O Dawn, splendor of eternal light and sun of justice: come! Give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death!
Jesus came to us first as the light of the world, though as in a lantern so as not to blind us. In his final coming he will be the very light of heaven where there will be no need of sun or moon for God himself is the light and the Lamb the lamp. But in this middle coming he comes in stages of interior light, in illuminating grace as William of St Thierry puts it, in deifying light as our father St Benedict puts it.
A scriptural passage that lends itself so well to this middle coming of Jesus in light and one that our fathers utilized significantly is: “But we all, beholding the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord.” Guerric applies it as follows, “House of Jacob, come and let us walk in the light of the Lord…from brightness to brightness, with the Spirit of the Lord to go before us and by one degree of virtue after another let us enter further and further into the kingdom of brightness.” What are these stages of brightness, of interior light? He describes them as faith, conscience, understanding and contemplation.
First of all the lamp of faith it lit so that by it we may work in the night of this world, forever mindful of God. Then faith, that clear, certain, infused light, moves toward more ample light—first, the light of conscience. The evidence of a good conscience is its clarity, says St Bernard, for there is nothing clearer than this transparent goodness, which is the light of truth shining in the mind, and nothing more glorious than the mind that sees itself in truth. Faith also moves toward the light on understanding flowing from knowledge so that reason, too, may have its fill of light; and, finally, it moves toward the light of contemplation flowing from wisdom. It is this last that enables us to be still and know that he is God; to see what no eye has seen; to enter the tent of the divine indwelling in order to gaze with face unveiled upon the Lord’s glory, although as in a mirror darkly. The darkness or obscurity of our present condition is no obstacle to one who sees with the eye of the heart, for the Lord, “while he is present and only while he is present, is light to soul and mind. In that light, invisible he is seen, inconceivable he is understood” (Guerric).