What Do the First Three Chapters of Genesis Really Mean? — Part 3, Let There Be Light
Please see part 1 and part 2, especially part 1, if any background information is required about the following series of articles and their content.
I’m now going on to discuss in detail Fabre d’Olivet’s book containing his translation of Genesis from what he claims is the original Hebrew. I will, however, be dealing only with the first three chapters, since these have the greatest implications for Christianity and its theology.
This series can be read in conjunction with another ongoing theme of mine, a New Reformation for Christianity. If such a Reformation is going to happen, we have to challenge claims that the Bible (at least as we have it) is infallible, divinely inspired, contains no contradictions, and so on. However, if we could restore the original text and penetrate its esoteric meaning, then we might discover that it was much closer to being divinely inspired than we might otherwise think.
There are 7 sources for what follows:
- a modern Bible in English — I’ll be using the New Revised Standard Version, which I personally find the most useful
- d’Olivet’s French rendering of the Hebrew — this will only be needed if it seems to differ from the translations
- d’Olivet’s commentary on the original text — this will obviously be according to Redfield’s translation
- Redfield’s literal English translation of d’Olivet
- Redfield’s personal rendering, what she calls the ‘Correct Translation’. She says that in her literal translation she has “retained his selection of words some of which are now obsolete”, but that in her version she has “set aside some of the quaint words making choice of more modern ones”
- Shabaz Britten Best’s translation
- his Esoteric Interpretation of the text.
For convenience I’ll be using the following abbreviations to refer to these sources: NRSV, OF, OC, OE, R, B, and BEI. I’ll also be interspersing all this with a few comments of my own.
So here we go. Here begins what for me is a fascinating adventure. I hope other spiritually and esoterically minded Medium readers will find this material equally fascinating. Hopefully open-minded Christians will also find something of interest. They should do.
Here is the NRSV version of Genesis 1, v1–5: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God (or the spirit of God) swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day”.
Use of the words earth, light, day and night suggest to Christian literalists that the universe, at least from the perspective of planet Earth, has been created. The problem, however, is that if the earth has been created, how can it be a formless void? If one is bothered to check the footnotes, one discovers that an alternative for ‘created’ is ‘began to create’, which may give a clue as to the original meaning. OF has “en existence potentielle” (into potential existence), translated in OE as “he brought forth in principle”. B uses both these words, saying “The Supreme Being, created in principle the potential existence of the Heavens and the Earth”. We see therefore that there is no suggestion that the material universe actually exists at this stage. What we have is rather some kind of willed intention/plan for the existence of the universe. That it consists of both ‘Heavens’ (in the plural) and ‘Earth’ suggests levels beyond the material.
BEI notes that Saint Augustine, having some knowledge of ancient Hebrew, agrees. He wrote: “In the Beginning GOD created the Heavens and the Earth, though this was not in reality, because at first they only existed in potentiality of being”. BEI continues: “Fabre d’Olivet explains that the Hebrew words ‘In principle’ mean ‘determining beforehand all the future conditions and consequences that must follow, and all the effects that will necessarily proceed from this Power of the ONE EFFICIENT CAUSE’ ”. Does that remind anyone of what in modern scientific debate is called ‘fine tuning’?
This interpretation should dissuade any Christians, as some do, from suggesting that “Let there be light” is referring to the Big Bang, some kind of creation ex nihilo of the material universe, and is therefore evidence that the Bible is in agreement with the modern scientific consensus.
For ‘light’ OF adds ‘élémentisation intelligible’, translated by OE as ‘intellectual elementizing’, and B as ‘luminous essence’ and ‘luminous and intelligible manifestation’. This is therefore not light as we understand it. BEI says: “The Divine Spirit became manifest in the original nebulae as Infinitesimal Light Cells of the Radiant Being of the Creative Deity. These Light Cells — now called photons — constitute the fundamental matrix of the Cosmos, and by means of His Will — establishing Laws of Nature — whirling spiral movements gradually combined and consolidated them into rhythmic motion as primordial fire-mist, in successive grades of density of super-physical matter… and later, in a lesser degree, the sub-planes of the composite being of the microcosm, man himself”.
According to this understanding, light is therefore something very primal, a cosmic creative force, a manifestation of God himself, and the basic building-block of a multi-levelled universe. Thus everything in the universe is light in one form or other. That reminds me of a statement by the physicist Fred Alan Wolf: “ ‘Matter’ may be nothing but gravitationally trapped light (energy)” — that’s his parenthesis — continuing, “The incomprehensible unaware oneness beyond space-time becomes aware of itself, creating light. Light chases itself in gravitational collapse!”¹. Now that’s a scientist making a statement (not necessarily in scientific language) that sounds remarkably similar to BEI, and for that matter to Genesis (in the esoteric interpretation) itself.
That passage in BEI also reminds me of the ideas expressed by Jonathan Black in his book The Secret History of the World², in which he describes the worldview of esoteric secret societies. Without actually using the word ‘light’, he says that since at the beginning “there was noTHING”, that “something must have happened before there was anything” to bring things into existence, and that “this first happening must have been quite different from the sorts of events we regularly account for in terms of the laws of physics”. He suggests that this first happening was a mental event, an impulse from the divine mind. The process continues in this way: “The birth of the universe, the mysterious transition from no-matter to matter has been explained” as “a series of thoughts emanating from the cosmic mind”.
From this point on, what he says is a close parallel to what BEI says in the quote above: “Pure mind to begin with, these thought-emanations later became a sort of proto-matter, energy that became increasingly dense, then became matter so ethereal that it was finer than gas, without particles of any kind. Eventually the emanations became gas, then liquid and finally…”, “at the lowest level of the hierarchy… these emanations… interweave so tightly that they create the appearance of solid matter”. Therefore, these “emanations from the cosmic mind should be understood… as working downwards in a hierarchy from the higher and more powerful and pervasive principles to the narrower and more particular, each level creating and directing the one below it” (adapted from his chapter 1, pp29–40).
As an aside, I should point out that historically some thoughtful Christians have understood something along these lines. Reflecting on the verse in Genesis, they concluded that there must be two different types of light: lumen, the ordinary light that comes from the heavenly bodies, which enables us to see things, and lux, the primary stuff which God used to make the cosmos. One example especially worthy of mention in this context is Robert Grosseteste, a 13th century Bishop, who described the birth of the cosmos in this way in his treatise On Light.
Focussing now on verses 4–5, here’s a reminder of NRSV: “And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day”.
Again that sounds very simple. Apart perhaps from some extreme literalists, Christians now take ‘day’ to mean an extremely long period of time, but still something happening from the perspective of a created Earth. Our three translators all agree, however, that what is being referred to here is something taking place in the spiritual realm, namely the first stage of creation willed by the Divine Mind, the “first phenomenal manifestation”.
For example, B calls the Light/Day “luminous and intelligible manifestation”, and the Darkness/Night “sensible existence and negative manifestation”. Light and Darkness are therefore seen as the two fundamental and complementary aspects of the creative process. I hope I’m not reading too much into this, but this reminds me of the Taoist symbol the T’ai-chi T’u, otherwise known as the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate.
This is an apparently simple yet incredibly profound symbol, where the two aspects of light (yang/positive) and darkness (yin/negative) contained within the original Oneness (and their separation) could not be made more explicit. On that theme BEI says: “The two primordial principles that preceded the Creation were: the ‘Divine Darkness’, that is the inactive or negative state that permeated the Abyss of Space, and the ‘Waters’ or Cosmic Substance that was animated by the Divine Spirit, and thereby was divided from the Darkness, in order to establish differentiation and the primeval basis of all Manifestation, for all matter resides potentially in the Aether of Space”.
One final detail. Where NRSV has ‘evening’ and ‘morning’, OE has ‘west-eve’ and ‘east-dawn’. B interprets this as meaning the Beginning of this part of the cosmic process (the dawn in the East), and its Goal (the evening in the West).
In the next article I move on to the following verses of Genesis chapter 1.
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
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Footnotes:
1. Space-Time and Beyond, Bantam, originally 1975, further edition 1983, pp46–47
2. Quercus, 2010
