Sunrise, Sunset

Each day the sun rises and sets. Each year, the sun does the same, ascending during the spring to its zenith in the summer solstice and then descending again to its nadir in the winter solstice. As Jean Hani points out (Symbolism of the Christian Temple, 73-4), the church worked this day-year analogy into its calendar:

“The temporal aspect of the Revelation of Christ, the Sun of Justice, corresponds to these two solstices, the ‘turning points’ of the sun, the two extremities being marked by the Forerunner, who announces His birth, and the beloved Apostle, who evokes His glorious return in the Apocalypse. This is why St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist, whose feasts are situated precisely at the two solstices (June 24th and December 27th, respectively), are often depicted on the uprights to either side of Christ on the tympanum. Just as they ‘open’ the two periods of history marked by the two advents of the Savior, so likewise, on a cosmic plane, they ‘open’ the two phases of the annual cycle, which is the condensed symbol of the universal cycle of time and history; and in this role, by so to speak duplicating him, they replace Janus of the two faces.”

Sometimes the two Johns are combined, as in a window at Rheims which “shows what could be called a ‘synthesized’ St. John, a single figure embracing both the Forerunner and the Evangelist, a fusion emphasized by the presence about the head of two sunflowers pointing in opposite directions (= the two solstices), in sum a sort of Christian Janus.”