The Last Supper

original digitized image

original digitized image

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How Leonardo da Vinci

pictured the Last Supper

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The Last Supper (1494-1498) by Leonardo da Vinci
in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan

During the bitter-cold first week in February, I went to snow-bound Milan to write stories about an annual world-class food-and-wine event called “IdentitàGolose” and Milan University’s Library and Archive of Egyptology. With great good luck (because the obligatory reservations made online via www.milan-museum.com often have a two-month backlog), I was able to squeeze in a same-day visit, which lasts barely 15 minutes, to see Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, The Last Supper, one of his 17 paintings and the only one not on canvas. I’d seen it only once before, almost 50 years ago. Just a month before Easter, I thought I’d share with ITV readers the unique way polymath Leonardo (1452-1519), a sculptor, architect, musician, draftsman, scientist, mathematician, engineer, anatomist, geologist, and cartographer, as well as painter, pictured this prelude to Our Savior’s sacrifice by telling this spellbinding mural’s story.

A self-portrait of Da Vinci depicted as the Apostle Jude Thaddeus

THE PAINTING

In 1482, Leonardo da Vinci, then 30, left Tuscany to be the court painter for Duke Ludovico Sforza (1451-1508) and his wife Duchess Beatrice d’Este (1475-1497) in Milan. A decade or so later, his patron commissioned Leonardo to paint The Last Supper as the centerpiece of his planned mausoleum in the monastery of the recently-completed Dominican Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, which was later remodeled by Bramante, also the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica. Leonardo began work, which was supposed to take a year, in 1494, but did not complete the painting until 1498. According to Wikipedia’s article about Leonardo, “the novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn to dusk without stopping to eat and then not paint for three or four days at a time. This was beyond the comprehension of the prior of the convent, who hounded him until Leonardo

asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to depict the faces of Christ and Judas (Iscariot), told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his ‘model’ for Judas.”

It is generally believed that the white-bearded Apostle on the right of the painting, Jude Thaddeus, is the artist’s self-portrait.

Leonardo also probably cryptically “signed” this work; the knot at the end of the tablecloth’s right-hand edge represents the Latin word for knot, vincium.

An earlier version of the scene: The Last Supper by Ghirlandaio (1482). Located in Florence

LEONARDO’S CONCEPTION

The Last Supper theme was a traditional one for refectories, although this room wasn’t a refectory at the time Leonardo painted his masterpiece on the north wall. His work of art represents the Last Supper as told in the Gospel of John 13:21, when Jesus announces that one of his twelve Apostles would betray him before sunrise, but does not reveal which one. We know that Leonardo studied earlier paintings by Ghirlandaio and Andrea del Castagno with traditional iconography that focuses instead on the moment of the traitor’s identification, when Judas, who is represented in an isolated position with respect to the other Apostles, receives a piece of bread from Jesus and dips it in his dish. Leonardo, however, preferred the moment prior to this, dominated by doubt. His is the first version of this theme with the Apostles displaying the human emotions of doubt, shock, fear, and anger through the expressions on their faces, the movements of their hands, and their body language, which contrast with Jesus’ calmness. It should also be mentioned that the daylight and unbroken bread confirm that it is too early for Judas to have been identified as the traitor.

Giacomo Raffaelli’s life-size mosaic copy of Leonardo’s
Last Supper (1809-14), now in Vienna’s Minoritenkirche

TECHNIQUE

A wall panel in the entrance to the refectory explains: “Leonardo creates a sense of continuity between the actual space of the refectory and the painted space through an exceptional use of perspective, which has Christ’s right temple as its vanishing point; all the lines of perspective in the composition guide the viewer’s eye towards Jesus’ face, the narrative center of the work.” Leonardo’s early ideas, both notes and preparatory drawings, for this painting are illustrated in a sheet of figure studies, no. 12542r, conserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.

Another first is that Leonardo’s Judas is not seated as is customary with his back to the viewer and, unlike the other well-lit Apostles, is in a shadow. He is also holding a purse. Although he would not yet have received the 30 silver coins, he was the treasurer for the Apostles. Until The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci were discovered during the 19th century, only Judas, Peter, John and Jesus could be positively identified.

The painting contains several references to the number 3 or the Blessed Trinity. The Apostles are seated in groups of three: to the left of Jesus (from the viewer’s point of view): Bartholomew, James the Lesser, and Andrew; Peter, Judas Iscariot, and John; to the right of Jesus: Thomas, James the Greater, and Philip; Matthew, Jude Thaddeus, and Simon the Zealot; there are three windows behind Jesus; and the shape of Jesus’ figure resembles a triangle.

MEDIUM

Also unique to The Last Supper is the medium Leonardo, always the inventor, used. According to Wikipedia, “he painted it on a dry wall rather than on wet plaster, so it is not a true fresco. Since a fresco cannot be modified as the artist works, Leonardo instead chose to seal the stone wall with a layer of pitch, gesso, and mastic, then paint onto the sealing layer with tempera.” Because of the method he used so that he, a known procrastinator with a marked tendency to leave projects unfinished, could make changes, his masterpiece began to deteriorate after a few years. The only evidence we have of what the original painting looked like is a 16th-century oil canvas by an unknown artist, in approximately original size, now housed in the Premonstratensian monastery, founded in 1128, at Tongerlo in Westerlo near Antwerp in Belgium. The copy reveals many details that are no longer visible in the original fresco, in particular the food, the room’s décor, and the landscape. Between 1809 and 1814 the Roman mosaic artist Giacomo Raffaelli made another life-size copy, commissioned by Napoleon and now in the Viennese Minoritenkirche.

The Last Supper by Dalí

DETERIORATION

In 1517, Don Antonio de Beatis was the first to testify that Leonardo’s painting “is already beginning to be damaged.” Some 50 years later, in 1566, Leonardo’s biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote in his Lives: “Of the original by Leonardo (…) one can now perceive only a glaring stain.” A century later, the Dominican Fathers enlarged the door at the center of the wall that connected the refectory to the kitchen, which, although later bricked up, is still visible. It eliminated the part that depicted Christ’s feet, which, through early copies, were supposedly in a position symbolizing his forthcoming crucifixion. Further damage was done in 1768 when a curtain was hung over the painting to protect it; instead it trapped moisture on the surface, and whenever pulled back, scratched the flaking paint. In 1722, an English traveler testified that the rough wall was visible in various parts of the “fresco.” In 1799, when Napoleon’s troops turned the refectory into a stable and barn, the painting suffered still further vandalism. The soldiers passed their free time throwing stones at the painting and climbed ladders to scratch out the Apostles’ eyes. In 1812, the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie was used as a headquarters by the fire brigade and subsequently as a military barracks. In 1934, the refectory became a state museum, while the church and the cloisters were returned to the Dominicans. During the Second World War, on the night of August 15, 1943, a bomb struck the cloisters, causing the collapse of the refectory’s vault and its east wall. The Last Supper was saved from bomb splinters thanks to sandbags put in place at the start of the war. After a long period of “open air,” the collapsed parts of the refectory were rebuilt in 1947.

The Last Supper by Andy Warhol

RESTORATION

The Last Supper by Andy Warhol

A first restoration was attempted in 1726 by Michelangelo Bellotti, who filled in missing sections with oil paint and then varnished the whole mural; many others followed over the next two centuries. By the end of the 1970s the painting’s appearance had so badly deteriorated that, from 1978 to 1999, Pinin Brambilla Barcilon guided a major restoration project, which, in a sealed, climate-controlled ambience, undertook to stabilize the painting permanently and reverse the damage caused by dirt, pollution and the misguided 18th- and 19th- century restoration attempts. On May 28th, 1999, the painting was put back on display.

In 1980, UNESCO made the Santa Maria delle Grazie complex and The Last Supper a World Heritage site.

SPECULATIONS

Perhaps because of its deteriorated state, Leonardo’s Last Supper has been the target of much speculation by historians and writers, usually centered around purported hidden messages within the painting.

Several examples follow:

1) The Templar Revelation (1997) by Lynn Pickett and Clive Prince and The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown both identify the person seated at Jesus’s right hand not as John the Apostle, but as a woman, and none other than Mary Magdalene, who supposedly bore Christ’s child after his death. It is true that the beardless John looks quite effeminate, but he was much younger than the other Apostles except for Phillip and maybe Matthew, both of whom are beardless here, too, while the others all have beards. Moreover, the Bible never mentions Mary Magdalene as present at the Last Supper, and if John is Mary, then where is John?

2) According to an article by Matthew Moore published on July 30, 2007 in The Telegraph, Slavisa Pesci, “an information technologist and amateur scholar,” superimposed Leonardo’s version of The Last Supper on its mirror image (with both images of Jesus lined up) and claimed that the resultant picture has a Templar Knight on the far left, a woman dressed in orange and holding a swaddled baby in her arms to the left of Jesus, and the Holy Grail in the form of a chalice in front of Jesus. With the naked eye no chalice is visible, although Jesus’ left hand is pointing to the Eucharist and his right to a glass of wine.

3) Giovanni Maria Pala, an Italian musician, has indicated that the positions of the hands and loaves of bread can be interpreted as notes on a musical staff, and, if read from right to left (because Leonardo was left-handed), form a musical composition.

4) Reported by British Vatican correspondent Richard Owen in an article entitled, “Da Vinci ‘predicted the world would end in 4066’ says Vatican researcher” in the London Times on March 15, 2010, is the most far-fetched of all theories. Sabrina Sforza Galitzia claimed to have deciphered the “mathematical and astrological” puzzle in Leonardo’s The Last Supper. She said that Leonardo foresaw the end of the world in a “universal flood” which would begin on March 21, 4006, and end on November 1 the same year. Leonardo believed that this would mark “a new start for humanity.”

The Last Supper by Escobar

Leonardo’s Last Supper is open all day Tuesday to Sunday from 8:15 AM to 7 PM with a maximum group of 25 people admitted every 15 minutes. Closed Mondays and on January 1st, May 1st, and Christmas Day. My same-day ticket, reserved by my hotel, cost 8 euros.

Epilogue

If you can’t make it to Milan, in Room VIII of the Pinocateca in the Vatican Museums there’s a Flemish tapestry of the Last Supper designed by Raphael, and in Raphael’s loggia on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace, one of the frescoes executed by Raphael’s workshop from 1517-19 is of the Last Supper. One of the frescoes on the northern wall of the Sistine Chapel, devoted to scenes from the life of Jesus and painted by Cosimo Rosselli (1431-1507) in 1481-2, also depicts the Last Supper.

There are several modern renditions of the Last Supper in the US. In 1955, Salvador Dalí painted The Sacrament of the Last Supper, one of the most popular paintings in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Sculptor Marisol Escobar was inspired by Leonardo’s Last Supper. Her work is in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. And in 1986, Andy Warhol was commissioned to produce a series of paintings based on The Last Supper. They were first exhibited in a bank across the street from Santa Maria delle Grazie. This was Warhol’s last series of paintings before his death. On loan from the Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh, one of Warhol’s many paintings of The Last Supper (the Museum, at 117 Sandusky Street, owns three others) will take part in the traveling exhibition of 300 works “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal” to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the artist’s death. The exhibition opened at the ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sands, in Singapore on March 17 and will travel to five other Asian cities: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and Tokyo, over the next 27 months.

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POEMS

The Last Supper, by Lydia Sigourney

The Last Supper, by Jack Stewart

The Last Supper, by Rainer Maria Rilke

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10 Secrets of The Last Supper

by Leonardo da Vinci

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The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci

In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci began what would become one of history's most influential works of art - The Last Supper

The Last Supper is Leonardo's visual interpretation of an event chronicled in all four of the Gospels (books in the Christian New Testament). The evening before Christ was betrayed by one of his disciples, he gathered them together to eat, tell them he knew what was coming and wash their feet (a gesture symbolizing that all were equal under the eyes of the Lord). As they ate and drank together, Christ gave the disciples explicit instructions on how to eat and drink in the future, in remembrance of him. It was the first celebration of the Eucharist, a ritual still performed.

Specifically, The Last Supper depicts the next few seconds in this story after Christ dropped the bombshell that one disciple would betray him before sunrise, and all twelve have reacted to the news with different degrees of horror, anger, and shock.

Leonardo hadn't worked on such a large painting and had no experience in the standard mural medium of fresco. The painting was made using experimental pigments directly on the dry plaster wall and unlike frescos, where the pigments are mixed with the wet plaster, it has not stood the test of time well. Even before it was finished there were problems with the paint flaking from the wall and Leonardo had to repair it. Over the years it has crumbled, been vandalized bombed and restored. Today we are probably looking at very little of the original.

Much of the recent interest in the painting has centered on the details hidden within the painting, but in directing attention to these 'hidden' details, most people miss the incredible sense of perspective the work displays. The sharp angling of the walls within the picture, which leads back to the seemingly distant back wall of the room and the windows that show the hills and sky beyond. The type of day shown through these windows adds to the feeling of serenity that rests in the center of the piece, around the figure of Christ.

The Layout of The Last Supper

The Last Supper Perspective

Leonardo balanced the perspective construction of the Last Supper so that its vanishing point is immediately behind Christ's right temple, pointing to the physical location of the center, or sensus communis, of his brain. By pulling a string in radial directions from this point, he marked the table ends, floor lines, and orthogonal edges of the six ceiling coffer columns. From the right and/or left edge of the horizon line, he drew diagonal lines up to the coffer corners, locating points for the horizontal lines of the 12 coffer rows.

Leonardo was well known for his love of symmetry. In his Last Supper, the layout is largely horizontal. The large table is seen in the foreground of the image with all of the figures behind it. The painting is largely symmetrical with the same number of figures on either side of Jesus. The above diagram shows how the perspective the Last Super was worked out with a series of marks at key points highlighting the architectural aspects of the composition and positioning of the figures.

10 Facts You Might not

Know about the Masterpiece

1. Who's who in "The Last Supper"

Who's who in the Last Supper

2. The secret of "The Last Supper"

The Last Supper is a very popular religious scene painted by many celebrated artists. Unlike artists before and after him, Leonardo da Vinci chose not to put halos on Jusus Christ. Many art historians believe that Leonardo da Vinci believe in nature, not in God. To Leonardo, nature is God, so he treated every character in the fresco as common people.

3. "Last Supper" is a failed experiment.

Unlike traditional frescoes, which Renaissance masters painted on wet plaster walls, Leonardo experimented with tempura paint on a dry, sealed plaster wall in the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan, Italy. The experiment proved unsuccessful, however, because the paint did not adhere properly and began to flake away only a few decades after the work was finished.

4. The spilled salt is symbolic.

Speculations about symbolism in the artwork are plentiful. For example, many scholars have discussed the meaning of the spilled salt container near Judas's elbow. Spilled salt could symbolize bad luck, loss, religion, or Jesus as salt of the earth.

5. Eel or herring?

Scholars have also remarked on da Vinci's choice of food. They dispute whether the fish on the table is herring or eel since each carries its own symbolic meaning. In Italian, the word for eel is "aringa." The similar word, "arringa," means to indoctrinate. In northern Italian dialect, the word for herring is "renga," which also describes someone who denies religion. This would fit with Jesus' biblical prediction that his apostle Peter would deny knowing him.

6. Da Vinci used a hammer and nail to help him to achieve the one-point perspective.

What makes the masterpiece so striking is the perspective from which it's painted, which seems to invite the viewer to step right into the dramatic scene. To achieve this illusion, da Vinci hammered a nail into the wall, then tied string to it to make marks that helped guide his hand in creating the painting's angles.

7. The existing mural is not 100% da Vinci's work.

At the end of the 20th century, restorer Panin Brambilla Barcilon and his crew relied on microscopic photographs, core samples, infrared reflectoscopy and sonar to remove the added layers of paint and restore the original as accurately as possible. Critics maintain that only a fraction of the painting that exists today is the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

8. Three early copies of the original exist.

Three of da Vinci's students, including Giampietrino, made copies of his painting early in the 16th century. Giampietrino did a full-scale copy that is now in London's Royal Academy of Arts. This oil painting on canvas was the primary resource for the latest restoration of the work. The second copy by Andrea Solari is in the Leonardo da Vinci Museum in Belgium while the third copy by Cesare da Sesto is in the Church of Saint Ambrogio in Switzerland.

The Last Supper Copy - by Giampietrino

9. The painting is also a musical score.

According to Italian musician Giovanni Maria Pala, da Vinci incorporated musical notes in "The Last Supper." In 2007, Pala created a 40-second melody from the notes that were allegedly hidden in the scene.

10. The painting has been a victim of neglect and abuse.

In 1652, monastery residents cut a new door in the wall of the deteriorating painting, which removed a chunk of the artwork showing the feet of Jesus. Late in the 18th century, Napoleon Bonaparte's soldiers turned the area into a stable and further damaged the wall with projectiles. During World War II, the Nazis bombed the monastery, reducing surrounding walls to rubble.

The Flat Perspectivalism of Creatio Ex Nihilo Worlds...

The Flat Perspectivalism of

Creatio Ex Nihilo Worlds...

by R.E. Slater

In the writing of books and theories there is no end...
but without a beginning there can be no middle nor end;
Such is the thinking in the Land of the Living, mortal and

perishable, prone to imaginations of all sorts. Speculating

without end, forgetting the past to conjure the present,

forging the future from what once was but now is.

- re slater

Speaking generally, then specifically...

In science, it is not uncommon to alter one's thinking, if not one's beliefs, for that of a more-real form of existential reality than the one previously held on too. To understand chemistries you must accept the reality of the unseeable molecule. Similarly with mathematics, standard numerics take on newer, more helpful forms in calculi and non-linear algebraics. The same can be said of Newtonian physics when enlightened had moved rapidly to Einstinian relativities and Heisenberg-Planck-Bohr's Quantum worlds of imagination to reality.

In science all thing change... especially one's perspectives.

Hence, once learning of a previously unknown creational position within the set parameters of my former theology I had immediately grasped the newer, unknown position and as quickly - if not by necessity - rejected what I had been taught for what I was coming to rethink and reperspectivize.

What was this?

Life Is About the Struggle for Perspective -

Not the Simple Consigned Accretion of Acceptance

To rethink life's institutionalized moralities requires a bit of radicalized effort. This occurred for me far later in life than I care to admit. Most likely in my mid-fifties when breaking away from pre-scientific evangelical world to the post-evangelical reperspectizing of my Baptist beliefs when conjoining metaphysics to my earlier youth of science and math.

Such a "mid-life crisis" isn't a bad thing... in fact, though greatly disruptive in it's personal experience, I now think back on that "dark period" of my life as rare opportunity not often utilized by society to afford myself of a positively transformative experience when seeking to expand my faith towards worlds of beauty and wonder.

I still believed in God but I was beginning to see a non-Baptist view of the world and religion I couldn't see within my enculturated bubble.

I had learned science and mathematics from public school and three years of rigorous university training but then rebooted to learn my metaphysical philosophy and existential reality through my Baptist faith of church and institutional studies. That is, I obtained a BA in psychology with a minor in bible; and a Masters of Divinity degree (120 graduate credit hours in biblical theology with a minor in pastoring) along with hundreds of hours in various field ministries.

At religious school, just as I had at university, we talked about a lot things related to contemporary world and bible-world. And I tried just as hard back then to think in contemporary forms of world events and statisms when attempting to reconcile beliefs with reality and imagination.

Whether I turned to science or to religion something was missing. But life being what it was I couldn't see the forest for the trees, as the adage goes.

However, a self re-enforcing and referential existential bubble is a bubble however helpful, comforting, or nourishing it may be. For myself, coming from a quasi-religious home I had to first find a religious beginning. Thus after three years at university I turned to a qualified bible school for continuing education in theology. Though I didn't realize this at the time I was seeking a new metaphysic which was both worldly and religious after the fashion of my own thinking.

Then, like any true explorer of truth and reality, I needed to expand my existential borders-and-edges to embrace what I hadn't learned and experienced from within my own geographical and institutional settings.

...Yet this was a standard personal practice gained from holding multiple perspectives gained by extensive travel, book learning, and talking with people and listening to their experiences. Even in my youth I lived through non-standardized, rapidly transformative personal experiences. Which meant that even though when viewing myself externally from the outside everything looked staid and normalized to external eyes. my interiority of self was ever a cascading tumult of conflicting ideas and recognitions which I was quite content to hold in tension without resolving any for the simple reason that I didn't wish to. I felt too young to the immense task at hand.

And though I relied on a vast number of guides I still hadn't decided for myself in which direction I needed to go. I was waiting for that next holistic moment of explosion and reintegration which might provide a sufficiency of thought and experience my soul was seeking. Faith wasn't enough. Nor science. I needed a new world of holistic healing and sensible faith formation. I found it at last through process philosophy and theology.

This takes a bit of doing, and truth be told, may not ever be accomplished if one's religious world is sufficiently extensive and comforting in the first place, as mine was. But when profoundly collapsing into a stage of uncertainty and doubt I had at last found a productively existential way to reimagine a more expanded form of religious metaphysic than the ones I had experienced or contemplated. One which expanded all present forms, charters and beliefs of existence while simultaneously questioning them in a positively helpful, if not deconstructive, then reconstructive, form of re-educational process.

Learning to Unlearn to Relearn

In my adult maturity, and with the advantage of many years, I was able to translate and transition from a Westernized perspective of religion and dogma to a Process perspective of religion acting more philosophically when unbound from its dogmas.  This demanded an inner constitutionality of mindful growth and understanding which could not have occurred if my earlier systems hadn't collapsed in-on-themselves borne from all the external stimuli pressing down upon it.

As I have spoken to this experience many times I wish to now transition to the topic at hand... one which couldn't be allowed if I hadn't first been transformed spiritually to allow such questions and reasonings....

Let's Talk About Nothingness

This is the idea of nothingness and whether the universe had a beginning.

As stated earlier I would not have considered this perspective if I had not first allowed the question to be entertained. What was the question? Did the universe have a beginning or was it ever as it is... in cycles of evolving, devolving, over and over again and again, infinitely in progression and regression?

Come to find out, my presumption of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) was a conjecture, an assumption, made by the senses and not by the sciences.

For many reasons we cannot fault the ancients of their a priori logic. But now that we have the means via quantum physics to examine the universe in which we live we may now state with more assurance that something cannot come from nothing but rather something ever comes from something.

Known as creatio continua we may now state that "our" universe is old. So old that it never had a birth and never will have a death. Radiant energy - however dense, dispersed, or defused - cannot be lost, just reconfigured in the quantum sense of things.

Just as no man is an island but finds identity and purpose in movement and relationships (sic, Alain Badiou's Being and Event metaphysic) so too can Whiteheadian metaphysics say without Being there can be no Event, and without Event there can be no Being.

That is to say that the universe always was and is and will be... that the universe is always becoming over against a state of nothingness.

We ascribe such god-like traits to God but what if God gives to pre-creational energy a nominal sense of being and in response the universe gives to God its initializing response of events. Then can we aver that the Maker of heaven and earth has quite properly, if not essentially, given to pre-creational energy it's sense of identity and purpose in relation to God's idea of things "to be and become"?

Process theology captures such a metaphysical relationship in its paradigms of processual novelty, continuum, resulting response, and organic complexity. Without saying the universe is sentient we may aver as sentient products and quotients of the universe's complexities that there is in some sense a latency - if not an extreme latency - within the universe in which we may ascribe a panpsychic quality of things most likely gained from its Organizer we claim as God.

A panpsychic experience or interiority which is best described via Whiteheadian process panentheism. Not a pantheism... panentheism. That is, the universe is not God... but something responding to God which gives to the universe it's destiny and meaning. Hence, a "panentheistic" universe responds to God's Otherness when infilled by God's inherent essence and image.

Hence, the burden of all energy, including organic life itself, is infused by the quality of God's likeness without being or becoming God itself. Divine Infusion is thus ascriptive to the very process of being and becoming.

As God is... so does creation aspire, yearn, and groan within itself towards an immortal, viable, nourishing, and benevolent life force. Whereas death defeats such possibilities in whose/which response life dies when losing purpose and meaning for mere survival and not thrival.

But in the Divine's "life blood", divine infusion (or the imago Dei of the God) may bring forward unending, continuous redemptive forces with loving, benevolent effect. This is what creatio continua (always-is creation, or "creation continually") can mean in a theologically metaphysical sense when understood to morph and evolve through its ages of revolutions against any death-like response and events attempting to disrupt and discontinue it's panentheistically-driven divine process of birthing life after life after life.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

January 27, 2024

Was The Universe Born From Nothing?

Jan 28, 2022

00:00 Introduction

04:56 The World Of Probabilities

12:05 The Quantum Of Cosmos Present

24:21 The Quantum Of Cosmos Past

31:20 The Quantum Of Cosmos Future

36:04 Looking Through The Singularity

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Unperspectival, Perspectival, Aperspectival:

Exploring Jean Gebser, Lesson II

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by Cyntia Bourgeault  |  November 24, 2020

Jean Gebser’s cultural home base was the world of art. He was a personal friend of Pablo Picasso’s, and examples culled from art history dot the landscape of his The Ever-Present Origin, illustrating almost every significant point he makes. It’s not surprising that his master interpretive lens, perspective, should itself derive from the domain of art.

Yes, perspective. Just like you learned in elementary school art. When you first began drawing pictures, probably as a preschooler, Mommy and Daddy and your big sister were always bigger, no matter where they appeared in your picture, because that’s what they were! Then someone taught you about foreground and background, and you learned how to make things at the back of the picture smaller to show that they were farther away. You learned to turn your house at a slight angle on the page so that you could show two sides of it at once. You may or may not have consciously realized that you were learning how to proportion the various bits and pieces in relation to a hypothetical point on the horizon. But your drawings got more orderly, and they began to convey a sense of depth.

That’s exactly what we’re talking about here. Perspective. But now applied as an organizing principle for the field of consciousness.

According to Gebser, the five structures of consciousness we met up with in my November 18, 2020 post Stages Versus Structures: Exploring Jean Gebser, Lesson I (you will find the link is at the bottom of this post)—archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral—can be grouped into three larger categories, or three worlds, as he calls them: unperspectival, perspectival, and aperspectival. While the nomenclature may at first feel intimidating, it’s actually quite easy to master if you keep your elementary school art days in mind. Unperspectival is how you drew before you learned about foreground and background, when everything was all just jumbled onto the drawing sheet. Perspectival is the drawing sheet once you’ve learned to arrange it in relationship to that hypothetical point on the horizon. And aperspectival is what ensues once you’ve learned to convey several perspectives simultaneously, as in some of Picasso’s surrealistic artwork where he simultaneously shows you the front side and back side of a person. A heads up: in Gebser the prefix “a” always conveys the meaning of “free from.” Thus an aperspectival view is one that is free from captivity to a single central point of reference.

• The Unperspectival World embraces the archaic, magic, and mythic structures.

• The Perspectival World hosts the mental structure.

• The Aperspectival World is the still-emerging integral structure.

Each of these three perspectives is properly called a world because it comprises an entire gestalt, an entire womb of meaning in which we live and move and make our connections. Each has its own distinctive fragrance, ambience, tincture. Each is an authentic pathway of participation, an authentic mode of encountering the cosmos, God, and our own selfhood. Each has its brilliant strengths and its glaring weaknesses. Compositely, they evoke “the width and length and height and depth” of our collective human journey into consciousness.

I am aware that I am walking the razor’s edge as I choose my words here, trying to escape the gravitational field of perspectival consciousness that would lock this all back into the evolutionary timeline. It is true, of course, that these three worlds broadly demarcate the three major epochs of Western human cultural history: ancient, medieval, and modern. But it’s always been a bit dicey to try to hold these timelines too tightly or to limit structures of consciousness to specific historical eras. We have stunning exemplars of the mental structure breaking through in ancient Greece and Israel, and the mythic still lives among us today in much of the American heartlands. Gebser’s model deftly sidesteps these all-too familiar cul de sacs by reminding us that the “worlds”—and the structures they encompass—are phenomenological, not developmental. While they appear to join the flow of linear time at specific entry points, they have in fact always been present and must continue to be present, for they are part of the ontology of the Whole.

Gebser’s visually oriented presentation allows him to make one additional very important point. From a visual standpoint, perspective is really a matter of dimensionality, and dimensionality is in turn a function of degree of separation. Gebser builds on this insight to draw powerful correlations between the emergence of perspective within the structures of consciousness and the emergence of the egoic—i.e., individual—selfhood so foundational to our modern self-understanding.

In the unperspectival world everything exists in guileless immediacy (remember preschooler art?). There is relatively little separation between viewer and viewed, the external world mirroring a self-structure that is still fluid and permeable. This is the world of “original participation” (as philosopher Owen Barfield once famously described it) where the cosmos is at its most numinous and communicative, and the sense of belonging is as oceanic as the sea itself.

As we enter the perspectival world, the double-edged sword begins to fall. The same growing capacity for abstraction that makes possible the perception of proportion and depth also—by the same measure—increases our sense of separation. We stand more on the outside, our attention fixed on that hypothetical point on the horizon which organizes our canvas and maintains the illusion of depth within a flat plane. Order is maintained, but at the cost of a necessary distancing and a strict adherence to the artifice that makes the illusion possible in the first place. Deception enters riding on the back of that abstractive power, as “original participation” gives way to a growing sense of dislocation and exile. That is essentially our modern world: “oscillating,” writes Jeremy Johnson in Seeing Through the World (pg. 58) “between a powerlessness to control the forces unleashed by the perspectival world on the one hand, and a total self-intoxicating power on the other”—in a word, “between anxiety and delight.”

It is my own observation here (rather than either Jeremy’s or Gebser’s) that the perspectival contains an inherently deceptive aspect since it is intentionally creating a sleight of hand—the illusion of three-dimensionality within a two-dimensional plane. But if I have not wandered too far off the mark, the observation gives me some strong additional leverage for emphasizing why resolutions to the perspectival crisis can never emerge from within the perspectival structure itself, and why the much-hyped “integral emergence” cannot simply be a new, improved version of our old mental habits—not even a vastly increased “paradox tolerance.” We need to get out of Flatland altogether.

For me, that is what aperspectival is essentially all about. It is an authentic transposition of consciousness from a two-dimensional plane to a sphere. Within that sphere, inner and outer world come back together again, and a sense of authentic belongingness returns. Numinosity returns as well: the felt-sense of a cosmos directly infused with the vivifying presence of Origin. Selfhood once again becomes fluid and interpenetrating even as presence becomes more centered and intensified.

The perspectival is at best a foreshadowing and at worst a mental simulacrum of authentic aperspectival three-dimensionality. The real deal can indeed be attained; in fact, it is now breaking in upon us whether we like it or not! But the cost of admission is not cheap: it entails the overhaul not only of our fundamental attitudes, but of our entire neurophysiology of perception.

I hope to circle back to this point in due course. For now, the most important thing to keep in mind is that in the Gebserian system perspective is not simply a point of view; it is a completely different world of seeing, unfolding according to its own protocols: its own core values and ways of making connections. To truly take in another’s perspective is not simply to take in another’s “position” and arrange the pieces dialectically on a mental chessboard. Rather, it is profoundly to take in another world and allow that world to touch our hearts and wash over us deeply until it, too, becomes our own. It is to listen in a whole new dimension. And I believe Gebser would argue that this dimension only truly opens up with the inbreaking of the aperspectival structure.

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*Jeremy Johnson’s book: Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness, is available from the publisher, here at Revelore Press.