Boundaries - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 208

great fish, represents Christ resurrected from the tomb—because both faced
the darkness of death and rose again on the third day.
But the great south window of Chartres presents the finest illus-ration in all
ouf art of the necessary interaction between arrows and cycles for any
comprehensive view of history (Figure 5.13). Here, at the close of the second
cycle, the gospel writers, scribes of the New Testament, appear as dwarfs
sitting on the shoulders of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, the great
prophets of time's first cycle. To see farther, as Newton remarked to crown
four centuries of metaphor dating back to these windows (Merton, 1965), we
must stand on the shoulders of giants.
If we step outside and study the statues on the porch of Chartres (Figure
5.14), we discover the epitome of this topic in a single figure. Burnet's
history has run its course; the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth is over.
The righteous have ascended to eternal reward. But they do not go forward
into further uniqueness. They rise instead to the beginning and come to rest
in the bosom of Abraham, the patriarch. James Hampton would have
understood, for his vision embraced both metaphors of time. Rock a my
soul. . .