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By the mid-19th century, when daily life had already been radically altered by the advent of the railroad and the telegraph and the use of anesthesia, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. argued that the most consequential invention of all might have been photography. Holmes, a poet and physician, was the father and namesake of a U.S. Supreme Court justice. He also made important improvements in the stereoscope, a binocular device for viewing paired photographs so they appear as a single three-dimensional image. “We are looking into stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a charming novelty,” Holmes wrote in an influential 1859 essay in The Atlantic. He predicted that “before another generation has passed away, it will be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates from the time when He who
never but in uncreated light
Dwelt from eternity—
took a pencil of fire from the hand of the ‘angel standing in the sun,’ and placed it in the hands of a mortal.
This Promethean utterance was a rather florid reference to photography, only in this case it wasn’t just any old god stealing fire from Mount Olympus and giving it to mortals, it was God himself giving them a “pencil of fire” (the word photograph means “writing with light”). Here God is described as a being who dwelled from eternity in “uncreated light” – a concept more familiar to Eastern Orthodox rather than Western churches. Uncreated light is what Moses beheld on the slopes of Mt. Horeb, when he turned aside to see the bush that burned but was not consumed. It was the light from heaven that blinded Saul of Tarsus, later to be known as St. Paul, on the road to Damascus. The defining moment, according to St. Gregory Palamas, was the gospel account of the Transfiguration, when Jesus and three of his disciples ascended a tall mountain where, according to the gospel account, "he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light."· Palamas, a 14th-century Greek monk and theologian, wrote, “The Lord came to send fire upon the earth, and through participation in this fire He makes divine not just the human substance which He assumed for our sake, but every person who is found worthy of communion with Him.”
For Palamas, uncreated light existed in the eye of the beholder, although not every eye was fit to behold it. “Take note that eyes with natural vision are blind to that light,” he said. “It is invisible, and those who behold it do so not simply with their bodily eyes, but with eyes transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit." Jesus had taught that those who were pure in heart could see God. Similarly, Palamas advised those wishing to see the uncreated light of God to repent, purify themselves of their worldly passions and practice certain spiritual disciplines. In effect, those who received the vision of divine radiance did so by becoming like God themselves, a process known in the Orthodox tradition as theosis.
I’d like to know where Palamas got the idea you needed to be worthy of communion with God to see this other-worldly light. By that standard I’m not sure any of the biblical prototypes would have measured up. Moses was a murderer and fugitive when he turned aside to see the bush burning in the Sinai wilderness. St. Paul styled himself the foremost of sinners when he had his blinding encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Even the apostles who witnessed the Transfiguration later distinguished themselves by abandoning Jesus after he was arrested and taken away to be crucified.
The issue in my mind is not why a select few are privileged to see light from heaven but why everybody doesn’t. The novelist Aldous Huxley, an early experimenter in psychedelic drugs, addressed this question in a long essay entitled “The Doors of Perception.” The title was taken from William Blake’s poem, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in which he wrote, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite/For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern." Huxley believed that normal waking consciousness functions as a kind of reducing valve that filters out the vast flood of sensory stimuli that might otherwise overwhelm our ability to go about our business.
Huxley used mescaline to bypass these inhibitors and to experience what Buddhists refer to as “clear seeing,” if only for a brief time. Having experimented with psychedelic drugs myself long ago, I find I can often achieve the same effect these days merely by picking up a camera. The camera becomes a high-powered extension of my visual cortex, allowing me to operate without the blinders of the conceptual mind. The world becomes pure light, color, shapes and texture, contained by nothing but the viewfinder of my camera. It is a world without names, a world unframed by any thought. And at such times I understand that fire from the gods has indeed been placed in the hands of mortals. At such times I see that the light from another world is actually the light from this one.
Matthew 17:1-13
Matthew 5:8
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