Pope Leo XIV has announced his motto and coat of arms, a long -standing tradition for those who are in the ranks of bishops, cardinals and potatoes. The choice of symbols and words reflects the person’s experience.
The León shield is divided diagonally: the upper half shows a white lily on blue background, and the lower shows the emblem of the order of St. Augustine, order to which it belongs. His motto says: “In brillo unam”, translated as “in one, we are one”, which are words of St. Augustine of his exhibition on Psalm 127, paragraph 2: “I understand one in the only Christ. Therefore, you are many, and you are one; we are many, and we are one.”
When choosing this motto, León includes Agustín’s identifying symbol, a heart pierced by an arrow.
As art historian, I explain how the Renaissance artists portrayed Agustín’s humility, and what the motion of the motto could tell us about the new Pope.
The Order of San Agustín
Agustín lived at the end of the fourth century, finally serving as Bishop of Hippo in North Africa for 34 years. The Agustina Order was founded in 1244 after several communities of hermit people living in the Tuscan region, Italy, asked Pope Innocent IV to form a single order. The Pope gave them the rule of St. Augustine as a life code, which said: “Do not call anything yours, but everything is yours in common; do not look for the vain and the earthly.”
Agustín’s status as scholar, theologian and administrator made him a widely represented saint. For example, it appears in a window in charge of a shepherd in 1622, in which he holds in his lap the symbol of the heart crossed by the arrow that rests on a book.
The image is related to a phrase of Agustín’s book “The Confessions”: “You had crossed our hearts with your love, and we carry your words, so to speak, pushed through our entrails.”
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In this window, the saint is seen talking to a child. The translation of 1483 of the “Golden Legend”, a collection of Santos lives explains that while fighting for writing his treatise “About the Trinity”, Agustín walked along the sea’s shore and saw a child filling a small well with water.
When the boy explained that he was taking the ocean to the well, Agustín scolded him for being silly. The boy replied that he would prefer to put all the sea water into the well before Agustín could introduce the mystery of the Trinity into his limited human understanding. Trinity is the Christian concept that God is not a single person, but three: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, united in a single divine and eternal nature.
This humility lesson was widely represented over the centuries. In 1482, an altarpiece of the painter and sculptor Michael Pacher shows Agustín with a child at his feet holding a spoon.
Agustín’s erudition
Agustín’s legacy includes not only “the confessions”, one of the most read books of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, and “On the Trinity”, but many others, including “The City of God”, a monumental work of more than 1,000 pages.
The painting of Sandro Botticelli of 1480 of Agustín in his study shows the saint looking for the clarity of thought while pauses in his writing.
Dress simply with a long white garment and a mantle, he has put aside his bishop’s miter, an official hat, also a gesture of humility. His study is crowded with books; On the right, behind his head, a book open to the study of geometry.
Botticelli tries to show the saint as a scholar in antiquity by placing an old and discredited celest model that represents the earth in the center of the universe, with the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars turning around. We, with modern knowledge, understand that despite his intelligence, Agustín cannot know everything.
Leo has been both a scholar and a shepherd. He served as a professor of Canon Law and Primitive Christian Theology in San Carlos and San Marcelo, a Seminar in Peru.
However, like the founder of his order, his words in this first Mass reflected his humility when he said that his appointment as Pope was “both a cross and a blessing” and spoke of the responsibility that he and the cardinals have in the world.
*Virginia Raguin is a distinguished professor of Humanities Emeritas from the College of the Santa Cruz
This article was originally published in The Conversation/Reuters.
