Light has no colour

不可思議光仏, the universality of light-dark imagery, and the need for the Light of the World

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash

“God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.”
1 John 1:5

Among the sundry idiocies of the victimisation industry, one of the most pernicious is that the privileging of light over darkness is a unique cultural defect of Judaeo-Christian tradition, the deeper intention of which is to express a latent racial bias of white over black skin. No matter that ancient Jews, Christians and Greco-Roman pagans made no such distinction and claimed no such hierarchy; that there were from the outset and within the pages of the Old Testament black, North African Jews; that the same were present at the first Christian Pentecost with no mention of the colour of their skin; that many of the church fathers hailed from Africa and that no word of discrimination against them is recorded; that the colour of one’s skin was of absolutely no account in regards to Roman citizenship.

All this notwithstanding, there are those who suggest we should abandon the binary of light-dark symbolism altogether, as something inherently racist. Turn away from the Middle Eastern, African and European context of Judaism and Christianity, and the thesis seems less credible. When we find not only in Judaeo-Christian tradition, nor even that of the Greek pagan, but in Egyptian, Indian and Chinese religion the same spiritual value attached to light, in cultures on which not even the most creative anachronist could impose an ancient racial distinction of black and white, still less a bias between them, we must surely treat such racialising of metaphor with some suspicion.

One might argue, more reasonably, that historically harmless symbols in the ancient world are now, centuries later, intractably laden with racially loaded baggage. But one need not and should not burn the cart simply to remove the suitcases. The light-dark binary retains a universal truth. Nobody at any time or of any race has preferred to live in darkness rather than light. A cursory examination of the origins and sustenance of organic life should be enough to demonstrate that the light and warmth of the sun constitute an essential good, of which darkness is only a lack.

However the imagery of light and darkness may have been abused and misapplied to racial types, this neither constitutes the essence of that imagery nor suffices to call for its abrogation. That is a call of which humanity must be wary in the extreme, because it is a cynical rhetorical device aimed not only at overthrowing the historic injustices of one particular cultural context, but at cutting away the roots of universal truth. The logic, such as it is, is this: light and darkness have been arbitrarily ascribed positive and negative values in one given culture, in which these values have been applied to those of light and dark skin colour, with heinous and criminal results. Whatever truth there is in the subordinate clause does not imply the validity of its antecedent, in which the words “arbitrarily ascribed” are false and most damaging, because they intend to deny any universal privileging of one thing over another. Critical theorists make this argument with the aim of “denormatising,” that is, denying any claims of universal truth. The truth in question, and much despised, is hierarchy.

Hierarchy is indeed a Christian word, coined as far as we know first by St Dionysius the Areopagite. Whoever he was in secular historical terms, he claimed identity with the Athenian philosopher brought to the Christian faith by St Paul, and his writings manifest a Platonic Christianity in which neither of those two elements is clearly distinguishable from the other. He is as much an heir to the Form of the Good, compared by Socrates to the sun, as to the Hebrew God who is “a consuming fire.” Hence, though sometimes characterised as a theologian of apophatic darkness, his corpus is suffused with light. He begins his discourse on the Celestial Hierarchy by quoting James 1:17, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights.” It is by procession of light from the Father, a “gift of goodness,” that the cosmos is restored to the oneness of God and so deified. Jesus, as perfect image of the invisible God, Dionysius calls the “Paternal Light, the Real, the True,” whose glory is manifested under the “variegated sacred veils” beginning with the angelic hierarchies and infusing the created bodies of the material world, all arranged in divinely premeditated order.

This recognition of the priority of light is utterly Christian and utterly Platonic. But it is not just because the Platonists and Christians arbitrarily assigned it as such. It is so because the valuing of light over darkness is universal, and not even just to humans. Physical light is good because it allows us to exist and to see; it is the source of both being and perception. This is not to say that we as embodied beings in our present physical state would want to live in the perpetual daylight of an Alaskan summer; the darkness has its own beauty and value. But that value is relative to the light. The light is the measure. We value darkness as shade from the light, not because we despise the light, but because we can only take so much of it. We do not seek darkness in its own right, and whilst we could survive without darkness, nothing can survive without light, for even nocturnal or troglodyte creatures rely on the existence of the planet and its various flora and fauna, which in turn rely on sunlight. Relatively, then, in material terms, light is superior to darkness; that is, as long as existence remains one’s basic measure of goodness (and how could it not, since there can be no good for anything non-existent?), there is a universal, real, hierarchical relationship between the two. The darkness is merely a lack of the light, and within them, there are gradations. Any degree of darkness which is partial remains in relationship with and retains something of the goodness of light. Only absolute darkness, the total absence of all light, could be termed an evil, for from it nothing can see or grow.

Even at the merely metaphorical level, since metaphors are drawn from physical models, there is a universal superiority of light over darkness (with no racial connotation at all). The religious application of this metaphor to metaphysical claims and salvific aims is therefore far from arbitrary. It, too, seems to be universal. There are no religions which offer their adherents the joy of perpetual darkness. The descent to the dark may be a route to the light, or to a recognition of some kind of nonduality between the two, but I am not aware of darkness per se and as an end in itself ever being sought.

Hence it is not just Platonists who seek illumination, or Christians who seek the Light of the World, even if one accepts the questionable criticism that these are now “white-coded” systems. Buddhism, too, speaks of Buddha in terms of light. Amida Buddha, in particular, is called the Buddha of Boundless Light, Unimpeded Light, Unparalleled Light and Uninterrupted Light. Shinran Shōnin, founder of True Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, describes in The Virtues of Amida Tathāgata’s Name a cosmos unmistakably hierarchical in order. “Between the Land of Utmost Bliss and this sahā world, there are said to be ten thousand billion Buddha lands,” each “surrounded by a four-fold iron mountain range,” and within each, concentric rings of successively higher mountain ranges, also of impassable iron. The import of this is that we sentient beings cannot hope to traverse these realms by our own efforts. Rather, “if it were not for the Buddha of Unimpeded Light, it would be impossible to traverse even a single world.” It is only the Buddha’s light which can penetrate all these realms unimpeded. In contrast to this light, we live in the darkness of “blind passions.” Only the light of the Buddha can save us from these, and even that light is hierarchically progressive by degree. First comes the Pure Light, which banishes the shadows of sexual passion and greed for wealth; second, the Light of Joy, which removes anger, rage, hate and envy; and only thereafter, third, the Light of Wisdom, which drives away ignorance. What is, in Dionysian terms, cataphatically described as a single light in its various degrees, illumines areas of darkness apophatically described: its effects are described by negation, “being without anger,” “being free of ignorance.” Not even these blind passions can impede the light, but its progress is by degree.

There remains an important caveat about this light, whether expressed in Christian, Platonic or Buddhist terms. Comparisons to worldly lights, such as the sun and fire, are ultimately inadequate. Hence the Psalmist can say that for God, “light and darkness are both alike,” and “clouds and darkness are round about him”; St Dionysius that God’s light is a “dazzling darkness”; and Shinran that Amida’s light “transcends the sun and the moon” and “exceeds all other lights in brilliance.” Plato himself says that the Form of the Good, whilst comparable to the sun, is itself “beyond being,” an instinct which St Dionysius repeatedly affirms, and Shinran maintains that Amida’s ultimate Name is the “Buddha of Inconceivable Light,” whose virtue not even Śākyamuni could explain. Dionysius maintains that language used of God is ultimately of no discursive use, but can only properly be addressed in praise; Shinran, likewise, concludes his manuscript not with an affirmation or denial, but with the words, 南無不可思議光仏, “I take refuge in the Buddha of Inconceivable Light.”

The light may be inconceivable, even, from a God’s-eye view, indistinguishable from the darkness in some sense. And yet it remains light. I have given only three examples of a tendency towards spiritual light which I understand to be universal, the threat against which is part of an orchestrated movement to demolish the very foundations which might establish human and indeed cosmic unity, on the ironic grounds of reconciliation and justice. The search and need in every human heart for spiritual light gives grounds for mutual recognition among people of a universal and unifying quest. Our common religious imagination precisely denies that the search for the light which illumines the cosmos is limited or variegated by race, tribe or custom. “There is sprung up a light for the righteous, and joyful gladness for such as are true-hearted,” and that supernatural light is analogous not to the hue of any skin, but to the natural light which warms and sustains all flesh.

The denial that the light-dark binary is arbitrary allows me, a Christian, whilst maintaining that Christ is the exclusive Light of the World in whose Name alone may all be saved, to see the very light He radiates at work in pagan Platonism, in Buddhism and elsewhere. Like Henri de Lubac, I cannot in the end bring myself to describe Shinran, for example, as an “atheist,” nor deny the light he saw in Amida as a fake light, because I recognise the truth, goodness, and beauty of light itself, in absolute terms. Those who called light ugly would not merely be “expressing their personal truth,” they would be outright wrong, unless swept away for a moment in poetic diction. Even, to push things to the extreme, when the Devil appears in the form of an angel of light, the light is only borrowed from God. The light itself is not evil. And there is nothing diabolical about the expression of pure, unbounded, formless and inexpressible light which Shinran knew of. I can find only one source for that Light. There is nothing un-Christian about affirming what is good wherever we find it, nor does that discovery in any way dilute the command of the Lord to make disciples of all nations. On the contrary, it makes that commandment all the more possible.

Martin Luther King, echoing the Johannine light imagery with which this essay started, proclaimed, “darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” His words are now used in DEI training as an example of unconscious white supremacy. The same trainers might accuse me of racism if I said that he died because of the fire that burned in him, as a beacon of goodness, but I do not know what metaphors of darkness these new commissars of language would have me substitute for those King himself clearly favoured. Perhaps they would eliminate metaphor altogether. In so doing, they would eliminate any possibility of addressing man’s higher spiritual instincts. The cynic might suspect that their aim might not entirely be unconscious. But if light and darkness really are just phenomena arbitrarily chosen to buttress the exercise of one man’s power over another, what remains of words except tokens of domination and control? If one man’s darkness is another man’s light, why not seek to enforce one’s own preferred shade of grey by force of arms?

The problem extends far beyond the scope of religion, into realms of race, class and politics. For if not even the light can be agreed on as a common good, and the proper fear of darkness justly expressed, then all our communication is reduced to the level of the propaganda broadcast of a Tito or a Stalin. We are entering the Orwellian world where compilers of dictionaries relish the destruction of words until future generations can only mimic, parrotlike, the exhortations of their masters; the world of Esperanto, Basic English, simplified Chinese characters, a lobotomised world from which all the ancient weight of words is hollowed out by tungsten carbide drill.

We have shunned the light too long. Life has not proven happier when we deny the light and lurk in shadows. Now is not the time to deny the metaphysical light which can still unite and bind all men of every race and colour. To criticise misapplication of the metaphor, certainly, but not therefore to break the mould from which it is cast. The true light penetrates all things, shines through every human heart. Let us seek it wherever we may find it and embrace it, proclaiming Him who is its Source.