were coming into play as Europeans began to feel their way out of a medieval world.
Along with medieval philosophy, medieval art focused on the numinous realm of the soul. Art also was iconic, aiming to represent the spiritual order beyond the material world. One way of conveying that order was through scale; thus Christ would be the largest figure in a painting, with angels next in size, followed by saints and martyrs, then ordinary human beings. Backgrounds too were iconic; gold and azure represented Heaven, whose value was viscerally present in exorbitantly expensive gold leaf and lapis lazuli pigments. Depth was almost absent from these images. But in the late twelfth century representation began to undergo a subtle transformation with a gradual interest in three-dimensionality starting to emerge. This new style reached a crescendo with Giotto’s work in the Arena Chapel in Padua in which he depicted a sequence of near-life-sized images recounting the life of Christ. What is immediately startling about these Christ Cycle frescoes is their sense of physical presence. Figures look solid and are anchored to the ground as if compelled by gravity. We are clearly no longer in Heaven but on Earth. Everyone appears at the same scale: Christ and humans and angels. Flat blue and gold backgrounds are replaced by attempts at genuine landscapes; there are mountains, trees and carefully observed studies of animals. Buildings seem to be leaping out of the surface. True, they are not entirely convincing, but one feels here that the artist is striving to convey three-dimensional space.
All this was in keeping with a revivified interest in the natural world. After the hiatus of the early Middle Ages, scholars had begun to recover the science and mathematics of ancient Greece, and during the thirteenth century the study of nature underwent a renaissance. With his careful attention to empirical detail, Giotto reflected this novel scientific bent. For artists and their patrons (many of whom were leaders of the Catholic Church) the observations of the outer eye were becoming more interesting than the revelations of the inner eye. In short, visual attention was shifting towards the material realm.
Paradoxically, this refocusing from spirit to matter was given credence by a novel theological development and it is here that science and religion intersect in a uniquely Western way. As Europeans recovered the heritage of the Greeks one thinker they increasingly encountered was Pythagoras, a mathematician and mystic who had dreamed the dream that would become modern physics. In the fifth century BCE Pythagoras posited that the structure of the world was determined by mathematics: ‘All is number’, he famously declared. A small band of medieval thinkers took Pythagorean precepts and transformed them into a Christian context, giving rise to the then-novel idea that God had created the material world according to mathematical rules.
Among God’s primary tools was Euclidean geometry and in 1267 the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon argued in a treatise to Pope Clement IV that artists ought to follow their Creator and construct images accordingly with geometric relationships. Bacon called the new style ‘geometric figuring’ and he proposed that the Church encourage painters to adopt it as a matter of principle. Artists who did so would not just be rendering Creation truthfully, Bacon said, they could also serve a powerful propaganda purpose, for according to him the techniques of three-dimensional verisimilitude were so psychologically powerful that viewers beholding such images would believe they were actually witnessing the scenes depicted. They would believe they were really seeing, for example, Christ raising Lazarus in front of them. To put this into current parlance, Bacon was suggesting that ‘geometric figuring’ acted as a kind of virtual reality and, as he saw it, this medieval VR would have the power to convert unbelievers to the Christian faith.
From the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries artists elaborated Bacon’s vision with ever-greater finesse, a movement that culminated in the formalisms of ‘linear perspective’. The consequences of this representational revolution reached far beyond the painted surfaces of the churches from which it began. Art historian Samuel Edgerton has argued that ‘geometric figuring’ retrained European minds to see space in a Euclidean sense and that in this respect Renaissance artists from Giotto through Raphael paved the way for the physicists who came after them. Edgerton’s thesis helps make sense of a historical conundrum, for following Aristotle most Western thinkers pointedly rejected a Euclidean view of space. As physicist and science historian Max Jammer has stressed, such a view of space was not ‘thought reasonable until the seventeenth century’. No other culture we know of has conceived of its cosmic scheme in this mathematical manner, and even in the West most learned people rebelled against the idea for several hundred years. Perspectival painting served to introduce the concept as a visceral experience, subverting intellectual objections by giving viewers a powerful psychological illusion that the painted scenes they were looking at were actually there.
By the mid-sixteenth century, educated Europeans were coming to believe that the space around them here on Earth was a Euclidean realm. But that raised an uneasy question: How far out does this space extend? Does it extend to the Moon? To Mars? To the Sun and stars? Though not articulated in quite this form during the Renaissance, the question assumed immense importance because it challenged the medieval distinction between the terrestrial and celestial realms. If Euclidean space proceeds beyond the Earth then that suggests that similar laws and similar things should be found in both regions.
The unification of the two domains was of course cemented by Isaac Newton and in some ways it remains his most profound legacy. Newton showed that the same force of gravity that makes an apple fall to the ground also operates to keep the Moon revolving around the Earth and the planets orbiting the Sun. Newton’s law (a Pythagorean triumph if ever there was one) demonstrated an essential continuity, for if gravity operates between celestial bodies then they too must be mundane matter like the pebble that rolls down a hill. Moreover, once astronomers abandoned the medieval distinction between earthly and celestial space, there was no longer any reason to imagine a limit to the physical world. Why should physical space not go on for ever? By the end of the eighteenth century, that view had become scientific orthodoxy.
WHERE IS HEAVEN?
This new cosmology had profound theological consequences, for with physical space extended to infinity there was literally no room left for Heaven. One could say, as liberal theologians do, that the realm of the soul is simply beyond the material plane and leave it enigmatically at that, yet with physical space infinitised the whole question of what a ‘beyond’ might constitute became increasingly problematic. For better or worse, one of the consequences of the scientific revolution was to write out of Western cosmology any sense of spiritual space as a legitimate aspect of the Real.
Newton himself was concerned about the matter and tried hard to rescue the situation by associating space with God. Picking up on a tradition that originates in Judaism, he posited space as the medium through which the deity’s presence permeates the world. Space, he said, was God’s sensorium, the substrate through which He sees all, feels all, knows all. Space was indeed synonymous with divine Knowing. As President of the Royal Society Newton understood that the new science had to do much more than make empirical predictions – it had to be acceptable to reasonable society. Galileo and Descartes had both run afoul of such expectations about what a cosmology should deliver and Newton was determined not to make the same deistic mistake. As Britain’s leading representative for science, he comprehended that neither the people nor the patrons would support the endeavour if it was seen to be in conflict with wider spiritual needs. The Royal Society stood on the side of reason, but it also allied itself with the state, the King and God. All this wasn’t just a propaganda exercise, for psychologically speaking, Newton needed reasons to accept the new space himself – God made the void ‘reasonable’ to him.
Newton had good cause to worry, for soon after his death less religious minds stripped the theological embellishments from his system leaving humans alone in the void. Increasingly in the age of science we have confronted the dilemma that if we want to claim something is real, we have to posit its position in physical space. If one can’t point to coordinates on a map, then more and more one invites the accusation that whatever it is, is not real at all. Hence the liberal
