ABSTRACT
Virtually all cultures have turned light and darkness into the opposite symbols of good (including the divine) and bad. Light is universally associated with the heavens and high places, the sun, male power, and elevation.1 What follows the divine One, argues Cusanus, is “otherness” (alteritas), marked by multiplicity and mutability, from whence descend all the pluralities of things; Cusanus envisages a pyramid of light that proceeds from the darkness of man’s existence in the world of Otherness and multiplicity towards the apex of Oneness.2 Light also expresses the human penetration in religious mysteries. Augustine compares the relationship between our soul and god’s wisdom to the participation between air and light:
as the corporeall ayre is lightened by the corporeal light, so is the incorporeal soule by gods wisdomes incorporeall light, & the aire being depriued of light, so doth the soule grow darkned, by want of the light of wisdom.3
