There are two kinds of dark, and most of your life you have only known one of them. The dark you were taught to fear. The dark where you can't see, so you fill it with whatever frightens you. But there is another one, and the old mystics gave it a strange name. They called it a divine darkness. And they did not mean the shadow at all.
Start with the first dark, because it's honest and it's ours. Hall is plain about it. Darkness, he says, is not something set against the light — it is only an area of the common place upon which the light of fact has not yet been cast. Ground not yet lit. That's all. We stand at the edge of what we don't know, and because we can't see into it, we people it with danger, and then we grow afraid of our own guessing.
So the shadow is never really an enemy. It's ignorance — the plain human condition of not yet knowing, the state the soul wanders in before the dawn. And the answer to it is not war. You don't defeat a dark room by fighting it. You carry a light in. Wisdom, in Hall's telling, is exactly that patience — to carry the light inward rather than declare war on the dark.
But the mystics spoke of a second darkness, and this one is not below the light. It's above it.
Every seeker who has gone far inward has come to a stretch that St. John of the Cross named the dark night of the soul. Hall borrows the phrase openly. It marks the point where the comforts of the outer world have dropped away, and the inner one hasn't arrived. The old props of the self are gone. The reward is not yet in hand. And it is dark — not because something evil has entered, but because nothing familiar has survived the crossing.
Here's the thing Hall is careful to say. The seeker in that night is not being punished. He is being emptied. Emptied so that reality can be revealed from within, instead of argued from without. The dark is not a wall. It's a clearing. Everything you could hold has been set down, so that at last your hands are open.
And what is it, this thing that is too bright to be seen as light?
Follow the Neoplatonists, as Hall does. Above every particular thing there is the One — the totality of all being, the seed from which every intellect and every soul comes, and to which they all return. And Hall keeps it deliberately nameless. He calls it the unknown God, beyond count and quality. Not because it is empty. Because it is too full. To give it a name is already to divide it, and to divide it is already to falsify it.
Think of what that means for the eye. A small light you can look at. A candle, a lamp — you take it in, you hold it. But the sun you cannot look at. Not because it is dark. Because it is more light than the eye was built to carry. Stare at it and you see black. That black is not the absence of the sun. It is the sun, met by an eye too small for it.
That is the divine darkness. Not the shadow at the bottom of things — the glory at the top of them. And this is why the traditions guard it with the language of night. When they say God dwells in thick darkness, when the mystic goes into the cloud and the silence, they are not describing evil, and they are not describing a pit. They are describing a light so complete that the mind goes quiet in front of it, the way the eye goes dark in front of the sun.
So be careful never to confuse the two. The shadow is a room you haven't lit yet — go in, bring the light. But the holy darkness is the opposite errand. There you are not the one carrying the light. There you are the one being flooded by it, past the edge of what you can hold, until the small self that wanted to see everything finally stops trying, and lets itself be seen.
That's the whole difference. One dark you walk into with a lamp. The other, you walk into empty-handed, and it fills you.
And notice — nothing in either one is against you. The first dark is only waiting to be known. The second is only too much good to be measured. There is no pit in this. There never was.
So the next time you come to a dark you cannot explain, ask which one it is. If it's the low dark, light it. But if it's the high one — if the quiet you've walked into is somehow more than you, not less — don't be afraid, and don't look for the shadow. You've come to the edge of the sun. Close the eye that wanted to stare, and let the warmth tell you the rest.