Veneration and the Evangelist Symbol

The Orthodox Church commemorates the Apostle and Evangelist Matthew on November 16, and with the whole company of the Twelve at the Synaxis of the Holy Apostles on June 30. In iconography he is figured by the winged man or angel — one of the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation — assigned to him because his Gospel opens with the human descent and birth of Christ. This file treats his feast and hymnography and the history of the evangelist symbol, including the variant patristic assignments and the standard later scheme.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Feast and the Hymnography

In the Orthodox calendar the principal feast of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist Matthew falls on November 16 (Synaxaristes; OCA and Greek Orthodox calendars), and he is commemorated again, with all the Twelve, at the Synaxis of the Holy Glorious and All-Praised Apostles on June 30. The hymnography for November 16 dwells on the great reversal at the heart of his life — the publican made an evangelist, the collector of unjust gain made the scribe of the good news. The kontakion and stichera contrast the tax-booth he abandoned with the Gospel he was given to write, and celebrate that Christ “did not despise the tax-gatherer” but called him from the receipt of custom to the apostolate, so that “the hand that counted money” was made to “write the words of life.” The liturgical memory thus fastens not on the legendary mission and martyrdom (which the sources transmit so variously) but on the firm and scriptural center: the call, the Gospel, and the mercy that made an apostle of a sinner. Matthew is also named in the litanies and dismissals among the holy, glorious, and all-praised apostles, and his Gospel is read through the Church’s year as the appointed lections of the Matthean cycle.

The Four Living Creatures

The symbol by which Matthew is known in Christian art derives from the four living creatures of the prophetic and apocalyptic visions: the four-faced cherubim of Ezekiel, each with the face of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle (Ezek. 1:5–10; 10:14), and the four living creatures around the throne in the Apocalypse — “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 a flying eagle” (Rev. 4:6–7). From at least the late second century Christian writers connected these four faces with the four Gospels, taking the fourfold creatures as a figure of the fourfold Gospel that the one Spirit gives to the one Church.

The earliest such connection is in Irenaeus, who in his defense of the four-Gospel canon argues that there are four Gospels because there are four “principal winds” and four corners of the earth, and aligns the four living creatures with the four evangelists (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8; ANF 1). It is important to note, however, that Irenaeus’s assignment is not the one later standardized: in Irenaeus the man is assigned to Matthew (because his Gospel sets out the human birth and lineage of Christ), but the lion is assigned to John, the ox (calf) to Luke, and the eagle to Mark. The face of the man as Matthew’s emblem is thus already fixed in the earliest scheme, but the assignment of the other three creatures varied among the Fathers — Augustine, for instance, gave a different distribution again (the lion to Matthew, the man to Mark, in De consensu 1.6) — before the Western tradition settled on the arrangement that became standard.

The Standard Scheme and the Winged Man

The assignment that prevailed and became the conventional one — fixed above all by Jerome in the prologue to his Commentary on Matthew — is: the man to Matthew, the lion to Mark, the ox to Luke, and the eagle to John (Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, prologue; NPNF II/3). The reasoning Jerome gives for Matthew’s emblem is the one already implicit in Irenaeus: Matthew is figured by the man (often shown winged, as an angel) because his Gospel begins with the human genealogy and the birth of Christ as the son of David and son of Abraham — it opens, as it were, from the human nature of the Savior. The winged man or angel became Matthew’s settled symbol in both East and West, appearing beside him in Gospel-book illuminations, in the pendentives and domes of churches (where the four creatures surround the Pantocrator), and in the iconography of the four evangelists. [Disputed: the assignment of the four living creatures (Ezek. 1; Rev. 4) to the evangelists varied in the patristic period — Irenaeus (*AH* 3.11.8) gives the man to Matthew, the eagle to Mark, the lion to John, the ox to Luke; Augustine (*De consensu* 1.6) gives the lion to Matthew, the man to Mark; the scheme that became standard, fixed by Jerome (*Comm. on Matthew*, prologue) and widely received, gives the man to Matthew, the lion to Mark, the ox to Luke, and the eagle to John. The man as Matthew's emblem is constant from Irenaeus onward; the other three were settled only later.]

The Symbol’s Meaning

For the Orthodox tradition the evangelist symbols are not arbitrary tokens but a theological figure of the fourfold Gospel and of the aspect of Christ each evangelist sets at the forefront. The winged man assigned to Matthew proclaims that this is the Gospel of the Incarnation in its human descent — the Gospel that opens “the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1), that traces the human line, recounts the human birth, and presents the Messiah in his manhood and his lineage. The four creatures together, surrounding the throne and the Pantocrator, declare the one Christ proclaimed in four Gospels by the one Spirit to the one Church — Irenaeus’s argument made visible (see Icons and Iconoclasm). Thus the symbol of the man unites the two ends of Matthew’s story: the evangelist who began his Gospel with the human face of God is himself figured by the human face among the living creatures, the publican-turned-apostle who wrote the most human opening of the four Gospels.

See Also

References

  • The Holy Gospel according to Matthew 1:1. With Ezek. 1:5–10; 10:14; Rev. 4:6–7. Cited by chapter and verse.
  • Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies 3.11.8 (the fourfold Gospel and the four living creatures). Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1.
  • Jerome. Commentary on Matthew, prologue (the standard assignment of the symbols). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 3.
  • Augustine of Hippo. The Harmony of the Gospels 1.6 (his variant assignment). NPNF I/6.
  • The Great Synaxaristes of the Orthodox Church, November 16 and June 30. Trans. Holy Apostles Convent, Buena Vista, CO.