The Golden Section of Writing:

The Golden Section of Creativity

How do we measure creativity, luck, inspiration?

The Golden Section, that well established Golden Ratio of 1.618 symbolized by the Greek φ (Phi) named after Phidias (Φειδίας), considered the greatest sculptors of ancient Greece (Parthenon, Acropolis,Temple of Zeus) can be a useful tool for finding harmony and proportion, breaking from patterns, changing lanes, and exploring the unknown in order to grow in our professions. We know that numbers are not spirit, or living things but a way to convey meaning, place holders or conversion tools to measure and define what is unknown, mysterious, or what we call inspiration. Building on that logic we can apply the Golden Ratio to Creativity: could its source equally be found in between those irrational numbers somewhere between 0-1 or 1.618 and 1.618..9, those infinite numbers of expression? As writers how can we stretch the imagination in a way that (Adler/Wolff, 1960) described geometry “Nothing but the mind can draw a Euclidean circle”. That which is without definition is the destination.

At some point in our College years as Business Majors, Graphic Designers and in the Fine Arts of Architecture, Theatre, Dance, Painting and Music, we came across this theory also known as the Golden Rectangle or Golden Mean and its counterpart, the Fibonacci Sequence. We were taught that this ratio of 1.618 was the blueprint for harmony and proportion. As we examined the Golden Ratio pattern found in nature, we explored irrational numbers. Examples of this phenomenon were more evident in architecture, and graphics where math could be applied to identify it, when it comes to creativity and pattern in writing, it is less definable and worth discovering. It might also be a great excercise to try to recognize the Golden Ratio in the Great writers of our time. Were they aware of it mechanically, mathematically, intuitively? Is there a formula for creativity, luck, inspiration? How do we measure it? How do we understand failure, is it an incomplete discovery? I wonder if what we understand to be “luck” is really a further playing out of the Golden Ratio—an accumulation (string) of both successes and failures that spiral out into a series of revelations and with those successes beget more having perfected themselves from the previous refining of an incomplete discovery in order to “Fail. Fail better”? Although Samuel Beckett's emphasis was more fatalistic, it takes on a new meaning in this case.

I am the last person on earth to think in mathematical terms, my father was an accountant and a stockbroker (his Art was Digits & Dow’s) and would often drill me with numbers and have me keep track of the Nasdaq. I always left feeling like it was a foreign language I would never learn. My highschool classmates can vouch for me that I was in the negative when it came to math and I still today remember being reprimanded by my math teacher Mr. Durant to write 50 times on the chalk board:

I joked that I did more writing in Math class than in English class and I would rationalize that my lateness was a variant of boredom but it was really fear of the unknown: MATH..UH..MATICS. It is no coincidence that algebra was one of my favorite subjects and I found safe harbor in the fact that algebraic equations contained letters. It spoke my language as a writer and made real for me the idea that literacy encompasses both numbers and letters. “[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.” (Galilei, Galileo (1564 – 1642), Opere Il Saggiatore p. 171)

Beauty has been the derivative of geometry and the built world, across cultures, architecture the beholder of the Golden Section. It became the canon for symmetry, proportion and harmony *coined by the Greeks that Leonardo Da Vinci called Divine Proportion. Ancient Greeks and Egyptians into the Islamic Golden Age transposed these formulas through Euclid (إقليدس) known as the Key to Geometry among the Arabs. The Golden Section or Golden Ratio, has been explored in almost every discipline since Euclid (300 BC) defined it in a single line of thinking :

to the Islamic Golden Age (762-1258 AD) from Al-Khwārizmī‘s (Algorithm) Arabic arithmetic and algebra from Indian numeric systems and back again with Leonardo (Pisa) Fibonacci (c.1170-c.1250) through the Italian Renaissance and has continued to spiral out in sequence through time in the Arts and Sciences and in popular movies like The Da Vinci Code.

When writing my last essay, my husband reminded me that it needed conflict— an asymmetrical reality that needed to be acknowledged. ‘That’s the golden ratio’ I thought: the line divided by 2 small parts in one rather than evenly divided or the Golden Mean. This tension, conflict, gave Homer’s blindness, epic vision for the visceral details of the Trojan War and the human arc towards peace and that same conflict gave Beethoven God’s ear. O the drama! Europe’s own inner conflict during the “dark ages” was to “reconcile reason with revelation, the secular knowledge with the religious” (I beleive Haskings said this, looking for reference) and with it produced both 12th and 14th century Renaissances. Were it not for Averroes (Arabic, ابن رشد) Ibn Rushd‘ s commentaries, the cupbearer of Aristotle’s works, Aquinas‘ Summa Thelogica would not have existed as an apologia for Catholic reasoning and the existence of God. In that conflict, Western Christendom was able to defend how it synthesized, adapted and rejected Aristotelianism.

The Ancient Greeks had a more philosophical approach to mathematics and understood it as 4 Sciences: Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy, their corpus of work was a dedication to sacred geometry or Gematria (hebrew,גמטריא) the study of numbers in Jewish culture, distinguished from numerology for its ciphering from written language. This polysomony is the key (or in musical terms, the treble and bass CLEF) to a robust culture:

Transmitting Mathematical Language

As writers we have inherited a rich intellectual tradition in the transmission of ideas. A culture can be recognized by how well those ideas have been articulated. Language is the key to cultural survival—sacred geometry and symbol, foundational in discourse (logos). There have been great ideas discovered in some cultures but redefined and developed linguistically by others. Pythagorus (c. 570 – c. 495 BC) was able to clearly map out and develop the Pythagorean theorem even though historians and chronologists (Loomis, 2008/Mansfield, 2017) claim it was discovered by the Babylonians 1000 years before him, around (1800 BC). The 16th century shift from Latin to Dante’s Italian dialect is a pure example of a culture transformed by its language of literature.

Our culture is also shaped by what we value and is a societal consent on what we will not destroy. The Islamic Golden Age, Byzantium and Western Christendom followed this instinct for cultural preservation during the Middle Ages and used that compass to disseminate universal knowledge. Not only were the Sciences flourishing, there was a cross pollination between the East and West in the transmission of Greek thought proving the “Dark Ages“ not so dark after all but candle-lit scriptoriums of knowledge that would illuminate the future Renaissance.

The Golden Spiral of History

As all roads lead to Rome, and well, Bagdad, the 8th Century Islamic Golden Age’s capital of higher learning was the Arab Empire’s Mecca for Science and Philosophy; Falasafa ( فلسفة ). The 3rd (Abbasid) Caliphate would delve into our Greek treasury with the help of Syriac Christians, scholars and the Iranian Barmakid Family (البرامكة‎ al-Barāmikah) notable from “One Thousand and One Nights/The Arabian Nights“ the builders of the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Ḥikmah, Arabic: الحكمة بيت) and the storytellers of our common epistemological history.

The 9th and 10th centuries were exponential in rediscovering Geometry, Science and Philosophy during the Middle Ages from Baghdad to Cordoba Spain under Arab rule, all the while steeped in battles, conquests and conflict—(the Golden Ratio) as that time of intellectual exchange flourished and produced the first Renaissance (12th century). Ancient Greek scholarship, the common denominator of Al-Andalusian Spain permitted a fragile but peaceful existence between Catholics, Muslims and Jews and the collaborative work of translation unified the trinitarian ambassadors of Science and Philosophy. Wether history accepts this symbiotic cultural view or not, we find insight into Jewish translator and Philosopher Moses ben Maimon (Rambam,רמבּ״ם, Maimon- ides, 1138-1204) ‘s statement ”You should listen to the truth, whoever may have said it.” (Commentary on the Mishnah, Tractate Neziqin). What a testament to human intellect and curiosity unteathered to Religion or Politics.

The fraternizing of translators from Greek manuscripts to Syriac into Arabic then Hebrew to Latin on the language market—the Silk Road of cultural and academic syncretization preserved our understanding of the measure of beauty as if they were sacred texts and in many ways they were as the world would see its Italian High Renaissance by the 16th century: “Without mathematics there is no art.” (Luca Pacioli 1447 –1517). Both East and West are in debt to eachother for its scholarly traditions as they were stewards at different intervals in history of a common civilization. The pursuit of knowledge and understanding, even if motives were self interested, was the common currency in the upper room of shared universal truth. Muslims viewed higher learning as a Holy activity and European humanists shared that kindred undertaking:

“The overriding objective of the Islamic humanists was to revive the ancient philosophic legacy as formative of mind and character. (…)The philosophers considered the ultimate aim of man to be happiness (eudaimonia/saʿada). Happiness, they thought, is achieved through the perfection of virtue, preeminently by the exercise of reason. Attainment of this happiness, or perfection, was said to be something divine, as Aristotle had stated in the Nicomachean Ethics. (Kraemer 1992, 6 and 19)

The final coronation in my view of this Humanism rooted in antiquity was during the 16th century High Renaissance at the commission of Raphael‘s fresco “School of Athens“ by Pope Julius II. It features key players on the world stage of shared wisdom: Italian Artists and Architects, Muslim and Zoroastrian Persian scholars, Ancient Greek Philosophers and Mathematicians, humans, gods, mortals and immortals. This work of Art is not only a virtuoso synthesis of Greek philosophy but the incarnation of geometry, numbers and mathematics fleshed out in the representation of universal truth reconciled within the Church bounds of Faith and Reason proving “theological truths by philosophical means” Leibell, J. (1924).

The Golden Ratio of achievement in this masterpiece overshadows ongoing debates over cultural influences of the Italian Renaissance. While the interest in antiquity had already been sparked in Florence, the Byzantines brought with them the fullness of Greco-Roman knowledge. Even though the languages of Latin and Italian were the final passagio to the Italian Renaissance, we are in debt to the wealth of original Greek manuscripts preserved by the Byzantines, including original copies of Aristotle. Geographically speaking, Italy (the heart of the Roman Empire) also referred to from the Latin Magna Graecia; “Greater Greece” was not dependent on imports as it had its own exhaustive treasury of Monastic scholarship, and a litany of Roman poets and historians (Cicero, Horace, Sallust, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Julius Caesar, Petrarch and Danté) who were embued with ancient Greek ethos. History should, however, recognize how Byzantine Humanism combined with the 'Ad Orientem', the facing East of the Roman Catholic Church possessed the DNA for the Renaissance both in Greek Revival (Byzantine professors dedicated to teaching fluency in Greek Philosophy) and Religious Art (Icons).

The Byzantine’s brought with them not only original Greek manuscripts but their battle wounds from reclaiming Religious imagery after a century of Iconoclasm. Byzantine Icons where the inspiration for medieval alterpieces in the 13th century beginning with Franciscan Naturalism in Religious Art that paved the way for the Italian Renaissance. Looking towards the East (Ad Orientem), meant Jerusalem, where the sun rises, an offering to Judaism, just as the prophet Daniel prayed towards the East window in the Book of Daniel. This orientation was the crux of the Renaissance and allowed the faithful to gaize on altarpieces and Medieval panels as a spiritual focal point. By 1226, the year of Saint Francis of Assisi’s death, Franciscans would dedicate frescos evoking Byzantine Iconography, while rendering these images not only beautiful and divine but human. This humanizing in Art ascribed the final brushstrokes of detail highlighting the vanishing point of the Italian Renaissance.

We could numerate all that contributed to the Italian Renaissance: House of Medici, Middle Class patronage, Merchants,Templar Knights’ inherited Afro-Eurasian commerce by guarding trade routes (1200’s) and engaging Arab culture, the Byzantines great treasury of Greek texts along with Arabic and Hebrew translations and commentaries on Aristotle. But perhaps were it not for the fall of the Byzantine Empire, there would be no Renaissance. Or let’s try this version: had the Ottoman Empire not conquered Constantinople, the Byzantines would not have fled to Europe as refugees with their Greek manuscripts in hand— there would be no Renaissance. Europe had to breathe with it’s second lung, the Eastern Church, as Pope John II perceptively stated, referring to East and West in his Encyclical Unt Unum Sinct, an impulse towards ecumanism since the Great Schism of 1054 AD that divided Eastern and Western Patriarchs of Christendom.

Back from the Golden Spiral

This is what happens when you open Pandora’s box of history. What we find in the Golden Ratio is that tension and conflict where we find Art and there seems then to be two approaches to creativity: a technical mastery and an intuitive mastery, both have vision and converge at the same counterpoint or 1:1 ratio. “A whole universe of connections is in your mind – a universe within a universe – and one capable of reaching out to the other that gave rise to it. Billions of neurons touching billions of stars – surely spiritual”. (Alejandro Mos Riera)

They say to write about what you know and I agree with that wisdom but sometimes you can’t resist writing about what you don’t know in order to learn something outside your sphere of knowledge. It is liberating as a writer to be on a quest for the mystery between 0 and 1 or what lies between 1.618 and 1.619, reject the idea to stay in your lane— let’s all change lanes, find harmony and proportion, break from patterns, and explore the unknown, a new manifest destiny of ideas— to take risks and be a little irrational sometimes. The contemporary habit to give advice to “stay in your lane” is erroneous and we may have curbed our source of idea makers with that idiom. Of all unlikely places it may be that I owe gratitude to mathematics for my love of writing. Who knew? I never could have calculated that or envisioned such a journey back through History. If you’ve reached the end of this without falling asleep, check my word count.

CODA. 1.618033988749...

Follow the Golden Ratio....

Notes:

*Coined; emphasis here on the french word coin for corner used in architectural details to conjoin and punctuate where two sides of a building meet making it more pleasing to the eye.

Bibliography

Kraemer, Joel L. 1992, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam. The Cultural Revival during the Buyid Age, Brill, Leiden – New York, Köln.

Howars, Douglas A., A History of the Ottoman Empire. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017

St. Thomas Aquinas and Muslim Thought FCNA (The Fiqh Council of North America) December 11, 2018.

C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927) London, Harvard University Press, 1955.

Williams, Elizabeth. “Trade and Commercial Activity in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Middle East.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/coin/hd_coin.htm (May 2012)

Adler, J. Mortimer, Wolff, PeterFoundations of Science and Mathematics. The Great Ideas Program, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. Chicago 1960

Euclid, The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, translations and commentaries by Sir T. L Heath, New York: Dover Publications, 1956

Rashed, Roshdi. Entre arithmétique et algèbre: Recherches sur l'histoire des mathematiques arabes. Société d'édition Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984.

Rosenthal, F. The Classical Heritage in Islam. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973.

"Ut Unum Sint, On commitment to Ecumenism "That They May Be One" His Holiness Pope John Paul II, May 25, 1995, paragraph 54.

Rosental, Creighton J, "The reconciliation of faith and reason in Thomas Aquinas" (2004). Doctoral Dissertations

Burnett, Charles. Leonardo of PisaFibonacci and Arabic Arithmetic January 14th, 2005.

Leibell, J. (1924). The Church and Humanism. The Catholic Historical Review,10(3), 331-352. Retrieved July 8, 2021.

(Loomis) Crease, Robert. P (2008) The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg.

Other references

Professor Greene, St Francis College, Brooklyn. Franciscan Art Lectures.

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/world-history/medieval-times/cross-cultural-diffusion-of-knowledge/a/the-golden-age-of-islam

Cowen,Ron. (Mansfield) https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/ancient-babylonian-tablet-may-contain-first-evidence-trigonometry

Further reading

Timaeus, Plato

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics