We see a tree suspended, on the Dom tower. The highest church tower and formerly part of the Utrecht Cathedral. Is the tree Holy? Is it a trophy, a hung one? The tree is uprooted, it’s roots are naked.
The Enlightment is often seen as a breach with the predominant Christian – Spiritual thinking. If we zoom out on the timescale though, we can see that the child very much resembles it’s mother. Especially if we look at things from a pagan perspective. We see that both Christian and Enlightened world visions take ‘getting somewhere’ as a principle. A sort of baked in idealism, a looking up. The idea we all have to go somewhere, a linearity of direction. Both world views are dominated by a spirituality of the mind, the holy, in which the physical and the earthly are of no importance. “I think, so I am” can be seen as a continuity rather than the opposite.
Christianity places the Holy outside the wordly sphere, literally outside Earth. Amongst pagans rivers, mountains and tree often had a sagred status. From the introduction of Christianity one could no longer touch, see or smell the Holy. Holiness became something abstract-spriritual, connected to the institution of the church. Nothing that had come to existence this Earth.
The church had holy trees cut dow and often placed maria-shrines on the same spot. A beautiful metaphor for the change in worldview. A change that is difficult to overestimate in importance.
It is fascinating to draw a line from ‘somebody who is in his head all the time’ in our current hypersociety and a proces of ‘uprootedness’ that well might have been initiated two thousand years ago with the rise of Roman Christhood and it’s devaluation of the Earthly.