134 – Seeking Light

Editorial: Seeking Light

As the days get shorter and darkness falls earlier and earlier we long for light, especially sunshine. This December Sofia is called Seeking Light. The front cover shows the Greek god Apollo driving his fiery chariot across the sky through the hours of the day. The back cover shows sunrise at Stonehenge at the Winter Solstice with people coming to honour it. In the Advent Liturgy leading up to Christmas, there is a series of ‘Great O’ antiphons to the Magnificat, each praying ‘O Come’. The antiphon for December 21st at the solstice prays for shining light and that it may also be a Sun of Justice.

The word for ‘god’ in proto-Indo European is Dyeus, derived from the root dei (to shine, be bright). The god is a ‘shining one’. This is where the name of the chief Greek god Zeus comes from. In our first article Margaret Connolly tells us ‘Zeus or his equivalent appears among the Minoan, Mycenaean and Indian pantheons, and the name of the Germanic god Ziu reflects similar ancestry.’ He was a sky and weather god who developed into the ‘Father of Gods and Men’ of Homeric times. In her entertaining article she points out that Zeus and his fellow gods are not moral; they are like larger humans and behave at least as badly, if not worse, than us. But the gods tell us things about ourselves and, she concludes, they ‘have not fallen out of our consciousness … live on in our literature and, for some of us, in our hearts.’

In our second article, ‘Gods and the Good,’ Richard Norman describes how Greek philosophers tried to seek the light – enlightenment – in a more intellectual way, within a culture that kept its traditional gods. For Plato, ‘our human values of justice, moderation, courage and the like are imperfect approximations to perfect timeless ideals which are the ultimate reality, more real than our changing physical world’; ‘the ultimate explanation of everything’ is ‘the idea of the Good’. For Plato those who do not understand this are living in a cave and see only shadows; they need to come up into the sunlight and be enlightened in the ‘real’ world.

However, as Norman points out, Aristotle criticises Plato for not being practical; ethics ‘is supposed to tell us what to do’. The claim that somewhere beyond our changing physical world is more real denies the central Christian insight of embodiment. A ‘better world beyond’ has been used as a powerful mechanism of social control of the lower classes – in direct contradiction to Jesus’ gospel of a Reign of Kindness on Earth that is good news for the poor and hungry.

On a Christmas theme, Frank Walker’s ‘The Festival of Adoration’, comes down to Earth. Kings must kneel before the child who ‘represents the deepest humanity’. This is followed by James Dunstone’s piece on Quaker differences in the way they read the Bible, some literally, some poetically – and eclectically.

Because we long for sunshine in the Winter, perhaps in temperate zones it is difficult for us to take the threat of climate change seriously enough. In our culture, light and warmth are very positive metaphors. In his article ‘The Sun and the Climate’ Edwin Salter examines why we find it so difficult to deal with climate change through global warming, and suggests things we should do. This message is now being urgently promoted, particularly by young people, in the massive recent Extinction Rebellion demonstrations in London and elsewhere. Earth is in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’, ideal for life because it is neither too cold nor too hot. We need the light and warmth of the sun to live, but if we are over-exposed to its burning rays, we cannot survive either. That sounds like an echo of Aristotle’s virtue of ‘moderation’, mentioned in Norman’s article.

Dinah Livingstone