Built between 450- 430 B.C., the Parthenon is one of the greatest architectural achievements known to man. Modern designers still marvel at the genius, mystery and beauty of this ancient structure and yet the construction is actually simple: a three step platform, a peristyle, a capital and the entablature. But don’t let the simplicity fool you, this Doric temple is the crowning achievement of classical Greece and is unprecedented in her scope, requiring 100,000 tons of Pen telic marble and costing $ 1 billion in today’s dollars. 19th century historian Auguste Choisy claimed the Parthenon to be “the supreme effort of genius in pursuit of beauty”. But she is more than an amazing work of art; she is a public statement to the Athenian worldview; a philosophy steeped in rationality, reason, order, experience and the search for truth. Bearing witness to her wonder requires more than an abstract study of her systematic dimensions; one must experience her mystery as well.
First of all, the engineering alone is pure genius. For the first time in ancient history, the Athenians used marble as the sole material for the entire superstructure. Each block was quarried and carried from Mount Pen Deli, 16 kilometers east of the city and up the mount of the Acropolis to the building site. Her 46 outer columns are 8 x 17 feet in dimension and consist of 11 separate drums of marble, each drum weighing between four and 8 tons. Lifting these sections alone is quite the feat, much less fitting them together to form a single smooth surface without the use of mortar. To do so, the Athenians created an ingenious way of ensuring the drums aligned perfectly. The original joints fit together through an empolia, placed at the center of each drum consisting of a male square component and cylinder female component, allowing the drums to sit so tightly upon one another that the original joint line was not visible to the naked eye. In fact, the gap between each drum has been measured to less that 1/5 the width of a human hair.
But rationality and perfect mathematical proportions aren’t the only staggering characteristic mastered by the Athenians; mystery and life seem to be found in the columns themselves. Although the outer columns, or peristyle, appear to have the same width from top to bottom, the drums at the base of the columns are wider and taper toward the top. But more mysteriously, the columns are not straight up and down, they tilt. The angle is only very slight, but scholars have calculated that if the columns continued upwards into the sky, they would meet one mile above the earth’s surface to form a perfect pyramid. But even more important to us, measurements show that the columns bulge at their center, creating an optical allusion known as “entasis”. This creates the impression of elasticity, as if the columns are bulging from the weight imposed by the building’s superstructure. The Athenians gave the columns an anthropomorphic quality similar to a human muscle flexing during exertion, making the building almost come to life before your eyes. Adding to this graceful and living appearance, each column’s outer surface has twenty grooves, or flutes that form concave vertical channels playing with light and shadow to give the columns a sense of animation. More than just an indifferent edifice, seeing the Parthenon first-hand is a spiritual phenomenon invoking a belief in miracles. For Ancient Athens, she was the physical manifestation of beauty, harmony, order, mystery and wonder. All, in fact, attributes of the Judeo-Christian God, not the goddess Athena.
And, similar to this holy place, rationality and reason alone aren’t enough to command belief in the creator God; experience is required, and experience leads to knowing... Jesus even said that he became flesh so that we may have eternal life. But what is eternal life? “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”[i] But how can we truly know God? This is the point where the intellectual bankruptcy of the rational western worldview leaves us spiritually destitute. If knowledge can only be understood through the genius and harmony of our western plausibility structure, there will never be enough reasons to prove the existence of God. The mind alone will always leave one wanting. Yet thankfully, we seek the God of the Israelites, those stubborn, prone to wander people who didn’t encounter God through reason but through experience. Abraham Herschel says, “The essence of Jewish religious thinking does not lie in entertaining a concept of God but in the ability to articulate a memory of moments of illumination by His presence. Israel is not a people of definers but a people of witnesses.” They can believe because they have seen. Judaism is not a three-step program of belief, it is a story: the story of a creator God, his people and his promise to restore creation. This God of Israel is not always rational or easy to define in purely western terms. He doesn’t fit nicely into our systematic theology. He is holy, yet human; personal but eternal; one, and three; judge and forgiver; omnipotent, yet humble. He is both the God of the Old and New Testament, connecting east and west through the experience of the mind and heart alike.
And much like the Parthenon, His incarnation is the ultimate synthesis of mystery and reason.
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