A number of saints are depicted with their symbol – St Jerome may be shown with a lion, as he removed a thorn from the lion’s paw and so it accompanied him as he worked, St Catherine is often depicted with her wheel, and St Lawrence with his gridiron, and so on. The four Evangelists are also often shown with their symbols: that for Matthew is a winged lion, for Mark a winged lion, for Luke a winged calf or ox, and for John a winged eagle. But why? How did these four symbols come to be associated with these four New Testament greats?

In the Bury Bible (above) the animals representing the Gospellers are shown in the four corners in an image of Christ sitting on a rainbow within a mandorla (a mandorla is the shape of two spheres overlapping; Jesus occupied that space between the sphere of heaven and the sphere of earth). The symbols around Christ are shown in this order – the man for St Matthew is top left (but on the right hand of Christ), the lion for St Mark below that, across the bottom is St Luke’s ox or calf, and finally the symbol for St John, the eagle, top right. All are winged and hold scrolls – the scrolls represent the writing of the Gospels.

These symbols didn’t come about by accident as they were noted by the prophet Ezekiel, 1, vv 4–14:

Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man.And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings, as for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, the face of a lion on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle.

 

 

In the Book of Revelation, 4, 5–8, St John also has a vision of four animals surrounding the throne of heaven.

… and round about the throne were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast was like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

Towards the end of the second century St Irenaeus of Lyon, associated each animal to the Evangelists. The man represented St Matthew, the lion St Mark, the ox or calf St Luke and the eagle St John.

The reason for this allocation is that the Gospel of Matthew starts with the genealogy of Jesus, and thus Christ as a human, his incarnation. Mark’s symbol of a lion indicates courage and monarchy, and this book starts with John the Baptist ‘preaching like a lion and Christ as king roaring in the desert’. The calf for Luke indicates sacrifice, service and strength. And finally the eagle of St John is the ‘king’ of birds and the one that flies closet to the sun and highest in the heavens and so brings the word of God directly.

 

These four images are from the Lindisfarne Gospels and show each Evangelist with their symbols and their names preceded by ‘Agios’ which is the Greek for ‘Saint’ in an angular runic-style script .