Christian artwork often contains four mysterious symbols—a man, a lion, and ox, and an eagle.
They’re known as the Tetramorph, and they go back to the second century of the Christian era, and they’re still in use today.
But what do they mean, where did they come from, and is there only one right way to interpret them?
In this episode, Jimmy Akin explores the mysterious origin and meaning of the Tetramorph.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
Here I have a copy of the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: New Testament.
And it’s got something really interesting on the cover.
You can see these five circles with drawings inside of them.
What are these all about?
Let’s get into it!
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Howdy, folks!
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The Center Circle
One of the things you’ll note about the cover is that—of the 5 circles on it—the one in the center is a lot bigger than the others.
That tells you it’s the most important, so what’s it showing us?
Well, it’s a drawing of a man, and he has a halo, so that tells us it’s a holy man.
It looks a lot like Jesus, and that is—in fact—who it is.
Among other things, this is confirmed by the fact that it has some Greek letters on the left and right sides of the picture.
To our eyes, the letters on the left look like I and C, while the letters on the right look like X and C.
But these are Greek letters rather than English ones, so the letters on the left aren’t I and C. They’re Iota and Sigma.
This Sigma may not look like other Sigmas you are familiar with, and that’s because in Greek writing the letter sigma changes form when it’s at the end of a word. So this is a final sigma, telling us that it’s at the end of a word.
You could try reading this as a two-letter word, with the vowel Iota and a final sigma, in which case it would sound like /is/.
And /is/ is a word in Greek! It means things like tendon, fiber, or vein. It’s also a city and a river in Persia.
But it would be hard to explain why such a word would appear on the cover of a Bible, so let’s look at the letters on the other side of the figure and see if they give us any help.
Here the letters look like X and C, but that’s another final sigma, so this is a two-letter representation of a word.
The first letter also isn’t an X. It’s the Greek letter chi, which is a rough noise. It’s kind of like a rough H or kind of like the sound of a cat hissing–/kh/
Unfortunately, it’s not a vowel, so there’s no good way to say these letters–/khs/. This is thus not a real word in Greek, so understood that way, it doesn’t mean anything.
But wait! There’s something we’ve overlooked!
Notice that above these letters there’s a squiggly line?
And there’s another squiggly line above the letters on the left side?
That helps us out! Because that tells us that the letters below them aren’t full words. They are words that have been abbreviated.
So the first word begins with iota and ends with sigma, while the second word begins with chi and ends with sigma.
What we’re seeing here is an ancient Christian writing custom that dates back to the earliest days of the Church. We don’t use it today, but back then there were no printing presses, and so every letter on every parchment had to be written by hand.
As a result, people would abbreviate when they could, especially for common words. And—as you might imagine—names for God were quite common in Christian writing, and so they were commonly abbreviated.
They were what came to be known as Nomina Sacra, which is Latin for Sacred Names.
But that’s the plural form. A single sacred name was known as a Nomen Sacrum.
So the ancient scribes would use a short abbreviation for a sacred name—or sometimes just a sacred word—and then they’d draw a line above the abbreviation to tell you that you were looking at a nomen sacrum.
And the thing was, there weren’t that many nomina sacra, so once you were familiar with the system, it was easy to guess which one was being abbreviated.
So how about here on our Bible cover? We’ve got 2 nomina sacra. The first begins with iota and ends with sigma, and the second begins with chi and ends with sigma. So what are we looking at?
Well, to the early Christians who were used to using this system, it would be obvious that the first was Iésous and the second was Christos.
So we were right! This is a picture of Jesus Christ!
And—just to make it obvious in case you’re not familiar with Greek—they have Jesus holding a book that says—in English—“I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”
That’s a direct quotation from Jesus from John 8:12, so that makes it extra clear, even to a Christian who knows only English, that this is a picture of Jesus.
And that reminds me of a joke that linguists—or people who study the phenomenon of language—tell.
You know what you call a Person who speaks 3 languages? Trilingual.
What do you call a Person who speaks 2 languages? Bilingual.
And what do you call a Person who speaks 1 language? That’s right, an American.
So the makers of this Bible have helpfully included a quotation from Jesus in English just to help us Americans out.
And that makes it clear that Jesus is here in the center of things, in the biggest, most important circle on the cover—as it should be.
The Tetramorph
But what’s going on with the four smaller circles?
The first one has a picture of what looks like an angel, or a winged human.
The second has a picture of what looks like a winged lion.
The third has a picture of what looks like a winged cow or ox.
And the fourth has a picture of an eagle, and eagles have, well, wings.
So maybe that first image wasn’t meant to be an angel but just a human with wings—like the other 3 winged images.
Why is Jesus surrounded by pictures of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle—all of whom have wings?
What do these 4 creatures have in common?
Well, at least in this depiction, one thing they have in common is that they’re all holding scrolls.
If you look at the lion, he’s unrolling a scroll in front of him.
Same thing if you look at the bull. He’s also unrolling a scroll in front of him.
The human has an unrolled scroll draped over his arms.
And the eagle doesn’t have hands, but it does have an unrolled scroll at the bottom in its feathers.
So these images—at least in this depiction—have something to do with scrolls.
And that lets us figure out what they symbolize, even if we haven’t seen them before.
Can you think of 4 scrolls—or books—that have a connection with Jesus?
Yeah! How about the 4 Gospels?
So that’s what these smaller images represent—the 4 Gospels that tell us the life of Christ.
This is a very common way of representing the Gospels in Christian art. You find it in sculptures and paintings and in pages printed in Bibles.
It’s such a common motif that it has its own name. It’s called The Tetramorph.
In Greek, Tetra- means Four, and Morphé means Form, Shape.
So The Tetramorph is The Four Shapes that represent the Gospels.
But there are still a lot of questions to be answered about the Tetramorph.
Like . . . where did it come from?
Ezekiel’s Visions
From a Christian perspective, the ultimate origin of the Tetramorph is in the book of Ezekiel, in the Old Testament.
In the book, the prophet Ezekiel sees two visions that both involve these symbols.
The first is in chapter 1 of the book, when Ezekiel is given a call to be a prophet, and he sees a vision of God sitting on his throne.
This throne is supported by 4 creatures who are unnamed here, though a sequel vision in chapter 10 of the book will identify them as cherubim.
One of the things we are told about cherubim in the Old Testament is that God rides on them. Psalm 18, we read:
Psalm 18:10, ESV
He rode on a cherub and flew;
he came swiftly on the wings of the wind.
That could sound like God was riding a cherub like men ride horses, but here in Ezekiel we see that God’s throne is being carried by cherubim.
His throne also has wheels, which are described as “a wheel within a wheel” (Ezekiel 1:16).
Now the latter phrase has set some people off, and they start talking about UFOs.
There’s a lot to say about this passage, and we can discuss it further—either in The Jimmy Akin Podcast or on Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World.
But for the moment, I’ll just say that this is not a UFO.
All of this fits with things that we see in Ancient Near Eastern art.
We see pictures of gods and kings sitting on thrones that have wheels.
Sometimes there are attendants moving the wheeled throne.
And sometimes the attendants are even holding up the throne off the ground.
And that’s basically what we’re seeing here: We see these four cherubim holding up God’s throne—which is often called his Chariot Throne because it has wheels—though in this case the cherubim throne attendants seem to come between the throne above and the wheels below.
What’s of interest to us are the cherubim themselves. Ezekiel sees a great storm cloud coming from the north, and he writes:
Ezekiel 1:5-6, 10-11, ESV
And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had a human likeness, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings.
As for the likeness of their faces, each had a human face. The four had the face of a lion on the right side, the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and the four had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces.
And their wings were spread out above. Each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies.
Now there are a few things to note.
First—even though in Ezekiel 10 the prophet will call them cherubim—here in Ezekiel 1 he refers to them as four living creatures.
He says that they each had four faces, and they also had four wings.
He describes them by saying they each had a human face. This would be the face on their front, toward the prophet Ezekiel.
They also had the face of a lion on their right side and the face of an ox on their left side.
Then, finally—on the back, facing away from the prophet Ezekiel—they had the face of an eagle.
When it comes to their wings, two of them were spread out so that they touched those of one of the other living creatures.
And their other two wings they used to modestly cover their bodies.
So that’s where the four shapes of the Tetramorph—the man, lion, ox, and eagle—ultimately come from in Christian terms.
But why these four shapes?
Well, there’s been considerable speculation on that, and we can discuss it further in a future episode.
However, here is one speculation, which is that they represent the strongest or most noble creatures in a given category.
Eagles are birds, and—unlike many birds—they happen to be predators, so they can be seen as stronger than other birds and thus the king of the birds.
Lions are wild animals, and they are also strong and predators, so we refer to them as the king of the beasts.
Oxen aren’t predators, but they are the strongest of the domestic animals, so you could think of them as the king of the domestic animals.
And we humans are the dominant life form on Earth. As his image-bearers, God put us in charge, so we’re the king of everything on Earth.
You can thus see the four shapes of the Tetramorph as representing the strongest, most noble creatures in each category: the king of the birds, the king of the wild land animals, the king of the domestic land animals, and the king of them all in the form of man.
At least, that’s one possibility of why these four shapes were chosen.
Isaiah’s Vision
But there’s more to know about the Tetramorph, and to understand it, we need to take a detour to the book of Isaiah.
There, in Isaiah 6, Isaiah has a parallel vision where God commissions him as a prophet, and he writes:
Isaiah 6:1-3, ESV
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple.
Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.
And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”
In Isaiah’s vision, he says that he sees seraphim rather than cherubim.
He doesn’t tell us how many he saw, but he says that each of them had six wings.
With two the modestly covered their faces, so they wouldn’t gaze on God’s holiness.
With two they modestly covered their feet—and feet is a euphemism in Hebrew for a man’s private parts.
And finally, with two they flew.
They also chanted the Trisagion or “Holy, holy, holy”—which is where we get the famous prayer we say at Mass.
Isaiah doesn’t mention what the bodies of the seraphim were like, but the evidence indicates that they had snake-like bodies. In fact, the term seraphim was also used for earthly snakes.
Flying snakes are often called Uraeuses, and we see them in Ancient Near Eastern artwork, such as from Egypt, where they are often depicted as guardians of sacred space.
So it makes sense that Isaiah would see them guarding God’s throne.
Sometimes, we even see depictions of seraphim or uraeuses with multiple sets of wings.
We talked about this in Episode 273 of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World Mysterious.fm/273 if you’d like to learn more.
But remember what Isaiah saw in his vision, because it’s about to intersect with something else.
John’s Vision
In Revelation 4, John sees a vision that combines elements from Ezekiel’s vision with the cherubim and Isaiah’s vision with the seraphim.
John sees God’s throne and writes:
Revelation 4:6-8, ESV
And around the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like an eagle in flight. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!”
Here—like both Ezekiel and Isaiah—John sees throne attendants.
Like in Ezekiel 1, John calls them four living creatures.
They’re also connected with the 4 shapes from Ezekiel:
The first is like a lion.
The second is like an ox.
The third has the face of a man.
And the fourth is like an eagle.
John’s four living creatures also incorporate elements from Isaiah’s seraphim.
Like the seraphim, they each have six wings, and they chant a version of the Trisagion or “Holy, holy, holy.”
So this isn’t simply a representation of Ezekiel’s cherubim. John’s four living creatures represent a combination of the cherubim and the seraphim.
Which is characteristic of how John sometimes fuses different symbols.
And it’s John’s four living creatures that really give us the Tetramorph.
Remember that Ezekiel saw four living creatures, each of which had four faces, one for each creature.
But that’s not what John sees. He sees four living creatures, each of which has one face.
So this is the more immediate source where we get the Tetramorph.
But . . . how did the Tetramorph get connected with the four Gospels?
Irenaeus’s Symbolism
The first person to connect the four shapes to the four Gospels may have been the early Church Father Irenaeus, who lived in the second century.
It may have been someone even earlier, but Irenaeus is the first person we have a record of connecting them.
Around A.D. 180, he wrote in his five-volume work titled Against Heresies. In it, he wrote about the four Gospels and said:
Against Heresies 3:11:8
It is not possible that there be more Gospels in number than these, or fewer. By way of illustration, since there are four zones in the world in which we live, and four cardinal winds, and since the Church is spread over the whole earth, and since the pillar and bulwark of the Church is the Gospel and the Spirit of life, consequently she has four pillars, blowing imperishability from all sides and giving life to men.
From these things it is manifest that the Word, who is Artificer of all things and is enthroned upon the cherubim and holds together all things, and who was manifested to men, gave us the fourfold Gospel, which is held together by the one Spirit. Just as David, when petitioning his [Christ’s] coming, said, “You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth” (Psalm 80:1).
For the cherubim, too, had four faces, and their faces are images of the dispensation of the Son of God. For the first one, he says, was like a lion, symbolizing his powerful, sovereign, and kingly nature. The second was like a calf, symbolizing his ministerial and priestly rank. The third animal had a face like a man, which manifestly describes his coming as man. The fourth is like a flying eagle, manifesting the gift of the Spirit hovering over the Church.
So Irenaeus definitely connects the four Gospels with the lion, ox, man, and eagle shapes seen by Ezekiel and John.
But how does Irenaeus connect them?
Here you may be in for something of a surprise.
Irenaeus continues:
Against Heresies 3:11:8
Now, the Gospels harmonize with these [creatures] on which Christ Jesus is enthroned.
For the Gospel according to John narrates the generation which is from the Father, sovereign, powerful, and glorious. It runs thus, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; and all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made” (John 1:1-3). On this account this Gospel is full of all confidence, for such is its characteristic.
Now, here Irenaeus isn’t explicit about which creature he associates with John’s Gospel, but he says this Gospel is full of confidence, and the one of the four creatures that we most associate with courage and confidence is the lion, so let’s provisionally put the lion in for John’s Gospel and see if Irenaeus’s other comments confirm that.
Irenaeus continues:
The Gospel according to Luke, since it has a priestly character, began with Zacharias the priest as he was offering incense to God. For the fatted calf which would be slaughtered when the younger son would be found was already being prepared.
That’s a reference to the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, where when the prodigal son returns home, the father in the parable slaughters the fatted calf to celebrate.
Cows or oxen were also used in priestly sacrifices in Israel, and Irenaeus says that Luke’s gospel has a priestly character, so he’s assigning the ox shape to Luke.
Now he says:
Matthew narrates his generation inasmuch as he is man. “The book,” he writes, “of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1); and again, “the birth of Christ took place in this way” (Matthew 1:18). This Gospel, then, belongs to the human form, and so throughout the Gospel the humble and meek man is retained.
So Irenaeus assigns the shape of the man to Matthew’s Gospel.
And finally he says:
Mark began with the prophetical Spirit which came down to men from on high. “The beginning,” he says, “of the Gospel . . . as it is written in Isaias the prophet” (Mark 1:1-2), pointing out the winged image [i.e., the eagle] of the Gospel. For this reason he made a compendious and cursory announcement [of the Gospel], for it has a prophetic character.
So Irenaeus assigns the shape of the eagle to Mark’s Gospel.
And these other three identifications confirm that Irenaeus identified John’s Gospel with a lion.
But wait a minute, you may say. That’s not how I learned the symbols.
What’s going on here?
A Step Back
First let’s take a step back and make sure that we’re understanding the images of the Tetramorph in their original context.
In Ezekiel—where they first enter the Judeo-Christian mindset—what do they represent?
Well, as we saw, they represent the faces of Ezekiel’s four living creatures, which he later calls cherubim.
And what do these creatures do?
They carry God’s throne. They’re throne attendants.
Do they have anything to do with relating the life story of Jesus Christ?
No. . . . Certainly not in the literal sense of the text. The life story of Jesus hasn’t even been lived yet.
Okay, now the Tetramorph symbols don’t appear in Isaiah, so we can skip that vision.
But they do appear in Revelation 4, and that happened after Christ became incarnate and lived his earthly life.
So what role do the shapes play there?
Revelation 4:6-8, ESV
And around the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with the face of a man, and the fourth living creature like an eagle in flight. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and within, and day and night they never cease to say, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!”
Well, they represent the forms of the four living creatures. And they don’t carry God’s throne, but they are around the throne, on each side of the throne. So they’re also throne attendants.
They also seem to refer to Jesus Christ when they say, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.” That reference to being in the past, being now, and coming in the future does sound like Jesus Christ, but they’re not relating his full biography.
So—except at this very general level—there’s no clear connection to the content of the four Gospels. They’re not relating the details of Jesus’ biography. In the literal sense of the text, they are throne attendants who worship God and Christ.
Also, in both Ezekiel and Revelation, are the four living creatures human beings like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were?
No. They’re heavenly creatures. Ezekiel identifies them as cherubim, and John presents them as a fusion of the cherubim and the seraphim, not human beings.
So do they represent the four Evangelists in the literal sense of the text?
No, they don’t.
So how did they become associated with the four Evangelists?
Well, so far as we know, Irenaeus linked them. But he also linked the four Gospels to other things.
Against Heresies 3:11:8
It is not possible that there be more Gospels in number than these, or fewer. By way of illustration, since there are four zones in the world in which we live, and four cardinal winds, and since the Church is spread over the whole earth, and since the pillar and bulwark of the Church is the Gospel and the Spirit of life, consequently she has four pillars, blowing imperishability from all sides and giving life to men.
From these things it is manifest that the Word, who is Artificer of all things and is enthroned upon the cherubim and holds together all things, and who was manifested to men, gave us the fourfold Gospel, which is held together by the one Spirit. Just as David, when petitioning his [Christ’s] coming, said, “You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth” (Psalm 80:1).
For the cherubim, too, had four faces, and their faces are images of the dispensation of the Son of God.
He linked them to the four zones in the world in which we live—that is, North, South, East, and West.
He also linked them to the four cardinal winds.
He called the four Gospels four pillars of the Church.
And then he linked them to the four faces of the cherubim.
But all of these are poetic connections, not literal ones. Notice that Irenaeus only says he’s bringing these other things in by way of illustration.
It’s not like when you drive up north you’re driving into the region of Matthew and when you drive East you’re driving into the region of Mark.
It’s not like when a wind blows from the South, it’s a wind from St. Luke, or when a wind blows from the West, it’s from St. John.
All of these connections are poetic, and we shouldn’t take them super literally.
So the four living creatures in both Ezekiel and Revelation do not literally represent the four Gospels. They literally represent God’s throne attendants.
And any connection between them and the Gospels is poetic rather than literal.
What Irenaeus is doing is creatively mapping the four shapes onto the four Gospels, but there’s more than one way you can do this.
In fact, there are 24 different ways that you could map the four shapes onto the four Gospels, and different people have done it different ways.
As we’ve seen, St. Irenaeus identified Matthew as a man, Mark as an eagle, Luke as an ox, and John as a lion.
But other people made different assignments.
A few decades after Irenaeus, St. Hippolytus of Rome identified Matthew as a lion, Mark as a man, Luke as an ox, and John as an eagle.
In the mid 300s, Pseudo-Athanasius identified Matthew as a man, Mark as an ox, Luke as a lion, and John as an eagle.
A bit later, St. Jerome identified Matthew as a man, Mark as a lion, Luke as an ox, and John as an eagle.
A bit after that, St. Augustine used the same scheme as Hippolytus and identified Matthew as a lion, Mark as a man, Luke as an ox, and John as an eagle.
And there have been other identifications as well.
So it’s not like everyone has identified the Gospels the same way.
Historically, the most popular identification has been Jerome’s, but his is far from the only one.
In this list alone, we have three doctors of the Church—Irenaeus, Jerome, and Augustine—providing three different identifications.
So very intelligent people who know the Gospels very well can make different identifications.
This is because this is a matter of creative imagination, not rigorous deduction. And it depends on which characteristics of the Gospels you choose to focus on.
In other words, we’re inventing these connections, not discovering them.
Conclusion
So where does that leave us? If the Tetramorph is an exercise in creative imagination rather than something that is rigorously deduced, should we maybe abandon it?
No, of course not!
It’s a staple of Christian art, and—especially in ages when literacy wasn’t common—it really helped people!
It still does that today, as artistic representations of the elements of faith always help people.
The fact that this has become so common in the history of Christian art that it has gotten its own name—the Tetramorph—testifies to the value people have found in it.
We just shouldn’t act like there’s only one true Tetramorph—only one right way to do it.
In fact, I kind of like the way the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible has done it.
You’ll note that they have the four shapes of the Tetramorph here on the cover, but they don’t label each one.
If you look at the sequence they use the shapes in, they’re suggestive of St. Jerome’s scheme, but they don’t label them, so—in principle—you can match them to whichever Gospels you want.
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