Eternal Light, Eternal Light!

Thomas Binney, 1826

When the prophet Isaiah was shown the Holy One and the six-winged angels about his throne, veiling their faces and crying out, “Holy, holy, holy!” he thought he was a dead man, because it was as the Lord said to Moses, “No man can see my face and live.” And yet the Psalmist cries, “Show us, O Lord, thy mercy, and grant us thy salvation.” You might say, “All that means is that we want the Lord to be merciful to us.” Ah, not so fast. The Hebrew verb there is the causative form of the verb to see, so that what he’s asking is that the Lord will cause him to see his mercy. And elsewhere, in one of the most glorious psalms attributed to David, the Lord gives this command: “Seek my face,” to which David replies, “Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” I find this to be all the more powerful, in that the Hebrews were forbidden to make any images of God. Everybody else around them had images of their gods to gawk at or to cower in front of, but the Hebrews did not, and for all that people chatter about “anthropomorphism” in the Old Testament vision of God, there really is almost none of it, only such as is necessary to make it possible to say anything at all about Him. You could squeeze all the anthropomorphism from the entire Old Testament and it wouldn’t fill up a single Homeric hymn to Zeus.

The most pious Greek could look at statues of Zeus and Athena all day long, but he never strove to see them in person — what would have been the point? But God, whom man cannot see, who is “hidden in inaccessible light,” calls upon us to search for him. How can that happen? “Show us the Father,” says Philip to Jesus, and Jesus, perhaps with a sigh and a shake of the head, asks Philip how long he’s been with him and still he doesn’t understand — if you look upon Jesus, you see the Father through him. Milton says so, not only about human beings, but about the angels themselves. Even when the Father shades the full blaze of his glory, the brightest of the seraphim “approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes,” yet through the Son, whose countenance looks forth upon them, they can see the Almighty, “whom else no creature can behold.” And that is the inspiration for our Hymn of the Week, “Eternal Light, Eternal Light,” by Thomas Binney, a British congregationalist minister. Binney was called “The Apostle of Nonconformity” for his striving to disestablish the Anglican Church; he was also one of the most tireless fighters for the abolition of slavery wherever the institution still existed.

You might expect Binney’s hymn, then, to be all about social matters, and he certainly did write about those, but ours today instead is about how God can show himself to man — to mortal man, living in a fallen world, man with dim eyes and a double heart. Yet even if we were as innocent as Adam and Eve before they ate the forbidden fruit, how could we bear the full weight of God’s glory? We’re creatures, not the Creator. We live in time, not above time in eternity. We can hardly think of more than one thing at a time, but God views all things at one view. Nor does God wish to force himself upon us. Love does not compel. “Freely we serve,” says Milton’s Raphael to Adam, “because we freely love.”

Love is the key — the love of Jesus, the face of Jesus. “Where there is love, there is an eye,” said the mystic Richard of St. Victor, a pure soul if there ever was one. It isn’t just that we see what is good and beautiful, and fall in love with it. It is also that unless we love, we will not see. Love opens the eyes. So we can imagine Jesus looking on Philip not only with a touch of perfectly understandable disappointment, but also with love for his simplicity and his open heart. And that is what this hymn is all about.

There are four main melodies for the hymn. Two of them — they are not the same — are called Eternal Light, composed specifically for it. They are not as common as Newcastle, composed by an otherwise unknown organist named Henry L. Morley, who perhaps gave the melody its name in honor of Reverend Binney, who was born at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. (It may be that Henry Morley was a brother or cousin of the notable member of Parliament, Samuel Morley, one of Gladstone’s most important assistants, and a member also of Binney’s congregation in London.) But my favorite melody for the hymn is REPTON, a beautiful and meditative melody we’ve featured here, for Whittier’s hymn Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.

Today’s hymn, set to the tune Newcastle, is sung by the congregation of the Tabernacle Church, in Cardiff, Wales. Click below to listen.

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. We value all of our subscribers, and we thank you for reading Word and Song!

Eternal Light! eternal Light!
How pure that soul must be,
When, placed within thy searching sight,
It shrinks not, but with calm delight
Can live, and look on thee.

The spirits that surround thy throne
May bear the burning bliss,
But that is surely theirs alone,
Since they have never, never known
A fallen world like this.

O how shall I, whose native sphere
Is dark, whose mind is dim,
Before the Ineffable appear,
And on my naked spirit bear
The uncreated beam?

There is a way for man to rise
To that sublime abode:
An offering and a sacrifice,
A Holy Spirit's energies,
An Advocate with God:

These, these prepare us for the sight
Of holiness above:
The sons of ignorance and night
May dwell in the eternal Light,
Through the eternal Love!

---