How soon does light fill amber?

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), an Italian poet from Florence, gives Beatrice a difficulty to explain near the end of the Paradiso. It arises whenever someone sets out to tell a story. Anyone describing how something began must put one word before another. In telling the beginning of the world, that habit can lead the listener astray. Did form come first, matter next, and their union last? Beatrice wants her listener to let go of precisely that sequence.

Three materials for a single instant

As a ray shines in glass, in amber or in crystal, with no interval between its coming and its being wholly there, so the threefold work of its Lord shone all at once into existence, with no difference in its beginning.

– Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, 1900, p. 352–353.^[1]

Beatrice names glass, amber and crystal. The comparison rests on an experience available to anyone who has held one of these translucent materials up to the light. As soon as a ray reaches the stone, the eye sees the light in it. Nobody watches it arrive and then has leisure to inspect the rest of the amber gradually lighting up. The poem gives the reader two moments to think about and no opportunity to distinguish one from the other by looking.

What language must take apart

Just before this, Dante has sent three arrows flying from a bow with three strings. It was possible there to picture three things sharing a single point of departure. In the amber even the supposed interval between beginning and being can disappear. That matters to Beatrice’s account of creation. Form, matter and the things compounded from them can be distinguished in thought. None had to wait for another to be finished. Counting seconds would miss the point. Beatrice needs an experience in which our habitual “first” and “then” briefly lose their hold.