Holy Prophet Jonah: Resurrecting The Body and Saving The City
The icon
of the Holy Prophet Jonah is one of the the most ancient images of
Christianity. Like the story of this prophet, his image is a powerful symbol of
death and resurrection. I want to look closely at the story of Jonah and its
iconography because it brings together almost all the elements I have been
pointing to in my articles for OAJ, elements relating to death and glory,
linked closely to the body and to the arts. I have heretofore presented these
symbolic elements under a basic leitmotiv, how the paradox of death is a moving
away from a center into an always further periphery. I have constantly alluded
to the primordial image of the garments of skin added by God to Adam’s nature
at the Fall and how they both show his exile from the Garden and protect him
within that exile.
The
structure of Jonah’s story is based on a few key elements, and most of these
have to do with inversion, a surprise or a “switch” happening at the very “end”
which turns life into death and death into life. I have explained elsewhere how
in our liturgical tradition, Christ’s harrowing of hell is presented as a trick
played on Hades, a surprise and inversion where Hades having brought the author
of life into death created the opposite effect of what was intended. Like
trying to capture light by bringing it into darkness, Christ filled death with
life as he entered the pit. With Jonah, one of these switches is of course
basic repentance which plays a strong role in the story, but we must be careful
not to limit our vision simply to a moral change, because to do so will blind
us to some of the more ontological aspects of the “metanoia” which underlies
the story.
The very
tone of Jonah’s story exemplifies the inversions seen within as it is really
the closest thing to a comedy found in the Bible. The comic aspect is not a
detail, for as Jonah goes to his extremes he in fact reproduces (or rather
anticipates) the movement of Christ down into Hades, then back up and then
ascending to Heaven, but he does so almost despite himself, whining and
complaining as a parody of the actual meaning. Yet in the story, like a pearl
hidden in a shell (or like a prophet hidden in a fish), is Jonah’s prayer, one
of the most powerful poetic expressions of death and resurrection found
anywhere.
The first
sign of the inversion in the text is that God asks Jonah to go East to Nineveh,
the Capital city of the Assyrian empire, the current enemy of Israel, but Jonah
goes West towards Tarshish to flee God. This is very interesting already,
because the West is usually associated with darkness, death and the edge of the
world, and this is where he will end up, at the “bottom” of the world. With
Jonah asleep in the bottom of the boat, we have the first image of death, of the
body and of the arts brought together. Jonah asleep in the bottom of the boat
is already his being “dead” yet protected through the water by a “shell”.(1) It
is of course an image which refers to Noah, the flood and the animals at the
bottom of the ark. This relationship was also made by early Christian artists
by linking Jonah to Noah (or even to Daniel) in the catacombs, those caves
where the dead were buried.
The pagan
foreigners on the boat find out through lots that Jonah is the cause of their
suffering such a horrible storm, but when Jonah tells them to throw him in the
water, they do not want to do it, they hesitate. This situation is of course a
mirror image, an inversion of how Jonah will later be angry that God will not
destroy Nineveh, which is the cause of Israel’s suffering. Also, unlike Nineveh
which repents before being destroyed because of Jonah’s warning, Jonah does not
heed the foreign mariners’ request to invoke his god, so Jonah does not repent
until he is “dead”, at the bottom of the water.
Jonah is
thrown in the water, and after three days in the fish, the big flip occurs, the
great repentance, and we will see the rest of the story like an almost perfect
mirror image of the first part. It is very important to notice that Jonah’s
fish is traditionally a Sea Monster. The monster, as I have explained
elsewhere, is the perfect image of the limit, the place where categories fall
apart through a hybridization which is the death of identity and particulars.
There are
small ivory statues of Jonah dated as early as the 3rd century. In this series of statues, one sees the major
elements of the story, Jonah going into the fish, coming out, Jonah praying and
Jonah sleeping under the vine. The image of Jonah was also painted in the
catacombs along other Old Testament prefigurations of death and resurrection
such as Noah's Ark, Daniel in the lion's den or the three youths in the fiery
furnace.
The mouth
of the Monster becomes a strong image of Hades in iconography. It appears in
Western images of the Harrowing of Hell as well as in later Orthodox images of
he Last Judgement or of the Divine Ladder. We need to see these elements as
supporting each other in their meaning. So in Jonah’s iconography, the
sea-monster is something which has persisted from the very early centuries
until now.
In the
deep, in the bottom of the waters, Jonah utters his prayer. Jonah’s prayer is a
powerful bringing together of so many aspects of the Christian symbolism of
death and the solution to death. In the first part of the prayer Jonah speaks
of his state, of being surrounded by the waters. This surrounding is the very
image of periphery for death comes from the outside, the “outer darkness” . He
compares death to the “belly” of the fish, to a prison with bars, to a cave or
pit, he also speaks of the “lowliness”, of the depths, of his being at the
bottom of the world, the root of the mountains. He says that he has been
“banished” from the sight of God, and in this he is using the same Hebrew word
as Adam and Eve being banished from the Garden. We need to remember that he is
using all these images as he has been swallowed by a fish, trapped yet covered
by an animal “garment”.
And in
that final moment he gives us the solution:
“When my life was ebbing away,
I remembered you, Lord,
and my prayer rose to you,
to your holy temple. (Jonah 2:7)
This is
the key, the key to all of it. This is the key to how all human action, all
human art and culture can be transformed. It is memory and humility- knowing we
are dead and remembering God. As Ilias the Presbiter tells us in the
Philokalia:
There is nothing more fearful than the
thought of death, or more wonderful than remembrance of God. For the first
induces the grief that leads us to salvation, and the second bestows gladness.
‘I remembered God,’ says the prophet, ‘and I rejoiced’ (Ps. 77:3. LXX). And
Sirach says: ‘Be mindful of your death and you will not sin’ (Eccles. 7:36).
You cannot possess the remembrance of God until you have experienced the
astringency of the thought of death.
Starting
with the Eucharist itself, memory is that attachment to our origin within
distance from that origin, it is the link which changes periphery from death
into glory. Memory can be expressed as both our remembering God or God
remembering us. Just as in the Fish, Jonah remembers God before being ejected
from the water, so too in the Ark it is said that God remembered Noah before he
was freed from the waters(Gen. 8:1). But just as Ilias the Presbiter tells us,
we cannot remember God without the thought or the awareness of death. It is
indeed humility, the knowledge of how low we are in relation to God, coupled
with our remembering of God which creates the true ontological link between the
highest and lowest and which permits us to be transformed. Memory “anchors” us
to the Divine Ladder and the level we find ourselves on the ladder does not
matter as much as being anchored to it, looking up to God’s “divine
Temple”. This is true repentance, and
this is what we see Jonah praying, both knowing his death and remembering God,
so that when he cries “From the Belly of Death I called upon the Lord”(Jonah
2:2), he could also say: “and my prayer rose to you, to to your holy
temple.”(Jonah 2:7)
All of
this is also the point of baptism, for baptism is not only dying, a sinking to
the bottom of the deep, but in that sinking is operated that double movement
which can be summed up in the “Memory of God”, the Memory which operates the
inversion between death and glory.
As we
return to Jonah, we will begin to see how the inversion, the flip which
happened at the bottom of the water will begin to play itself out in the rest
of the story. Jonah goes East to Nineveh and announces that God will destroy
the city in 40 days. The city is made to be yet another image of death for the
text gives us the detail that Nineveh takes 3 days to cross, and is therefore
analogical to Jonah’s descent into the waters. The city is also made an image
of death in two other ways. First it is a foreign city, the city of the enemy,
and I have explained in other articles the relationship made in the Bible
between the city and the arts with Cain and the foreigner. Secondly, twice the
text gives us a very strange detail about animals, in fact this is the only
place I know of in the Bible where it is said that animals fast. The fasting of
animality is the very image of the conversion of flesh while at the same time
continuing the inversion of the story, for unlike the fish that swallowed Jonah
the Israelite in the deep, the “foreign animals” fast in the city. Of course
God no longer intends to destroy the city once the foreigners have repented,
and because the city is made akin to the fish and to Jonah’s tree days, it is
almost as if the prayer Jonah made becomes the prayer of the city itself by
which it is saved. As I said earlier, the inversion here is that unlike the
foreigners in the boat who wanted to save Jonah who would not repent, now Jonah
wants God to destroy the foreign city despite the fact that it has repented.
The
excess of Jonah is seen powerfully in his now moving out of the city to the
East where the inversion of the story will reach its extreme. Jonah was once at
the far “West” and now we could say that he has come to the far “East”, instead
of being in the bottom of the ship built by men to be protected by the water he
is now covered with a plant that God grows next to him so that he is protected
from the sun and the wind (read spirit). The moving East and being protected by
leaves of a plant is like a kind of rewind of Jonah and Man in general, moving
out of the deep pit, through the city and into the garden of Eden where Adam
and Eve had made garments of fig leaves to protect themselves.
But those
coverings are shown by God to be inadequate, and unlike when Jonah was in the
bottom of death and wanted to live, now he is in the glory of the sun and the
spirit and wants to die! And this is where God reminds Jonah of the city, of
its population and its animals and how God could not destroy such a great city
where “they do not know their right from their left”, a very mysterious
statement that certainly refers to a kind of innocence in regards to the Tree
of Knowledge. And so the city is seen as the “middle” place, not the “naked”
facing of God, not the impossible vision of the invisible Father, but rather
the glorified body, the Church, the New Jerusalem anchored in the vision of the
incarnate Christ. And so this is the hope of human activity, the joy of of the
liturgical artist and any artist who wishes to participate through the building
of a glorious city, a city that can hopefully both remember death and remember
God all at once.
Source: https://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/jonah/
