For Calcidius, and the rest of the tradition, if you cultivate a perception of the deep harmony of nature, it leads to worship, because the “soul, fashioned after the same pattern as the celestial bodies, immediately recognizes its own natural affinity to them.”18 In other words, despite the messiness of earthly reality, we find underneath the material a paradigm of order, and thus we can see that, in an extraordinary phrase, “time is an image of eternity.”
