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 Visualizations
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
