Image of Astonishment

Here’s the first page of Ephesians from a sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript from France (now in the Mazarin Library in Paris):

It’s a beautiful page of script surrounded by elaborate floral and geometric designs. That initial letter is a stylized P, for Paul, as in Paulus apostolus christi iesu etc. Only verses 1-7 fit on this page (it breaks off with “redemption through his blood”), but if you know Ephesians, you know that’s only about half of Paul’s opening benediction. The “blessed be God who has blessed us” sentence runs through verse 14, and it has nearly everything in it.

You want to be careful about over-interpreting the margins of a manuscript, because the artists, bless ’em, often had a lot of license to do whatever made them happy out there on the borders. What made this artist happy was a floral frenzy (strawberries and columbine among acanthus forms and other identifiable blossoms) and seven golden rectangles jostling around. That’s an apt setting for Ephesians 1: a fruitful, fragrant, abundant-nearly-to-excess, structured-but-not-reducible-to-strict-order explosion of the good news of God’s decisive blessing. So maybe, just maybe, this skillful illustrator who was hired to make the page pretty was also inspired by the meaning of the words at the center of it.

Tucked in among all that floral decor, the artist provided a few little anthropomorphic animal figures in the margins. This whole manuscript has them (here are the other pages), but just look for a moment at the little guy at the bottom of this Ephesians page:

He’s all like, wow. Blown away by the block of text above him! Rocked off his mount by the blessing we’re blessed with by the blessed God. I don’t even know what he is or what he’s riding: He is some kind of hairy monkey man riding some kind of fanciful bird-camel. Here’s a great close-up:

The blue and gold acanthus scrolls downward at him, or maybe lifts him up toward itself and its source. The plumage of his ride coruscates with golden highlights. Whatever he is (God knows, and the artist may also), his posture and his gesture are eloquent and apt: astonishment at what is said in Ephesians 1.