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John Muir
The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly.
How an ordinary stone can become light
John Scottus Eriugena, a ninth-century Irish scholar at the West Frankish court, considers the language of light in his commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy. He turns for his example to things almost any reader will have seen. A stone or a piece of wood will serve. The small phrase meaning “for me” gives the statement a particular direction. Eriugena wishes to describe what an object can become for someone who takes the time to consider it.
A statement made in the first person
This stone or this piece of wood is a light to me. […]
– John Scottus Eriugena, Expositions on the Celestial Hierarchy, 1865, Expositiones, I, Sp. 129.[1]
A stone brings out the point especially well. Even a dark specimen with no sparkle can be light in this sense. An observer notices that something exists, that it has a particular shape and that it can be distinguished from some things and compared with others. Making distinctions discloses an order that a first glance may have missed. The light of which Eriugena speaks has something to do with the questions an observer can put to the object. They reach from the individual thing to the conditions that make it intelligible.
What an attentive eye can distinguish
Within the commentary this little experiment serves a theological reflection. Visible things can direct the mind towards an origin beyond its immediate grasp. Eriugena starts very low down, with something a passer-by could easily tread upon. That choice makes the passage unusually approachable. The first step requires no rare or transparent jewel. An ordinary stone will do, provided that someone begins to distinguish in it what a hurried eye had registered only as a patch of colour.
My First Summer in the Sierra · p. 319
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