“Seeing the World with the Eyes of God”: An Alternative Explanation of “Reverse Perspective”

In his book Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages Umberto Eco says that: “they [the Medievals] saw the world with the eyes of God”. ¹ I would like to suggest one way in which this statement is true. I will be proposing in this chapter that some of the “distortions” which lie at the heart of “reverse perspective” are informed by a timeless conception of God’s eternity. To a God who transcends the temporal dimension, events of human history exist simultaneously, all at once. By implication, such a timeless being will not perceive objects successively in time but simultaneously. In this sense, divine vision is simultaneous and thus “view-pointless”, i.e., things are not seen from a certain point of view but, potentially, from all possible viewpoints at once. As God, or more precisely his “eye”, ² is not subject to spatial location he is also ubiquitous. In other words, God transcends space as well and his spacelessness becomes a metaphor for his timelessness (even though it does not literally illustrate timelessness). Space and time in this pre-Einstein context are not to be conflated automatically. They are distinct dimensions which are considered together through their shared transcendence in God’s world.