Transcript of Interview with Mike Aquilina about Signs and Mysteries. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Signs and Mysteries-Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1001117/Signs-Mysteries-Revealing-Ancient-Christian-Symbols/

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Chris: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the podcast where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of e-Commerce from catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Chris: And today in the spotlight, we have author Mike Aquilina. This is the second time Mike’s been on our show and he is talking today with us about Signs and Mysteries, an excellent new book from our Sunday visitor talking about early Christian symbols. Mike, glad to have you on the show.

Mike: Great to be back, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris: Oh well, it is certainly a pleasure to have you on and to hear about some of the more heady things you’ve got to talk about here certainly. Your books certainly are not some of the easier to understand things but they’re always very significant in what you’ve got to say and I really appreciate that.

Mike: Well, I’m trying to take things that are a little bit remote but I’m trying to make them accessible to as many people as possible. When we look at the things like the symbols of the early Church, they’re still the symbols that are in our churches today and we want to understand them. So in order to do that, we need a little bit of history and a little bit of art history and a little bit of the history of religion. So it’s a lot of interesting topics but again, we try to make them accessible to everyday people.

Chris: So what was it that brought your attention toward doing a book on early Christian symbols?

Mike: Well, for many years I’ve been reading the Church fathers and for a number of years I’ve been writing about the Church fathers. And the fathers are the great teachers of early Christianity. They’re the people who give us the record of what we know about the early Church going back to the time of the New Testament. Some of the fathers were living at the same time as the apostles and they handed on the faith to the next generation and the next generation after that. So they really do teach us a lot about the world where Jesus lived and the world of our earliest Christian ancestors. Well, I’ve been as I said, reading their sermons and their letters and their records for many years now and when I made a trip to Rome, my first trip to Rome, I began to see that the visual record from those years, the archeological record from those years really did show forth the same symbols that you find in the Church fathers. We find symbols like the anchor appearing in art and the phoenix and the peacock and the dolphin and the fish. The fish we see everywhere now because it’s been recovered from those early years. But all of these beautiful and strange symbols that appear in the homilies of the fathers of the Church and the letters of the fathers of the Church and the poetry of the fathers, these things appear in the archaeological record as well. So I wanted to get up the meaning of these things by looking at the writings of the fathers but also by looking at the archaeological record. So for this book, I worked with artist who’s expert in art history as well and in reproducing things from the archaeological record.

Chris: Now there’s also a lot of fervor around early Christian symbols because of the Dan Brown books. Was this book written in any way to address some of that or was it written kind of on its own merit?

Mike: Well I think the book does address some of the confusion that was generated by Dan Brown’s various books because Mr. Brown likes to play around with the symbols we find in early Christianity but he really does confuse their meaning and he does attribute to them meanings they didn’t have in their original context. And he tries to make them into a secret code representing ideas they definitely did not represent; ideas that came about much later in history in many cases, and also some pagan ideas that really had nothing to do with Christianity. So this book does address some of that but it wasn’t the motivation for my writing the book. I wrote the book really as an act of love and as an act of devotion to our Christian ancestors. I wanted to try to see the world as they saw it and I wanted to try to pray as they prayed. And so, in order to do that, I had to understand the things that they left for us because so many of these symbols that we find like the fish, they’re not carved as works of art in the walls of catacombs. Sometimes, they’re just scratched in the wall with a rock. So it wasn’t like they were trying to do something stunning or beautiful and leaving that for future generations. They were trying to send a message. They wanted to communicate something to people. They wanted to leave something for everyone who would visit those corridors for all the centuries afterward. They were trying to communicate something and I wanted to hear what they had to say. I wanted to understand their message. So that was my motivation for writing the book because I assumed that there were a lot of people out there who want to know what their ancestors had to say.

Chris: So why is it that they communicated in these cryptic symbols rather that in writing down a full paragraph about what they meant in many of these instances?

Mike: Well, we have to try to put ourselves back into that world and it’s a world where there were no mass media, for example. And it was a world where literacy was actually pretty low. I mean, most people could not read and write, perhaps. So they had to communicate by other means. Also, it was a world where persecution was rife was you couldn’t just come out and say a lot of things because it would leave you open for being misunderstood and you really did not want to be misunderstood. Some of the persecutions, the more lynch-mob-type events that happened in early Christianity happened because people thought that the Christians were cannibals because they went around saying that they ate the flesh and drank the blood of this man named Christ. So that led to these crazy rumors that went around and sometimes it led to witch hunts and the Christians were victims of those.

So you didn’t want to be misunderstood by just putting the text of the Scripture out there as we might do today because we really don’t fear the misunderstanding in the same way. So they would put out these symbols of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and the most famous of those symbols was the fish that you talked about before. That symbol that’s out there, that’s a symbol of the Real Presence. It’s also a symbol of the name of Jesus Christ and a lot of other things. It’s a creed in miniature. But there were many reasons for speaking symbolically like that. Another thing is that when you have a common symbolic language, it creates a sense of community. The people who understand the language are included in the community. In this case, the community is the Church. The people who don’t understand the language are excluded from the community. So it really does draw boundary lines and that’s one thing that the symbolic language did in the catacombs. Well, because of the community and its saints, we belong to that ancient community. It really does transcend time so we want to be part of it, we want to understand what their symbols say to us and again, that’s what this book is all about.

Chris: Now what were the sources of these symbols? Did they…where did they come up with a lot of them?

Mike: Well, what’s interesting to me is that the symbols were the same, no matter where you went in the world. They would be the same thing in Palestine and in Syria and in Egypt and Rome and in France. The early Christians were using the same symbols wherever they went so there was this commonality and the…

Chris: And were the spread of the symbols very rapid when a new symbol was adopted?

Mike: Well, it seems that way. It seems that the symbols were pretty constant from the early years of the Church and they came from several sources and I mean, that the obvious source was the Scriptures. People…the Christians drew from the metaphors that appeared in the Scriptures and the imagery of the Scriptures. You’d often see the wine because Jesus Christ said, “I am the true wine. You are the branches.” And so they would decorate their walls of the catacombs and of some of their churches with these images of vines. The fish obviously was coming from multiplication of the loaves and fishes. It also referred to his name, well his title, Jesus Christ, Son of God, savior in Greek spelled out, if you take the first letter of each word, it’s spells out the Greek word for fish and so, the fish represented Jesus Christ and His Real Presence with the loaves so it was a Eucharistic symbol. But there were many other symbols that came from Judaism. They were very common in Judaism and they kind of made their way into Christianity that way.

We find many of the images of the Old Testament and they’re appropriated for the New Testament. So we find an image of St. Peter, a very common image of St. Peter striking the rock and water coming forward because he’s a new Moses who’s releasing the baptismal waters into the Church because he is the first pope. So we find some of these images coming from the Old Testament and from the Judaism of the day. We also find pagan symbols that were appropriated for the purpose of the Christianity. The very common image we see of the Good Shepherd carrying the sheep, the lamb on his shoulders is a very common pagan image of one of the Roman gods and it was just appropriated. It was something that people could recognize but now it found a new meaning because of the words of Jesus Christ who said that He was the Good Shepherd who laid down His life for His sheep. So they have many, many sources in this common culture, the Jewish culture and the pagan culture as well and even the scientific culture, because at that time, there was a lot of scientific speculation and research going on and Christians found themselves feeding off that as well as they did these symbolic paintings.

Chris: Now how have these symbols survived through the centuries? Are we still using a lot of the same symbols today as they were back then?

Mike: Yes. One way it’s survived is just because the churches themselves have survived. Some of these great churches in Rome, these ancient churches, these monumental churches have been carefully preserved because they’re sacred spaces. They’re holy places. They’re destinations of pilgrimage and they have survived from those early centuries of the Church and when we go into these places and I’m thinking two of the places below the ground like the Scavi under St. Peter’s or the similar excavations under San Clemente or the catacombs. These places have been preserved because they’re holy to Christians and of course, everything that’s in them has been well preserved as well. The etchings on the wall, the paintings, and so on…so we see these things and they’re there in the record for us to see but also that they’ve been copied down through the ages and we see them recurring throughout history. If we look at medieval art, much of the symbolism was taken over from ancient art and even emphasized more in the medieval period. But again, many of those symbols like for example, the peacock, these symbols have ancient roots in Christian art.

Chris: Okay, we’re going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor but when we come back, we’ll be speaking more with Mike Aquilina about Signs and Mysteries and hopefully, we’ll be able to talk a little about some of the more specific things about some of the more popular symbols here. This is the Catholic Spotlight.

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Chris: And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight with Mike Aquilina talking about Signs and Mysteries and the early symbols of the Christian Church. Now obviously, the fish is probably the most well-known and widely-viewed symbol of Christ. Talk just a little about…are there some things that maybe the lay person isn’t going to know about the background of the fish?

Mike: Well, it’s interesting that you should say that about the fish being the most well-known symbol of Christ because it has enjoyed a resurge in popularity. You see them in bumper stickers, in these little emblems that people put on their cars and it’s a recent phenomenon actually. It’s a recovery of something from the very early Church and the fish was very common in the early Church but I think the most common symbol today is the cross. If we look at a town and we scan the skyline, we can usually tell the Christian churches because up there on the steeple, there’s a cross and sometimes when we’re driving down the highway, we find these crosses that are put up on the roadside to symbolize Calvary, to evoke this memory of the Savior. So the cross really through most of Christian history has been the preeminent symbol of Jesus Christ and of Christianity.

Chris: You know, it’s just so prevalent I guess in my mind that it didn’t even occur to me.

Mike: But you know what’s funny is that it’s not so prevalent in the ancient record. We do find occasional crosses but it’s definitely not as common as it is today. Nowhere near as common in relation to many other symbols and we do find certain symbols appearing much more often than the cross. It’s interesting to see that even when the cross is presented, sometimes it’s shown as what archaeologists call a crypto-cross. It’s almost hidden. What the ancient artist will do is emphasize the horizontal and vertical lines in an anchor, for example and make them more prominent so that the cross pops out but the image is actually an anchor. So you find interesting things like that, hidden crosses, crosses that are hidden in a greater work of art. So it’s almost like a secret that’s shared between the artist and the viewer but the fish, as you say, is much more common in the ancient record and it is a symbol of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. Those, the first, if you look at those words in Greek, the first letter of each word, you line them up and they spell out ichthus which is the Greek word for fish. And even when the Latins spoke of Jesus this way symbolically, they use the Greek word, even they’d be speaking Latin all the way through but suddenly they would bring in the Greek word because they wanted to make sure that we all understand we’re talking about our fish, Jesus Christ.

And the fish, because of that, Jesus Christ Son of God Savior, if you look at all of those things, that’s professing his divinity, it’s professing his humanity. Son of God. Savior. It’s professing that Jesus is the Redeemer of the world. It really is a very simple and elegant creed. So now, whenever we’re driving down the highway and we see that fish on the bumper sticker in front of us, it can really inspire us to prayer. It’s a creed right there before us. It’s a profession of belief in the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ and the incarnation and the redemption. It really inspires us to an act of thanksgiving but it also evokes so many of those meal scenes in the New Testament; the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the charcoal fire where our Lord has his meeting with the apostles after the resurrection. There are so many times when our Lord breaks bread but breaks fish as well with them. He shares a fish meal with them.

Chris: Well, you know when you got that many fishermen in one place, you’re going to have a lot of a fish around, I would imagine.

Mike: That’s right! That’s right! And what’s interesting is that whenever we look at the representations of the Last Supper that appear in the catacombs and in other places, they do not portray a traditional Passover meal. Nowhere do they show a lamb. If they show anything on the table, they show a fish in the middle of the table and many modern interpreters have seen that to be a sign of the Real Presence. And we find this even in the work of Protestant archaeologists where they recognize that this is a sign of the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. It’s a powerful image, that image of the fish and as a result, it’s one of the most popular images in the ancient archaeological record. It’s also one of the longest chapters in my book for that reason because its context are so common in the ancient world. One of my favorite images of the fish, it’s actually two fish and it’s profoundly Eucharistic. You find these two fish and they’re facing each other and one fish is holding a loaf of bread in its mouth and the other fish is holding a cluster of grapes in its mouth. So you have this gorgeous symbol of Jesus Christ really present in the Eucharist. I have not found anything more explicit than that but it really is an explicit symbol of Jesus Christ really present in the Eucharist.

Chris: Now one of the symbols you addressed that I found very interesting was the ankh because to me, the ankh is ancient Egyptian symbol so how does this tie in to ancient Christianity?

Mike: Well, it was an ancient Egyptian symbol. It dates back to the time of the pharaohs and the ankh was the symbol of the Nile River and of the Nile River god. It was also a symbol of fertility because when the Nile flooded, the fields were fertile and it was a symbol of eternal life. So we find it very often in the funerary context of ancient Egypt, the tombs of the pharaohs along with their mummies. Sometimes, we will find images of the pharaohs holding onto an ankh. Now an ankh is something that looks like a cross with a loop on the top and you often see these things in New Age bookstores in our day and age in America but it was a symbol in pharaohnic Egypt and it was adopted by the earliest Christians in Egypt. It was adopted as the Crux Ansata, the Romans called it. The cross with the handle, or the cross with the loop and of course, they found resonances with the pagan precursors because if the old ankh was the key to the Nile that unleashed the waters of the Nile and fertilized the land; well the new ankh which is an image of the cross, the cross was the key that unlocked the gates, the baptismal gates that flooded the earth and rendered the earth ever more fertile now because of the saving action of Jesus Christ. So the ankh appears in ancient manuscripts of the New Testament sometimes as a symbol of Jesus Christ or as an abbreviation for Jesus Christ. It’s still used by Egyptian Christians; the Coptic Christians continue to incorporate it in their icons and in their architecture as a symbol of Christ and as a representation of the cross. It shows the way we really have inherited so much from natural religion but it’s been elevated in supernatural religion, the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Chris: Now, another symbol you talked about that I found particularly interesting was the phoenix because obviously there’s a lot of New Age usage of the phoenix…how does that tie in to our early Christian heritage as well?

Mike: Well the phoenix was a legendary bird and it’s supposedly lived a very long life and it died in a blaze of flames and then it left only ashes and then the phoenix arose again from the ashes. That was the ancient story and it’s been around for many thousands of years. Now the interesting thing is that we think of that today as mythology but all of the ancient naturalists like Pliny for example, and Tacitus, they thought of it as just natural history. They thought that the phoenix was a bird that actually lived over in Arabia. They believed the legends and they believed them to be scientific. In 39 A.D. some charlatan appeared in Rome with a large bird he was claiming was the phoenix and he took in a lot of people before he was unmasked but many people believed in the phoenix so it really is almost in the realm of science of that time because the natural historians wrote down what they had heard from others. But people obviously would think about the phoenix rising up from the ashes and think about Jesus who rose from the dead and it became a very natural thing to do.

And so, very early on, as a matter of fact, in the first century we find references to the phoenix in St. Clement of Rome, one of the very early popes when he was writing to the Corinthians, he refers to the phoenix and he uses it as a metaphor for the resurrection. By the late 3rd century, we’re finding poems about the phoenix comparing it to Christ and this of course exploded in the middle Ages where the symbolism appears often in the churches. The phoenix does appear in the Scriptures in the Old Testament especially in several places. Sometimes the translations obscure that but Job in one place said, “In my own nest I shall grow old, I shall multiply years like the phoenix.” And some modern translations render that last word as sand rather than phoenix and that’s a valid alternative reading of the Hebrew because it’s the same word that represents either the bird phoenix or sand. But it also renders the line meaningless but if you multiply the years like the phoenix then we see then that it really is a testimony of Job’s belief in his vindication and his resurrection. The ancient rabbis confirmed that reading of the Book of Job. So the phoenix is something that has been appropriated, as you say, by modern occultists and by New Age people but it was a rich symbol in the early Church and even in the Scriptures as well.

Chris: And one of my other favorites to talk about would be the anchor because there’s a lot of rich heritage to that as well. You want to share with us a little bit about that one?

Mike: Well the anchor is a neat symbol. It’s taken from Scripture in the letter to the Hebrews we find the ascension and the glorification of Jesus Christ described as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain. So hope is an anchor for the early Christians and often when they depicted that anchor, they would emphasize that cross that we find in the middle of the structure of an anchor. They’d emphasize the cross. Now, as they would elaborate on this, sometimes they would make the anchor very, very intricate and the circle, the loop at the top of the anchor would represent the eternity of God the Father and then the cross section in the middle would emphasize or would represent the eternal Word, God the Son who became incarnate in Jesus Christ so we have the circle representing God the Father and the cross presenting God the Son and then at the bottom, the curved part, in many of these representations in the catacombs, the curved part is made to resemble a dove so that we find in the anchor, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit represented by the dove at the bottom. So the anchor is a beautiful thing that speaks especially to seafaring people. So what we find there is a symbol that might not mean much if you’re an agrarian or a pastoral culture but it does mean a lot to you if you’re one of the ports in Roman empire. So it’s a neat example of enculturation as well.

Chris: Well, we’re about out of time today so were there any final remarks you want to make to our listeners?

Mike: Just that when we see these things, these are visual prayers and they still remain in our churches today. Many churches today incorporate these ancient symbols and we look at them and we’re puzzled by them and we’d like to understand what they mean. So really, this is a book about how to read ancient churches but it’s also about how to read modern churches because we’re sharing one communion with those ancient Christians. We’re all one family and it transcends time.

Chris: Well thank you, Mike. We really appreciate having a chance to hear a little more about these symbols with you and I think our listeners will learn a lot more about some of the other very interesting symbols that you have in the book if they’d choose to pick that up. Things like the fish to the ankh to the shepherd, the vine, the philosopher, the phoenix, the dolphin, the peacock, and it just goes on and on but I know that from what I’ve heard, people have been very enthralled with a lot of the detail you bring out in the book.

Mike: Well thanks so much Chris and thanks for having me on the show.

Chris: God bless!

Chris: Thank you for listening to the Catholic Spotlight, a production of the Catholic Company, your source for over 10,000 Catholic books and gifts that make a difference. Find us online at catholiccompany.com. You can find more podcasts from Catholic Spotlight at catholicspotlight.com and if you have a question, comment, or would like to be featured in our intro, call our voicemail at 206-426-1207. We would love to hear from you. You can find more info on being featured in our intro at catholicspotlight.com as well as announcements about future interviews. Have a great day and God bless!

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Transcript of Interview with Mike Aquilina about Signs and Mysteries. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Signs and Mysteries-Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1001117/Signs-Mysteries-Revealing-Ancient-Christian-Symbols/