Babylon and Black Holes

This article has been illustrated by C&D artist Davis Dear with a drawing of the Imago Mundi, which you can see as its cover image on our “Articles” page, or at the bottom of this page.

There is a Babylonian map preserved from antiquity known as the Imago Mundi, inscribed into a clay tablet that shows the city of Babylon at the center of the ancient world, with the rest of the Middle East and Mediterranean region radiating outward from it. As a work of accurate geography, it’s far from impressive—massively distorting the area’s actual topography, you could never hope to actually navigate by it—but it still illustrates something telling about the way we envision the world we inhabit.

Compare a modern world map—precise, scientific, and differing from reality only in the ways dictated by a Mercator projection. A map like this is undeniably more helpful for driving or sailing or flying, but it also lacks something that the Imago Mundi has: a center. In fact, while your typical modern map fairly successfully depicts all the places on it in equal and impartial detail, it also illustrates a rather bleakly rational perspective on the geography it represents: that it is a certain amount of physical matter and human demographics to be traveled across, but has little more transcendent significance than that. In contrast, the Imago Mundi—even though we can agree that Babylon is not the center of the world—says something more about the environment that its ancient geographer inhabited: by virtue of being oriented around a “sacred center,” it conveys meaning, not just data.

In our modern era, we tend to instinctively adopt the worldview of the Mercator projection, not the Imago Mundi: we often treat our surroundings as neutral, impersonal material simply waiting for us to make something of it. But should we do that? 

For Christians, the answer is a decisive no—in fact, we should do exactly the opposite. One often-quoted Bible verse reads “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1 ESV)—and although it’s easy to miss this verse’s full significance amid the many contexts in which people invoke it, it actually points out something quite profound: the Christian’s view of the world must not be limited to only the realities of the physical environment. Instead, it should be fundamentally oriented around a central point of meaning—that is, God. This view elevates nature beyond being mere matter, making it instead a thing intended for goodness and beauty, and to which humans have a certain responsibility for stewardship; it elevates human action beyond mere arbitrary decision-making, infusing it with moral significance. For the Christian, all of creation ought to be more Imago Mundi than Mercator projection—God as the axis of the map, ordering everything around Himself. 

A similar but more abstract illustration of God’s place in the Christian universe is an application of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity: massive celestial bodies like stars and black holes “indent” spacetime like a heavy ball weighing on a taut sheet, bending the paths of light and other objects around them (NASA). In this case, like the star or black hole, God’s presence, once admitted, necessarily becomes a kind of singularity that changes the very nature of our reality. Much as the star alters the movement of everything in its vicinity, so too God subtly yet profoundly affects our world, from the way we understand science to the ways we create art. 

This perspective isn’t a vague “finding God in everything,” either—a universe ordered around God as its absolute origin forces its inhabitants to choose between a binary of options: work with that order, or against it. The laws of physics, it turns out, also predict that within a certain radius of a black hole, there are no stable orbits—that is, all objects either spiral into the black hole or accelerate permanently away from it. Correspondingly, if God really is the sole point where the divine enters the material and from which meaning diffuses into all things, there is no neutral “stable orbit” of human action—as C. S Lewis writes, “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” (Lewis) In the same way that a hypothetical ancient traveler moving across the landscape depicted in the Imago Mundi would eventually have to reach Babylon or travel away from it—a sort of “all roads lead to Rome” scenario—we likewise have to choose between turning towards God, or setting ourselves against Him. 

The good news, though, is that for Christians—that is, those people who turn towards God—this ordering of creation becomes a blessing rather than something to be feared: reason to find loveliness in nature, to act charitably and kindly towards others, to write and paint and build beautiful things (and to understand why they are really beautiful). Indeed, there is one particularly key difference between the Christian worldview and the analogies of the Imago Mundi and the black hole: both of the latter represent some kind of distortion of how space actually exists—the black hole bends light away from a theoretically straight path, and the Imago Mundi is certainly not a geographically accurate map. By contrast, realizing God’s role as the sacred central point of our world is fundamentally an “un-distortion,” bringing our minds into sharper focus on the fundamental truths about the world we inhabit. Drawing us out of a materialistic Mercator-projection worldview, this recognition orients us properly towards the true center of our metaphysical map: God, the singularity within whose total influence we ought to live our lives.

Lewis, C. S. The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics. San Francisco, Harperone, 2017.

SVS. “NASA Scientific Visualization Studio - How the Sun Warps Starlight.” SVS, 22 July 2019, svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13260.

‌“Tablet | British Museum.” The British Museum, www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1882 -0714-509.

The Holy Bible : ESV, English Standard Version Containing the Old and New Testaments. New York, American Bible Society, 2007.