Omnia quae sunt lumina sunt
Scotus Eriugena
Human beings, as reflective animals, can describe their existence in light and sound because they are at the forefront of a cosmic development that could be interpreted, in line with their dominant characteristic, as an audio-visual ‘eye-opener’ to being. The intelligence complex that operates in the species Homo sapiens incarnates the result of a wildly improbable biological-cognitive evolution. This has culminated in the emergence of living beings that relate to the environment through their brain coordinating the integration of the eye, ear, hand and language. The special position human beings occupy in the cosmos is obvious not just to theologians but also, and even more so, to biologists who are working on the riddle of human beings’ sensory world-openness. We do not yet completely understand how it works, but there seems to be a connection between the cognitive primacy of the human genus in the group of natural species and the primacy of the audio-visual senses in human beings.
The Harvard ecologist Edward O. Wilson illustrated these ideas by trying to imagine that we are in a Brazilian rainforest in the middle of the night:
The forest at night is an experience in sensory deprivation most of the time, black and silent as the midnight zone of a cave. Life is out there in expected abundance. The jungle teems, but mostly in a manner beyond the reach of the human senses. Ninety-nine percent of the animals find their way by chemical trails laid over the surface, puffs of odor are released into the air or water, and scents diffused out of little hidden glands and into the air downwind. Animals are masters of this chemical channel, where we are idiots. But we are geniuses of the audiovisual channel, equaled in this modality only by a few odd groups (whales, monkeys, birds). So we wait for the dawn, while they wait for the fall of darkness; and because sight and sound are the evolutionary prerequisites of intelligence, we alone have come to reflect on such matters as Amazon nights and sensory modalities.1
Pursuing these observations further, we can say that human intelligence, particularly when it is contemplative and scientific, means an ecstasy of audio-visual sensation. The representation of the world as such in human forms of knowledge is based on the special path of sight. In what follows we shall omit the auditory components of our cosmopolitan outlook; we shall focus on the path of sight that opens up when human beings veer away from the path of merely biological evolution. The majority of Western philosophers have used optical analogies to provide terms for the essence of cognition and the foundation of cognizability, and with good reason. World, intellect and cognition were intended to create a similar association to that of the lamp, the eye and light in the physical sphere. Indeed, the ‘principle of the world’2 itself, God or a central creative intelligence, is sometimes presented as an active, intelligible sun whose radiation generates world forms, things and intellects – like an all-embracing theatre of self-observation of absolute intelligence in which looking and creating are one and the same thing. This backs up the claim that Western metaphysics, on account of its pervasive obsession with ocular themes, was actually a kind of meta-optics. In that case, post-metaphysical philosophizing would be the attempt to overcome optical idealism and restore to the condition humaine the real breadth of its openness to the world.
In the ‘light’ of a post-metaphysical interpretation of the human condition we can see that human beings are adventive animals – beings in the process of coming. Although this is a classical idea, it has still not been completely elaborated. Previous formulations no longer meet the needs of contemporary philosophy. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition the term ‘creatureliness’, the idea that God created human beings, was used to describe the basic human feeling of coming into the world. The process of coming into being was interpreted as evidence of a divine original conception. This led to the idea that the process of human coming-into-being was less important than the original passive process of being put into the world. In fact, the medieval Christian world was more interested in order and survival than in the event and arrival of new things. In contrast, the modern post-Christian age highlighted the active, innovative moments in human beings’ relation to the world. It shifted the emphasis from human beings as products of creation to their own creative power. From a modernist perspective, coming into the world means, above all, producing the world that ‘the human being’ undertakes to enter on the authority of humans themselves; making it into a world where dreams of a life fit for humans can be universally realized. There are reduced views of basic human emotion in both kinds of anthropology – in the Christian interpretation of human beings as God’s creatures and vassals, and in the modern view of human beings as world engineers and self-producers. The adventure of the species as adventive beings has yet to be properly described from within.
As beings in the process of coming, humans have the character of an animal coming from the interior. In this case ‘interior’ means foetal character, non-appearance or latency, concealment, water, familiarity, womblike character and homeliness. The process of coming into the world must therefore be understood in five different ways: in gynaecological terms as birth; in ontological terms as the ‘opening of a world’; in anthropological terms as an elemental change from liquid to solid; in psychological terms as becoming an adult; and in political terms as entering areas of power. Wherever there are humans, we are not just talking about the place where a species like any other frolics in the light of the sun, but the place where the clearing appears with inhabitants for whom we can say for the first time that ‘a world exists’. It follows that arrival and the clearing belong together on a deep level. The light that shines over everything that exists is not a fact like any other. Instead, it embodies the coming of the human being as an approach towards the world that enables renaissance. The arrival of the human being is itself the ‘eye-opener’ to the state of being in which the entity itself brightens. On this perspective the advent of the species as a whole – including its vanguard in knowledge and technology – should be seen as a cosmic adventure involving the idea of Lucifer, the bringer of light. On this view the history of humanity would be the period of the clearing; the age of humanity is the age of the lightning that forms the world, which we do not see as such because we are in the world and therefore in the lightning.
All the same, the experience that the world remains reliably visible reassures human beings that they know a familiar place well – and as living entities active in the daytime they tend to interpret the meaning of being as being-in-daylight. This is why the early Western metaphysicians and philosophers saw the world as everything that is the case by daylight. We could almost say that by its nature Western philosophy is heliology, metaphysics of the sun, or photology, metaphysics of light. That the Egyptians made the first attempts at monotheism as the monarchy of the sun god is related to this rationalized metaphysical understanding of light. In religious history, the traces of this understanding could later be found in the Sol Invictus cult in Imperial Rome and in Mithras worship, while from a philosophical perspective this conception of light lasted until the metamorphoses of Platonism in the medieval Christian era. In the sixth book of The Republic Plato invented the famous sun allegory that laid the basis for the cave allegory, the basic theme of all subsequent metaphysics of light. Plato explained that aside from the eye and the visible object, a third element was needed to achieve successful seeing: light. Light is the gift of Helios, the god of the sky and lord of light, who gives us humans the sense of seeing and gives visibility to things. The sense of seeing is, by its nature, sun in its alternative state – solar flow and solar power – and therefore the reason why the sunny eye is open to the sun. Seeing basically means continuation of the sun’s rays by other means: sunny eyes shine at visible things and ‘recognize’ them by the power of this radiation. Thinking, for its part, is only another way of seeing; in other words, seeing in the sphere of invisible things, of ideas. Just as Helios is the giver of light for things that are visible, in the world of ideas, agathon, the Good, acts as the central sun that pervades everything. It is what gives human beings the power of thought, and at the same time the ideas become thinkable. Starting to think about ideas with the clear ray of thought is thus analogous to looking at welllit visible things with the (heliomorphic) optic ray. And just as the latter fails at night, where we can only see outlines and the dark void, thinking fails when it concentrates on subjects tinged with the darkness of mere opinion. Correct (agathomorphic) thinking is seeing in the eternal daytime of the world of ideas illuminated by the Good. We can see here how optical idealism decisively makes its mark by prioritizing thinking that sees above sensory seeing. According to Plato, Helios is the image of the Good in his time, the Good that overflows from the sphere of ideas into the world of the senses. The analogy of the sun and godliness (goodness) becomes an ontological hierarchy headed by the intelligible divine principle. This means that the newer discipline of metaphysics of mind has superseded archaic natural philosophy – and that visible light is now ‘only an allegory’, although still an extremely malevolent, majestic allegory in terms of natural theology. It was not for nothing that medieval metaphysics was able to interpret the fiat lux of Genesis in the Platonic sense – because the creation of light and the sun are credible as the first acts of the God who was unable in His statement of creation to do anything but represent in material form the best things, those that most resembled His essence. In a world of supreme goodness that was to be created, the most noble thing had to be created first of all, as if light were analogous to spirit and God among the creatures of the earth, a sublime bond and medium of nature that can be seen as the evangelium corporale by redeemed human eyes. The compelling conclusion in positive theology that God is supreme and so the creation must be optimal implies a basic three-part definition of the creation: it must have a spherical form because the sphere symbolizes the optimal shape; it must be suffused with light because light is the physical optimum; and rationally it must be completely transparent because transparency signifies the cognitive optimum. All three optimal qualities occur together in a creation that is conceived as a sphere of light radiating from the absolute point of light, God – the sphaera lucis, which simultaneously provides the model of the world and a reason for its cognizability; understanding the world means comprehending the radiation of categories from the single unconditional source of light, of being and of comprehensibility.3 Of course, one of the chronic dilemmas of the metaphysics of light, both in Platonism and in the Christian philosophies that rely on it, is the question of the origin and status of the matter over which the light, as God’s first product of creation, was initially supposed to shine. Similarly, the Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Book of Genesis must circumvent the question of what kind of waters the spirit of God is originally supposed to have floated above.
The absolute determination of light in monotheistic metaphysics brought a tendency to over-illuminate being – to the point of the submersion of matter by light. This involves the Gnostic theme of the world estrangement of light as well as the eschatological idea that at the end of time world and life will be suspended in an ultimate symphony of light in the interior of the divine; then light alone would be everything that is the case – or rather: everything that is redeemed from the case and remains floating in eternity. The most sublime monument to this kind of imagining are the songs of Paradise from Dante’s Divine Comedy; they show a super-world of blessed intelligences completely modelled out of light in the light, all partaking in the freely flowing current of original light that ‘shares out’ and flows back into itself.
Dante’s visions are a response to the final images of the Apocalypse of St John, which prophesies the end of the change from day to night and the hegemony of Eternal Light; in the Heavenly City of Jerusalem all the lamps, the starry ones and those made by human hand, will become superfluous.
And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. (Revelations 21:23)
And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light [. . .]. (Revelations 22:5)
It is indicative of the close relationship between monotheism and the metaphysics of light that the Islamic culture of the Middle Ages also produced an abundance of excellent discussions on philosophy of light – a mixture of Platonic, Plotinic, Aristotelian, Jewish and Arabian components sometimes enhanced by motifs from Iranian dualism.4
The Arabian philosopher Abu-Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1059–1111) used expressions close to the Platonic tradition in his treatise The Niche of Lights [Mishkat al-anwar] (written around 1100) on the meaning of light in the sayings of the Prophet:
The Qur’an’s verses take the place that is occupied by the sun’s light for the outward eye, since seeing occurs through it. Hence, it is appropriate for the Qur’an to be called ‘light’ and is like the light of the sun while the rational faculty is like the light of the eye. In this way we should understand the meaning of his words: ‘Therefore, have faith in God and His messenger and in the light which We have sent down.’5
Where there is much light, there are many shadows, and where there is too much light, darkness rules. Metaphysical monism has its own dynamic, and when it becomes radical, it inevitably ends in mysticism. Anyone who believes unconditionally in the One ends up, for better or for worse, suspending all distinctions in the bottomless pit of the first of the last. This also applies when the absolute first is conceived as light, primal light or superior light. Human beings may be able to experience the last light-chasm in some manner, but only when those who recognize it perish in it – that is the rule of radicalized monism. Perishing in the One God abolishes the differences between light, vision and the lighted object: the seeing person drowns in the primordial sea of light that simultaneously ceases to appear as brightness – to the extent that brightness is still part of the contrast zone between darkness and light that is not in the abyss. Under monistic premises, therefore, mysticism of light forms the necessary finale to the metaphysics of light – rather like its overflow or excess function. Plato conceived the rise of the One liberated from the cave to the light and open air as blinding – as a catastrophe of vision in relation to the light in the sky.
These concepts reached medieval theology through Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita and helped to shape its mystical constructs of culmination. At the apex theoriae, the summit of vision, the brightest form of seeing turns into blindness, and the most perfect knowledge into ignorance. St Bonaventura (who died in 1274) conceived the last stage of the itinerarium mentis in deum – the soul’s journey into God – as an annihilating, transforming transition: that is, as the step into the darkness (caligo) and as the ensouling blinding or bedazzlement. In the vocabulary of mysticism of light, this final fusion of the meditating person with the Absolute is called ‘dying’, which means that classical metaphysics recognized a ‘death of the subject’ – by over-illumination. What the Middle Ages called illumination is the middle part, the part related to mystical light, in the exercise to achieve apotheosis through the triad of purification–illumination–unification. (In Latin this is purificatio–illuminatio–unio and in ancient Greek katharsis–photismos–henosis.) This is how German mysticism could arrive at sonorous phrases such as überliehte dunkle vinsterheit [where darkness beyond all light pervades],6 which may not be very bold poetically but is logically correct.
Wherever the mysticism of light comes closest to religious themes we are dealing less with optics or logic than with shaping our own conscious life. For a long period the theory of light was the field where Western people could rehearse speeches about subjectivity. What makes people think about the question of God, world and the self is not the light of physicists but the personal light that is a metaphor for self-awareness and inspiration. In the midst of things whose aggregate forms the world as a whole [Weltganze], how can souls be found, something like lights of the self and inner sparks, whose illumination cannot be understood in terms of an inherent property or a natural reaction? Philosophy of light is consonant with the history of the riddle that ‘subjectivity’ asks itself in the process of self-discovery. Being oneself as a human being has always implied a moment of being a light or a spark, which raises the legitimate question of whether it has a different origin than the material world. Talking about the experience of an inner light means, mutatis mutandis, participating in the experience of Moses encountering the burning bush from which a voice speaks apparently in the spirit of the flame: ‘I am who I am’ – or, in a different translation, ‘I am the here-am-I’ (Exodus 3:14). It is hardly surprising that in high religion, beyond optics and logic, there was a turn towards personalizing light. Human beings are interested in exploring not just the origins of the light that shines, and the light that makes us aware, but, even more, the light that lives, that brightens and heals us. That is why metaphysics of light is basically just as much soteriology as philosophical optics, and just as much metaphysical therapeutics as logic. The prologue of the Gospel according to St John sets the tone for such stories of healing light.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men. (John 1:4)
The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5)
The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. (John 1:9)
He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. (John 1:10)
This light, seen as the ‘life of life’, shares the compulsion to suffer with the living person as such. According to St Augustine, this lux vivens enters the world ‘like a mortal’ and returns to its supra-heavenly source after an exemplary trail of suffering that vanquishes the world and death. For this light, the world is the theatre of its passion. Among the canonical Gospels, the Gospel according to St John is the closest to Gnosticism. It portrays the souls of certain human beings – the pneumatics, or spiritual people – as fallen sparks of light that recall their true nature through the appearance of a voice calling and a saviour who can liberate them from the prison of matter. The Gnostic drama of the light that has come into the world culminates in the religion of the prophet Mani, which interprets the course of the world as a passion story of suffering light. Each individual soul that contains light is involved in a three-part cosmic drama. In this drama light sinks from its original state of separation into a state of intermingling and suffering, and finally achieves redemption through purification, disentanglement and renewed segregation.7
Such narratives of the passion of light offer the logical possibility of an answer to the otherwise insoluble question of the reason for non-light, matter and evil. Because light is initially only expansion of itself it needs to be refracted by the resistance of the world to reflect on this resistance and to return to itself from its own selfestrangement. From the Gnostics of late Antiquity to Hegel, the passion story of the light that is estranged from the world without light is the condition that enables the homecoming light to be reflected in itself and know itself ‘at last’.
At the beginning of the modern age, Western rationality saw a basic shift in attitudes to the metaphysics of light. From that time on, the real world no longer lay under the rather hazy eternal light of a divine world above. Instead, it was progressively revealed during a process of illumination with the epistemological title of research and the political slogan of Enlightenment. The motivation for this lay in a new understanding of the very idea of the foundation of the world [Weltgrund]. The authoritative original construction of the world based on an order of creation was replaced by the establishment of the world by human beings themselves through human practice. There were far-reaching consequences for the understanding of light. Whereas ancient Western ontology – and Oriental metaphysics was hardly different in this respect – showed God, the world and the soul in a self-created or revelatory light, modern European rationality relied on human beings’ own illuminating action. Light (like intellect and action) became de-ontologized – it became the medium and the instrument of a practice that gained sufficient enlightenment by itself. ‘Enlightenment’ is the process by which modern reason makes the effort to bring light into social and natural relationships. We could say that light is activated and becomes a probe for the technological and political penetration of the world. The ontological and religious habit of participating in devotions to mystery is transformed into the will to demystify and expose. The common ground of politics and technology in the modern age is found in the pervasive theme of shining light into what was previously dark or obscured. Enlightenment is the age of light penetration. Privileged priestly intellectuals should no longer be able to fool people by claiming superior insight. This is why dubious characters are exposed in public, the politics of secrecy is replaced by the politics of transparency, unconscious motives are brought to conscious light and new energy sources are tapped to provide artificial lighting for homes and cities. A Luciferian – ‘light-bringing’– light of unconscious activism typifies the age that emerged from the siècle des lumières. In the self-image of the industrial, electrical and electronic modern age, lamplighters and philosophers, journalists and surgeons, detectives and astrophysicists are all members of the great coalition of the proactive illumination of all things. The partisans of the democratic-technological light campaign see the defenders of pre-modern relationships as their natural opponents – the ‘obscurantists’ and sympathizers of the bygone agrarian age with its supernatural lights and its privileged illuminations. The ‘Luciferian’ light of emancipated autonomous activity that has established its position as the ultimate reason in the modern age cannot tolerate any other light source beside it – especially no ‘light from above’.
Even the light of the Enlightenment has experiences with its shadow. It is typical of modern people’s personal experience that enlightenment and progress make them see the world not only more brightly but also with more doubt. The political learning processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to a reversal that spread across civilization, from the optimism of the Enlightenment to historical pessimism. Most commentators, in trying to assess two hundred years of ‘enlightened’ politics and technology, find it necessary to ‘evaluate the Enlightenment’ or develop a critique of enlightening rationality. One of the most convincing themes of what is commonly called postmodernism is this retrospective investigation of the consequences of the Enlightenment.8 Reflection in the twilight of a great experiment: the formula of combining Soviet power and electricity did not result in a red dawn for the whole of humanity or a bright sunny day for the participants in the great socialist experiment. Instead, the result for almost everyone involved was a heavy black cloud over the prospects of life. Likewise, the synthesis of market capitalism and welfare state that characterizes the way of life of the ‘enlightened’ Western industrial nations has led not to general satisfaction but to a culture of sullen ambiguity that seems to have lost great perspectives and projections.
The grey light of the post-historical lack of perspective hangs over the life of societies based on consumption and work. The age we live in no longer articulates its consciousness of light with huge solar symbols but rather with discreet arrangements of artificial light sources such as spotlights and floodlights. The highest level of artificial light technology occurs at the same time as a more widespread consciousness of universally confused perspectives and bewilderment that are nonetheless called ‘new’. This label reveals the disappointment of the Enlightenment in relation to its failed optical promises. The growing complexity of the world reveals the crisis of the panoramic rationality that confirmed the modern Enlightenment as the pragmatic heir of the ancient European metaphysics of light. Looking back at the history of optical idealism in both its religious and political forms we can see that today the entire Westernized hemisphere of the world has become an occidental world, literally an ‘evening world’.9
Should we expect a postmodern return of religions of light as a reaction to unease about twilight? There are some indications of this. First, the monotheistic religions are presently engaged in worldwide offensives that show strong restorative features of light metaphysics, complete with panoramic views of the great Totality and ideological ‘descriptions’ of the world that are presented like certitudes. We should not underestimate the attractions of this for the volatile masses of the three religious ‘worlds’. Moreover, the speculative offshoots of modern natural science offer plenty of ideologically suggestive models of evolution in which ideas of light metaphysics return to the arena in a different form. This started in the mid-twentieth century with the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin, the heterodox Jesuit who combined themes from light metaphysics, cosmology and Christology into an eschatological vision of Dantean scope. Teilhard de Chardin saw the entire world process as moving towards the total clearing of all beings in the sense that clearings are created in the forest. It is as if the ideas of anti-cosmic Gnosticism returned home to the cosmos under the banner of modern hypernatural science. This characterizes, for example, the system developed by Arthur Young, the scholar of nature and consciousness who described the present as the apex of a light-evolution curve in his book The Reflexive Universe (1976).10 After the descent of light over the world of particles and molecules, the plant world, the animal world and the human realm, this trajectory has reached a point where it may possibly ascend again with the goal of returning to the light. Young copied the loop or arc model of evolution onto a version of the doctrine of emanation from late Antiquity (a version more symptomatic than original), which held that the cosmos was created from emanations of the Divine One. Asian and Central European ideas of ‘illumination’ as the final goal of the soul reappear in scientistic versions, usually with overtones of evolutionary theory. The new evolutionists of light loops would like to establish the probability that a human race that is forced to understand its status quo as an interim result of cosmic development following an initial hyper-light catastrophe (the ‘Big Bang’) may well end up in a general illumination or enlightenment by means of future sweeping arcs. Authors such as Ken Wilber became famous with ideas relating to light and evolution.11 In places where such speculations lead to the formation of like-minded groups, as in some Californian subcultures, a new age of light or Light Age may be proclaimed – with echoes in some circles within Central European neo-sophistry and consultative philosophy.
The old questions about what we will see as the last thing of all are still important for modern human beings in many ways. Is the last vision nothing but the eternal blinking of the last human beings looking into the evening sun that has lost its glow? Is it like the experience of the dying that the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes as a transition into the white light of extinction? Or will the last view be blinded in a nuclear light hurricane – something like a technological realization of the mystical transit of light? If it is true that there is nothing in technology that was not already present in metaphysics, then a humankind that has been pre-formed by the metaphysics of light has the prospect of finally looking into self-made great light – ‘brighter than a thousand suns’. Or is it a defining characteristic of the civilization process that the final vision of all things should be kept open by repeated deferrals? The difference between the last vision and the penultimate one will be abstract if the world is open to the eyes of artists. ‘The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul – the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun.’12