As the night comprises the other half of the daylight, so does darkness complement the light of human sight. Its shadow lies in the heart of each of us as we set about our livelihood precariously in the light of the day. It reminds us how close we all are to the primordial chaos out of which creation evolved. And so, not far beneath the smiling face of our present ease, there lies an ominous dark presence. It never ceases to draw the mind back to the unpleasant episodes of the past, on which the present moment has its foundation, as it casts a threatening shadow on the plans ahead of us. How little control do we indeed have over the course of even a small part of our life; how much are we at the mercy of unpredictable cosmic forces, to say nothing of the emotions that dominate our actions! The vast range of the unconscious is occupied by a darkness inhabited by various emotional elements that can wreak terrible havoc on our lives, but yet have in them the propensity for creative imagination if properly harnessed. The seething dark forces of destruction boil inwardly like the lava of a simmering volcano, apt to erupt at any time, able both to destroy the life around it and to pour down into the wider plain beneath, thus increasing its lethal potential.
It is little wonder that the reflective type of person learns to count his blessings day by day, and if of a superstitious frame of mind, to placate and ingratiate the intelligence that governs his little world. In this way he hopes that the time of good fortune may be prolonged, and that subterranean disorder may stay away from his abode. And yet there is a larger, more adult awareness of the inevitability of destruction and chaos, of a darkness close even to the transitory experience of bliss. We hang on to youth, to success, to happiness, while we know with inescapable certainty that all is founded on a seething tide of change, enfeeblement and death. Did not the prosperous Job sacrifice unfailingly to God after his rather empty-headed children had celebrated together, lest in their unreflecting levity, perhaps roused up by drink, they might have blasphemed the Name of God? Did not the boy Jesus know; even as he sat entranced at the learning and disputations of the doctors of the Law in the temple at Jerusalem, that he had to be continually about his Father's business? And this business was not only the light of teaching and healing, but also the darkness of jealousy, passion and death. At the same time his distracted parents suffered agony as they believed he was lost on the way home; the joy of his presence was overlaid by the pain of his absence on a mission far beyond their understanding. The hour that shows us the light of day prepares us for the time of darkness which no man can avoid. It may be the comforting darkness that envelops us as we move wearily towards rest and sleep, but in due course it assumes more threatening undertones as life moves towards its end: impersonal oblivion, incapacity and final death. In the darkness of the night much is revealed of our inner life from which we would flinch during the diverting work of the hours of coming day. Activity of a worldly type forms a protective barrier against contact with inner truths of loneliness and panic, but there comes a time when nothing can remain hidden as we assume the full stature of a human being. And so the light of day may conceal what the darkness of the night brings into exquisite focus. In the light of human conviviality we may act with conviction a stereotyped role according to wonted tradition, but in the black solitude the role is personal and authentic. In the end the darkness has to inform the light no less than the light to illuminate the darkness. Each has valuable teaching to bestow so that a life beyond the dualities may emerge. This is the life of integrity. It is the life of God beyond the dualities of darkness and light, in which the uncreated light embraces and transfigures both earthly light and subterranean darkness.
In early life we seem to be balanced precariously on a pinnacle of radiant promise that is subtly and persistently undermined by disorder of cosmic proportions, yet concentrated into the little world of fellow creatures among whom we live and work. The disorder gnaws at the foundation of our apparent stability, which is the life of common endeavour in which we pass each moment in personal aspiration lit by the glow of suffused hope. In the biblical story this undermining power is in perpetual conflict with all that leads the human to the vision of God. It seeks to sully all that is noble and beautiful in our lives. It makes its appearance in the creation allegory, when the serpent, the most crafty of God's creatures, seduces Eve - and then her husband Adam - away from the path of obedience to the will of God. They then are expelled from the sanctuary of heaven and fall into the limited sphere of mortal life. The darkness of death awaits them patiently yet hungrily as mortal life drains from them. There is no magic path back to what was lost through ignorance and self-seeking, but instead the way is shown of an onerous, onward journey of increasing self-knowledge in the pitiless wastes of matter, coarse and uncomprehending. Indeed, it seems to be the function of the human race to infuse that coarseness and illuminate that incomprehension with so great a love that all living forms may finally be freed from the prison of death and enter upon a travelled path leading to enlightenment and final resurrection. But first the coarseness of matter must be appreciated and the imprisonment of darkness experienced. The fear we all know in closed space and undefined darkness can be dispelled only by the presence of the Living God, a presence that must be known before an advance into the silent stretches of darkness can be tolerated without the advent of terror, if not sheer panic. This may be our clue to a mature understanding of heaven, an atmosphere (or realm, or dimension depending on the metaphor preferred) inhabited by diverse creatures working in trustful collaboration, instead of merely the single unaware couple, Adam and Eve, ungrateful for and oblivious of the bliss that encompassed them. And so, while death cuts short the plight of Adam and Eve, irrevocably shut out of the heaven of intimate communion with their Father and all their fellow creatures, there remains the hope of a resurrection to new heights of spiritual stature into that full proper man whose name is Jesus in the Christian revelation. Other faiths will proclaim their own particular master, but the acid test of validity is the effect that individual has had in lightening the burden of humanity and illuminating the darkness of the cruel, unresponsive world of matter.
Where there is heaven there is no darkness, for everything lies revealed, open to the gaze of everyone and radiating a love that holds all in its blessing. And so St John can say in his first letter (1:5) that God is wholly light without a trace of darkness. Where there is darkness, a shadow falls upon the person who may, like Adam and Eve, use it to hide from the gaze of their fellow creatures, even the very presence of God. But the shadow does not conceal anything to those outside it. Only those who cast it believe it can shield them from the consequences of their actions. To those who can see, or more pertinently have had their sight restored - like the man born blind whom Jesus healed, well described in the ninth chapter of the Fourth Gospel - little remains hidden even when enveloped in a dense cloud. The basis of this penetrating vision is the divine essence pouring from those whom God has healed, so that they are endued with an intensity of spiritual sight that can penetrate the deepest mysteries of creation. This is, in fact, a measure of a person's spiritual proficiency: he can look into himself unflinchingly as through plain glass, and by his own searing self-knowledge see into the hearts of his fellow creatures with a similar clarity. However, the energy that directs spiritual vision is love, and in its glow there is no judgement but only an all-embracing acceptance of all that exists. And then the truth can be known, and its burden gradually assimilated by those who seek the way of God even to their own suffering.
If the Fall heralds man's departure from the heavenly state in the Old Testament, the tragic story of Ananias and Sapphira in the fifth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles outlines it in the New Dispensation. In the early apostolic period, the disciples were so filled with the Holy Spirit that had been fully released within them after they had acknowledged the Lordship of Christ that they had no need of material possessions to substantiate their sense of fulfilment. And so all they possessed was held in common; their identity in this new heaven depended on their membership of the body of believers, and did not require individual gifts or talents to confirm it: each contributed his own particular gift to the whole community, which in turn provided its support. In its limits he could attain his own spiritual development. And so the Cypriot Levite Joseph, surnamed Barnabas (which means "Son of Exhortation"), sold a large estate and laid the proceeds at the apostles' feet. By contrast, Ananias and his wife Sapphira held back some of the purchase money on a property they sold, and pretended that the sum they gave the apostles was the full amount. The darkness of cupidity had cast its shadow on the very portals of heavenly accord, and the erring couple found themselves inextricably bound to that shadow. They had, through their dishonesty, shut out the Holy Spirit from their lives, and so, once confronted by Peter with their sin of lying to God's Spirit, they dropped down dead. This is a dramatic example of the sin against the Holy Spirit for which death in one form or another is an inevitable consequence, inasmuch as the Spirit of God is the giver of life, without whom a living creature falls back into a lifeless corpse of inert matter. We may look in inspired hope for the later forgiveness and restoration of this sadly misguided couple - and the multitudes who have subsequently followed the same path of perjury in the pursuance of covetousness - once they have confessed their sin, but their immediate fate is pitiable: falling into the opaque featurelessness of death, isolated and friendless. So it is with all who withdraw into the caves of darkness to commit sins against humanity, which is tantamount to blaspheming the Name of God and undermining all he has set up. It becomes increasingly apparent that the advent of darkness follows the creature's transgression, showing itself when he excludes himself from the light. And yet all is embraced within the creative fiat of God, and matter never ceases to be holy.
It is an ironic variation of this theme of darkness and light that possessions cast their shadow, while in a state of blessed poverty all is bright. The more one has, the more one desires, and greed soon trespasses the bounds of the law to assuage its ravenous appetite. And so the wealthy tend to move uneasily in the borderland of lawful profit and subtle crime. The greater the riches, the greater the darkness. One can almost, but not quite, envy the hero of George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess who sings
I got plenty of nuttin'
and nuttin's plenty for me.
On a more scriptural note, the first Beatitude blesses the poor in spirit, those who know their need of God - for they already have the Kingdom of Heaven, hence they are in fellowship with the Most High, and all lesser considerations fall into their proper place. Possessions and attitudes of mind are transfigured in the light of God's love, and become ways of serving the greater community of life. As Jesus teaches later in the Sermon on the Mount, "Set your mind on God's Kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well" (Matthew 6:33). Porgy, in the direct, unsophisticated manner of the truly lowly person - who is also a natural discerner of spirits - knew this by intuition, and so everything he touched took on a spiritual radiance. This applied even to the woman he loved, on the surface a feeble chattel of men's lust but at heart also a child of God, weak as flesh but yearning for the acceptance born of love.
We come, in the great vision of Wordsworth's Ode to the Intimations of Immortality, trailing clouds of glory from God who is our home. As we incarnate more and more completely in the world of grit, dirt and slime, so the darkness forms a dense encrustation around our personality, an accretion of compliant conformity in a world of blind covetousness. Shielded by and concealed within that crust we can participate in the underhand intrigues that characterize mundane existence, with its sordid goal of material success, if need be to the exclusion of any nobler vision. And yet the crust that shuts out the light is as much a part of our worldly condition as is the radiance of God's love. It is fortunate that monotheistic religion sees all things in the creative control of God, all under his aegis. And so the realm of darkness we have inherited as part of our collective responsibility as members of the human race is one we are destined to explore. We cast its shadow on the fair earth beneath us, but even when it clouds our spiritual as well as our rational vision, it too is permeated by the uncreated light of God who is the master of eternity. The opacity of matter is our first definitive experience of darkness, for it is inert, largely unresponsive and unreflective by its very nature. On it, in it, and through it we, creatures both of material opacity and spiritual light, work out our destiny, and in this essentially self-centred act we can either destroy or create. If we work in the service of the light, that light issues from us to illuminate the hidden, the unexplored regions of the earth. But if the work is self-centred and crassly insensitive to the needs of others, the innocence at the heart of nature is desecrated, and darkness covers the trail we have set up: In the words of the prologue to the Fourth Gospel, the light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never mastered it. But we can say with equal assurance, born of bitter experience, that the light will never master the darkness of the universe until it has so inflamed the souls of all God's creatures that they become participants in a universal transfiguration that will herald the coming in glory of the One Who Is. In him alone is the light's mastery unchallenged, because it flows out in loving radiance, not a brilliant glare that blinds rather than enlightens. And so all is accepted in love and presented to the Father for final resurrection.
It should be emphasized, lest one is tempted to fall into a heretical gnosticism that sees matter as fundamentally evil and the earth a place of imprisonment from which to escape at all costs, that everything that God has created - and creation never stops, for it continues until the time of final consummation - is good. This theme occupies the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. As the creation story unfolds to the tragedy of the Fall, so the fundamental light of the world darkens, and its radiant energy slows down to a less responsive solidity. The creature has started to exert his baneful effect on the environment, just as man's departure from God heralds bitter internecine strife, evidenced tragically in the murder of Abel by Cain, and his progressive desecration of the earth. This precedes the story of the Flood, in the course of which God destroys everything except the just man Noah and his family (and samples of all living animals). When the waters recede and the ark touches solid earth, a new covenant is proclaimed: the human may henceforth feed on animals (provided they are drained of blood, the traditional life-force of the creature) in contradistinction to the older covenant when both the human and the animal fed exclusively on plant life. And so the era of callous animal exploitation, with its attendant cruelty, is inaugurated.
Of course, no one except the literalist (a more satisfactory term than fundamentalist, which can at least theoretically have a number of different nuances) would accept all this as a historical account of the early years of the world, but the underlying spiritual truth is evident to anyone with imagination and experience of human nature. St Paul expands on this theme in the glorious eighth chapter of his letter to the Romans:
For the whole created universe waits with eager expectation for God's sons to be revealed. It was made the victim of frustration, not by its own choice but because of him who made it so; yet always there was hope, because the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and enter upon the liberty and splendour of the children of God. Up to the present we know the whole created universe groans in all its parts as if in the pangs of childbirth. Not only so, but also even we, to whom the Spirit is given as first fruits of the harvest to come, are groaning inwardly while we wait for God to make us his sons and set our whole body free. For we have been saved, though only in hope (8:19-24).
It is indeed the bringing into full manifestation of this hope that is the way of lightening the world's darkness and overcoming the sting of mortality. Matter, however, as indeed all that God has created, retains an essence of goodness despite the tragedy - in my view inevitable - of the Fall. If God did not actively plan it, he certainly had contingency plans available for its eventuality. By the nature of free will selfish actions are inevitable as part of the individual's growth, and these cloud the transparency of the created order as the protagonists huddle together in the darkness they have created in order to plan further destructive action under the ironic guise of self-advancement. And yet it is the darkness rather than the light that is the most fertile medium of growth. We can once again, in company with the writer of Psalm 139, celebrate God's overall supremacy, that he is the master alike of heaven and hell, of the light and the darkness. But in our mundane existence he seems all too often to have surrendered his control to less exalted agents, and here lies the tragedy as well as the glory of the human situation.
What is indeed this light that St John identifies with God, and whose is the darkness that has no place in him? Certainly the bitter experience of pain and suffering can open up the gaze of even untutored people to a reality far wider than anything, that may be read of in texts or taught by well-schooled philosophers and theologians. Did not the young unknown Jesus of Nazareth speak to the masses with an authority completely lacking in the recognized teachers of the Law? He apparently had had no known rabbinic training, indeed his very antecedents were so plebeian that none could associate his understanding with his background. God the Son he was indeed, but he, as an emptied human being, had to know and actualize his godhead through the manifold experiences of his everyday life. And then he could know the Father so intimately that he was in complete union with him, even when the darkness of hell obliterated any visible trace of that relationship. He knew God in the light of day, groped after him in the darkness of passion, and came completely into his presence when death had claimed a victory over the mortal man. Somehow we too are called upon to tread this path, to experience the sequence, so that divine wisdom may illuminate and transfigure the worldly knowledge we have attained in the shadow region of reality. The path to heaven must inevitably traverse long stretches of hell, for every part of the drab landscape has to be known, accepted and loved. God is never far from any creature, but it is we who have to draw out the divine essence at the heart of reality.