La Lumière

Today I'm thinking about light. On Friday we visited the Musée d'Orsay, the Paris art museum mostly dedicated to pre-Impressionism, Impressionism, and post-Impressionism. A few months ago we were giving a presentation to Kim Clark, our university President, about a new approach to our online courses. Our PowerPoint presentation included a slide of a sample syllabus with a Monet painting on it.  After some discussion about the presentation, President Clark pointed at the Monet and said, "So, Jon, how does he make the paint look so much like water?" I told him that it all had to do with light.

Impressionism especially seems to be about light. Monet insisted that his paintings were actually more realistic, not less, than those of artists that had gone before. For hundreds of years painters had painted mostly in their studios under light that was carefully constrained to produce the maximum effect. Caravaggio, for instance, treated his light theatrically, like a spotlight in an opera, to draw the viewers attention directly to the point where the artist wanted it—in this case on St. Peter's face and on the shoulders and buttocks of his executioners.

But in real life, Monet insisted, light doesn't work like that. It splashes everywhere, like a dysfunctional showerhead, creating too much light in one place and too little in another. What's more, the light we see is a reflection, rejected by the object on which it falls, splashing into our eyes as a million varicolored photons, and it is up to our brain to put it all together and make a picture out of it. That's the way the Impressionists paintings look, dapples of light and shade, the pre-eminent forms and colors shaped by our minds out of a thousand shades of gray. This only works because it's the way our minds are made.

 But today, Sunday, I am at least as interested in metaphysical as physical light. Plato, the founding father of Western thought, believed that reality lay not in the actual world, but in the ideal. Today we find his rejection of actuality hard to fathom: surely those things are real that we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell. But reality was dicey to Plato. There was too much that could go wrong with it. Even if it was possible to make it absolutely perfect, some big lummox was sure to come along and break it or scuff it or wear it out and that would be the end of it. There had to be room, Plato believed, for the ideal, the sine qua non, that existed independently of our perception of it. Without an ideal there is nothing to which we can aspire.

One of Plato's most influential followers was a pagan Greek of the Roman era named Plotinus. Plotinus taught that the root of all being was something he called "the One." The One was like God in a sense, and it was in the mind of the One that all the ideal things existed. In other words, the perfect version of anything exists first of all as an idea in the mind of God. But the One is not just ideas: it is also creative and instructive. The One has ideas, then creates versions of them throughout the universe. The One also seeks to instruct us in its Divine nature, in an act of love that seeks to bring us into harmony with it. This instruction is like light, that proceeds forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space. But like light, it grows dimmer the farther it gets from its source. It is also refracted, reflected, and shaded by a multitude of influences. Sometimes in this fallen world it seems to go out altogether. Matthew Arnold wrote in Dover Beach:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and      flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

But sometimes, even in the midst of grossest darkness, the eyes of our soul detect minute slivers of light, hardly enough to make a coherent form, much less to inspire visions of eternity. And yet our minds are made for light, and so we see. This may be the most compelling evidence of a benevolent Creator—not the light that comes to our eyes, but that we have eyes made to receive it.

Besides the paintings, we had a lovely two-hour lunch in the splendid museum dining room. Yesterday (Saturday) morning I took everyone up to the Montmartre, and back again to the Champs Elysées and Eiffel Tower in the afternoon. Last night everyone packed and turned in early. This morning everyone left and went home, but Evelyn and I are still here for another seven weeks. It's 3:00, and we are going to a concert at the Opéra tonight. I think I'll go over to the Louvre for a little while.