by Umberto Eco
On the First Friday of each month, the above-mentioned grace connected with the pain in my side was renewed in the following manner: The Sacred Heart was represented to me as a resplendent sun, the burning rays of which fell vertically upon my heart, which was inflamed with a fire so fervid that it seemed as if it would reduce me to ashes. It was at these times especially that my Divine Master taught me what He required of me and disclosed to me the secrets of His loving Heart. On one occasion, whilst the Blessed Sacrament was exposed, feeling wholly withdrawn within myself by an extraordinary recollection of all my senses and powers, Jesus Christ, my sweet Master, presented Himself to me, all resplendent with glory, His Five Wounds shining like so many suns. Flames issued from every part of His Sacred Humanity, especially from His Adorable Bosom, which resembled an open furnace and disclosed to me His most loving and most amiable Heart, which was the living source of these flames.
I was so extremely dainty that the least want of cleanliness made me feel inclined to vomit. He reproved me for this with such severity, that, on one occasion, being about to remove what a sick person had vomited, I was constrained to take it up with my tongue and to swallow it, saying: “Had I a thousand bodies, O my God, a thousand loves and a thousand lives, I would immolate them all to Thy service!” I experienced such delight in this action that I would have wished to meet every day with similar occasions, that I might thus learn to conquer myself, having God alone as witness. And He, Whose goodness alone had given me the strength to overcome myself did not fail to manifest to me the pleasure He had taken therein. For the following night, if I mistake not, He kept me for two or three hours with my lips pressed to the Wound of His Sacred Heart. It would be difficult for me to explain what I then felt, and what marvellous effects this grace produced in my soul and in my heart.…
Thus did this Divine Love deal with His unworthy slave. It happened once, when I was tending a patient who was suffering from dysentery, I was overcome by a feeling of nausea; but He gave me so severe a reprimand, that I felt urged to repair this fault and I felt obliged, as I went to throw away what the woman had done, to thrust my tongue in it and fill my mouth. I would have swallowed it all if He had not reminded me of obedience, which did not permit me to eat anything without permission.
Why women would have erotic traffic with the (male) divine image while men (who could experience ecstasies of equal intensity with the Virgin) would not, I am unable to explain. The nineteenth-century physician Jean-Martin Charcot would have said that hysteria is a uniquely feminine disorder, but this has been denied; one might say that women have greater bodily sensitivity; or even that the reasons are purely cultural: men were not denied the possibility of erotic relationships and chose chastity of their own free will, while women were forcibly kept away from any sexual experience that was not sanctioned by marriage and perhaps through hierophanic sex they could satisfy many repressed desires. I do not know and I do not wish to deal with this topic here.
All I can say is, since it was the female saints who saw the sacred in an anthropomorphic manner, it is to their experience we must necessarily turn. In the noche oscura of St. John of the Cross we are lost and silent.
It is therefore beyond doubt that the sacred, while it is by definition inexpressible, comes to be expressed because human beings (except the most heroic mystics) need to see it. But, inasmuch as it is unattainable, either by its essence or due to the lack of experience of the individuals who have embodied it, it can only be represented—and not just anthropomorphically, but also and solely with reference to models with precise locations in history.
And this is what I intend to deal with now: how the sacred takes on different forms depending on the historical period and the artistic tastes of that time.
In the Middle Ages they maintained that pulchra enim sunt ubera quae paululum supereminent et tument modice (breasts that stand out little and swell moderately are beautiful). This was another way of referring to small breasts supported by a tight corset—and this is how the ladies and the Madonnas of the secular imagination were portrayed.
In the Renaissance, the opulence of Holbein’s and Raphael’s ladies recalls the opulence of certain Virgins by Lorenzo Lotto, and the almost cellulitic emphasis with which Rubens represents the beauty of Venus also shows through the garments of the Virgin Mary or at least becomes evident in the appealing angelic cellulite of the putti.
We could go on to reflect on how the style of different eras is reflected in the sacred representations of Asian cultures, but I think we can limit ourselves here to also citing the romantic and decadent portrayals of masculine beauty in the nineteenth and twentieth century and how this ideal is also realized in images of the Sacred Heart—not to mention how the languor of the fin-de-siècle aesthete is reflected in the languor of the saints.
With regard to the mysticism of the Sacred Heart as an epiphany of divine love, Raymond Firth, in Symbols Public and Private, notes that Saint Marguerite Marie Alacoque had her mystical visions at a time when it had become known that the seat of affections is not the heart. But either Jesus in appearing to her, or the confessor who helped her express her mystical experience in visible terms, did not take into account the science explaining the world God made as it truly works, but rather chose to align with common opinion about those workings. And to this day, common opinion still talks in terms of heartfelt love and broken hearts—as if to suggest that our only mediator with the sacred is popular song.
Our Lady appeared to Bernadette in Lourdes in 1858, so we know how Bernadette Soubirous actually looked from photos of that time. But because ecclesiastical authorities gave permission to take photographs of her on various occasions, we can also see how at a certain point, as her reputation for holiness grew, the photographers of the time managed to make her more seductive. By the 1950s, Hollywood was presenting her in the form of Jennifer Jones—and I remember the scandalized reaction in the Catholic world when, a few years later, the very same Jennifer Jones, the face of Bernadette, appeared in the erotically charged scenes of Duel in the Sun.
The shepherd girls of Fatima were no models of grace and beauty but, again, 1950s Hollywood transformed them. And then came the transformation of the Blessed, and later Saint, Dominic Savio: after appearing in the first portrayals as a boy dressed appropriately but inelegantly, with trousers made baggy by kneeling, he gradually became increasingly good-looking and emerged in modern times as a handsome and virile young man. He even appeared, as if part of an engaged couple, with a young woman who, like him, died very young in the odor of sanctity: the Blessed Laura Vicuña.
This is not to mention the transformations of the Virgin Mary. An old statue of Our Lady in Lourdes resembles the women painted by Francesco Hayez in the nineteenth century, and the faces of certain statues of the Madonna of Fatima have the beauty of other times, but just imagine how Our Lady of Medjugorje must appear to the faithful who see her today: probably far closer to the fashion-model looks of a Monica Bellucci than to the grief-stricken Virgins of the distant past.
Saint Maria Goretti has also been subjected to similar changes as her kitsch devotional iconography has gradually been transformed by analogy with the actresses of the day.
Now we come to a curious case: the publication of the Three Secrets of Fatima in the twentieth century.
On reading Sister Lucia’s document on the third secret of Fatima, it can be seen that the text—which the good sister wrote not as an illiterate little girl in 1917 but in 1944, by then a mature nun—is full of highly recognizable quotations from the Book of Revelation. Sister Lucia says that on the left-hand side of Our Lady and a little higher up she and her cousins saw an Angel with a sword of fire in his left hand; the glittering sword emitted flames that looked as though they might set the world on fire; but they were extinguished on contact with the splendor that Our Lady emanated from her right hand toward him. And pointing to the earth with his right hand, the angel cried out in a loud voice: “Penance, Penance, Penance!”
And the children then saw in the immense light of God “rather like how you see people in a mirror when they pass in front of it,” a bishop dressed in white (“we had the impression that it was the Holy Father”), various other bishops, priests, and religious men and women all going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn tree trunks as if made of the wood of the cork tree complete with bark; before reaching that place the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins, and with trembling, halting steps, afflicted by pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the dead bodies he encountered on his way; once he reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross, he was killed by a group of soldiers who shot him with bullets and arrows, and in the same way, one after another, the other bishops, priests, religious men and women, and various secular people of different ranks and positions were all killed. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels, both with glass “watering cans” in their hands in which they gathered up the blood of the martyrs and used it to bathe the souls that were making their way to God.
So Lucia saw an angel with a sword of fire who seemed to want to set the world on fire. In the Book of Revelation, angels also spread fire throughout the world, for example in 9:8, with the angel of the second trumpet. True, this angel does not have a flaming sword, but we will see later where the sword comes from (perhaps assisted by traditional iconography, which offers a wealth of archangels with burning swords). Then Lucia sees the divine light as in a mirror: here the suggestion does not come from Revelation, but from the first epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (13:12): “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.”
After this, behold a bishop dressed in white. He is alone, whereas in Revelation the gentleman in white has many servants, all ready to be martyred, appearing multiple times (in 6:11, in 7:9, and in 7:14), but never mind. Then we see bishops and priests going up a steep mountain, and we are at Revelation 6:15, where the powerful of the Earth hide in the dens and rocks of a mountain. Then the Holy Father arrives in a “half ruined” city, and on his way encounters the souls of the dead; the city is mentioned in Revelation 11:8, corpses included, while it collapses and falls into ruin in 11:13 and, again, in the form of Babylon, in 18:21.
Let’s go on to where the bishop and many other faithful are killed by soldiers with arrows and firearms. While Sister Lucia is innovating when she mentions firearms, massacres with sharp weapons are performed by locusts wearing warriors’ breastplates in 9:7, at the sound of the fifth trumpet. Finally, we come to the two angels pouring blood from a glass watering can (regador in Portuguese). Revelation surely abounds in angels that spill blood, but in 8:5 they do it with a censer, in 14:20 the blood overflows from a vat, and in 16:3 it is poured from a vial. Why a watering can? We might recall that Fatima is not far from the Asturias, where in the Middle Ages they first made those splendid Mozarabic miniatures of the Apocalypse that were afterwards reproduced many times. In some of the images of angels sounding trumpets, the trumpets may be taken for swords of fire or, just as readily, if associated with the sort of spouts that appear below, might be mistaken for some kind of watering can. In other images, we see angels pouring blood from goblets of indeterminate design, as if they were watering the world.
The interesting thing is that, if you read the theological commentary written by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, you see that, in pointing out that a private vision is not a matter of faith, and that an allegory is not a prophecy to be taken literally, he explicitly points out the analogies with Revelation’s images, and notes: “The concluding part of the ‘secret’ uses images which Lucia may have seen in devotional books and which draw their inspiration from long-standing intuitions of faith.” So, in a chapter significantly titled “The Anthropological Structure of Private Revelations” in the theological commentary on the Message of Fatima, he writes:
In this field, theological anthropology distinguishes three forms of perception or “vision”: vision with the senses, and hence exterior bodily perception, interior perception, and spiritual vision (visio sensibilis–imaginativa–intellectualis). It is clear that in the visions of Lourdes, Fatima and other places it is not a question of normal exterior perception of the senses: the images and forms which are seen are not located spatially, as is the case, for example, with a tree or a house. This is perfectly obvious … especially since not everybody present saw them, but only the “visionaries.” It is also clear that it is not a matter of a “vision” in the mind, without images, as occurs at the higher levels of mysticism. Therefore we are dealing with the middle category, interior perception.… Interior vision does not mean fantasy, which would be no more than an expression of the subjective imagination. It means rather that the soul is touched by something real, even if beyond the senses. It is rendered capable of seeing that which is beyond the senses, that which cannot be seen—seeing by means of the “interior senses.” … Perhaps this explains why children tend to be the ones to receive these apparitions: their souls are as yet little disturbed, their interior powers of perception are still not impaired.… “Interior vision” is not fantasy.… But it also has its limitations. Even in exterior vision the subjective element is always present: We do not see the pure object, but it comes to us through the filter of our senses, which carry out a work of translation. This is still more evident in the case of interior vision, especially when it involves realities which in themselves transcend our horizon. The subject, the visionary, is still more powerfully involved. He sees insofar as he is able, in the modes of representation and consciousness available to him. In the case of interior vision, the process of translation is even more extensive than in exterior vision, for the subject shares in an essential way in the formation of the image of what appears. He can arrive at the image only within the bounds of his capacities and possibilities. Such visions therefore are never simple “photographs” of the other world, but are influenced by the potentialities and limitations of the perceiving subject.
This can be demonstrated in all the great visions of the saints; and naturally it is also true of the visions of the children at Fatima. The images described by them are by no means a simple expression of their fantasy, but the result of a real perception of a higher and interior origin. But neither should they be thought of as if for a moment the veil of the other world were drawn back, with heaven appearing in its pure essence, as one day we hope to see it in our definitive union with God. Rather the images are, in a manner of speaking, a synthesis of the impulse coming from on high and the capacity to receive this impulse in the visionaries—that is, the children.
This, in rather more secular terms, means that visionaries see only what their culture has taught them to see and allows them to imagine. It seems to me that the approval of the retired Pontiff puts a reasonable seal on my brief observations on the iconography of the sacred.
[Prepared for La Milanesiana, 2016]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Bibliography
Listed here are published works explicitly mentioned in the text, presented alphabetically by chapter. In his remarks, Eco himself did not indicate specific editions used or recommended. For the convenience of English-language readers, information is presented for English-language editions rather than the Italian-language editions that Eco is more likely to have known.
1. On the Shoulders of Giants
Aldhelm of Malmesbury. “Letter to Eahfrid.” In James Ussher, Veterum Epistolarum Hibernicarum Sylloge, letter no. 13, 37–41. Dublin: Societatis Bibliopolarum, 1632.
Apuleius. Florida. In Apologia. Florida. De Deo Socratis. Trans. Christopher P. Jones. Loeb Classical Library, no. 534. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Aristotle. “Logic.” In The Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, trans. William David Ross. London: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1971.
Auraicept na n’Eces: The Scholar’s Primer [7th century]. Trans. George Calder. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1917.
Dante Alighieri. De vulgari eloquentia [1304–1307]. “On the Eloquence of the Vernacular.” In De Vulgari Eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile, trans. Marianne Shapiro. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.