by Umberto Eco
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 fa
ce 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).