God is Light

The other day a friend of mine and faithful Touchstone reader sent me a fascinating article on a neglected Italian scholar and philosopher, Romano Amerio: www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=45538&eng=y

What interests me most is that in that charnel house of a century, crammed with the hundreds of millions of people who died fighting for, or at the hands of, das Volk, or the Soviet, or the Cultural Revolution, or the malign imam of Teheran, or that whole clownish pageant of villains, charlatans, pomposities, and brutes -- people dying for a bizarre amalgam of the demonic and the banally material, a Master Race here and a gangrenous British Empire there -- Professor Amerio could yet claim, calmly, that at the heart of the misery was modern man’s misconception of the essences of the divine nature.

Here is not the place to launch into the filioque controversy, nor into the intra-ecclesial controversies of the Roman Catholic Church. I am fascinated by Amerio’s staggering assertion. Amerio argued that modern man had reversed the arrow of love. For the ancient Christian insight, consonant also with Aristotelian and Platonic contemplation, is that the Love of the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father; to put it differently, we are created for the good of the intellect, and thus to desire that good, and to be moved in love to seek it, and to love meanwhile the lesser and created goods that direct our minds to the Uncreated. Love therefore cannot be understood apart from the Truth that is, essentially, prior to it.

But modern man, instead of identifying God with love, has rather identified love as his god: he has, in art and literature, in economic life, in statecraft, and in the banal wranglings that pass for politics, assumed as an irrefragable fact that his desires are centrally important for no other reason than that they are his. No one may summon those desires to the bar of rational judgment; at best we can adjudicate between one person’s desires and another’s, and come to a mutually agreeable compromise; at worst, we lapse into war. In such a world even religion devolves into self-help, or saccharine consolation, a superstition rigged up to satisfy a bruised ego. We do not long for God, but reduce God to what we long for. We revise the words of the writer to the Hebrews, and say that it is a lovely and delightful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. “For God is love,” we say, for our own purposes misconstruing that word “love”.

Yet there is another short and potent sentence from the same letter of John. It is not so well known, but maybe in our age it is precisely what we need to help us reorient our hearts toward the truth. It is simply this: “God is light.” That light of God precedes love, not temporally, but as love’s source: I mean the love of God for His creation, the answering love of the creature for God, and, in the first instance, the Love that proceeds from the Father, in the life of the Trinity. If the Christian is afire with love, yearning to see God face to face, to know even as he is known, what else can it be than to gaze into the surpassing light of God’s beauty and goodness, into the splendor of truth? Hence we are advised by that gentle apostle not that some godlike love of ours excuses us from having to bother about such little things as commandments and doctrine, but that commandments and doctrine are just the things we will want to cherish if we really are in love with God, who is light. But modern man has ceased to believe in light; and many of us Christians in the pews, still believing in God, yet may be hard put to suppose that there can ever be any difference between the Light who is Truth and the fitful flames of our own desires.