The Day Without Shadows

Glory to thee, who safe hast kept
And hast refreshed me whilst I slept;
Grant, Lord, when I from death shall wake
I may of endless light partake.

Bishop Thomas Ken, English cleric, 1637-1711

In an oblique reference to Plato’s Parable of the Cave, C.S. Lewis believed that our earthly existence is a shadowland. In Plato’s allegory, people are chained by their necks and ankles in front of an inner wall with a view of the empty outer wall of the cave. They observe the shadows projected onto the outer wall by objects carried behind the inner wall by people who are invisible to the chained prisoners and who walk along the inner wall with a fire behind them. That creates the shadows on the outer wall in front of the prisoners.

The only reality the prisoners perceive is the shadows and sounds, which are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent distorted and blurred copies of the reality normally perceived through our senses.

However, Lewis was convinced of the dual nature of human existence, that we are spiritual beings tethered to our bodies. Compounding our compromised standing, we inhabit three dimensions and must contend with time, which toys with our minds, insidiously whispering that the past is masquerading as the present, while the future is a rehearsal of the past.

This temporal conundrum is captured at the beginning of T.S. Eliot’s poem, Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

Similarly, Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men (written in 1925 and profoundly influenced by the horrors of World War One), explores the world’s serial failures to achieve its aspirations, so often leading to disillusionment, and its dark co-conspirator, spiritual atrophy. Here are the relevant lines for us:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

The shadow is a kind of temporal guillotine. Eliot’s shadowland was the realm of hollow men, those whose souls were severed from reality and the truth. A bleak and colorless landscape.

As Christians, we know we are a fallen people, so the notion that we exist in a shadowland is palpably real and inescapable. But we are armed with graces from the Holy Spirit to defy them. Those blessings help us to train our inner eye to see through the omnipresent shadows into the luminous world of joy. Delving into that nano universe, we find a veil of happiness that spiritually lights our moments, exuding the fragrance of faith. Just over our shoulder we feel the quiet comfort of our guardian angel tracing our every movement, step by step.

To dispel the temporal shadows, we are lured into the inner sanctum of St. Teresa of Avila’s world:

The light God grants you from time to time concerning spiritual joys is a special mercy. His Majesty comforts us in proportion to our trials.
(November, 1576)

We have all experienced that unearthly comfort during the intensity of an apparently insurmountable trial. That spiritual balm is often felt as an inner voice, a reassurance that mysteriously materializes. The saint’s insight is, of course, predicated on faith, without which such divine brightness remains unseen. Moreover, the deeper our faith, the more radiant the light.

Our Lord’s light far exceeds our frail, innate powers, overshadowing them in glory. It is in this mysterious “light” that He waits for us, and it is always at the intersection of human suffering and divine love — the mystery of the Cross. St. Teresa knew that with God’s grace, our human frailties, our lowliness and simplicity, are transformed by humility and prayer.

She was also convinced that the notion of light in reference to God and creation is not intended to serve a poetic or rhetorical purpose. Rather, the ethereal light of John 1:5, the Word made manifest, reflects an entirely separate reality, the shadowless spiritual realm.

St. Thomas Aquinas on Corporeal and Spiritual Light

St. Thomas believed that the proper meaning of “light” (its ratio propria) belongs to matter and refers to what the eye sees. However, he expands this construction and argues that corporeal and spiritual things do share light as a common reality.

According to Aquinas, there is a common notion (ratio communis) that the light of spiritual and corporeal phenomena shares a “principle of manifestation.” He argues that “intellectual light is nothing else than a manifestation of truth,” and adduces Ephesians 5:13 in support of his claim:  “All that is made manifest is light.”

The notion of a “principle of manifestation” bears no reference to matter per se, but rather shares a common reality among all things that manifest light. If we consider the things which fall under this common signification (secundum ordinem rerum), it clarifies how light applies to spiritual things more properly than it does to things that are material. As St. Thomas states:

Light is more truly in spiritual things than in corporeal things, not according to the proper meaning of light, but according to the principle of manifestation.

As St. Thomas has established, the nature of that spiritual light versus what William Wordsworth called “the light of common day” (cf. Intimations of Immortality), could not be more profound, nor more manifold in its spiritual implications. For we are assured that…

God is immortal and inhabiteth light inaccessible, where no man hath seen nor can see. (Timothy 6:16)

By design, our lives are imprinted with a mix of light and shadow, a kind of spiritual chiaroscuro, which includes moments of such blinding brightness that we are stunned when they cast such dark shadows. But as our prayers ascend to our Lord, we are delighted by the revelation that He sends the light to overtake the shadows, and as that heavenly light grows incrementally, the shadows fade, leaving only our souls, lit beautifully from within.

Philip E. Mella