IMAGES OF GOD IN TIME AND SPACE

Theology Today, Jul 2004 by Henry, Patrick

COSMICOMICS: EVERYTHING LEAVES ITS PRINT

I must move on, with only one more reference to Calvino. It's in a story called "The Form of Space." Many people today are familiar with the picturesque example of chaos theory: that the fluttering of a butterfly's wings over Hong Kong can precipitate a hurricane in the Caribbean. But really to grasp the interconnectedness of everything requires not only a grappling with the "all in one point" of the pre-Big-Bang singularity, but also a reveling in the sheer exuberance of all that is and the way in which the shape of space is determined by the contents of space. Indeed, it makes no sense to talk of the space in which things are; things make space. The narrator of "The Form of Space" gives it a try: "We should always bear in mind how space breaks up around every cherry tree and every leaf of every bough that moves in the wind, and at every indentation of the edge of every leaf, and also it forms along every vein of the leaf, and on the network of veins inside the leaf, and on the piercings made every moment by the riddling arrows of light, all printed in negative in the dough of the void, so that there is nothing now that does not leave its print, every possible print of every possible thing, and together every transformation of these prints, instant by instant, so the pimple growing on a caliph's nose or the soap bubble resting on a laundress's bosom changes the general form of space in all its dimensions."14

Calvino weaves a magic spell with words and stories. he lets us peek over the wall into mysterious realms where the crazy is the norm, where limits are reached and gone beyond and reencountered-where a brief article with the innocuous title, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," turns everything upside down and inside out (this was Einstein's 1905 article announcing special relativity). Cosmicomics is the sort of reading you do for fun and find your mind fully engaged.

THE REVERSE PERSPECTIVE OF ICONS

I have found additional help in grasping the significance of the new views of time and space from a subject I have studied in a traditional, meticulous, academic fashion: the role of icons in the worship and theology of eastern Christianity. The Orthodox, many centuries ago, had an intuition about dimensions and how our perception, our seeing, can blind us.

The most unexpected feature of icons from a western point-of-view is their inverse, or reverse, perspective.15 Since the Renaissance, at least, our artists have located the vanishing point within the picture, and this sort of perspective seems "natural" to us. But Orthodox icons locate the vanishing point in front of the picture, out toward the viewer, and sometimes there are multiple vanishing points peppering the area in which the viewer is standing. In Carl Sagan's novel Contact, when Ellie Arroway and her colleagues travel to the center of the galaxy and her friends step through a door into an entirely other realm,16 it is just like an Orthodox congregation entering church.