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
