Another look at the disappearing Christ: corporeal and spiritual vision in early medieval images

In the Crucifixion in the Odbert Gospels, the Evangelist is shown holding the book, but in this case not writing. That the book includes not just John's corporeal witnessing of the Crucifixion, however, but also his all-encompassing spiritual visions is established by the juxtaposition of the narrative scene and the Evangelist portrait on the opposite page. The placement of the Crucifixion scene in the initial that begins the prologue of John's Gospel, a text affirming Christ's celestial preexistence and Incarnation, makes the same point. Furthermore, as we have seen, Christ's disappearance at the Ascension enabled all the Apostles to share this Johannine vision of the eternal, divine Christ, and that explains why the Ascension is depicted on this page even though the event is not mentioned in John's Gospel.(169)

Ultimately the iconographic linkage of Christ's disappearance, his perpetual heavenly coexistence with the Father, and John's spiritual visions can be traced to the same inspiration, namely, the illustration of the Apostolic Creed in the Utrecht Psalter [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED]. We have already seen that the psalter's juxtaposition of an anonymous apostolic "author" of the Creed beholding the Trinity and the Virgin, and the Apostles watching Christ ascend into heaven, helped provoke the new iconography of the disappearing Christ.(170) It is equally significant that the author figure stands directly behind John the Evangelist, who keenly observes Christ's Crucifixion. The close proximity of the two figures is only one of several factors that seem to have led the Anglo-Saxons to identify this author figure specifically as the visionary John. Because the Evangelist, as one of the Apostles, was also an author of the Creed, this identification would have been entirely appropriate. The Johannine association would also have been prompted by the author figure's witnessing of Christ's celestial enthronement next to the Father, since, like the Creed, John's Gospel prologue affirmed that the Word was with God in heaven before the Incarnation. Indeed, the prologue illustration in the Grimbald Gospels confirms the association, for in that picture, which also derived in part from the psalter's Creed illustration, John the Evangelist replaces the unspecified author of the Creed as the observer of the Trinity and the Virgin.(171) At the same time, the association of the two figures in the Psalter influenced the Anglo-Saxon conception of John writing at the Crucifixion; through the new iconography, John assumed the identity and character of the visionary author of the Creed as well as of his Gospel, both of which are texts that manifest his spiritual visions of Christ's heavenly and earthly existence.(172)

The realization that the disappearing Christ and the visionary John are interrelated iconographic phenomena brings us closer to answering the question of why these innovations should have occurred in England around the year 1000. By the turn of the millennium, the monastic reform begun a half century earlier under the aegis of Dunstan of Canterbury (d. 988), AEthelwold of Winchester (d. 984), and Oswald of Ramsey (d. 992) was an established fact.(175) The new Christological and Johannine imagery appears first in Anglo-Saxon books that were created by and for monks. The Odbert Gospels was made in the monastic scriptorium of St. Bertin at the behest of its abbot, and Archbishop Bernward of Hildesheim, though not a monk himself, commissioned his Gospel book as a gift to the newly founded abbey church of St. Michael.(174) Moreover, as O'Reilly has recently suggested, the Anglo-Saxon reform fostered the new imagery of the visionary John, especially the motif of the Evangelist writing at the Crucifixion, as a figure and model of the contemplative monastic life.(175)