UNITED GRAND LODGE OF ENGLAND

APPROVED ORATION

“DARKNESS VISIBLE”

Oration Number: OR08015

LEVEL: ADVANCED
Third Degree

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DARKNESS VISIBLE
If, as Fellow Crafts, we study the art of grammar and rhetoric we will recognise and
appreciate John Milton’s forceful oxymoron – “darkness visible” – all the more so as
this powerful juxtaposition of apparent opposites is echoed in the opening words of
the Charge after Raising in the Third Degree of our Masonic ritual – “Let me now beg
you to observe that the light of a Master Mason is darkness visible” – and clearly
resonates with Milton’s graphic depiction of Hell in Paradise Lost – “ … yet from
those flames , no light, but rather darkness visible, served only to discover sights of
woe.”

What insight might “darkness visible” impart to the newly raised Master Mason or
indeed to the Brethren at large who may have witnessed the ceremony many times?

John Milton was a learned academic and knew as many as ten languages including
Latin, Greek and Hebrew. His poetry displays a powerful imagery and semantic
craftsmanship and, when Paradise Lost was finally committed to paper in 1674, it
was by the hand of Milton’s secretary as the poet was by then totally blind. With such
a strong command of language and etymology at his disposal and an intensified
hearing awareness of the power of metaphor and image, Milton must have known that
“dark” derives from the Old English “deorc”1 meaning “hidden”. Nowadays we may
acknowledge that what is in darkness is also hidden but darkness or obscurity itself
surely always requires light to dis-cover or uncover what it conceals, namely, in
Paradise Lost, “sights of woe”. Yet we have already been told that there is no light in
Hell, only “darkness visible”. Writing with a strong puritanical agenda and zeal at a
time when paganism was still prevalent in popular consciousness, Milton must
emphasise that the Hell into which Satan is falling has no light, as light is the symbol
of the divine and God is absent from Hell. “Darkness visible” may therefore, in a
Miltonic sense, be a palpable force of positive opposition to lightness but still capable
of being revealed or disclosed to the uninitiated listener or reader as a place of
unimaginable horror.

Some 50 years after Milton’s death, at the beginning of the age of reason and
“enlightenment” – one of the many words Milton introduced into the modern English
1
pronounced “DeWrk”

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language – we see his paradoxical phrase being again repeated, this time by Alexander
Pope who, in his mock epic The Dunciad, challenges Milton’s Puritanism and
describes the light of reason as “one dim ray of light” – another resonance of the
Third Degree ceremony – and “darkness visible, so much be lent, as half to show, half
veil the deep intent”.

Some 300 years later, Carl Jung also concerns himself with mankind’s paradoxes and
reveals the power and subtlety of a crafted image – “It does not define or explain; it
points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined but is still beyond our grasp
and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language”. In this
sense, a symbol may be said to belong to two worlds: the world of every day and the
world of the inner unconscious – in other words, just as Pope had presaged – “to half
show, half veil the deep intent”, to speak to our whole personality, to lead us towards
an experience of insight.

In our Masonic ritual, the candidate is asked to contemplate his own mortality, even
perhaps to study the dark recesses of his undiscovered self and to face his own
shadow before he can begin to discover and live out his own essential truth. Reason
alone – “one dim glimmering ray of light” – is, however, not of itself sufficient to
illumine the soul. Something more is required to permeate the darkness and it is
provided by the collective support of the Lodge. As Brethren, all our sensory
awareness is focussed on the seminal moment of the candidate being raised from a
figurative death and supine helplessness. Now the living symbol unleashes its psychic
energy, but the moment of concentration must be intense as the candidate is enjoined
to see the world not just with his eyes but through his entire being – “let me now BEG
you to observe that the light of a Master Mason is DARKNESS VISIBLE”, divinely
and intuitively inspired, that is darkness made light but not from without but from
above or within, like Kubler-Ross’ stained glass windows – “their true beauty is
revealed only when there is light from within.” This is light which comprehends the
darkness, makes it conscious and is the real moment of intended transformation in the
ritual.

For many of us walking the chequered pavement of life, the deeper mysteries of what
the Masonic ritual may reveal can remain concealed or at least still partially obscured
for prolonged periods of time. Sometimes the darkness of night itself seems endless
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and often the pre-dawn the blackest of all; and yet, conversely, the night can
sometimes yield our most luminous moments of rational, emotional or even spiritual
clarity.

Milton intended both to shock and inform by his symbolic portrayal of angels falling
into a dark and ghastly black void. Happily the fall is later reversed in his epic poem
through God’s grace and redemption and the status regained is even higher than
before. Similarly, in our Masonic ritual, the enigmatic phrase retains its potency and
can lead us towards a deeper understanding of what it means to acknowledge our own
foibles and weakness and to step barefoot into reality by accepting the dark as our
own darkness. Once raised, the candidate is enabled to square up to life’s challenges,
fortified by the support of his Brethren, and to look death, whenever it might come,
straight in the face and to live without reserve or condition in the present. Once
realised, this is the only way to address and live out the second half of life but it is
only a realisation that may dawn once we have drunk sufficiently from life’s cup,
experienced life’s joys and sorrows, reflected upon them and, by then, probably
having participated in many raising ceremonies along the path towards Milton’s
concept of “enlightenment”. He also first coined the word “zeal” which is another
essential Masonic attribute belonging to all who remain confident in and faithful to
the ultimate sovereignty of the numinous and sacred – that “bright morning star” and
its regenerative and restorative power.

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