Of light and shadow

William Blake never spoke more truly than when he said, "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence." I have a print of his 'The Good and Evil Angels' hanging on my wall to remind me of this profound and inescapable truth. Whether we like it or not, we are all of us creatures of both darkness and light. It is folly and hubris to attempt to deny or repress the darker side of our nature. Without our shadow, without the chiaroscuro that reveals the planes and the masses of our personality, how could we know our true selves? Without knowledge of darkness, how could we choose the light? I do not mean "choose" in the radical and exclusive sense which one would choose between Manichean antinomies; I mean, rather, the creative act of self-definition, whereby we realise the vision of human freedom, and its corollary, the ideal of the dignity of man, bequethed to us by the Humanists of the Renaissance.

"O highest and most marvellous felicity of man!", declared Pico della Mirandola, "To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills ... Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit." But in order that it may bear this fruit, the seed needs both the darkness of the earth and the light of the sun. The power to act without the freedom to choose is blind. Freedom of choice without the power to act is an impotent wish. The light must learn from the dark, and the dark from the light. "Our antagonist is our helper", Burke tells us, "This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial." Without this inner conflict, where we are both our own antagonist and object, we do indeed risk becoming "superficial", by which I mean either insipid or gross; but, like most worthwhile human endeavours, this conflict carries risks of its own, and certainly cannot always be relied on to be "amicable".

It would be a mistake to regard darkness - or evil, if you prefer - as a passive or inert quality, from which one can borrow indiscriminately and with impunity. We should never forget that darkness is a living entity, with a dynamic of its own. And there is always a price to pay for the wisdom that we would seek, and particularly for the strength that we would draw, from the darker side of our personalities. Just as the light learns from the dark, so the dark learns from the light: it becomes subtle; it learns dissimulation and, above all, it learns patience; but this will never alter its fundamental nature. We should take care lest the strength of will we borrow to control ourselves and others be turned towards destruction, even our self-destruction, because this is the precipice to which the dynamic of darkness will inevitably draw us. And how does one fight will with will? If that from which we have been accustomed to draw our strength suddenly turns against us, where then are we to turn? True; every time we pull ourselves back from this precipice, we become stronger and wiser. But so, too, does our adversary. Like the "implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention" in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it remains ever watchful for the next opportunity to draw us over the edge. And I must be ready for the day when a dark volcanic island will emerge from the bright serene sea of my space, silence and solitude, and shatter once more the peace of my vita contemplativa.