Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

An angel rolls up the Heavens.

Americans come from the most religious nation in the West, but they rarely see much church art at home. A tour in virtually any European country will usually include more ecclesiastical masterpieces than the typical American will ever be capable of appreciating. Meanwhile, native Western Europeans are (by and large) among the planet’s least religious people, yet they live amidst a stupendous patrimony of religious art. When Americans tour churches in a place like Italy, it's a case of the eagerly ignorant confronting the knowingly indifferent.

     After many trips around Europe, this American has the luxury to (usually) give the local cathedral or convent a pass. Life’s too short to take in another altar screen, another shoal of putti massing in a narthex. I make exception for truly old stuff, however—the paleo-Christian mosaics and paintings that form the bridge between the ancient world and the medieval West.  That interest brought me this week to the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, on the island of Torcello near Venice.

     The largely 11^th century church is a survivor from a time when it wasn’t so clear which of the islands in the Venetian lagoon would come to dominate the region. The mosaics in the apse, including the figure of the Virgin Mary standing in solitary majesty in a field of gold, are probably the work of Byzantine masters. Depictions of the Crucifixion, the Harrowing of Hell, and the Last Judgment are placed on the forty foot-high west wall, presumably so worshippers would be reminded of their possible fates in eternity before trudging home.

     Though cartoony and ingenuous compared to Renaissance or Baroque treatments, the mosaics have an undeniable power—as if in the grip of their fervor, the artists had no time for fussing over draperies and musculatures and other aspects of outward appearance. The metallic backgrounds only increase the impact on the modern eye, which senses electricity coursing through those patinated swaths.

     But my attention was drawn this time to a particular panel in the Last Judgment. Here an angel, depicted entirely in shades of gold and white, is literally rolling up a scroll of stars. This apocalyptic image seems to be inspired by a passage in the Bible: Isaiah 34.4 (“And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.”) This was echoed later in Revelation 6.14 (“And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.”) In other words, so great is the power of the Lord, that at the time of His final dispensation even the things that seem most permanent in this world—the stars, the mountains—will be revealed to be as flimsy as stage props.

     Of course, to someone educated in a scientific age, the notion of the totality of the universe being “rolled up” by our moral failures is more than a little absurd. The stars, after all, have been here a lot longer than our tiny planet, much less humans and their religions. Taken uncharitably, we might accuse our ancestors not only of ignorance (which is excusable) but arrogance in their presumption that who-smite-whom and who-slept-with-whom’s-wife should be matters of galactic importance. Indeed, this was criticism that far predates modernity. The arrogance of Christianity and Judaism, in believing that any self-respecting deity would concern Itself with for creatures so recent, so cosmically insignificant as humans, was observed by Roman-era critics, such as Celsus and Porphyry.

     Yet however absurd it seems, this attitude is far from dead. It lives on in evangelical America. Millions nodded in agreement when, in 2009, U.S. Congressman John Shimkus (R-Illinois) denied climate change thusly:

 “I believe that is the infallible word of God, and that's the way it is going to be for his creation…the earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood…”

     In other words, the laws of thermodynamics that underlie global climate change are like the stars in Isaiah 34.4—mere stage props to be rolled up and put away at the whim of the Great Director.

     And it was there again in the notorious evolution vs. creationism debate between Bill Nye “the Science Guy” and Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. When Nye cited empirical evidence that the earth couldn’t possibly be a mere 6000 years old (that is, evidence from geology and biology), Ham responded by making a distinction between “observational science”, the kind of stuff Nye was talking about, and “historical science”, or the way the universe may have worked in the past. According to Ham, while it may clearly be impossible for the Rocky Mountains to have formed in a few years according to observational science, that doesn’t necessarily mean the laws of physics weren’t different 6000 years ago. Nye’s got his science, and Ham’s got his book. I say tomayto, you say tomahto. Let’s call the whole thing off.

     Of course, Ham’s distinction is nonsense. Scientific laws are acknowledged as laws because they explain not only what we can directly observe, but what we can infer indirectly about the past. Laws that change over time aren’t really laws at all. Imagine how all science would grind to a halt if any empirical result applied only at the very moment they were found, and only at that moment. (There is a flavor of philosophical skepticism that suggests this very thing, but Ken Ham is no Humean skeptic.)

     But Ham’s Biblical literalism is really the Shimkus doctrine again: “observational science”, like the veil of stars, is mere appearance, subject to being “rolled out” after the Creation just as it might be “rolled up” at the End. The message is supposed to be Good News—how great is the power and the glory of God. But the meaning is “what a piece of work is Man”…and not always in a good way.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro