Promised You A Miracle

Islamic interlace patterns, public domain

Elsa: What've you got there?
Jeremy: The Gutenberg Bible... it was in the Rare Books Room.
Elsa: Think God's gonna' save you?
Jeremy: No... I don't believe in God.
Elsa: You're holding on to that Bible pretty tight.
Jeremy: I'm protecting it.
-The Day After Tomorrow, 2004

I don't recall a time when I ever believed the stories from The Bible or what I was told in Sunday School - which is not to say I had somehow transcended it at the age of ten or earlier. The only bits of the Bible that ever really interested me were the maps as I had a fascination with atlases at the time, and even then I couldn't tell what I was looking at. I can remember being in Primary 5 and having to read Genesis (likely part of Religious Education). The cover of whatever children's edition we were using particularly annoyed me with its colourful depiction of Noah's Ark and a vivid rainbow. This was at least six months before the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis was published, but as a keen Horizon viewer I'd probably been exposed to discussions about the historicity of the flood myths and spending class time on that would have been far more interesting and at least factual. From Horizon and other science programming I was well versed in several theories. In the same year I recall advocating the impact hypothesis in a debate about the extinction of the dinosaurs, and in second year RE I was called on to try to explain the big bang and the Tunguska blast (interdimensional cross-rip?). So it would probably seem odd to the outside observer that I've long treasured, or at least not buried in a box in the basement, a children's illustrated book about the story of Easter.

The book is, rather generically, called The Easter Story by Brian Wildsmith. Every year in Sunday School the class would receive a book with a little certificate stuck inside for various achievements - the only one I have still in the bookshelf is for excellent attendance dated June 1993. I would image I received the Easter Story in 1994 or 1995 via that channel but it doesn't have the certificate sticker on the inside. It's possible I bought it through the book club, as with my tattered and treasured guide to the 1994 World Cup, which would be a strange purchase for me to make but justified aesthetically. The Easter Story is a bit like Prometheus - its narrative is about theological concepts I disagree with and don't believe, but it is visually exquisite. The book is a large A4 sized paperback composed of fourteen double-page illustrations of scenes from the story done in watercolour with pseudo-gold leaf highlights (such as the sun or the dusk sky). As the story is aimed at children it uses the donkey ridden by Jesus as a narrative device. From meeting Jesus before the journey to Jerusalem, through the Last Supper and the hearing before Pontius Pilate, to the crucifixion and eventual resurrection. The reader follows these scenes witnessed by the donkey accompanied by a short paragraph of text. The spread on the events in the Garden of Gethsemane is nothing short of beautiful - a stylised but very simple depiction of the characters against a purple flower print on gilded paper.

For me aged eight or nine I didn't really 'get' the story. I understood it perfectly well, but it was never going to flip a switch in my brain and make me believe. In a way the narrative device kind of backfired. The last page follows Jesus' ascension into heaven and the donkey is lead back to his home. "And the little donkey stayed there for the rest of his life, remembering the kind and good man he had carried on his back to Jerusalem". I always sympathised with the donkey (admittedly, anthropomorphisised). I've made a point of not seeing the Lord of the Rings films, however I understand that after their adventure Frodo and his friends are changed by their experiences and struggle to settle back into life in the Shire. That's how I felt about the donkey - he had a part in the unfolding of history and then went back to being a donkey and died after how ever long it is that donkeys live for. History records no name for the donkey.

The real reason I brought up The Easter Story was to discuss religious art. I hadn't read it in something like fifteen years, so when I saw the aforementioned scene in Gethsemane it neatly tied into some observations about Islamic art. While Western art has made a genre of depicting Jesus and biblical scenes, Islam has for the most part famously avoided such works that could be considers idolatrous and instead embraced geometric and abstract art. The most iconic form is the Arabesque which could be very basically described as patterns of interwoven vines or plant stems. These geometric patterns arose in the period that the baton of science was passed to Islamic culture while Europe reeled from the fall of the Roman Empire. The Arabesque can be understood to represent that "man can discover the geometric forms that constitute the Arabesque, but these forms always existed before as part of God's creation". The idea of the mathematical as divine creation, or being divine in itself, was something I touched on nearly two years ago. This post was originally part of that draft before being deferred once and then twice, which neatly brings things full circle from big bang to big crunch.

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