The Moral Compass and Mortal Slumber: Divine and Human Reason in the Bibles Moralisées

Abstract

In the thirteenth-century Bibles moralisées there appears a new iconographical type in which God the Father, and figures depicted in moralising illustrations, are shown with a compass. This article argues that these images throw light on the medieval concept of reason and its role in the Divine Economy. In these French Capetian Bibles, the compass is the symbol of divine or human reason, depending on the context where it occurs. When depicted in the scene of Creation in the frontispieces, the compass is the instrument of Christ-Logos as Divine Reason, used to impose God’s rational order on formless matter, but also to initiate the Divine Economy. The compass is depicted again, in the same sense, at the beginning of the New Testament, as a ‘dynamic sign’ which links the start of God’s plan for humankind salvation during Creation with the re-enactment of the Divine Economy through the Incarnation. When a compass occurs elsewhere, in a moralised image for a biblical story which takes place in the earthly realm, the instrument becomes the tool used by human reason to discern between good and evil. The analysis which leads to this interpretation is borne out by an examination of related themes in the Bibles moralisées: those of the sleep of mortal reason, and of the endurance of Divine Reason as a guide to true knowledge.