Three is the number of things divine, and four is the number of creation. The world is four-square, divided into four quarters which are ruled by four great creatures, the four winged creatures that surround the throne of the Almighty. These four great creatures make up the sum of mighty space, both dark and light, and their wings are the quivering of this space, that trembles all the time with thunderous praise of the Creator: for these are Creation praising their Maker, as Creation shall praise its Maker forever. That their wings (strictly) are full of eyes before and behind, only means that they are the stars of the trembling heavens forever changing and travelling and pulsing. In Ezekiel, muddled and mutilated as the text is, we see the four great creatures amid the wheels of the revolving heavens — a conception which belongs to the seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries — and supporting on their wing-tips the crystal vault of the final heaven of the throne.
In their origin, the Creatures are probably older than God himself. They were a very grand conception, and some suggestion of them is at the back of most of the great winged Creatures of the east. They belong to the last age of the living cosmos, the cosmos that was not created, that had yet no god in it because it was in itself utterly divine and primal. Away behind all the creation myths lies the grand idea that the cosmos always was, that it could not have had any beginning, because it always was there and always would be there. It could not have a god to start it, because it was itself all god and all divine, the origin of everything.
This living cosmos man first divided into three parts: and then, at some point of great change, we cannot know when, he divided it instead into four quarters, and the four quarters demanded a whole, a conception of the whole, and then a maker, a Creator. So the four great elemental creatures became subordinate, they surrounded the supreme central unit, and their wings cover all space. Later still, they are turned from vast and living elements into beasts or Creatures or Cherubim — it is a process of degradation — and given the four elemental or cosmic natures of man, lion, bull, and eagle. In Ezekiel, each of the creatures is all four at once, with a different face looking in each direction. But in the Apocalypse each beast has its own face. And as the cosmic idea dwindled, we get the four cosmic natures of the four Creatures applied first to the great Cherubim then to the personified Archangels, Michael, Gabriel, etc., and finally they are applied to the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. ‘Four for the Gospel Natures.’ It is all a process of degradation or personification of a great old concept.
Parallel to the division of the cosmos into four quarters, four parts, and four dynamic ‘natures’ comes the other division, into four elements. At first, it seems as if there had been only three elements: heaven, earth, and sea, or water: heaven being primarily light or fire. The recognition of air came later. But with the elements of fire, earth, and water the cosmos was complete, air being conceived of as a form of vapour, darkness the same.
And the earliest scientists (philosophers) seemed to want to make one element, or at most two, responsible for the cosmos. Anaximenes said all was water. Xenophanes said all was earth and water. Water gave off moist exhalations, and in these moist exhalations were latent sparks; these exhalations blew aloft as clouds, they blew far, aloft, and condensed upon their sparks instead of into water, and thus they produced stars: thus they even produced the sun. The sun was a great ‘cloud’ of assembled sparks from the moist exhalations of the watery earth. This is how science began: far more fantastic than myth, but using processes of reason.
Then came Herakleitos with his: All is Fire, or rather: All is an exchange for Fire, and his insistence on Strife, which holds things asunder and so holds them integral and makes their existence even possible, as the creative principle: Fire being an element.
After which the Four Elements become almost inevitable. With Empedokles in the fifth century the Four Elements of Fire, Earth, Air, and Water established themselves in the imagination of men forever, the four living or cosmic elements, the radical elements: the Four Roots Empedokles called them, the four cosmic roots of all existence. And they were controlled by two principles, Love and Strife.— ‘Fire and Water and Earth and the mighty height of Air; dread Strife, too, apart from these, of equal weight to each, and Love in their midst, equal in length and breadth.’ And again Empedokles calls the Four: ‘shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus, and Vestis.’ So we see the Four also as gods: the Big Four of the ages. When we consider the four elements, we shall see that they are, now and forever, the four elements of our experience. All that science has taught about fire does not make fire any different. The processes of combustion are not fire, they are thought-forms. H2O is not water, it is a thought-form derived from experiments with water. Thought-forms are thought-forms, they do not make our life. Our life is made still of elemental fire and water, earth and air: by these we move and live and have our being.
From the four elements we come to the four natures of man himself, based on the conception of blood, bile, lymph, and phlegm, and their properties. Man is still a creature that thinks with his blood: ‘the heart, dwelling in the sea of blood that runs in opposite directions, where chiefly is what men call thought; for the blood round the heart is the thought of men’. — And maybe this is true. Maybe all basic thought takes place in the blood around the heart, and is only transferred to the brain. Then there are the Four Ages, based on the four metals: gold, silver, bronze, and iron. In the sixth century already the Iron Age had set in, and already man laments it. The age before the eating of the Fruit of Knowledge is left far behind.
The first scientists, then, are very near to the old symbolists. And so we see in the Apocalypse, that when St. John is referring to the old primal or divine cosmos, he speaks of a third part of this, that, or another: as when the dragon, who belongs to the old divine cosmos, draws down a third part of the stars with his tail: or where the divine trumps destroy a third part of things: or the horsemen from the abyss, which are divine demons, destroy a third part of man. But when the destruction is by non-divine agency, it is usually a fourth part that is destroyed. — Anyhow there is far too much destroying in the Apocalypse. It ceases to be fun.