The Movement of the Spheres

God is not like human beings. While we endure trials and temptations, God ‘cannot be tempted’ (James 1:13). While we deceive ourselves in dark folds of reflection, God is pure, transparent light in which ‘there is no variation or shadow due to change’ (v.17). What happens, then, when a human being stands ‘before God’ (v.27)? When you stand beneath the sun and look down, you see your own shadow.

David Wood’s Reflections, installed at Cheekwood Botanical Garden, Nashville in 2011, is part of a series named Heliotrope. Wood, a philosopher as well as an artist, creates landscape sculptures to raise ecological consciousness, questioning the place of human beings between earth and sky. Reflections played with change and stasis: the serene floating heliotrope mirrored the sun in a transparent sky, yet also drew attention to the movement of light on water and the shifting hues of sky and land. Its circular form evoked the regular motions of the heavens, long thought by watchers of the night sky to approximate the unchanging being of God. The human eye cannot see God, or look directly at the sun; only in an earthly reflection can we ‘look into the perfect law’ (v.25) of creation.

Although there is no variation in God, God’s being is a generative plenitude, ‘bringing us forth’ (v.18) and offering ‘every good endowment’, ‘every perfect gift’, (v.17). Juxtaposing an ever-changing sky and landscape with the geometrical form of the heliotrope, Reflections suggests both constancy and a ceaseless cycle of generosity and receptivity: a small revelation of a gift-giving ‘Father of lights’.

This passage from James twice promises a ‘blessing’ (1:12, 25) and here in Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin, Mary receives a golden crown from Jesus, her son, on her assumption into heaven. Unlike some paintings of the Coronation of the Virgin—including a second version of the scene painted by Fra Angelico in 1434–35, now in the Louvre—Mary is not here kneeling before Jesus, but sitting by his side. This symmetrical position suggests a mutual gift-giving, which is perhaps appropriate to their relationship: Jesus received his earthly life from Mary, and she receives her spiritual ‘crown of life’ (v.12) from him.

All the circular forms in Fra Angelico’s composition echo the shape of Mary’s crown. The entire gathering seems united in the circle of friendship and celebration: every figure is connected, everyone is touching someone else. Mary looks like a queen, yet all here wear spiritual crowns: their bright halos express their consciousness of God. The trials of their earthly lives are over; they have loved God, and now they enjoy God’s blessing.

Though this is an image of heaven, of risen lives bathed in golden light—no one looks old or diseased—the gathering is still recognizably human, composed of distinctive-looking people from various walks of life. The female saints at the bottom-right corner even seem a little gossipy. This painting is full of hands—holding things, playing instruments, gesturing in different ways. While all the halos invoke a life that is ‘pure and undefiled’, ‘unstained from the world’ (v.27), the hands suggest human agency, so that each figure combines these contrasting elements of the biblical passage. All these people, and most of all the child-bearing, child-rearing mother Mary, whose hands can now finally rest, have been ‘blessed in [their] doing’ (v.25).

According to Greek legend, the beautiful young man Narcissus was so captivated by his own reflection that he could not tear himself away from it, and died of thirst and starvation by the water’s edge. Caravaggio’s painting conveys this stasis in the rigid, awkward position of Narcissus’s arms, and in the circular form of the composition: Narcissus isn’t going anywhere. This form resonates with the insatiable—but ultimately sterile—circle of desire, sin, and death described in the Letter of James: ‘desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings death’ (1:15).

This is an image of the human condition without God. ‘Lured and enticed by his own desire’ (1:14), a person becomes solipsistic, self-enclosed. The folds and doublings within Caravaggio’s painting—the reflection of Narcissus in the water, and the way the figure is uncomfortably bent double, folded over himself—echo the repeated references to duplicity, self-deception, in the passage (vv.16, 22, 26). The whole image is bisected horizontally by the line dividing land and water; despite his self-absorption, Narcissus remains divided from himself.

Caravaggio’s use of darkness and light also amplify this existential moment, frozen in time. Narcissus is illuminated ‘from above’—his physical ‘endowments’ are, after all, gifts from the ‘Father of lights’ (v.17)—yet he has turned away from this light, and looks down into near-darkness. This motionless human figure almost parodies the unchangeable nature of God. While for the author of James’s letter ‘those who love [God]’ (v.12) are ‘doers of the word’ (v.22)—active people who go readily to those in need, and who grow inwardly in faith and virtue—Narcissus is transfixed, arrested by his own shallow image, unable to carry out the works of love that the text cites as the signs of responsiveness to God’s word.