Library of Light
Books about light, gathered by theme rather than by date.
An Appeal to All that Doubt
Law wrote this to people who had stopped believing, and he argues with them rather than at them. He keeps returning to fire: something already burning, held down, waiting for a strike.
Find it on AmazonCenturies of Meditations
Traherne wrote these for himself, and they were not printed until 1908, when a manuscript turned up after two centuries. They read as a man teaching himself to see, and then inviting you to try.
Find it on AmazonMysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness
Blake says the same light is received differently by each beholder. Underhill carries that observation across a lifetime, one account after another of people who met the same light and were changed in ways that resemble no one else’s.
Find it on AmazonPoems from the Divan of Hafiz
A fourteenth-century poet of Shiraz wrote these, and Gertrude Bell’s English keeps both of his habits at once: he means the wine cup and he means God, and he does not choose between them.
Find it on AmazonPseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works
Dionysius wrote in Greek some fifteen hundred years ago and signed himself with a name that was already centuries old, which is one way of saying the light was never his. This volume holds all of his surviving work, and the long fourth chapter on light is where the portrait comes from.
Find it on AmazonRevelations of Divine Love
Julian wrote down what she experienced, and the record survived six hundred years of being copied by hand. It is a book about being held, and about a sentence that widens the longer you sit with it.
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A fifteenth-century weaver from Benares sang these, and for centuries they travelled by voice rather than by page. Rabindranath Tagore’s English is spare on purpose: it keeps the song’s shape instead of explaining it.
Find it on AmazonThe Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage
A fourteenth-century Flemish priest wrote this for people living ordinary lives, and he keeps returning to one image: a light that is common to all, and trees that stand in the same sun and bear different fruit.
Find it on AmazonThe Cloud of Unknowing
An anonymous writer set this down for one student and never signed it. It is short, it is plain, and it keeps returning to a single instruction: stop trying to think your way in.
Find it on AmazonThe Confessions
A bishop wrote this near the end of the fourth century, telling the whole of his life in the open and addressing it to God. He keeps returning to what can and cannot be said about light.
Find it on AmazonThe Divine Comedy
Dante walks the whole distance and writes down what it does to him. The Paradiso is the last third, composed last, and Canto XXX is where the poem stops describing and says what it saw.
Find it on AmazonThe Enneads
Plotinus wrote these as letters to students rather than as a system, and his pupil Porphyry arranged them after his death. They read as one long argument that keeps circling what cannot be argued.
Find it on AmazonThe Fire of Love
A fourteenth-century English hermit wrote this in Latin, and it has been carried into English many times since. He spends the whole of it on one subject: what arrives when love comes uninvited, and how little of it language is able to hold.
Find it on AmazonThe Imitation of Christ
A fifteenth-century priest wrote this as counsel for ordinary life rather than for a cloister. He keeps returning to attention — to what a person can gather, and to how much of it arrives rather than being won.
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A seventeenth-century lay brother cooked in a monastery kitchen and wrote almost nothing himself; the letters and conversations here were gathered by others. He keeps returning to the same discovery, that attention can be held in the middle of ordinary work.
Find it on AmazonThe Revelations of Mechthild of Magdeburg
A thirteenth-century beguine wrote this in her own Low German over three decades. Light is her recurring figure, and she keeps asking what it does when nothing lights it.
Find it on AmazonThe Scale of Perfection
A fourteenth-century English priest wrote this as guidance for one person, and it has been read ever since by people with no cell and no rule. He keeps returning to what a person can actually tell apart, and to how little of it is settled by looking.
Find it on AmazonTheologia Germanica
Written by someone whose name never survived, and kept alive by readers who copied it by hand. It spends its short chapters on one question: what is left of a person when they stop putting themselves first.
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