An Angelic Line in Rome

 

Visions of angels

There are angels in Rome. The Castel Sant’Angelo was built by Hadrian in 139 AD as his mausoleum, but the name stems from Pope Gregory the Great’s vision in 590 AD, when he saw an angel sheathing his sword on the castle’s summit when the town was hit by the plague. Taking this as a sign that the plague was over, he built a chapel on the site of the vision and renamed the fortress. The 18th century bronze Archangel Michael that crowns the monument is a reminder of these events and in case anyone forgets, the Ponte Sant’Angelo leads towards the castle from the other side of the river Tiber.
There are angels elsewhere, in fact right outside the Station Termini – named not because it is a terminal, but because it sits right next to the Baths of Diocletian, part of which is now the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
The church is an impressive building: it is a huge, open building with an interior standardized by Luigi Vanvitelli, after a few centuries of piecemeal changes, begun by an aged Michelangelo. The pink granite pillars measure 3 metres in diameter and are the biggest in Rome and are actually original to the baths. The main transept formed the main hall of the baths.

An Angelic Meridian?

What is of interest to us in this church is the presence of a meridian, like in St Sulpice. Is it “just” a coincidence that here is a church of the angels and we find a meridian inside? Furthermore, this meridian was until 1846 the regulator of time for the Romans. Now, time is known through a cannon shot fired daily at noon from the Janiculum Hill.
Whereas the line in St Sulpice is very “Spartan”, that of Santa Maria degli Angeli is very “illuminated”. Around 1700, Pope Clement XI commissioned Francesco Bianchini to build this meridian line, within the basilica. The object was threefold: the pope wanted to check the accuracy of the Gregorian reformation of the calendar; he wanted to produce a tool to exactly predict Easter; finally, he wanted to give Rome a meridian line as important as the one Bianchini had recently built in Bologna's cathedral, San Petronio.

The church was chosen for several reasons:
- like other baths in Rome, the building was already naturally southerly oriented, so as to receive unobstructed exposure to the sun.
- the height of the walls allowed for a long line to more precisely measure the sun's progress through the year.
- the ancient walls had long since stopped settling into the ground, ensuring that carefully calibrated observational instruments set in them would not move out of place.
- because it was set in the former baths of Diocletian, it would symbolically represent a victory of the Christian calendar over the earlier pagan calendar. But perhaps there is even a fifth point, which is that this is indeed a church “of angels”.
Furthermore Bianchini’s sundial was built along the meridian that crosses Rome, at longitude 12° 50'. At solar noon, around 12.15 p.m. (1.15 p.m. in summer time), the sun shines through a small hole in the wall to cast its light on this line each day. At the summer solstice, the sun appears highest, and its ray hits the meridian line at the point closest to the wall. At the winter solstice, the ray crosses the line at the point furthest from the wall. At either equinox, the sun touches the line exactly halfway between these two extremes. The longer the meridian line, the more accurately can the observer calculate the length of the year. The meridian line built here is 45 m long, and is composed of bronze, enclosed in yellow-white marble.
But that is not all: Bianchini also added holes in the ceiling to mark the passage of stars. Inside the dark interior, Polaris, Arcturus and Sirius are visible through these holes, even in bright midday and their names are recorded on the floor.

Cassini and heliocentrism

A similar device exists in the Duomo in Florence, installed there by the geographer Paolo Toscanelli (1398-1482) in 1475. It is a marble strip on which the midday sun shines through a hole from 90 metres above ground, making it the largest of its kind. With changing fortunes, it was used in scientific programs for more than 300 years. It was used to determine whether the ecliptic, that is to say the Sun’s apparent course through the stars, remained constant through time. This question was repeatedly posed in Florence as of the early 16th century. After Toscanelli, a new measurement was made in 1510, as reads an inscription in the Cappella della Croce.
In 1754, Jesuit father Leonardo Ximenes formulated a new research project: he proposed to use the gnomon to measure the very small variation of the obliquity of the ecliptic by comparing the height of the Sun at the solstice of 1756 with the height measured in 1510. In effect, Ximenes succeeded in measuring this variation at the limits of the instrument’s capacity and, fully aware of this, commended his successors to repeat the measurements every year.
There are other churches in Italy – and elsewhere – that have such a gnomon. The gnomons generally date from the 16th century, but they received a new impetus in the 17th century, when no-one else but Giovanni Domenico Cassini used the one at San Petronio in Bologna to try to prove Kepler’s reformulation of the Ptolemaic system – i.e. the heliocentric system. The Basilica of San Petronio is the main church of Bologna and the fifth greatest church in the world, stretching for 132 meters in length and 60 in width, while the vault reaches 45 meters.
While Kepler was safe from prosecution by Rome for advocating Heliocentrism, Italian astronomers, particularly after the recent trial and abjuration of Galileo, were mindful of demonstrating the orthodoxy of their beliefs. Cassini, of course, was one of the leaders of this scientific revolution. The sundial was built in 1655 and designed by Cassini: at 66.8 meters it is the longest sundial in the world.

Coincidence?

It could indeed be a coincidence: there are hundreds of churches in Rome, but there is only one with a gnomon, and it is found in a church dedicated to angels – of which there are very few in Rome. There are dozens of churches in Paris, but there is a gnomon in just one: St Sulpice and it is there where we find an important chapel of Angels, which according to some authors, such as Maurice Barrès, was a key site for an “Angelic Society”. What a remarkable coincidence to find therefore that one of the first gnomons to be used for scientific experiments was inside the church of Bologna and was created by none other than Cassini… whom we then find to present in France, where he is involved with the creation of the Paris Meridian… but where he is also rumoured to be a member of the “Angelic Society”. Coincidence, or evidence of a plan?
If coincidence, then the list does not end there: Cassini was employed by Pope Clement IX in regard to fortifications, river management, and flooding of the river Po. But the Pope asked Cassini to take Holy Orders, to work with him permanently; Cassini turned him down because he wanted to work on astronomy full time. Pope Clement IX was pope from 1667 to 1669 and born Giulio Rospigliosi. Coincidentally, Rospigliosi, as a cardinal, commissioned a Poussin's painting called A Dance to the Music of Time. According to Poussin's earliest biographer Bellori, it was Rospigliosi who defined the subject (a 'moral poem'), which is an allegory about fortune and the cycle of human life, in which the dancers personify poverty, labour, wealth and pleasure. They follow the music of Father Time, who plays a lyre, while putti toy with an hourglass and blow bubbles (both emblems of life's brevity), and the Janus figure looks to the future and the past. In the sky, Apollo and Aurora emerge from the zodiac to herald the dawn, and the passage of the day and the year. Poussin often painted on the subject of “time” and The Shepherds of Arcadia forms part of a trilogy in which Time equally was the central subject.

Angels and time

There has been a lot of debate – from Christian circles and largely in medieval times – about the relationship between angels and time. St. Augustine said that "God is the only one who has no beginning". Angels, it was deemed, had a beginning and hence were not eternal. And so there must be a kind of duration that is proper to the spiritual existence of an angel, which is called aeviternity, which is neither eternity, nor time, but the mean between the two.

Aeviternity may be a typical Christian philosophical pass-time without much use. But take away its Christian context, and it actually does have a use in trying to explain other philosophical problems: take for example the notion that a “soul” goes through various incarnations. As an incarnated soul, the soul is subject to “time”; but how to express the “life” of the soul across the span of incarnations, which involves “bits” not subject to time, but “bits” that are purely based on decisions made? “Aeviternity” could thus be used to describe this “length” of “existence”. It applies to things immaterial – outside of “time”.

Penitence

Intriguingly, it is by virtue of this non-temporal existence that angels do not repent of their decisions. And we can only wonder whether the same would apply to our souls – once rid of a Christian context. One could say that there is "no time" to repent, and that would be true enough. But a better explanation concerns the degree of knowledge involved in an angel's choice. We make decisions on the basis of what we know, feel and will. Our knowledge is acquired gradually, so we are limited by a number of things, such as ignorance and excessive passion. Our conscience is not entirely formed, and we often experience the pressure of human emotion, which can cloud our judgment. But an angel does not have emotion to contend with, nor does the angel need time to grow from his experiences.
Because our decisions can be made on the basis of a clouded judgment, we can repent of them. But this sort of experience is not something angels are subject to. Their decisions are entirely enlightened, and so there is no "reason" that is eventually uncovered that would change their course of action. Hence, the fundamental orientation of their lives is unalterable (by their own choice), and all the choices they make are an outflow of their original decision to either serve God or rebel against Him. And that may have been another “coincidence” that appealed to this group of people…