How God can be like thirst-quenching light
Iwas struck by a line from one of those poems that we call the Psalms. “In your light, we see light,” it says, in a modern translation of Psalm 36: 10. What can it mean?
As recited in the Church of England, the text is: “For with thee is the well of life: and in thy light shall we see light.” I wondered what St Augustine of Hippo made of it, since he wrote commentaries on the Psalms and he had a special place for light in his cosmology.
Augustine spoke and wrote Latin well, being a scholar of the practical use of language. The Greek version of the Psalms, from which came the Latin translation that he knew, says exactly the same as the Latin: “In thy light shall we see light.” (The Greek and Latin numbering of the Psalms varies from the Hebrew and Book of Common Prayer, so this Psalm was number 35 to Augustine.)
Anyway, Augustine is clearly transported by the line to a deep area of his thought about God. “Here, a fountain is one thing, light another: there, not so,” he says. By “here”, he means on earth; by “there”, in heaven. In the context of this Psalm, fountain is probably a better translation in English of the Latin fons than well, since we think of wells as deep and dark and fountains as high and bright.
“For that which is the Fountain,” he continues, getting excited, “the same is also Light. And whatever you call It, It is not what you call It. For you cannot find a fit name. It remains not in one name.” What he is getting at is that we are referring to God, who is not another item in the universe to be catalogued and labelled. He is not to be labelled with the name Fountain or Light, though you may call him so metaphorically in a poem like this.
However, if God is Light alone, Augustine would feel defrauded by being “told to hunger and thirst for it – for who can eat light?” Likewise if God is a Fountain only, Augustine wouldn’t be able to trust in the Beatitude (in Matthew’s Gospel, 5:6) that says: “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” On earth “sometimes fountains run even in darkness; and sometimes in the desert you suffer the sun, but find no fountain. Here, then, these two can be separated.” So God must be both a fountain to drink and a light to be seen, though neither name does him justice. Augustine will prepare both his lips to drink and his eyes to see God.
If it sounds as though he is making heavy weather of saying that God is both like light and like a fountain, it might help to attend to the short sentence: “And whatever you call It, It is not what you call It.” The 19th-century translator has capitalised It, since the word refers to God. Elsewhere, Augustine, who spent a long book trying to plumb the doctrine of God the Trinity, admits that we call God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit “persons” only for want of anything better to call them.
In his autobiographical Confessions, he breaks off from discussing the Trinity to exclaim: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.” Not only does he acknowledge by doing so that Scripture (in this case Isaiah 6:3) tells us more about God as Trinity than we can formulate ourselves, but he is demonstrating that although it is impossible to understand the nature of God, it is quite possible to talk to him, as by this triple acclamation of worship.
Another Psalm (27) begins, “The Lord is my light and my help.” This is still the University of Oxford’s motto, heaven help it. Later in this Psalm the narrator says: “Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” In the Psalms, God’s face shines upon us. It is not in any other light that we can see it, but in its own light.