Light, Page Two

There has never been a time when the human soul did not intuit the divinity of light. The canon pervasively reflects this archetype from Gen 1,3 ("Let there be light") to Rev 22,5 ("they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light"). Not until the thirteenth century did Christendom, and the human soul in general, begin to look critically at the nature of light. It started with Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), prominent English bishop and first chancellor of Oxford. In his Catching the Light (CLT), subtitled The Entwined History of Light and Mind, Arthur Zajonc (pronounced "zionce," sounding remarkably like "science"), Amherst physics professor and prominent anthroposophist, says that according to Grosseteste, "Light … was the first form of corporeality, and from it all else followed" (p. 53). And, along with Christian tradition from the first, Grosseteste accepted the reality of the hierarchies (see I-6) and the ages that the Archangels respectively administer in human development (CLT, p. 220). According to that tradition, lost in Christendom after the sixteenth century, the light of divine intelligence is administered by the Archangel Michael. According to Steiner, Michael's current regency of approximately 350 years began in 1879, his prior regency having been before the Incarnation of Christ and encompassing the age of the Greek sages Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle as well as the spreading of Greek civilization so instrumental in preparing for the spread of Christianity.⁷

Happily, today there is at least a minority in each camp, theologians on one side and scientists on the other, that is reaching out as though to bring the two historically separated disciplines more nearly into union. Perhaps nothing is more indicative of the onset in 1879 (or thereabouts) of the new age of the Archangel Michael than the difference in nature and consequence between Vatican I (1869-1870) and Vatican II (1962-1965). During the life of Rudolf Steiner it would have been hard to imagine greater mutual antagonism than existed between his anthroposophy and the Jesuits. Yet Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), only twenty years Steiner's junior and ordained a Jesuit priest in 1911, began his paleontological missions to China in 1923 that led eventually to his magnificent The Phenomenon of Man (PHEN). The three quotes from it in the "Evolution" essay above splendidly articulate anthroposophical principles. It is no surprise that his superiors not only frustrated his own teaching efforts but prohibited his publication of this priceless work. He could only avoid violating his vow of obedience by arranging for its posthumous publication in 1955. He was followed by another freethinking Jesuit priest, Karl Rahner (1904-1984). Since Vatican II, a new spirit of ecumenism in biblical study and outreach seems clearly to be emanating from a significant segment of Roman Catholicism. It has been matched in this impulse by a significant segment of Protestantism, and both have opened active dialogue with other religions in recognition of the common bond of all human beings.⁸

It is just this phenomenon that gives me (traditionally a Methodist) such joy in finding recent writings by Catholic authors upon which to carry forward the discussion on light. I refer, for example, to The Numinous Universe (NU) by Daniel Liderbach, associate professor in the department of religious studies at Canisius College in Buffalo, a Jesuit institution, and to Lawrence W. Fagg's previously cited Electromagnetism and the Sacred (EMS). Fagg is Research Professor in Nuclear Physics (retired) at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., with a master's degree in religion from George Washington University. Liderbach, while not himself a physicist or mathematician, collaborated with his colleagues who were, in producing his book, and one of them, James J. Ruddick, himself a physicist and priest, wrote the book's Foreword. Before focusing on anthroposophy's special contribution, I shall be looking at the respective approaches to science and religion, relating to light, taken by these two excellent works.

Coinciding with the commencement of the new regency of the Archangel Michael, the last half of the nineteenth century brought to the Western world new impulses, or at least a heightening of those with their seeds as far back as the Renaissance, in both religion and science. And the progressively greater explosion in both fields as the twentieth century unfolded must not obscure the significance of the dramatic changes that gave birth to them in the last half of the nineteenth.

The theological underpinnings of religion were beginning to reflect a new consciousness across a broad spectrum, from the new appreciation of ancient Oriental religions introduced by H. P. Blavatsky, to "the peak in nineteenth-century German scholarship and genius as far as the text of the New Testament was concerned,"⁹ to the two-source hypothesis (i.e., Mark and Q) of Holtzmann and Weiss (from which later sprang Streeter's four-source hypothesis) as a solution to the "synoptic problem,"¹⁰ to the abolition of the evil of slavery and eventually of feminine subservience in America (both condoned by Paul as recognized conditions of humanity in his day; Eph 5,22-24; 6,5-8; Col 3,18,22). Later, the deeply religious Edgar Cayce would initiate a new and unorthodox form of spiritual investigation in America, while in Europe Rudolf Steiner broke away from the Theosophical Society (as it then existed) to reveal Christ-centered spiritual insights of such depth and radical newness that they can only be absorbed into human consciousness during the unfolding divine guidance of a Michealic regency. What the Enlightenment did to the Genesis creation account, the nineteenth century did to the Gospel accounts, namely, enucleated them with documentary hypotheses. While anthroposophy shows the error in both cases, the phenomena themselves demonstrate a departure from prior orthodoxy.

Modern Scientific View

When Steiner, having already laid the foundations in his work on Goethean science, began to reveal his spiritual insights at the beginning of the twentieth century, scientific thinking was in the midst of a revolution. Scientists were breaking the chrysalis of Newtonian physics and developing dramatic new theories now identified as electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, and special and general relativity. Among the array of physicists and mathematicians taking part in this development, certain names stand out. Thanks to Michael Faraday's discovery of electromagnetic induction in 1831, James Clerk Maxwell published, in 1873, on the very threshold of the new Michaelic age, his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (said to "rank with Newton's Principia as one of the most important works in the history of science");¹¹ Max Planck introduced quantum theory in 1900; Einstein pronounced his theories of special and general relativity in 1905 and 1916, respectively; and then Heisenberg his uncertainty (or indeterminancy) principle in June 1925 (published in 1927), shortly after Steiner's death.

Most of my readers will likely be as unqualified as I to understand the mathematical formulations, and much of the discussion, behind these scientific discoveries and their subsequent elaborations by hosts of other highly qualified persons. Fortunately, however, qualified scientists with distinctly, if quite varied, religio-spiritual interests have provided us lay readers with writings that make it possible for us to enter meaningfully into the dialogue on the nature of light. From what may well be a far wider bibliography of such works, I have chosen four, all directly or indirectly cited above, namely, Einstein, Relativity (REL); Liderbach, The Numinous Universe (NU); Fagg, Electromagnetism and the Sacred (EMS); and Zajonc, Catching the Light (CLT). It is quite infeasible to relate here more than certain points developed in these respective works, and thus to be completely true to all that each sets out. Each is a splendid reference in and of itself and is commended to the student (particularly those like myself without extensive scientific background) who desires to contemplate even more fully the subject at hand.¹²

Einstein

The first of these, Einstein, a naturally devout Jew with an almost archetypal childlike openness for new revelation, writes with characteristic ingenuousness in the Preface (1916):

The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics. The work presumes a standard of education corresponding to that of a university matriculation examination, and, despite the shortness of the book, a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader. The author has spared himself no pains in his endeavor to present the main ideas in the simplest and most intelligible form, and on the whole, in the sequence and connection in which they actually originated.

With this standard, some university graduates may occasionally wonder about the validity of their own university "matriculation." But they must surely be impressed with the degree to which Einstein has stooped to articulate, in the simplest possible terms, the complexities of his theories. Aside from highly recommending it, I shall not make primary reference to it below since it is inherent in the three other works cited.