Celestial Chi
Although modern representations of the Chi-Rho sign represent the two lines crossing at ninety degree angles, the early examples of the Chi-Rho cross at an angle that is more vividly representative of the chi formed by the solar ecliptic path and the celestial equator. This image is most familiar in Plato's Timaeus, where it is explained that the two bands which form the "world soul" (anima mundi) cross each other like the letter chi. Not only did the two legs of the chi remind early Christians of the Holy Cross, "it reminded them of the mystery of the pre-existent Christ, the Logos Theou, the Word of God, who extended himself through all things in order to establish peace and harmony in the universe," in Robert Grigg's words. Hugo Rahner summarized the significance: "The two great circles of the heavens, the equator and the ecliptic, which, by intersecting each other form a sort of recumbent chi and about which the whole dome of the starry heavens swings in a wondrous rhythm, became for the Christian eye a heavenly cross." Of Plato's image in Timaeus, Justin Martyr, the Christian apologist writing in the 2nd century, found a prefiguration of the Holy Cross, and an early testimony may be the phrase in Didache, "sign of extension in heaven" (sēmeion ekpetaseōsen ouranō).
An alternate explanation of the intersecting celestial symbol has been advanced by George Latura, claiming that Plato's visible god in Timaeus is in fact the intersection of the Milky Way and the Zodiacal Light, a rare apparition important to pagan beliefs that Christian bishops reinvented as a Christian symbol.
Read more about this topic: Chi Rho
Famous quotes containing the word celestial:
“Say next to holiness is the will thereto,
And next to love is the desire for love,
The desire for its celestial ease in the heart,
Which nothing can frustrate, that most secure,
Unlike love in possession of that which was
To be possessed and is.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)