We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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Our Lord teaches us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” But I sometimes fancy that we have seldom given much thought to what that means.
I think that, in part, it’s because we don’t quite know what to make of heaven, much less how God’s will is done there, nor how to use that as a template for doing it here. The popular notion of heaven is of a sort of pictorial mélange of puffy clouds, pink cherubim, and gauzy TV images of a paradise park or perpetual comfy chair by the hearth on Christmas Eve. Occasionally, in our postmodern culture, our more trendy sorts will depict a God-and-angel-free “heaven” of Higher Consciousness in which we achieve something called “Enlightenment” and move beyond such petty concerns as love and the troubles of mortal flesh. This usually involves the screen fading to a white blank to signify that the hero has ascended to some realm beyond good and evil, etc. The bottom line is that whether you believe in God or merely in Enlightenment, Heaven is the place where, as the saying goes “all our troubles are over.”
The problem is, the New Testament doesn’t seem to share this simple picture of heaven. Indeed, the puzzle of scripture is pinning down just what the word “heaven” means. Of course, part of the puzzle is that “heaven” is something that, in biblical Greek as in modern English, refers to both spiritual and physical reality. Partly “heaven” or “the heavens” refers to the sky. Partly it refers to the spiritual realm. In the ancient mind, the two images were blended and some people, such as modern atheists, often imagine that modern believers still function at that Bronze Age level of cognition. So, for instance, there is the famous story of Khrushchev scoffing that cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had not seen God in outer space. And, of course, there are those innocents today who bill themselves as New Atheists, pointing out to us childish believers that God is not an old man sitting on a cloud. The reply to this sort of confusion is that New Atheists really need to attempt to understand both the ancient and the modern religious mind a bit better.
What they would see, if they did make such an attempt, has been aptly described in the title of a book called Before Philosophy.[1] The point of the book is that, in many cases, the distinctions that Western Man will make subsequent to antiquity and sometimes well after the start of the Christian era do not exist for many ancients. For instance, there are no hard and fast categories for science, art, magic, religion, philosophy, and math in remote antiquity because the universe is typically received as a connected whole rather than chopped up into academic fields of specialization. So, for instance, Pythagoras, whom we moderns are taught to regard strictly as a secular mathematician, does not see mathematics cut off from the spiritual realm but as emblematic of it. After all, what are the two places where you encounter things that are absolutely real and yet which are not composed of either matter or energy, nor do they exist in time or space? Answer: spirits and numerical values both have this strange quality. You can grasp the reality of “two-ness” without having two things in front of you. Mathematics runs through everything, holding things together in a colossal and elegant dance of equations, as though it were the language—or better still the syntax—of God’s creative speech. So Pythagoras saw no particular reason to quarantine his cogitations about numbers into the box called “mathematics” while keeping his musings about the transmigration of souls in a box called “religion.” It was all one to him.
Similarly, the Babylonian Magi in the New Testament who studied the heavens saw no particular division between what we would later distinguish as astrology, astronomy, science, and religion. It was all one, all connected. Much the same idea was present in the minds of biblical writers. For instance, in Revelation 4 and 5 we meet the “four living creatures”—angelic beings John describes as looking like a lion, an ox, a man, and an eagle. These images, in turn, refer us back to the vision of Ezekiel 1, in which the prophet, in exile in Babylon some six centuries before John, sees an identical vision. But there’s also strong evidence to link these four images to the constellations of the zodiac, according to biblical scholars like Michel Barnouin,[2] Austin Marsden Farrer, and David Chilton.[3] For (as all ancient peoples did), the biblical writers indicate a high degree of familiarity with the constellations, with the exception that Scorpio was probably known to them as the Eagle. The four cherubim mentioned in Revelation 4:6–7 are very likely the middle signs in the four quarters of the zodiac: The lion is Leo, the ox is Taurus, the man is Aquarius, and the eagle corresponds to Scorpio. John lists them in counter-clockwise order, backward around the zodiac.
This is not, however, an example of star worship on John’s part any more than Matthew’s gospel is a tribute to the Babylonian astrology of the Magi. Rather, it’s just another example of the common biblical understanding that the heavens, like all the rest of creation, are a sign made by God and pointing to God. In the words of Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” To the people of biblical times, the groupings of the stars are not random, for the simple reason that nothing in creation is random. Rather, they thought the macrocosm of creation showed the glory of God writ large across the heavens just as the microcosm of the tabernacle and, later, the temple showed it on a smaller, more intimate scale.[4] What we are seeing, in fact, is a sort of embryonic sacramentalism whereby the invisible is made visible through the physical.
So it should be no surprise to us that John’s star imagery borrows not from paganism but from Jewish scripture. For in the Old Testament (cf. Numbers 2), the arrangement of the twelve tribes of Israel around the tabernacle probably corresponded to the zodiac and its twelve signs. In fact, at least six ancient synagogues at Hammat Tiberias, Beit Alpha, Huseifa, Susiya, Naaran, and Sepphoris are decorated with the zodiac.[5] The hope of the twelve tribes of the Chosen People is that Israel is the beginning of the new order of things, whose destiny and divine authorship is symbolized by the twelve constellations. Indeed, the link between the “heavenly host” ruled by Yahweh Sabaoth (the “Lord of Hosts”) and the nation of Israel is very strong, for the heavenly host, or army of angelic powers symbolized by the stars, is ruled over by the very same God who commands the armies of Israel or the “earthly host.” The earthly tabernacle was understood by Israelites to be a miniature of God’s heavenly dwelling. both were attended by the armies of the Lord, composed of the angels and the people of Israel.
So, for instance, in Genesis 37:9, Jacob and his family are likened to the sun, moon, and twelve stars. The book of Judges also reflects the notion that the “heavenly host” of God and the earthly host of Israel are all members of the army of God. That’s why Judges 5:20 celebrates the defeat of Jabin and his general Sisera by singing, “From heaven fought the stars, from their courses they fought against Sisera.” Once again, the tendency of the ancient mind to see things as connected rather than as separated is in evidence. Heaven (in what we moderns call the “spiritual sense”) and the heavens (meaning the skies above, whether full of puffy clouds or stars) were seen as connected. But it seldom occurs to the ancient mind to probe the nature of the connection or distinguish the spiritual reality from the thing symbolizing it. That mind sees the connectedness of things and it sees something else—warfare, even in the heavenlies.
Of which more tomorrow.
[1] Henri Frankfort, Mrs. H.A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (London: Penguin, 1946)
[2] Michel Barnouin, “Remarques sur les tableaux numériques du Livre des Nombres,” RB 76 (1969) pp. 351–64.
Michel Barnouin, “Les recensements du Livre des Nombres et l’astronomie babylonienne,” VT 27 (1977), 280–303.
[3] For a full discussion of John’s use of zodiac imagery, see Austin Marsden Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John’s Apocalypse (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986). Also see David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance: An Exposition of the Book of Revelation (Fort Worth, TX: Dominion, 1990), pp. 158–59.
[4] For a fuller discussion of the relationship between cosmos and temple, see Joshua Berman, The Temple: Its Meaning and Symbolism Then and Now (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995), pp. 10–14.
[5] Prof. Rachel Hachlili, “Mosaic Floors in Ancient Synagogues,” Jewish Heritage Online Magazine. Available at http://www.jhom.com/topics/stones/mosaic.html as of August 15, 2007.
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