From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation by Umberto Eco
This is why the treatise of Adso of Montier-en-Der, De ortu et tempore Antichristi (PL 101, 1289–1293), came out in the tenth century, probably under Beatus’s influence. Adso claims that the Antichrist will be born of the Jewish people and, born from the union of a father and a mother like the rest of mankind, and not, as some would have it, from a virgin, he will be entirely conceived in sin. From his first conception, the Devil will enter his mother’s womb, he will be nourished in the womb by virtue of the Devil, and the power of the Devil will be always with him. And, as the Holy Spirit descended into the womb of the mother of Jesus Christ and filled it with his virtue, so the Devil will enter into the mother of the Antichrist and will fill her, surround her, and make her his own, possessing her within and without, so that, thanks to the cooperation of the Devil, she will conceive him in congress with a man, and he who will be born shall be wholly evil, iniquitous, and damned. And for this reason he shall be called the son of perdition. He will have wizards, witch doctors, diviners, and enchanters who will educate him in every iniquity, falsehood, and malefic art.
In the twelfth century Hildegard of Bingen will write that the son of perdition will come with all the wiles of the first seduction, and monstrous turpitudes, and black iniquities, with eyes of fire, ass’s ears, the muzzle and mouth of a lion; and, inducing humankind to renounce God, he will smother their senses with the most horrendous stench, snarling with an enormous grimace and displaying his fearsome iron fangs (Liber Scivias III, 1, 14).
The popularity of the figure of the Antichrist is no doubt partly to be ascribed to the millennialist anxieties we have outlined. If we hope, however, to fully account for these anxieties, and with them for the success of Beatus, we must take into consideration, in addition to these theological considerations and a taste for symbolic storytelling, the material circumstances that went along with the state of crisis that was the life of the High Middle Ages. Beatus was not regaling his readers with happenings that might occur a few years or 1,000 years into the future, but with happenings that people in those still dark ages were accustomed to experiencing on a daily basis. We have only to read Benedictine Rodulfus Glaber’s account in his Historiarum libri of events that occurred, not in Beatus’s time, but after the millennium was already thirty years into the past, at the start of the year 1033. Rodulfus describes a famine brought on by weather so inclement that, as a result of the flooding, it was impossible to find a favorable moment either to sow or to reap. Hunger had made the entire populace, rich and poor alike, completely emaciated and, when there were no more live animals to eat, they were compelled to eat corpses “and other things it is too repugnant even to mention,” to such a point that some people were reduced to devouring human flesh. Travelers were waylaid, murdered, cut into pieces, and roasted, and people who had left their homes in the hope of escaping the penury had their throats slit during the night by those who had offered them shelter. People even lured in children, offering them a piece of fruit or an egg, only to slaughter them and eat them.
In many localities corpses were dug up and eaten. Someone was discovered to have brought roasted human flesh to the market in Tournus and was burned at the stake; someone else suffered an identical fate because he went out at night in search of the place where the same meat had been buried. In a word, “that insane fury spread so far that abandoned cattle were safer from being carried off than were human beings” (Historiarum liber IV, 9–10).
Perhaps Rodolfus was still under the influence of his reading of Beatus. Otherwise it is difficult to understand how such horrible things could come to pass in the year 1033, since Rodulfus had earlier exulted (in book III, iv, 13) that in 1003 the rebirth of Europe had begun “shaking off, as it were, and ridding itself of its former senility, it had put on a pure white mantle of churches.” But that was how Rodolfus was: in book V he will also narrate how the Devil once appeared to him. A sure sign that, after the year 1000 had gone by, people were laughing on one side of their faces to have come through unscathed and weeping on the other for fear their calculations were off and something even worse was still about to happen. But when he is not seeing the Devil but simply looking around him, Rodulfus seems to be a reliable chronicler. So his tales of hard times have an aura of truth.
What is to prevent, then, in times dominated by such a sense of insecuritas, the scholar reading Beatus, or the unlettered masses listening to someone else read Beatus, or seeing the same horrors depicted on the frescoed walls of their churches, thinking, along with Horace, “de te fabula narratur” (“this could be your story”)? Even in our own day, on the silver screen, stories involving cataclysms and disasters that hold out no hope for the future but fuel (or hypnotically sublimate) our night sweats and nightmares continue to garner success.
A reworking of my essay “Palinsesto su Beato” (Eco 1973), a commentary that first appeared in the sumptuously illustrated Franco Maria Ricci edition of Beato di Liébana (1973), and “Jerusalem and the Temple as Signs in Medieval Culture,” in Manetti (1996: 329–344). [Translator’s note: English citations from the Apocalypse are from the King James Version (KJV)].
1. For the differences between metaphor and allegory, see Chapter 3 in the present volume.
2. References for the citations from Beatus’s Commentarius that follow are to the critical edition by Sanders (1930) (S followed by the page number) as well as to that of the 1985 Poligrafico dello Stato edition (B followed by the page number). For a monumental five-volume illustrated catalogue of the illustrations, see Williams 1994–2005.
3. The illuminations in the Beatus manuscripts have a preeminent place in the development of the figurative arts of the Middle Ages. Their influence spread along the “ways of Saint James,” along the four roads, that is, which criss-crossed Europe and were taken by pilgrims on their pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Along these roads the great abbey churches of the Romanesque period rose. The churches fulfilled several functions: organizational, hospitable, liturgical, and especially didactic. The church itself was, so to speak, a book made out of stone. The figures on its portals and capitals told the believers stopping there all they needed to know for the salvation of their souls: the mysteries of the faith, the precepts of virtuous behavior, the phenomena of nature, the elements of a more or less fabulous geography, tall tales of exotic peoples and monstrous creatures. For a long time, the West, having emerged from the Middle Ages, lost the knack of deciphering the meanings of many of these representations, so obvious to the medieval spectator or reader. It will be art historian Emile Mâle (1922, vol. I, ch. 2) who will identify the references to the Apocalypse that have their source in the illuminated Beati. See also Focillon (1938).
4. Huysmans 2003, p. 39.
5. The rules, set forth in the Liber regularum (and discussed at length by Augustine in his De doctrina christiana III, 30–37) are: 1. “Of the Lord and his Body”: Christ is sometimes presented as the head of the Church and sometimes as the Church itself, his Mystical Body. 2. “On the Double Body of Christ”: a somewhat obscure rule, partly because Augustine, in his commentary, taken up, for example, by the Venerable Bede, outmaneuvers Donatist Tyconius, seizing the occasion to interpret him in an anti-Donatist key: it is not true that only the just belong to the Church and are worthy of administering the sacraments, instead the Church is a Corpus Permixtum, made up, that is, of good and bad members, whom God will separate on the Day of Judgment; for now, the Church is “bipartite.” 3. “On Promises and the Law” deals with the discussion of grace versus good works. 4. “Of Species and Genus”: Holy Scripture sometimes speaks of a specific entity designating by metonymy the vaster genus: it says “Jerusalem” or “Solomon” and means the Church and all its members. 5. “Of the Times”: based explicitly on the principle of synecdoche or the part for the whole—the Apocalypse speaks of 144,000 elect to indicate the assembly of all the Saints, who are somewhat more, and it speaks of times in the same way. 6. “Of Recapitulation”: sometimes the author of Scripture lists
6. [Translator’s note: Unless otherwise attributed, translations of Italian secondary sources, here and elsewhere, are my own, from Eco’s text.]
7. The Latin version of the Apocalypse quoted by Beatus (Commentarius III, S266, B442, S267, B459) is slightly different from the Vulgate but the basic sense is the same, as is the case with the KJV. We reproduce here Beatus’s Latin source text along with the corresponding text from the KJV (which we already followed closely in the body of the chapter): “Et ecce thronus positus erat in caelo, et supra thronum sedens, et qui sedebat similis erat aspectui lapidi iaspidis et sardino; et iris in circuito sedis, similis aspectui zmaragdino; et in circuitu throni vidi sedes viginti quattuor, et supra sedes viginti quattuor seniores sedentes in veste alba, et in capitibus eorum coronas aureas. Et de sede procedunt fulgura et voces et tonitrua. Et septem lampades ignis ardentis, qui sunt septem spiritus Dei. Et in conspectu throni sicut mare vitreum simile cristallo. Et vidi in medio throni et in circuito throni quattuor animalia plena oculia ante et retro. Animal primum simile leonis, et secundum animal simile vituli, et tertium animal habens faciem hominis, et quartum animal simile ad aquilae volantis. Haec quattuor animalia singula eorum habebant alas senas: et in circuitu et intus plena sunt oculis” (“And, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God. And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beast full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within”) King James 4:2–8.
8. John combines together several different visions, and in this case his inspiration is Isaiah 6:2. See the commentary on the Apocalypse by Lupieri (1999).
9. The only way the people of the Middle Ages could appreciate any treasure or architectural harmony was by experiencing it in the same terms in which the Apostle had described the Heavenly Jerusalem. Suffice it to quote the example of Suger, abbot of Saint Denis (twelfth century), who in his Liber de rebus in administratione sua gestis and in his Libellus alter de consecratione ecclesiae Sancti Dionisii (PL 186), speaking of how he feels when he contemplates the treasures he has accumulated for his church, explicitly cites Jerusalem, and its Temple, proudly regarding himself as a second Solomon and referring to his church as a second temple.
10. A curious failure to align one’s spiritual discourse with earthly contingencies, when we recall that the De civitate Dei was written at precisely the same time as Alaric’s Goths were putting Rome to the sack. But Augustine is too much of a philosopher to indulge in short-term prophecies. In any case, great long-term eschatological convictions arise precisely when, in the short term, there is little or nothing to hope for. Indeed, to the Christians who fear for the fall of Rome as the fall of their very civilization, Augustine says not to fear, because the City of God is something completely different, its destiny is not of this world, and in this world the just are bound to the reprobate in their alternate vicissitudes.
11. The literature on the terrors of the year 1000 is extremely vast and contradictory. Focillon (1952) refuted the legend (dear to Romantic historians like Michelet) according to which, on the fatal night of December 31, 999, the Christian world kept vigil in its churches awaiting the end of the world. The texts of the period do not contain any hint of these terrors, and expressions such as appropinquante fine mundi (“since the end of the world is approaching”) were standard rhetorical formulas. Finally, dating the year from the birth of Christ and not from the supposed creation of the world, though it had been in fashion for three centuries, was still not a universal practice. Robert II the Pious was given a penance of seven years in 998, a sign that nobody was expecting the world to end tomorrow. In 998 Abbo of Fleury, in his Liber apologeticus, mentions these apocalyptic beliefs, but he condemns them, dismissing them as fables. Nevertheless, another hypothesis has been proposed (see esp. Landes 1988): that the terrors really did exist among the populace, endemic but underground, stirred up by heretical preachers, and that the official literature does not mention them for reasons of censorship. Gouguenheim (2000), however, has pointed out that, not only is it difficult to come up with a text of the period that speaks explicitly of the terrors, but that the first authors to mention them are John Trithemius, in his Annales Hirsaugiensis, written at the beginning of the sixteenth century (and the allusion could well be an insertion by subsequent seventeenth-century editors), and Cesare Baronio, in his Annales Ecclesiastici in 1590. In which case, all of the literature on the terrors would be derived from these two extremely late sources. But, even if we were to admit that the terrors existed and any mention of them suppressed, a proof from silence is a very fragile proof. The Church had no reason to remain silent about the terrors, merely in order to stifle presumed heretical ideas. There was nothing in the least heretical about the notion that the world was about to end in the year 1000, since it could be buttressed by a reading of none other than Saint Augustine.
12. “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matt. 24:24). “And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or lo, he is there; believe him not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect” (Mark 13:21–22). “Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time” (1 John 2:18); “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22); “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world” (1 John 4:3).
13. “And these are the signs of him: his head [is] as a fiery flame, his right eye shot with blood, his left [eye] blue-black, and he hath two pupils. His eyelashes are white, his lower lip is large; but his right thigh slender; his feet broad, his great toe is bruised and flat. This is the sickle of desolation” (The Testament of Our Lord, translated into English from the Syriac with Introduction and Notes by James Cooper, D.D. and Arthur John Maclean, M.A., F.R.G.S., Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1902, 1, 11. Available online from the Cornell University library: http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924029296170/cu31924029296170_djvu.txt.
“He is small, with thin legs, tall, a tuft of grey hair on his bald forehead, his eyebrows reach to his ears, he has a mark of leprosy on the back of his hand. He will change his shape in front of those who see him: at one time he will be a young man, at another an old man” (Apocalypse of Elijah 3:15–17 [third century]). “His face has a dark look, his hair is like the heads of arrows, his forehead is scowling, his right eye is like the morning star and his left like that of a lion. His mouth is a cubit broad, his teeth a span in length and
It is uncertain whether Beatus was familiar with a tenth-century fragment in a manuscript from the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel: “His disciples said to Jesus: “Lord, tell us how to recognize him.” And Jesus said to them: “He will be nine cubits tall. He will have black hair gathered like an iron chain. He will have in his forehead an eye that shines like the dawn. His lower lip will be thick and he will have no upper lip. The little finger of his hand will be the longest, his left foot broader. His posture similar.”
He certainly knew Irenaeus of Lyon: “But when this Antichrist shall have devastated all things in this world, he will reign for three years and six months, and sit in the temple at Jerusalem; and then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds, in the glory of the Father, sending this man and those who follow him into the lake of fire; but bringing in for the righteous the times of the kingdom, that is, the rest, the hallowed seventh day” (Against Heresies, V, 30, 4. Available online at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103530.htm.
7
Dante between Modistae and Kabbalah
7.1. The De vulgari eloquentia
In his De vulgari eloquentia (hereinafter DVE), to explain the existence of a plurality of languages, Dante sticks to the letter of the biblical account in Genesis, which he knew in the Latin text of the Vulgate. So we must stick to the Vulgate too, setting aside any philological concerns regarding its fidelity to the original Hebrew. In any case, as we shall see, Dante occasionally strays, with the highhandedness we have come to expect of him, even from the text of the Vulgate.