Psalm 8:2

hold it all in your mind

O Lord our Lord, how admirable is thy name in the whole earth! For thy magnificence is elevated above the heavens. (Psalm 8:2 DR)

An unavoidable corollary of being finite creatures is that our apprehension of reality is also circumscribed. We find it difficult to conceptualize great quantities, even if in the abstract we can contemplate the concept of the infinite. Thus, when describing great quantities we often compare them to other things which we are readily familiar.

For example, a trillion dollars is an unfathomably large amount of, ahem, “money,” and is probably impossible to mentally apprehend on its own without reference to other things. If you placed $10,000 bundles of $100 bills next to you, a million dollars would be about the size of a large shoebox. If you had a billion it would fill eight pallets about waist high. And if you had a trillion dollars it would double-stack those pallets up to one’s head and fill an entire football field.

In terms of time, a millions seconds is about 12 days, a billion about 31 years, and a trillion around 31,688 years.

These comparisons help us to begin to conceptualize such vast numbers, but even then we are actually kicking the conceptual can down the road, as it were, for by means of the comparison we are transferring the thing or things themselves into a smaller or simpler unit. For example, in the dollars example, I cannot mentally apprehend 1 trillion individual things, but I can easily think of a football field field with pallets of fiat currency. The more familiar becomes a container, as it were, for the less familiar and helps me to hold in my mind what I actually cannot.

Due to our finitude we cannot hold the totality of the universe—let alone God—in our minds, and thus we reason to and about Him by means of analogy. We cannot behold His essence directly and thus can only perceive His effects. The Psalmist sees in creation the glory of God—His effects, as it were. It is the greatness of this creation as it spans throughout the world and the universe that causes the Psalmist to declare that the Lord’s name is admirable. This isn’t simply a sentimental or emotional acclamation, but is reasoned from cause to effect. Since God is the Creator of all things, and since the things the Psalmist sees are wonderful and magnificent, it naturally follows that the Author of this great work be magnified. When we view a great work of art the work is of course wonderful, but the artist is praised for originating it, for without him it would not exist. So to the created order and all its splendor:

He calls the name of God admirable, because though the admirers may be few, when few reflect on God’s works; however, the name is most worthy of admiration when all creatures constantly praise the Creator in the sense that all beautiful productions are said to praise the producer, and in such wise the whole earth is full of the glory of God; for whatever is on earth, even to the minutest particle, declares the infinite power and wisdom of the Creator. (St. Robert Bellarmine, A Commentary on the Book of the Psalms, 8, 1.)

St. Bellarmine continues in noting that in our typical mode of thought we ascribe greatness and such to princes, rulers, etc., by virtue of their wealth, power, magnanimity, etc. God naturally surpasses these all in an infinite manner and thus is infinitely more worthy of admiration:

The magnificence of great princes is estimated from their expensive manner of living, their building great cities or palaces, their keeping up great retinues or armies, or their distribution of great presents. God created the universe for a palace, having the earth for its pavement, the heavens for its roof. He feeds all living things, who are beyond counting. He has already bestowed on the angels and saints, who are the most numerous, and will hereafter on the just, a most ample kingdom, not temporal but eternal. Truly great, then, is his magnificence. (ibid.)

The paradox of the Catholic faith and thus of true religion is that the magnificence of God in all His transcendent wonder is yet nevertheless fully present in our Lord Jesus Christ in His Incarnation, the fullness of the Godhead (cf. Colossians 1:19) hypostatically united to the human nature of our Lord. The human mind of Jesus immediately (e.g., not by phantasms) beheld the Beatific Vision from the moment of His conception (cf. Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, 75) yet as a finite mind did not fully comprehend the Divine Nature (cf. ST, III, 10, A1, Reply 2). In His wonderful condescension to us He emptied Himself (cf. Philippians 2:6-8) which became the cause of His exaltation (cf. Philippians 2:9).

St. Augustine sees in this passage from Psalm 8 an prophetic declaration of this mystery in which the condescension of our Lord in the Incarnation is the demonstration of His magnificence over the earth and the heavens:

I ask, how is His Name wonderful in all the earth? The answer is, “For Your glory has been raised above the heavens.” So that the meaning is this, O Lord, who art our Lord, how do all that inhabit the earth admire You! For Your glory has been raised from earthly humiliation above the heavens. For hence it appeared who You were that descended, when it was by some seen, and by the rest believed, whither it was that You ascended. (St. Augustine, Exposition on the Psalms, 8, 4.)

And since our Lord is the self-same God through whom all things were made (cf. John 1:3), the divergence in readings between Sts. Bellarmine and Augustine is in reality viewing the same reality from different angles. The mystery of the Godhead in our Lord Jesus Christ is hidden in the Incarnation but fully revealed in His ascension, as St. Augustine explains. And since He is the end of all things, He becomes the reference point for all the wonder and magnificence of the creation He made, just as the Psalmist declares.

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I wanted to somehow meld the earth and heavens into one animation, and so I found some great earth textures and used Video CoPilot’s Orb plugin to create te spinning globe. It’s a fantastic plugin which lets you do more than the built-in CC Sphere, like bump maps, specular maps, etc, which really help give the orbs you create more realism and style.

I also added in some clouds for the “heavens” aspect of it but tried to keep that part fairly low-key since there was already a lot of other things happening. I created some growing ellipses coming forth from the earth for visual interest and then added ins some color correction and Len Blur to focus the eye into the center of the composition. The text is simply a text layer with an ellipse mask drawn on it and the text mapped to that mask.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: