The Seraphims' Threefold Cry and the Living Creatures Who Rest Not
Old Testament: Isaias 6:2-3
Upon it stood the seraphims: the one had six wings, and the other had six wings: with two they covered his face, and with two they covered his feet, and with two they flew. And they cried one to another, and said: Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God of hosts, all the earth is full of his glory.
Old Testament, also: Isaias 6:1
In the year that king Ozias died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and elevated: and his train filled the temple.
New Testament: Apocalypse 4:8
And the four living creatures had each of them six wings; and round about and within they are full of eyes. And they rested not day and night, saying: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, who was, and who is, and who is to come.
The connection
Isaias dates his vision by a dead king. In the year that king Ozias died, when the throne of Juda changed hands, he is shown the throne that never does, and the creatures around it are doing what they are first recorded doing. The six wings are accounted for exactly: four of them are spent covering the face and the feet, and only two are used to fly, so that most of what a seraph has is given to reverence rather than motion. What they cry is not addressed to God but to one another, one to another, praise handed back and forth between them rather than delivered upward. John, shown the same throne centuries later, records the same six wings and the same three words without alteration, and adds two things Isaias does not: the creatures are full of eyes, round about and within, so that ceaseless seeing accompanies ceaseless praise; and they rested not day and night, which states as a permanent condition what Isaias glimpsed once. Where Isaias hears all the earth is full of his glory, spoken over a kingdom that would one day be carried off, John hears who was, and who is, and who is to come, the same holiness now named across all three tenses at once.
Moral sense
Four wings for covering and two for flying is the working proportion of a creature near God: most of its strength goes to reverence, and only what remains to motion. The praise is also handed one to another rather than hoarded, which is what makes it worship and not performance.
Anagogical sense
What Isaias saw for one moment in a temple, and could barely survive, is the ordinary and unbroken condition of heaven, where seeing and praising never exhaust their object and therefore never stop.
The Fathers
St Ambrose, Exposition of the Christian Faith, Book II, ch. 12, sect. 107: "What means this threefold utterance of the same name Holy? If thrice repeated, why is it but one act of praise? If one act of praise, why a threefold repetition? Why the threefold repetition, unless that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one in holiness?"
Warrant
Apocalypse 4:8 does not name Isaias, but it reproduces Isaias 6:2-3 closely enough to be a deliberate citation rather than an echo: the same six wings, the same threefold Holy, the same throne. The Fathers read the threefold cry itself as more than emphasis; Ambrose treats the repetition as Trinitarian and the singular Lord of hosts as the answering statement of one nature. Checked in the Greek: Isaias 6:2 gives each seraph hex pteryges and Apocalypse 4:8 gives each living creature pterygas hex, the same noun and the same numeral, so the wings are counted in the same words.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1138.
