To browse Academia. That is, they are used not for veracity but for fantasy, evidence not of a past presence of cameras, but of a futurity toward which they can propel their audiences.
The movement is by no means one-way. For some years, cinematographic use of flare in films like Lawrence of Arabia David Lean, had evoked extreme states of consciousness, even of divine light, and with it the long history of light in human affairs. We can only speculate about the meanings of light during the millennia preceding the scriptures of Babylon and Judaea. Somewhere around a half a million years ago human ancestors tamed fire Diamond Separating light from dark instigates creation in Genesis.
Before the fiat lux, the Earth was 'without form and void'. Formlessness, Augustine's imaginary interlocutor suggests Confessions XII: ; , already existed, and it was from this formlessness that God created the world, as later he would create Adam out of a handful of dust. For Erigena in the eighth century, omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt: all things that are, are lights.
In the De luce of the twelfth century divine Robert Grosseteste: …light, which is the first form in first created matter, extended itself at the beginning of time, multiplying itself an infinity of times through itself on every side and stretching out equally in every direction, dispersing with itself matter, which it was not able to desert, to such a great mass as the fabric of the cosmos. Grosseteste, quoted in MacKenzie 26 As the analogue to Divine Light which, Anselm had lamented, was by definition invisible , light pours form from God into creation.
While mystics sought to plunge into the darkness of unknowing in order to find their way back to the creator, Grosseteste attributed to light the making of form space as well as the governance of the heavens time to provide a model scientific and theological understanding of light's role in the moment of creation.
