THE VISION OF THE FOUR CREATURES
by Dom Prosper Gueranger
As the preaching made to Israel had its four great representatives,
Isaias, Jeremias, Ezechiel, and Daniel; so, likewise, would God have the
New Covenant to be embodied in the four Gospels, which were to make
known to the world the Life and teachings of his divine Son. The Holy
Fathers tell us that the Gospels are like the four streams which watered
the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:10), and that this Garden was a figure of the future Church.
Saint Matthew begins his Gospel with the human genealogy of the Son of
God, and has thus realized the prophetic type of the Man. Saint Mark
fulfils that of the Lion, for he commences his Gospel with the preaching
of John the Baptist, whose office as precursor of the Messias had been
foretold by Isaias, where he spoke of the Voice of one crying in the
wilderness, as the Lion that makes the desert echo with his roar. Saint
Luke is represented by an ox, because he begins his Gospel with the
revelation of what happened to Zachary in the Temple, where oxen, sheep
and other animals were offered, according to the Old Covenant, in
sacrifice to the Almighty. And Saint John, in his Gospel, soars like an
Eagle to the subject of Christ's divinity, and proves it indisputably
against the heresies of Ebion and Cerinthus.
(Photo courtesy of PictureObelix CC BY-SA 3.0 Austria)
(Photo courtesy of PictureObelix CC BY-SA 3.0 Austria)
