Why the King screamed in terror, 'Lights, lights!'
PAUL JOHNSON
0 ur paddock in the Quantocks is at present occupied by a score of sable sheep — gentle, delightful creatures, the reverse of diabolical. Yet when Charles Powell made his famous joke at a dinner in honour of General Colin Powell, introducing him as 'the black sheep of the family', he stressed a distinction as old as time. The old sea dog at the Admiral Benbow was struck with terror when handed the Black Spot. We categorise white magic as benign, black as evil. It's hard to say how often Milton uses the word 'black' to describe his devils in Paradise Lost. Of course, black is a relative term. The Wanted poster the Parliamentarians put up to find the fugitive Charles II, who took after his French mother, described him as 'a Black Man, two Yards high'. (He grumbled that in London theatrical performances the hero was always blond, the villain black-haired.)
Is there any reasoning, in morality, aesthetics or physics, why we identify black with wickedness and white with virtue? I suspect it is one of the deepest and oldest human instincts — not shared by animals, so far as one can see — and springs from the distinction between light and darkness. However grown-up we may be, we still fear darkness when it is absolute. Once, at night in an African game park. I wandered a little too far from the comfortable, well-lighted lodge and found myself lost for a moment in the total blackness of the bush, unable to see my hand in front of my face and uncomfortably aware of non-human sounds. I have never been so frightened. I remembered the words of Genesis: 'An horror of great darkness fell upon him.' The ancient Hebrews distinguished between Middle and Outer Darkness, and St Matthew reports Christ as saying that for those cast into the more Stygian region 'there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth'.
The powerful infusion of biblical language in our lives may account for our fear of darkness and almost desperate need for light. What I do not know, and would very much like to learn, is whether darkness or light is the natural state of the universe. I have consulted both the encyclopaedias I possess, and am none the wiser, though much better informed on the subject of optics. But that is to approach light (and darkness) from a purely human viewpoint. Before humans existed, was matter, or the atmosphere, light or impenetrably dark? Does light have to be, as it was, created by some agency in order to exist at all, and disperse the darkness? The Old Testament and the Big Bang supporters who compose the majority of astrophysicists agree that the creation of the universe was a definite event. Before that. what? Darkness or light? The biblical account implies light, since God existed and is identified with light. But the universe he created was dark. Let me recall Genesis 1 i:
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.
This suggests that the natural state of the created universe was darkness, and that God created light to give it a moral dimension. This theme is taken up repeatedly in Milton's account of the Fall and the Creation, where he makes use of metaphysics to insist that evil and light are mutually exclusive, so that even the flames of Hell produced 'no light, but rather darkness visible'. Here is a fresh horror: a darkness whose impenetrability you can grasp by actually seeing it.
In the Bible light dawns or shines, but darkness falls, like an insupportable burden, crushing and smothering, as well as blinding, hapless humans. Such biblical images have entered the vernacular of our poets, so that they reproduce them automatically. But they also add their own. A favourite image is the idea of light as a vapour, and darkness as a conquering liquid, drowning the light with its voluminous power. Shakespeare, in Henry V. produces one of his noblest passages to describe the night before Agincourt, 'when . . the poring dark fills the wide vessel of the Universe'. In A Midsummer Night's Dream he varies the metaphor: brightness is like a flash of lightning: 'the jaws of darkness do devour it up' before a man has time to say 'Behold!'
The poets see the light as weaker, as well as virtuous, always in danger of being gobbled up or submerged by the stronger and malign dark, which seems to have the power of inevitable law. The summation of this imagery occurs in that sinister and memorable work Phantastes (1858) by the Scots Congregationalist poet George MacDonald:
So then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. The light cloth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea.
I suspect this daunting vision of the unequal conflict corresponds only too closely to our common fears of how darkness necessarily overcomes the light, just as evil triumphs over good in this world. The image of striking a match, watching it briefly carve out a cave of illumination in the dark mountain, then seeing it inevitably extinguished by the returning forces of night, is very sobering. Humanity — perhaps I should say civilisation — is little more than a series of lighthouses on a dark and dangerous coast. Remember those who thought that the end of the Cold War had seen the light triumph for ever? We know better now, do we not? The bin Ladens — and there are many more out there — do indeed stand black as night and shake a dreadful dart.
None thought more constantly and nobly of the clash of light and dark than John Milton, agonised as he was by his own affliction, which plunged him into physical darkness even in the brief triumphs of the light — 'dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon', as he puts it in Samson Agonistes. I have just been rereading his poem 'Light', which must surely be one of the most striking works ever composed by man, glorious in language enshrining like precious pearls a perfect cameo of enlightened submission to harsh fate. While in no way minimising his plight — `everduring dark surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men cut off — he reminds himself that God is light, transcending all his own physical laws, and beaming wisdom. So he ends by calling on his creator,
Thou Celestial light.
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell Of things invisible to mortal sight.
Here, I think, is the key to the question: is light or darkness the natural order of things? The astrophysicist does not know. The agnostic charged with explaining science to the world, a Richard Dawkins, say, fears the worst, that existence is ultimately dark. A belief in God as the source of light which is self-sustaining brings the assurance that the true answer lies in the inner light for which Milton appealed. That is why those of us who have this faith, however feeble, cling to it desperately. The alternative is to play Claudius in Hamlet, who screams in terror at the darkness, 'Lights, lights!'
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