The Ornament of the World

In 955 a Benedictine nun named Hroswitha wrote of the marvels of a city far from her convent in Saxony. The city was Cordoba in present-day Spain, and Hroswitha called it "the ornament of the world." I'm struck by her metaphor.

Hroswitha learned about Cordoba from a man who came from there--a Christian bishop named Racemundo who was also called Rabi ibn Zayd. Racemundo was both a leader in his church and a diplomat in the corps of Cordoba's Muslim ruler. In 955 he was sent to the German court of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, and there he met Hroswitha. Racemundo spoke Latin and Arabic and knew the literature of the long-forgotten Greeks. He was a reflection of the ornament-city.

Exactly two hundred years before Racemundo's trip, in 755, a young Muslim of the ruling Umayyad family escaped the slaughter of his relatives by rival Abbasids. That was back east in Damascus. Abd al-Rahman fled west and wound up in Spain, in a frontier of the Islamic Empire known as al-Andalus, or Andalusia. A year later he became its emir. The House of Umayya had a new home.

Author Maria Rosa Menocal describes what happened next:

Abd al-Rahman . . . vigorously and uncompromisingly administered al-Andalus while refusing to play the games of tribal loyalties. In the long run his strategy succeeded brilliantly, and the result was (among other things) a thriving, powerful, and well-organized state, which he passed on to his heirs, and they to theirs, for a quarter of a millenium." (The Ornament of the World, p. 57)

At the heart of al-Andalus was Cordoba, known for its wealth, its military prowess, its palaces, its running water, its paved and well lit streets--but especially, wrote Hroswitha, "for its seven streams of wisdom." By one count, the caliph's library held four hundred thousand volumes, at a time when the largest in Christian Europe held a scant four hundred. Here Andalusians translated and eventually brought to the Latin West the lost works of the Greeks. The "Dark Ages" never cast a shadow on the ornament.

Cordoba was a city of tolerance. Despite intractable differences and enduring hostilities, Jews, Christians, and Muslims managed to live together in peace. And more: they blended cultures, as in the person of Racemundo. You could see it in their food, clothing, and language, in their philosophy, art, poetry, and song. Today it's visible in their architecture. (Take a virtual tour.) Cultures fused in Cordoba not because of interfaith dialogue but because beauty was allowed to cast its spell. The triumph wasn't doctrinal; it was aesthetic. Hence Hroswitha's methaphor.

Cordoba continued to shine even when bitter civil wars among Muslim factions destroyed the caliphate and fragmented al-Andalus. Christian power grew (the first Crusade was announced in 1095) but not at the expense of symbiosis in Andalusia. Even Ferdinand III took part. A Christian saint-to-be, he used a Muslim alliance to take over Cordoba in 1236. When he died, his son had his tomb inscribed not only in Latin, Hebrew, and Castilian, but also in Arabic.

Two weeks ago I wondered if science and religion could meet along the "Beauty Way." In Cordoba it appears they did. It wasn't the science of our day, but still it mingled freely with three different monotheisms. There was beauty in that mingling. Hroswitha chose her metaphor well.

P.S. You can learn more about the Andalusian story from the book (and upcoming PBS special) by Maria Rosa Menocal. The Metanexus Institute will celebrate this story at its forthcoming conference this July in Madrid. Menocal will be there.

READ COMMENTS
MAKE A COMMENT
FORWARD TO A FRIEND
SIGN UP FOR FRIDAY PREVIEWS

COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE

Lilies

Last week, in the expanse of a desert, we were reminded of the beauty of Matter. This week, thanks to another reader, we can contemplate the beauty of living things. Dick Bayerl has had a long fascination with lilies and sent us these photos.

It's easy to get lost in the simple elegance of Lilium canadense, a wild variety found in eastern Canada. Design unfolds, but so does spontaneity. Is the combination a metaphor for all creation, for the cosmos itself?



According to the fossil record, flowers appeared out of nowhere about 125 million years ago. Chemical evidence in the record hints at an earlier date: 250 million years.




Flowers appeared as a way of attracting insects that would spread a plant's genes. It was a feat of co-evolution. This is Lilium henryi from China, and it "remembers" how to attract, over and over again.



Long after flowers emerged, humans came on the scene. They created hybrids--a feat of conscious design. This one is derived from Lilium henryi above. Now beauty exists not for the sake of genes, but for its own sake.






Be silent now and drink the beauty in. This flower lasts but a day.








How did the cosmos get around to growing lilies? Natural selection explains why these flowers look the way they do. It explains why I have the eyes to see them. But things are going on here that natural selection cannot reach.


Beauty is going on. The idea of it. The experience of it. The spirit of it. Not the kind of Idea that Plato had in mind, but close to it. In the New Story, beauty is an emergent. It depends on what came before--on genes and eyes and natural selection. But it cannot be reduced to them. When beauty becomes an Idea, something new starts to happen, something more, something "higher." Something causal. A reality is born.

Moments ago, in cosmic time, beauty emerged and began to circle an ordinary star in a remote region of the universe. Producing flowers was strange, but producing an idea was the oddest thing a universe could do. You just had one.

READ COMMENTS
MAKE A COMMENT
FORWARD TO A FRIEND
SIGN UP FOR FRIDAY PREVIEWS

COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE

Impossibly Beautiful II

On my way to a writing a series about journeys, I stopped to reread comments about the Goldilocks Enigma. What was on the mind of readers? For several it was beauty, as it had been once before.

Reader Mark Thomas told me about a stunning collection of photos entitled Navajoland. (The photographer, Alain Briot, was good enough to let me post these samples.) "Who perceives what is beautiful?" Mark asked. "What is the code for beauty? Is it inherent in our DNA?"

Beauty lies in design, but what is the source of design? Above, one stone monument casts a shadow on another. The placement of the shadow is perfect, the design pleasing. Yet no intelligence planned it.



Here, a shaft of light enters an enclosed space. The required precision comes from "blind" nature. At Newgrange, another shaft of light enters an enclosure (take a look), but now the precision comes from human planning. Whether the source is blind or intelligent, I see little difference in the result.





Something about these photos were "eerily reminiscent" to Mark of Hubble space photos. Was it the expanse? The emptiness? The call from "out there"? In The Story of Everything the desert actually calls to Adam, telling him what to do in life.





How many similar calls have come in deserts? In desert caves? How many lie at the heart of religion? In this scene, is it the perspective that beckons? Or perhaps the focus on a single spire, a single shadow. Monotheism began in deserts.







Such calls are heard no matter what the season. What does beauty have to do with them? What does it have to do with religion? For that matter, what does it have to do with science?





Beauty lies at the core of neither. The universal religious commandment is not "Be beautiful" but rather "Be compassionate." Yet beauty is never far from religion. It permeates its art, its music, its architecture. It is seen in arches and pillars and spirals and domes, in stone that looks like lace.

Nor is beauty that far from science. Copernicus embraced heliocentrism not because it predicted planetary motion better than geocentrism (it didn't), not because he had proof of the earth's motion (he didn't), but because a sun-centered system was aesthetically pleasing. Similarly, Mark Thomas finds Planck units appealing because they're "beautifully simple."

This is from the Navajo Beauty Way ceremony:

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk
With dew about my feet may I walk
With beauty may I walk

Walk with beauty and you may find a place where science and religion meet.

P.S. Be sure to see the work of Alain Briot at www.beautiful-landscape.com.

READ COMMENTS
MAKE A COMMENT
FORWARD TO A FRIEND
SIGN UP FOR FRIDAY PREVIEWS

COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE
PHOTOS COPYRIGHT (C) ALAIN BRIOT