St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (review)

"Beloved, we are God's children now," writes the teacher called "St. John the Divine"—the name tradition gives to the supposed author of the Fourth Gospel, the Johannine epistles, and the Apocalypse. Then he adds the clincher: "It does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2).

That verse is a key New Testament witness for two doctrines that together define the Christian eschatological hope: the beatific vision and deification (theosis). While the former has long been central to Western eschatology, the latter has not. A patristic axiom, sometimes ascribed to St. Athanasius, held that "God became man so that man might become God." With that warrant, deification became a standard feature of Orthodox eschatology, although it was never defined as dogma. But in the West, as Jeffrey Hamburger rightly states, it remained "an elite, but not an esoteric, doctrine" (4). "Becoming God" was not only a difficult idea, since its philosophical underpinnings derived from the sophisticated Neoplatonist hermeneutics of John Scotus Eriugena, it was also a dangerous one, since without sufficient theological nuance it could easily veer into pantheism or blasphemy. Largely for these reasons, speculation about theosis never made its way into catechesis or pastoral theology, but found its cloistered home in monastic and mystical writings—and images. It is about these images, with their visual poetics of deification, that Hamburger writes in this subtle, lavishly illustrated volume.

St. John the Divine is itself a subtly ambiguous title. The epithet "divine" is an archaic Anglican rendition of the saint's Byzantine title, St. John the Theologian. But a theologian, in the Orthodox understanding, is one who both speaks with God and "sees him as he is," insofar as that is possible to mortals, and so becomes like God. Eastern Orthodox tradition bestows this honorific on only three persons in all of church history (the others are St. Gregory of Nazianzus and St. Symeon the New Theologian). It is appropriate, therefore, that the title St. John the Divine also implies Hamburger's subtitle, "the deified evangelist." This saint, at least in certain centers of his cult—notably the Rhineland in the early fourteenth century—became the prime exemplum and standard bearer for the hope of divinization expressed in the Johannine writings.

Medieval scholars universally viewed the "Gospel According to St. John" as the most profound of the four. Conventional iconography of the evangelists, allegorically based on the "four living creatures" of Ezekiel 1:10 symbolized Matthew by a winged man for his emphasis on Christ's humanity, Mark by a lion for his mighty deeds, and Luke by an ox for his sacrificial death. But John's attribute, the eagle, signified the revelation of Christ's divinity, for that bird not only soars high in the heavens but was believed to gaze directly on the sun, just as the deified evangelist gazed on the mystery of the eternal Word. While the eagle was St. John's standard emblem, Hamburger's study unveils a less familiar array of images, each one distinctly and sometimes idiosyncratically representing John as a "Christomorph," a saint recreated in the image and likeness of the God-man whose double nature he had revealed. The evangelist might, for example, appear enthroned in majesty; receive the attributes of Christ the Creator; take the place of Christ as Mary's adoptive son; or be assumed bodily into heaven after celebrating a final mass. Like the honors of Mary herself, these special prerogatives accorded to the evangelist not only gave him an exalted place among the saints, but also—and more important—foreshadowed the glory that all might...