Reflections on Revelation, or swallowing metaphors

[ Published in the Yale Literary Review. ]

The Apocalypse of Saint John appears rife with material metaphors [1]. John’s vision is experienced and communicated in these terms. One is struck by the physicality of his objects of description. Take Christ’s appearance in the introductory passage: “[He emerges with] feet like unto fine brass, as in a burning furnace…” (1.15). John gives an image of familiar facture, melting metal. Similarly, a heavenly throne manifests in clear terms, constructed, like God, in a series of visually accessible elements: “He that sat, was to the sight like the jasper and the sardine stone; and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald” (4.3). “And in the sight of the throne was, as it were, a sea of glass like to crystal…” (4.6). Brass, jasper, carnelian (John’s sardius, or “sardine stone”), emerald, crystal—such divine images depend upon earthly referents. Jasper and carnelian are chosen with symbolic intention: they are the first and last stones of Jerusalem’s foundation, and thus mirror the introductory framing of Christ as beginning and end, alpha and omega [2]. Alphabet and lapidary intersect. 

John’s imagistic text treats the Word itself as a starting point for analogy and anagogy. This procedure of visionary writing and ascent falls under self-referential scrutiny throughout. A literary topos of subjective inscriptions (“I looked,” “I beheld,” “I saw”) professes the visionary’s singularity. Doubt develops. John is both author and visionary. Reception and reproduction is unequivocally conflated. (One could consider the importance of the second voice of witness or amanuensis in later medieval contexts, such as Hildegard’s Jutta, Volmar, and Richardis von Stade, as a “response” to the doubt surrounding an individual who claimed divine connection). John, the island-bound exile, lacks such an audience. Crucially then, John’s inability to write proffers the reader’s understanding of the prophet as beholden to the Word [3]. The text’s silences become its paradoxical verification.  

Interestingly, the moment of noli ea scribere follows the first and second woes. Humankind is killed in droves. The seven thunders speak, yet John may not write: “Seal up the things which the seven thunders have spoken; and write them not” (10.4). Is the woe too great? Pain distorts. Perhaps, here, it marks the limitation of text (one the image rarely heeds). The visionary has access to an aural understanding which cannot be made textual, and thus we cannot share in it. The Word articulates a failure of circumscription, in which the reader might locate their own. The failure of text might also prompt speculation. What has been whispered? What does John silently picture? Just as St. Jerome notes that “all praise is inadequate: many meanings are hidden in a single word,” [4] one might view the inadequacy (in literary terms) of silence as a site where meaning proliferates, albeit inaccessibly. The wax of Martianus Capella’s Ad Herennium, as described by Yates and Lewis, is conceived as a liminal space between image and text: “and the remembrance of things is held by images as though they were letters,” we read [5]. Mnemonic images function as text. The metaphor of the wax, the seal, is readily tied to John’s manipulation of them as physical substantiations of his writing. More profound still is the conflation of text and image which subsists in Martianus’s description. Where text fails, the image continues. Where text is (intentionally) absent, the image expands. 

The co-incidence of this moment in the speechless, pained body is amplified by the following event: John’s eating of the book itself. Visionary consumption is made the object of John’s metaphor. The reception is sweet, like honey on the tastebuds. But swallowing the pages produces “bile.” Might we view this bitterness as a return to the body, to exilic reality (as depicted in the Escorial Revelations)? John’s vision is one of bitternesses, of decay. “Thrust in thy sickle, and reap, because the hour is come to reap: for the harvest of the earth is ripe…” (14.15). The image of the martyr, those “who die in the Lord,” emerges before this harvest (14.13). We read of ripe grapes and picture bloody bodies in a similar moment of transubstantiation. The mind of the visionary is similarly fertile; receptive, in the Aristotelian sense; the most impressionable, like Martianus’s wax. The martyr’s access to vision affords a similar state of grace. The martyr is literally their own “witness” (from the Greek, mártus), and the reception of grace is essentially singular. Until the Revelation of which John speaks, this reception can only occur apart from collective experience. If John is not a martyr in the traditional sense, he is, as a singular visionary, a witness par excellence. His consumption of the book enacts a procedure of revelation: where the Word is (painfully) embodied and digested. Like silence, his consumption becomes another opportunity for expression: a moment in which the Word exceeds its linguistic capacity and requires bodily action.

A textual framework departs from the Word to approach the Book and Body. Thomas Aquinas’s notion of the image “cleaving with affection,” as raised in Lewis’s essay [6], lays an (anachronistic) base from which to consider the rupture of metaphor into one’s lived experience: the object (the body) cleaving with the image (the metaphor). How might the metaphorical image enter into the everyday? Does the poetic circumscription of the earthly referent effect that which is referred to—as in the case of John himself, the author who swallows his text? And could the structure of Revelation—and John’s response to it—suggest or prefigure such an affect, not only through the body but through those earthly referents which surround it?

[1] I refer throughout to The Apocalypse of St John (Revelation) in the Douay-Rheims Bible (drbo.org). 

[2] John F. Walvoord, The Revelation of Jesus Christ (Chicago: Moody Press, 1966), 104.

[3] Richard K. Emmerson, “Visualizing the Visionary,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams, and Insights in Medieval Art & History, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 161.

[4] Suzanne Lewis, “The English Gothic illuminated Apocalypse, lectio divina, and the art of memory,” Word & Image 7, 1 (1991), 3.

[5] Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, ed. Adolfus Dick (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1925). Quoted in Lewis, 15; excerpted and translated in Francis Yates, The Art Of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1992), 64.

[6] Lewis, 18.