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
