We can measure light, to some extend control it, and for those of us blessed with sight, use it to see, to navigate through life and to shine its beams upon things we love to behold. But its origin in the fearful cauldron of the sun should give us pause. It reminds us that fire, heat and light are also dangerous, like the flames stolen from heaven by the Titan Prometheus – both a boon and a bane to its human beneficiaries.
I wish, however, to focus on intellectual illumination, the sort of thing that happens when a light goes off in our head, or when we “see” the point of a joke and laugh, or when we celebrate cultural sophistication or even spiritual realization with the term “enlightenment.” And I am thinking about those who are spectacularly endowed with this kind of light, the ones Americans would hence call “brilliant.”
I read books and hear talks by many extraordinarily gifted minds. And something has become more and more evident over the years as I absorb the words of these luminaries; it has to do with intellectual light. Those who are powerfully gifted with great insight almost always display both rather paradoxical dimensions of light – the bane as well as the boon. Their endowments allow them to see things the rest of us, less graced with brilliance, cannot see. Thus, we are able to learn many and various things from them. But the very intensity of the light that allows them to see with such penetration can also – I will say almost inevitably – blind them to matters outside the province of their particular insights. They will either continue to hold forth with supposed authority on issues they know little about, or simply be blissfully unaware of a host of conditions and qualifications that would seriously compromise their tendency to simply extrapolate on the things they do understand.
Fortunately, the virtue of humility can reduce this danger considerably, and I am happy to say that there are some great thinkers (Aquinas, Newman and Chesterton come to mind) who exhibit this safeguard to an extraordinary degree. But, regrettably, they are few and far between.