Geometry and Theology

See

• C. S. Lewis on this topic (pdf) and

• Mark L. Olson on C. S. Lewis and Greg Egan,

the science fiction writer mentioned in a Friday entry.

Mark Olson's article is at the website of the New England Science Fiction Association, publisher of Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson.  This book, by one of my favorite science-fiction authors, was apparently edited by the same Mark Olson.

The following remarks seem relevant to the recurring telepathy theme in Henderson:

From the first article cited above,

David L. Neuhouser,

Higher Dimensions in the Writings of C. S. Lewis (pdf):

"If we are three-dimensional cross-sections of four-dimensional
reality, perhaps we are parts of the same body. In fact, we know we are
parts of the same body in some way, this four-dimensional idea just may
help us to see it more clearly. Remember the preceding comments are
mine, not Lewis's. He puts it this way, 'That we can die "in" Adam and
live "in" Christ seems to me to imply that man as he really is differs
a good deal from man as our categories of thought and our
three-dimensional imaginations represent him; that the separateness...
which we discern between individuals, is balanced, in absolute reality,
by some kind of inter-inanimation of which we have no
conception at all. It may be that the acts and sufferings of great
archetypal individuals such as Adam and Christ are ours, not by legal
fiction, metaphor, or causality, but in some much deeper fashion. There
is no question, of course, of individuals melting down into a kind of
spiritual continuum such as Pantheistic systems believe in; that is
excluded by the whole tenor of our faith.'"

From Webster's Unabridged, 1913 edition:

inanimate, v. t.

[Pref. in-

in (or intensively) + animate.]

 To animate.

[Obs.] -- Donne.

inanimation, n.

Infusion of life or vigor;
animation;

inspiration. [Obs.]

The inanimation of Christ

living and breathing

within us.

-- Bp. Hall.

Related words...

Also from the 1913 Webster's:

circumincession, n.

[Pref. circum- + L. incedere, incessum, to walk.]
(Theol.) The reciprocal existence in each other
of the three persons of the Trinity.

From an online essay:

perichoresis, n.

"The term means mutual indwelling or, better, mutual
interpenetration and refers to the understanding of both the Trinity
and Christology. In the divine perichoresis, each person has 'being in
each other without coalescence' (John of Damascus ca. 650). The roots
of this doctrine are long and deep."

--  Bert Waggoner

coinherence, n.

"In our human experience of personhood, at any rate in a fallen world, there is
in each person an inevitable element of exclusiveness, of opaqueness and
impenetrability.  But with the three divine persons it is not so.  Each is
entirely 'open' to the others, totally transparent and receptive.  This
transparency and receptivity is summed up in the Greek notion of perichoresis,
which Gibbon once called 'the deepest and darkest corner of the whole
theological abyss.'  Rendered in Latin as circumincessio and in English usually
as 'coinherence,' the Greek term means literally, cyclical movement, and so
reciprocity, interchange, mutual indwelling.  The prefix peri bears the
sense 'around,' while choresis is linked with chora, 'room,' space,' 'place' or
'container,' and with chorein, to 'go,' 'advance,' 'make room for' or 'contain.'  Some also see a connection with choros, 'dance,' and so they take perichoresis
to mean 'round dance.'  Applied to Christ, the term signifies that his two
natures, the divine and the human, interpenetrate one another without separation
and without confusion.  Applied to the Trinity, it signifies that each person
'contains' the other two and 'moves' within them.  In the words of St Gregory of
Nyssa, 'All that is the Father's is seen in the Son, and all that is the Son's
belongs also the Father. For the whole Son abides in the Father, and he has in
his turn the whole Father abiding in himself.' 

By virtue of this perichoresis, Father, Son and Holy Spirit 'coinhere' in one
another, each dwelling in the other two through an unceasing movement of mutual
love - the 'round dance' of the Trinity."

-- Timothy Ware, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia,
    The Human Person as an Icon of the Trinity

"Difficult to understand because of intricacy: byzantine, complex, complicated, convoluted, daedal, Daedalian, elaborate, intricate, involute, knotty, labyrinthine, tangled."

-- Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition

"It's ... extremely weird how the previously-on-Revelations announcer doesn't seem to be able to draw the distinction between what's happening in the real world where Revelations is just a cheesy miniseries that's keeping people from watching Alias
and what's happening in the fake world of the miniseries itself, where
they keep promising the apocalypse and it keeps not happening. After
the wrap-up of all the nothing that's come before, the announcer intones ominously, 'And now, as the end of the world draws near, Revelations continues.' Well, no. Here, where Revelations is continuing, the end of the world is not drawing near. Or is NBC genuinely aiming for the crowd who thinks The Rapture Index is a valuable and educational resource?

Does someone involved here have an actual sense of humor?"

-- The Flick Filosopher

"In Francis Ford
Coppola's film, Col. Kurtz tells how after his medics
inoculated a small village, the Reds chopped off
every child's left arm. 'My God, the genius of
that. The genius,' Kurtz said. 'The will to
do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline,
pure! And then I realized they were stronger than me
because they could stand it.'"

-- Col. David Hackworth
    on Tuesday, April 9, 2002.
    Col. Hackworth died at 74
    on Wednesday, May 4, 2005.

"Professor Krauss even uses many of the same decorations with which
she festooned earlier volumes. Bataille’s photograph of a big toe,
for example, which I like to think of as her mascot, reappears. As
does her favorite doodle, a little graph known as a 'Klein Group' or
'L Schema' whose sides and diagonals sport arrows pointing to corners
labeled with various opposing pairs: e.g., 'ground' and 'not ground,'
'figure' and 'not figure.' Professor Krauss seems to believe that
this device, lifted from the pages of structuralist theory,
illuminates any number of deep mysteries: the nature of modernism, to
begin with, but also the essence of gender relations,
self-consciousness, perception, vision, castration anxiety, and other
pressing conundrums that, as it happens, she
has trouble distinguishing from the nature
of modernism. Altogether,
the doodle is a handy thing to have around. One is not surprised that Professor
Krauss reproduces it many times in her new book."

From Drid Williams,

The Semiotics of Human Action,
Ritual, and Dance:

This is closely related to
Beckett's "Quad" figure

A Jungian on this six-line figure: "They are the same six lines that exist in the I Ching.... Now observe the square more closely: four of the lines are of equal length, the other two are longer.... For this reason symmetry cannot be statically produced and a dance results."   -- Marie-Louise von Franz, Number and Time (1970)

and to the Greimas "semiotic square":

"People have believed in the fundamental character of binary oppositions since at least
classical times. For instance, in his Metaphysics Aristotle advanced as primary
oppositions: form/matter, natural/unnatural, active/passive,
whole/part, unity/variety, before/after and being/not-being.* 
But it is not in isolation that the rhetorical power of such oppositions resides, but
in their articulation in relation to other oppositions.
In Aristotle's Physics the four elements of earth, air, fire and
water were said to be opposed in pairs.
For more than two thousand years oppositional patterns based on these four
elements were widely accepted as the fundamental structure underlying surface reality....

The structuralist semiotician Algirdas Greimas introduced the semiotic square
(which he adapted from the 'logical square' of scholastic philosophy)
as a means of analysing paired concepts more fully...."

-- Daniel Chandler, Semiotics for Beginners.

* Compare Chandler's list of Aristotle's primary oppositions with Aristotle's list (also in the  Metaphysics) of Pythagorean oppositions (see Midrash Jazz Quartet).

Hooray, Hooray...