Signs and Mysteries: What You Didn't Know About that Fish Symbol

So we all know about why the fish symbol is used by Christians. Don't we? Well, maybe we do ... and maybe we don't. Or at least, maybe we don't know everything about it. As Mike Aquilina is ready and willing to point out. Love these details, don't ya know?

But we have not yet touched on the original and the deepest meaning of the fish. The fish is the primal symbol of the Holy Eucharist. One need not be Catholic to recognize this fact. Erwin Goodenough, an agnostic scholar at Yale University, wrote that the Gospel According to John — which he called “the primitive Gospel” — gives us “the earliest explicit acceptance of the fish as a eucharistic symbol and as a symbol of the Savior who was eaten in the Eucharist.” John does this, in his sixth chapter, by moving immediately from Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes to the Bread of Life discourse, His most famous eucharistic sermon. Jesus is the bread come down from heaven, multiplied for the multitude. At the end of John’s Gospel, we see the figures of fish and bread return as Jesus prepares a lakeside meal for the disciples (Jn 21:9). For the early Christians, all of these events prefigured the life-giving blessing that Jesus bestowed upon the Church. The Protestant scholar of archeology Graydon Snyder concluded: “the fish was, with the bread, the primary symbol for the Eucharist, the meal that developed, maintained, and celebrated the new community of faith.”

No text could make the association as clearly as one particular depiction in Rome’s Catacomb of St. Callistus. There we see two fish on a gravestone, one fish bearing bread, the other bearing a cluster of grapes: the eucharistic bread, the eucharistic wine . . . and the symbolic eucharistic fish.

Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols
by Mike Aquilina

Signs and Mysteries: Christ is a ... Dolphin?

I must admit that one of the pleasures of this book is finding out completely new and surprising symbolism that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Jesus as a dolphin. Hmmmmmm. But when it is explained, of course, it makes perfect sense and I will never look at a dolphin without remembering this.

Christian sailors likened Jesus Christ to the dolphin. Pastoral images of the lamb were remote from their experience. But they knew countless stories of dolphins as rescuers, guides, and friends. As the dolphins appeared in the ancient legends, so Jesus served in life: rescuer, guide, and friend.

Dolphins appear frequently on the walls of the catacombs. As symbols of Christ, they bear the souls of the saints to glory. Sometimes they appear crushing the head of a sea monster or an octopus, representing Satan. Often, they are shown twisted around a trident or an anchor, suggesting Christ on the Cross. In underground Rome there is even an image of a dolphin with an exposed heart.

The dolphin usually symbolizes Jesus Christ. In some instances, however, the dolphin seems to represent not Christ, but Christians. Thus the dolphin, like the lamb, holds an ambiguous position for the ancients: the lamb can represent Christ as “Lamb of God” — or the Christian as member of the Good Shepherd’s “little flock.” These dolphin-Christians appear sometimes in pairs, both swimming toward a monogram or other symbol of Christ.

Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols
by Mike Aquilina

Signs & Mysteries: Incorporating History into the Sacraments

I like the excitement of thinking of how early Christians and those ever since have understood the reality of salvation history as part of our history. Also, the idea of these symbols being lovingly passed down to us by our Christian forebears is like something out of a mystery novel that engages us in every way possible ... heart, mind, and soul.

But the art of nascent Christianity intended to “incorporate the events of history into the sacrament.” What does that mean? It means that, by participating in the rites of the Church, each and every Christian was stepping into the stream of salvation history. Each was taking his or her place alongside Abraham, Moses, and David, Peter and Paul and the martyrs. God’s saving action was not a matter of the long-ago past or a vague and distant future, but a reality of the most immediate present — it was really present, and experienced in the baptismal water, the oil of anointing, and in the bread and wine of the liturgy. This is the overarching theme that runs through the vast array of symbols we find on the walls, lamps, rings, medals, cups, caskets, coins, and flasks of Christian antiquity.

This was more than theory, more than theology, more than the excitement of sharing a code or cracking a code. St. Cyril of Jerusalem talked about the difference these symbols made in the everyday spirituality of ordinary Christians. “The Savior comes in different forms for the benefit of each person. To those who lack joy, He becomes a Vine; and to those who wish to enter, He stands as a Door. To those who need to offer up their prayers, He stands as a mediating High Priest. To those who have sins, He becomes a Sheep, that He may be sacrificed for them. He becomes all things to all men, keeping what He is in His own nature. “

The lamb on the lamp, then, was a reminder of a truth at the heart of life — a truth worth dying for.

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We have tried in this book to provide a key to understanding not only the early-Christian symbols, but the early Christians’ experience of these symbols as well. We wanted to recover the freshness and urgency of the original images — to show the symbols as they first appeared and explain how they “worked,” using the words of the early Christians themselves. This material will help to demonstrate the significance of each particular symbol in the life of the Church, in history, and in the lives of individual believers.

In depicting the symbols, we tried, again whenever possible, to model our illustrations on the real archeological remains of the era of the Fathers. We have, however, restored them to some semblance of their original condition — again, to enable modern readers to experience the symbols not as artifacts but as personal messages, from one Christian generation to another.

Signs and Mysteries: Revealing Ancient Christian Symbols
by Mike Aquilina