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From the sublime to the monstrous

From the sublime to the monstrous

Last updated on: April 17, 2026 at 3:06 pm by Dan Peterson

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From the sublime to the monstrous 2026-04-17T15:06:49-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Byzantine Emperor Justinan I (“the Great”) in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. He is shown with some of his clergy, including Maximian, the balding and bearded archbishop of Ravenna, and his courtiers. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

A new article, written by Janet Ewell, went up today on the ne’er-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation: “Gamma Marks: Recent Works Relevant to Their Study” (Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 68 [2026]: 311-370):

Abstract: Many are familiar with the so-called gamma marks as they are portrayed on early medieval mosaics in Ravenna and Rome. They appear as right-angle marks, usually with toothed ends, or in a shape like a capital H on the corners of angels’ and worthies’ robes or mosaics depicting textiles such as altar cloths and hangings. The marks defy easy explanation, in part because they are also portrayed in multiple cultural contexts, well beyond Italy, and because they take other forms. This paper surveys publications from Maciej Szymaszek, one of three scholars whose recent works significantly increase our knowledge of the marks’ geographic spread, their frequency of use, and their persistence across time.

It was accompanied on the Interpreter Foundation’s moribund webpage by Interpreting Interpreter: “Ancient Ritual Marks,” written by Kyler Rasmussen:

This post is a summary of the article “Gamma Marks: Recent Works Relevant to Their Study” by Janet Ewell in Volume 68 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. All of the Interpreting Interpreter articles may be seen at https://interpreterfoundation.org/category/summaries/. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreter series is available at https:/interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/.

A video introduction to this Interpreter article is now available on all of our social media channels, including on YouTube at https://youtube.com/shorts/C-_V4jZvtM0.

The Takeaway: Ewell outlines recent research on gamma marks—right-angled marks that appear on ancient textiles and medieval artistic renderings—noting their association with early Christian funeral and initiation rites and their connection to temple-oriented spaces.

I visited the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald for the first time in the summer of 2015. A naturalistic materialist can oppose such things, of course. She can point out that they cause pain, harm society, and so forth. But can she pronounce them objectively, absolutely, non-metaphorically evil? If so, on what basis? (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I found Chapter 7 of Hyrum Lewis’s There is a God — entitled “The Good Delusion” — particularly stimulating, and I intend to share the notes that I’ve taken from it. A few today and quite a few more in blog entries yet to come:

“The ‘God delusion’ necessarily implies the ‘good delusion,'” he says on page 107, and he spends the rest of the chapter fleshing out what he intends when he says that.

Some atheists, he notes — and I’ve observed the same phenomenon — become rather indignant at the proposition that morality depends upon God. God, they say, doesn’t exist. And, anyway, we can derive morality quite nicely, thank you, from science.

But many of them will also say that you can really know only what you can see — or feel, or measure, or, in some sense, empirically perceive. That’s one of their strong reasons for denying the existence of God, who is, whether in principle, by definition, or at least in fact or common experience.

But morality can’t be seen. “The good” can’t be measured, or perceived by any of our five senses. Nor, if you want to push it, detected by any instrument or device.

So doesn’t it indicate something of a double standard to dismiss God as mere imagined superstition while insisting on the reality of “good” and “evil,” which seem to be equally invisible?

It seems unlikely that any scientist, puzzled about a moral dilemma, has ever consulted astrophysical data or performed a biochemical laboratory experiment in order to resolve it. Science deals in empirical data, and moral questions are beyond its purview. They aren’t empirical.

Nor is morality material.

It is neither moral nor immoral for grains of sand to scatter, for air molecules to blow eastward, for a comet to follow a particular orbit, or for a cat to chase a mouse. There is no right or wrong among atoms, molecules, dirt, rocks, comets, planets, or galaxies, so how can it be any different for those purely material entities we call humans? Material is neither good nor evil; it just is.

Let’s use the case of murder to illustrate. If humans are mere material, then a murderer is only rearranging matter (the assemblage of atoms we call a human body) in space. The molecules that make up a hill of sound rearrange without moral implication, so why can’t the molecules that make up a human body rearrange (what we call death) without moral implications as well? (109)

We naturally and intuitively feel that murder is wrong, and that it’s something much more serious than a mere rearrangement of matter. Instead, we feel that there is some higher value associated with the body than can be found merely in the chemical substances of which it’s composed. (One source that I consulted puts the monetary value of the human body, viewed in those terms, at no more than about $160 in 2026 US currency: oxygen and hydrogen have negligible market value, carbon is pretty cheap, and a few trace minerals round out the sum.)

We would probably laugh if someone said it was morally right that oceans consist of saltwater or that a continental plate rearranges matter by drifting northward, yet atheists say it is morally right that other materials (humans) are arranged in a random way and that it’s immoral to rearrange them. Materialists can only have morality if they sneak immaterialism in through the back door. (109)

Earlier atheists understood this well enough. Lewis cites the late great logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, who spent much of the last half of his campaigning for nuclear disarmament and for various other causes that might today be labeled “progressive.” In his Autobiography, Russell admitted that, given his atheism, he had no real way to justify or ground his moral preferences. “I cannot . . . prove that my view of the good life is right,” he wrote in Why I Am Not a Christian (New York: Touchstone, 1957), 56.

Friedrich Nietzsche was straightforward about the matter, too. If God is “dead,” as he argued, traditional concepts of morality appear to be dead, as well, “implying a radical transvaluation of values and movement beyond good and evil” (110).

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