Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 14.djvu/432

 SYMBOLISM

376

SYMBOLISM

architects designed and built with the conscious pur- pose of rendering in stone the beautiful thoughts which had become to them as a new language. To begin with the church was "oriented", i. e. its chan- cel (apart from the Roman basilicas where the cele- brant offered Mass facing the people) pointed to the East. Whether one is to recognize here the Chris- tianization of a form of sun-worship, which some have traced to the influence of the emperor Constantine, or whether the faithful looked eastward to greet the coming of the "Sun of Justice", the "Orient from on high", certain it is that already in the Apostolic Con- stitutions of the fourth century (II, xlvii) the church was built to face the East. The practice lasted on throughout the Middle Ages. From this indication of the points of the compass it followed that the dea- con in reading the Gospel turned himself sideways so as to proclaim the glad tidings to the barbarous races of the north. The great porch at the western end, on the other hand, faced the setting sun and led men's thoughts to the close of life. Hence it is that this be- came the conventional position for those magnificent sculptures or paintings of the last judgment foimd in many of our old cathedrals. With regard to the door itself there is frequently some significant scheme of decoration which emphasizes the idea that the door is Christ {Ego sum ostium, John, x, 7) and this is alone sufficient justification for the glorification of these portals, one, two, or three in number, often encased in great arches and crowded with stone carvings of angels and saints.

Iq such liturgical treatises as the "Rationale" of Durandus every detail in the construction of the church has a special significance assigned to it. The roof represents charity which covers a multitude of sins; the beams which tie the building together be- token the champions of ecclesiastical right who de- fend it with the sword; the vaulting signifies the preachers who bear up the dead weight of man's in- firmity heavenwards; the columns and piers stand for the Apostles, bishops, and doctors; the pavement symbolizes the foundation of faith or the humility of the poor; and so on. In all this the mystical inter- pretation of numbers holds a great place. There are twelve consecration crosses, and this, besides a refer- ence to the Twelve Apostles (in not a few instances each consecration cross is marked upon a shield borne by one of the Apostles), symbolizes the spiritualizing of human nature and of the world by faith, or, as others put it, it betokens the universal Church. The reason is that three, the number of the Blessed Trin- ity, figures the Divine nature, and four, the number of the elements, typifies the number of the material world. Twelve is the product of three and four, and it consequently betokens the penetration of matter with spirit. So again eight denotes perfection and completion, for the visible world was made in seven days and the invisible kingdom of grace follows upon that. In this way the octagonal shape was judged specially appropriate for the baptistery or for the font, on the ground that this initiation into the super- natural order of grace completed the work of creation. Naturally five recalls the wounds of Christ, and five grains of incense are inserted cross-wise in the Pas- chal Candle, while ten, the nimiberof the Command- ments, is typical of the Old Law. Seven again has its own very special atiraction as the number of the sac- raments, of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, of the virtues and vices, and many other things. There can be little doubt that much of this symbolism of numbers is to be traced back to Egypt and Assyria, where the move- ments of the seven planets, as men then counted them, were continuously studied and where the ele- ments of three and four into which seven was divided lent thciusclvcs to other combinati(ms also regarded as i)eciiliarly sacred, for example the number sixty, the product of three, four, and five.

Of isolated pieces of symbolism of various kinds medieval art and literature are full. The early mon- ogram of Christ, sometimes spoken of as the chirho, as it is a combination of these two letters X P, thus ■^ or ^P, sometimes again as the labarum and -^ in T^ French as the chrisme, has been dis- cussed under Cross (IV, 522). Another Christ emblem (besides Fish, treated in a separate article) was the Iamb, often associated with a flag. This actually took the place of the figure of Our Saviour, and it was repre- sented in combination with the cross instead of the hu- man form, being sometimes even surrounded by a cruciform nimbus. As there seemed a danger of the Sacred Humanity being lost in allegory, the Council, "In Trullo", at Constantinople (691) decreed that the lamb in future should not be used in this way, but that the figure of Christ should be substituted. As for the first Person of the Blessed Trinity the earliest sym- bolical representation seems to be foimd in the Divine hand which is often seen extended from the clouds in early representations of the baptism of Our Saviour and of other operations of grace.

It is hardly needful to add that a vast chapter in the history of symbolism is supplied by the saints and their emblems. Almost everyone of the more fa- miliar saints has some emblem, often more than one, by the presence of which his identity is made known. The gridiron of St. La-nTence, the scallop shell of St. James, the special cross of St. Andrew, the lion of St. Jerome etc. might be quoted in illustration, but often also there are emblems common to a whole group of saints, the palm branch, for example being in general indicative of a martyr, and the deacons being nearly always represented in their dalmatics. For the Evan- gelists there have been used from very early times certain conventional emblems — a winged man or an angel for St. Matthew, a winged lion for St. Mark, a winged calf for St. Luke, and an eagle for St. John. All these are taken from the description of the heavenly liturgy in Apoc, iv, v, and must have been suggested by the vision of Ezechiel (Ezech., i, 10). In (he art of the early Middle Ages these emblems play a very prominent part. Other forms of sjTn- bolism are of much later development, for example the type which as been called "the Eucharistic Ecce Homo" representing Our Saviour with the sacred wounds, divested of his garments and standing in the tomb, not dead but living. In the paintings, etc., known as the Mass of St. CJregory which were popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Our Lord is generally depicted in this way. Again Our Lady of the Seven Dolours, with the seven swords piercing her heart, is a type of comparatively late occurrence, and this of course is still more true of the pictures con- nected with the Sacred Heart. The monogram, I. H. S. surrounded by rays, which, from the fact that it was much used by the early Jesuits, has sometimes been supposed to be the peculiar device of the Society of Jesus, reall}' owes its popularity to the preaching of St. Bemardine of Siena (q. v.) at the beginning of the fifteenth centurj'. It represents the Holy Name written in a Greek abbreviated form and had orig- inally nothing to do with lesus Hominum, Salvator.

For another section of sjanbolism which is con- cerned with the mystical significance attached to the representations of animals, the reader is referred to the article Bestiaries.

An excellent compendium of the whole subject is that of Jen- NER, Christian St/mbolism (London, 1910); a fuller treatise is supplied bv Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchenoebaudes (Freiburg, 1902), which concerns itself chiefly with architecture. The same is true of Kreuser, Chrisltiche Kirchenhau (Brixen, 1868-9). AuBER. Hist, et Ihforie du symbolisme rfligieui (4 vols., Paris. 1S74). is ver\' diffuse. Nieuwrarn, HH roomsche Kergebouw (tr. Nymwegen, 1908), is too sliRht and sketchy. For the later Middle Ages and for Franco in particular there are the two ad- mirable books of Mai.k. 1,'iirt rrli'i. de la fin du moj/cti-dar (Paris, 1908). and L'art reliintui ,lu XIII' siMe en France (3rd ed., Paris. 1910). See alsu Ai i.kn. Karti/ Chrislinn Sumbolism in Grtat Britain and Ireland (London, 1SS7); Hctsmans. La Calkfdralt