On pretty much any street corner in New York you can buy one of those knockoff Coach handbags. Everyone knows they’re not the real thing. And just the fact that they’re sitting there in the open air for $12.99 (or whatever they go for) tarnishes the brand. But people buy them. Because, truth be told, the shimmering ideal represented by the Coach brand isn’t found on the shelves of Saks Fifth Avenue either. No actual bag, no matter how expensive, no matter how beautifully lit from above and below, fully captures it. The brand lives on a plane all of its own, forever unattainable. It reminds me of Plato’s theory of forms. Remember that? From high school or college? Plato’s theory of forms says that everything in the real world has a corresponding ideal version in the world of ideas. This “ideal” version is called the “form.” So a handbag is a particular example of the general idea or form of Handbag with a capital “H.” And to Plato, any actual thing is inferior to the form. The form is primary; everything in our world is just a flawed, derivative knockoff. Things in this world change, they come, they go. The form is eternal and unchanging. Take love, as another example. You have love as we know it between people in our world and then you have “Platonic” love. That’s what that term comes from – it’s Plato’s pure ideal, unsullied with real life.
Biblical literalists get all into a tizzy about the creation of the sun and moon and stars on the fourth day. You can see why. On the first day we learn that God made light and then separated the light from the darkness, which made day and night. Then on the fourth day, for some bewildering reason, God makes lights in the rakiya (the dome of the sky) to shed light on the earth and to separate between day and night. Wasn’t that already done? Hadn’t there already been three whole days, each with an evening and a morning? If we already had light, why did we need lights? So the literalists twist themselves into pretzels and publish all kinds of explanations for how this is really not the problem that it seems to be.
What they miss, in my view, is that even for the ancient people who wrote this story, it wasn’t meant to be a linear scientific narrative. It was theology. It was about our relationship to God and the nature of the universe. And, it was politics. This is a bit of an aside, but this creation story was part of a bigger conversation with the other civilizations of the ancient Near East. In fact, it was a diatribe against them. Many cultures back 3000 years ago believed that the sun and moon and all the other forces of nature were gods. They had to be worshipped and appeased; they had mood swings of anger and benevolence. There were sea monsters. The ancient Babylonian creation myth features a great sea monster and you’ll see next month that the Biblical text has God specifically creating sea monsters. By having the Hebrew God create all the forces of nature, they were basically saying, “Our God is the one God, and that God created your sea monsters and your sun and your moon and your stars and all y’all!” It was theology and it was politics.
On the fourth day of creation we see a huge shift in what God is up to. The first half of the story is basically about the creation of the four elements: fire on the first day, water and air on the second day, and earth on the third day, along with plants. So by the end of day three, you have a world with these four basic building blocks in place. It’s almost as if the first half of the creation story is about the elements in their Platonic form. They exist in some rarified, pure state, untarnished but also unrealized. Now there’s a different kind of project: to give those elements their full-bodied, real-life, earthly, particular expression. If you take days one, two, and three, and pair them up with days four, five, and six, you’ll see that there’s a correspondence between the pairs. Day one is fire; day four is the sun, moon, and stars. Day two is water and air; day five is fish and birds. Day three is earth; day six is the land animals, including humans.
The Biblical authors needed to make some transition between the bare elements themselves and the lived world as we experience it. They probably thought of the fire, water, air and earth as physical but they were kind of like primary season campaign speeches – utterly lacking in real world specificity. And so on the fourth day, primordial light as a diffuse, sourceless luminescence that had nothing to do with us got localized, concentrated, and distilled into the sun and the moon and the stars. Our sun that warms our faces and grows our flowers. Our moon that we saw in the faintest, most beautiful sliver last week. Our stars in the night sky at which we gaze in wonder. These luminaries were created for the benefit of the humans who would come later. It says, “Let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to shed light on the earth.” The form of “Light” now became our light. It was the consummation of the creative act from the first day.
Did it really need to take four days to get here? Couldn’t God have just skipped a step and created the luminaries from the get-go? In other words, does Plato’s form have any use if you can just have the actual object? Think again of a bag – any kind of bag. A three year old could tell you that it’s a bag, even if she’s never seen that particular bag before. Whether it’s a Coach bag, a plastic bag, a backpack, a WNYC tote bag, any color, any size, any fabric, that three year old is going to look at it and say, “that’s a bag.” Because she has a pre-existing understanding of the essence or form of “bag-ness.” Each bag somehow expresses the form or else it wouldn’t be a bag. It would just be a crumpled object with no meaning at all. The form, the idea, gives meaning to reality.
On the other hand, if you have only the form and no actual bag, you’ve got nothing to put your stuff in. If you have only the light from day one and not the lights from day four, you’ve got no months and no years, no winter, no spring, no summer, no fall. No light filtering through leaves, no shadows, no sparkling on the ocean. The world would be a flat and static place. The difference between Plato and what I think is the message of the creation story is that to Plato the form is the highest ideal and the real world is forever running to catch up. Whereas in creation, the diversity and depth and imperfections that arise when ideas becomes real are the most beautiful things. They are what make life worth living. Creation is never consummated until the idea comes to fruition in lived experience.
For the world to be what it is today requires both the first three days and the second three days. We need both when we do creative work (and I’m thinking artistic creativity, business creativity, science, public policy-making, childrearing, building and making things). We need to create both the Platonic form that is the repository of meaning and vision and we need the real life nitty-gritty expression of it. The two will never be the same and the latter is messy. It changes. It varies. It grows. It falters. Once you leave the ethereal world of pure elemental thought-vision and come crashing into our atmosphere, all hell breaks loose. Things break, they don’t work like they’re supposed to, people don’t cooperate with your plan, people get hurt, you get hurt.
And oh boy, the politics of doing stuff in the real world. The ancients knew all about this too. According to rabbinic folklore, even God got into some political hot water while starting the real, real world on the fourth day. The text says that God created “two great luminaries: the great luminary to rule the day and the lesser luminary to rule the night.” Well, in this folk tale, the moon did not like this one bit. It did not want to be a “lesser luminary,” thank you very much, and made its objections loud and clear. After much wrangling and negotiation, God tried to appease the moon by making the stars as kind of attendants, hosts that would add to its shimmer. The moon remained disgruntled.
It’s so much easier to stay in the nice, safe realm of ideas. It’s so much easier to imagine a baby – round and soft and cuddly and giggling – than to actually have a baby – round and soft and cuddly and giggling and crying, pooping, throwing up on your clothes, maybe having health problems, maybe keeping you up all night unable to tell you what’s wrong. It’s so much easier to imagine getting a new job than it is to do what it takes to get one and then adjust to a new culture and a new boss and new colleagues, some of whom are pains in the butt. It’s so much easier to back seat drive than to front seat drive; to tell others what ought to be done than to try to do it ourselves; to argue and debate endlessly rather than to make an imperfect decision and get it done. There’s an old joke about Unitarian Universalists that says that when we die, there’ll be a fork in the road with one sign pointing to heaven and one sign pointing to a discussion about heaven – and of course we choose the discussion about heaven. It’s so much easier to talk about something where it stays pure than to do something where it gets messy.
We can take a message from this fourth day of creation that the real world here is the one where we ought to be. Though it’s tempting to stay in the zone of great ideas and big thoughts or hang back and criticize what others are doing, creation is never consummated until the idea comes to fruition in lived experience. Take the plunge, take some chances, have less patience for your own excuses. You know those dreams about your life that have been percolating for decades? Try them out. Invite in the messiness and the complexity and the imperfections, the ups and the downs, the changes and the inconsistencies. Because that’s what life on this planet under our sun and our moon and our stars is all about. Plato was wrong. This world is not some cheap street vender knockoff of an ideal real world. This world is the realest world there is. It is our home. And it is beautiful. The text teaches that after creating the luminaries, God looked at it all and “God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning: a fourth day.”