“And God said, “Let there be light and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.”
Saint Augustine in his literal commentary on Genesis thinks this light refers to the angels. God is sharing His mind with them, His mind about creation and about man. The darkness refers to those angels who turn against their loving Creator. Lux (light) in Hebrew is masculine. Light illumines others, it shows them the way, it shows them what things should be and what they are. This is a masculine character which comes out in the intense thirst for truth in authentic men.
Philosophical and Theological Exposition
This light in the material order is the energy that is intrinsic to a potency, moves a potency to intelligibility in act. Once this awakens in the conscious order, it becomes in men and women the light of intelligibility, of being, of conscience, of faith, and in the afterlife, of Glory for those who are gifted to receive the divine Light. Physical light as Aristotle notes is the closest to spiritual agency, and this is why it becomes the analog for spiritual illumination. Human wonder is this light. It is spiritual energy. Both men and women share in it, but men are disposed to move it through lengthy difficulties that lead to insight, or lengthy accumulations of evidence that move toward reflective insight (see Lonergan’s Insight for more on reflective insight), and thus toward judgment and hence truth. That drive toward the spiritual operations of understanding and judgment requires strength and perseverance and through such perseverance one builds a landscape of understanding and judgment, which then attunes one to a horizon of beings, and the interrelations of beings, and it discovers their lower and higher orders that constitute a hierarchy of creation. This male disposition is what then builds an entire fund of knowledge and value that is passed on from one generation to the next.
One must remember that light is not merely for itself, but it seeks to illumine. Of course physical light does not need to illumine. When one shines a flashlight into the sky and there is nothing for it to illumine, one cannot really see the light. It seems like it is nothing. Only when an object falls into the path of the light does the light then illumine. In a similar fashion, the light of the mind seeks to find intelligibility in understanding and actuality in judgment. To state this somewhat poetically or descriptively, that which receives the light as a seed and is illumined by the light into a flower of understanding and truth, and shows off her meaning and beauty is the feminine element of the cosmos. And thus, light seeks to bring out the glory of the feminine. He is about her. And when the light of understanding and truth shines upon the authentic woman, then understanding and truth grow into a cedar of Lebanon.