Symbolic numbers from the Church Fathers to the Middle Ages

The Pythagorean heritage did not die out with the end of the ancient world. It passed, transformed, into Hellenistic Jewish culture and then into Christianity, where the numbers of the Bible became the object of systematic symbolic interpretation. This was not divination in the strict sense, that is, predicting the future, but a reading of sacred scripture and of creation in which every figure could reveal a spiritual meaning. This form of numerology carried enormous weight in medieval theology, art and architecture.

Philo and the week of creation

One of the first to unite the Pythagorean tradition and Scripture was Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher of the first century AD. In his treatise on the creation of the world he devotes ample space to the number seven, the hebdomad, showing its arithmetical properties and its links with the phases of the moon, the ages of human life and the Sabbath rest.

Philo did not claim to predict the future with numbers, but to show that creation revealed a rational and divine order. His method, which combined biblical exegesis and Greek philosophy, was greatly admired by the Church Fathers of Alexandria and, through them, by the whole later Christian tradition, which continued to read his works throughout the Middle Ages.

Augustine and the hundred and fifty-three fish

Augustine of Hippo was among the greatest Christian interpreters of numbers. In the City of God he explains that God created the world in six days because six is a perfect number, equal to the sum of its divisors, one, two and three. He specifies, however, that six is not perfect because God completed creation in it: on the contrary, God completed it in six days because the number was perfect.

In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Augustine deals with the episode of the miraculous catch, in which the apostles gather one hundred and fifty-three fish. He observes that the number is the sum of all the integers from one to seventeen, and that seventeen joins the ten of the Law and the seven of the Spirit. The calculation thus becomes a way of meditating on the relationship between law and grace.

Isidore, the monasteries and the Renaissance

Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, composed a Liber numerorum devoted to the numbers that occur in Scripture, explaining their meanings one by one. In the following centuries authors such as Bede and Rabanus Maurus continued this tradition, and the symbolism of numbers entered the building of churches, the structure of poems and the ordering of the liturgy.

This culture culminated, at the end of the Renaissance, in the work of the Bergamo canon Pietro Bongo, the Numerorum mysteria, published in the 1580s: a vast repertoire that gathered for each number the meanings attributed to it by philosophers, theologians and poets. Dante, for his part, had built the Commedia on a carefully designed numerical architecture, founded on three and nine.

Christian numerology shows how the wish to find meaning in numbers could live outside divination. For Augustine and his heirs, number did not open the doors of the future but those of contemplation: it was a sign of the order with which, according to faith, the world had been created.