The Infinite Sphere: God, Cosmos and Soul
One
primordial image in particular has survived in scientific tradition for a
greater length of time than most, one that has appeared as a visual
image
of God, of existence, of the cosmos, of
space-time,
and of the particle:
the image of a circle or of the “sphere whose center is everywhere and whose
circumference is nowhere.” Over the centuries this image has
undergone many transformations, until finally it was understood more and more as
the image of an endopsychic reality in the human being. P&R
57
For
Plato, the cosmos is a spherical, blessed god, a reflection of his eternal
primordial image. Plotinus took over this idea and elaborated
on it. The eternal primordial image is a mental sphere (sphaira
noete), the model for the visible sphere of heaven created by
God. This
purely spiritual sphere is without extension in space, so that one can say of
God either that he is the
All-embracing One or equally that he lives “down in the depths.”
P&R 57
The
primordial image of the world (…) is God himself, “to whom no other figure is so
like as the surface of a sphere.” God is, so to speak, the
point of origin at the center of this sphere; the Son is
the universal revelation of the onefoldedness of this
point; the
Holy Ghost, finally, is the “identity of the space between.”
The finite world is created to accord with this divine primordial image,
which is why geometry is a divine art.
The human spirit also possesses the same spherical form; it stands
between the divine spirit and the physical world, like the circular line between
the surface of a sphere and the plane from which it cuts a piece.
P&R 58
For Isaac Newton, too, three-dimensional space is still “tanquam
effectus emanativus Dei.” The omnipresence of God thus
became, so to speak, the primordial image of a physical field.