1 - The architecture of createdness

Summary

La gloria di colui che tutto move

per l'universo penetra e risplende

In una parte più e meno altrove.

The glory of him who moves all things

Penetrates the universe and shines

In one part more and in another less.

Dante, Paradiso, canto I

The project of constructing a new theology of the createdness of the world can usefully begin with a reflection on world-views from the past which achieved this same aim, though in ways deeply alien to us today. But the cosmological sense-world is constructed of diverse impulses and ideas in a complex unity of sense-inputs, presuppositions, ideas and imagination. The reconstruction of an implicit cosmology in the pre-modern period is a particularly demanding task, therefore, which entails the analysis of fields as diverse as astronomy, the arts, metaphysics, semiotics and epistemology, all of which can be said to interact in distinctive ways in the formation of what we might call ‘the sense of a world’. In the following chapter, two different cosmological structures will emerge. The first is cosmology by extension, which placed heaven in the heavens, at a point far removed from the earth, but in a field of extension that was continuous with it. This is perhaps most difficult for us to understand today though it was, arguably, the most foundational aspect in the formation of medieval perception with its ideologies of heaven as site of our highest values and ultimate destiny. The second is cosmology by participation.