Before the Sun: What “Let There Be Light” Really Means
Why Light Is More Than Physical Phenomenon
Step outside on a bright morning, and something profound occurs that no scientific equation can fully capture.
The world doesn’t simply become illuminated - it becomes navigable, comprehensible, alive with detail and color. Objects emerge from shadow. Distances become measurable. Faces become recognizable.
This isn’t light as waves or photons, though it certainly involves these. This is light as the fundamental condition that allows anything to appear at all.
What you’re experiencing points to one of our civilisation’s oldest and most persistent insights about the nature of reality.
This article continues our Genesis series. Part 1 explored the meaning of “In the beginning,” Part 2 examined “heaven and earth,” and Part 3 now delves into the significance of “let there be light.”
Each part stands on its own, so you can jump in here even if you missed the first two. Subscribe to follow along and discover a deeper understanding of the Bible.
The Problem With Reducing Light to Physics
The scientific understanding of light as electromagnetic radiation, wavelengths, and particles captures profound truths about physical phenomena. But it addresses an entirely different question than the one that has captivated philosophers and theologians for millennia.
Science asks what light is as a measurable phenomenon.
Ancient cosmology asks what light does in making reality intelligible to consciousness.
Consider how this distinction plays out in something as simple as speech.
Every word you utter depends on breath - air flowing from your lungs carries sound outward, making your inner thoughts audible to others. Speaking is intellect manifesting through breath.
In Genesis, we see this pattern established at the cosmic level: “The Spirit of God hovered over the waters, and God said, ‘Let there be light.’” The divine breath becomes the vehicle through which divine intellect creates.
The first words spoken bring forth light itself.
Why Words, Breath, and Light Share the Same Pattern
This connection between breath, word, and light reveals something essential about consciousness and meaning that materialist explanations miss entirely.
When you speak, you don’t merely move air molecules around. You manifest inner thoughts into the shared world of meaning. Your breath becomes the medium through which invisible ideas take tangible form that others can receive and understand.
Similarly, when God speaks light into existence, this represents the fundamental act by which meaning, intelligibility, and consciousness enter reality.
Augustine grasped this insight in his wrestling with Genesis. This primordial light might be understood as the creation of the angels: those rational beings who first received divine illumination and became “sharers in the eternal light.”
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Light Before the Sun
But here we encounter the curious problem that exposes the inadequacy of literalist readings:
How can light exist before the sun, moon, and stars, which aren’t created until the fourth day?
This question points us toward the deeper meaning. Basil the Great observed that God truly created light before creating the luminaries - a primordial brightness that preceded and made possible all subsequent physical light sources.
This wasn’t metaphor. It pointed to light’s fundamental nature as the principle of manifestation.
Philo of Alexandria had earlier recognized this mystery, identifying the light of the first day with God’s Logos - the divine Word that orders creation. When John’s Gospel declares, “In the beginning was the Word... In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind,” it deliberately echoes Genesis while revealing that the light of creation is Christ himself:
The divine reason by which all things were made.
Light as the Condition, Not the Object
This brings us to the crucial insight that transforms how we understand both light and consciousness:
Light is not one created thing among others. It’s the condition that makes other things come into being and become visible.
Just as light in our everyday experience allows us to see objects so the the primordial light of Genesis allows reality itself to become meaningful and intelligible.
Medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen experienced this in her visions as the reflection of the living Light - the ongoing force by which truth illuminates understanding.
The Jewish tradition captured this in the mystical concept of the Hidden Light by which Adam could “see from one end of the universe to the other.” This wasn’t physical sight but the capacity for perfect understanding, divine knowledge, complete intelligibility.
The rabbis taught that God concealed this primordial light, saving it for the righteous in the world to come. This echoes Revelation’s promise that there will be “no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God gives it light.”
What These Traditions Recognized
Light, life, and the Word operate as the invisible forces that bring other things into existence rather than existing as objects themselves.
Light makes things visible
Life makes things move
The Word gives meaning and brings things to pass
None of these can be reduced to material components because they are the active principles by which materiality itself becomes manifest and comprehensible.
This differs fundamentally from the modern scientific approach, which necessarily treats light as an object of study - measuring wavelengths, calculating photon energies, mapping electromagnetic spectra.
Science yields enormous practical knowledge. But it cannot address light’s role in making experience possible in the first place.
You cannot study light as an object without already depending on light’s illuminating function to make that study intelligible.
How Consciousness Participates in Primordial Illumination
The phenomenological truth cuts deeper than most realize:
Consciousness participates in this primordial act of illumination.
When you see, you don’t merely receive photons passively. You actively distinguish, define, and bring potentiality into manifestation. Human awareness shares in the divine Light that first separated light from darkness, order from chaos, meaning from confusion.
This is why Christ could say “the eye is the lamp of the body”. Not because the eye emits photons, but because seeing is itself a participation in the Logos that makes all things visible.
The Mystics’ Direct Understanding
The mystics understood this participatory dimension most clearly.
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