As a child, I remember how I was always intrigued by shadows. How, when we are hit by strong light, we cast a shadow, a clingy dark silhouette. Even at that young age, I tried to understand how the shadow could only depend upon the light, how it moves with us and with every change of the light’s angle. Yet, the shadow belongs not to the light but to the night.
Like most children, we were raised to fear the dark. We rushed home at sundown afraid, as mother would tell us, that we might be caught by monsters that lurk in the dark. The ungo, wakwak, manananggal, sigbin, kapre, and the dark-skinned agta, all scary characters in my lola’s stories, would start to emerge as the sun dipped in the horizon.
We retreated to the house and huddled around the lampara, whose faint light would make our shadows appear like giants on the walls. That’s how I began to fear my own shadow. It seemed to belong to the world of darkness, like a dark ghost attached to me.
So, in our young minds, we understood the dualism of adult morality: light is good and night is evil. White is pure and black is impure. Angels are dazzling in their white skin, wings and robes while the devil is dark red like burning coals, naked and having a tail and bat-like wings.
We studied Fernando Amorsolo’s drawing on the label of the kuwatro kantos of the Archangel Gabriel shining in his armor about to slay the devil lying down naked on the flames under him.
Yet I wondered why such drawing would decorate the bottle of a drink that often brings out the worst in those who drink it. A popular beer would also be named after the Archangel.
Soon we adopted this way of looking at the world as black and white or good and evil, without fully knowing its implications. It made us look up to light-skinned people, among them foreign missionaries who came to our house to talk to our parents about God and salvation, which seemed convincing as they spoke in the language of the book they carried.
At the same time, we tended to look down on dark-skinned people, particularly the Mamanwa natives who also visited our house to beg for food. In fact, we tend to think that all dark-skinned people were unsophisticated. We laugh at all those jokes about them, particularly those on TV.
And all that could be traced to the idea of light as might or right and darkness as weak or evil.
Light stands for that which makes things known or intelligible. Darkness is suspect for it implies something unknown, something mysterious, something unpredictable. Light means security.
Darkness means danger.
Illumination symbolizes reason or knowledge. Darkness, on the other hand, stands for emotion and ignorance. Yet, it never occurred to us that what we know by reason is limited. Light never really reaches every nook and cranny. Even in the strongest light, there would still be shadows.
What we know then by the light of reason remains finite. It cannot account for that great part of reality that remained shrouded in mystery. It cannot account for God, who is beyond rational understanding. It cannot account for the complexities of love and the depths of other human passions.
That is why the great mystics of ancient times often use the metaphor of darkness in describing God. Dionysius the Areopagite challenged the classical and Christian notion of God as Divine Reason and Light and proposed instead to call God as Divine Darkness. Darkness best describes the failure of the human intellect to shed light on the mystery of the Divine.
St. John of the Cross also called God the “night of the soul”. In fact, he thought that in reaching God, the soul had to go through three “nights”: the first is the night of the senses or the purgation of all kinds of sensual pleasure; the second is faith or the night of understanding or the failure of reason to penetrate the divine; lastly is God who remains veiled in mystery, as the night to the human soul on earth.
If light symbolizes knowledge, night stands for the unknown or the unknowable. Light stands for all the achievements of rational thinking, for our claims on certainty. Darkness represents that which is unknown, unknowable, and what we simply refuse to know. It also represents that which we chose to omit or deny or things about ourselves we keep in the dark.
So what is illuminated is what is obvious, but much of what is true hides in shadows. We are scared of the night not so much for the mythical monsters that it may hide. We are scared because those monsters could be truths about ourselves we refuse to acknowledge. Escaping from the night to follow us wherever we go is our shadow.
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