batting an eye: “ecce apertissime manifestavi patriarcharum et apostolorum chorum” (“behold I have shown unquestionably the chorus of the patriarchs and the apostles”) (Commentarius III, S 270). This adverb apertissime is a minor masterpiece of the medieval mentality, because the last thing that would occur to us is that the twenty-four elders refer unquestionably to the patriarchs and the apostles. And it is even more curious, if one is reading the text convinced, as Beatus was, that it was written by John the Apostle, that the Seer of Patmos, who is therefore still alive and well, should see himself as one of the twenty-four figures who surround the throne of the Lord. But at this point Beatus is speaking on the basis of an exegetical tradition represented by the Fathers of the Church, and he behaves exactly like the army of interpreters of the Apocalyse that his own text will inspire. He speaks as if there were reading codes for every allegory.
Prior to Beatus, Hippolytus of Rome, Tyconius, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Saint Jerome, Augustine, and many others had laid the groundwork for an authorized reading of Scripture. And hence it makes perfect sense that the elders should represent the patriarchs and the apostles unquestionably.
Nevertheless, the medieval tradition is not strictly unanimous in its interpretations. Bede—in his Explanatio Apocalypsis (PL, 93)—agrees with Beatus about the elders, but apropos of the beasts, after stating that “haec animalia multifarie interpretantur” (“these animals are interpreted in various ways”), he associates the lion with Matthew and the beast with the face as a man with Mark, a rather singular solution, since the exegetical tradition has accustomed us to the opposite attribution. Furthermore, for Bede the reasons why each of the animals are associated with a given evangelist are quite different from those advanced by Beatus. Finally, Bede alludes to the fact that at times the beasts, instead of signifying the Evangelists, signify the entire Church. And subsequently, when he comes to interpret the figure of the Lamb, which would appear to be so solidly connected with the image of Christ, Bede reminds us that in the Lamb Tyconius saw the Church. Bede is more subtle than Beatus, as can be seen in the critical clarity with which he points out that there can be more than one interpretation: “Dominus qui agnus est innocenter moriendo, leo quoque factus est mortem fortiter evincendo” (“The Lord, who, dying innocently, is a lamb, in boldly conquering death also became a lion”).
Bede is aware, in other words, of what students of medieval Christian iconography know today, that is, that the same animal or the same flower may signify realities as opposed as God and the Devil, since in the domain of the symbolic we are perpetually encountering interconnected homonymies and synonymies. He knows that interpretation is an exercise in high rhetoric, and he cites at the beginning of his commentary the seven rules for the reading of the sacred texts enunciated by Tyconius, several of which are nothing more or less than rules for the interpretation of rhetorical figures.5 Bede knows that hermeneutics is an interpretive choice—a principle that Beatus, so convinced of the correctness of his own decodifications, seems to be less aware of. This may be why it is his text, and not that of Bede, that was destined to become so popular and influential, because it is untroubled by exegetical doubts and appears to read the Apocalypse like an open book.
The truth is, however, that Beatus is well aware that the sacred text is open to multiple interpretations. Augustine had said so in no uncertain terms, providing extremely telling examples, in books 11 and 12 of his Confessions where he explains that Scripture may be understood on several levels. If we take an expression like “In the beginning God made,” one interpreter sees the beginning as referring to Divine Wisdom, while another sees it as referring to the beginning of things. And if one sees heaven and earth as prime matter, another sees heaven and earth as already formed and distinct, while yet another believes that the word “heaven” designates spiritual nature in its perfected form and the word “earth” corporeal matter in all its formlessness.
The fact is, says Augustine, that it is God Himself who inspires the prophets and patriarchs in such a way that they conceive ab initio all of the meanings that may be attributed to their words. When there is disagreement over which of two meanings should be attributed to an expression used by Moses, Augustine wonders whether both senses may not be true at the same time, with space left over for a third or fourth meaning that remains to be discovered, “quam ut unam veram sententiam ad hoc apertius ponerem, ut excluderem ceteras, quarum falsitas me non posset offendere” (“rather than set down my own meaning so clearly as to exclude the rest, which, not being false, could not offend me”). What’s to prevent us believing that all meanings were foreseen by this great servant of the Lord?
Thus, on the one hand, the medieval interpreter operates with a sort of theoretical empiricism, passing unconcernedly from one meaning to another, citing an authority as irrefutable at one moment and putting words into his mouth at another, appealing to an illustrious Father of the Church when it suits him and ignoring him when he encounters another interpretation that seems to be more convincing (excluding, naturally, those “quarum falsitas me non posset offendere”—itself a little masterpiece of medieval hermeneutics). On the other hand, he remains firmly convinced that his reading is illuminated by divine grace, taking his interpretation to be the only one possible and buttressing it with proofs—proofs completely alien to our concept of scientific rigor.
Inspired by this laissez-faire dogmatism (if I may be permitted an oxymoron), the interpreter behaves as if there was only one code, whereas everyone knows that there are many, but nobody seems to mind. In this way, if we must speak of a medieval symbolic code, we must bear in mind that it is a code full of semantic bifurcations, an honest-to-goodness dictionary of synonyms and homonyms, in which one image may suggest many realities and a real object many different images—all of them true because what God has to say is vast and complex, every language inadequate, and we must try to grasp it as best we can, a little at a time.
Nonetheless, as we remarked, Beatus belongs to the school of those who would have the text say what it has to say in the most unambiguous way possible. So, to explain why the twenty-four elders are unquestionably the patriarchs and the apostles, he plunges into a numerological demonstration that is just as conclusive for him as dropping a weight off the Tower of Pisa was for Galileo. He has no misgivings about the fact that the Church is duodecimally constituted on the model of the twelve tribes of Israel and, since twelve is the number of hours in the day and twelve the number of hours in the night, therefore twelve is the number of the apostles and twelve the number of the patriarchs and of the prophets who, as representatives of the Law, were the only sources of light during the long night that preceded the advent of Christ (Commentarius III, S 271, B 450).
It follows that in the New Testament Christ is incarnate, and his appearance is called light and day, and he is called, in the words of the prophet, a sun, the sun of justice (“ecce vobis, qui timete Dominum, orietur sol justitiae,” [“But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise,”] [Mal. 4:2]), because he elected the twelve apostles as the hours of the day, and he said of them “vos estis lux mundi” (“you are the light of the world”) (Matt. 5:14). And he supplemented the number of the twelve apostles with the body of bishops (ibid.).
So went the hermeneutic delirium of Beatus’s ruminations; and the result was that, not merely his contemporaries, but posterity too (as evidenced by the number of illuminated manuscripts his commentary generated), fell completely under his spell.
Beatus goes still further. He interprets as “self-evident” signs, not only the images of the major figurations (the elders, the beasts), but also the minimal characteristics described in the text. Thus, the four beasts are endowed with six wings and are full of eyes for reasons that are once again unquestionable: because, being the Four Evangelists, they understand and perceive all of the divine mysteries, past and to come. And they are lion, calf, man, and eagle because Mark was the first to speak of John the Baptist who loved the desert (“in hoc autem forma leonis est” [“in this then is the form of the lion”]), and Luke began with a reference to the spirit of the priesthood citing Zachariah (“bene ergo Lucam similem vitulo dicit, vitulus enim in persona ponitur sacerdotum sicut dixit Esaya” [“therefore he is right to say that Luke is like a calf, in fact the calf is represented in the person of the priests, as Isaiah says”]), Matthew was the one who insisted on the earthly and human generation of Christ, hence the image of the man, and finally John was the theorist of the Word that comes down from heaven and to heaven returns, so he is aptly symbolized by the eagle (S 278 et seq., B 462 et seq.).
6.2. Seeing Scripture
Beatus personifies a typical medieval tendency according to which the imagination—even the theological imagination—is eminently visual. It is no accident that Beatus’s text produced so many illuminated illustrations. The illuminators illustrated his text a posteriori, but Beatus was already writing a text to be illustrated, because the sacred text he had in front of him seemed to have been imagined as a series of vivid pictures.
Modern biblical exegesis appears to view this pictorial tendency with suspicion, as an historical residue from which John’s text must be freed if we are to interpret it correctly:
The modern Western reader must also beware of the tendency to translate the figures and scenes presented by the author into pictures. The author is in fact making use of conventional symbolic materials, without concern for the figurative effects thereby produced. A reader attempting to picture or imagine a Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, or a dragon with seven heads and ten horns, wondering, for example, how the ten horns were distributed on the seven heads, would be off on the wrong track. Instead we must translate the symbols intellectually, without stopping to consider their effect on the imagination. Therefore, since the number seven is the symbol of fullness, the seven horns and the seven eyes signify that the Lamb possesses the fullness of power (the horns) and the fullness of knowledge (the eyes). (Rossano 1963: 342)6
The fact is that the medieval interpreter could not and would not read the text in this way, and did precisely the opposite, first of all because he was ignorant of those Oriental traditions of which the modern philologist has such a clear historical and ethnographical awareness. Therefore, if the text said seven heads and ten horns, it had to be taken literally. Second because, already in Beatus’s day, and even more after it, thinking in pictures was the preferred way—and for the vast masses of the illiterate, however rich and powerful they might be, who laid their eyes on an illuminated manuscript or any other pictorial representation, it was the privileged way, the only way even, in which they could understand and commit to memory the contents of the sacred text. It was therefore essential—especially for those with pedagogical intent—to picture events and characters visually down to the tiniest detail. And the more monstrous and marvelous the detail, the more the imagination was awakened and the interpretive passion inflamed. A visual symbol crammed with details is bound to be richer in meanings, as we know from the evidence of dreams. And, as occurred in the Latin mnemonic tradition (as well as the Greek), which the Middle Ages knew in part from the surviving texts and in part at second hand, for an item of knowledge to be stored in our memories it had to be associated with a scene, the more astonishing and terrible the better (see Carruthers 1990).
We will not go so far as to say—overestimating the influence of mnemonic techniques—that the entire apocalyptic tradition is nothing more than an attempt to embody in memorable images a few moral and eschatological principles. But we feel confident in asserting that the medieval passion for apocalyptic imagerie is partly the result of the influence of the ancient arts of memory.
Beatus’s attitude toward the text, then, was the opposite of that of the modern interpreter: the scenes must be transposed into visual images, the interpreter must be concerned with the resulting pictorial effect, because the cryptography, the mystical enigma, depend on that effect. And if there are ten horns and seven heads, we must ask ourselves how these numbers, incongruous in themselves, can be represented congruously. The problem for the illuminator, who must solve the problem pictorially, is the same as that for the commentator, who must solve it symbolically. And the commentators often find themselves stymied because they are endeavoring to translate the text with an illustrator’s mentality. Beatus’s Commentarius is a glaring example of this predicament.
Let us see how this impulse to translate the text into clear visual images leads our scrutinist to misrepresent the text. We will start from the beginning, from John’s vision of the one seated on a throne and the four beasts (chapter 4) and from its most likely source: Ezekiel’s vision in the book that bears his name (Ezek. 1:4–26).
Ezekiel speaks of a whirlwind coming out of the north: and a great cloud, and a fire infolding it, and brightness about it: and out of the midst thereof, that is, out of the midst of the fire, “as it were the resemblance of amber.” And in the midst thereof the likeness of four living creatures and this was their appearance: there was the likeness of a man in them. Every one had four faces and four wings, straight feet and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot, and they sparkled like the color of burnished brass. And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides. And these four living creatures turned not when they went but went straight forward.
So far so good. Up to now the vision looks like something that can be pictured. But at this point the prophet declares that, in addition to the face of a man, the creatures had the face of a lion on the right side and the face of an ox on the left side, and they also had the face of an eagle. Their wings were stretched upward, two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies. Their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps.
Another confusing fact: although Ezekiel had said (twice) that they turned not when they went and all four went straight forward, he now informs us that the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning, and behold one wheel on the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces, And the appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of a beryl, and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. And they went in four directions, and they turned not when they went, and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up, and “whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels” (Ezek. 1:20).
As we will have occasion to observe in a moment, it is clear that Ezekiel is not, so to speak, indulging in ekphrasis, but recounting a series of oneiric events. But let us proceed with our reading of his text: now above the firmament that was over the living creatures’ heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it. “And I saw as the colour of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it, from the appearance of his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about. As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain.” “This,” declares Ezekiel, “was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake” (Ezek. 1:27–28).
This is the same vision that appears, in an abridged form, in Apocalypse 4:2–8, with the difference that John seems to start where Ezekiel left off. The throne in the firmament appears right away, and on the throne someone is seated, similar in appearance to a jasper and a sardine stone. A rainbow like an emerald surrounds the throne. Around the throne are twenty-four seats and upon the seats are seated twenty-four elders clothed in white raiment, with crowns of gold on their heads. From the throne (before which burn seven lamps of fire, which are the seven Spirits of God) proceed lightnings and thunderings and voices. Before the throne is a sea of glass like crystal. “In the midst of the throne and round about the throne were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within …” (Apoc. 4:6–8).7
At first blush John’s text appears to be a copy of Ezekiel’s, except for the fact that in Ezekiel each of the living creatures had the face of all four animals. John makes the same vision easier to picture: each of the beasts has the face of a different animal. In Ezekiel the creatures have four wings, in John six,8 and naturally Beatus, after expressing his amazement that the wings are not part of the normal endowments of the four animals (including the eagle, which is only supposed to have two), indulges in the usual allegorical interpretations. Furthermore, the eyes are not on the wheels, or on the wings of the four beasts, but on the beasts themselves (and the Greek text of the Apocalypse in any case confirms this reading).
Nevertheless, John does not entirely succeed in escaping the influence of the text of Ezekiel. Before the throne is a transparent sea like crystal, and “in the midst of the throne and round about the throne” are the elders. The same expression is found in the Latin text used by Beatus (“in medio throni et in circuitu throni”). The expression seems to be obscure, because on the throne is the One Seated, and it is difficult to see how the elders can be in the midst of the throne at the same time. To resolve this embarrassing contradiction, a modern commentator, Angelini (1969), eliminates the second mention of the throne and translates in such a way that the elders seem to be, not in the midst of the throne, but in the midst of the sea of crystal that stretches before the throne: “Facing the throne stretched a billowing sea of transparent crystal, and in the midst and around were four beasts full of eyes in front and behind.” A violence done to the text to make it more reasonable. But why should a vision be reasonable?
Not surprisingly, at this point a perplexed Beatus remarks that “quaestio oritur” (“a question arises”), and he gets out of it by revealing that what the text sometimes refers to as a throne and sometimes as a seat is none other than the Church, upon which obviously is seated Christ our Lord, but in which dwell, thanks to his largesse, also the gospels, the Evangelists, and the elders, who cannot be said to dwell outside the Church.
An elegant solution perhaps, but at odds with the rest of his exegetical method, which is that of “visualizing” or projecting the facts of the story in space. For proof of our contention, we have only to look at the illuminators, who are not sure how to get around it and represent this topological problem variously in different images.
For instance, in the Beatus of Ferdinand and Sancha of Madrid—and this is also the case in the majority of the other Beati—the limited space available leads the illustrator to reduce the number of the elders from twelve to eight, and there is only one wheel placed in the center. As in many Beati, the Seated One is depicted as a lamb (because Beatus identifies him as Christ), but it is not clear whether or not the eyes are represented, whether, that is, the eyes are to be interpreted as the ones around the throne of the lamb or those that appear on the wings of the four animalia. What is more important, however, is that the illuminator fails to render the sense of movement that the words of the text suggest, that the four beasts, that is, are evidently on the move, and appear now in the midst of and now around the throne (Figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1
A more interesting case is that of the Beatus of San Millán, in which, with a fine torsion of the figures that has an expressionist feel to it, the illuminator at least tries to convey the movement of the beasts: he does not have them mount onto the throne, but he does manage to suggest their whirling motion around the throne of the Lamb (Figure 6.2).
Figure 6.2
In the Beatus of San Severo (Figure 6.3), the artist endeavors to convey somehow the movement of at least one of the four beasts, showing the lion about to invade the circular area around the throne.
Figure 6.3
Medieval culture has no trouble translating biblical texts into images, because its roots are in Greek culture, which is eminently visual. Every epiphany of the sacred in classical Greece occurs in the form of an image and—for obvious reasons—of a fixed image. It is no accident if the literary genre of ekphrasis—the minutely detailed description of statues and pictures, so as to render them, through the skilled use of verbal language, practically visible—has its origin and development in Greek culture. Hebrew culture, on the other hand, was eminently oral. In Plato’s Timaeus the Demiurge creates the universe using geometrical figures, whereas in the Bible it is by means of a verbal act that God creates the world. The Greeks saw their gods; Moses only hears God’s voice.
Now a voice can certainly evoke images, but those images will not be necessarily immobile. On the other hand, while both Ezekiel and John claim to have had a vision, they do not say that what they saw was a gallery of fixed images. And it is significant that they do not speak in the present tense, as someone does when they are describing a picture that they still have before their eyes, but in the past or the imperfect, as we might do if we were narrating a dream in which the events came one after the other. Every visionary experience is of necessity oneiric, and what the Seer sees has the same sense of flou and lack of preciseness as what we see in a dream. Today we would say that the vision takes the form of a cinematographic event, in which the images occur one after the other. This is why it is possible to see the Seated One on a throne, upon whose image, through a series of fade-outs, the living creatures are then superimposed, and, in the following sequence, in which everything has changed position, the Seated One again on the throne, the living creatures around it, and the Lamb between them. All of the Apocalypse has this dreamlike rhythm: events occur more than once—the beast is given up for dead and once again we see it in combat, Babylon is said to have collapsed and it is still there awaiting its castigation, and so on.
If we reread the vision as the description of a sequence in motion (bearing in mind that Ezekiel said that “the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning”), all the contradictions disappear. What we have is a succession of movements and metamorphoses. The image of the dream would have been a help to Beatus in solving his quandaries, but Beatus thought in terms of synchronic images motionless in space with no passage of time to alter them.
6.3. Other Impossible Visualizations
Naturally, it is not just Beatus who attempts to translate biblical visions into representable images. Take what happens with the description of the Temple. The Temple does not appear in the Apocalypse, and Beatus does not mention it, but it certainly provides the inspiration for John’s vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Now, all of the medieval attempts to visualize the various biblical descriptions of the Temple suffer from the same failing as Beatus: their insistence on seeing as fixed images what were in fact oneiric and metamorphic visions.
The Old Testament offers two meticulous descriptions of the Temple of Jerusalem: one in 1 Kings and the other in Ezekiel. The description in 1 Kings is more precise, today we might say “user-friendly”:
And the house which king Solomon built for the LORD, the length thereof was threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof twenty cubits, and the height thereof thirty cubits. And the porch before the temple of the house, twenty cubits was the length thereof, according to the breadth of the house; and ten cubits was the breadth thereof before the house. And for the house he made windows of narrow lights. And against the wall of the house he built chambers round about, against the walls of the house round about, both of the temple and of the oracle: and he made chambers round about: The nethermost chamber was five cubits broad, and the middle was six cubits broad, and the third was seven cubits broad: for without in the wall of the house he made narrowed rests round about, that the beams should not be fastened in the walls of the house. And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither: so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building. The door for the middle chamber was in the right side of the house: and they went up with winding stairs into the middle chamber, and out of the middle into the third. So he built the house, and finished it; and covered the house with beams and boards of cedar. And then he built chambers against all the house, five cubits high: and they rested on the house with timber of cedar. (1 Kings 6:2–10)
Not so exact is the lengthy description in Ezekiel (40:5–49, 41:1–26, and 42:1–20), which, precisely because of its apparent incoherence, seems apt to challenge its exegetes to the most reckless feats of interpretation:
And behold a wall on the outside of the house round about, and in the man’s hand a measuring reed of six cubits long by the cubit and an hand breadth: so he measured the breadth of the building, one reed; and the height, one reed. Then came he unto the gate which looketh toward the east, and went up the stairs thereof, and measured the threshold of the gate, which was one reed broad; and the other threshold of the gate, which was one reed broad. And every little chamber was one reed long, and one reed broad; and between the little chambers were five cubits; and the threshold of the gate by the porch of the gate within was one reed. He measured also the porch of the gate within, one reed. Then measured he the porch of the gate, eight cubits; and the posts thereof, two cubits; and the porch of the gate was inward. And the little chambers of the gate eastward were three on this side, and three on that side; they three were of one measure: and the posts had one measure on this side and on that side. And he measured the breadth of the entry of the gate, ten cubits; and the length of the gate, thirteen cubits. The space also before the little chambers was one cubit on this side, and the space was one cubit on that side: and the little chambers were six cubits on this side, and six cubits on that side. He measured then the gate from the roof of one little chamber to the roof of another: the breadth was five and twenty cubits, door against door. He made also posts of threescore cubits, even unto the post of the court round about the gate. And from the face of the gate of the entrance unto the face of the porch of the inner gate were fifty cubits. And there were narrow windows to the little chambers, and to their posts within the gate round about, and likewise to the arches: and windows were round about inward: and upon each post were palm trees. (Ezek. 40:5–16)
And so on in the same vein. Imagine trying to reconstruct a model of the Temple based on this description with the aid of a measuring tape and a conversion table. In addition to which, medieval interpreters did not even have a conversion table for the measurements, to say nothing of the corruption of the data that would have occurred thanks to the manifold translations, and manuscript transcriptions of translations, that they had at their disposal. But, come to that, even a twenty-first-century architect would find it a challenge to translate these verbal instructions into a project drawing.
It is interesting to observe the pains the medieval allegorists go to in their determination to see the Temple as Ezekiel describes it (and in their efforts to picture it they attempt to provide instructions for its ideal reconstruction; see De Lubac 1959–1964, II, 7, 2). The Hebrew tradition itself admitted the impossibility of a coherent architectural reading: in the twelfth century Rabbi Solomon Ben Isaac agreed that no one could ever figure out the arrangement of the northern chambers, where they began to the east and how far they extended to the west, and where they began on the one side and how far they extended on the other (see Rosenau 1979). Furthermore, Ezekiel himself does not claim to have seen a real construction but a “quasi aedificium” (“as [it were] the frame of a city,” Ezek. 40:2, my emphasis), while the Fathers of the Church, just as they granted that the vision of the four living creatures defied literal explanation, also declared that the measurements of the building were inconceivable in physical terms, given, for example, that the gates would have to have been wider than the walls.
Thus, interpreters like Hugh of Fouilloy, in his De claustro animae (XII century), though he based himself on 1 Kings 6 (less confused and confusing than Ezekiel’s vision), confined himself to analyzing the mystical significance of the Temple. The Temple in fact stands for the body of Christ and that of every Christian (“nostrum spirituale templum” [“our spiritual temple”]), the cedars of Lebanon stand for the most glorious men of all times, and Hiram’s builders who hewed the stones are the good monks who know how to smooth the irregularities and imperfections of the rough stone (in other words, the souls of their brethren), making them even and harmoniously disposed. And the splendor of the precious metals and stones was the splendor of charity. Cutting the stones signified cutting away human vices. Solomon employed 30,000 workmen, and this number is a multiple of 3 and 10 and, setting aside the mystical meanings of the number 10, 3 is the number of the Trinity, of the three eminent good works (prayer, fasting, and alms deeds), the three virtues of reading, meditation, and preaching, and so on.
Confronted with the measurements of the Temple, rather than trying to interpret them literally, Hugh comments upon the spiritual significance of its dimensions (the length of the building means patience, its breadth means charity, its height means hope, etc.) (chapter XVII, PL 176, 1118).
Other commentators struggled instead to reconstruct the Temple because, if we buy into the idea (Augustinian in origin) that, when faced in Scripture with expressions that seem to convey an excess of basically superfluous information, such as numbers and measurements, we should be on the lookout for an allegorical meaning, bearing in mind that biblical allegory was in factis not in verbis. Therefore, that a reed was six cubits long was not a mere verbal affirmation or flatus vocis, but a fact that had actually occurred, and that God had so predisposed so that we could interpret it allegorically. Hence, a realistic reconstruction of the Temple had to be possible, otherwise it would mean Scripture had lied.
And so, in his In visionem Ezechielis, we find Richard of Saint Victor—in a polemical stance vis-à-vis the Fathers of the Church, who had advised interpreters to stick to a spiritual reading—laboring over his calculations and producing plans, elevations and cross sections, deciding, when two measurements are impossible to reconcile, that one of them must refer to the whole edifice and the other to one of its parts—in a desperate attempt (doomed, alas, to failure) to reduce the quasi aedificium to something a medieval master builder could really have constructed (see De Lubac 1959–1964: II, 5, 3).
6.4. The Jerusalem of Beatus
As for the Heavenly Jerusalem, Christian thought had transformed the biblical Jerusalem into a theological image, idealizing and, so to speak, disincarnating the real historical city. The first transformation of Jerusalem occurs at the end of the Apocalypse, where it is said of the city that
her light was like unto that of a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; and [she] had a great wall and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels … on the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb … And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs.… And he measured the wall thereof, a hundred and forty and four cubits.… And the building of the wall of it was of jasper; and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass.… And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. (Apoc. 21:11–23)
Thus, Jerusalem ceases to be a geographical place in order to become the image of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Rather than urbanistic, John’s description is architectural, with special insistence on the aesthetic aspects. Moreover, his description is clearly inspired by that of Ezekiel, in which the construction is not rectangular, as it is in other biblical texts, by based upon squares.
The vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem could not fail to fascinate Beatus of Liébana and, centuries later, his illustrators. But more than anything else, he appears to be fascinated by three aspects: Jerusalem’s foursquare perfection, its measurements, and the splendor of its precious stones and its golden decorations. Beatus in fact is a forerunner of the aesthetics of the threefold criterion of beauty: integrity, proportion, and light, but he lacked the philosophical categories that would have allowed him to focus in on the reasons for his admiration. He therefore proceeds by confused interjections and inexact calculations.
The chief aspect of Jerusalem that strikes him seems to be the fact that the city shines like a gem without the need for an external light source. Jerusalem has no need of stellar illumination to shine; she radiates light from within herself like a soul internally illuminated by grace. The twelve gates are figures of the twelve apostles, the twelve prophets, and the twelve tribes of Israel. Twelve gates, twelve angels at the gates (a number John plucks out of nowhere, without any previous scriptural support), and twelve foundations, produce the number thirty-six, the number of hours Christ spent in the Sepulcher. The city is square as a reminder of the Four Evangelists, given that its breadth is the same as its length. Following the Vulgate that speaks of twelve thousand by twelve thousand cubits, Beatus decides to multiply twelve by ten to produce 120, which is (according to the Acts of the Apostles) the number of souls who have received the Holy Spirit. Then he adds to the 120 the 24 elders of the Apocalypse and comes up with 144, which is the measurement of the wall of Jerusalem in cubits. And we could go on and on, showing how every number, every detail of the city’s layout, permits Beatus to unearth ever newer and more prodigious allegorical allusions.9
In order to obtain a “readable” result, Beatus has no qualms in having recourse to citations that he presents as faithful, but which are in fact altered ever so slightly, changing a word here, eliminating an aside there, or modifying an inflection.
6.5.
Mille Annos
What makes the Apocalypse fascinating for the Middle Ages is the substantial ambiguity of chapter 20, verses 1–15, which it will be useful to cite in full here. Here we can read it in the King James Version but we are obliged to put in a footnote the text as it was quoted by Beatus, which was lacunary at certain points with respect to the Vulgate:
And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.
And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.
And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.
And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.
But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.
Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.
And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison. And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.
And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and the fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.
And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.
And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God: and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.
Taken literally, this chapter could mean that, at a certain point in human history, Satan will be cast into prison and, during the entire time of his imprisonment, the kingdom of the Messiah will be realized on earth, and all of the elect will participate in it, rewarded with a “first resurrection.” This period will last for the 1,000 years of the Devil’s captivity. Then the Devil will be freed for a certain period of time, then once more defeated. At this point the enthroned Christ will begin the Last Judgment, human history will be fulfilled, and (we are now at the beginning of chapter 21) there will be a new heaven and a new earth, the advent, that is, of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
The problem for the Christians of the early centuries is whether the 1,000 years of the Messiah’s reign were still to come or whether they were the years that they themselves were living. If the first interpretation was correct they had to wait for a Second Coming of the Messiah and a kind of golden age (which had also been promised by a number of ancient religions), followed by a return of the Devil and his false prophet the Antichrist (as the tradition will gradually come to call him, although the Apocalypse itself speaks only in fact of a false prophet). And finally, the Last Judgment and the end of time. This is the dominant reading, with some fluctuation, down to Augustine.
In the fourth century the Donatist heresy gained a footing. True, it targeted the unworthy ministers of the cult, insisting that the sacraments that they administered were invalid; but to deny validity to the liturgical actions of a considerable portion of the official Church, and to set against it the purity of a rigoristically virtuous community illuminated by the Holy Spirit, was tantamount in the last analysis to setting against a Heavenly Jerusalem (yet to come) the new Babylon represented by the current Church.
Augustine’s response (De Civitate Dei XX) is that neither the City of God nor the millennium are historical events that will be realized in this world; they are mystical events. The millennium John speaks of represents the period that stretches from the Incarnation to the end of history, therefore it is the period we are already living, the period in progress, completely realized in the living Church. It does not occur to Augustine to separate in day-to-day history the perfect members of the perfect city from the reprobates; he is well aware that human history is riddled with sin and error, even the history of the just who seek salvation in the body of the Church. Earthly history, then, will not be the site of a battle for the supremacy of the heavenly city—Armageddon is not of this world.10
With this solution, however, Augustine leaves the way open for two magnificent suggestions. The first concerns the earthly possibility of that City of God that he had already demonstrated was not of this world. What happened in Augustine’s case was what happens with many polemists who, thinking to refute an argument, write a book that turns out to be such a success that the argument in question is, if not bolstered, at least brought into the public eye. Accordingly, we will see how, in the course of subsequent history, the idea of the two cities will fascinate reformers and revolutionaries alike, all of them convinced that the City of God must be realized forthwith by the elect; what is needed, then, is a great battle, an Armageddon on earth, a revolution.
The second suggestion concerns the immediate advent of the Day of Judgment, and hence the expectation of the year 1000. If the millennium is not a promise for the future, but is going on here and now, if we are to interpret the Apocalypse correctly, the first thing that must come to pass is the end of the world. The fact that the interpreters were divided over doing the math—whether 1,000 years was to be taken as an approximate or precise figure, whether it was to be calculated from the year of Christ’s birth, from his Passion, from the beginning or end of the persecutions: whether in other words the years were 1,000, 1,400 or 1,033—did not affect the fact that the end of the world must come sooner or later.
The history of the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages oscillates between these two possible interpretations, accompanied by alternate euphoria and dysphoria, as well as a perennial sense of expectation and tension. Because, either Christ must still be coming to reign for 1,000 years on earth or he has already come, in which case it won’t be long before the Devil returns and with him the end of the world.
This is the context in which Beatus writes his commentary. History informs us that he wrote it for precise theological reasons. Elipandus, archbishop of Toledo, and Felix, bishop of Urgel, had resuscitated an old heresy, adoptionism, which denied the divinity of the Word, relegated to the role of adopted son of the Father. Spanish adoptionism was a “mitigated” form of the heresy and, while they accepted the fact that the Word was the natural son of the Father, they saw Christ in his human nature as merely an adopted son.
Beatus finds in the Apocalypse a text apt to display a Christ in his full consubstantial divinity and sonship, and he employs his commentary as a weapon. And he proves to be a winner, since later Charlemagne will convene two whole councils and a synod, in Germany and Italy, in the course of which the adoptionists will be condemned—and this may explain why the commentary created such a furor at the time.
Beatus lingers with lyric ardor, in a dazzling display of high medieval rhetoric, over the phrase “ab eo qui est, et qui erat, et qui venturus est” (“from Him who is, and who was, and who is to come”) from which, with something of a non sequitur, he draws the proof of the divinity of Christ. But what fascinates him most is that Christ is coming as judge (venturus ad iudicandum)—and when he arrives at chapter 20 of the Apocalypse, in other words at the ambiguous prophecy of the millennium, he goes so far as to open with an invocation imploring God not to let him fall into error. He is aware that he is dealing with a fundamental issue.
The text of John tells him first of all that the angel casts the Devil into the abyss “till the thousand years should be fulfilled” (Apoc. 20:3). Then it says that “the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast … lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years” (20:4). John goes on to specify that this reign is the “first resurrection,” which is baptism, and concludes: “but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years” (20:6). Beatus admits that these 1,000 years are to be calculated from the passion of Our Lord and are therefore those of the earthly reign of the Church, which had been the opinion of Augustine. He repeats several times that the millennium spoken of, both for the Devil and the blessed, is the one in which he and his readers are living: “they will reign with the Lord now and in the future … when speaking of 1,000 years he meant of this world.…” And so on and so forth.
In order that there should be no misunderstanding, he conducts a subtle analysis of the verb tenses, since John says at a certain point that the blessed “have reigned” for 1,000 years, and elsewhere that they “will reign for a thousand years.” Beatus, however, knows how to handle Holy Scripture and reminds us that the prophets, speaking of what will happen to Christ, often use the past perfect tense (“et diviserunt vestimenta mea” [“they parted my garments among them”]) when they are obviously talking about something that is destined to happen in the future. Secondly, he states more than once that the use of 1,000 years is certainly an example of synecdoche in the manner of Tyconius, and probably means a longer period of time, at the same time he makes it quite clear that, though it may be a perfect number that indicates a longer period, 1,000 is still a number that implies closure and does not allude to the “perpetuum saeculum” or eternity.
Therefore, Beatus insists, John is speaking of the current millennium and the end of this world. Psychologically speaking, Beatus was, as Camón Aznar describes him, an author obsessed with the millennium and at the same time a rationalist, in the sense that he wanted at all costs to reduce the visionary suggestions of his favorite text to a series of comprehensible messages. And someone obsessed with the millennium is not so much interested in the fact that we are living it as that it is approaching its end.
Augustine, seemingly irritated by the literalist myopia with which the fanatics of the coming millennium read chapter 20 (he declares that many have reduced this passage to a kind of ridiculous fable [De Civitate Dei XX, 7]), found an elegant solution to the problem: what we are dealing with is a figurative expression that indicates the period in which the Church Militant will live in this world (he avoided prophesies as to how long this might be). Beatus, instead, feels obliged to compel John’s text to express this concept literally in every word, every verb ending, every adverb. It is not that he wants to be right at all costs, he just wants the text to be manifestissime (most manifestly) transparent.
Thus, readers of Beatus’s text found themselves faced with the end of the millennium as an incontrovertible historical event, which helps explain why his text had such a wide circulation, and why the better part of the illuminations that accompany it were made between the beginning and the end of the tenth century, in other words, when the first millennium was drawing to a close.11
Just how profound was Beatus’s visionary immersion in his play of verbal echoes (biblical citations, patristic influences, captious disputations) can be seen from the energetic fashion in which he inveighs against the dangerous heretics who held that the millennium was to be dated from the Incarnation onward, whereas for him there was no doubt that it had to be calculated starting from the Passion. But it is even clearer in the pages he devotes to the Antichrist.
Beatus is obsessed with the idea of the Antichrist, as is apparent from the very start (Commentarius I, S 44, B 73): “Incipit tractatus de Apocalypsin Iohannis in explanatione sua a multis doctoribus et probatissimis viris illustribus, diverso quidem stilo, sed non diversa fide interpretata, ubi de Cristo et ecclesia et de antichristo et eius signis primissime recognoscas” (“Here begins the treatise on the Apocalypse of John, which in the commentaries of many doctors and highly esteemed famous men has been interpreted in different ways, but not with different faith, in which what concerns Christ and his church and what concerns the Antichrist and his signs can be examined at the highest level”). The Apocalypse is a treatise on the Antichrist and how to recognize him.
On this subject Beatus did not only have the suggestions of the Apocalypse to go on. Quite apart from the readings in this sense of certain Old Testament prophets, the Gospels too spoke of the Antichrist, as did the First Epistle of Saint John.12 Patristic literature also frequently referred to the Antichrist (we have only to think of the De Antechristo of Hippolytus in the third century), to say nothing of other more or less spurious texts.13 But Beatus was not content with what he found already available. He plunges first of all into an incredible Kabbalistic speculation, teasing out the numerical hints of John’s text to provide a mathematical matrix by means of which to identify the name of the coming Antichrist. Secondly, once he has declared that the Antichrist is bound to come, that he will destroy the community of the faithful, that the saints will need all of their spirit of martyrdom and perseverance to resist him, he launches into a prolonged diatribe to demonstrate that the Antichrist will seek to restore the Judaic law and will definitely be a Jew, taking up a theme common to most previous authors of apocalyptic treatises, but blithely forgetting that in his day his own country has fallen prey to a flesh-and-blood Antichrist in the person of the Muslim invader. It is not clear whether he was even aware of it (because after all the kingdom of Asturias where Beatus was active fell within the Frankish orbit) or whether he is resorting to some kind of code, since his Antichrist will not only impose circumcision but will have the added characteristic of not drinking wine, which would seem to allude to the Muslims, were it not for the fact that he will have the further distinction of not appreciating female embraces (something about which the Muslims might have begged to differ). What is more, the Antichrist—and this trait would not fit either the Muslims or the Jews—though himself impurissimus, will seduce the people by preaching, sobriety, and chastity. Here Beatus may be alluding to some rigoristic heresy, maybe one no longer even active in his own day, but combated in one of his sources.
Beatus’s readers, however, did not stop to worry about the coherence of his narrative. They wanted to hear about the Antichrist. The fact is that the fortune of a text may be explained by something outside the text. After the year 1000 the medieval reader will develop a taste for tales of war, love, and magic, but in Beatus’s day the Song of Songs couldn’t hold a candle to the Apocalypse.
This is why the treatise of Adso of Montier-en-Der, De ortu et tempore Antichristi (PL 101, 1289–1293), came out in the tenth century, probably under Beatus’s influence. Adso claims that the Antichrist will be born of the Jewish people and, born from the union of a father and a mother like the rest of mankind, and not, as some would have it, from a virgin, he will be entirely conceived in sin. From his first conception, the Devil will enter his mother’s womb, he will be nourished in the womb by virtue of the Devil, and the power of the Devil will be always with him. And, as the Holy Spirit descended into the womb of the mother of Jesus Christ and filled it with his virtue, so the Devil will enter into the mother of the Antichrist and will fill her, surround her, and make her his own, possessing her within and without, so that, thanks to the cooperation of the Devil, she will conceive him in congress with a man, and he who will be born shall be wholly evil, iniquitous, and damned. And for this reason he shall be called the son of perdition. He will have wizards, witch doctors, diviners, and enchanters who will educate him in every iniquity, falsehood, and malefic art.
In the twelfth century Hildegard of Bingen will write that the son of perdition will come with all the wiles of the first seduction, and monstrous turpitudes, and black iniquities, with eyes of fire, ass’s ears, the muzzle and mouth of a lion; and, inducing humankind to renounce God, he will smother their senses with the most horrendous stench, snarling with an enormous grimace and displaying his fearsome iron fangs (Liber Scivias III, 1, 14).
The popularity of the figure of the Antichrist is no doubt partly to be ascribed to the millennialist anxieties we have outlined. If we hope, however, to fully account for these anxieties, and with them for the success of Beatus, we must take into consideration, in addition to these theological considerations and a taste for symbolic storytelling, the material circumstances that went along with the state of crisis that was the life of the High Middle Ages. Beatus was not regaling his readers with happenings that might occur a few years or 1,000 years into the future, but with happenings that people in those still dark ages were accustomed to experiencing on a daily basis. We have only to read Benedictine Rodulfus Glaber’s account in his Historiarum libri of events that occurred, not in Beatus’s time, but after the millennium was already thirty years into the past, at the start of the year 1033. Rodulfus describes a famine brought on by weather so inclement that, as a result of the flooding, it was impossible to find a favorable moment either to sow or to reap. Hunger had made the entire populace, rich and poor alike, completely emaciated and, when there were no more live animals to eat, they were compelled to eat corpses “and other things it is too repugnant even to mention,” to such a point that some people were reduced to devouring human flesh. Travelers were waylaid, murdered, cut into pieces, and roasted, and people who had left their homes in the hope of escaping the penury had their throats slit during the night by those who had offered them shelter. People even lured in children, offering them a piece of fruit or an egg, only to slaughter them and eat them.
In many localities corpses were dug up and eaten. Someone was discovered to have brought roasted human flesh to the market in Tournus and was burned at the stake; someone else suffered an identical fate because he went out at night in search of the place where the same meat had been buried. In a word, “that insane fury spread so far that abandoned cattle were safer from being carried off than were human beings” (Historiarum liber IV, 9–10).
Perhaps Rodolfus was still under the influence of his reading of Beatus. Otherwise it is difficult to understand how such horrible things could come to pass in the year 1033, since Rodulfus had earlier exulted (in book III, iv, 13) that in 1003 the rebirth of Europe had begun “shaking off, as it were, and ridding itself of its former senility, it had put on a pure white mantle of churches.” But that was how Rodolfus was: in book V he will also narrate how the Devil once appeared to him. A sure sign that, after the year 1000 had gone by, people were laughing on one side of their faces to have come through unscathed and weeping on the other for fear their calculations were off and something even worse was still about to happen. But when he is not seeing the Devil but simply looking around him, Rodulfus seems to be a reliable chronicler. So his tales of hard times have an aura of truth.
What is to prevent, then, in times dominated by such a sense of insecuritas, the scholar reading Beatus, or the unlettered masses listening to someone else read Beatus, or seeing the same horrors depicted on the frescoed walls of their churches, thinking, along with Horace, “de te fabula narratur” (“this could be your story”)? Even in our own day, on the silver screen, stories involving cataclysms and disasters that hold out no hope for the future but fuel (or hypnotically sublimate) our night sweats and nightmares continue to garner success.
A reworking of my essay “Palinsesto su Beato” (Eco 1973), a commentary that first appeared in the sumptuously illustrated Franco Maria Ricci edition of Beato di Liébana (1973), and “Jerusalem and the Temple as Signs in Medieval Culture,” in Manetti (1996: 329–344). [Translator’s note: English citations from the Apocalypse are from the King James Version (KJV)].
1. For the differences between metaphor and allegory, see Chapter 3 in the present volume.
2. References for the citations from Beatus’s Commentarius that follow are to the critical edition by Sanders (1930) (S followed by the page number) as well as to that of the 1985 Poligrafico dello Stato edition (B followed by the page number). For a monumental five-volume illustrated catalogue of the illustrations, see Williams 1994–2005.
3. The illuminations in the Beatus manuscripts have a preeminent place in the development of the figurative arts of the Middle Ages. Their influence spread along the “ways of Saint James,” along the four roads, that is, which criss-crossed Europe and were taken by pilgrims on their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Along these roads the great abbey churches of the Romanesque period rose. The churches fulfilled several functions: organizational, hospitable, liturgical, and especially didactic. The church itself was, so to speak, a book made out of stone. The figures on its portals and capitals told the believers stopping there all they needed to know for the salvation of their souls: the mysteries of the faith, the precepts of virtuous behavior, the phenomena of nature, the elements of a more or less fabulous geography, tall tales of exotic peoples and monstrous creatures. For a long time, the West, having emerged from the Middle Ages, lost the knack of deciphering the meanings of many of these representations, so obvious to the medieval spectator or reader. It will be art historian Emile Mâle (1922, vol. I, ch. 2) who will identify the references to the Apocalypse that have their source in the illuminated Beati. See also Focillon (1938).
4. Huysmans 2003, p. 39.
5. The rules, set forth in the Liber regularum (and discussed at length by Augustine in his De doctrina christiana III, 30–37) are: 1. “Of the Lord and his Body”: Christ is sometimes presented as the head of the Church and sometimes as the Church itself, his Mystical Body. 2. “On the Double Body of Christ”: a somewhat obscure rule, partly because Augustine, in his commentary, taken up, for example, by the Venerable Bede, outmaneuvers Donatist Tyconius, seizing the occasion to interpret him in an anti-Donatist key: it is not true that only the just belong to the Church and are worthy of administering the sacraments, instead the Church is a Corpus Permixtum, made up, that is, of good and bad members, whom God will separate on the Day of Judgment; for now, the Church is “bipartite.” 3. “On Promises and the Law” deals with the discussion of grace versus good works. 4. “Of Species and Genus”: Holy Scripture sometimes speaks of a specific entity designating by metonymy the vaster genus: it says “Jerusalem” or “Solomon” and means the Church and all its members. 5. “Of the Times”: based explicitly on the principle of synecdoche or the part for the whole—the Apocalypse speaks of 144,000 elect to indicate the assembly of all the Saints, who are somewhat more, and it speaks of times in the same way. 6. “Of Recapitulation”: sometimes the author of Scripture lists a temporal sequence of events, then he adds one that seems to be the continuation of the series but is in fact their recapitulation or the repetition of something already said (this is a rule that helps overcome the sense of flashback that the Apocalypse communicates to the reader when certain events appear to occur twice). 7. “Of the Devil and his Body”: repeats the rule, once more metonymical, according to which we speak of Christ as both head and body of the community of the Elect.
6. [Translator’s note: Unless otherwise attributed, translations of Italian secondary sources, here and elsewhere, are my own, from Eco’s text.]
7. The Latin version of the Apocalypse quoted by Beatus (Commentarius III, S266, B442, S267, B459) is slightly different from the Vulgate but the basic sense is the same, as is the case with the KJV. We reproduce here Beatus’s Latin source text along with the corresponding text from the KJV (which we already followed closely in the body of the chapter): “Et ecce thronus positus erat in caelo, et supra thronum sedens, et qui sedebat similis erat aspectui lapidi iaspidis et sardino; et iris in circuito sedis, similis aspectui zmaragdino; et in circuitu throni vidi sedes viginti quattuor, et supra sedes viginti quattuor seniores sedentes in veste alba, et in capitibus eorum coronas aureas. Et de sede procedunt fulgura et voces et tonitrua. Et septem lampades ignis ardentis, qui sunt septem spiritus Dei. Et in conspectu throni sicut mare vitreum simile cristallo. Et vidi in medio throni et in circuito throni quattuor animalia plena oculia ante et retro. Animal primum simile leonis, et secundum animal simile vituli, et tertium animal habens faciem hominis, et quartum animal simile ad aquilae volantis. Haec quattuor animalia singula eorum habebant alas senas: et in circuitu et intus plena sunt oculis” (“And, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God. And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beast full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within”) King James 4:2–8.
8. John combines together several different visions, and in this case his inspiration is Isaiah 6:2. See the commentary on the Apocalypse by Lupieri (1999).
9. The only way the people of the Middle Ages could appreciate any treasure or architectural harmony was by experiencing it in the same terms in which the Apostle had described the Heavenly Jerusalem. Suffice it to quote the example of Suger, abbot of Saint Denis (twelfth century), who in his Liber de rebus in administratione sua gestis and in his Libellus alter de consecratione ecclesiae Sancti Dionisii (PL 186), speaking of how he feels when he contemplates the treasures he has accumulated for his church, explicitly cites Jerusalem, and its Temple, proudly regarding himself as a second Solomon and referring to his church as a second temple.
10. A curious failure to align one’s spiritual discourse with earthly contingencies, when we recall that the De civitate Dei was written at precisely the same time as Alaric’s Goths were putting Rome to the sack. But Augustine is too much of a philosopher to indulge in short-term prophecies. In any case, great long-term eschatological convictions arise precisely when, in the short term, there is little or nothing to hope for. Indeed, to the Christians who fear for the fall of Rome as the fall of their very civilization, Augustine says not to fear, because the City of God is something completely different, its destiny is not of this world, and in this world the just are bound to the reprobate in their alternate vicissitudes.
11. The literature on the terrors of the year 1000 is extremely vast and contradictory. Focillon (1952) refuted the legend (dear to Romantic historians like Michelet) according to which, on the fatal night of December 31, 999, the Christian world kept vigil in its churches awaiting the end of the world. The texts of the period do not contain any hint of these terrors, and expressions such as appropinquante fine mundi (“since the end of the world is approaching”) were standard rhetorical formulas. Finally, dating the year from the birth of Christ and not from the supposed creation of the world, though it had been in fashion for three centuries, was still not a universal practice. Robert II the Pious was given a penance of seven years in 998, a sign that nobody was expecting the world to end tomorrow. In 998 Abbo of Fleury, in his Liber apologeticus, mentions these apocalyptic beliefs, but he condemns them, dismissing them as fables. Nevertheless, another hypothesis has been proposed (see esp. Landes 1988): that the terrors really did exist among the populace, endemic but underground, stirred up by heretical preachers, and that the official literature does not mention them for reasons of censorship. Gouguenheim (2000), however, has pointed out that, not only is it difficult to come up with a text of the period that speaks explicitly of the terrors, but that the first authors to mention them are John Trithemius, in his Annales Hirsaugiensis, written at the beginning of the sixteenth century (and the allusion could well be an insertion by subsequent seventeenth-century editors), and Cesare Baronio, in his Annales Ecclesiastici in 1590. In which case, all of the literature on the terrors would be derived from these two extremely late sources. But, even if we were to admit that the terrors existed and any mention of them suppressed, a proof from silence is a very fragile proof. The Church had no reason to remain silent about the terrors, merely in order to stifle presumed heretical ideas. There was nothing in the least heretical about the notion that the world was about to end in the year 1000, since it could be buttressed by a reading of none other than Saint Augustine.
12. “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matt. 24:24). “And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or lo, he is there; believe him not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect” (Mark 13:21–22). “Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time” (1 John 2:18); “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22); “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world” (1 John 4:3).
13. “And these are the signs of him: his head [is] as a fiery flame, his right eye shot with blood, his left [eye] blue-black, and he hath two pupils. His eyelashes are white, his lower lip is large; but his right thigh slender; his feet broad, his great toe is bruised and flat. This is the sickle of desolation” (The Testament of Our Lord, translated into English from the Syriac with Introduction and Notes by James Cooper, D.D. and Arthur John Maclean, M.A., F.R.G.S., Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1902, 1, 11. Available online from the Cornell University library: http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924029296170/cu31924029296170_djvu.txt.
“He is small, with thin legs, tall, a tuft of grey hair on his bald forehead, his eyebrows reach to his ears, he has a mark of leprosy on the back of his hand. He will change his shape in front of those who see him: at one time he will be a young man, at another an old man” (Apocalypse of Elijah 3:15–17 [third century]). “His face has a dark look, his hair is like the heads of arrows, his forehead is scowling, his right eye is like the morning star and his left like that of a lion. His mouth is a cubit broad, his teeth a span in length and his fingers are like sickles. His footprints are two cubits long and on his forehead is written: Antichrist” (Apocalypse of Saint John the Theologian [fifth century]).
It is uncertain whether Beatus was familiar with a tenth-century fragment in a manuscript from the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel: “His disciples said to Jesus: “Lord, tell us how to recognize him.” And Jesus said to them: “He will be nine cubits tall. He will have black hair gathered like an iron chain. He will have in his forehead an eye that shines like the dawn. His lower lip will be thick and he will have no upper lip. The little finger of his hand will be the longest, his left foot broader. His posture similar.”
He certainly knew Irenaeus of Lyon: “But when this Antichrist shall have devastated all things in this world, he will reign for three years and six months, and sit in the temple at Jerusalem; and then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds, in the glory of the Father, sending this man and those who follow him into the lake of fire; but bringing in for the righteous the times of the kingdom, that is, the rest, the hallowed seventh day” (Against Heresies, V, 30, 4. Available online at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103530.htm.
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