Many of the twentieth century’s most illustrious comparativists argued that the ubiquity of light and luminosity across different religions and cultures suggested a universal human religiosity. But since the turn of the millennium, studies of supposedly universal archetypes or religious symbols have been natural casualties of postmodern and other deconstructive critiques of comparative religion. Today, reputable comparative studies rarely search for universals and instead historically situate their comparands. This session will use a papers session followed by a spirited discussion to explore the possibility of symbolic and archetypal studies remaining analytically useful within our deconstructive age. Specialists in Quakerism, Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, and Tibetan Buddhism will each offer a brief examination of the operation of light within a specific context relevant to their research. However, these papers are offered in service of a broader conversation discussing whether comparison might—or might not—prove generative to each scholar’s more specialized research.
From the first act of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis, to an abundance of metaphors and images employed by rabbis, kabbalists, and philosophers to describe wisdom and godliness, light illuminates the Jewish path of knowledge. In this paper, I will consider light as a physical phenomenon and follow up with a discussion of the significance and meanings of the various lights in the Torah, Midrash, and Jewish philosophy.
This paper considers the symbolism of light in Islamicate discourses of spiritual intellectuality, identifying ways that the Sūfī figure ʿAlā al-dīn al-Mahāʾimī (d. 1431CE) made ambivalent use of the earlier metaphysics of light identified with the Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) school of Islamicate philosophy, founded by Shihāb al-dīn Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī (d.1191CE). Within the historiography of Islamicate intellectual thought, Suhrawardī's Illuminationism offers an image of the immediate spiritual knowledge of Sufism and rationalism of Avicennan Scholastic discourse converging in an epistemological synthesis mirrored by that of Ibn ʿArabī's (d.1240CE) school of the Unicity of Being (waḥdat al-wujūd). Heuristically, both proffer a vision of a singular, gradational reality accessible through spiritual practice and expressible through a technical discourse, while disagreeing on the nature of that reality. While Mahāʾimī's criticizes Illuminationism from his position within Ibn ʿArabian existentialism, he utilizes a symbolism of light to solve problems where 'existence' is insufficient.
The mysticism of light is a common feature of early Christian spirituality. This paper will focus on one case study in this larger tradition, namely, the spiritual perception of the nature of the world as blue, sapphire, or turquoise. In Christian contemplative traditions, the sky is experienced as the outer image of God’s infinite horizon, in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). After sketching this tradition from Origen (c.185–264) and Evagrius Ponticus (345–99) to Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) and Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), the paper will conclude by touching on the role of sense perception in contemplative experience, the ways that such contemplative states mirror and invert normative sense experiences, and what makes the spiritual senses primordial or properly transensory in these Christian traditions.
This paper examines the Tibetan Buddhist contemplative theory of the rainbow body (’ja’ lus), according to which the material body transforms into multicolored light at the culmination of awakening. While widely known in Tibetan Buddhist communities and cultures—and increasingly referenced in popular spiritual discourse—the doctrinal mechanism underlying this transformation remains insufficiently understood. I provide an example from the eleventh–twelfth century Great Perfection Heart Essence (rdzogs chen snying thig) corpus, in which the rainbow body phenomenon is theorized as an alchemical resolution of the body’s elemental constituents—earth, water, fire, and wind—into their purified mode as “clear light” (’od gsal). I further connect this theory to contemplative practices involving meditation on entoptic visions of luminous forms, typically experienced in dark retreat. The paper thus presents a model of religious light understood as the latent ontological condition of the body disclosed through contemplative perception.
This paper examines the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light as a form of inward illumination that grounds ethical community beyond institutional authority. Drawing on early and modern Quaker sources, the study argues that the Inner Light articulates a pre-religious grammar of spiritual capacity that precedes formal doctrinal systems. Through historical-textual analysis of writings by George Fox, Margaret Fell, William Penn, and Rufus Jones, the paper traces how inward experiences of illumination are translated into shared ethical responsibility and communal witness. Fox’s accounts of direct revelation, Fell’s defense of women’s preaching, and Penn’s political theology demonstrate how divine illumination authorizes moral action independent of clerical mediation. The analysis concludes with Jones’s twentieth-century reinterpretation of the Inner Light as a universal structure of human consciousness. Taken together, these sources show how Quaker spirituality transforms immediate inward experience into enduring ethical communities grounded in shared illumination rather than external authority.
| Andrew Taylor | ataylor9@css.edu | View |