I am one of those people who does what he is told. Elisabetta Sgarbi told me that the topic of this year’s festival is “the Invisible,” and I will go along with that. But I dealt with a similar topic a few years ago at a conference of the Italian Association of Semiotic Studies, which was dedicated to “the Sacred.” And since I realized that the sacred is one of the most invisible things around, I have decided to talk about the ways and means used to take what is least visible in the natural world and render it visible.
I know that a few years ago here I had to discuss “the Absolute” (don’t blame me if La Milanesiana returns a little obsessively to such intractable subjects) and I also know that the sacred is commonly understood as a feeling or vision of something that transcends our experience, but gives a meaning to that experience. Some might say that the sacred amounts to the same thing as the absolute. But the absolute is the subject of some philosophies or religions, and it is a philosophical concept, whereas the sacred has been considered to be a mysterious force that is the wellspring of every thought or religious sentiment. When it comes to the sacred, philosophy can at best recognize its existence, or at least its apparition as a psychological constant of the human mind. Simply put, a lightning strike that incinerates a tree accompanied by a clap of thunder would in itself be only a frightening accident and sensation were it not seen and justified as a manifestation of some transcendent entity or will—without this, though the event would remain impressive in memory, it would not have tremendous import.
The sacred is therefore presented as the numinoso, mysterium tremendum et fascinans (the numinous, terrible yet fascinating mystery) which confounds reason, which overwhelms and arouses wonder, amazement, and dismay, but which at the same time gives rise to forces of both repulsion and attraction—and as such, it resists immediate description in conceptual terms but is instead experiential, to use Friedrich Schleiermacher’s term, involving an ingrained awareness of the infinite, and a feeling of dependence, weakness, impotence, and insignificance in its presence.
Sometimes the experience of the sacred, the presence of which is felt without our being able to define it, prompts people to react with practices of submission or of sacrifice, even human sacrifice. At other times, and this happens with simpler folk in particular, people want to see the sacred, hence the need for a hierophancy—a system of priests who interpret the sacred mysteries, and in that way allow the sacred to take the visible forms that will make it understandable. Those who experience the presence of the sacred, to be able to speak of it, want to see the numinous. Otherwise, there are only its effects to observe (and they are effects we like to escape)—namely, wonder, amazement, dismay, and terror.
The sacred does not always appear in anthropomorphic forms; in certain cultures it can assume a variety of vicarious forms. It can be a tree or a rock in which, in some way, people perceive something “other.”
Clearly, simpler people attempt to confer a recognizably human or animal likeness on the sacred, either in the form of a totemic image or in the way that has always scandalized mystics and theologians the most, by giving it an anthropomorphic form.
So the fundamental problem with the sacred is that, to allow it to appear and be something that gives meaning to our experience, it may be talked about and made evident in the guise of idola or amalgamata, images—but how is it possible to make images of the sacred if the sacred is by definition something that lies beyond our experience?
There is a rather disconcerting text in which William of Ockham says that an image can only be a sign that allows us to recall something we have already known as an entity in and of itself; otherwise, the image would not strike us as similar to whatever is represented. So seeing a statue of Hercules would not make me think of Hercules if I had not already seen Hercules.
This text assumes (and this was a matter on which there was general agreement) that we are not capable, starting from an icon, of imagining something that until then was unknown to us. This would seem to contradict our experience, since people constantly use paintings, photographs, or Identi-Kit facial composites to be able to envision people, animals, or things still unknown—and even in Ockham’s day, when monarchs wanted to marry off daughters to cousins living in another country they would send images of them in advance. There is, however, an epistemological explanation for such an embarrassing statement. For Augustine, a sign was something which, while presenting itself to the senses, conveyed aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire—something else to the intellect. For the Aristotelian tradition, at least until Thomas Aquinas, the sign referred directly to the concept, which was in its turn an image of the thing. But for Ockham, the true signum of the thing was the concept, not the word that referred to it. Concepts are the natural signs that signify things, while words are imposed by direct relation to things, he explains in Summa logicae: voces sunt signa secundario significantia illa quae per passiones animae primario importantur. Words signify the same things signified by concepts, yet they do not signify concepts!
If the only sign of individual things is the concept, and the physical expression (be it a word or a picture) is only a symptom of the inner image, then without a preliminary notitia intuitiva of an object, the physical expressions cannot mean anything. Words and images neither create nor bring into being anything in the mind of the addressee (as could happen in Augustine’s semiotics) if that mind does not already contain the only possible sign of the experienced reality—in other words, the mental one.
We might object to Ockham that any representation (such as an Identi-Kit composite) stimulates our mind to produce a mental sign thanks to which we can recognize the corresponding thing, and this is why we can imagine Hercules or Hitler even though we have never met them. But Ockham’s text gives rise to an interesting problem: the police officer could not put together that image of the suspect if the witness providing the input had not really met or seen the corresponding individual, just as Pietro Annigoni could not have made the portrait of Queen Elizabeth if she had not been sitting in front of him. The indisputable consequence is that there cannot be an image of something no one has ever seen. Even when something new is created, as is the case with centaurs, it results from putting together parts of things that are already known. And this is why we can make images of Hitler and even Mickey Mouse, but we cannot make images of a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. The Ockhamist theory of the image can be challenged as regards images of things attainable through experience, but holds up perfectly well for images of things that transcend experience.
Perhaps the first to pose the problem of the impossibility of representing or naming the sacred was Dionysius the Areopagite, known since the nineteenth century as Pseudo-Dionysius. He conceived of the deity as unfathomable and contradictory, describing something that is “not a material body, and therefore does not possess outward shape or intelligible form, or quality, or quantity, or solid weight; nor has It any local existence which can be perceived by sight or touch.… It is not soul, or mind, or endowed with the faculty of imagination, conjecture, reason, or understanding … nor is It number or order, or greatness … nor is It personal essence, or eternity, or time … nor is it darkness, nor is It light, or error, or truth …” and so on, for pages and pages of dazzling mystic aphasia. Not knowing how to name it otherwise, Pseudo-Dionysius calls the divinity “the luminous dimness, a silence which teaches secretly” and “luminous darkness.” But even these are images that refer to data of experience. How can we base on data drawn from experience something that should instead be the foundation of such data?
Pseudo-Dionysius held that God is ineffable, and the only way to address this satisfactorily is with silence. When someone speaks, it can only conceal the divine mysteries from those who cannot accept them.
This mystical attitude is, however, constantly contradicted by the opposite one, the theophanic conviction that, as God is the cause of all things, all names befit him, in the sense that every effect refers to its Cause. God can therefore be given the form and figure of man, of fire, or of amber. People can praise the ears, eyes, hair, face, hands, shoulders, wings, and arms, the back and the feet, and fashion crowns, thrones, goblets, volcanoes, and other objects full of mystery.
Pseudo-Dionysius warns, however, that such naming drawn from various symbols will never be adequate. Hence the need for those making such representations to dispense with what can only be extremely understated hyperbole (the oxymoron being appropriate here). Instead, the deity should only be named using “dissimilar similarities” or “incongruous dissimilarities” such that, for the divine “sometimes the images are of the lowliest kind, such as sweet-smelling ointment, and corner stone. Sometimes the imagery is even derived from animals so that God is described as a lion or a panther, a leopard or a charging bear. Add to this what seems the lowliest and most incongruous of all, for the experts in things divine gave him the form of a worm.” Elsewhere Dionysius refers to another supreme case of dissimilitude, citing the part of Psalm 78 where a wrathful Lord is “awaked as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine.”
But here, too, the allusion to the inexpressible sacred is through representations of things attainable in experience—and they are no greater than attempts to anthropomorphize the deity (depicting God with a beard and triangular halo), or for that matter to animalize the Holy Spirit.
And therefore, since we cannot really formulate a negative theology that says only what God is not, in trying to find one that is positively affirmative, we end up accepting representations of God as if he were one of us. This emerges even at the beginning of the Book of Genesis: if God made us in his own image and likeness, this means that we can imagine God in our own image and likeness.
Christianity has overcome this impossibility to a certain extent by speaking of an incarnate deity. Incarnation would be the semiotic artifice through which God is rendered thinkable and representable, understandable even to the humble—not only through the image of Jesus but also through the likeness of those who have been in some way mediators of the sacred, such as the Virgin Mary and the saints.
But the Ockhamist predicament arises in these cases, too, because none of the artists who have painted or sculpted portraits of Jesus and the Virgin ever saw them—given that the portraiture of evangelical characters began centuries after the death of Christ—and the Mandylion, the Veil of Veronica, and the Shroud of Turin (to the extent we wish to lend them credence) also appeared in much later periods.
If anyone has had direct experience of God, it is the mystics and, precisely out of faithfulness to the idea of the non-perceivable nature of the sacred and the impossibility of translating it into images, they have always described the experience of divinity in the form of darkness, dark night, emptiness, and silence. Yet all the great mystics have affirmed that, even in the mystical vision, which is an ineffable gift, it is possible to provide an image of God. To the mystic, God appears as a Great Void.
Dionysius the Carthusian, a fifteenth-century Flemish theologian, said: “O most benign God, you are the light and the sphere of light, where your elect go sweetly to rest, where they fall asleep and sleep. You are like a vast desert, perfectly flat and incommensurable, in which the truly devout heart, purified of all particular love, illuminated from on high, and full of ardor, wanders without getting lost, blissfully succumbs and together heals.”
The thirteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhart speaks of a silent and empty deity as an abyss devoid of mode and form, and describes how the soul “wants to go into the simple ground, into the quiet desert, into which distinction never gazed, not the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit … For this ground is a simple silence, in itself immovable, and by this immovability all things are moved.” Only in this way does the soul attain supreme bliss, by plunging into the deserted divinity where there is neither work nor image. Eckhart’s disciple Johannes Tauler in his own Sermons writes:
The purified and clarified spirit sinks into the divine darkness, in a mute silence and in an unfathomable and ineffable union, and in this sinking all equality and all inequality are lost, and in that abyss the spirit loses itself and knows nothing either of God or of itself, it knows not either the equal or the unequal, or any thing; since it has plunged into the unity of God and has forgotten all differences.
And Tauler says that one arrives at true simplicity through closed senses, the absence of images, and contempt for oneself. In every event and in every external act, we must be the master of our senses, because in truth the senses lead us out of ourselves and cause extraneous images to come to us. We read of a holy man who, having to leave his cell in the month of May, pulled the hood of his habit over his eyes. Asked why he did this, he said: “I am defending my eyes from the sight of the trees, so that the visions of my spirit might not be obstructed. O my dear children, if the sight of the wild wood created an impediment for that man, how harmful the variety of worldly and frivolous things must be!”
In The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Saint John of the Cross says:
For, in order that one may attain supernatural transformation, it is clear that he must be plunged into darkness and carried far away from all contained in his nature that is sensual and rational. For the word supernatural means that which soars above the natural self; the natural self, therefore, remains beneath it. For, although this transformation and union is something that cannot be comprehended by human ability and sense, the soul must completely and voluntarily void itself of all that can enter into it.…
With respect to all these there may come, and there are wont to come, to spiritual persons representations and objects of a supernatural kind. With respect to sight, they are apt to picture figures and forms of persons belonging to the life to come—the forms of certain saints, and representations of angels, good and evil, and certain lights and brightnesses of an extraordinary kind. And with the ears they hear certain extraordinary words, sometimes spoken by those figures that they see, sometimes without seeing the person who speaks them. As to the sense of smell, they sometimes perceive the sweetest perfumes with the senses, without knowing whence they proceed. Likewise, as to taste, it comes to pass that they are conscious of the sweetest savors, and, as to touch, they experience great delight—sometimes to such a degree that it is as though all the bones and the marrow rejoice and sing and are bathed in delight; this is like that which we call spiritual unction, which in pure souls proceeds from the spirit and flows into the very members. And this sensible sweetness is a very ordinary thing with spiritual persons, for it comes to them from their sensible affection and devotion to a greater or a lesser degree, to each one after his own manner.
And it must be known that, although all these things may happen to the bodily senses in the way of God, we must never rely upon them or accept them, but must always fly from them, without trying to ascertain whether they be good or evil; for, the more completely exterior and corporeal they are, the less certainly are they of God. For it is more proper and habitual to God to communicate Himself to the spirit, wherein there is more security and profit for the soul, than to sense, wherein there is ordinarily much danger and deception.…
So he that esteems such things errs greatly and exposes himself to great peril of being deceived; in any case he will have within himself a complete impediment to the attainment of spirituality.…
For over and above the difficulty that there is in being sure that one is not going astray in respect of locutions and visions which are of God, there are ordinarily many of these locutions and visions which are of the devil; for in his converse with the soul the devil habitually wears the same guise as God assumes.
In the early seventeenth century, Jakob Böhme had a fundamental mystical experience that brought him into contact with the very core of the universe, thanks to a sort of dazzling epiphany when one morning he saw a ray of sunlight reflected in a tin tub. What he saw is not known, nor did he tell us, and all the editions that have tried to illustrate his mystical perceptions are made up of circular, spindly structures that are difficult to decipher.
The bottomless abyss of the Divinity, Böhme writes in The Incarnation of Jesus Christ (1620), is none other than a quietude devoid of essence. It can give nothing. It is eternal peace with no peer, an abyss with neither beginning nor end. It is neither purpose nor place, it is not seeking or finding, nor anything where there is possibility. It resembles an eye, its own mirror. It has no essence, or light or darkness; it is above all a magic, and it has a will, which we must neither seek nor follow, for it perturbs us. By this will we mean the foundation of the Divinity, without origin. It comprises itself in itself, beyond nature; therefore we must keep silent
And yet (even though I am not an expert in the history of mysticism and I make this suggestion with great caution) while I have the impression that the experience of pure and ineffable nothingness is proper to male mysticism, it does not seem to me that many mystical women have referred to God as Pure Nothingness; on the contrary, the most important among them have spoken of Christ as an almost carnal presence. Female mysticism is dominated by hierophany, and the woman who sees the divine image expatiates on her subject in pages of undoubted erotic ecstasy, and on her amorous feelings for the Cross.
The following quotation from Saint Maddalena de’ Pazzi’s “The Forty Days” (I quaranta giorni, 1558) ought to suffice:
Love, love, Oh love, give me a great voice so that when I call you Love I may be heard from the East to the West, and in all parts of the world, even unto hell, so that you may be known and beloved of all; Love, love, You are strong, and powerful love. Love, love only you penetrate, and pierce; you break and vanquish all things. Love, love. You are heaven and earth, Fire and Air, Blood and Water. Oh Love you are God and man, love and hate, Joy of nobility, Divine, Old and new Truth. Oh Love neither loved nor known. But I see one person who has known this love.
Then there are the pages in which Saint Teresa of Ávila speaks of the wine of love that penetrates her veins and inebriates her, of the divine spouse that in an instant makes her enjoy all the beauty, all the glory of paradise in such an ineffable way:
on some occasions I am in such transports I do not realize, were it not for my uttering amorous moans with all my spirit.… Once an angel appeared before me in tangible, bodily form. He was most beautiful and I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and piercing my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God.… The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one’s soul be content with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it—indeed, a great share.
Among the poems of Teresa of Ávila, we also find this:
When the gentle hunter
Shot me and made me surrender
My soul fell into the arms of love …
What joy my beloved
To be close to you
Eager to see you
I wish to die. And when you deign
To enter my breast
Oh then my God, in that moment
I fear losing you.
At fifteen, the French Salesian nun Marguerite Marie Alacoque (1647–1690) began to believe she was “betrothed to Jesus” and even reported that one day Jesus lay himself upon her with all his weight. “Let me use you at my pleasure because there is a time for all things,” he told her when she protested. “Now I want you to be the object of my love, yielding to my will, without resistance on your part, so that I may enjoy you.” It is worth quoting much more from her autobiography:
One day, having a little more leisure—for the occupations confided to me left me scarcely any—I was praying before the Blessed Sacrament, when I felt myself wholly penetrated with that Divine Presence, but to such a degree that I lost all thought of myself and of the place where I was, and abandoned myself to this Divine Spirit, yielding up my heart to the power of His love. He made me repose for a long time upon His Sacred Breast, where He disclosed to me the marvels of His love and the inexplicable secrets of His Sacred Heart, which so far He had concealed from me. Then it was that, for the first time, He opened to me His Divine Heart in a manner so real and sensible as to be beyond all doubt, by reason of the effects which this favor produced in me, fearful, as I always am, of deceiving myself in anything that I say of what passes in me. It seems to me that this is what took place: “My Divine Heart,” He said, “is so inflamed with love for men, and for thee in particular that, being unable any longer to contain within Itself the flames of Its burning Charity, It must needs spread them abroad by thy means, and manifest Itself to them (mankind) in order to enrich them with the precious treasures which I discover to thee, and which contain graces of sanctification and salvation necessary to withdraw them from the abyss of perdition. I have chosen thee as an abyss of unworthiness and ignorance for the accomplishment of this great design, in order that every thing may be done by Me.” After this He asked me for my heart, which I begged Him to take. He did so and placed it in His own Adorable Heart where He showed it to me as a little atom which was being consumed in this great furnace, and withdrawing it thence as a burning flame in the form of a heart, He restored it to the place whence He had taken it saying to me: “See, My well-beloved, I give thee a precious token of My love, having enclosed within thy side a little spark of its glowing flames, that it may serve thee for a heart and consume thee to the last moment of thy life; its ardor will never be exhausted, and thou wilt be able to find some slight relief only by bleeding.…
On the First Friday of each month, the above-mentioned grace connected with the pain in my side was renewed in the following manner: The Sacred Heart was represented to me as a resplendent sun, the burning rays of which fell vertically upon my heart, which was inflamed with a fire so fervid that it seemed as if it would reduce me to ashes. It was at these times especially that my Divine Master taught me what He required of me and disclosed to me the secrets of His loving Heart. On one occasion, whilst the Blessed Sacrament was exposed, feeling wholly withdrawn within myself by an extraordinary recollection of all my senses and powers, Jesus Christ, my sweet Master, presented Himself to me, all resplendent with glory, His Five Wounds shining like so many suns. Flames issued from every part of His Sacred Humanity, especially from His Adorable Bosom, which resembled an open furnace and disclosed to me His most loving and most amiable Heart, which was the living source of these flames.
I was so extremely dainty that the least want of cleanliness made me feel inclined to vomit. He reproved me for this with such severity, that, on one occasion, being about to remove what a sick person had vomited, I was constrained to take it up with my tongue and to swallow it, saying: “Had I a thousand bodies, O my God, a thousand loves and a thousand lives, I would immolate them all to Thy service!” I experienced such delight in this action that I would have wished to meet every day with similar occasions, that I might thus learn to conquer myself, having God alone as witness. And He, Whose goodness alone had given me the strength to overcome myself did not fail to manifest to me the pleasure He had taken therein. For the following night, if I mistake not, He kept me for two or three hours with my lips pressed to the Wound of His Sacred Heart. It would be difficult for me to explain what I then felt, and what marvellous effects this grace produced in my soul and in my heart.…
Thus did this Divine Love deal with His unworthy slave. It happened once, when I was tending a patient who was suffering from dysentery, I was overcome by a feeling of nausea; but He gave me so severe a reprimand, that I felt urged to repair this fault and I felt obliged, as I went to throw away what the woman had done, to thrust my tongue in it and fill my mouth. I would have swallowed it all if He had not reminded me of obedience, which did not permit me to eat anything without permission.
Why women would have erotic traffic with the (male) divine image while men (who could experience ecstasies of equal intensity with the Virgin) would not, I am unable to explain. The nineteenth-century physician Jean-Martin Charcot would have said that hysteria is a uniquely feminine disorder, but this has been denied; one might say that women have greater bodily sensitivity; or even that the reasons are purely cultural: men were not denied the possibility of erotic relationships and chose chastity of their own free will, while women were forcibly kept away from any sexual experience that was not sanctioned by marriage and perhaps through hierophanic sex they could satisfy many repressed desires. I do not know and I do not wish to deal with this topic here.
All I can say is, since it was the female saints who saw the sacred in an anthropomorphic manner, it is to their experience we must necessarily turn. In the noche oscura of St. John of the Cross we are lost and silent.
It is therefore beyond doubt that the sacred, while it is by definition inexpressible, comes to be expressed because human beings (except the most heroic mystics) need to see it. But, inasmuch as it is unattainable, either by its essence or due to the lack of experience of the individuals who have embodied it, it can only be represented—and not just anthropomorphically, but also and solely with reference to models with precise locations in history.
And this is what I intend to deal with now: how the sacred takes on different forms depending on the historical period and the artistic tastes of that time.
In the Middle Ages they maintained that pulchra enim sunt ubera quae paululum supereminent et tument modice (breasts that stand out little and swell moderately are beautiful). This was another way of referring to small breasts supported by a tight corset—and this is how the ladies and the Madonnas of the secular imagination were portrayed.
In the Renaissance, the opulence of Holbein’s and Raphael’s ladies recalls the opulence of certain Virgins by Lorenzo Lotto, and the almost cellulitic emphasis with which Rubens represents the beauty of Venus also shows through the garments of the Virgin Mary or at least becomes evident in the appealing angelic cellulite of the putti.
We could go on to reflect on how the style of different eras is reflected in the sacred representations of Asian cultures, but I think we can limit ourselves here to also citing the romantic and decadent portrayals of masculine beauty in the nineteenth and twentieth century and how this ideal is also realized in images of the Sacred Heart—not to mention how the languor of the fin-de-siècle aesthete is reflected in the languor of the saints.
With regard to the mysticism of the Sacred Heart as an epiphany of divine love, Raymond Firth, in Symbols Public and Private, notes that Saint Marguerite Marie Alacoque had her mystical visions at a time when it had become known that the seat of affections is not the heart. But either Jesus in appearing to her, or the confessor who helped her express her mystical experience in visible terms, did not take into account the science explaining the world God made as it truly works, but rather chose to align with common opinion about those workings. And to this day, common opinion still talks in terms of heartfelt love and broken hearts—as if to suggest that our only mediator with the sacred is popular song.
Our Lady appeared to Bernadette in Lourdes in 1858, so we know how Bernadette Soubirous actually looked from photos of that time. But because ecclesiastical authorities gave permission to take photographs of her on various occasions, we can also see how at a certain point, as her reputation for holiness grew, the photographers of the time managed to make her more seductive. By the 1950s, Hollywood was presenting her in the form of Jennifer Jones—and I remember the scandalized reaction in the Catholic world when, a few years later, the very same Jennifer Jones, the face of Bernadette, appeared in the erotically charged scenes of Duel in the Sun.
The shepherd girls of Fatima were no models of grace and beauty but, again, 1950s Hollywood transformed them. And then came the transformation of the Blessed, and later Saint, Dominic Savio: after appearing in the first portrayals as a boy dressed appropriately but inelegantly, with trousers made baggy by kneeling, he gradually became increasingly good-looking and emerged in modern times as a handsome and virile young man. He even appeared, as if part of an engaged couple, with a young woman who, like him, died very young in the odor of sanctity: the Blessed Laura Vicuña.
This is not to mention the transformations of the Virgin Mary. An old statue of Our Lady in Lourdes resembles the women painted by Francesco Hayez in the nineteenth century, and the faces of certain statues of the Madonna of Fatima have the beauty of other times, but just imagine how Our Lady of Medjugorje must appear to the faithful who see her today: probably far closer to the fashion-model looks of a Monica Bellucci than to the grief-stricken Virgins of the distant past.
Saint Maria Goretti has also been subjected to similar changes as her kitsch devotional iconography has gradually been transformed by analogy with the actresses of the day.
Now we come to a curious case: the publication of the Three Secrets of Fatima in the twentieth century.
On reading Sister Lucia’s document on the third secret of Fatima, it can be seen that the text—which the good sister wrote not as an illiterate little girl in 1917 but in 1944, by then a mature nun—is full of highly recognizable quotations from the Book of Revelation. Sister Lucia says that on the left-hand side of Our Lady and a little higher up she and her cousins saw an Angel with a sword of fire in his left hand; the glittering sword emitted flames that looked as though they might set the world on fire; but they were extinguished on contact with the splendor that Our Lady emanated from her right hand toward him. And pointing to the earth with his right hand, the angel cried out in a loud voice: “Penance, Penance, Penance!” And the children then saw in the immense light of God “rather like how you see people in a mirror when they pass in front of it,” a bishop dressed in white (“we had the impression that it was the Holy Father”), various other bishops, priests, and religious men and women all going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn tree trunks as if made of the wood of the cork tree complete with bark; before reaching that place the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins, and with trembling, halting steps, afflicted by pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the dead bodies he encountered on his way; once he reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross, he was killed by a group of soldiers who shot him with bullets and arrows, and in the same way, one after another, the other bishops, priests, religious men and women, and various secular people of different ranks and positions were all killed. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels, both with glass “watering cans” in their hands in which they gathered up the blood of the martyrs and used it to bathe the souls that were making their way to God.
So Lucia saw an angel with a sword of fire who seemed to want to set the world on fire. In the Book of Revelation, angels also spread fire throughout the world, for example in 9:8, with the angel of the second trumpet. True, this angel does not have a flaming sword, but we will see later where the sword comes from (perhaps assisted by traditional iconography, which offers a wealth of archangels with burning swords). Then Lucia sees the divine light as in a mirror: here the suggestion does not come from Revelation, but from the first epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (13:12): “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.”
After this, behold a bishop dressed in white. He is alone, whereas in Revelation the gentleman in white has many servants, all ready to be martyred, appearing multiple times (in 6:11, in 7:9, and in 7:14), but never mind. Then we see bishops and priests going up a steep mountain, and we are at Revelation 6:15, where the powerful of the Earth hide in the dens and rocks of a mountain. Then the Holy Father arrives in a “half ruined” city, and on his way encounters the souls of the dead; the city is mentioned in Revelation 11:8, corpses included, while it collapses and falls into ruin in 11:13 and, again, in the form of Babylon, in 18:21.
Let’s go on to where the bishop and many other faithful are killed by soldiers with arrows and firearms. While Sister Lucia is innovating when she mentions firearms, massacres with sharp weapons are performed by locusts wearing warriors’ breastplates in 9:7, at the sound of the fifth trumpet. Finally, we come to the two angels pouring blood from a glass watering can (regador in Portuguese). Revelation surely abounds in angels that spill blood, but in 8:5 they do it with a censer, in 14:20 the blood overflows from a vat, and in 16:3 it is poured from a vial. Why a watering can? We might recall that Fatima is not far from the Asturias, where in the Middle Ages they first made those splendid Mozarabic miniatures of the Apocalypse that were afterwards reproduced many times. In some of the images of angels sounding trumpets, the trumpets may be taken for swords of fire or, just as readily, if associated with the sort of spouts that appear below, might be mistaken for some kind of watering can. In other images, we see angels pouring blood from goblets of indeterminate design, as if they were watering the world.
The interesting thing is that, if you read the theological commentary written by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, you see that, in pointing out that a private vision is not a matter of faith, and that an allegory is not a prophecy to be taken literally, he explicitly points out the analogies with Revelation’s images, and notes: “The concluding part of the ‘secret’ uses images which Lucia may have seen in devotional books and which draw their inspiration from long-standing intuitions of faith.” So, in a chapter significantly titled “The Anthropological Structure of Private Revelations” in the theological commentary on the Message of Fatima, he writes:
In this field, theological anthropology distinguishes three forms of perception or “vision”: vision with the senses, and hence exterior bodily perception, interior perception, and spiritual vision (visio sensibilis–imaginativa–intellectualis). It is clear that in the visions of Lourdes, Fatima and other places it is not a question of normal exterior perception of the senses: the images and forms which are seen are not located spatially, as is the case, for example, with a tree or a house. This is perfectly obvious … especially since not everybody present saw them, but only the “visionaries.” It is also clear that it is not a matter of a “vision” in the mind, without images, as occurs at the higher levels of mysticism. Therefore we are dealing with the middle category, interior perception.… Interior vision does not mean fantasy, which would be no more than an expression of the subjective imagination. It means rather that the soul is touched by something real, even if beyond the senses. It is rendered capable of seeing that which is beyond the senses, that which cannot be seen—seeing by means of the “interior senses.” … Perhaps this explains why children tend to be the ones to receive these apparitions: their souls are as yet little disturbed, their interior powers of perception are still not impaired.… “Interior vision” is not fantasy.… But it also has its limitations. Even in exterior vision the subjective element is always present: We do not see the pure object, but it comes to us through the filter of our senses, which carry out a work of translation. This is still more evident in the case of interior vision, especially when it involves realities which in themselves transcend our horizon. The subject, the visionary, is still more powerfully involved. He sees insofar as he is able, in the modes of representation and consciousness available to him. In the case of interior vision, the process of translation is even more extensive than in exterior vision, for the subject shares in an essential way in the formation of the image of what appears. He can arrive at the image only within the bounds of his capacities and possibilities. Such visions therefore are never simple “photographs” of the other world, but are influenced by the potentialities and limitations of the perceiving subject.
This can be demonstrated in all the great visions of the saints; and naturally it is also true of the visions of the children at Fatima. The images described by them are by no means a simple expression of their fantasy, but the result of a real perception of a higher and interior origin. But neither should they be thought of as if for a moment the veil of the other world were drawn back, with heaven appearing in its pure essence, as one day we hope to see it in our definitive union with God. Rather the images are, in a manner of speaking, a synthesis of the impulse coming from on high and the capacity to receive this impulse in the visionaries—that is, the children.
This, in rather more secular terms, means that visionaries see only what their culture has taught them to see and allows them to imagine. It seems to me that the approval of the retired Pontiff puts a reasonable seal on my brief observations on the iconography of the sacred.
[Prepared for La Milanesiana, 2016]