The whole structure and arrangement of the eye is full of wisdom from the side of nature, which you may tell from the following fact. During the day, objects appear sharp and clear. But in the morning when you first awaken you sometimes see the outlines of surrounding objects very indistinctly—with a little halo. To what is this due? It is due to there being two different kinds of things in our eye, namely, the vitreous body and the lens. The lens is formed from without and the vitreous humor from within. While the lens is rather unalive, the vitreous body is full of vitality. In the moment of awakening they are not yet adapted to one another. Each tries to picture the objects in its own way. We thus see again how deeply mobile everything organic is. The one has to adapt itself to the other.

Perhaps no single book presents so complete a panorama of the many-splendored aspects of light as Arthur Zajonc's Catching the Light (CLT), appropriately subtitled The Entwined History of Light and Mind. He opens Chapter 1 with the pathetic situation of the congenitally blind whose eyes are thereafter surgically made completely healthy as physical organs. Sadly, vision is not restored save with enormous therapeutic effort on the part of the patient, failing which functional blindness continues. What is otherwise developed from the day the infant first squints and opens its eyes can later be retrieved only through the greatest effort and proper education. It is almost Helen Keller-like in difficulty. We recognize in this the same thing brought out in Mark's story of the healing of the blind man (Mk 8,22-25):

22 And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him a blind man, and begged him to touch him. 23 And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village; and when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands upon him, he asked him, "Do you see anything?" 24 And he looked up and said, "I see men; but they look like trees, walking." 25 Then again he laid his hands upon his eyes; and he looked intently and was restored, and saw everything clearly.

We miss the significance of the passage if we don't recognize the healing as a two-step procedure. First, the eyes were completely healed organically. But vision still did not exist except in some form of unintelligible blur. Only when the inner light was restored by the second step did the man see clearly. John's version of the healing of the man born blind does not bring out two steps quite so clearly, but two are nevertheless there. Christ's action had to be followed by the man going to wash in the pool of Siloam (Jn 9,1-11).

Christ speaks of the eye as providing light: "The eye is the lamp of the body" (Mt 6,22; Lk 11,34). Commenting on Mt 6,22, 8 NIB 210 says, "In contrast to the modern understanding, which regards the eye as a window that lets light into the body, the common understanding in the ancient world was that the eye was like a lamp [citing, among others, Prov 15,30 and Dan 10,6; see also Rev 1,14], an instrument that projects the inner light onto objects so they may be seen." More boldly, 9 NIB 244, commenting on Lk 11,34, implies Christ misunderstood the nature of things in using his metaphor, saying "The verse [34] has often been misinterpreted … because it assumes an ancient understanding of the eye and sight. We know that the eye responds to light from outside the body, but in antiquity the common understanding in both Greco-Roman and Jewish literature was that the eye emitted light and that sight was possible when the light from within met light from outside."

The unmitigated presumptuousness of these comments nevertheless speaks for most of us in our day who accept without question what is said in our textbooks, theology books and scientific treatises. Yet Einstein said "It seems that the human mind has first to construct forms independently before we can find them in things," and in 1917, after completing Relativity, "For the rest of my life I will reflect on what light is!" (both cited as epigraphs in Zajonc, Chap. 10). Zajonc himself writes in Chapter 1:

In my own professional life, I first sought to understand light by means of laboratory research in quantum optics. In laser experiments performed at institutes in Boulder, Amherst, Paris, Hanover, and Munich, I studied light and the way it touches matter. The more I learned of the quantum theory of light, theoretically and experimentally, the more wonderful light seemed. Even armed with such sophisticated theories, I have no sense of closure regarding our knowledge of light. Far from it, light remains as fundamentally mysterious as ever. In fact, quantum theory has taken the simplistic, mechanistic conceptions of light provided by early science and, on the firm basis of experiment, shown them all to be impossible. In their place, it has framed a new theory of light that every great modern physicist from Albert Einstein to Richard Feynman has struggled to understand—unsuccessfully, as they realized themselves.

Before returning to Steiner's lectures, let us look at what was said by that unsurpassed modern mystic of Egyptology, René Schwaller de Lubicz in his monumental The Temple of Man (TOMN), pp. 108-109 ("The Symbol of the Eye"):

The eye is the only nerve that comes to the surface of the body, the only one we can observe in its living function. It blossoms into a sphere filled with a white crystalline liquid. It is sensitive to light, to the effect of fire, and it reacts to colors. . . .

The constitution of the eye shows that the "fire" of light must be neutralized by the watery nature of the aqueous humor and the vitreous body, the Amunian aspect of life. The phenomenon of vision is a reaction to the light filtered by the iris; then the "fire," neutralized by the crystalline lens, strikes the complementary rods and cones of the retina. If this reaction did not occur, the phenomenon of light would never exist for the intellective optical center of the brain. Functionally, this complete process constitutes the "eye of Ra"; the reactive emanation from the retina is the true light. The electromagnetic vibration, or the photons, are the impulsive activity, the active mechanical energy, and the light that we see is the reactive vital energy. The physical and chemical effect of the light only exists through some similar reactive phenomena, but these effects are only visible (to the eye) after this vital genesis. It is thus that the sun, the eye of Ra (and not Aten, the solar disk) emanates an invisible light that nourishes the world; this invisible light&151;the luminous vital energy—makes possible our intelligence of the active, visible light, our knowledge of the light. This concerns the esotericism of the symbol of the eye. To these explanations is added the symbol of genesis represented by the eye and in which, as in all generation, the amniotic crystalline lens takes part. The myth says that it is from the tears of Ra, the salty Water evoked by solar Fire, that human beings were created.

Have we moderns, like Esau, sold our heritage for a mess of pottage (Gen 25,24-34)? Just as we've lost the great insights of the four elements and the four ethers, so also the understanding that there is no light in the human kingdom unless the inner light of the eye joins with the outer light of the Sun (for all that can create physical light comes directly or indirectly from the Sun via the fire). But let us return to Steiner's next lectures (Lect. 4 et seq.).

The Implications of Interference

Steiner directs us to look at the "ur-phenomenon" of the theory of color. Goethe would have expressed it, to begin with, by saying that when you look through darkness at something lighter, the light object will appear modified by the darkness in the direction of the light colors, i.e., in the direction of the red and yellow tones. Figure 9 thus shows candle light being seen through a block of dim or cloudy matter. Conversely if I look at a simple black surface through a trough of water which is illumined (Figure 10), blue or violet colors will appear. Thus, in summary: Light through dark appears yellow, while dark through light appears blue.

Taking this principle forward Steiner recalls Figure 2 which he reproduces except that this time he places the human eye where the image fell on the wall in Figure 2.

FIGURE 11

What then is seen by the eye? One must hold to what is seen. You see the light, but you see it coming through dark. On the top side you are looking at it through the darkened blue side of the image that previously fell on the wall; you are looking through dark and thus see yellow on top. Conversely, on the bottom side you are looking through the light yellow colors that previously fell on the wall, and thus see blue on the bottom side. And, of course, what you see has been displaced, i.e., "projected," downward by the action of your eye (rather than by refraction) as previously discussed. It is the polarity that matters. If one wants to speak in "learned terms," the image on the screen can be called the "objective" colors and the one seen by looking back through the prism at the light the "subjective" colors. The latter image appears as an inversion of the former.

There has been much intellectual speculation in modern time concerning all these phenomena, beginning with Newton. He came up with the corpuscular theory, but that was seriously shaken by others later, so a wave theory was adopted. At first longitudinal waves, like sound waves, were considered, it being thought that they moved in a very fine substantial medium of "ether," but phenomena were seen as being at variance with this type of waves, so transverse waves were settled upon.