14. An interesting link between Priscian and Bernard could be William of Conches, who mentions dwarves and giants in his glosses on Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae. William’s text precedes that of John of Salisbury and was written in the years when William was chancellor at Chartres. But, while the first version of William’s glosses dates back to before 1123 (John’s Metalogicon is dated 1159), before Neckam, Peter of Blois, and Alain de Lille, all three cited by Merton, we find the aphorism in 1160 in a text from the school of Laon and later, around 1185, in the Danish historian Sven Aggesen. In the thirteenth century, the aphorism also appears in Gérard of Cambrai, Raoul of Longchamp, Gilles de Corbeil, Gérard of Auvergne, and, in the fourteenth century, in Alexandre Ricat, physician to the kings of Aragon, or other doctors like Guy de Chauliac and Ambroise Paré, as well as in Daniel Sennert. Gregory (1961) identifies it in Gassendi. Ortega y Gasset, in “Entorno a Galileo” (Obras completas V, Madrid 1947: 45), speaking of the succession of generations, says that men stand “one on the shoulders of another, and the one who is on top enjoys the impression of dominating the others, but he ought to realize that at the same time he is their prisoner.”
15. See, for example, the chapter on the spatial and temporal structures of the Middle Ages in Le Goff (1964).
16. See McGarry (1955: 167).
6
Jottings on Beatus of Liébana
Read today in a secular spirit, the Apocalypse or Revelation of Saint John the Divine can be savored as an exercise in Surrealism, without the reader feeling the urge to reduce its absurd or oneiric elements to a decipherable letter. Or it could be interpreted as an exercise in mystical symbolism, lending itself to every possible interpretation, a stimulus for the most unbridled flights of the imagination, and consequently anyone proposing to assign a precise meaning to the text would be accused of betraying its rich poetic suggestion. The Middle Ages on the other hand, true to the Pauline admonition, knew that, before seeing truth face to face, “videmus per speculum et in aegnigmate” (“we see through a glass darkly”), and enigmas or riddles, ever since the time of the Sphinx, are there to be solved. The Middle Ages, then, was within its rights to interpret the Apocalyse as an allegory; and the keys for interpreting any allegory correctly have to be absolutely precise.
The text certainly employs similes—and metaphors as well—that present no problems of interpretation (“His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow.… and his voice as the sound of many waters.”). Nevertheless, taken as a whole, it is an allegory, a rhetorical figure in which the text may be taken literally (what is to prevent seven stars and seven lamps of fire from manifesting themselves?), though it seems more profitable from the hermeneutical point of view to interpret every character, figure, or event with reference to a key (hence, for example, the seven stars are the angels of the seven Churches and the seven lamps are the seven Churches themselves).1
Once we are in possession of the necessary keys, reading allegory is like solving a puzzle—and etymological wordplay was never so legitimate as it is in this case, if we interpret this riddling as the enigmatic language of a form of mysticism.
Interpreting the Apocalypse allegorically, however, is not all that easy, because the keys are not always supplied by the text. The Seer tells us what the seven stars are, but he does not spell out clearly who the beast rising up out of the sea is. He tells us the dragon is Satan, but he does not tell us immediately who the beast rising up out of the earth is—he will define him later as a false prophet, but he will confound his identity in a Kabbalistic conjuring of numbers and dynastic hocus-pocus. He speaks of a battlefield, Armageddon, recognizable in Hebrew tradition, and then he alludes to two witnesses who according to modern interpreters are Saints Peter and Paul, but whom Saint Bonaventure identifies instead as Enoch and Elijah (Hexaem I, 3, iii).
The vision, then, is in the allegorical mode, but it seems to go only halfway toward out-and-out allegory. When, in describing the procession in the Earthly Paradise toward the end of Purgatory, Dante says: “Beneath the handsome sky I have described, / twenty-four elders moved on, two by two, / and they had wreaths of lilies on their heads” (Pg., XXIX, 82–84), his modern commentators inform us that these are the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. But in more than one modern commentary on the Apocalypse we are told that the four and twenty elders represent the twenty-four priestly classes (Rossano 1963), while equally frequent is the interpretation that would prefer to identify them with the twelve patriarchs and the twelve apostles. Saint Jerome, on the other hand, saw them as the twenty-four books of the Old Testament. Such an identification obliges us to interpret in turn the four beasts (the lion, the calf, the flying eagle, and the beast with the face as a man) as the four Gospels of the New Testament—something the traditional iconography usually does in fact do, on the evidence supplied once more by Saint Jerome. In another, modern commentary on the Apocalypse, however, Angelini (1969) suggests that the four beasts are beings of a superangelic nature. Can we assert that, for its author John, there existed a terminus a quo for this backward flight, from signifier to signified, a point at which they meant something precise?
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.