The Summary of Physics Restored

195The origin of light establishes that it must be numbered among truly spiritual things. Before first matter was informed and the World arose, there was no light outside God. As Nature came into being, spiritual light began to flow from the fiery Spirit of Divinity into matter and to adhere to it as to a wick. This was the creation and origin of light, the first action of divinity in matter, the first marriage of Creator with creature and of spirit with body. Primary, informing light was therefore pure spirit. Through its fiery power, as though through heat, it kindled the neighbouring, intensely rarefied matter with its spiritual radiance, thus turning darkness into light. Heaven, distinguished by the first light, is nevertheless wholly invisible, though material and fiery, because on the side of matter it has attained the highest degree of fineness, while on the side of form it is spiritual. In the middle Heaven, however, the light that had been scattered was gathered into a bounded compass and passed into the solar globe. This had to become somewhat dense, like smoke that can be kindled but cannot be consumed, so that, lit by immortal light, it might hold that light and present itself to universal Nature as a torch or mass of flame. Solar light is therefore nothing other than a luminous spirit deriving its origin from the spirit of eternal light. It is joined to its own body as form and inheres in it inseparably, becoming perceptible through that body’s density. It communicates radiance and much of its power to all the natures of the Universe. By its constant flow it constitutes the spirit of the Universe, assigned to a body for the benefit and preservation of bodily Nature.