This is Jonathan Pejel. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone. I
thought we could look at a little bit of architecture. I've mentioned several times
in my videos that the church architecture, the Christian church architecture is based in
some ways both on the Old Testament temple imagery, but then ultimately also this
imagery that we find in the Book of Revelation. There's also a third strain
which is related to the manner in which the church architecture was developed, and
that is the visions of the prophets, a vision of Ezekiel. So we're
going to kind of get into all of that, look into several of these
strains, but ultimately what I want to do is begin with the words of
Christ himself. And so before we begin, you know, don't forget.
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different projects. We are doing the Dante course right now and it is wild,
it's quite a right. I'm really excited about it. The first time,
the first Dante class was just great, and so I'm looking forward to
continuing that with Richard Roland. And so the way we want to start here
is with, of course, this very particular verse which talks about the relationship
between Christ and architecture. So Christ has the stone which the builders rejected,
has become the chief cornerstone, was the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous
in our eyes. And so when I was young, people would talk about
this verse, I remember, and they would often reference what we often called
the cornerstone today, which is the idea of putting a very square stone at
the corner of the building so that then you can align the rest of the
building to make sure that all the stones that are aligned to it are straight.
And you know, this is a fine interpretation, is very interesting,
but I do think there's a better interpretation for this for what it is the
Christ is, you know, you know, describing what it does it mean
to be the chief cornerstone, you know, the head of the head cornerstone
or something like that and this argument, actually I take from Reniguinot, which
I don't know where he got it from, but I think it's a very
powerful image, which is that, in fact, what this seems to be
referencing is what we call a keystone. And so for those who who know
the way that you build an art, which is the basic structure of all
Roman architecture, is that the arches, the stone in the arch are all
the same. So all the stones inside the arch are all the same,
can be all the same stone, but in order for the arch to hold
together at the very end, you put in what we call a cornerstone,
a keystone, and the keystone what it does is that because it's angled like
this, and because it's one stone that has that angle, it holds the
entire art together. And so this of course makes sense of the words of
Christ, which is that he says that the stone the builders rejected, and
why did they reject it? They rejected it because it didn't look like all
the other stones. It was a different quality of stone. So because of
that, until they get to the end, they don't know what its use
is. Because you have all these stones that stack up, and at the
end you have this one stone that doesn't fit, and this stone that doesn't
fit ultimately ends up being the keystone of the arts, the mystery, the
secret that hides the reason for the rest of the of the entire structure.
And so you know, this is of course a reference by Christ in many
ways, in different in different manners, which is that the you know,
he talks about the pearl, that you buy the entire field in order to
get the pearl, and the pearl is a different quality from the rest of
the field, but it is the reason why you want the field in the
in the first place. It's the reason for the field. And so this
is of course the good way to understand it is that the keystone, it
holds the entire structure together, and it also you know, comes down from
heaven. All of this imagery makes sense and it is the basis of Roman
architecture. Now you know, of course Christ would have been aware of Roman
architecture. He would have you know. And it's also it's not just Roman
architecture. There are other types of architecture that have used arches and you know,
things akin to arches in order to create the structure. Now you know
what you can do with an arch is that you can multiply arches and you
can join them together, and then you can create what we called a vault,
and a vault in architecture also often has what we called a capstone.
So the capstone is similar to the keystone. It is a stone that holds
all the ribs of the vault together. And so imagine all the ribs of
the vault are like arches, and then in the center you put this stone,
particular stone that connects all the arches together and hold them in the middle.
And so often in this structure, what they would do in the capstone
is they would often put the monogram of Christ or different images, sometimes of
Lamb, but sometimes in the West they would literally put an image of Christ.
You know, that is the capstone, the three dimensional version of a
keystone that holds the ribs of the vault together. And so again this stone
is different from all the other stones. It is a connector stone, and
all the other stones of the rib are all the same because they just kind
of go all the way up. And then you have this last stone which
is strange and looks ill shapen at the outset, but ultimately is the reason
and maniffects the wholeness of the entire structure, and so this is of course
you can see how all of this is related to the symbolism of Christ.
But in the Orthodox tradition we don't necessarily have ribbed vaults this way. But
what we do have is of course the dome. And so a dome is
a three dimensional arch. So the image of the arch itself now projected into
space so that it creates this round structure, and so it can help you
understand architecturally why it is that we put the image of Christ up there at
the very top of the dome, For it is in some ways an image
of the keystone or the capstone, or the top of the arch, or
the chief cornerstone, which is at the very top of the structure, gives
the reason for the structure, and also you know, shows everything that it's
pointed to and what holds it all together. And so to go further into
this understanding, we have to basically understand this the image of the arch itself,
that is that an arch is an image of the union of Heaven and
Earth in its very structure. Why, because it has a dome at the
top, it has a circle at the top, and it has a square
bottom. It has a flat bottom, so it's square at the bottom and
it's round at the top. For those who don't know that the heaven is
round and the Earth is square, I know this is difficult for people to
totally understand. If you're interested in that, I wrote several articles on the
Orthodox arch Jurnal about the cosmic vision and how you know the basic experience of
heaven and Earth is that earth is that the heaven is round and earth is
square. Of course, if you lie down in a field and you look
up into the heavens, what will you see? What will you experience?
You will experience this dome. The heaven will present itself as a dome that
then comes down and connects with the Earth. And the Earth is a square
because of your experience of the earth. Because the Earth has four corners,
the Earth is experienced as stable. And our experience of something that's stable is
something that has four and so think of a beast with four feet, think
of a table with four legs. If you want to make something stable in
the world, which you do is you make it square. That is the
best way for it to be stable. But it also has a reflection of
our experience in the world, which is that we do experience our place in
the world as four that is, we have in front of us, we
have behind us. Then we have the left and the right, and we
experience that as the four directions as north, south, you know, east,
west, or depending on the orientation. The ancient orientation was actually eastward,
so it would have east in front of you. You would have north
on your left hand, you'd have south on your right hand, and you
would have the west behind you. It's also the structure of a church which
faces east, and therefore you have the front of the church, where you
know it represents ultimately it's an image of the heaven, but it also represents
the east the front, and then you have the west in the back that
when you were baptized, you turn around and you spit at the devil who's
in the west, because he's in the place where darkness starts. And then
the left hand is the strange is the dark hand, because the sun never
goes north, and the right hand is the south hand, which is the
place where the sun is. So sun goes up from the east, moves
south and then sets in the west. Okay, but it's just to understand
that our experience of the world is that it is a square. So once
you kind of understand that that a good way to represent the relationship between Heaven
and Earth is this way, then then you can understand how this image,
this arch becomes the structure by which Christian churches are understood and start to manifest
themselves in both the east and the west in different ways. But nonetheless,
so some of the very first churches we have in Rome will have this structure.
And so the first structures that appear as soon as Christianity becomes legal is
what we call the basilica structure. So the basilica structure has this image of
the arch as being horizontal, and so you kind of take the arch,
you lay it on the ground, and now the east becomes the image of
the heavens, and the west becomes the image of the earth, because the
sun comes up, comes up in the east and goes down in the west,
and so it creates that structure this way. And the apps, which
is the very top of the church, which is this round part that you
see at the very top of the church, then becomes an image of Heaven
itself, which is why in the churches. You know, Christ is represented
in the apps, in the early churches, in the churches in the West
also for a very long time. You see Christ is sitting on the world.
He is surrounded by angels, and he is in that appse. The
apse is a half dome. It is an image. It's a dome that's
cut in that's cut in half, and so it represents this heaven which is
there. But it also has the strength of representing the arch again now this
way. So now you have a horizontal arch which goes moved towards towards the
east, but because of the structure of the apps, you also have a
vertical arch which goes up and is represented here. And then you can multiply
that. You can see in this image of the Church of Saint Pras said
in Ravenna, where you have these multiple arches that are both the apps,
then the entire basilica which is projected into the east, and then of course
moving into the the apps, you also have different arches that move into it.
And then it's that arch is then repeated in the shape of the windows.
You know, everything then repeats it as a fractal structure where you have
arches within arches, arches projected this way, arches projected this way, and
then you have arches that are inside the arches. And this can be taken
to levels that are very extreme. If you think of here's a transversal of
Hagia Sophia, where you can see now all the arches kind of coming together,
where you have the main dome in the center. Then you have the
second arches that create the pendentives inside, and then you have multiple arches.
Everything about it is just arches within arches all the way down to the level
of the window and to the shape of the church itself. So you have
understand that this image of the union of Heaven and Earth is a fractal image.
This is what I'm telling you NonStop, which is there's a union of
heaven and earth in your heart. You know you have Heaven and Earth in
your heart. This is this is attested to by the by this herean fathers,
where there's a little Heaven and a little earth inside you and a ladder
which connects the two. And then your body has that shape as well.
If you've noticed, your head is round and your feet are square. So
a human being is made like an arch, not only in arch, but
also a square, because if you put your hands out like that, then
you have you have the shape of a western church with the extension of the
four and at the very top you have the east, which is the top
the roundness of the skull. And this is I mean, this is the
testit to and all these theological all these like weird mythological stories you'll find,
like for example, in the Northern Scandinavian stories, the idea that there's a
giant, primordial giant, and they they they use his the inside of his
skull to make the heaven, you know. And so this is alluding to
the fact that the human the human being is a microcosm of the cosmos,
our experience of the world, and its shape is reflected in the way that
we are, that we are made. And so then this, this fractal
structure gets repeated, repeated in the church at every level. And in the
early churches there was even what we call the ciborium, which was a kind
of canopy that was set up above the altar and would now represent this structure
once again inside the altar. So you would have a a a structure with
four feet and then a dome at the You know, sometimes the dome wouldn't
necessarily have to be a dome. It could also be a It could also
just be like a triangle at the top. But even that, like you
know, the the image of the capstone as the stone that holds the whole
structure together in an arch makes sense, but it also makes sense in the
sense of a triangle or the sense of a pyramid. As you probably know,
the capstone of pyramids, of the Egyptian pyramids would have been a fractal
pyramid that would be gold at the very top of the of the pyramid,
and then the rest of the pyramid at the bottom. So you can see,
for example, like in the famous the famous unfinished pyramid that you find
on the dollar bill, that the capstone is not there. There's no capstone
on the pyramid. And above the pyramid is the eye, which is the
image of the capstone, which is the image of the logos, you could
say, descending on the peerred manifesting the act of being, the act of
consciousness, the act of evaluating all the things that Mattia talks about in his
book as being ultimately being an image of the capstone, itself, the thing
that is above the pyramid and comes down upon it. Okay, So this
is also all there in this image of this fractal relationship, and it is
also there in this ciborium that we find inside the church. Now, there
are different ways you can end up doing it, and there's an indefinite variety
of church structures which play with this imagery and will represent it in different ways.
And so in the West what ends up mostly happening is that this basic
structure of the arch gets represented in the shape of the church itself as a
fractal, as a macrocosm of the human shape, with a Latin cross,
so you can imagine with Christ with his hands out and the body down.
So you can see that on the right side here which this is I think
it's a point of view of Shaft or one of the Gothic churches. And
then on the left then you can see an orthodox structure which emphasizes the squareness
of the shape itself. Below here and there the cross is inside, usually
some kind of Greek cross or square cross, which nonetheless represents these four directions,
the fourness of the human body. And then ultimately, like I said,
the cross of course, of Christ itself, which is the ultimate meaning
of it. And so then you but the way that they did it,
And this is really interesting because you know, one of the things you see
happening in the in the Christian tradition is that there seems to be an effort
to get to this, to get to the to get to the dome,
you know, to get to the idea of putting a dome on a square.
And there were some attempts to do this in you know, even before
on the Russian time, in the Russian in the Roman times, you know,
you can see the Pantheon, for example, in Rome, it's a
dome on a if you look at it sideways, like if you look at
it from outside, it looks like an arch, because it's a dome on
the ground with a vertical side, so it looks like an arch. But
when you're inside, it's not a square at the bottom, it's a circle.
And so like, how can we get to a full representation of this
imagery? And the solution is to stack the arches them on each other.
It is really to use the fractal structure of heaven and earth in order to
make this work. This is how the Christians and Justinian excelling in this with
how Yes Sophia develop the structure of the Pendentives, and so the Pendentives what
they are is you can see in this image the pentitives are what the little
a's that you have there. And the way you do that is that you
create two arches, a wider arch at the bottom and then a narrow arch
at the top. And what it does is it distributes the weight so that
the narrower dome can then hold on the wider dome at the bottom, and
it distributes the weight in a way that makes the dome possible, that makes
it possible for you to create the dome. But what it also does is
it emphasizes very powerfully the relationship between the circle and the square, because what
you can do with the arches as you see here, is that then the
second arch you can pull it down into again a square. And then when
you look up you actually see four corners that come out as you create this
with fractal arches that go all around all around the structure, and these four,
you know, these four Pendentives. What the Church ends up doing is
putting in them an image of the four Evangelists and it is of course a
manner to represent how the one becomes the many, how become one manifests itself
in four, how one is stabilized into four, just like the oneness of
the dome gets stabilized into four pillars into the church. But this is also
a reflection on the vision of Ezekiel, which is why sometimes in the Four
Glories what you see is the evangelist, but sometimes in the Four Glories what
you also see are the faces of the Cherub. And so this is of
course a famous image of Christ's and glory by rube Lev, where you can
see that it looks like what it would look like if you stood in the
church underneath. Right, you stood in a church under here, and you
looked up into the dome, what you would see is this, right,
you would see the four corners coming down from the glory, and on those
four corners would be the four evangelists, but also representing the four beasts.
In Rubelev's image, it is the four beasts of the Cherub, that is
the man, the eagle, the bull, and the lion. And you
can see that it's really referencing the vision of Ezekiel, because under his feet
you can see that there are these wheels, and now the square of the
earth is represented both. So if you look at how powerful this image is.
It has the relationship between the circle and the square in multiple ways.
So you can see that the square is his footstool, right it is,
the round is of course his head, which I can't show, but and
then the round is this glory around him, and then the square is also
the four points that are on the corner. It's a very powerful image of
this fractoral relationship between the circle and the square. And you know, interestingly
enough, if you look at the bottom of his feet, which you see
are these wheels. Look now at the church. This is a very powerful
church in terms of the fractal relationship between all these arches. I think this
is church in Serbia. I think it's one of the cathedrals, I'm not
sure. And so you can see that here the Dome of Christ represents the
ascension, and there's a fractal relationship all through, which is that in the
Dome of Christ you have Christ up at the top. Then you have the
Mother of God that is represented. You know here Christ is up here at
the top, you have the Mother of God which is represented at the lower
part, which becomes like an image of Earth inside of the Dome of Heaven.
And then that gets reproduced down here where you have two apses. You
have one appse which is at the top and has Christ in it, that
is in glory, and then you have a smaller apse which is below and
we're recessed. And in that smaller app you have the Mother of God sitting
there with Christ in her lap. And look at how powerful the use of
these repeating arches is in this architecture. You have arches within arches within arches.
It's really quite astounding. But look also as that what is below the
feet, you know, below the dome of Heaven that comes down are the
these chandeliers, the corals chandeliers, now the chorus chandelier, this round chandelier.
Often there are two chandeliers in many churches where you have on the one
hand this round chandelier which hangs from the dome and then the outside of the
dome, and then you'll also often have a chandelier that hangs from the center
of the dome that comes down and is one kind of more the way we
usually understand a chandelier like with all the lights in it, and so you
have one around and one in the middle. And what happens in many churches,
in the monasteries, for sure, but then also in many churches that
at Pasca and that certain feasts, what they'll do is they'll spin the corals,
and then inside the spinning corals will also spin the chandelier. And it's
this powerful image of these rotating wheels. And so you know, let's look
now at the vision of Ezekiel, and you'll see how all this comes together
in a very powerful way. And so I looked, and I saw a
windstorm coming out of the north, an immense cloud with flashing lightning, and
surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal,
and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. Each of the
four had the face of a human being, and on the right side,
each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of
an ox. Each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their
faces. As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on
the ground besides each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and
structure of the wheels. They sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike.
Each appeared to be made like a wheel, intersecting a wheel. Spread
out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked something like a vault,
sparkling like crystal and awesome. Then there came a voice from above the
vault over their heads as they stood with lowered wings. Above the vault,
over their heads was what looked like a throne of Lapis lazuli. And high
above on the throne was a figure like that of a man. All right,
Now look at that again. When Ezekiel says that above the earth was
a vault, he's talking about your experience of heaven. He's talking about a
dome. He says, above your head, above his head was a dome,
and above the dome was a throne of Lapis lazually. And and then
on the throne was the son of Man. On the throne was who,
in Christian understanding, came to be Christ, rank to be the incarnate one.
And so he described this powerful image of a dome with Christ above it,
the capstone, the chief cornerstone. You know, all of his symbolism
crashing together in powerful ways, and then he describes these four beasts the four
But what he does is he uses a fractal structure. It's very very powerful,
you know. It's like there are four beasts, like these four corners,
and the four beasts each have wheels that have wheels within wheels. Think
of it, and it really is a chariot. That's the way to understand
it. It's it's what the Hebrew mystics called the macaba. It's this mystical
chariot that is a fractal structure that manifests God in the world. So you
have these four beasts, and each of the four beasts have four faces,
and then the four and then they each have wheels that are wheels within wheels,
and so you have this powerful fractal structure. Now in the way we
represent it in the church, the fractal is how can I say this is
there in a different way. And so we don't represent each glory, you
know, we don't represent each glory as having four faces, but we just
represent the four faces as emanating from the central Son of Man. And we
don't necessarily represent wheels within wheels within wheels. We have simply represent the wheels
and you can see. But you can see when you look now at the
church that it is this fractal system. It is this fractal relationship of heaven
and earth, of how the dome and the square, and the penitives and
the arches upon arches within arches, and also even the chandelier and the circle
of the dome and the chandelier that hangs down from it is these wheels within
wheels within wheels. But you can see that uses the same symbolism and presents
it in a way that is understandable. And now this fractal system is really
very true. And if you're interested, Mattsira, my brother Mattir wrote an
article about it in the Secrets of God's Dog, which is here a very
amazing article. Very grateful he was that he gave it to us, and
he shows that in Ezekiel there are two descriptions of the cherub, one in
which the cherub, like I said, has the faith of a man,
the face of an egle, of a lion, and an ark. But
there's another description where it says there's a face of a man, a face
of an egle, a face of a lion, and the face of a
cherub. And so he Ezekiel installed inside the cherub the very fractal reflection where
one of the faces is the hole itself, and so it's like a mirror
reflecting within a mirror where the whole has the fourfold structure, but one of
those is the fourfold structure itself. And you can imagine that going indefinitely,
you know, fractally down into because that cherub also has four faces, and
then the face of a cherub and etcetera, etcetera, as you kind of
move into this beautiful, powerful, fractal structure. So it's pretty amazing to
see how the Christians, you know, took this image that of Ezekil.
Of course, there are many other symbolisms in the Church. Maybe one day
we can go through other aspects of the symbolism, but this is definitely one
that's very important. It seems like the Christians had this desire to make real
the vision that Ezekiel had of the of the chariot. And it's important to
understand the Church as this chariot because what the chariot does in terms of the
structure of the Marcabite shows how God reveals himself in multiplicity with the four faces
of the Cherub, but also of the chariot that can move around and can
manifest himself in different ways. This is very different from the revelation of the
Temple, or the revelation of the Tabernacle, which is in one point place.
Or the Temple it was in one place. It wasn't all over all
over the world. It could only be in one place. And there's a
difference of course in Christian uh in the Christian liturgy, which is that the
temple structure, which becomes Ezekiel's structure at the same time, is now everywhere,
and so every city, every town, every place can't have its own
fractal participation, which is a full participation. Right. It's like each church
is the church because it is this, this mirror, this reflected mirror of
the fullness in its particular state, just like Christ was in his particular state,
a reflection of the fullness of God. The Church becomes a small version
of that that is now can move in the sense that it can be multiplied
all over the world without you know, without any limit. And so you
can see how this image of the Marcaba now instantiates itself in the church.
Now, so this is very important all this is very important to understand.
But there is also another aspect which is very important to understand, and that
it's part of Christian symbolism, and we have to acknowledge because we have to
be careful a little bit about limiting it to this this kind of glorious fractal
aspect. And so on the one hand, God manifests itself in this beautiful
fractal thing, but there's also a manner in which God is always warning us
to be careful not to mistake the fractal mirror with himself. And so in
the very verse where Christ says that he is the stone of the that he
is the head of the art, he says the stone which the builders rejected
has become the chief cornerstone. This was the Lord's doing, and it is
marvelous in our eyes. But then it goes on and says, therefore,
I tell you that the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you and
given to a people who will produce its. Anyone who falls on this stone
will be broken to pieces. Anyone on whom it falls will be crushed.
So you can see that these two verses are taken from the Old Testament and
they're smashed together in a powerful way where you see the two aspects of Christ,
the aspect of Christ which manifests itself in the world, then also the
aspect of God which is hiding itself or is you know, it's like Christ
setting up the Peter as his representative, but then Peter being able to betray
him, and Peter being called Satan if he is not connected to that high
aspect. And so the idea is that you know, you can imagine now
that the chief cornerstone, right, this keystone, falling on you and crushing
you. And also because it's so irregular being on the ground and being the
stumbling stone, and so Christ is also this stumbling stone if for those who
don't recognize the stone is it becomes a stumbling stone but on the But also
Christ is always as he is setting up his kingdom, He's always saying,
be careful not to mistake the kingdom for the king, and to not mistake
the fractal representation for the for the one who's instantiating it. And so this
is why in the story of Christ, there are many stories where he is
negating or you know, showing that in fact, this fractal, this fractal
representation is not sufficient, and that there's a sensi which you have to always
be able to attend to the highest and not mistake the one for the other.
So, for example, in the Transfiguration, interestingly enough, Saint Peter,
who is the one that Christ chose to be his representative, test hells
Christ, you know, you know, Lord is good to be here.
Why don't we build a tabernacle. Why don't we build a house for you
and for Moses and for Elijah so that we can stay here forever, right,
so we can just be here because it's great to be here. And
Christ refuses him. Christ does not accept that you build a house for him,
you know. And then there are stories where it says God is spirit,
and those who worship him with worship in spirit and truth, and not
in Jerusalem, not at the Temple, not in these particular spaces. There
is also the image, of course, with the veil of the temple which
is being ripped, and Christ saying that now the body is the temple,
our body, physical body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. And so
there's this movement in order to negate in some ways the fractal representation. While
Christ is the instantiator of that fractal representation at the same time, and this
is important to understand. It seems like a contradiction, but once you understand
it, you can see that it is in fact in some ways. You
said Christ created your eyes, but he says, if the eye is an
obstacle to you being in communion with God, then it out, you know,
throw it away. You know, anything in creation that becomes an obstacle
to you being communing with God should be removed, even though He is the
origin of those very things, and He manifests himself in those in those realities,
and the eye is particularly strong about that because he's basically it is it's
the closest thing to what is described in Genesis One as God creating the world
and seeing that it is good. It's like that there is this, you
know. It's like Christ saying, you know, the commandments, saying love
your father and your mother and God, and Christ criticizing the Pharisees. He
tells the Pharisees that the Pharisees are horrible because they attribute to God what they
should attribute to the parents. Because the Pharisees what they would do is they
would say oh, I didn't receive what I received in the world from my
parents. I received it directly from God, you know, holier than thou.
And then, refusing the fractal system that God has created, you know,
to make the goods we get from God come from others, Christ criticizes
him for doing that. But then Christ also says, he who does not
hate my father, their father and mother, he who does not hate their
brother for the sake for my sake, you know, will not enter into
the kingdom. And so this, this strong duality has to be understood properly,
and that is what accounts of course for the asceticism of the Church.
And so you have powerful images in our tradition of you know, for example,
saying these these are two icons from Father siloeon Justiniano, who, as
you know, I think is one of the one of the best iconographers in
the world right now. And so you can see this icon of Saint Euprius
the Great. Where Saint Nuprius lived in the wilderness, he had access to
no church, he had access to no liturgy, but he received communion directly
from Christ, directly from the Angel who came to commune with them. And
similarly with you know, Saint Mary of Egypt who lived in the desert,
an extreme asthetical life for all all of her life of repentance, and then
ultimately receiving communion once before she died. And so there's room in Christianity,
and not only room, but there's a necessity to keep the tension between those
two. And you often see by the way in the church, this competition
between the monastic aspect of the church and the liturgical aspect of the church.
And you find it in the writings of some of the even some of the
great theologians of the twentieth century, where there's a anti monastic stance because they
want to see you know, Christ manifested fractally in all aspects of reality.
And then on this in the same way, you can sometimes have the monastic
tendency to see with suspicion, you know, the the this instantiation, all
these stories of monks who say, who don't like when there's melodies, you
know, on the in the Desert fathers, basically they would sing without melody
because melody is is a dangerous seductor, like it can seduce you into its
pleasures, you know, And so you can see like that tension is part
of Christianity, and it's there in the story of Christ himself, and it
is important to keep to maintain the tension. But ultimately, when you come
also to the final image of creation, it is an image of this fractal
structure, and so you know, and here is a powerful representation of it
by Jake Jacobello Albert Baregno a Western image from the fourteenth century where now you
can really see it. And so of course now the arch is not round,
it is a pointed arch. But nonetheless you can see Christ in the
arch coming down from above, being the corner chief cornerstone, and now being
the one at the top of the dome in the image of Ezekiel, and
coming down upon the square, which is the Earth, which is the heavenly
Jerusalem, which is the Church. It is an image of the groom coming
to his bride. It is all of this imagery of the union of heaven
and Earth which we see in the Book of Revelation, in the presentation of
the Heavenly Jerusalem. But then it is also you know, the basic cosmic
image. It's the image of everything you know, and it is it is
can be let's say, resumed in the simple structure of an arch and so
hopefully this is helpful to you and it can give you some insight into why
church architecture looks the way it does. There are, of course, other
aspects of the symbolsom Like I said, I want to be careful that you
don't think that this is the only thread that you can follow to understand the
architecture. But this is definitely a very powerful one that can help us appreciate
and understand, you know, how strong the Christian symbolism is, you know,
and how it's embedded in the very structure of our architecture. So thank
you for your attention everyone, and I'll talk to you very so soon,
but bye.