Religions are postured to answer the fundamental questions regarding human life, such as: where did we come from; why are we here; what is the nature of the after life?  Religions typically posit virtues as well, which constitute an upright, moral and just life on earth.  Religions define the good for mankind in other words, as they also describe the Creator God and His relation towards created Creation.  Some speculative orders may complement religion and reinforce morality, but they are not a substitution for religion.  Indeed, they recur to the same authoritative source as religion for what is deemed “Light.”  For Christianity as for fraternal speculative orders in the United States, that authoritative source of Truth from God is The Holy Bible. 

 At the start of The Holy Bible, Genesis reads: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.  And God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (Genesis 1:1-3).  The questions will naturally arise, “What is this light, and whence did it come?”  The speculative philosopher William Green Huie in 1908 concluded, as we may fairly conclude from the biblical account, that God is the fountainhead or source of light.  He reflected this light through his spirit, as a medium.  We are, in effect existing in a sea that is His Spirit.  In terms of what the reflected “light” is, the term isn’t literal.  Or if it is literal, it is simultaneously a metaphor for something else.  Light is in fact the first symbol presented in the Bible.  The English language bears this out.  Light means radiant energy from the sun, but it also means mental illumination and knowledge.  It can easily stand for Truth.  Ironically “light” may have multiple meanings, and these may be inseparable from each other.  Huie believed the term as used in the Bible referred at once to material light as from the sun, but also to intellectual light or the light of knowledge, as well as to spiritual light and to the possible communion as with thoughts moving from the Holy Spirit to man. 

 Along these same lines, if material light enables the eye to “see” and the human mind to perceive and imagine, then intellectual light would include a thinking faculty enabling man to judge and comprehend.  And while intellectual light to some degree is necessary to advance to the next luminous stage of so-called spiritual light, it would also seem that something else is required.  For what passes as knowledge or scholarly attainments per se, may not result in anything remotely approaching godliness or spirituality, as we intuitively know.  Here we may enter into a conjecture that something akin to the negative of light, i.e., darkness is the symbol or metaphor for both ignorance and evil.  So the knowledge one collects, as well as the way in which that knowledge is assimilated, makes a huge difference in terms of lighting your proverbial candle and letting your little light shine—and possibly producing the negative thereof. 

 From the very beginning of understanding, whether of light and life or the text of the Bible itself, there would seem to be inherent in any reference to the supposed material, physical world an automatic allusion to something else beyond our five corporeal senses.  The physical as one dimension is counterpart to something else real and substantial in the realm of spirit.  Metaphysics thus undergirds physics and physical reality.  Huie believed that if and when knowledge resulted in the proper discernment of one’s duty in relations to man and God, one will have become ready for the next stage or level of luminosity.  And while examples of people who attain spiritual light might seem to be rare, it should be the object of individual achievement (a variant of self-actualization); or more correctly, our prayerful wish to receive such grace from God the Father over the course of a natural lifetime.  For at the stage of receiving spiritual light we no longer exist as swimming in a sea that is His Spirit, but we have become attuned to such a degree as to receive communications, as it were, through communion and virtual atonement.  Huie likens a man’s life to stations of the sun—rising in the east, its meridian in the south, its setting in the west; and like the stations of the sun, a man’s youth, his prime and old age lead him on a journey from material light to intellectual light, and finally to spiritual light—and to an expected end, the inevitable departure from this material, physical life across what Shakespeare dubbed that ‘undiscovered country.’  We presumably go on to the source of light, and to the consummation of the life to come.  For as Jesus said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12).  He proved it on Easter morning.

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford.  Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary.  Email: wes@wesriddle.com