Math and Mysticism: Sacred Art Can Change the Way You Think About God, Man and the Cosmos

How medievals mapped the cosmos on the human face

We are materialist “see-ers”

Christ the divine architect, from the Bible moralisée (also known as Codex Vindobonensis 2554). c. 1220–1230, (early Gothic) an illustration of the mathematical precision of created reality; divine orderliness. Interesting little point: His right foot is outside the picture frame, possibly a visual allusion to the Incarnation, in which God, the author of everything, stepped into the framework of material reality.

“He has arranged all things by measure and number and weight.”
Wisdom 11:20

What if the way we’ve been taught all our lives to look at art has actually blinded us? What if we have been immersed all our lives in a visual and intellectual culture that takes materialism so much for granted that we no longer have a mental framework to understand these images from our own culture’s past, images that seem strange and incomprehensibly distant in time?

We think we see clearly; we assume this. But most of us have simply learned to see, and to think about what we see, in one way, and to take that as the only possibility. But what if, in looking at ancient Christian sacred art and not understanding it, the problem comes from the way we’ve been taught from infancy to see?

What if the “flat,” “stiff,” “primitive” Byzantine icons, Romanesque angels and Gothic Madonnas, symbolic saints with canonically long noses and almond eyes, aren’t failures of visual realism by unskilled painters, but expressions of a completely different kind of seeing and thinking about reality? And what if this different way of seeing is something we can re-acquire?

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In today’s post for paid subscribers, we’ll begin exploring the foundations of how the canonically prescribed visual tradition of Christian sacred art doesn’t just reflect the medieval mind, it can reorder the eye and the mind of modern people suffering our peculiar cultural and moral blind spots. We’ll consider how the sacred art of the Middle Ages, built on the logic of number, proportion and theological symbolism, was constructed to reflect a cosmos that is ordered, knowable and created in love by God for the sake of man.

So, in preparation for our move into the Romanesque, and its vision of divine order, transcendence and symbolic clarity, we’ll step back from our chronology, and see if we can begin to create a mental space for understanding.

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