Circles and the Cross: Cosmos, Consciousness, Christ, and the Human Place in Creation

By Loren Wilkinson and Peter Harris

Circles and the Cross is an invitation to explore two mysteries. One is the miracle of the cosmos: why is there something and not nothing? The other is the miracle of consciousness: why should this collection of stardust be an I and not just an it? Our basic response to those mysteries is wonder, and from wonder have grown the three great trees of human culture: religion, art, and science. This exploration is undertaken in the light of a third mystery: the cross of Christ is the clearest picture we have of the triune Creator of both cosmos and consciousness. That self-emptying of the Creator out of love for the creation helps us understand the pleasures, paradoxes, and pains of science; it helps us understand how "evolution" can be another name for creation; it casts light on the Enlightenment and Romanticism. In particular, it illuminates the environmental movement: an ethic in search of a religion. Loren Wilkinson, drawing on fifty years of teaching and writing about our relationship to creation, invites you to join this journey into understanding how the cross of Christ sheds light on the mysteries that surround us--and gives us hope in a difficult age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Aug 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666746365

Loren Wilkinson

Loren Wilkinson is professor emeritus of philosophy and interdisciplinary studies at Regent College in Vancouver, BC. For more than fifty years, he and his wife, Mary Ruth, have been teaching and writing about our relation to the created world.

Book preview

Preface

Circles and the Cross is an invitation to join me on a personal journey through two mysteries in the light of a third. Journeys need maps, and this book is a map through terrain that has been for me both difficult and delightful. Cosmos is that first mystery: why is there something, and not nothing? And why should that something be not chaos, but cosmos, which we experience—at least in this one tiny corner of it, the earth—as life-friendly and beautiful. The second mystery is consciousness: why should this collection of stardust, which is myself, be an I and not just an it? The basic human response to that mystery is wonder. And from wonder grow the three great trees of human culture: art, science, and worship.

Worship takes us to the third mystery, Christ. The word might prompt some readers to dismiss this book as religious, but that would neglect the fact that no one is without religion. Such a dismissal would also miss the fact that the crucifixion of Jesus remains the central influence on contemporary culture, whether conservative or woke. That point has been made forcefully in a recent book by historian Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. In his concluding chapter he writes: The cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth.

⁴

And no one, whatever their belief, can avoid religion. In the center of that word, the root (lig) suggests its importance. Re-lig-ion is related to the word ligament. Lig-aments hold us together, and just as we cannot live without ligaments, none of us can live without some sort of religion: a worldview or story that holds everything together.

Ultimately we have only two such religious stories. One says that the cosmos is a purposeful creation. The other says that it is a long, elaborate accident. Science grew out of that first story, belief in a Creator, but is often associated with the second story, belief in an accidental universe. So this book spends a great deal of time talking about science. It is written for religious people of both atheist and theist persuasions.

For over forty years I have taught at Regent College, a graduate school of Christian studies affiliated with the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I have been working on this book for over half of that time. Its long gestation can be explained in part by the sort of school Regent is, and in part by the awkwardness of the job I was given when I joined the faculty in 1981. My title is professor of philosophy and interdisciplinary studies. Interdisciplinary studies has no content in itself. (Philosophy was thrown in to make the title more respectable.) An unkind but understandable description of interdisciplinary studies contrasts it with specialized disciplines, whose scholars are said to know more and more about less and less until they know practically everything about almost nothing. Interdisciplinary scholars, on the other hand, are said to know less and less about more and more until they know practically nothing about almost everything. And as C. S. Lewis has helpfully observed (in a long article on the word Nature), ‘Everything’ is a subject on which there is not much to be said.

⁵

On the other hand, a lot of effort has been expended in the last century on developing a theory of everything in cosmology. As Wikipedia (that handy recent guide to everything) puts it, this cosmological search is looking for a theory that fully links together and explains all aspects of the universe. The peculiar nature of Regent College is that it attempts to provide a sort of Christian theory of everything to the adult students who come—from many parts of the world—with many kinds of professional training and experience (disciplines such as science, medicine, law, and so on) and want an understanding of their faith that is at the same level as their professional training. That has been provided over the years by my superb colleagues through their expertise in more focussed disciplines such as biblical studies, theology, and history.

It has been my task to help provide some of the ligaments that connect that theological knowledge with the world in which we all live. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that those connections require a kind of Christian theory of everything. With much help from that rich community of colleagues and students, I’ve come increasingly to recognize that such a theory has always been there in the Christian story, implicit in the central belief that the Logos of the cosmos, without which nothing was made that has been made (John 1:3), became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood in Jesus (as Eugene Peterson, one of those Regent colleagues, put it in paraphrasing John 1:14).

⁶

That Christian theory of everything is given a clear statement by Paul when (in a passage that uses ta panta, the Greek word for everything, six times) he says that the Creator’s purpose is to bring everything to reconciliation with God through Christ (Col 1:15–19).

These years of teaching and writing have given me the great privilege to learn and share that theory of everything in a world of people who desperately need such a theory to hold their life together. Time spent in Scotland (as I explain in my introduction) helped me to appreciate the powerful symbolism of the Celtic cross: that image of the suffering love of God at the center of the circles of both cosmos and consciousness. The cross gives us our clearest picture of the character of the triune Creator of all things. That character is best summed up in Paul’s letter to the Philippians when he urges them to have the mind of Christ who, being equal with God, "emptied himself."

⁷

The Greek word translated as emptied gives us the term kenosis. What kenosis implies for Creator, cosmos, and consciousness is the central question that Circles and the Cross seeks to explore.

This journey of exploration ranges widely, covering terrain as different as Neolithic culture, medieval philosophy, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the birth of the environmental movement, and the complexities and confusions of the twenty-first-century. We will have guides as diverse as St. Francis, Duns Scotus, Johannes Kepler, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Aldo Leopold, and Iain McGilchrist. This is also a very personal journey, touching lightly on my own story, which begins on a riverfront farm on the remnants of the frontier in Oregon, continues through years of education, and finally comes to Regent College and a shared waterfront farm on an island in British Columbia. My wife, Mary Ruth, joined me in that journey during college; our twin children, Heidi and Erik, a bit later. Our life together traverses most of the history of what has come to be called the environmental movement, and much of the teaching that Mary Ruth and I have shared has been about trying to show how the concerns of that movement can be understood most fully within the Christian story.

I invite you to join us on this journey.

4. Thomas Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books,

2021)

.

5

. Lewis, Nature, Studies in Words,

37

.

6

. Peterson, The Message.

7

. Phil

2:7

(NASB), emphasis added.

Introduction

Stones, Circles, and the Cross

But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.

—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Mary Ruth and I have lived for more than thirty years on Galiano Island, one of the many islands scattered between Vancouver Island and the mainland Canadian city of Vancouver. I am sitting at a window that looks out across our somewhat disheveled and uneven lawn. At this time of year, in the late winter of this mild coastal climate, the lawn is very green, dotted with dandelions and bluebells that are escaped remnants from the long-gone flower garden around the (equally long-gone) house built by the English couple who settled here nearly a century ago.

Because these islands are in the rain shadow of Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula, the climate is very dry for this part of the world. It has been called Mediterranean and as the climate warms, people are successfully experimenting with growing wine grapes, olives, even lemons. We do not have the luxury of watering the lawn, so by midsummer it will be brown and dry. But the lawn is also the drain field for our septic tank, so by July the sere brown of the lawn will be broken by strips and patches of rank, green, vigorously healthy grass. (I recall a book titled The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, by Erma Bombeck.)

How does such an apparently irrelevant and irreverent detail fit into a reflection on the mysteries of cosmos, consciousness, and Christ? To answer that question, we need to dig a little deeper. A few years ago, when our septic system clogged up (with consequences I need not describe), I spent several days of quite unmetaphorical digging to uncover the buried drainpipes, which were blocked by the roots of grass that (responding to the available fertility) had gradually filled the perforated pipes. Near the end of the job, when the pipes were cleaned, reconnected, and carefully relaid in their gently sloping trenches on gravel hauled up from the beach, I took a picture to memorialize the hard work. Only then, I noticed that the three parallel trenches holding the sewage drainpipes pointed precisely from the house toward a weathered Celtic cross at the edge of our yard overlooking Retreat Cove, the little bay in front of our house.

Years ago, our son, Erik, had carved that cross with a chainsaw from a yellow cedar log he had found in the driftwood on the beach to mark the grave of a family dog. Other dogs have followed that one into the earth near the cross, along with the ashes of some friends. (Mary Ruth’s and my ashes will probably end up there one day as well.) Near the cross, there is a ring of large stones in the trees, which are rumored to mark a much older Native grave, for of course people have been living in this place for a very long time. My digging made this evident as well, for the sandy soil was richly interspersed with oyster, clam, and mussel shells. Long before this lawn was a septic field, it was a midden—a waste dump for Indigenous people, who used to harvest shellfish from the beach.

The perforated pipes that distribute the waste from our house are buried in an ancient garbage dump, and they point to that old Christian symbol of the relationship between the cycles of life and the self-giving love of the Creator. Both the circle-centered cross and the sewer pipes in the lawn are good reminders that what we call nature proceeds mainly in circles: the turning earth; the circling moon; the cycling seasons; the tides; rainfall and rivers; the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen cycles of life; respiration; fertility and decay; food—and sewage. . . . The circle of the seasons turns the whole lawn green—then brown again.

In the cove beyond the lawn, I can now, in late afternoon, begin to see a rock that has been submerged since the fall. During late fall and winter, the low tides that would reveal the rock always occur at night, but in the spring, in their moon-tied annual cycle, the low tides slowly shift to daytime. Now, the seabirds we saw in the fall are returning to the cove in their yearly migrations. Soon the rufous hummingbirds will return—at about the same time as the vultures.¹ Both fly south in the winter, then north in the summer, to feed on the shifting seasonal bounty of the tilted earth.

There is great comfort in coming to know these cycles—but also a kind of sadness, for they remind us of our own mortality. These cycles will outlast us. Human life is linear. We come to ourselves, uniquely conscious, in the midst of a beautiful, mysterious, and terrifying world. Our selfhood stands, in the crosshairs of vast improbability, at the center of all those circles. We make our way through them and come to our end—yet it is not an end in the sense of telos, completeness, but rather termination. Thus the pathos of our own mortality is the place from which we regard the apparently endless cycles of the cosmos. The day when my ashes will join the soil near the cross on our lawn is nearer than when I began this sentence.

A Story of Stones

Reminders of that mortality are everywhere. On the window ledge in front me—as I look across the septic field at the cross and the cove—are five rounded stones, fist-sized and smaller. They are, at first glance, unremarkable. Yet a closer look reveals a similar strange pattern. Roughly half of each stone has a smooth, brown surface, the result of being tumbled by water against other stones for thousands of years. But that smooth surface is interrupted by regular roughened patches on the narrower contours of each rock, leaving the broader surfaces smooth. On each stone, the flatter surfaces are smooth, but the narrowest edges have eroded, revealing the rough quartzite beneath. These marks can hardly be left by natural erosion, which should have smoothed those parts first.

The questions raised by those odd patterns are answered when I hold the stones in my hand, for each fits comfortably, like a tool. For the stones are tools. A very long time ago, a long-dead person picked each one because the smooth surfaces were comfortable to the hand (or, in the smaller ones, to thumb and fingers). The edges then were free for pounding, scraping, or chipping, which slowly wore away the smooth patina, down to the rough quartzite. On the larger stones, it’s easy to see where the smoothness was protected by palm, thumb, and fingers—and even to determine whether the long-ago user was left- or right-handed.

These stones were given to us by a friend, who found them—and many others like them—near a spring on his farm, just uphill from an ancient Native village along the Columbia River. We can’t know for sure all of the things these carefully gripped stones pounded, ground, or scraped, but almost certainly some of them were used to carve weights to hold fishing nets under the water. Each of those larger weights (made from much softer basaltic rock) has two grooves carved around its smooth bulk at right angles to each other. Where the grooves cross, on one side, a deeper hole was gouged for the knot that held the rawhide or cedar-bark rope tightly around the stone, which then pulled the net deep under the water. The fishing nets provided the people who used to live in the Columbia River drainage with their main source of food, salmon, which surged upstream annually to leave their eggs and sperm—and their own lives (for Pacific salmon die when they spawn)—in the same shaded riffle on the tributary where they had hatched three or four years earlier. For thousands of years, the Native culture depended on the salmon’s spawning cycle for their survival.

Sitting at my desk, looking out at Retreat Cove, as I wrap my hand around this smooth stone from the Columbia River, I feel a link to another human being who, like me, grew up in that vast watershed, where the salmon-bearing streams link the Pacific Ocean to the mountains. This stone also links me to the pleasure and pain of being a living creature—and to the wonder and pathos of being conscious in the cosmos. Reflecting on the outlines of ancient handprints on the wall of a California cave, Robinson Jeffers writes:

. . . hands,A multitude of hands in the twilight, a cloud of men’s palms, no more . . .

Like the smooth but roughened stones that fit so comfortably in my own hand, the hands in the cave say (in Jeffers’ words):

"Look: we also were human; we had hands, not paws.

All hail

You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down And be supplanted; for you also are human."

²

Rivers and Forests

Just across the river from where those hand-friendly stones were found, the Willamette River flows from its broad valley into the Columbia. Sixty miles upstream from that junction, the Santiam flows from the Cascade mountain range into the Willamette; ten miles up the Santiam, the north and south forks of that river merge, and a few miles up the south fork (just opposite the mouth of Crabtree Creek) is the half-mile strip of field, forest, and gravel bar where I spent the first eighteen years of my life. My earliest memories are from that corner of the cosmos, where I first began to learn wonder. The riverside forest of alder, ash, maple, cedar, Douglas fir, and tall cottonwoods with herons squawking in their nests was a kind of Eden to me as a small boy. In the deep moss of the woods in the spring, there were white trilliums, blue violets, and purple bleeding heart; in the fall, the fleshy taste of brown morel mushrooms. In the summers along the river, I would wander upstream or down to hunt for lucent stones in the flood-churned gravel bars: blue agate, jasper, carnelian, petrified wood. In winter, after a warm rain, I would wake at night and hear the roar of the river as it carried the melted snow down from the Cascades, spreading through the sloughs and across our fields to (and sometimes under) our very doors.

That was where I began to learn that creation was a gift and was very good. I knew—from my Christian family, church, and summer Bible camps—that nature was indeed creation. And thankfully, neither then nor later, as I began to learn more of the vast scope and complexity of creation across space and time, did I feel that either the scientific story or the biblical story rendered the other untrue. Both were attempts to describe a mystery that was much bigger than either.

In that river and forest, I began to learn wonder, but I also learned pain. I remember one time finding hundreds of large fish, all dead, washed up on the gravel bar as far as I could see. Upstream, a large paper mill had dumped something toxic into the water; the dead fish were collateral damage. The upstream mill was one place our family augmented its modest farm income by selling cottonwood logs from our riverside forest, which we were gradually cutting down and turning into fields.

Another place that bought our logs was a huge paper mill along the Columbia in Longview, Washington. In the summers, my father and I would cable the logs together in rafts, which would fit into the locks around the falls on the Willamette at Oregon City. If all went well, at high water in the winter, a tug would come up the flooded South Santiam and tow them back down the rivers, into the Columbia, past the village near where the stone tools were found, to the foul-smelling Longview mill to be chipped, pulped, digested, and made into paper.

As a boy I was only very dimly aware of the tension between my two ways of relating to the created world around me: on the one hand, as an inexhaustible source of wonder; on the other, as a source of income, a natural resource. Sadly, in those early years, little in my Christian world gave me much help for thinking about the relationship between these two ways. (Though, to be fair, in those post-war years of economic growth and enthusiasm about new technologies, hardly anyone else was thinking about such questions either.) If there was a purpose for the natural world—beyond providing our physical needs—it was to remind us of God and how we had fallen short of his glory. Jesus Christ was only a way of saving us from the wrath of God, from hell, and getting us to heaven. Even more sadly, I was never prompted to think about what it might mean for the forest, the river, the herons, and the salmon that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14) and that in him all things hold together (Col 1:17). One of the hymns we used to sing was, We’re saved, saved to tell others. . . . It never occurred to me then to ask the obvious question: What if everyone were saved? Is there any larger human purpose? Did the others include the life of the forest and river, which told me so much about the goodness of the Creator? What are we here for? There, I began to ask some of those deeper questions. I knew the gospel was good news for me, but was it good news for the fir trees and the trilliums as well?

Across the Columbia, on the Oregon side, the river used to flow past the reactor and cooling tower of the Trojan nuclear power plant, which were built about the time I came back to the northwest to teach after years of study. At the time, Trojan was the largest pressurized water reactor ever built, and it briefly provided my home state with over a tenth of its electricity. But very soon after it began operation, geologists discovered a nearby fault in the always-shifting tectonic plates of this earthquake-prone area, and eventually, less than halfway through its projected life, the reactor was shut down and dismantled. Its spent fuel and hot core were barged up the Columbia to Hanford, where the plutonium of the first atomic bomb (and thousands of others) was produced. There the reactor and the spent fuel lies carefully buried, along with millions of gallons of waste, which inevitably will leak, over thousands of years, into the Columbia, which a series of dams has already nearly emptied of its salmon runs.

These rounded stones with their use-roughened edges are tools—one distinctly human way of responding to the gift of creation. There is a direct (but very long) line between these stones and the logging on our farm—and the now-dismantled Trojan power plant. Whether through fishing weights, chain saws, paper mills, or nuclear reactors, our increasingly clever hands and minds continue their long task of mastering creation. We all take part in—and benefit from—such mastery: it is an essential part of our humanity. Yet it is not our highest purpose.

Another Story of Ancient Stones

In the middle of a sheep pasture in the Orkney Islands, in the far north of Scotland, the grass-covered stone mound known as Maeshowe powerfully conveys the human dilemma of living a short life within the endless cycles of nature. Orkney lies on the sixtieth parallel, as far north as the southern tip of Greenland, yet humans have been raising their grains and grazing their animals there for over five thousand years, since nearly halfway back to the time the ice withdrew and left the fertile soil of Mainland. That name, which the residents gave to the largest of the Orkney Islands (roughly ten by fifteen miles in size) says much about how this surprisingly hospitable group of far-north islands has long been a world in itself to its inhabitants.

Those people lived, so far as we can tell, a comfortable life, warmed by the unknown gift of the Gulf Stream, and fed by the bounty of both sea and land. Not far from the mound of Maeshowe, on the shore, is Skara Brae, a village of astonishingly intact stone houses, which have stood there for at least five thousand years. Millennia ago, the sands blew in and covered the little village until the nineteenth century, when another fierce storm blew the sand away, revealing the circle of stone houses with their unchanged stone furniture open again to the sun. Visitors can still see the platforms for the villagers’ beds, the ovens, basins, and shelves to hold their implements for cooking and adornment.

Orkney is so far north that the circle of the seasons is very obvious. Near the summer solstice, it never gets really dark. (A local golf course advertises a midnight solstice tournament with tee off at 2 a.m., and a cynical local says there are lots of lost golf balls, not so much from the poor light as from the tipsiness of the golfers.) But the corresponding fact is that six months later, at the winter solstice, the nights are very long and the days alarmingly short. As the days shorten, the sun slips further and further to the south, and the winds blowing unimpeded from the pole are a grim hint of what life would be here if the days did not lengthen.

But the knowledge that the life-giving sun will return is the great, ancient vision arching over the stone mound of Maeshowe. It is not, like the pyramids, only a monument or a tomb. Built with meticulous care and immense labor, its red sandstone slabs are corbeled from each side to an arching roof that covers a large chamber. The bones of loved ones were placed in alcoves along the side. The spacious central room was a gathering place for the living. We do not know any details of the ceremonies that brought the people, by flickering torchlight, from surrounding communities like Skara Brae into this arched room. But we can be quite sure of when, in the cycle of the year, one such gathering took place.

People enter the chamber of Maeshowe now, as then, through a long, low tunnel. The slots near the entrance make clear that the stone that closed it was meant to be removed regularly. And every year, as the sun sets further and further south behind the hills of Hoy, for a few days the sunset light pours down the tunnel, through the vaulted chamber, and into the alcoves where the bones were kept. Perhaps the people came to mourn, but we can also be sure that they came to hope, for what the light from the blessed and blessing sun promised was that even in those bleak midwinters, death did not have the final word.

These people gathered long before the Buddha, long before Lao-Tsu, long before Moses was addressed from the flames by One who called himself, I Am, and long before Abraham was called to leave his home. If ever a people followed the only light available to them, that was true of these long-dead people of Orkney. They knew, through the circles of the seasons and the turning year, that life was a miraculous gift sustained by a mystery whose name they did not know, but for which the sun was a faithful symbol.

The church-like stone tomb and the stone village of Skara Brae are not the only remnants of an ancient people on Orkney. A short distance on the other side of Maeshowe, there is a huge circle cut into the sandstone known as The Ring of Brodgar, which was originally ringed by some sixty standing stones, each twice as tall as a man. Most are fallen now, but enough remain to remind us of the remarkable effort of the ring’s construction, which must have stretched across generations.

Similar standing stones and stone circles scatter the landscapes of Britain, Ireland, and northern Europe. The medicine wheels on the plains of North America echo this theme. The British monuments combine two motifs: one is the circle—with its evocation of completeness, connection, inclusion, protection—and the other is the stark vertical of the upright stone. The upright stones declare wordlessly the voices of the living, singing, praying people who were conscious of their place in the center of this great mystery of the turning seasons: we were here; we were thankful; we had hope; do not forget us.

Stones, Bones, Crosses, Circles

Many years ago, long before we ever visited Orkney, Mary Ruth and I were privileged to spend six months in the old university town of St. Andrews, Scotland. We lived in a pleasant, second-floor flat in a stone house, whose south-facing window looked across a wall and a huge cemetery toward the ruined tower of St. Andrews Cathedral. Once the largest church in Scotland, the cathedral has been in ruins for more than four centuries. In 1559—after a fiery sermon by John Knox—the Lords of the congregation (in a covenant to end centuries of perceived Catholic abuse by making Scotland Protestant and Calvinist) raised an army, occupied the town, and sacked the cathedral.

For years the dilapidating cathedral was a kind of stone quarry for the town. Now it is an honored monument, though all that remains are the two towers of the east front, one wall (through its empty arches, we watched the slow spring brighten the fertile Fife hills), and the ruined west front tower outside our window. We often sat in bed with morning coffee and watched crows and pigeons flutter to nests high up in the weathered stone ruins.

When we moved in, we noticed in the corner of the cemetery, just below our window, signs of construction (a portable shelter, a temporary fence, and piles of stone under plastic tarps). On inquiry (and by checking photos of this much-pictured corner of town), we learned that the foundations under a tall cross honoring the century’s war dead were sagging. Thus the monument had to be dismantled and its foundations replaced. One morning we heard heavy equipment below our window and looked out to see a backhoe cautiously digging in the disturbed earth around the foundations. A gray-haired woman in a raincoat watched intently.

Over the next few days, as the hole went deeper, we watched as she and her two assistants, with brush and trowel, gently uncovered skeleton after skeleton, carefully lifting the brittle bones and placing them in plastic bags for burial elsewhere. We talked to the workers, archaeologists who had been commissioned by the city to remove and re-bury all the bones, as they delicately brushed the dirt away from two long-legged skeletons, carefully laid side by side. Twelfth to fourteenth century, they told us. Any sign of a coffin? No, at that time they would have been buried in shrouds. Any artifacts? No, we never find artifacts in a Christian burial.

Yet the archaeologists had known they would find bones, for in the shadow of a once-great church surrounded by graves, the skeletons were inevitable. After the archaeologists had done their work, the hole stood empty for a long time, and one spring evening, I climbed in myself and took several bags of the bone-rich dirt for a planter box, which, by the time we left Scotland in July, had become fragrant with stocks and sweet peas. As I filled my bags, I remembered the lines Walt Whitman had addressed to the earth in his poem, This Compost:

Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?

Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

. . .

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,

It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,

It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

³

The heavy granite cross, which was shored up and eventually placed back over the monument, was a traditional Celtic design. Its slightly tapering shaft was intersected by a stone crosspiece, and that intersection formed the center of a circle. Like many other crosses in that cemetery, it is a relatively recent copy of an older form, but the museum in the ruined cathedral’s undercroft has many carved crosses (and fragments) from this site, some of them a thousand years old. There are similar crosses all across the north and west of Britain, and even more in Ireland, which mark earlier Christian communities. On most of them, the distinctive shape is embellished by the elaborately carved intersecting knots, which are the signature of Celtic art. It is easy to speculate on the symbolism—probably largely unconscious—of those crosses against the backdrop of the long, bloody history of the British Isles.

The old Celtic crosses join that much older and more mysterious set of human artifacts: the standing stones, such as the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney, which were often arranged in circles. And the great carved crosses raised by the early British Christians are almost certainly a kind of baptismal response to the wordless declaration of the standing stones. Inevitably, in their stark silhouettes, the earliest crosses suggest a literal transformation of the standing stones. James Bullock, in his history of the Celtic church, cites an old source that describes St. Patrick inscribing a cross on one of those old standing stones.

⁴

The fact that Patrick (and others) used these remnants of ancient worship to suggest the cross indicates that, in some sense, they are a fulfillment of the longing that the stones represent. By centering the circle on the tapered shaft of the cross, these early British Christians linked the standing stone to one particular life and one unique event. In this way, the Celtic crosses can be seen as an attempt to answer the universal human questions represented by the standing stones.

⁵

Of course, the crossed circle does not necessarily provide this answer. In the world of visual symbol, the cross and circle are sometimes combined in ways quite different from the Celtic cross, whose meaning is unmistakably Christian. A later Christian symbol planted the cross on top of the circle, which tragically became an emblem of political Christendom: the orb of empire, as held in many portraits by the reigning monarch. That use of the circle and the cross recalls Constantine and the word that came to him with a vision of the cross on the night before a crucial battle: In this sign, conquer. A substantial minority voice throughout church history considers this alliance of power with the cross to be one of Christendom’s greatest mistakes: a mistake embodied in the very concept of Christendom.

In another symbol, the mandala, which is associated both with primal and monist religion, the equal-armed cross is contained by the circle, which suggests balance, eternity, and return. And during the twentieth century, the ancient sign of the swastika—a cross with bent arms (on the way, as it were, to becoming a circle)—became under Hitler a symbol of brute power and, later, of evil, forever effacing its positive ancient meanings, especially in Hinduism, where it meant roughly, goodness or blessing.

This blending of a cross and a circle is an inescapable visual device, for it combines two geometric icons of our consciousness of both space and time.

Spatially, the circle is an image of encompassing inclusiveness. Abstractly, it inscribes the circumference of our vision as we turn in a circle, wherever we stand. However, because it is closed upon itself, this image of totality is also an image of limitation. We draw a circle to shut something in—or out. The cross, likewise, is an inevitable image of our experience of space. Most obviously, our bodies, in all their curved complexity, can be simplified to a cross: the vertical is drawn downward by gravity through our legs to the earth of our origin; the horizontal is drawn outward through our arms and our own will to the world of our action.

The iconography of the cross and the circle in the dimension of time is equally profound. The circle is an all-but-universal way of imaging time. Consider our round clock faces (and the subtle detachment from the cycles of the earth represented by digital time). The movements of the heavens seem to inscribe a circle around the earth: the sun rises, traces part of a circle through the sky, then sets, and our imaginations complete the arc. Likewise the moon, stars, and planets each repeat the circular theme. It is but one brief metaphorical step to see the year as a circle, in its endless cycling through wet and dry seasons, seedtime and harvest, growth and decay. Another step takes us to one of the most pervasive images of Asian religions: life as a wheel, an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Just as we conjecture and connect the nighttime passage of the sun to its daytime arc, so also have thoughtful people connected death with birth, and thereby assumed our life to be an endless cycle of reincarnation. All these temporal cycles have led many who reflect on history to conclude that it, too, is a cycle: what has been will be again . . . and again and again.

Lurking behind the imagery of wholeness and eternity in the circle, there is a kind of despair in its prospect of endless repetition. Our figure for nothing, zero, is also a circle. The American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote what is perhaps the ultimate despairing epitaph for persons in the circle of nature, precisely titled Immortal Helix:

Hereunder Jacob Schmidt who, man and bones,

Has been his hundred times around the sun.

His chronicle is endless—the great curve

Inscribed in nothing by a point upon

The spinning surface of a circling sphere.

Dead bones roll on.

⁶

The centerless circle, in the dimension of time, symbolizes eternity, but an eternity without meaning, hope, purpose, or personality. Undoubtedly the biblical author of Ecclesiastes saw something of this when, reflecting on the cycles of nature, he wrote:

A generation goes and a generation comes,

but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun goes down,

and hurries to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south,

and goes around to the north,

round and round goes the wind,

and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea,

but the sea is not full;

to the place where the streams flow,

there they continue to flow.

. . .

For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. . . . All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again.

(Eccl

1

:

4

–

7

;

3

:

19

–

20

)

There may be a kind of comfort in knowing one’s dust will perhaps live again in other organisms, but the I of our unique personhood seems to be extinguished by the cycles of nature. Gerard Manley Hopkins, evoking the ceaseless flux of Heraclitus, puts this most starkly:

Million-fuelèd, nature’s bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an únfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned.

⁷

Such drowning of the self in the cycling fires of nature is small comfort, indeed, and few people, ancient or modern, accept it gladly. Hence there is a strong negative meaning of the circle that reinforces the default modern worldview, which argues that the universe and human existence are mere accidents. Hence, too, we have built monuments such as Maeshowe, with its silent plea to the deathless sun and the hope of its eternal return.

But speaking of nature as a cycle evokes another potent image of the circle—one that nowadays is stamped on almost all plastic objects: three arrows bent into a circle, suggesting our recognition of the way that the cycles of nature work and our determination to fit back into those cycles, to give even manufactured things a life after their death. Back in the seventies, in the early days of the environmental movement, the biologist Barry Commoner wrote The Closing Circle, an important book that points out the danger of widespread modern technologies that attempt to break out of these natural cycles. More recently, such ideas have been aptly referred to as circular economies, and many ecological renewal movements are trying to close the circle in a push toward greater sustainability. But the grim meaning of the word closure remains, one we sense at every funeral.

To these endless and extinguishing cycles of nature, the cross is a kind of answer. Temporally, the cross is a variant of a simpler symbol, the line, which connects two points, a beginning and an end. Paths and roads are lines: we walk our path, journey along our road, to wherever it leads us. We like to imagine (in Tolkien’s words) that the road goes ever on and on,

⁸

but dimly we know our road will eventually come to an end. The line has also become an image for a way of thinking about history, where our movement along that historical line indicates progress. This notion of linear progress is often linked with attitudes associated with Christianity—including hierarchy, patriarchy, and careless dominion of a creation that, some argue, we will leave behind as we progress toward eternity. But as global civilization, with its commitment to endless growth, pushes up against its limits, many have become disillusioned with that linear way of thinking and have begun to look back with longing to earlier views of history and human life that are symbolized by the circle.

To the linear image of the ongoing way, the shape of the cross adds an intersecting line, and the junction of these two lines singles out a particularity, a uniqueness—or perhaps an opportunity. The image of intersecting paths, a crossroads, or the crux of a problem, carries this meaning of crisis and opportunity with a kind of universal symbolic clarity. It also describes one of the features of our consciousness: we perceive the cosmos always from the particular center of our presence in it.

But whoever erected the Celtic circled crosses clearly had one event in mind.

⁹

As the carved stories on the shafts of many of the crosses make plain, they were telling the story of Jesus, a story that (like the arms of the cross) extends beyond the circle. The cross is not contained by the circle (as in the mandala) nor is it becoming a circle (as in the ancient swastika). Rather, it contains the circle, thereby giving a past, a future, and a meaning to all the endless cycles. That center is the story of Jesus.

One of the greatest of the standing crosses (though this one without a circle) stood at Ruthwell, Scotland for a thousand years, till it was cast down, but carefully broken and buried (by a community who seems to have had reservations about iconoclasm), in the same Protestant turmoil that sacked St. Andrews cathedral. It has been re-erected and now stands in a small church, where visitors can see stories from the life of Jesus carved upon it, along with the earliest extant text fragment of a great Anglo-Saxon poem, A Dream of the Rood, which gives the cross itself a voice:

Then the young Warrior, God, the All-Wielder,

Put off His raiment, steadfast and strong;

With lordly mood in the sight of many

He mounted the Cross to redeem mankind.

When the Hero clasped me I trembled in terror,

But I dared not bow me nor bend to earth;

I must needs stand fast. Upraised as the Rood

I held the High King, the Lord of heaven.

¹⁰

Rooted in the life of Jesus, these crosses and the stories carved upon them eloquently declare the Christian belief that the cross is the center of a story that makes all other stories intelligible, including the mute pleas of the stone circles and monoliths and the hope preserved in the solstice-sunward tunnel of the Maeshowe entrance. The Rood poem does not hesitate to call the figure on the cross God the All-Wielder, nor to suggest that the might of the Creator is evident only in the passivity of the crucified man. This irony hints at the profound truth I am exploring in this book: the intersecting lines of Christ’s body, stretched on the cross, give us a clue to the meaning of all the cycles in cosmos, which is sustained by self-giving love.

The Celtic cross brings together creation, pictured by the circle, and redemption, pictured by the cross. In the Latin West, the principal metaphors for describing redemption have been drawn from the language of the courtroom: propitiation, substitution, justification, advocate. These catch one important aspect of the biblical language of atonement, but they are—like the New Testament generally—metaphors that were shaped in the urban world of Roman law. Rome did not reach to the wild or rural fringes of Britain, where the standing crosses were raised.

And so it is not surprising that the picture of redemption in these wilder regions is centered in the cycles of creation itself—the circles of seedtime and harvest, winter and summer, wet and dry—which were known and honored by pagan peoples everywhere. The etymological opposite of pagan, which is related to the word campagne, or countryside, is urban, which is related to the word urbanus, or city. But the cross provides the endless cycles of creation with a center. Standing firmly on the earth, the form of the cross containing a circle points to the Creator, whose suffering love is at the very center of creation.

Hans Urs von Balthasar makes this point in his description of the second-century thought of Irenaeus. He writes:

The thought of Irenaeus forms a great axis. Its first movement is steep and Godward. . . . It flies straight to the saving heights of the ever greater God, whom no finite mind can grasp. The other movement is broad, slow, heavy, a line drawn across the face of the earth. . . . If there is to be real redemption, this earth and no other, this body and no other, must have the capacity to take God's grace into itself.

At the centre of this axis is the image of the Son of Man, who unites heaven and earth. . . . this uniting of God and world takes place in the Passion of Christ, when He is stretched out between height and depth, breadth and length. The cross-beams are the world’s true centre, and since it is in this sign that all creation is redeemed, they become the watermark of any kind of existence in the world.

¹¹

Like Irenaeus, the Celtic Christians lived out of their understanding of God as Trinity.

¹²

Though all of Christendom confesses belief in the triune God, this confession has often been skewed in a unitarian direction. Even our understanding of the meaning of the cross has been expressed largely in terms of sacrifice to God rather than the self-sacrifice of God in Christ. By distancing God the Creator from the incarnate Christ and the life-giving Spirit, the cost at the heart of creation has been obscured. Most of Western Christendom has preserved belief in a transcendent, sovereign God of power, but has largely lost the sense of God’s self-giving love toward us through Christ in the Spirit. We have preserved God’s transcendence and power by overlooking his immanence and love, a mistake with disastrous consequences for our culture.

Not the least tragic of these consequences has been for those today who, disillusioned both with Christianity and science, try to be followers of the ancient pagans, who raised the standing stones to mark their presence in the Great Mystery. Neopaganism, in its various contemporary forms, ranging from deep ecology to ecofeminism, is unable to see through the haze of Christian confusion to the message of the standing cross: here, in all the turning cycles of the universe, in one particular place, time, and person, the ever-present God has sought them and spoken the answer they seek.

The power of that pagan appeal is often strong enough to erase the Christian meaning of the Celtic cross. Off the west coast of Scotland, on the beautiful island of Iona, many pilgrims find it easy to overlook the passionate Christian history of the place. In a spiritually eclectic bookstore on Iona, we found a handsome pewter replica of one of the great Celtic crosses from Glendalough, an ancient Christian center in Ireland. Historically, there is no avoiding the Christian meaning of the object, but the label attached to this replica read: A cross is one of the most ancient and powerful of symbols. The cross is the meeting of horizontal and vertical, yin and yang, male and female. In the Celtic cross the circle spins this union into infinity.

This description ignores the ancient Christian belief that the Celtic cross is first of all a depiction of a historical event—the instrument of torture on which Jesus was put to death. But no amount of postmodern redefinition can completely obscure the fact that the Celtic cross is an irreducibly Christian symbol, which pictures a particular event in a specific place and time.

The circles centered on the cross help us hold together some polarities that are central to a Christian view of the world: God’s transcendence and immanence, the freedom of the Creator and the God-sustained freedom of the creature, and the scandal of the incarnation,

¹³

which is that the God of the cosmos, within the vastness of created time and space, entered creation as a human being at a particular crosshairs of history.

Two Long