One of my
friends, the most brilliant man I know, is a molecular biologist. He is also a
Dominican priest, equally at home speaking to world-class scientists on the
aging of cells as he is speaking to ordinary people on submitting to the
direction of the Holy Spirit in all that they do, including such simple things
as deciding what path to take to go home.
One day, we
were discussing the fruitful relationship between faith and reason. He said
that he held the Catholic faith because of, literally, “everything,” or as I
like to call it, The Everything. It is not only its explanatory power
that appeals, but its power to bring us into ever-deeper relationship with the
infinite and inexplicable: beauty, goodness, personal being, love, God Himself.
What might
we expect of such a faith? Chesterton said it was like a key that fit the
wondrously specific indentations of the lock of reality. Of such a key we might
say two apparently contradictory things.
One, that
its engagement with reality is everywhere. There is nothing so mundane or lowly
that it escapes the notice of the faith. The key meets the lock at every point.
And indeed the faith instructs us not only on the nature of heaven, but on the
nature of earth.
It does not
recommend escape, either with a golden Buddha or a steely Marcus Aurelius. In
this sense, the key is like any other. But only one key fits the lock exactly,
so we should also expect to find that, in important regards, it is unique.
Here we
must take Chesterton’s advice, and be like the pilgrim who traveled the world
and arrived at the destination of his dreams, and found it to be the home he
had left but had not known aright.
We are too
familiar with the Scriptures; we are too familiar with the Church; we are too
familiar with at least a caricature of Jesus – it is a disquieting thing to
meditate too long upon Jesus.
So, I want
to begin a series of columns here examining this uniqueness.
There is no
better place to begin than the beginning: “Let there be light, said God, and
there was light.” A revelation that, if we could but understand it, should
strike us with a tremor of the heart. What does it mean?
The first
thing to note is its bold uniqueness. In every other “creation” story I know
of, such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish or Hesiod’s Theogony, there’s
some primal violence or sexual intercourse or spontaneous birthing or
sculptor-like shaping. But the verse here rules all of that out.
It proceeds
with the minimal metaphorical vehicle necessary to impart meaning to the human
imagination – particularly the imagination of a half-barbaric people, as were
the ancient Hebrews. The action, too, is not an action at all, but a speaking:
God said.
We need not
here consider the profound relationship between this verse and the other in
principio of sacred scripture: “In the beginning was the Word.” The
“saying” is an instantaneous act of the creative and loving will of God. Its
immediacy is suggested by the Hebrew words.
Hebrew
oddly alternates verb forms after the conjunction “and.” Practically, this
means that a normally future form will be used for the past, after the
conjunction. In Hebrew: “W’yomer Elohim: Yehi ’or, w’yehi ’or.” The “let
there be” and “there was” are identical, in language and in being. It is as
simple as that.
That is not
only far from the Enuma Elish’s tale of the world as fashioned
from the dismembered parts of the evil sea-goddess Tiamat. It’s on another
plane of understanding entirely.
We see this
more clearly when we consider what God first makes: light. Not the
earth, sea, stars, nor any object bounded in any other way than by the being of
God. For the phrase cannot have meant, to the Hebrews, “Let there be
photons.”
What does light
mean in their ancient writings? The psalmists speak again and again
about the light of the countenance of God, or the light of wisdom imparted by God:
“In your light we see light.” The word implies intelligibility and truth,
and especially the truth of the right paths of godly life.
To put it
in Greekish terms, “Let there be light” affirms that there is reason all the
way to the core of things. Reason is not some film floating atop a pond of
unreason, a late comer to the universe. We do not have to accept the springing
of intelligibility from the unintelligibility of pure nothingness.
The verb
“let there be” is a command: it corresponds in the verse to come with, “God saw
the light, that it was good.” The “seeing” of God is not to be interpreted
temporally – as if God’s seeing depended upon a prior event. He created what
was good, because of his own eternal, self-possessing, and self-communicating goodness.
But to put
it in Hebrew terms, “Let there be light” affirms that there is love all the way
to the core of things. To walk in the light is to walk with God. The light is
good, that is to say desirable, because the God who made it is desirable.
The
Neo-Platonists, a thousand years later, would come around to saying that. But
since the light is made, and not simply an automatic effluence of the
great Alone, as in Neo-Platonism, its goodness is an invitation to approach its
Maker.
The
covenant is already revealed, in that first terse and explosive sentence, “Let
there be light.” And, therefore, so too is revealed what the Church has
consistently taught: man is made for love and that if we are not to be
intellectual and existential cripples, when we talk of truth, we must talk
about our longing for union, personal union, with the Truth, for, as the
exalted apostle says, “God is light.”
