And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Genesis 1:4-5, NRSV
Jesus said to them, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.” After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.
John 12:35-36
Life will dissolve itself in death, rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown. Knowledge is access to the unknown. Nonsense is the outcome of every possible sense.
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, 1943
Translated by Leslie Anne Boldt
State University of New York Press, 1988
Principium Luciferi pronuntio. I proclaim the principle of Satan as Lightbearer.
We need not reach into the primordial to apprehend bereshit, the continuous beginning which opens from the first chapter of Genesis. We need only wait for the dusk to see that which God has divided between.
What is it that God saw in the light? We are not what we see; the eye does not see itself. By means of sight we define the abjection of our reality. All that upon which our gaze falls is Other, and by this we know ourselves to be that which we cannot see. A whole reality constructed from negation. The eye that sees itself sees sight, a sight which comes to us through the luminousness of things. Augustine of Hippo said in his Confessions, “Thou [God] art the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world” and that “the Word of God, being God, is that true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world”—is God the light which illuminates itself? “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” says the anonymous author in the 105th verse of Psalm 119. Not God but rather the word of God is the lamp. The prophet Daniel, in the 22nd verse of the 2nd chapter of his book, writes, “He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with him” (emphasis mine). In the first verses of Genesis, the first words of the Bible, God is prior to light, and the absence of light is darkness. Catherine Keller tells us in her theology Face of the Deep (2002) that the eleventh century biblical interpreter Rashi admonished us against thinking of these events as occurring in linear time, saying that we should be ashamed of ourselves for such a reading. It may be that God remains ontologically prior to the light, even if not chronologically prior, but if I imagine the sequences of events described as an all-at-once, then I may as well imagine that God said, “Let me see just what it is that I am. Let me be light.”
As Keller points out, God’s role in the creation of the light is described as being more passive than the word “creation” would imply. “How else does Elohim make—but by letting be” (p. 17). God spoke this letting be; it is Λόγος which determined what would become. The language of John is similarly passive: “All things came into being through him” (John 1:3, emphasis mine). Whence came the light if God let it be rather than bringing it into being? We can only infer an autopoiesis in which the light thus arisen is paradoxically unified with the darkness, for God must then “separate” them (and again, the chronology here is irrelevant to the ontology), but God’s assessment of the light occurs “before” this, when light and dark are still integral.
“God saw that the light was good.” Is this a value judgement or a moral one? Does the copula here signify a property or an identity? Given its context elsewhere in the Old Testament, all such translations of the Hebrew word tov seem possible, allowing for such readings as “God saw that the light was of value,” “God saw the light as being good,” and “God saw that the light was goodness itself.” The more prevalent readings of “God created the light so as to be good” or “God created goodness in the form of light” seem not to be in evidence. God-as-Word allows itself to be light; God-as-Word-as-light knows itself to be good; light-as-God is the self-knowing of God-as-Word-as-God.
From the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, First Part, Question 14, Article 2:
Since… God has nothing in Him of potentiality, but is pure act, His intellect and its object are altogether the same; so that He neither is without the intelligible species, as is the case with our intellect when it understands potentially; nor does the intelligible species differ from the substance of the divine intellect, as it differs in our intellect when it understands actually; but the intelligible species itself is the divine intellect itself, and thus God understands Himself through Himself.
Principium Luciferi identifies Satan as the first light of creation, the light which is the self-illuminating self-consciousness of divine being. It would seem, then, that even Jesus asked of us that we walk together with Satan. Jesus’ admonitions in John chapter 12 are leveled in response to questions concerning his death and the apparent contradiction between his mortality and finitude insofar as he is human and his immortality and infinitude insofar as he is God. He gave his answer to a crowd of those whom the author John thought important to mention were Greek; it is relevant that it is in their language that this gospel was first written, when it is Aramaic that its characters would have been speaking. We have only the author’s translations, translations in which Jesus evades their questions with parable, admonishing us to “walk while [we] have the light,” though the text correlates light not with the creator but rather with that which was created. Introducing a story of those who spoke Aramaic, Hebrew, and Latin, as well as including a few characters who spoke Greek, John evokes the unique power of the Greek word Λόγος (Logos)—a word which has no clear English equivalent but which may be reasonably translated as word, speech, story, or reason—as being with God and being as God in the primordial dark of the Beginning. Through Λόγος all things came into being, and the life that came thus into being “was the light of all people” (John 1:4). Then it is the Greeks who come to him and hear his words regarding “the kind of death he was to die” (John 12:33), and it is them—those “with ears to hear”—to whom Jesus speaks of walking in the light, believing in the light, becoming children of the light, so that they do not lose their way in God’s primordial dark—in other words, so that they might know God as God is self-known, or, what is the same thing, know themselves as they are known by God, and it is Principium Luciferi by which such knowledge comes to be.
“When the complete comes,” Paul tells us in the 13th chapter of his First Letter to the Corinthians, “the partial will come to an end.” He continues:
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned [ἐλογιζόμην, from the root λόγος] like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
11-12
Most translations of Genesis 1:4 follow the verb template “to separate something from something else,” which brings to mind a kind of sorting between things that are intrinsically different and which have become somehow intermingled. But the Hebrew preposition in question is ben, translated elsewhere most commonly as “between,” thus, to separate between (or, in some translations, to divide between). I imagine a river bifurcated by an island, the waters divided between east and west. In such a case it is not the day and night which would be separated from each other but rather God dividing between night and day, a branching of the Waters of God that parallels the division between the waters of the depths in Genesis 1:6. In that verse as well there is not a separation of what is intrinsically different but rather a polarization of that which is of the same essence. Genesis 1:4 affirms the intrinsic unity of light and dark: evening and morning together are the first day, and first came the evening, the night, the darkness.
Looking up into the night sky, I see stars, planets, nebulae, perhaps the moon. I might see the moon in the day as well, but during that interval, the sun is dominant, too bright to look at directly and casting so much light across the sky that nothing can be discerned, and when we see the moon in the day, it is only because it reflects the light of the sun. One celestial object among tens of thousands. How diminutive would our universe be in a world of perpetual daylight? It is the night that limns the stars and makes apparent the galactic panoply to our eyes. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5, emphasis mine). “Paradoxically, however,” Catherine Keller tells us, “It is theology that taught the West to shun the depths of the creation,” and it did so to its own detriment, “at the cost of its own depth” (2002, xvi).
Keller implicates Christianity in what she calls tehomophobia, a “fear of the depths,” or more specifically a fear of the Deep of creation. “A certain Christianity, unfurling towards the light, knew only dread of the dark depths. Its God comes cloaked in light” (2002, p. 200). Against this lumino-hegemony exists an interpretive tradition which sees God in the dark as much as the light. Thirteenth century German mystic Meister Eckhart saw in the darkness of creation “the hidden things of God… the divine itself” and 15th century German theologian Nicholas of Cusa wrote of the light of creation as “light, in which darkness is infinite light” (Keller, 2002, p. 201-2).
Georges Bataille wrote in Inner Experience that
There is in divine things a transparency so great that one slips into the illuminated depths of laughter beginning even with opaque intentions.
1988, p. 33
Light is seen, darkness seen through, only appearing opaque and impenetrable when there is no light within. What is it that is interstitial to the transit of a photon? Where is light? Attempts to answer questions such as these lead us to absurdities for which the only proper response is laughter. A skyward glance through the 8.6 light-years between my retina and the star Sirius suggest to me that the light is out there, and I know enough of physics to know as well that what is out there is also back then, equally distant to me in time and space, contradicting its presence to me here and now. Is the light the photon itself, or the neural impulses in my retina or in my brain that are caused by the photon, or the experiential phenomenon that they cause in turn? If light is rather the total system of these things, then I and the star exist in a remarkable unity across vast reaches of time and space. Indeed, our relativistic equations are unable to quantify the “journey” of a photon; to even speak of such a thing beyond its being as a parallel excitation at two points in spacetime is nonsensical. In light there is neither time nor space and questions of distance are not merely negated but rather become entirely without meaning.
Bataille tells us of a night that he walked home through the streets of Paris:
I was extremely young then, chaotic and full of empty intoxications: a round of unseemly, vertiginous ideas, but ideas already full of anxieties, rigorous and crucifying, ran through my mind. In this shipwreck of reason, anguish, the solitary fall from grace, cowardice, bad faith profited: the festivity started up again a little further on. What is certain is that this freedom, at the same time as the “impossible” which I had run up against, burst in my head. A space constellated with laughter opened its dark abyss before me. At the crossing of the rue du Four, I became in this “Nothingness” unknown—suddenly… I negated these gray walls which enclosed me, I rushed into a sort of rapture. I laughed divinely: the umbrella, having descended upon my head, covered me (I expressly covered myself with this black shroud). I laughed as perhaps one had never laughed; the extreme depth of each thing opened itself up—laid bare, as if I were dead.
1988, p. 34, emphasis mine
Satan the Accuser comes to me not ex nihilo but ex profundis, from the transparent and infinite depths of the darkness of God in which the light of Satan shines. I do not read Satan into the Bible as if its words could have any meaning to me. Rather, I read Satan out of the infinite depths of the Bible’s possible meanings. Satanists are sometimes asked, “Why follow the Deceiver?” but such an interpretation is more eisegetical than exegetical. Satan the Deceiver is not present in Genesis (where even a retconned reading that includes Satan at all finds him speaking only truths), nor in Job, and even in the gospels Satan seems as much teacher as adversary, with such verses as Matthew 4:1-11 documenting a series of lessons on knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Nowhere in the Bible do I find the most prevalent Christian creation narratives, which expound a creation theology ex nihilo in defiance to what the text describes: the creation ex profundis—from the depths—that Keller details in Face of the Deep. The contents of the Bible and the contents of popular Christian faith and theology overlap in places but are not consubstantial. And so it is with the popular understanding of Satan.
We must remember that, while orthodoxy does indeed follow the text, so too does the text follow orthodoxy in a circle of interpretation (“explaining from within”) and exterpretation (“explaining from without”), and with regards to the New Testament in particular, the orthodoxy is chronologically prior to the text; indeed, the texts were written and canonized in order to reinforce one among several competing orthodoxies, and so Satan the Deceiver was written into as well as read into the text rather than reflecting its original intentions or even its possible exegetical readings.
Before Satan was a demon, Satan was a demonization. As religious historian Elaine Pagels explicates in The Origin of Satan (1995), Satan was appropriated by the early Christians in order to demonize heretics and Jews. Pagels’ book shows
…how the events told in the gospels about Jesus, his advocates, and his enemies correlate with the supernatural drama the writers use to interpret that story—the struggle between God’s spirit and Satan. And because Christians as they read the gospels have characteristically identified themselves with the disciples, for some two thousand years they have also identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan.
p. xxiii
This appropriation is Satan the Deceiver, who exists only in the most recent books of the Bible. Later still we have Milton’s Satan the Adversary, whose Fall from Heaven parallels less the Biblical account than it does the historical progression of the idea of Satan. However Romantic the ideal of the Adversary, however poetic it may be to invert and reappropriate the stigma of the Deceiver, both are fallen from the Satan of the Old Testament: Satan the Accuser, Satan as identified by Principium Luciferi as the first light of creation.
In 1807 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel published his Phenomenology of Spirit, which documents the shapes and forms undertaken by Spirit (Geist, which encompasses the self-consciousness of individuals, societies, and God) as it evolves through dialectical processes towards Absolute Knowing. Hegel’s Phenomenology is simultaneously a history of these forms, and so the chapter on religion is simultaneously an explication and a history of religion, with the subsection “God as Light” describing Spirit as evolving through ancient Iranian religion, which sees the divine manifest in fire and light:
Spirit as the essence that is self-consciousness—or the self-conscious Being that is all truth and knows all reality as its own self—is, to begin with, only its Notion in contrast to the actuality which it gives itself in the movement of its consciousness. And this Notion is, as contrasted with the daylight of this explicit development, the night of its essence; as contrasted with the outer existence of its moments as independent shapes, it is the creative secret of its birth. This secret has its revelation within itself; for the existence of its moments has its necessity in this Notion, because this Notion is self-knowing Spirit and therefore has in its essence the moment of being consciousness, and of presenting itself objectively.—This is the pure “I,” which in its externalization has within itself as universal object the certainty of its own self, or, in other words, this object is for the “I” the penetration of all thought and all reality.
2013, §685
Spirit is its own awareness of itself in terms of its being universal self-awareness, and yet this is only an idea which is set against actual Being in a dialectic: the daylight of knowing against the night of the actual. Emerging from this dialectic is the “I” through which comes “all thought and all reality,” by means of which is the self self-known.
A little further on, Hegel describes the relation of Spirit to itself, which is “the pure, all-embracing and all-pervading essential light of sunrise” whose negative is darkness (2013, §686). He continues:
The movements of its own externalizations, its creations in the unresisting element of its otherness, are torrents of light; in their simplicity, they are at the same time the genesis of its being-for-self and the return from the existence [of its moments], streams of fire destructive of [all] structured form. The [moment of] difference which it gives itself does, it is true, proliferate unchecked in the substance of existence and shapes itself to the forms of Nature; yet the essential simplicity of its thought moves aimlessly about in it without stability or intelligence, enlarges its bounds to the measureless, and its beauty, heightened to splendour, is dissolved in its sublimity.
From light there emerges all that which is other to darkness, void, and nothing: the myriad forms of reality, which, being initially unknown and unknowing, must return to their source through the dialectical evolution towards Absolute Knowing. “Pure Light disperses its unitary nature into an infinity of forms, and offers up itself as a sacrifice to being-for-self, so that from its substance the individual may take an enduring existence for itself” (2013, §688).
Some time within a few centuries of 600 B.C.E., the Chinese philosopher Laozi (老子) opened his book the Tao Te Ching (道德经, roughly “The Book of the Way and its Virtue”) with the words
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, 1972
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.
The Chinese word tao (道) is similar to the Greek word Λόγος, both in terms of it being a multifaceted word with no single, clear translation into English—as in this translation, it is often simply left untranslated—and in terms of its actual meaning: the most common translation is “way” or “path,” but “speech” and “reason” are also possible. Indeed, tao is the word used when translating Λόγος into Chinese.
According to Paul Tillich, it is theology which relates our finite being to the infinite being of the universe (1951, 66-7). In his book Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James—who spent the entirety of his book hedging in a psychological theory of religion which needn’t rely on objective religious claims—made one assertion of objective religious truth:
…the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come [is] a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes.
p. 515
As above, so below. As without, so within.
One night many years ago I went to the mountains to camp with some college friends. We had timed our excursion to coincide with the Perseids, and on the night of the meteor shower, the Milky Way, the Backbone of the Night, splayed out above us, clearer than I had ever seen it. Among our troupe was a woman whom I was trying to impress. Knowing this, before I left, I checked the timing of the Perseids and made some statistical calculations on the frequency of shooting stars during a meteor shower and used that information to make my move: at the appropriate time, I would tell her that I had planned a show for her, and then point her towards the sky. If my timing was mistaken, as would most likely be the case, I could play it off as a cute joke—nothing gained, nothing lost—but if perchance I happened to get it right, I would look like a magician.
As it so happened, I made my move, and when I pointed her towards the sky the meteors began falling like rain. She was awestruck, and for me, all at once the celestial spheres of the heavens snapped into focus in a way that made apparent to me the whole scale of the galaxy, all of the tens of thousands of light years between the Earth and the veil of stars swirling around the supermassive black hole at the center of it. I could perceive not only each individual celestial object but the whole of the distance between them—an awesome, staggering distance beyond my ability to describe. I hear some speak of how small they feel when looking up at the night sky, but I have never in my life felt so expansive. I understood in that moment how I am come out of all this, how the iron in my blood is forged in supernovae.
We all sat together by the shores of a lake and watched the starfall play out into the night.
In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux. Sensitque ipsum Deus propter luce et vidit quod esset tenebra. Lux Luciferi pronuntio. Oculus quod ipsum videt sum et propter luce Luciferi video mei. Ex animo meo lucet lux Satanae corpus divinum meum accendens.
Ave lux. Ave Lucifer. Ave Satana.
Works Cited and Referenced
Aquinas, T. (2017). Summa Theologiae. New Advent.
Augustine of Hippo. (2004). Confessions. Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf.
Bataille, G. (1988). Inner Experience (L. A. Boldt, Trans.). State University of New York Press.
Hegel, G. W. F., Miller, A. V., & Findlay, J. N. (2013). Phenomenology of spirit (Reprint.). Oxford Univ. Press.
James, W. (1982). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature (M. E. Marty, Ed.). Penguin Books.
Keller, C. (2003). Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. Routledge.
Tsu, L. (1972). Tao Te Ching (G.-F. Feng & J. English, Trans.). Vintage Books, a division of Random House.
λόγος—Wiktionary. (n.d.). Retrieved July 21, 2020, from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BB%CF%8C%CE%B3%CE%BF%CF%82
道—Wiktionary. (n.d.). Retrieved August 3, 2020, from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%81%93#Chinese