For most of Christian history, heaven was above, and the statement would scarcely have seemed to require explanation. Scripture speaks with an almost inexhaustible confidence in this vertical language: God looks down from heaven, prayer rises before Him, blessing and judgment descend, angels ascend and descend, Christ comes down from heaven and, having entered the depths of death, rises and returns to the Father.

We do retain every one of these words, and repeat many of them each Sunday, yet the world within which they once possessed their native force has grown strangely difficult for us to inhabit. Why is that?

The Biblical Worldview

The older Christian world, the one within which the Church Fathers lived and imagined, did not picture the universe as an immeasurable quantity of neutral space, extending indefinitely in every direction. It knew a cosmos with shape, with rank and orientation: the heavens arched above, the earth lay below, and the invisible world above gave pattern and intelligibility to the visible one below.

Meaning could descend into matter, while earthly things might be raised and offered upward. For example, the Law descends from Sinai, while the smoke of burned offerings rises from the altar. And between these two movements our world, the human world, appeared, neither wholly spiritual nor simply material, but as the meeting place of the celestial and the chthonic. Heaven and earth, therefore, named considerably more than two geographical regions. They named the great poles of created order, the higher and the lower, the informing and the receiving, the source from which things come and the place in which they are embodied.

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Once this is seen, the consistency of Scripture’s vertical imagination appears less accidental. At the beginning, the Spirit of God hovers above the face of the waters, and the waters themselves are divided into those above and those below. Dry land rises out of the sea, and upon the height of Eden a garden is planted from which the rivers go down into the lands of men. Jacob beholds a ladder set upon the earth whose summit reaches heaven, with messengers moving between the two. Moses ascends Sinai out of the wilderness. Zion rises above the surrounding country, and the Temple crowns the mountain. Prophets are caught up. Sacrifices ascend in smoke. The Son of Man descends from heaven, goes down even into death, rises from the sealed earth and at last is taken up in glory.

These are (obviously) not disconnected. They belong to the same worldview. A biblical worldview. A worldview in which high and low, ascent and descent, mountain and abyss, heaven and earth answer one another across the whole length of the sacred history.

For a Christian formed within such a world, physical height could disclose spiritual height because visible things participated in invisible realities. A mountain was therefore more than a metaphor for transcendence. Below, the world is scattered into innumerable separate things, and from within the plain we cannot easily perceive the relations that bind them together, while from the summit roads, rivers, fields and villages are gathered into a single intelligible whole. The mountain thus makes visible a movement from multiplicity toward unity, from dispersion toward order, and from the horizontal world toward a higher principle that contains what lies beneath it. What appears separate below is revealed as belonging together from above.

The heavens likewise did more than remind the thoughtful observer of God, as an old photograph might remind him of an absent friend. Below, the earth spreads into countless separate things, while above them stretches one heaven, gathering the whole visible world beneath its vault. From above come the light by which things are seen, and the ordered courses of sun, moon and stars by which days, months and seasons are measured. When the Psalmist declared that the heavens proclaim the glory of God, he meant that their very form spoke the language of what is higher, what gives light and order to the multiplicity below.

The Modern Worldview

What modernity altered, therefore, was considerably subtler than the discovery that God could not be found by traveling a sufficient number of miles beyond the clouds. Serious Christian thought had never required so crude a celestial geography, and Augustine of Hippo, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Thomas Aquinas, and a host of others would hardly have been troubled to learn that no palace of God lies hidden immediately behind the blue of the daytime sky.

The deeper change concerned the very idea of space, for the modern universe came increasingly to be conceived as homogeneous extension: one may travel upward through cloud and atmosphere into vacuum, continue among planets and stars, pass galaxies whose light has journeyed for ages, and yet at no point has one crossed from a lower order of being into a higher one. Up and down became local, determined by the gravitational field of whatever body happens for the moment to hold one’s feet.

Something whose importance is difficult to overstate was lost when this occurred, although the loss is difficult to name precisely because it has become the condition under which we live today, the condition expressed with almost perfect clarity by the Cartesian coordinate system, in which up and down differ only by position. The ancient vertical axis of the world collapses into abstract geometry, and heaven, if it is to be imagined as anything more than the atmosphere at all, is easily reduced to another location somewhere beyond the visible universe, exceedingly remote and accessible only after death.

Once heaven has become another place, saying that God is “above” begins to sound as though He were very far away, and the modern imagination, almost without noticing what it has done, translates overarching into distance. The very language meant to express the nearness of a reality that encompasses us is made to suggest absence, as though God inhabited a parallel dimension of sorts: some unimaginably remote province of the same bizarre map upon which we presently occupy a less distinguished coordinate. And this is where the older Christian imagination begins to look less primitive, and ours rather more peculiar…

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There is truth in this, but not enough truth. For the older world did not merely believe that reality was meaningful. It saw reality as meaningful. In other words, meaning was not a conclusion reached at the end of an argument. It was more like sunlight on a field, or the cry of a bird at dawn. It arrived before explanation. It struck the senses before it entered the mind as an idea.

A medieval peasant did not rise in the morning, rub his eyes, and decide to regard the sunrise as a symbol of the Resurrection. The sunrise came to him already flaming with significance. The heavens did not wait to be interpreted. They declared. The world addressed him before he had time to assess it. He had one word for breath and spirit, and in his thought, they were one.

In short, belief followed perception. Not the other way around. Faith was not a theory imposed upon a neutral world. Modernity has not only made certain doctrines difficult to defend. It has made certain sights difficult to see.

The loss of God in modern life is therefore stranger than ordinary disagreement. It is not only that people reject the answer. It is that the question itself has begun to sound odd. The world no longer seems to ask it.

And if the world no longer appears meaningful, argument alone cannot make it sing. Seeing rarely follows argument. More often, seeing follows a change in the conditions under which the world is encountered.

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Fortunately, perception can be trained. A musician hears hidden chambers in a symphony where another hears only a tune. A woodworker sees the secret direction of the grain where another sees a plank. A physician reads the body as a text where another sees only a face grown pale. Notice how these people do not inhabit a different physical world. They inhabit the same world with disciplined attention. Practice has made them obedient to realities that were always there but not yet visible to them.

The same is true of noticing the divine. The medieval Christian world trained people to feel the order of creation in their bones. Liturgy, architecture, calendar, and story made up a school of sight.

Consider the architecture of the cathedral. It slowed the step. It lowered the voice. It raised the gaze. It made a man small in precisely the way that allows him to become large again. Before a priest spoke a word, the body had already begun to learn how to stand before God. The worshiper did not first manufacture belief and then project it onto the church walls. It was the building that disciplined him into receptivity.

Or consider the church year. It was the great tale by which time remembered its Maker. Advent taught waiting. Lent taught descent. Easter taught that death is not the bottom of the world. Today time often feels like a row of empty boxes waiting to be filled. Sacred time felt more like a road through a kingdom: expectation, exile, fasting, feasting, death, resurrection, and return.

The point is not that medieval Christians were purer, wiser, or less foolish than we are. They had their sins, cruelties, and confusions. The point is that they lived within a world arranged to train perception toward God.

Our world trains perception too. But it trains it in another direction. Modernity has its own liturgies, its own cathedrals, its own fasts and feasts, its own sacred times. The shopping mall, the office tower, the gas station, the airport terminal, the quarterly report, the interface of the smartphone. These too instruct the soul.

They teach us to see the world as mechanism, resource, and material awaiting use. They teach us to stand above things, outside things, over things. They teach us to value quick explanation more than deep encounter, and novelty more than wonder. No one has to preach this gospel. It is absorbed by repetition. It enters through the feet, the eyes, the timetable, the architecture, the advertisement, the notification. It settles into the body long before it becomes an idea.

A city built around a cathedral trains the imagination differently from a city built around a shopping mall. Each has a center. Each has processions. Each tells the body where to go and what to desire. Each whispers, in its own way, “This is what matters.”

The same is true of time. A calendar shaped by Advent, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost forms a different creature from one governed by deadlines, productivity cycles, fiscal quarters, and the next thing flashing for attention. Both calendars guide the soul. Both form desire. But they lead toward different horizons.

So… we did not simply stop believing in an enchanted cosmos. We were apprenticed into perceiving a disenchanted one. That is why the recovery of enchantment cannot be reduced to better arguments. If disenchantment has reached the level of perception, then the recovery of faith must reach the level of formation.

The question is, “What kind of life makes the world visible again as gift, sign, and address?”

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At the summit of the world there is a garden. On the most common medieval representation of the world, east rises toward the top, and in the east lies Paradise, the first country of mankind.

The modern map familiar from the classroom proceeds from a very different understanding of what a map is for, presenting the world as a broad rectangle of coastlines drawn to scale, where every place is fixed by distance and coordinate.

This article means to persuade you that the above circle crowned with Paradise contains more of the world than the rectangle beside it, and that once you have learned to read its lines, you may discover that you have been living within it all your life.

The T and O Map

The map on the left is called a T and O map. The earliest example to have survived appears in a manuscript copy of Isidore of Seville’s De natura rerum, produced in the late 7th or early 8th century.

For a thousand years this type of map passed from manuscript to manuscript, until at last it grew large enough to cover the walls of cathedrals. It is called a T and O map because a ring of ocean, the O, encloses the inhabited earth and, within that ring, a great T of water divides the land into three.

Asia is the continent of beginnings, and so it occupies the upper half of the map, nearest to Paradise. Below it, Europe lies to the left, beneath the fading sun, while Africa lies to the right, beneath its fiercest heat. As we shall see, this arrangement follows the deeper logic of the Christian world.

To bring its underlying order more clearly into view, we may translate the east-facing T and O map into the modern globe familiar from the classroom. The result would appear something like this:

Facing the Dawn

First consider the direction of the map. The east stands at the top because the east is the quarter in which the sun first rises and the day begins. East and west belong to the great drama of the sun, and therefore to the mystery of time. Along this axis the day is born, rises into fullness, declines, and at last passes from sight. It is the path by which the world speaks of beginnings and endings, of birth and death.

In Genesis, light is spoken before the sun is made. In other words, within the biblical worldview, the sun is not the source but the sign of light. Light is the first form to enter the darkness, the first revelation through which order emerges from the deep. To face east is therefore to face the origin. It is to look toward the dawn of the present day and toward the garden planted at the dawn of history.

“And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden in the east”

-Genesis 2:8

By placing east at the summit of the page, the map gives the world a direction in which to face. The reader is turned eastward, just as the worshipper is in a church. Here, the returning light of the east recalls the Resurrection. The Church also awaits the second coming of Christ from the east. As early as the year 200, Tertullian could speak of the Latin orientem as a figure of Christ. The word signifies both the East and the rising sun. As we shall see, this is also why Christ was placed in the east on T and O maps, at the horizon toward which the whole created order is turned.

A comparison between the T and O map and the modern map therefore brings into view two different ways of knowing the world. North stands at the top of the modern map. But why should this be so? Because modern cartography begins with the rotation of the earth, which establishes a fixed axis terminating in the northern and southern poles. East and west possess no corresponding extremities, since they name the course of movement around that axis.

Yet no one feels the earth turning beneath his feet, and its axis is nowhere disclosed to ordinary sight. It must be inferred from the motions of the heavens by observation and calculation. East is known in another way. It belongs to the immediate experience of every person. It is the quarter in which the sun rises, darkness withdraws, and the visible world is restored.

The northward map thus derives its height from the mathematical reconstruction of the rotating globe. The eastward map derives its height from the world as it presents itself to the embodied creature who stands within it.

The Cross Inside the Circle

Now look at the T that divides the lands. In most T and O maps, the Mediterranean Sea divides Europe from Africa, the Nile River divides Africa from Asia, and the Don River, then known as the Tanais, divides Europe from Asia.

The T was not necessarily devised as a cross, or at least no surviving evidence allows us to say that it was. Yet within a Christian civilisation the resemblance could scarcely remain mute, and over time the shape at the heart of the inhabited world came to be read as the Cross.

The shape carried an ontological claim. Christian writers had long spoken of the Cross as the place where the scattered creation was gathered again into its maker. Irenaeus wrote that the Word through whom the world was made, and by whom it is invisibly sustained, hung upon the tree in order to sum up all things in himself. Cyril of Jerusalem called Golgotha the very center of the earth (a point we shall return to below) and imagined Christ stretching out his hands to embrace its furthest ends.

One might ask why no river carries the figure of the Cross eastward. The answer might lie in the above-mentioned dignity of the east. The east does not signify the end of the earth, for it is the quarter from which light first comes forth. The other three directions mark the ends, the world in its extension, whereas the east marks its beginning.

In any case, the letter T, though lacking the short vertical stroke above the crossbeam, had long been read as cruciform. In Ezekiel 9:4, a taw is placed upon the foreheads of those who mourn the corruption of Jerusalem, marking them out to be spared from the judgement that follows. The word means a mark or sign, but is also the name of the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet, whose ancient form resembled a cross. Christian writers therefore came to read the passage as a foreshadowing of the cross traced upon the forehead. Tertullian made the connection explicit, observing that the corresponding Greek tau, like the Latin T, bore the form of the cross.

And if any doubt remains that the T was understood as the Cross, the Ebstorf Map (see below) dispels it. Christ’s head, hands, and feet appear at the outer limits of the world, as though his body were stretched upon the cruciform structure of the T of the map.1

One Above Two

One land, Asia, lies above, while the other two, Europe and Africa, spread beneath it. The world appears here as man writ large. A single head preserves the unity of the person, while the body divides below into two legs, whose separation gives it balance and stability. So too the world remains one even as it opens into a pair. The one passes into the two without ceasing to hold them together.

This is one of the primal forms of creation, unity unfolding into difference without surrendering its underlying order: in Genesis, the waters are divided above and below, the earth into sea and dry land, and humanity into man and woman. The pattern appears wherever life is handed on, for what is one must open into distinction in order to become fruitful.

The same is true for humanity. This means that the three continents were long understood as the portions of the three sons of Noah, the whole family of mankind branching from one father after the flood. Noah emerges from the ark as the father of a renewed human world, and his line continues through Shem, while Ham and Japheth spread outward on either side. From the three brothers the nations of the earth descend, and Genesis unfolds their descendants into peoples.

Later tradition laid this genealogy directly upon the threefold world. Asia, the single land above, belonged to Shem. Europe, below to the left, belonged to Japheth, and Africa, below to the right, to Ham. The Book of Jubilees tells how Noah apportioned the earth among his sons by lot. Shem received the centre of the earth, including Eden and the lands of the east, Ham the hot regions of the south, and Japheth the cold lands of the north, extending into the western lands and islands. T and O maps compressed this immense genealogy into a single figure, one brother above and two beneath.

The map is therefore also a family tree. One household opens into three great branches, and those branches into the many nations of the earth. Every people remains beneath one heaven and within one universal history. The many have gone out from the one, yet the one still holds them together.

The World Inside the Body of Christ

On the Ebstorf Map, another famous T and O map, the whole world lies within the body of Christ. His head rises above the eastern summit, at the place of Paradise and the dawn. His hands reach toward north and south. His feet rest in the west. At the meeting place of the waters, in the very center of the world, stands Jerusalem, and within Jerusalem appears the risen Lord.

The head of Christ grants identity and direction. The body bears that meaning outward into every limb and extremity of the known world. Across this vast body, the makers of the map placed some fifteen hundred inscriptions and hundreds of images: cities, kings, rivers, and monsters. The teeming multitude of creation is gathered into one human form.

Here the T and O map ventures upon its deepest theological claim. The Church is the body of Christ, and the world drawn within his limbs declares that all things hold together in him. The Logos, the eternal Word through whom all things were made, has taken the gathered dust of creation into himself.

The map places the mystery of the Incarnation before the eye as something immediately apprehensible. Heaven has descended into the earth and taken its measure. The earth, to its final coastline and its strangest inhabitant, rests within the One through whom it came to be.

The World in the Hand That Holds It

A smaller T and O map, bound within a psalter, presents the same truth from another side. Above the circle of the world stands Christ. In his hand he holds an orb. Upon that orb appear once more the three lands, the whole map repeated in miniature within the palm of the One who sustains it.

Jerusalem stands at the heart of the T and O map because the history of the world is gathered there and sent forth again. The Ebstorf Map makes this principle visible. Jerusalem occupies the center of the world because it is the place of the Resurrection, and the center of the world corresponds to the center of the human body, the heart. The heart receives blood renewed by breath and sends it outward again, carrying life to the furthest limbs. Jerusalem performs the same office within the sacred geography of the T and O map. From it the Holy Spirit proceeds to the ends of the earth, borne outward by the apostles. This movement is made explicit on the Beatus maps, where the apostolic routes spread from Jerusalem across the inhabited world. The center of a world born from the Logos is the place from which its order is understood to proceed.

Notice how the Jerusalem pilgrim returns toward the holy centre as spent blood returns to the heart, there to be renewed before passing once more into the body. He travels inward in order to be sent outward again with life.

The Ebstorf Map carries the analogy still further. The head of Christ appears at the head of the world, corresponding to the human head through which breath is received. That breath renews the blood, which the heart then sends throughout the limbs. Christ’s head, Jerusalem at the center, and the nations at the extremities thus belong to a single living order of breath, blood, and body.

We have thus traced the bones of the map. We have seen the earth laid upon the body of the Lord and held within his hand. Yet one part of the image remains, and it is the part that reaches beyond the page toward those who read it.

This is the decisive turn, the point at which the circle ceases to be a relic behind glass and becomes the earth beneath your feet, the country in which you wake, and the place in which you have been called to stand…

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To understand the burning bush, we must first see that it belongs to Mount Sinai. It stands at the mountain’s foot, and even its Hebrew name, sneh, may gesture toward Sinai.

This is important because Sinai is the mountain of divine encounter. Moses will ascend it and meet the God who gives the Law and gathers slaves into Israel. The fire in the bush prepares that ascent.

The context, of course, must also be taken into account. Israel lies in bondage beneath the empire of Egypt. The people of promise live as slaves under a power that has made itself the center of the world. Moses was raised within that false center, a city of outward splendor and coercive strength, formed in the pattern of the lineage of Cain. He leaves it behind and takes up the shepherd staff. He keeps sheep beyond the settled order of power, walking the older road of Abel. There, at the edge of the wilderness, the Lord appears and reveals the true center.

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It is worth observing, too, that Sinai calls another mountain to mind. Paradise is the first cosmic mountain (see Ezekiel 28:13-14), the high garden from which the rivers flow. Jonathan Pageau has suggested that the whole mountain of Paradise may be seen as a single world tree. The burning bush gathers that image into a small and concentrated form.

The correspondence may be traced as follows:

Trunk: At the center of Paradise stands the Tree of Life, the living pillar of the world, the trunk of creation rising from earth toward heaven.

Branch: Beside it stands the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. There the first division opens before humanity. Good and evil, obedience and disobedience, gift and theft, life and death, appear as the branching paths of our forefathers. The tree becomes the first fork in that road.

Leaf: Adam and Eve eat from the tree, descend, and cover themselves with fig leaves. The tree has moved outward into concealment. The leaf bears the memory of lost glory and newly felt nakedness.

Thorn: The curse finally reaches the ground, and the earth brings forth thorns and thistles. Trunk, branch, leaf, and thorn mark the descent of the world from the mountain to the plain, from the ordered garden to the tangled wilderness.

The burning bush gathers every stage into one image. It has trunk, branch, leaf, and thorn. So creation may be understood as a tree, and the flame of God reaches the whole tree. It flows from the trunk at the center. It runs through the branch. It touches the leaf. It rests upon the thorn. The heavenly center fills the outer edge. Glory settles upon the sign of the curse and makes it shine.

Among Thorns

And Exodus follows this movement. God comes down into the land of bondage and raises Israel toward the mountain, then onward toward a land flowing with milk and honey, a land that carries the fragrance of Eden.

“The Lord said, ‘I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.’”

-Exodus 3:7-8

Israel lives among the thorns at the bottom of creation. The masters of Egypt stand above the Israelites and sever the path toward the center. Their authority encloses and so consumes. The cry of the people rises beyond them and reaches God.

“The cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them.”

-Exodus 3:9

This gives us a deep image of exile. Exile is life beneath a power that blocks the way upward. True authority receives from above and gives below. It opens a path toward the source. A good teacher possesses greater skill and leads the student toward the insight from which that skill arose. The student grows through that gift and may one day see farther still. A fearful teacher hides the sources, narrows the road, and makes dependence permanent. Egypt holds Israel in that second pattern. God descends through the blocked order, reaches the people at the bottom, and leads them upward.

I Am That I Am

Moses asks for the name. He is being sent to slaves, and he must tell them who has sent him. His question concerns connection. He asks for the name by which the people at the bottom may be joined to the one who speaks from the fire.

The Lord answers, “I AM THAT I AM.” This name opens the mystery of the bush. A god among gods spreads through conquest. He stands among rivals, gathers force, and extends his rule by overcoming other powers. His fire advances by consuming whatever lies before it.

The God who speaks from the bush is the source from whom all things receive being. His presence enters creation from its deepest ground. He reaches the creature as the one through whom the creature already exists. His fire kindles the bush and preserves it in its fullness.

The bush therefore remains whole. The flame is the fire of the One who is Being itself. Divine life fills created life as source and completion, beginning and end.

The same truth carries the divine presence into the slavery of Israel. The name of God reaches beneath every human degradation. Slavery strips a person of land, honor, leisure, strength, and outward freedom. Beneath every loss, the slave remains a creature held in being by God. The One who is Being meets the slave at that depth. The fire enters the lowest place and calls the captive upward into freedom.

The pattern by which God descends to raise what lies below does not end with Israel’s ascent. It passes onward through Mary and Christ, and at last turns toward us. The burning bush thus becomes a guide to the spiritual life, showing how one may enter suffering, duty, and love without losing the center from which all true descent becomes possible…

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The longest day burns at its full height, the sun resting at the very summit of the year, and a man clothed in rough animal skins walks out of the desert to announce that the world is about to be remade. He has come to the dry margin of the inhabited land, the wilderness where every borrowed identity is stripped away and the soul is broken down to its essence. From that edge he lifts his voice and commands that the way be made straight, that the valleys be filled and the high places brought low. The light has climbed as far as light can climb. From this turning it begins to wane, and Saint John the Baptist stands on the hinge of the year, the forerunner whose whole greatness consists in stepping back so that another may rise.

The Wild Man Who Refuses the Crown

There is an image that helps us see John more clearly. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Green Knight enters Arthur’s court during the feast of Christmas and New Year, enormous, green, wild, and yet strangely noble. He belongs to the forest and to the turning year. He brings into the ordered hall of Camelot something older than the court, a green and primordial power from the margin of the world. His challenge is absurd and terrifying. Let one knight cut off his head with an axe, and in one year he must come to receive the same blow in return. Gawain accepts. He severs the Green Knight’s head, but the knight rises, lifts the head in his hand, and rides away, binding Gawain to seek him at the next turning of the year.

The image is not Christian in the manner that John is Christian, yet it remains remarkably suggestive. The wild man comes at the turning of the year. He brings the axe. He stands for the old power of nature that breaks down courts and walls, as vines enter abandoned halls and rain loosens the stones of forgotten cities. He is the force by which an old order is cut down so that another may arise. This is why he is so close to the Green Man, the leafy face in the margin of churches, the forest pressing against the carved stone of civilization.

John stands in that same symbolic place, but transfigured. He too is a wild man at the edge of the inhabited world. He dwells in the wilderness, clothed in hair, feeding on locusts and wild honey. He is not found in the palace or the temple, but outside the city, beside the Jordan, where the land opens onto the desert and every false identity is stripped away. He comes like the green force that overtakes a ruined civilization, not to abolish order as such, but to break the order that has become crooked. He is the flood at the end of a cycle and the cleared earth at the beginning of another. He is the axe at the root of the barren tree.

Yet this is where John differs. In the pre-Christian stories the son overthrows the father, only to inherit the father’s fear. Uranus is castrated by Cronus. Cronus devours his children. Zeus overthrows Cronus, but still guards his throne against the next possible usurper. The revolution that promises freedom becomes another devouring power. The head is cut off, the throne is seized, and the cycle of violence begins again.

John breaks that cycle. He does not cut down the old order in order to crown himself. He does not seize the authority that belongs to another. Like Robin Hood, that forest figure so near to the Green Man, he refuses obedience to an order that has ceased to act legitimately. Yet, as Pageau has noted, his refusal is not an attempt to found his own kingdom. He waits upon the true King. He prepares the way and then steps aside. He is great precisely because he refuses to become the center. Like the Green Man, John gathers the fierce power of the wilderness, the flood (baptism), and the axe, but turns all of it toward obedience. He is not revolution but preparation. He clears the ground so that the true King may enter.

Only now do we see why John himself must pass under the blade. The prophet of the axe receives the axe into himself. The wild man who announces the cutting down of the old order is himself cut down by that old order. As Matthew tells it, Herod, that shadow of a king, acts after the fashion of the old tyrants, preserving himself by bloodshed. But John does not answer violence with another claim to power. His head is lifted up in death, and his final witness is the same as his first. He points beyond himself. He decreases. He shows the only way the old world can truly end without beginning the same nightmare again.

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The Voice That Levels the Ground

John is the voice crying in the wilderness, preparing the road for the One who comes after him. His is the work of clearing. He levels the ground, casts down what has grown crooked, and makes straight the paths by which the Lord may be recognized when He appears.

The Green Man personifies the untamed power of nature. John, too, bears something of that wildness, though transfigured toward another end. It is no accident that his ministry belongs to the wilderness. Throughout Scripture the wilderness is the place of stripping and purification, where false securities fall away and a people are made ready for God. Israel’s deliverance was not complete when Pharaoh’s yoke was broken. Before entering the Promised Land, they first had to pass through the desert, where not only the tyranny of Egypt but the Egypt within themselves was brought to light and judged.

John himself embodies that wilderness. He summons every hearer into the same place of exposure, where borrowed identities are shed, hidden sins confessed, and the heart made ready for the coming of the true King:

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

-Matthew 3:2

In the old Byzantine image of the Lord’s baptism, the axe is often shown at the root of a tree beside the Jordan. The descent into the water becomes a descent into death and chaos from which one rises purified. John teaches the world to go down before it can be raised, to be emptied before it can be filled. The two names by which he is chiefly known, the Forerunner and the Baptist, are not opposed, but belong together. This is the first motion of the grand pattern, the removal of the old so that the new can be born from above.

“The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

-Matthew 3:10

Something of this same mystery is already present in the strange courtesy-game of the Green Knight. He receives the axe, passes through the image of death, and rises again to call Sir Gawain out of King Arthur’s bright hall and into the winter wilderness. The blow that seemed at first to end the matter becomes instead the beginning of Gawain’s test.

Elijah Returns to End the Old

The tradition expected Elijah to come before the Messiah, and the Lord names John as that Elijah, the same piece of reality appearing again in a new form. Elijah is the prophet who clears the foreign gods, who mocks and discredits the worship of Baal until the house of Jezebel falls. The forerunner moves like the raven sent out from the ark, going ahead of the dove to clear the way before the world stands ready to be inhabited again.

Like Adam and Eve, who received garments of skin from God, the prophets endure the harshness of the wilderness clothed in the rough sign of exile: the hairy mantle known from Elijah, taken up by Elisha, and echoed at last in John the Baptist.

These garments are the first coverings of the fallen world, and in them all later human artifice is already foreshadowed: clothing, shelter, craft, culture, every necessary veil by which man survives east of Eden. John still belongs to this order. He stands at the close of the old world and at the doorway of the new, the last and greatest of those who pointed forward. He is still clothed in skins, still bearing the sign of exile, not yet clothed, as Christ is, in the garments of light, re-entering Paradise as the Second Adam.

The turning of the year echoes this passage. The solstice is the seam between one order and another, the moment when the old light gives way and a new course begins. John is that seam.

The Glory of Becoming Less

And so the deepest word John speaks about himself is a word of decrease.

“He must increase, but I must decrease.”

-John 3:30

This belongs to a great family of reversals running through the whole of Scripture, the giving way of the old covenant to the new, the replacement of corruption by glory, the small seed that brings the Kingdom as the barren tree withers. John is the human face of that decrease, the one whose entire mission is fulfilled by diminishing before the rising Sun.

The Byzantine liturgy beautifully acclaims of Saint John:

“Rejoice, ray proclaiming new Light unto the world.

Rejoice, star illumining the path that leadeth unto Christ.

Rejoice, morning star of the never-setting Sun.

Rejoice, worthy lamp of the never-waning Light.

Rejoice, thou who preparest the way for the approaching Christ.”

-Akathist to the Holy Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John.

John is fittingly called the morning star. As Pageau has noted, the morning star shines most brightly at the edge of dawn, just as the night is passing away. Its glory is real, but borrowed and brief: it illumines the road toward the rising sun, and then disappears in the greater light. So too John shines by pointing to Christ, and fulfills his glory by yielding to Him. John is light in the right manner, a pointing light whose whole dignity lies in announcing the true Light and stepping aside. At Midsummer the sun reaches its peak and turns toward its long descent, and the forerunner who has reached the height of all the prophets turns the whole of his glory toward the One who must now increase.

What follows draws the two turnings of the year into a single image, the height of light that bends toward decrease and the depth of darkness that hides a secret birth. It shows why the waning of the light at Midsummer, whose decline we presently observe, opens the way to the deeper nativity at the heart of winter, how this one pattern governs the whole arc of the Bible, and how the same turning is meant to take place in each of us…

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“Bereshit” opens the Bible. We usually hear it as “In the beginning,” and that is true as far as it goes. Yet the first word of Genesis is not just pointing us to a moment long ago, as though creation were only the first event in a line of events. It is naming the hidden source from which all things (including time and space) receive their form.

In other words, the beginning of Genesis is not only behind us. It is beneath us, within us, ahead of us, and above us. It is the wellspring from which the world continually receives its being. Malcolm Guite’s sonnet for Trinity Sunday gathers this mystery beautifully:

In the Beginning, not in time or space,
But in the quick before both space and time,
In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,
In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,

In music, in the whole creation story,
In His own image, His imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,
And makes us each the other’s inspiration.

He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
To improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone,
To sing the End in whom we all begin;
Our God beyond, beside us and within.

That is the heart of Genesis 1:1. Creation is more than an object God once made. It is a living order that bears the mark of the One who made it. To understand Bereshit is to begin to see that the Bible is not giving us a flat account of material origins, but a vision of a world whose visible forms are joined to invisible patterns, whose matter is arranged in accordance with its source.

In the Origin

The Greek Scriptures render the opening as en archē: “in the beginning,” or “in the origin.” The word archē can mean more than the first moment in time. It can mean source, that from which a thing takes its rise. The old philosophers searched for the archē of all things. Thales looked to water, Pythagoras to number, Democritus to atoms. Genesis begins differently. The source of all things is not a thing within the world, nor a hidden mechanism beneath it, but God Himself. All things flow from Him, and because they flow from Him, they are not meaningless fragments, but belong to an order.

This is why Genesis immediately gives us “heaven and earth.” These are the first great pairing in Scripture: the higher and the lower, the invisible and the visible, pattern and embodiment. Heaven is the realm of divine order, the place of meaning, form, and spiritual authority. Earth is the realm where that order becomes manifest, where pattern receives body, where invisible meaning takes visible shape. The world we inhabit is formed through this meeting. Heaven is not meant to remain remote, and earth is not meant to remain formless. Creation is the joining of the two.

Later it is revealed that man stands at the heart of this union. Adam is formed from the dust of the earth and receives the breath of life from God. He is earth filled with heaven, he is matter opened to spirit. In the words of N.F.S. Grundtvig, he is a divine experiment of spirit and dust. This is why man is a microcosm, a little world, gathering the primary pattern of creation into himself. Man is heaven leaning down, and earth rising to meet it. In him, the lower is called to receive the higher, and the visible is called to reveal the invisible. To be human is more than to exist within creation. It is to participate in its making.

In the Word

The Gospel of John opens the same door from another side: “In the beginning was the Word.” The Word helps us see what Genesis has been showing from the first. God creates by speaking. “Let there be light.” “Let there be a firmament.” “Let the earth bring forth.” Creation comes into being through speech, and this means that the world has something like a grammar. It is not a heap of disconnected mute things. Rather, the world is divine speech made visible.

This does not mean that man, the microcosm, may bend creation to whatever meaning he wishes. It means nearly the reverse. The world is already meaningful before we come upon it, and we are able to read it only because we ourselves have first been written. Its signs are older than our thoughts, and its speech precedes our naming. We do not draw meaning out of ourselves and lay it upon the world. We learn to read what has been written, to hear what has already been spoken. The task of man is therefore priestly and poetic. He names, receives, discerns, and offers. Being thought by God, he may think after Him, being addressed by the Word, he may answer. He learns the language of creation because that language already runs through him.

But Genesis has not yet yielded all the wisdom hidden in its first word. The Greek has shown us two depths: archē, the origin from which all things take their rise, and Logos, the Word by whom creation is spoken into being. Now the Latin gives the word a weight of stone and measure: the beginning appears as the hidden foundation by which the whole house of creation is held together…

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Most modern readers suppose that the Bible thrusts women out of the tale. In truth, it makes them bear the tale together, as deep roots bear the tree. We keep asking the wrong question. Where are the women? Why does Scripture so seldom let a woman stride into the middle of the road, take up the sword of the plot, and carry the story upon her shoulders?

And we keep giving the same weary answer. We say the old texts were ruled by old prejudices. We say the story forgot to give women their turn. But there is another answer, more strange and more fruitful. Below I suggest that the women were never chiefly meant to walk across the board, because they are the board itself.

Our Mistaken Frame

The trouble begins when we imagine that every person in a story is contending for the same crown. We assume there is only one noble office, the visible one. The one who slays as Samson. The one who journeys as Abraham. The one who rules as David. So when a woman does not stand in that place, we call it absence.

But a story is not a line of actors clamoring for the lamp-light. A story has a shape. It has a world. It has a field where action may take flesh. There is the road, and there is the traveller. There is the house, and there is the son who leaves it. There is the womb, and there is the child who comes forth.

These pairs are by no means rivals. They are not two beggars stretching out their hands for the same bread. They belong to different orders of being. If we confuse them, we are fated to misread the Bible from its first dawn to its last city. To watch only the pieces and not the board is to make the whole contest dark. By staring too fiercely at the moving figures, we miss the ground beneath their feet. To see that ground again, we have to speak of the masculine and the feminine. But not in the shallow way.

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Not Men and Women

And let us set this stone in place at once. When we speak of masculine and feminine, we are not first speaking about males and females. We are speaking about two interwoven principles. The masculine is the principle of speech, light, and seed. The feminine is the principle of soil, frame, and enclosure. The human world becomes legible through the dance between the two.

A man can stand in a feminine place when he frames the conversation. A woman can stand in a masculine place when she sows the seed in the kitchen garden. A mother consoles her child, yet she also gives him light. A priest receives from God, as soil receives the seed, and then turns and speaks blessing to the people. In other words, the same person may stand in both places, according to the shape of the hour.

So the question is not which sex has power. That question is far too thin. And we have seen the horrors it wrought in the twentieth century and still works in the so-called culture wars of our own day. The deeper question is what each principle does inside the story of the world. And, by extension, how they may be wedded in harmony.

The Board and the Pieces

A simple way to take hold of it is this. The feminine is the board. The masculine is the piece that moves upon it. The feminine frames, surrounds, contains, and gives the world its border. The masculine moves, speaks, divides, names, and goes forth within that border. The feminine is the garden, the masculine the gardener. The feminine is the city, the masculine the king at its center. The feminine is the question, the masculine the answering word.

Notice how neither is whole without the other. A seed without soil is, as the parable teaches, soon a dead thing. Soil without seed cannot fulfil its purpose any more than a plate without food upon it. At a larger scale, within the biblical logocentric vision, we may say that the Word must descend and enter the deep, but the deep must be there to incarnate it.

When stories follow the masculine principle it does so because stories follow motion. They follow the one who leaves home, crosses the river, enters the battle, speaks the vow, and returns changed. This goes deep. Even our eyes are made to follow movement. Our very field of seeing is built upon the interplay between masculine and feminine: the first taking the center of our sight, and the second surrounding and undergirding it as the hidden field from which whatever caught our eye sprang forth and showed itself to us.

But this does not mean the unmoving thing is of lesser worth. Quite the opposite. The stage is quieter than the actor, but without the stage there is no play. The earth does not boast like the tower, but the tower falls without the earth. So the most central figure may also be the least visible. She may be too foundational, too literal a ground, to be seen at first glance. And this brings us to Sarah.

Sarah Is the Deep

Before the world is formed, Scripture gives us the deep. There is water without shape. There is darkness. There is emptiness. There is no distinction, no word, no beast, no man, no tower, no song. Then the Spirit hovers, the Word is spoken, and life begins.

Now look at Sarah. She is barren. She is an emptiness that cannot make itself fruitful. She is a shut gate, a dry field, a sea without land. Yet into this impossibility comes a promise. A word enters the void, and out of Sarah comes Isaac, and then Israel: in a way, God’s beloved son.

To compare Sarah to Abraham and claim that her role is less important is simply not true. Yes, she is more peripheral, as the edge of our vision is peripheral, and therefore less visible. But she is also more foundational, as the primordial possibility from which all growing things arise. Isaac, and by extension Israel, comes forth from her.

Sarah is not simply a biological woman in the story. She bears the role of the deep in Genesis. She is the barren place into which God speaks life. She is the salt sea that becomes fruitful land, the desert that becomes a well-watered garden. She is the miracle of the oasis in the waste. The creation of the world and the creation of Israel are the same type of miracle told at different scales.

First there is the empty deep, and the world is born. Then there is Sarah’s empty womb, and a people is born. And at the end stands the empty tomb, and the new creation is born, but that is a story for another time. God delights to fill what cannot fill itself. He brings fruit and harvest from a dead and empty earth, a nation from a barren woman, and life from a grave.

Once you see Sarah in this light, you understand why she is not the hero in the usual sense. Her greatness is older and deeper than that. She is not the sun, but the horizon from which the sun arises. She is the land out of which the kingdom is born.

This prepares us for Mary. For if Sarah is the barren land from which Israel is born, what does that make Mary, from whom Israel’s God is born? Here the pattern widens further. We will see that feminine figures do not merely point back to one and the same frame, but may nest inside one another so that one becomes the floor beneath the next story. To follow this pattern is to learn how Scripture builds its house, level by level, with the most hidden ground often bearing the greatest weight…

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At the beginning of the world, before kings carved borders into the earth and merchants learned to measure value by weight, four rivers went out from that first garden. They flowed from the place of communion into the lands of history, carrying with them the first lesson of creation: that all life is received.

Eden is not only a lost location, but an image of the world rightly ordered: a world in which the source overflows, the center gives itself away, and the whole earth is watered by a generosity it did not create. Paradise is not only the source behind us from which we come, but the hidden source above us, to which creation still bears witness. The tragedy of the modern worldview is not only that we have forgotten Eden’s old address, but that we no longer know how to recognize the rivers that still run from it. To recognize them is to see that life is not sustained by possession, but by gift: it descends to us from above, and is given into our hands so that we may offer it back in service to the Lord.

The four rivers go out from the garden and become the veins of the world. They spring from a height of unhewn stone, pass down through root and soil, part toward the four winds, and come at last to the bitter sea at the margin of every map. The mountain gives itself away, and the world is green because of that surrender.

To read Scripture thus is to learn that every river is, in some sense, the same river, because each bears witness to the one Source descending into the body of the world: not as an ornament of reality, but as its Logos.¹

So, what is this source of the rivers? Within the biblical worldview certain realities gather significance in such a way that others depend upon them for coherence. Light makes seeing possible. The heart sustains the body. The center orients the periphery. Such relations are not imposed by power or preference. They are intrinsic to the way meaning manifests itself. This is what is meant by hierarchy, understood not as domination but as articulation, a structuring of reality in which significance flows from source to expression.

Some examples are light, breath, or the spoken word. In other words, a source is not simply one thing among others, but the hidden principle by which other things become visible, living, and meaningful. These are not items in the universe as a chair or a stone is an item in the universe. They are sources. They are the conditions by which there can be chairs and stones.

The Hierarchy We Forgot

Modern man has made a strange map of the world. He imagines reality as a flat field, on which all things sit side by side like pebbles on a table, each weighed by the same indifferent scale. Scripture lives in a less dull, and therefore more reasonable, universe. In that universe some things give, and other things receive. Some things stand above, not as tyrants, but as fountains. True hierarchy, in the older and saner sense, is not merely a ladder of pride. It is the articulation of gift, the descent of meaning from height into breadth. The radii of a circle draw closer as they approach the center, and the true center exists not to hoard, but to overflow.²

The opening words of Genesis disclose this logic with magnificent simplicity.³ Heaven names the realm of invisible light, spirit, and breath. Earth names the realm of visible matter, potential, and body. Every existing thing is a wedding of these two. Every act of creation is form descending into receptive ground. The invisible lands because the visible willingly bears it. To read the world biblically is to see every appearance as a participation in some higher thing that lends it being. Nothing is merely itself. Every visible thing also points beyond itself, toward the unseen generosity that allows it to exist.

This is why hierarchy carries, in the biblical imagination, a meaning our age can scarcely hear. A true center pours itself out. A true source does not clutch its riches, but becomes fruitful by giving them. Paradise is the picture of this gift made visible: one height, four streams, and the whole earth watered.

Light, the First Manifestation

Before the sun is hung in the firmament, before the stars are scattered like seed across the dark, light is spoken. Light comes before the bodies that bear it, because light is more primordial than lamps. It is the first form to enter the formless deep, the shining act by which creation is drawn out of chaos and made legible.⁴ Wind, spirit, heaven, word, identity, name, and light belong together in this first scene as the conditions of vision and clarity.⁴

To exist is to stand within a field of manifestation. Light makes things appear, and to appear is to be called out of the abyss toward identity. The first brightness by which the world is read from chaos is named in the Gospel of John as the light of all mankind, the Logos in whom every visible thing finds the ground of its being.⁵

In the Bible, and therefore also in the Christian life, glory belongs to this family of meanings. Glory is inward fullness becoming outward splendor. A king’s glory is kingship overflowing to the honor of the nation. Divine glory is being itself overflowing into manifestation. It is fullness giving itself to its surroundings.

The Word That Names

A word is invisible. It rides the air, and yet it can begin a marriage, end a war, free a prisoner, or still a storm. The modern mind, which is always trying to make invisible things unreal, has never quite explained why words rule the visible world. Scripture explains it by placing speech at the foundation of things. God speaks, and the world stands. Christ speaks, and the waters are quiet. Blessings shape lineages. Curses bind nations. Speech moves the visible because speech belongs to the realm that gives the visible its form.

The Logos gathers chaos into pattern: lines into letters, letters into words, words into the living structures by which a person, a family, and a city receive their identities.⁶ The universe is held in the motion of mind, word, and breath. Abram becomes Abraham. Jacob becomes Israel. Simon becomes Peter. Each new name is a new height joined to a new life. The cosmos stands within this same mystery. The world is a poem spoken forth by the Maker, and all things bear the echo of His voice.

We have thus seen the height. Below the road bends downward, into the dust and shadow of our world, where the great question is whether we will be closed against the gift, or opened to the glory, light, and Word that seek us…

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Fire splits above the heads of the disciples and divides into twelve tongues. The upper room opens onto every nation. The flame that burned before Moses has leapt from one head to many. The same uncreated light that flamed from Christ on Tabor descends through the dome of the Orthodox icon of Pentecost and rests on each apostle as a particular ray, while a figure of old Cosmos waits at the door, holding twelve scrolls that answer the twelve flames. Pentecost gathers the whole arc of Scripture into one event, and from this gathering the Church is born…

The pattern Pentecost fulfills begins in Genesis. The Spirit hovers over the dark waters, and the wind of heaven descends to draw a world out of the formless deep. Adam is shaped from gathered dust and receives the breath of heaven into his nostrils, becoming a living bridge who joins earth to sky. In the Bible, one word names wind, breath, and the divine descent at once. Creation is a rhythm of breath meeting matter, of meaning entering potential. The Logos gathers heaven and earth in every being it forms, and every later manifestation of God repeats this primordial scene. Notice how the descent of the Spirit upon Christ at the Jordan reveals the Trinity that was always at work in the original act of creation.

But Babel then speaks this sentence in reverse. All is united, one common speech is bent into a wall of bricks, stones made artificially identical. Thus a city rises by human works toward a heaven it cannot reach. The fruit of this ascent is the scattering of tongues and the multiplication of foreigners. Where the breath of God once gathered dust into Adam, here speech and clay are gathered by human pride into a tower that produces only fragmentation. The motive is the making of a name from below by human ascent. But name and identity must come from above. And so the result is a small unmaking, a return of the world toward the chaos that preceded creation. The square city of human will collapses into a sea of mutually opaque speech.

Before Pentecost Sinai answers Babel. A wind from the east opens the sea, the people pass through the waters, and Moses ascends the mountain. The cloud and fire on the summit are the same divine presence that flamed in the bush of Horeb, the same Spirit that hovered over the deep, now received as ideal patterns of behaviour and arrangements (the law and the Tabernacle). According to St. Gregory of Nyssa, Moses passes beyond the limit of the visible into a darkness that is divine knowledge, and from that darkness he carries down a hierarchy of attention and priorities that reorders Israel around the worship of the one God. We realize that Israel was the burning bush, scorched by the oppression of Egypt but kept whole by the indwelling presence of God.

The Temple in Jerusalem completes this trajectory (within the old covenant). The structure that Babel attempted by pride is given on God’s terms. A house is built where heaven and earth meet, where the divine name dwells, where the cosmos is recapitulated in stone and gold while the priest stands as the prelapsarian Adam restored. Around this center a geography of sanctity radiates outward, with diminishing holiness as one moves from the holy of holies to the courts, from the courts to the city, from the city to the lands. The Temple is the visible figure of the world as it was meant to be, a stable union of breath and matter, of God’s presence and the heaviness of earth. In short, it is an echo of Eden.

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Jesus Christ gathers this whole arrangement into his own person. Born of the burning bush who is the Virgin Mary, baptized by the descent of the Spirit on the waters of the Jordan in an event that replays Genesis 1, called out of Egypt like Israel, transfigured on Tabor with the same uncreated light that flamed at Sinai, Jesus stands as the true Temple, the true Adam, the true gardened mountain of the first age on which heaven and earth converge. The Trinity is unveiled at his baptism, and the act of creation is shown to have always carried this destination within itself. The Logos who was spoken at the beginning has taken on the gathered dust that was waiting for him. From this center the fire will now be divided in order to spread.

Here we have arrived at Pentecost which is the moment of that division. The promise made at the Ascension is fulfilled. The same Light that burned in the bush, thundered on Sinai, and radiated from the transfigured body, now descends as fire upon a gathering of twelve. The fire splits, and a particular ray rests on each apostle. The breath that animated Adam becomes the breath that animates the apostolic body. What appeared once at the center multiplies outward while preserving its source. The dome of the icon below shows the divine darkness (that Moses encountered) above, and from that darkness the rays descend onto a band of disciples seated in an arch that is itself a figure of the Church. To summarise, the many proceed from one fire but remember their origin.

The scattering of Babel is undone in the manner most proper to the Logos. The apostles speak, and every nation hears its own speech. The fragmentation of tongues is taken up into a higher unity that preserves difference because its center is the Logos who is both one and many, the Word who utters all words. Babel attempted to compel one speech by force from below. At Pentecost one Spirit descends. But this Spirit illuminates many speeches. The twelve tongues of fire rest upon the twelve apostles, and Israel’s twelvefold form is taken up into a mission that now moves outward toward every nation under heaven. Put differently, the twelve tribes of Israel have become the twelve apostles, and what was once gathered in one people is now sent out to gather the whole world.

The single language of Babel was a tyranny of sameness. The multiple tongues of Pentecost are a gathering of nations around a center that wills their distinction. This gathering is the work proper to the Spirit. From the one eternal flame, all the many lights descend. But each, however far it shines, turns back in longing toward its first fire and source.

Pentecost is therefore not an isolated miracle, but the moment when the whole biblical pattern begins to move outward. The question is how this single fire becomes a many-personed Church, and how the nations can be gathered without being made the same…

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We live in an age where the church can easily mistake intelligibility for familiarity. When the old symbols of the church cease to yield themselves at first glance, it sounds tempting to say that the church must find new images, images that speak straight into the present age. But the deeper trouble may lie elsewhere. The symbols may have grown old only in the noble way that language grows old, by waiting for children to be taught it. We may have ceased to learn their tongue.

Recently, a theologian and designer wrote in the newspaper, asking whether the church’s symbols have lost their meaning for the congregation. She mentioned the fish, the dove, the symbols of the evangelists, the Christ monogram, and even the cross. These are signs that carry historical weight, though they may now speak with less clarity to those who meet them in the church room. She therefore proposed a renewal of the visual language of the church, chasubles and church textiles that more fully reflect the life of the congregation, its grief, longing, fellowship, sustainability, and diversity.

A church that has lost the habit of explaining its own images has a real problem. People must be able to enter the church with their sorrow, their love, their families, their doubt, their joy, and their wounds. The church is, after all, a place for sinners.

But the first task of the church is larger than helping me catch sight of myself. Its task is to let me catch sight of Christ. A church room is a bridge to another country. It gathers the congregation around something the congregation has received: the gospel, baptism, the supper, prayer, blessing, and the cross. Therefore the symbols point beyond us. They have a calling that goes beyond portraying the congregation as it is.

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The Two Movements of the Church

The columnist wrote that, in moving from theologian to designer of a new Easter chasuble, she experienced a shift in the direction of her gaze. The gaze moved downward toward the congregation and outward toward the world. From there her whole column takes its direction. The chasuble becomes a woven portrait of the parish: the sewing fellowship, the stories carried by the congregation, and the contemporary world in which it lives.

The church knows this movement well. Its name is mission. Its name is diakonia. And its name is love of neighbor. The church turns outward toward the world, downward toward the suffering, and toward the one who stands outside. After all, Christ goes down and out. He becomes human, touches the unclean, eats with sinners, and seeks the lost.

But the church also knows another movement. Its name is worship. Here the congregation gathers around the altar, around the Word and the sacraments, with its gaze directed toward Christ. Both movements belong to the church. The outward movement and the inward movement, mission and worship, the world and the altar. (Jonathan Pageau makes a related distinction through the figures of the Virgin Mary and St. Mary of Egypt, treating them as two symbolic images of the Church.)

The difficulty arises when the church’s outward movement toward the world is turned back into the central image of worship. Mission and diakonia send the church out toward human grief, longing, suffering, fellowship, and need. But when those same experiences become the main thing displayed at the altar, the altar begins to mirror the congregation’s own life instead of directing the congregation beyond itself to Christ.

The chasuble therefore has a task larger than expressing the identity of the priest or the congregation. It lets the person of the priest recede, so that Word and sacrament come forward. It makes the priest less private and less individual. It says, here stands one set apart to serve the Word and the sacraments.

When what the chasuble carries becomes chiefly an image of the congregation and its experiences, the congregation has been moved into the center. And a congregation that studies its own reflection at the altar risks losing the place where it might be changed.

The columnist describes how the congregation was involved in sewing the motif of the chasuble. Such a sewing fellowship may be a beautiful part of its making. But the process need not become its theology. A chasuble may be made by the congregation without being made about the congregation. It may pass through their hands and still bear witness beyond them.

This is where the question becomes deeper than church textiles. It becomes a question about what worship is for, what symbols are meant to do, and whether the church should primarily show us ourselves, or lead us beyond ourselves…

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The modern man, with admirable industry and a certain comic absent-mindedness, asks first what shoved a thing into existence. He asks what moved it, what struck it, what process produced it. All this is useful. But it is not the way men actually live. A man on a road does not first ask by what pressure of prehistoric mud the road was made. He asks wheth…

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A man tending sheep in the desert turns aside to look at a fire. The bush before him is clothed in flame, and the flame moves through it like living wind. The leaves keep their green. The branches keep their form. The fire inhabits the bush, but the bush remains.

This is how Exodus begins its theology. Before the Plagues of Egypt, before the Staff of God, before the Parting of the Red Sea, God gives Moses an image. This image speaks first. So, when the voice at last speaks the name “I Am” from the heart of the fire, Moses has already seen the meaning of the speaker.

Too many readings of Exodus set the miracles in a row as separate wonders. Each event appears as a marvel with its own task. But the Book of Exodus is governed by a more secret order. It orders the miracles into one procession, and, as I will suggest here, the procession makes one argument. Each miracle answers the same question. Each one tells Israel who is speaking when the name of God is spoken.

The miracles of Exodus repeat one shape at every scale. The bush, the rod, the leprous hand, the plagues, the pillar, and the sea write the same name in different letters. The whole Exodus is one long pronunciation of “I Am.”

The Fire and the Thorns

Look first at the bush. The Hebrew gives a particular plant. It is a thornbush, a seneh, the poor thorny growth of the desert. Genesis has already taught the reader what thorns mean. After the fall, the ground brings forth thorns and thistles. The thorn is the signature of a wounded earth, a creation that resists man and draws blood from him.

Fire, on the other hand, belongs to heaven. It descends at Sinai. It guards Eden in the hand of the cherub. It rests on the altar. It shines in the seraphim, the burning ones. And the highest heaven in the Christian imagination is called the Empyrean. The word means the fiery place, the heaven in fire, the height above the air and the stars where God dwells with the blessed. Medieval writers called it the source of light. Dante reaches it at the end of Paradiso, where heaven becomes a rose of light, and the saved are gathered around God in perfect order.

This burning bush brings the very top of the cosmos down into the lowest scrub of the desert. The Empyrean, the dwelling of God and the saved, enters the thornbush, the plant of the cursed ground where fallen man lives. The highest heaven inhabits the sign of the fall, and the sign of the fall is held whole inside the fire.

This is where God speaks his name. He speaks from inside that very sign. The sign is already the announcement. “I Am” is the name of the One who holds heaven and earth within one image, and gives each its own fullness. Every miracle that follows is another writing of that same name.

The Staff and the Serpent

Moses asks how the Israelites will believe that God has sent him. He knows they may hear his message and doubt him. God answers with another image. He points to the rod in the hand of Moses and tells him to cast it down. The rod becomes a serpent. Then Moses takes it by the tail, and the serpent becomes a rod again.

A staff is the tool of a shepherd. It gathers sheep. It directs them. It gives order to movement. It is wood made into authority, the small instrument by which a flock receives a path. The serpent, on the other hand, runs along the ground. It carried scattering into Eden. Its motion is chaos made visible. God can turn the one into the other and back again.

Notice how the sign echoes the burning bush. At the bush, the cursed thorn holds the heavenly fire and remains whole. Here, the shepherd’s rod takes the shape of the serpent and returns to itself. In both signs, God holds the high and the low in one act. The thing that wounds is made to serve. The sign of scattering is gathered back into order.

Healing and Sickness

The second sign moves the same pattern into the body. God tells Moses to put his hand into his cloak. He draws it out, and the hand is leprous. He puts it in again, and the hand returns whole.

The sign has entered flesh. The same authority that turns a stick into a serpent turns health into disease and disease into health. Matthieu Pageau reads this as the staff sign brought inward. The first sign concerns the world around Moses. The second concerns the body of Moses.

The present article follows the signs from the burning bush to the Red Sea. But the pattern continues later in the wilderness, when God commands Moses to set the serpent on the rod so that those who look upon it may live. That later sign has the same structure. The serpent, the image of the wound, is lifted upon the staff, the image of ordered authority, and becomes the means of healing.

Once the staff has been associated with healing, and the serpent with sickness, it is difficult to avoid thinking of the Rod of Asclepius: the serpent coiled around the staff that became the lasting emblem of medicine, a connection discussed, for instance, by Gillian Williams.

The Land of Goshen and the Land of Egypt

The plagues begin, and the careful reader sees creation walked backward. The plagues belong with the thorns, the serpent, and the sickness named above. They are the same dark language written on Egypt. In a moment, we shall return to fire, staff, and health, and see how the darker signs are held inside the larger pattern.

First we must ask why the plagues should be read as creation in reverse. In Genesis, water is the first realm God orders. He separates the waters above from the waters below, gathers the lower waters into their place, and makes dry land appear. In Egypt, that order begins to come undone. The Nile, Egypt’s artery of life, runs with blood and becomes an artery of death. Creatures of the water climb into the houses of men. Creepers from the dust become a torment. Wild creatures press into the city. Livestock perish. Human bodies bloom with sores. Then the heavens, which were made to give rain in its season, give hail and lightning. Then the wind carries devouring flyers across the land. Finally, darkness covers Egypt like a shroud.

This reading has been opened up in places by Jonathan Pageau, and I hope to explore it more carefully in a future article. For now, the point is simple. The plagues are not a heap of random punishments. They are creation read backwards. Realm after realm (beginning with the waters below and climbing upward through earth, beasts, man, sky, and light) ceases to serve life and turns against the false order of Pharaoh. The world that Pharaoh claimed to rule begins to testify against him.

The God who said “let there be” can also say “let there cease to be.” The Spirit who ordered the cosmos can release the cosmos back toward the deep from which it came.

Here we return to the other side of the pattern, where fire, staff, and health find their echoes. God sets a boundary through Egypt and places Goshen, the corner of Egypt where Israel has been kept, on the safe side. He preserves the child of Israel while the firstborn of Egypt dies in the same night. The plagues reach their last stroke in the firstborn. “I Am,” the source of life, reveals that life is received at every moment. Egypt spends the long night learning that creation stands open because the Lord holds it open by hand.

For our purposes here, the point is that the same pattern is revealed at a national level. As God is the ground of fire and thorn, staff and serpent, sickness and healing, so he can uncreate Egypt and uphold Goshen in the same act. The same presence that turns the false order of Pharaoh into ruin keeps Israel whole inside the ruin.

Day and Night, Cloud and Fire

Then Israel leaves Egypt and walks into the desert. By day God gives them cloud. By night he gives them fire. The sign is stranger than it first appears. Day already belongs to fire, yet God covers the day with cloud. Night already belongs to thorns, yet God pierces the night with fire.

Fire belongs with the fire in the bush, the staff in the hand, the healed flesh, and the guarded land of Goshen. It is the sign of heaven entering the world, the sign of order, life, and revelation. Night belongs with the thorn, the serpent, the diseased hand, and the plagues of Egypt. It is the sign of the fallen world, the world of danger, concealment, and dissolution.

But notice the new complexity added by the two pillars. The day receives cloud, a darkening and concealing sign. The night receives fire, a bright and revealing sign. The two sides cross into one another. There is concealment in the day, and revelation in the night. There is a dark sign in the bright realm, and a bright sign in the dark realm. The symbol has become almost like a living seal of black and white, each side carrying the mark of the other. Pageau has suggested that the pattern here resembles the yin yang, since each side carries the sign of its opposite.

This adds to the pattern we have established. Exodus has been showing, from the beginning, that God holds the whole pattern at once. He is the God of fire and thorn, staff and serpent, healing and sickness, Goshen kept whole and Egypt brought down.

In the pillar, these oppositions are harmonized. God rules the bright world and the dark world. He shelters Israel under cloud by day and leads Israel by flame at night.

So by the time Israel reaches the Red Sea, every miracle has trained the eye to recognize the same form under different signs. This is the hour when the whole pattern must either hold or break. Israel stands where Goshen once stood, gathered, guarded, and trapped between death and death. Between the sea and the Egyptian army. Moses is still holding on to the staff. The flame from the bush has now become the pillar. The Red Sea lies before them as the blood red Nile grown apocalyptic.

The story has been teaching the reader how to see each element, one by one, so that at the shore they can be seen all at once. The name spoken from the bush must now be written across the sea. What happens there reveals the consequence of the whole pattern. It tells Israel what creation is for. It tells them where the gathered go, and where the scattered go. It draws the line between heaven and hell and shows how the same deep can become a birth for Israel and a burial for Egypt…

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The angel with the flaming sword reveals a pattern that runs through every threshold of your life.

After the Fall, God moved with haste. He drove Adam from the Garden, and he placed an angel with a turning sword at the gate, keeping the way to the Tree of Life.

Many readers see punishment h…

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We are surrounded by love stories, yet most of those stories give us a very small map of love. They usually begin with the shock of being seized by another person. Then they divide the world into two possible endings. If the beloved returns the feeling, love becomes Heaven. If the beloved refuses it, love becomes Hell.

This is the modern romance in its simplest form. Love is treated as intensity, and intensity is treated as some kind of truth. The question then becomes whether the feeling succeeds. Dante asks another question: what does the feeling become after its first force has passed, where does it then carry the soul?

So why is this important? First of all, because no one can live forever inside the first storm of being in love. The storm may be beautiful. It may awaken courage, tenderness, even sacrifice. But it may also make a person careless, selfish, disloyal, and dangerously blind toward other people. If one remains in that state, other relations cannot help but suffer. Friendships weaken, duties are neglected, trust breaks down, and the wider world is slowly pushed aside.

One might object that no one remains in that first storm of love forever. But that misses the point. We still crown the storm. We still write songs to it, make films about it, and call it the great proof that love has arrived. Yet a storm is a strange thing to place on a throne. It may shake the windows and wake the house, but it cannot build the home. If this condition weakens friendships, distorts duties, and makes the rest of the world disappear, then why do we treat it as the summit of love rather than the first wild weather through which love must pass?

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Love in The Divine Comedy

Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century as a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. At its deepest level, whole tale is about love. Dante travels downward through ruined love, upward through corrected love, and finally into “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

This is why Dante speaks so directly to us. We know the power of love and lack the wisdom of love. Dante gives us a world where love is the deepest motion of the soul and of the world. In short, every person moves toward something good. A thief loves money in a crooked way. A proud man loves his own height until it makes him small. A lustful person loves beauty in a way that destroys the order beauty was meant to serve. Sin is love bent out of shape. Purgatory is love being straightened. Heaven is love at home.

The first great test of this vision, and the one we are going to dive into today, comes through Francesca da Rimini. She is a woman whom Dante meets near the beginning of Hell, just after Limbo. In life, she entered an adulterous love with Paolo, the brother of her husband. In Hell, the two of them are swept forever through the air by a violent wind. Their punishment shows the truth of their inner life. They gave themselves to a passion without rule, and now they are carried by motion without rest.

Francesca is intriguing because she does not sound wicked. She speaks as someone who has been formed by reading beautiful poetry. And she has. She tells Dante that she and Paolo fell while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. The book helped give language and shape to their desire. A romance taught them to call lustful love destiny.

That is the danger Dante sees. Francesca treats being overcome as proof that the love was real. She speaks as though the strength of the feeling made the act truthful. This is close to the modern imagination. We may condemn betrayal in principle, while secretly admiring the power of a feeling that seems able to break every principle.

Dante makes the scene painful because Francesca is pitiable. He wants the reader to feel the charm of her speech. He wants us to see how easily elegance can make sin sound innocent. Dante even faints after hearing her. Pity is part of the scene, and pity is also tested by the scene. The reader must learn that sorrow for a soul does not make the soul right.

Courtly Love

Behind Francesca stands the old tradition of courtly love. This tradition grew among the troubadour poets of southern France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Much courtly love poetry imagined love as service. A man devoted himself to a lady who was often noble, married, or otherwise unreachable. He humbled himself before her. He expressed his longing through poetry. His unfulfilled desire was supposed to refine him.

There was truth in this. Courtly love saw that the beloved could lift the lover above vulgar appetite. In other words, courtly love saw a truth, but then crowned it too soon. Desire may indeed be a schoolmaster. Beauty may indeed be a bell that wakes the sleeping soul. But courtly love took the incense meant for heaven, and too often swung it before a human face. It ended up teaching the poet to kneel before a creature as the lady too often became the sun of his small cosmos, and the soul went round her with the solemn foolishness of a planet. This is the snare into which Francesca falls.

Dante knew the snare because he had worn it like a garland. In his youth, he too had made poems to a beloved woman. Yet when he came to write the Comedy, he did what almost no poet has had either the insight or the courage or the courtesy to do. He took the same woman, Beatrice, and would not make her the sun. He made her a window. And through that window he saw the truth that puts all things back in their places, the destination often missed by the courtly imagination, tragically missed by Francesca, and still missed by nearly every love song sung today…

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If you open any of the four Gospels at the end, you find a curious thing. The story has been moving, with increasing pressure, toward one supreme event. It has been building toward the victory of victories, the turning-point of the world. But when the moment comes, the Evangelists do not quite look at it…

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Samson is the only man in Scripture who asks a riddle, and that lonely fact already stands over him like a sign. He was himself a riddle before ever he spoke one.

“Out of the eater, something to eat;
out of the strong, something sweet.”

The Philistines sat with it for days, as men sit before a shut door and stare at the lock. They could imagine a strong thing. And they could imagine a hungry thing. But they could not imagine sweetness hidden in strength, or food hidden in the mouth of destruction.

At last his wife wore the secret out of him and gave it away, and the wedding guests flung the answer back at him.

“What is sweeter than honey?
What is stronger than a lion?”

That was the answer, but it was also the deeper question. For the lion was Samson, and the honey was the strange thing that could only come out of Samson when Samson was broken open. His whole life had that shape. He was strength made perilous to itself, and sweetness trapped in the heart of violence. He carried the outline of the cross in the dark long before Christ carried the cross in the day.

The Strange Deliverer

Samson enters the world already under a sign. He is a Nazirite, a man bound to God by a special vow of separation and holiness, and the vow hangs over him like a crown too heavy for the head that bears it.

He moves through life with the grandeur of a consecrated man and the recklessness of a man playing at the edge of his own mystery. He takes honey from the dead lion. He makes his feast among the Philistines. He gives his heart where his enemies can reach it. He lays his head in the lap of betrayal and is sold into darkness.

Then comes the last picture. Possibly one of the greatest in all Scripture. He stands blind and bound between the pillars of the house of Dagon, and the mighty man has become a slave who must be led by the hand. Yet the final thing in him has not been spent. He asks for strength once more, not to escape the house but to bring the house down.

The Fathers saw in him a type of Christ. Nothing but a great truth could explain so strange a shadow. Samson is one of those Old Testament figures who seem almost too wild to be sacred, until one remembers that prophecy often comes first in thunder and only later in music.

The key is the riddle mentioned above.

Tearing the Beast Apart

Samson meets the lion on the road to his Philistine bride. The Spirit of the Lord comes upon him, and he tears the beast apart with his bare hands as though he were tearing cloth. When he passes that same road again, bees have built in the carcass, and honey lies in the rent body of the lion. He reaches in and takes it, and from that act the riddle is born. From the riddle his trouble begins to gather. The sweetness in the dead beast becomes the secret that opens his own life to ruin.

In killing the lion Samson reveals himself. The lion is the old image of kingly force, of strength enthroned, of the sun at noon, of the thing that rules because it can rend. Samson belongs to that order of things. His very name leans toward the sun. He burns fields. He smites armies. He has in him the glare and suddenness of something solar.

But he does not end there. When he tears the lion, he is tearing an image of himself. Then comes the great surprise. Honey appears in the broken beast. That is the riddle Samson spends his life trying to answer. The strong must be opened before the sweet can appear. The whole question is what kind of opening can do it.

Foxes Tied Tail to Tail

Samson opens himself to his enemies and joins himself to them at every turn. But that is why every victory wounds him. He does not stand apart from the Philistines as a clean avenger. He courts among them, feasts among them, sleeps among them, speaks his heart among them. The enemy is always close enough to touch, close enough to embrace, close enough to become part of the weapon and part of the wound.

This strange law appears again and again in the images of Samson’s life. He burns the fields of the Philistines with foxes tied tail to tail, two creatures fastened together and driven into one fire. The image is grotesque because it is a parody of union. In Scripture marriage is the great sign of difference made fruitful and whole. These foxes are difference made frantic. They are bound together without peace, and set ablaze without agreement.

That is what gives the weapon its force. The fire drives them on, but their very union makes the movement wilder. They run this way and that, in panic and confusion, like two minds trapped in one body. Their joining does not steady them. It multiplies the ruin.

So with Samson. He opens himself to his enemies and joins himself to them at every turn, and that is why every victory returns upon his own flesh. One might even say that one fox is Israel and the other the Philistines, and Samson is the fiery bond between them. His strength never moves in clean separation. It is always tangled up with the thing it strikes.

That image stands at the opposite pole from the old Christian image of the ox and the ass at the manger. There the Jew and the Gentile are gathered in peace before the Bread of Life. Here the divided things are tied together in fury and driven through the fields by fire.

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That is why the pattern goes back to Eden. The cherub stands at the gate with the sword that turns both ways. As Jonathan Pageau notes, the image appears again when David kills Goliath with the giant’s own sword. Samson is that sword in the flesh. He does not only strike enemies who stand outside him. He enters their world. He eats among them, loves among them, sleeps among them, and gives his secret into their hands. So when he strikes, the blow is already turning back upon himself. That is the problem. To wound the enemy, he must first draw near, learn his ways, and join himself to him. But once he is joined, no blow can fall on the enemy alone.

At the end he understands his own law with a frightful lucidity. He has learned that when he kills the enemy, he pays for it in his own flesh. The final act follows with the dreadful neatness of a syllogism. If my death is their death, then my death may be the last blow. His last prayer gathers the whole logic of his life into one sentence.

“Let me die with the Philistines.”

It is a heroic sentence, but it is still only half an answer.

The Mill of Time

The Philistines treat Samson as sin and death treat all the sons of Adam. They blind him, bind him, mock him, and make him grind at the mill like a beast. This is more than a punishment. It is a picture of the whole race in bondage. Man after the fall is blind in the prison house, chained between powers he cannot overthrow, made to labor in circles, and laughed at by the ancient enemy. The prison is the underworld of man. The grinding is the wheel of time. The mockery is the serpent laughing through history.

By the end Samson has seen almost everything. He has seen that the lion is himself. He has seen that sweetness must come out of broken strength. He has seen that the deliverer must join himself to the enemy and go down into death if death is to be struck from within. But he can only live that truth as tragedy. He can die with the Philistines. He cannot yet make death yield life.

Christ will answer the same riddle, and He will answer it by turning the whole movement inside out…

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After man eats of the forbidden fruit, God does not appear at once. The text slows down. There is the sound of Him walking in the garden. Then the question:

“Where are you?”

St. Ephrem the Syrian says this is mercy. God is not looking for information. He is giving Adam room to speak before anything else occurs.

But Adam does not say, “I ate.” Instead, he…

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Nearly four years of a human life. That is about how long the average modern person will spend shut up inside a car. He sits in a little iron room, skimming the road and passing through a world he does not touch. We eat there, quarrel there, sometimes even sleep there. For many of us it is the closest and strangest man-made room we will ever know.

And still we almost never ask the plainest question: What does it mean?

Not what it costs, nor how fast it goes. But what does it point to? The ancients assumed that every made thing had a place in the order of things. The plow was not only useful, it meant something. The sword was not only sharp and dangerous, it stood for something. The ship was not just a vessel, it belonged to a vision of the world. Each craft had its proper place in the syntax of the world, as a word has its proper place in a well-made sentence.

If we read the car as they read the plow or the ship, what sort of thing would it turn out to be?

The answer is odder, and darker, than it first appears. In Scripture, a vehicle is never just a way of getting from one place to another. Rather, it is one of the clearest images of power rightly ordered. When God reveals Himself to Ezekiel, there are wheels turning in every direction, living creatures of mystery, and above them the throne-like brightness on which sits the Son of Man.

“I also heard the noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched one another, and the noise of the wheels beside them, and a great thunderous noise.”

-Ezekiel 2:13

At the cosmic scale, the whole world rolls like a chariot under the weight of God’s glory.

And the same image appears again and again in Scripture. Elijah does not climb into heaven by his own strength, he is swept up in a chariot of fire. The Ark of the Covenant throws the matter into even stronger relief. When men set it on a cart and let oxen carry it, the act was impious. The holy thing was not to be hauled like baggage. It was meant to rest on human shoulders. That is the biblical order of things. A man may govern a beast, he may bridle it, mount it, and turn its strength to a human end. But God does not yoke Himself to brute force. He lays hold of man first.

So the image of riding, wherever it appears, speaks of rule. The higher governing the lower, reason mastering appetite, the king holding the realm, and God giving law to the world. Power is never greatest when it is untamed. It is greatest when it has found its master.

The automobile comes late into that old symbolic story.

But it turns the story upside down.

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The Metal Beast

Dr. Rodney Blackhirst once called the automobile a diabolical symbol. Not because steel and rubber are wicked in themselves, but because the car was born after the old habit of blessing things had begun to die. The plow was blessed. The sword was consecrated. The ship was christened. But the car arrived just when the hands that might have baptized it had gone weak.

So what emerged was a very strange emblem. The car pretends, almost shamelessly, to be an animal. It has four feet in its tyres, eyes in its headlights, and a mouth in its grille. There is fire shut up in its belly. It runs on the buried remains of former ages, dragged up from the depths of the earth, what Blackhirst called the “aurumic humus of Edenic times.” By symbol, the internal combustion engine turns the car into a kind of dragon.

And like the Trojan Horse, the beast asks us to trust it and get in.

The motorist sits enclosed in a small compartment, legs half-idle, hands fixed to the wheel. Blackhirst calls him “Hephaestean,” like the lame smith-god who forged marvels and paid for them with his own body. The maker buys power at the expense of his own flesh. The driver begins to look less like a man and more like a creature in a shell. The Volkswagen Beetle is not merely a brand name. The name is almost too honest. In the car, the human skeleton has, in a sense, moved outside. Man has undergone a kind of metamorphosis into the insectile.

The Old Trick of Technique

But the trouble goes deeper. The nature of the car has rearranged ordinary human life from the ground up.

The Christian writer on symbolism, Jonathan Pageau, uses the car to show what happens when a wish becomes a machine. Men wanted to go faster. They wanted to cover more ground with less effort. What they did not see was that speed would redraw the map of civilization.

The old concentric town, with the church near the center and homes gathered about it, gave way to sprawl. We built suburbs with houses but few shops, commercial strips with shops but no homes, districts for amusement, districts for work, districts for sleeping. Each part cut off from the others. The car alone was left to stitch them together.

That is the old trick of technique. First it gives a convenience, then it makes that convenience a condition, and at last a chain.

In The Great Gatsby, the car becomes the perfect emblem of this careless separation. Daisy Buchanan kills Myrtle Wilson with an automobile and does not stop. As we all know, encased within the machine, we become more primitive toward those in other cars, precisely because our contact with them is less human (harder, more abrupt, almost insect-like). And so Fitzgerald’s rich move through the world encased in machinery, protected from the consequences they leave behind. The book is full of people in motion who never really arrive.

The car teaches us to measure distance by speed instead of by place. We no longer live four streets from the church. We live twenty minutes from the office. The map has been swallowed by the clock. And where there was once a square for meeting, there is now a place for parking.

But this is not the end of the matter. The old tradition that saw the disease also kept the cure…

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Look up at the night sky on a clear evening. You will see stars flung across a black immensity that runs farther than thought can run after it. The spectacle is magnificent. But it is also, in a curious way, vacant. The stars are very far away. That is all they immediately consent to say. Most men feel first…

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White snow, red blood, black wood, and a mother who gives life by losing it. This is not a prelude but the secret of the tale, and perhaps of the world.

A queen sits at her window in the dead of winter. The frame is of black ebony. She sews as the snow falls, feather by feather, from heaven. Then she glances up, and the needle pricks her finger. Three drops of blood fall into the snow below. At once she makes a wish: for a child white as snow, red as blood, and black as the wood of the window frame. Not long after, the child is born. And the queen dies.

There are three colors in it: white, red, and black. White is light, and that first purity which seems to stand at the beginning of things. Red is blood, which is life, but not life cheaply had. Life carried in the body, life paid for, life given. Black is the dark ground out of which things are called and into which they return. “Darkness was upon the face of the deep,” says Genesis, then comes light, and between darkness and light the breath and blood of living things.

The queen at her sewing is not an accidental picture. She is making, and the needle is part of that making. Yet the tale will not let us imagine that making is easy. The blood from her finger tells us otherwise. Something must be given up. Something must be spent. The child comes from that gift, and the mother dies in the giving of her. This is not tragedy merely in the modern sense, as though it were only a cruel event. It is closer to the old pattern by which things come to be. The grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, otherwise it remains alone.

Then the stepmother enters.

Here it is worth slowing down, because it is just here that many modern readings become too small for the tale. One reading says the stepmother is only the child’s fear of growing up. Another says she is a victim of beauty standards, made hard and cruel by the demands of a man’s world. Another says she is simply a vain and wicked woman, and that the tale is only a lesson against vanity. None of these readings is wholly false. But all of them are too thin.

The tale is doing something more exact. The first mother is like the garden in its first freshness. She is fertility without strain, gift without self-consciousness, bounty without suspicion. She dies because the world cannot remain forever in that first innocence. It must harden into shape. And the shape it hardens into is the stepmother. She is nature after the Fall. She is still beautiful, still powerful, still called mother, but the turn has come. She is what the ground becomes when it no longer yields with ease, when the same earth that fed you now answers you with thorns. She is the world as we actually find it. The world that nourishes us, clothes us, shelters us, and then, at some point, begins also to resist us.

This is not allegory in the cheap sense. The stepmother is still a stepmother. The tale means what it says first of all. But the surface of the story belongs to a deeper order.

Dr. Samuel Fohr, in one of the most careful studies of spiritual meaning in the Grimm tales, argues that the stepmother’s cruelty is not merely personal but cosmic. She plays the part that the world plays in every human life. The world first seems a place of gift, and then slowly reveals itself as a place of trial.

Then there is the mirror.

The queen asks the mirror who in the land is fairest of all. For years it answers that she is. We modern readers nearly always rush to call this vanity, as though the mirror were simply a prop for narcissism. But the tale is more severe and more interesting than that. The mirror speaks the truth. It says she is the fairest because she is. And when that ceases to be true, it says that too.

So the mirror is not merely the servant of vanity. It is the emblem of truth. It does not flatter, and it does not bend. It tells what is, without caring who has asked.

What it finally says is that Snow White is fairer than the queen. Here the Christian thinker Jonathan Pageau makes a useful distinction. The queen knows she is beautiful. She sees herself in the mirror and grasps her beauty as an object of knowledge. Snow White does not do this. She simply possesses beauty without turning it into a possession. She is beautiful without needing to hold the fact in her hand. And that innocence, that freedom from self-regard, is part of what makes her more beautiful. The queen’s self-consciousness bends her inward. Snow White’s innocence leaves her whole.

This lies very near the story of the Fall. Adam and Eve were made in the image of God. The serpent promised them that they would become like God. But in a deep sense they already were what he tempted them to seek. The trick was to make them grasp at what had already been given. And by grasping, to lose it.

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At this point it helps to say how such tales ought to be read.

Fairy tales are not Scripture. Scripture stands above them as the church stands above its vestibule. We do not go to Snow White to extract doctrine. Yet fairy tales, legends, and myths can train the imagination to notice what Scripture reveals. The apple in Snow White throws a side-light upon the fruit in Genesis. The glass coffin can sharpen our sense of the tomb. The prince can help us see the bridegroom more clearly. These things do not replace revelation but prepare us for it. They tune the ear before the greater music begins.

And they are not, in the first place, moral tales. If you try to squeeze a neat lesson out of Snow White, as Disney did last year, you will probably deform it. As Pageau notes, the tale is not chiefly instructing you in behavior. It is showing the shape of reality. The moral comes after, and grows out of that shape.

But back to the tale itself.

The queen orders a huntsman to take Snow White into the wood and kill her. He cannot do it. Instead, a young boar comes running by. He kills the boar and brings its lungs and liver back to the queen as proof that the girl is dead. The queen has them cooked and eats them. She believes she has consumed Snow White.

Again the old pattern appears. The innocent is spared, and another creature dies in her stead. It is the pattern of Abraham and Isaac, where the ram caught in the thicket takes the child’s place upon the altar. The boar dies so that Snow White may live. The queen devours the substitute and thinks she has won.

Snow White flees through the forest.

She runs over sharp stones and through thorns. Wild beasts spring toward her, yet do her no harm. The forest is a wilderness: outside the garden, outside safety, outside the ordered life of the house. It is a place of exile and exposure. Cain goes out further from the presence of God. Israel wanders in the desert for forty years. Christ is driven into the wilderness. The wood in Snow White belongs to the same pattern. It is a place of danger. For that very reason it is also a place of purification. In such a place all that is unnecessary is stripped away.

At last she finds the house of the seven dwarfs. Everything in it is small, but everything is in order. She eats a little from each plate, drinks a little from each cup, and falls asleep. The dwarfs return, find her, pity her, and take her in. She keeps house for them, and they watch over her.

Each dwarf is marked by some single quality. They are good and faithful, but incomplete. They work below ground, digging ore from the mountain. They represent the hidden virtues of labor, humility, and steadfast service. The quiet work by which the world is upheld from beneath. They can shelter innocence. They cannot bring it to its end. The tale knows very well that this cannot be the end of the story.

Snow White is learning the duties of a home before she yet has a home of her own, or a family for whom such duties become a gift rather than a mere task. In that sense she resembles the Samaritan woman at the well. Surrounded by relations yet not fulfilled by any of them. The dwarfs are not so much companions as splinters. Each one a fragment of the man she needs, but none of them a whole man. And because she lives among fragments, she remains herself unguarded and vulnerable.

So the queen comes three times, as tempters often do.

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