Pope Leo XIV has introduced his motto and coat of fingers – a long-held custom for the ones within the ranks of bishops, cardinals and popes. The selection of symbols and phrases displays the individual’s revel in.
Leo’s protect is split diagonally: The higher part displays a white lily on a blue background, and the decrease displays the brand of the Order of St. Augustine – an order to which he belongs. His motto reads, “In Illo uno unam,” translated as “In the One, we are one,” that are phrases of St. Augustine from his Exposition on Psalm 127, Paragraph 2: “I understand one in the One Christ. You are therefore many, and you are one; we are many, and we are one. ”
In opting for this motto, Leo contains the figuring out image of Augustine, a center pierced by way of an arrow.
Coat of Palms of Pope Leo XIV.
Picture courtesy of the Holy See Press Place of work
As an artwork historian, I give an explanation for how Renaissance artists portrayed Augustine’s humility – and what the selection of the motto would possibly let us know in regards to the new pope.
.
The Order of St. Augustine
Augustine lived within the past due fourth century, in the long run serving as bishop of Hippo in northern Africa for 34 years. The Augustinian order used to be based in 1244 after a number of communities of hermits dwelling within the area of Tuscany, Italy, petitioned Pope Blameless IV to shape a unmarried order. The pope gave them the Rule of Saint Augustine as a code of dwelling, which mentioned: “Call nothing your own, but let everything be yours in common; [do] not seek after what is vain and earthly.”
Augustine’s standing as a student, theologian and administrator made him a extensively depicted saint. For instance, he seems in a stained glass window commissioned by way of a pastor in 1622, wherein he holds his image of the center pierced with the arrow resting on a e book on his lap.
The picture pertains to a word from Augustine’s e book “The Confessions”: “Thou hadst pierced our heart with thy love, and we carried thy words, as it were, thrust through our vitals.”
On this stained-glass symbol, the saint is noticed chatting with a kid. The 1483 translation of the “Golden Legend,” a choice of saints’ lives, explains that whilst suffering to jot down his treatise “On the Trinity,” Augustine used to be strolling on the beach and noticed a kid filling a tiny pit with water.
When the kid defined that he used to be bringing the sea into the pit, Augustine scolded him for fooling around. The kid replied that he would faster are compatible the entire water of the ocean into the pit than Augustine may convey the thriller of the Trinity into his restricted human working out. The Trinity is the Christian idea that God isn’t a unmarried particular person however 3 – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – united in one divine and everlasting nature.
This lesson in humility become extensively depicted around the centuries. In 1482, an altarpiece by way of the painter and sculptor Michael Pacher displays Augustine with a kid at his toes protecting a spoon.
Augustine’s scholarship
Augustine’s legacy contains now not simplest “The Confessions,” some of the extensively learn books of medieval and early trendy instances, and “On the Trinity,” however many others, together with “The City of God,” a huge paintings of over 1,000 pages.
Fresco of St. Augustine.
Sandro Botticelli by means of Wikimedia Commons
Sandro Botticelli’s 1480 portray of Augustine in his find out about displays the saint looking for readability of idea as he pauses his writing.
Dressed merely in a protracted white garment and a cloak, he has put aside his bishop’s miter, an reliable hat – additionally a gesture of humility. His find out about is crowded with books; at the proper, in the back of his head, a e book is open to a find out about of geometry.
Botticelli tries to turn the saint as a student in earlier period by way of striking at the left an previous and discredited celestial style that depicts the Earth on the heart of the universe, with the Solar, Moon, planets and stars revolving round it. We, with trendy wisdom, remember the fact that regardless of his intelligence, Augustine can not know the whole thing.
Leo has been each a student and pastor. He served as a professor of canon legislation and early Christian theology at San Carlos y San Marcelo, a seminary in Peru.
But, just like the founding father of his order, his phrases at this primary Mass mirrored his humility when he stated that his appointment as pope used to be “both a cross and a blessing” and spoke of the duty he and the cardinals have on the earth.
