Immensity Made Manifold

(Circle Limit with Butterflies, M.C. Escher, 1950. Fair Use, Wikiart.)

Ah, awful weight! Infinity

Pressed down upon the finite Me!

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

How do you quantify the infinite nature of God for the finite mind? God gave us a hint when He told Moses His name is “I AM.” Putting it another way, He told Samson’s father His name is “too wonderful to know.” Being made in God’s image, we yearn to comprehend infinity. Mathematicians tell us irrational numbers like pi suggest infinity with their decimal places that go on endlessly without repeating, and scientists continue to explore the question of whether the universe always existed and whether it will go on forever. But we don’t always just desire to understand the infinite. True to our fallen natures, we sometimes yearn to possess it.

Here we’ll consider insight three artists provide, as they are also gifted to express our varied approaches to what exceeds our grasp.

Jorge Luis Borges sets his story “The Library of Babel” in a universe that is a library. It’s made of an endless number of hexagonal galleries of bookshelves. The main character tells us the library universe is infinite and says this continuing-on-forever universe of ideas could only have been god-made. Borges’ bookshelves go on in a mise en abyme pattern, like when two mirrors reflect the same image as far as you can see. While this makes his library an appropriate metaphor for infinity, his library of Babel also shows the confusion mankind is thrown into as it attempts to find the one book that contains all knowledge.

Borges’ allusion to the biblical tower of Babel brings us to reflect on a deeper problem. Is his Babel reference a way of saying mankind’s quest for the infinite is like Noah’s descendants’ quest to “make a name” for themselves? Would this be the same as Adam eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to fulfill his desire to “be like God”? If so, it connects Adam’s desire to the persistent problem in our own hearts as descendants of Adam: to not only know the infinite, but to be the infinite—to be our own gods.

Artist M.C. Escher was determined, as mathematician Bruno Ernst tells us, “to approach infinity through his art.” In Ernst’s book, The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher, he tells us Escher tried to “represent the limitless and infinite in many of his prints.” He borrowed from mathematicians to achieve his goals, giving us images like “Snakes.”

(Snakes, M.C. Escher, Woodcut, 1969. Fair Use, WikiArt.)

For other prints he used a magnifying glass to cut out very small figures, or a piece of end-grain wood for more detail. But in “Snakes” he used the idea of “constant diminution” and the mathematical Coxeter group with arcs curving in different directions to achieve his goals.

Escher said he spent many “wretched” nights in order to share with others what brought him joy. He never gave up “the sense of wonder at the infinite ability of life to create beauty.”

In the poem “Renascence,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, the speaker finds himself hemmed in by mountains, trees, and bay. These are his limits and impenetrable borders. He also discovers to his astonishment and horror that he can actually touch the seemingly far off sky. But when he does, Infinity, with a capital I, taken as a metaphor for God, presses in on him and holds up something like a magnifying glass that makes him able to see “Immensity made manifold.” The speaker goes on, as if seeing through God’s eyes, to experience Adam’s sin, Christ’s anguish on the cross, and his own death. Infinity then presses him into the grave which becomes a redemptive act causing him to value and yearn for life:

O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again!

His prayers for new birth are answered, he comes alive again with a deep desire for God:

O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e'er hereafter hide from me
Thy radiant identity!

Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.

Millay expresses Infinity as God, who draws man to be reconciled to Himself and thereafter see all of life differently.

Millay might give us our biggest view of what infinite means. She makes immensity exponentially more by modifying it with manifold, which means numerous and various. Directed toward God, it shows that He is more than infinite, you could say it makes Him infinitely infinite. As A.W. Tozer points out in The Knowledge of the Holy, God being infinite means His every attribute is infinite. He’s not just good, He’s infinitely good; He’s not just wise, He’s infinitely wise; He’s not just loving, He’s infinitely loving. This elevates our understanding of infinite and makes it like comparing a rock to the splendor of a multifaceted diamond shining in prismatic majesty. And still, this ornate language does not accurately describe our gloriously infinite God.

Mathematics and science, innumerable books on infinite shelves, constant diminution, and the manifold immensity of Infinity all show mankind’s attempts to comprehend what’s beyond our reach. Victor Hugo describes us when he says, “With his eyes raised to heaven, he listened with a sort of longing toward all the mysteries of the infinite.” While infinity remains a concept we can only try to grasp, God, the infinite, Wonderful I AM, scaled Himself back to become a Person we finite beings can know.