by Umberto Eco
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 Visualization
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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)