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“You will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these you will do!”
Pierre-Marie Dumont
The Jonah Sarcophagus (c. 300)
Vatican Museums
The enigma of early Christian art
Early Christian art can strike our modern sensibilities as being a bit primitive. The quality is usually not very high, the figures are not in good proportion, and the scenes depicted often seem like a random collection of images with little connection to one another. But perhaps the most surprising thing about early Christian art for us today is the popularity of certain scenes and not of others. The crucifixion, for example, is never depicted in the first three centuries by Christians. Portraits of Christ and the saints are a rarity. Far and away the most popular story is the one depicted here: Jonah and the whale.
The Jonah sarcophagus (a stone coffin) dates from around 300 and is one of the most beautiful examples of early Christian art. Art from underground burial places called catacombs is the most common type of early Christian art that we have; perhaps it is simply what survived. Looking at how Jonah dominates the relief of this sarcophagus we have to ask: why did early Christians depict Jonah so often? And why, in particular, was Jonah in the belly of the whale a fitting scene for funerary art?
The importance of Jonah
In October, the lectionary features the entire book of Jonah, and so it is a good month to reflect on the power of this story and what it might have meant to early Christians. Jonah is actually one of the only Old Testament figures to whom Christ explicitly compares himself, and he even explains the comparison at some length (Jesus is usually much terser!). In Matthew’s Gospel, Christ tells the scribes and Pharisees: An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights. At the judgment, the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and there is something greater than Jonah here (Mt 12:39-41; see also Mt 16:4 and Lk 11:29-32).
Jonah is an unlikely person for Jesus to take as a prophetic figure for himself. Jonah runs away from the call of God, causes misfortune to come upon his companions, and is thrown overboard, where he has some time to think about his decisions in the belly of a great fish. There he prays for deliverance, and goes on to preach to the Ninevites (quite halfheartedly, since he hopes they won’t repent). The story ends with Jonah quarreling with God over a plant that has withered; God uses Jonah’s lament over a mere plant to reprimand him for being so reluctant to convert the Ninevites.
Saint Augustine says that Jonah, despite being basically a bad prophet, is the most sublime because he “prophesied Christ not so much in words as in certain features of his experience. In fact, he prophesied far more clearly in this way than if with his voice he were crying out Christ’s death and resurrection” (City of God 18.30, trans. Babcock). Between Jesus’ own words and Augustine’s we have a strong indication of how Jonah’s story was understood. The very contours of his life were seen as prophetic, rather than his words or even his character. History is conforming itself to Christ’s mystery, even if Jonah does not know it. Just as Jonah was “buried” three days and came up again, so also Christ. The connection with burial is quite explicit in Jonah’s story, where the belly of the whale is likened to Sheol itself (and water generally was associated with the underworld and chaos; see Ez 31:15-16). Jonah emerges a new man and converts a large number of gentiles, foreshadowing Christ’s universal mission.
The sarcophagus as typological
On the sarcophagus itself, there are many hints that Jonah is a type of death and resurrection. First, the entire story boils down to three scenes: Jonah getting cast overboard, Jonah in the depths of the sea, and Jonah reclining on dry land. These three make clear the parallel to the Paschal Mystery. First, Christ dies for others; he is willing to go overboard. Second, Christ is buried, going into underworld—a parallel made clear by the horrible sea monster who evokes the ancient serpent. And lastly, the Resurrection: Jonah rests at peace under the vine of paradise.
Another clue is that only the figures in the Jonah cycle are naked. Nakedness on these early sarcophagi represents new life. Just as babies are born naked, early Christians were also baptized in the nude (and depicted that way). But nakedness is also reminiscent of death—as we come into the world, so we leave it; likewise baptism is both death and new life.
The other scenes on the sarcophagus reinforce this theme of death and resurrection. For example, a tiny Noah floats on the primordial sea into which Jonah is thrown; he is raising his hand to receive the olive branch. Noah was also a common figure in early Christian art—and a favorite image of salvation through water (see 1 Pt 3:20-21). The ark, strikingly, looks like a coffin, and the dove descending on Noah may evoke baptism. On the upper left, we have Jesus calling Lazarus from his tomb, and on the upper right the Good Shepherd calls forth his sheep from death.
The artistic message is clear: just as Christ died and was raised to new life, so also the one buried in this sarcophagus died in hope of salvation through baptism, by which he or she was united to the one greater than Jonah. The one buried here died in hope of the resurrection.
Elizabeth Klein
Assistant professor of theology at the Augustine Institute in Denver, Colorado.
The Jonah Sarcophagus (c. 300), Vatican Museums, Italy. © Eric Vandeville / akg-images.
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This English miniature from the twelfth century depicts the return of Saint Cuthbert, and of two of his brother monks, from the land of the Picts where they were on mission. After resisting the Romans, the Picts maintained until the tenth century a powerful kingdom occupying a large part of present-day Scotland—a kingdom where Christianity had not yet succeeded in taking root until Saint Cuthbert († 687) evangelized it. There is a veritable golden legend about Saint Cuthbert’s mission among the Picts. It was said about him, as about the holiest missionaries, that he fulfilled the Lord’s prophecy: You will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these you will do! (Jn 14:12). He then became bishop in the kingdom of Lot, in the southwest of present-day Scotland. We know that in the Arthurian legend, Lot was the husband of Arthur’s sister, Morgause, and the father of Sir Gawain, Gareth, and Mordred.
The sea, with its waves and its immense swell, is the place where the Egyptians perish, along with the pigs that were possessed by the devil. It is the depiction of the universe that has been perverted by original sin and has come under the domination of Satan, the prince of this world. But it is also the place where Jesus walks on water without sinking into it, the place where the ship of the Church ventures, fluctuat nec mergitur (“she is tossed [by the waves] but does not sink”). Here, then, is this ship, depicted on its primordial peregrination, which is mission itself.
The red background of the sky is made with lead oxide—the minium that gave its name to miniatures. This fiery sky represents the fire of hell to which the souls of the Picts were doomed before their passage from the waters of the abyss to the waters of baptism. This background is sown here with fleurs de lys: with their corollas opening upward they symbolize the souls that are open to receiving the grace of salvation. From now on these souls will embody the Church and become sharers in Christ’s charity, and thus escape the damnation to which they had been doomed. In the Communion of Saints, they will become active members of Christ’s kingdom—here represented by a golden solar frame, prolonging exactly, not upwards but in the direction of the infinite depth of its celestial fulfillment, the earthly influence of the ship of the Church. Outside of this well-demarcated influence, there is no salvation: The abyss of perdition represented by the sea leads inevitably to the horror of damnation represented by the red-hot fire of hell. Hence the first and absolute requirement of charity which, for Christians, means mission work.
The new and eternal Ark furrowing the seas
In a manner of speaking, mission is the essential thing that is lacking in the Passion of Christ for his body which is the Church (cf. Col 1:24). It is up to his disciples to take up this responsibility until he comes again.
However, we hasten to explain: Mission work is lacking in Christ’s Passion only insofar as it comes in addition. In reality, Christ’s Passion lacks nothing for the glory of God and our salvation. This explains the golden frame* in which this dynamic depiction of the new and eternal Ark is situated: the ship crisscrosses the seas in order to snatch souls away from their native curse through the grace of their baptismal rebirth, and so this frame, which embraces the Church as well as the abyss, down to the infernal regions, is gold like the heaven of the elect. It represents the infinite divine mercy which in the person of Jesus Christ will come again in glory on the last day and will speak the last word of history. Can anyone be saved outside the visible Church? For man it is impossible. But for God, all things are possible. Now, it is not the will of My Father who is in heaven, Jesus tells us, that one of these little ones should perish (Mt 18:14).
So it is that, on their return from the land of the Picts, while Saint Cuthbert with open hands gives thanks for the miraculous catch of fish that it was granted to him to make, his brother in mission, at the prow of the Church, points to all the souls that were saved.
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*To see this golden frame click here.
St. Cuthbert and two of the brethren returning from the land of the Picts [Northern Scotland], English illumination from Bede’s prose Life of St. Cuthbert, 12th c., British Library, London, UK. © akg-images / British Library.
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