Post by Kriyaban on Oct 1, 2022 18:37:10 GMT
LIGHT METAPHYSICS
The works of Proclus and of Dionysius the Areopagite also contributed greatly
to what Father F. C. Copleston has called the “light metaphysics” of the Middle
Ages.
12 The central significance of the word light ought immediately to alert us
to a gnostic presence. Light, illumination, the inner sun are perennial gnostic
themes. The Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas, to take one of many examples, is
full of the special understanding of the Gnostic as one who both sees and is in
the light: “It is I who am the light which is above them all. If they say to you
‘Where do you come from?’ say to them, ‘we came from the light.’. . . The
images are manifest to man, but the light in them remains concealed in the image
of the light of the Father. He will become manifest, but his image will remain
concealed by his light.”
13
The Gnostic Christ is described as “the light which is in the light”: a spiritual
reality sustaining the visible aspect of God in the world. The true Gnostic is a
person of the light and a light to the world; in the canonical Gospels, we are
enjoined not to hide our light under a bushel.
The medieval world did not state this light theme so directly or so explicitly as
did the authors of the Nag Hammadi library. However, the vestiges were there
for those with the eyes to see them. In the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus, God—the
Neoplatonic One—is light itself: the spiritual and intelligible light, source of
material light.
Light flows down to the world by gradation and diminution. Thus, the reverse
ascent to the One was experienced as greater degrees of illumination. This theme
was to have a great influence on natural philosophers such as the Franciscan
Roger Bacon, and we can discern in his studies of physical light a groping for
inner awareness of the “light which is in the light.”
The philosophy of light goes back even further than the first explicit Gnostics
—to Plato, in fact. In the Republic (517–18), the absolute good is said to be the
source of light in the intelligible world (or sphere of being), and to be the parent
or producer of the source of light—namely, the sun—in the visible world. (An
extract from the Republic was also discovered, with some surprise, in the Nag
Hammadi Gnostic library.) Interestingly, it was in a comment on this Platonic
light idea that Proclus revealed what Garth Fowden sees as an essential kinship
with the Hermetic and pious pagan practice generally of devoting a thrice-daily
act of worship to the sun.
14 For Proclus, this act of devotion was a simile for the
philosopher’s encounter with the One.
In his Theologia Platonica, available in the Middle Ages, Proclus spoke of an
encounter with “the sun of the light of the intelligible gods” as being like a
prostration before the rising sun, when one shut one’s corporeal eyes because of
the sun’s unbearable power and glory. Like the Hermetists, Proclus greeted this
spectacle with a hymn of praise and thanksgiving for the paradoxical opening of
the (inner) eyes. Such a hymn is preserved in the Nag Hammadi library and is of
undoubted Hermetic provenance.
15
From Baghdad via Spain came Thabit ibn Qurra’s De imaginibus (Concerning
the Imagination) on talismanic, Neoplatonist celestial magic and al-Kindi’s
important De radiis or Theorica artium magicarum (Concerning Rays; Theory
of Magic Art): talismanic and liturgical magic in the context of a philosophy of
causation based on the emanation of rays. Medieval light metaphysics was
necessarily bound up with ray theory.
Abu Yusuf Ya’qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, the first Arab Muslim philosopher
(born in 850 in the southern Arabian peninsula and educated in Baghdad), also
translated the Uthulujiyya (Theology) of Aristotle. This work was not by
Aristotle but was in fact a commentary by Porphyry on books 4 to 6 of the
Enneads of Plotinus, and was known in the West as the Liber de causis, or Book
of Causes.
The book represents a kind of gnosticizing of Plotinus, describing the descent
of the soul from the pure incorporeal realm of “intelligence” into the world of
sense and corporeality. Showing conceptual kinship to the Valentinian myth of
the yearning Sophia, the book reveals how the soul produces the world of
perception out of its pain and desire to give form to the ideal or intellectual
forms that are present to it.
The forms derive from the soul’s origin in the active intellect of God the One.
In short, the soul or spirit (intellectus, to the Latins in this context) creates
reality. This gnostic theory of perception was to have great impact in the West
for centuries and is currently being revived in the world of quantum physics as
well as in the Continental philosophy of perception and optics.
Al-Kindi’s De radiis was highly influential on two thirteenth-century
geniuses: Friar Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste. It was particularly
influential because it tried to explain through a natural philosophy that astral and
other magical effects could be understood without demonology, through the
propagation of astral and other “natural” rays.
The theory of this “natural magic” runs as follows: The nature of a star is
emitted as a ray. All terrestrial events are the product of a total harmony of rays
in the heavens, a view frequently blended with both geometry and the more
mystical light metaphysics. Events could be shown as having “natural,” not
demonic, causes, the basis for the natural magicians’ defense against the
imputation of vulgar magic leveled against them.
Robert Grosseteste interpreted al-Kindi’s work as grounds for believing that
the essence of light is the formative and structural principle of the universe.
According to Grosseteste, in a striking conceptual premonition of Einstein’s
famous formula (E = mc
2
), the universe is the result of the union of formless
prime matter and “light,” of which visible light is only an aspect. Our word
radiation, of course, is derived from the idea of astral rays.
Grosseteste believed that a point of “light” can produce a sphere of any size—
again a striking premonition of the hidden potential within the atom—and that
light formed the basis of spatial dimension and physical extension. Thus,
humans’ essential being was light, a somewhat gnostic view. For Grosseteste,
light was the principle and model for all natural operations, including the
emanation of species and the virtues of things; as with light, all causes of natural
effects operate by lines, angles, and figures. The differences among phenomena
depend on the laws of optics, geometry, and perspective.
Geometric optics thus became the basis for a mathematical philosophy of
nature, affecting and effecting everything, including astrology. For example, a
stellar virtue was understood to act more strongly when concentrated rather than
when diffused through refraction or reflection, or when striking perpendicularly
rather than obliquely, due to the numerically lower angles of incidence of those
rays when reaching the earth.
Astral influences were regarded not as occult forces or demonic powers but as
rays that behaved as light. Thus, mathematics had become a divine science, or
science of the divine. The full implications of this shift in perspective would
have to wait until the seventeenth century for its fulfillment in the scientific
revolution.
16 Nevertheless, Grosseteste’s universe was still magical, but the
magic was determined by an understanding of mathematical and physical laws.
The deterministic power of the stars had been theoretically overcome by the
illumination gained by knowledge of their mathematical nature. Knowledge was
empowering. Gnostic-influenced manuscripts oversaw the birth of natural magic,
the critical stage before the birth of modern science, the latter rejecting its
mother in infancy.
17
However cogent the scientific defense against imputations of sorcery
Gnostic Philosophy
Gnostic Philosophy