What is Uncreated Light and why is it an experience of the Transcendent? Why do I capitalize the word “Transcendent?” It is because by experiencing the Transcendent we experience God, a personal God, a Divine Person, who is beyond our comprehension, yet who relates to us and loves us personally in a way we can comprehend by experiencing Him in our hearts. God is not some sort of impersonal, abstract being or phenomenon. Too often today people think of the Transcendent in the abstract, as something other than a personal God. When Orthodox theologians, clergy, teachers, or others talk or write about Uncreated Light they are referring to God’s divine energy, or presence, present in our world. It’s the energy of the Holy Spirit who permeates everything. St. Paul says in Acts 17:28: “…for in Him [God] we live, and move and have our being.”
God’s Uncreated Light, the Light within Himself that He has chosen to share with us, is all around us but we don’t often see or experience it; or if we do, in what measure do we; we don’t perceive it or understand it as such, or we attribute it to something else. Father George Papademetriou in his excellent article, Introduction to Orthodox Spirituality, writes that: “The divine energies are “within everything and outside everything.” All creation is the manifestation of God’s energies.” He quotes the theologian Vladimir Lossky who says in his work, the “Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church”: “These divine rays penetrate the whole created universe and are the cause of its existence.” Father George further explains “The uncreated Light and the knowledge of God in Orthodox tradition ‘illuminates every man that cometh into this world. It is the same light that the apostles saw on Mount Tabor that penetrates all of creation and transforms it, creating it anew.”
In addition to the experience of the apostles on Mount Tabor, there are other key Scriptures that teach us about Uncreated Light. In Genesis 1:3 God says: “Let there be light”; and there was light.” It’s not until verse 16 that He creates the greater and lesser lights, the sun and the moon, so this light is something other than the sun, moon, and stars. It is God Himself. God is the Light by which we experience this light.
Psalm 35:10 in the Greek Translation of the Bible says: “For with You is the fountain of life; in Your Light we shall see light.” Just as the Bible begins with light, it ends with a reaffirmation of this truth that God is the Light and that we need no other light. Revelation 21:23 reads when referring to the new Heaven, new earth and specifically new Jerusalem: “The city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory of God illuminated it. The Lamb is its light.” The Orthodox Study Bible note to this passage reads: “Created light is unnecessary. For the everlasting Uncreated Light will illumine all (Ps 35:10) with true and clear vision to see things as they really are. The true Light, the Light of the world (Jn 8:12), was incarnate (Jn 1:9), and even while on earth He shone with Uncreated Light (Mk 9:2–8; 2Pt 1:16–18).”
The Book of Revelation reminds us one more time before it ends regarding the Light. Revelation 22:5 reads: “There shall be no light there; they need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light.” Peter, James, and John experienced a foretaste of this Light in the Transfiguration. Matthew 17:2 reads: “and He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light.” In addition to these experiences and accounts of the uncreated Light of God, we also have clear teachings about this Light from Christ. In John 8:12 Jesus said: “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”
When Christ says this, the Feast of the Tabernacles is concluding with great lamps being lit. One can imagine many of the dutiful religious faithful celebrating the lighting of these lamps yet the true light is not in the lamps. Christ is drawing attention from those symbolic lights to His true light. It’s in the person of God to whom those religious faithful should have been turning their attention. This represents a common mistake we, as Christians, are surrounded by and which I explain more below.
In Matthew 5:14 Jesus says something remarkable, especially when you consider it in the context of what He says in John 8:12 and the experience of the Transfiguration. He says: “You are the light of the world.” The “you” is us, human beings. In its corresponding notes to this Scripture, the Orthodox Study Bible reminds us that “God is the true and Uncreated Light.”
So Christ who is God, who is uncreated, who is the Light, is telling us, created beings who God created out of love, that we are the light as well affirming that we are indeed created in His image and likeness. That is the depth of God’s love for us that He gives us His Light and wills for us to also be the light. Just as Peter, James, and John – and many of the Holy Fathers – experienced a foretaste of the Uncreated Light, we too can experience it, even if it is a lesser measure than the experience of these Saints. St. John of Kronstadt reminds us: “We can raise our nature to communion with the Divine Nature; and God is the Light uncreated, surpassing every light that has been created.”
As Orthodox Christians, we yearn for this Light, yearn for the beauty of the Light, yearn for God. But first, we have to be attuned to it, attuned to God, which comes through our sincere participation in the Sacramental life of the Church. How much we are attuned to God determines how much we experience Him, to the measure of how He created us and according to His will. With God, things are not formulaic according to human understanding. We are all different and unique in our persons, and God grants us the experience of Him both based on our desire for Him and also per His will for us as individuals.
Christ reminded Peter of this at the end of the Gospel of John when Peter was comparing himself to John, and Christ essentially told him it doesn’t matter, what His will was for John; Peter needed to follow Christ according to how He called him. And of course, we can never confuse what points to the Light, for the Light Himself. This is where a lot of the world is. They confuse the pointers to the Light with the real thing, mistaking the experience of these pointers with the experience of the Light Himself.
But how do we, who are not Saints as we commonly understand the meaning of the word, but are saints, that is believers, as in the New Testament use of the word; how do we, ordinary believers who are not Saints, experience God’s light? There are myriad ways. Experiencing God’s Light was described as something not so much as light we see, but that we sense and feel intuitively in the depth of our being, in our nous, that part of us, where we know and connect with God.
First, we have the Church to experience God’s Light. Ask yourself how often you come out of Church after a beautiful service where you received the Sacrament of Holy Communion, and you feel such a sense of peace and contentment and joy. That’s experiencing God’s divine energy or God’s Light through your union with Him.
Have you ever encountered a person who just seemed to have a light about them? I often see it in the faces of devoted and committed clergy and laity who just seem to have something about them that comes through in their faces. I also experience it in nature and that is why I love to take country and forest walks and hikes or be in the mountains or at the beach in solitude.
I was away in a remote place one time during the Feast Day of the Transfiguration. Though I couldn’t be in Church for that day, one of my favorite Feast Days of the Church, I was in one of the most beautiful natural places I have ever been. I was on this beautiful mountain and forest hike with sunlight, running waterfalls and it was so awe-inspiring I just felt God’s presence all around me. I found my thoughts constantly going to God and thanking Him for His creation and being able to experience the beauty and peace and joy that came with it. I didn’t for a moment mistake the created for the Creator. Nor did I experience nature impersonally. I experienced it as communion because in those moments I was participating in the life of Christ through the beauty of His creation. It led my mind and heart to our Personal God. I was with a naturalist who was leading the hike. He was explaining and appreciating the hike from a spiritual perspective but not in a personal way. When he spoke reverently about nature, he never went beyond nature itself and Whom it pointed to. He stopped short of this and simply revered creation.
Too often I have heard people over the years say things like, “Let go and let the universe guide you” as if the Universe were some sort of deity or personal force as opposed to a created thing. Or I have heard people say after a great outdoor experience “I felt at one with nature.” This oneness is closeness with God whose creation and beauty of it draws us to Him, draws us to experience Him, but not in some detached nominalist way in which we are more present in the observation of the experience than in the experience itself. When people believe that the universe, or nature, has this power within itself apart from God it’s a form of pantheism. Fr. George Morelli explains: “As Father of the created world, God creates from without. In other words, creation exists apart from Him. Creation is not equivalent to Him. God as Father is transcendent to what He creates. There is no room for pantheism.”
It gets back to St. Gregory Palamas’s distinction between God’s essence and His energies. Another saint, St. Athanasius, describes God’s essence and energies like this: “He is outside all things according to His essence but He is in all things through His acts of power.” Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of blessed memory wrote that God’s essence is His nature or inner being and His energies are His operations or acts of power.
I get concerned today with its plurality or beliefs to include new age thought systems and competing spiritualties, and secular atheist thought that diminishes everything beyond human rationale to superstition, that our children and grandchildren will get exposed and potentially enamored of this type of pantheistic thought. We often convey and teach our faith in a legalistic way where strict adherence or a sense of duty to a set of rules and requirements because your belief in God is what makes your Christian. We don’t often teach enough about the depth and beauty of our sacramental understanding of reality that celebrates all of reality, all of creation, as a way of communion with our loving God. One of the reasons that people gravitate toward new age and eastern spiritual practices is due to celebration and appreciation of the spiritual beauty of the natural world and its transcendent nature. But it’s lacking in the end because it is missing something or, to be more accurate, Someone.
We have all of this appreciation for the same things in Orthodox Christianity but with one huge difference. It all points to a personal God who loves us, and further, beyond just pointing, it allows us to experience Him in an intimate loving way. That’s what we need to make sure our children, grandchildren, and fellow believers never lose sight of. We need to do our best to help them understand and to experience our faith knowing it is all about leading us to ever deepening understanding and experience with the Transcendent, that is a loving personal God, not simply adhering to a set of rules and regulations. The latter is nothing more than a cold understanding that will create a natural dichotomy, or divide, in their thoughts and hearts that will lead them to understand Christ and His Church and God’s natural world as two separate unrelated realities.
This will only lead them to seek to fulfill their deep spiritual need, whether they recognize this need consciously or not, someplace else besides our Orthodox Church.
And we care about this not because we are trying to win converts over to the Christian faith, but because we know our faith is the true reality, and the only reality that exists is God, and we can only find our real and true growth and fulfillment in Him.
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