The Light of the World is Giles' thesis project from Harvard Divinity School

 

Introduction: Ones, Twos, and Threes


In 2003, I walked into a graduate level plant physiology class on the first day of school, and, by looking around, I knew right away I had stepped into an unfamiliar world. My initial foray into plant science, the semester before, had been an undergraduate course on botany-general plant science-and it was populated with the same cross-section of people you would get in an undergraduate anthropology class-faded ball caps, practical backpacks, jeans. This was different. I could tell, almost by smell, that I was surrounded by scientists, and by that I mean people who could draw molecular structures and solve physics equations that involved multivariable calculus. I can do neither of those things. I am a theology student. The fact that the teacher, Missy Holbrook, had become a friend of mine during my struggle through the previous semester, was a comfort, but not one that alleviated my nerves about my ability to understand what was going on in the class. When Missy-- a sandy-haired plant physiologist whose muted, baggy clothes contradict both her professional stature and her pulsing intensity as a teacher-- spoke for the first time, my fears were both confirmed and partially mitigated. She confirmed that the class would involve a lot of chemistry, because it is an indispensable language of description when dealing with plants at a cellular level. But she also said-- pointing at me-- that her main concern was neither that we solved the physics equations perfectly nor that we nailed the chemistry, but that we learned to "think like plants". That innocuous little phrase stuck with me.

 

For some reason it comforted me on the first day of class, assuming as I did at the time that I could think like a plant as well as the next person, maybe even better than the bio-engineering assassin at the end of the table who was twirling a $300 pen.

As time wore on, though, the idea of "thinking like a plant" became an obsession and in many ways is still the focus of my interest in plant science. How can a human being think like a plant? Do plants even think? The most we can do, it seems, is to think like human beings trying to think like plants. And what's the point of that? Wouldn't it be more useful to just think deeply, as human beings, about what plants mean to us? I later came to the conclusion that to think like a plant is an analogy, a metaphor, for the epistemological dilemma of human existence, which, like Jacob and the angel, is what I study theology to wrestle. For that reason the question grabbed me, hit me hard, and still hits me hard when I least expect it. How can we think as if we are outside of ourselves, as beings fundamentally different from ourselves? Without doing just that, how can we understand the things that exist beyond our ability to experience them-like plants, death, spirit, God? I wonder if Missy tricked us on that day. I wonder further whether all botanists, like theologians, aren't in some ways chasing the same mystery latent in the problem Missy posed to us.

I am about to tell a story about the science of photosynthesis and I'm going to claim that the story I tell is related to my spiritual journey. I'm also going to bring in as witnesses three Greek-speaking mystics, so-called church fathers, who wrote fifteen hundred years ago about Christianity as they understood it. Even as I sit here writing, the absurdity of my project stares back at me like a third grader with too many questions. Part of me wants to tell you to drop the paper, to save you the trouble of reading it and tell you right off that all I'm going to be doing over the course of the next hundred or so pages is to pose the same problem that Missy posed to me when she told me to think like a plant. But the stronger part of me is hissing in my ear that what I'm working through is still so raw to me-that it still sticks in me with the same driving pleasure and pain as the first time I thought about it-that it has to be important in some way to somebody else. I will not try to convince you that anything I write is "true" or that I'm "right" about anything. Instead I'm going to write down a story about light, water, and life, and about how they come together in plants. I will write about how we as humans have always watched this interaction with an amazement that is significant in itself, not merely proportional to the fact that our lives actually depend on the light-harvesting reactions forever taking place in the leaves around us.

Incidentally, as your door prize, I also hope to offer you some amusement as I write, because I'm inviting you to walk with me-a theologian and not a scientist-as I struggle through the contemporary science of photosynthesis. While I hope my own lack of training will make the struggle humorous at times, I undertake it for the crucial purpose of becoming, for those of you who would never pick up a science textbook, an analogy. You'll see why I think that's so important a little later on, for now let me tell you a bit about my credentials.

I did well in Mr. Carroll's 9th grade biology class, extremely well if I do say so myself. But beyond that my record with science has been dubious at best. I skipped 10th grade chemistry because technically only two full-year science classes were required at my high school (though three were recommended if you intended to go to college and have a good life afterwards). I didn't take another science class until 12th grade when I took Physics and escaped with a solid C. My greatest achievements in that class were painting the south wall of the lab in exchange for skipping class and receiving the descriptive grade of "omelet fodder" as a result of my lackluster performance in the annual egg-drop contest, during which students attempt to land an egg safely from a three-story drop with only paper, tape and straws as their resources. In college I took Physics For Poets, which, by the way, was not at all poetic; it was hard as hell. I worked for my C in that class, or at least Sergei, my Russian lab supervisor worked for it, since I usually floundered around until his only choice was to stay late or to do my procedures for me. I built on that solid showing by getting a B in "Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Other Hazards." This course was exactly as easy as it sounds but not nearly as exciting. I only went to the lecture when I could not possibly think of something better to do, and even then, as I listened to the red-faced gray hair (who supposedly came up with the idea of plate tectonics in the 60s) sputter through a lecture, I spent most of my time trying to decide whether given the choice I would rather be an earthquake, a volcano, or an "other hazard." So here lies before you my academic record as a scientist. Keep it in mind as I lead you forward through the cellular science of photosynthesis as it is presented in three chapters of a graduate level textbook. Deep down I still take comfort in the fact that I can think like a plant as well as the next person, maybe even better.

My professional modesty only extends so far as the science in this paper. The rest of this project is massively ambitious and I wouldn't start it if I didn't think I could finish it. My confidence stems in no small part from my training as a theologian with specific course work in Greek language and Patristic authors. Also, I have the experience of my own spiritual journey. I think of myself dealing with this subject matter as a mountain guide. I'm confident in my abilities but I respect and fear the elements I'm dealing with, and I know that I have to rely on you as much as you rely on me. Over the course of this paper, as you follow my footsteps, think of yourself walking up a steep trail cut into the rock face. On your right is a sheer drop, as beautiful as it is terrifying. This is my view of the science we are studying. On your left rises the rock face your fingers grasp, at once solid/safe and slippery/dangerous. This is my view of the theology we are studying. In between them the path unfurls like a red ribbon. Your only choice in reading this paper is whether you want to stay on it or get off. Stay and trust me and we'll go somewhere together. That's my invitation.


The purpose of this introduction is to detail my project conceptually and to present to you, my reader, the characters of this story. You'll notice that I cut back and forth between theological summaries and fairly dense pieces of scientific narrative. This may be incredibly annoying to you at first, but hang in there please. I think the juxtaposition of the two narratives is the only way to show them as analogies for one another. More on that later. Now to the introductions.

First the two protagonists, Light and the Plant. Then on to the numbers One, Two, and Three as symbols of understanding. Then to Origen, Gregory, Dionysius, and the chloroplast. I've thought a lot about the order of their appearance. Should the drums, the guitar, or the bass start a rock song? But since we've already started with the problem of thinking like a plant, let's scrape away at some of the fundamental identity issues at stake in this process by introducing the Plant.

The Plant I am describing is not a specific plant but, like a stage character, it is a personality amalgam of many, a synthesis of plant characteristics. In addition, one of the peculiarities of this paper is that I'm really going to be focused on the intra-cellular life of the plant, particularly the functioning of the chloroplast, a semi-autonomous organism that lives inside a plant cell and assimilates the energy of the sun. Since plants are essentially modular, and their parts reflect their wholes, their macrocosms their microcosms, I'm going to try to shrink the world of the plant into focus around the primary reactions of photosynthesis. But before I do that I want you to understand how and why plants are modular in a way that we as humans are not biologically.
Let's start with the basic differences between plants and animals at the cellular level. You are an animal full of animal cells. The plant cell, unlike the animal cell, has a rigid cell wall-meaning that every plant cell has a strong structural wall made of cellulose around it by which it is attached to other plant cells. When I first heard this fact, I was not immediately struck by its implications, so I wouldn't blame you if you just said "so what?" But a corollary to having a rigid cell wall is that plant cells are stationary. They cannot move. Why? Because they are locked in by their walls and the walls of the cells around them-think of rooms in a house or compartments in a honeycomb. Animal cells can move; your blood is an example.

A second corollary is that plant cells are "not highly differentiated" and they are "indeterminate." Welcome to science textbook language, as specific as it is non-descriptive. Calling a plant cell "indeterminate" is a succinct way of saying that plant cells can and do grow throughout their lifetimes while animal cells, like animals, grow to maturity and stay there until they die. Read: plants never stop growing!

To say that plant cells are "not highly differentiated" is a backwards way of stating a cataclysmic difference between plants and animals that is hard to talk about. Plant cells, being stationary, cannot react to (control) their environments by moving. Plant cells have to be highly adaptable and in our terms they sacrifice specialization for this end. This means that plant cells all carry the same genetic tools and can potentially change their shapes and functions in reaction to their environments and to signals received from their neighbors. Research on stem cells in animals is a human attempt to artificially gain access to some small amount of the potential power of cells that are "not highly differentiated". So three main differences: rigid cell walls, indeterminacy, and no high differentiation. These are cellular distinctions but they work on the organismic level too. Plants cannot move. They are always growing, changing shape, adapting, and regenerating in response to their stationary nature. Imagine yourself buried up to your neck in sand at the beach and eating sunlight? Think you could make it work?

All three of the facts I listed above can be distilled into one conceptual message. Plants are modular and decentralized where animals are specialized and centralized. This message is a conscious oversimplification of the situation intended at this moment to de-emphasize our similarities with plants. There are similarities: for example, when you touch a hot stove, the message to move does not come from your brain but travels directly across your nerve pathways from sense mechanism to motor mechanism. But there is a very real difference between an organism that has a central nervous system and an organism that doesn't even have a center. A plant's brain, if plants have brains, exists in every one of its cells or between all of them. To turn this into a sick joke that conveys some of the semantic complication of writing this paper, a plant could never, as the result of trauma, become a vegetable.

This paper will be organized into three chapters. In my first chapter I am going to look at how the basic differences between plants and animals are brought to bear in the study of the chloroplast, the part of the plant that conducts the molecular reactions of photosynthesis, and how the function of the chloroplast during photosynthesis can describe what Origen of Alexandria (185 CE-255 CE) has to say about the relationship between God, humanity, and creation. It was Origen's curiosity about the relationships in the universe that led him to produce the set of ideas that later theologians considered the first comprehensive Christian cosmology in his work On First Principles. Cosmologies are attempts to explain in abstract terms how and why we, as humans, exist and where we go after we die by relating our individual experiences to the eternal story of the world. Most Christian cosmologies start with Creation and end with Judgment Day. In my first chapter I'm going to say, basically, that the modular organization of plants creates a unique part/whole relationship that is on one hand alien to humans in their relationship to humanity, and, on another hand, is the basis for all metaphor and allegory, our most basic means for describing things we cannot directly experience. Origen, hip to this fact in the third century of the first millennium of this era, created a system of understanding Christian scripture in terms of systematic cosmological allegory in order to teach his readers how to make sense of this paradoxical relationship between part and whole, between human and humanity. I just threw a few terms at you. Please use them if they are helpful, but if they aren't just close your eyes and dig into the pictures I give you; they tell the same story. The basis for any analogy is a belief that all things are, at some level of understanding, alike, because everything comes from and returns to the same source. For Origen, as we will see, this idea is scripturally anchored to a quotation concerning the resurrection from St. Paul's letters (1 Cor. 15:28) where he claims in the end "God may be all in all." I won't break it down for you now, but just to say my first chapter is about the number One, and how all things have a relationship through this number and yet are alienated by it. One of the fundamental tenets of One-ness is that it is not observable. You cannot stand outside of one and look at it if you are a part of it. Or can you?


Neither you nor I can look at anything at all without light. It is around us, above us, maybe within us. It is so basic that it cannot be described. But our bodies, as far as we know, cannot metabolize sunlight directly. Plants metabolize it for us. If we did it ourselves maybe we would understand light better and be able to talk about how it works to feed us. As things stand today, in the absence of a spiritual tradition focused on light, science gives us the best language of description for the fundamental mystery of light. Let's take a minute to talk about how the mystery of light plays out in scientific discourse.

Light possesses the properties of both a wave and a particle. This fact is the basis for quantum physics and it defines light as a scientific paradox. In wave form, light energy arrives on earth in a spectrum of different intensities described by their wavelengths-the shorter the wavelength the more energy the light carries. In particle form, light energy arrives on earth in discreet packages called photons, whose energy levels correspond to the wavelengths of the waves of light the photons associate with. The significance of this paradox is both fundamental to the understanding of life and beyond understanding. How can we define something by way of two otherwise mutually exclusive properties? Both Wave and Particle. That's like both liquid and solid: that's a capital BOTH AND. My point here is that our very definition of light contains a paradox. To deal with this paradox, we first have to accept it. Light, as it is explained scientifically, contains our most fundamental assumptions. We need to decide how we describe it mathematically before we can understand the energetics of our universe at all, and because we don't yet understand light completely enough to describe it without contradicting ourselves, we ascribe to it two mutually exclusive properties: wave and particle. What's amazing is that the math still works out.

Imagine that the power of the light of the sun arrives on earth simultaneously as an ocean wave and as rain. A plant leaf is subject to the energy of waves of different magnitudes as well as to different intensities of a rainstorm, and both of these manifestations are somehow the same. We can describe a leaf as it is rocked by a wave or we can describe each cell in the leaf as they are buffeted by particles. Keep this idea at the fore of your mind through the rest of this paper, but the reality is that both are happening always. Also, a related fact, plants receive the energy of the sun by way of their leaves but these leaves are structural appendages that hold highly complex biochemical systems that interact on a sub-cellular level. So waves of light are hitting leaves at the same time photons are hitting cells. Ya dig? You have to think big and small at the same time when you try to understand the assimilation of light. Reflecting back on what I've said about Origen already, light does something even more miraculous to the part/whole relationship than allegory does. In light there is no distinction, by definition, between part and whole, wave and particle, and yet we can only speak of light in terms of this duality of being. While in the first chapter I'm going to deal with the part/whole relationship in the Plant in terms of One-ness, in my second chapter I'd like to think about the paradox of light in terms of Two-ness.

This paper will be full of oppositions and analogies. I will define oppositions now as pairs of ideas that function to define each other as limits. Where one stops, the other begins. Together the two halves of an opposition define a whole space. The primary oppositions in this paper will be light/dark, light/water, plant/human, Aristotle/Plato, chlorophyll/chloroplast, stroma/lumen. The last three I will explain later. You may as well get used to seeing some strange names now. I will define analogies now as pairs of ideas that reflect each other's identity. The paper is already riddled with them. I will use the terms analogy, allegory, and metaphor in a fluid manner that may seem imprecise but in fact undergirds the basis for this paper. An analogy in Greek (prefix ana-, "again" and noun logos, "word") basically means "another word" for the same thing, but logos is a highly complex concept in Greek, particularly in the Christian tradition.

The prologue of the Gospel of John crystallizes the complexity of the word "word" in Greek. "1In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word (Logos) was with God, and the Word (Logos) was God. 2He (it) was with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him (it) was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it." (Jn. 1:1-5) The word logos, in this context, is an appropriation of what is often called a Neo-Platonic concept. Logos in this sense means a divine template from which all real things are printed as images. In this context the idea of "another word" can be thought of as another form, another representation, another image of the original.

In English analogy is the inference that if two or more things agree with one another in some respects they will probably agree in others. If things have wings, then they probably both fly. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them. My beliefs are eagles wings. From the Greek meta and ferein, it literally means to bear with, to carry along with, as if the meaning of one image or idea can carry the meaning of another. In Greek allegory (alla- "but, rather, else" and egorein "to speak publicly") means to use figures of speech rhetorically, speaking in terms of something else. In English it has come to have a narrower meaning. I will use it broadly and say that allegory is what happens when you set metaphor rolling in time and space, creating a string of analogies in one organic pattern:

If, as in water stirr'd more circles be
Produced by one, love such additions take,
Those like so many spheres but one heaven make,
For they are all concentric unto thee ;
And though each spring do add to love new heat,
As princes do in times of action get
New taxes, and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate this spring's increase.

That's allegory how I mean it, broadly. What I'm trying to demonstrate is that the language of analogy, metaphor, and allegory are different ways of describing the relationship that inheres in all things, even things as disparate as love, taxes, and water. Or try this one. Knowledge is a pot of rice. The material, rice, is your instinct. Add water, learning. Bring it to a boil at high heat through the interchange of ideas. Cover the pot, walk alone for a while sorting through the ideas, and drop it to a simmer, meditate and remember what answers you were looking for in the first place. Wait patiently for some period of time and the rice will cook as you do other things, work a job, live life, play music. When your rice is ready, you will smell it. But do not serve it to others until you let it congeal, so that it is easier to serve. Finally, release the steam of your pride and expectation and you can feed other people with it.

In the same way that I am going in my first chapter to listen to Origen talk about One-ness, in the second chapter I will listen to Dionysius the Areopagite talk about Two-ness. Arguably Dionysius' two most famous works, On the Celestial Hierarchy and Mystical Theology deal with God's presence in contradictory ways, as light and as darkness respectively. I'd like to try to harmonize his message by demonstrating the unity in what I see as the two distinct purposes of his works, how they model two distinct ways of seeing one God.

Dionysius the Areopagite, or Pseudo-Dionysius, wrote around 500 CE. We don't know who he was. For many years, he was believed to be the Athenian convert of the Apostle Paul. In the 16th century it was finally "proven" by a scholar in the papal curia named Lorenzo Valla that he was not the Areopagite on the basis that his language did not fit in the first century. Interestingly, Martin Luther was also keen to overturn Dionysius' false identity on the same grounds. It is now presumed that Dionysius was a Syrian monk who wrote over four hundred years after he was first believed to have written, but some Christians staunchly reject this claim. Talk about a mind-bending time experiment. Dionysius' writings were five hundred years old when they were written down and they were almost fifteen hundred years old when they were first discovered to be only a thousand years old. Hah! We're time bandits now! Welcome aboard the time-ship Beagle.

Dionysius is most famous for a work entitled On the Celestial Hierarchy, in which he attempts to lay out how the universe is ordered. It is interesting to note that Dionysius is credited with the invention of the term "hierarchy," which roughly translates into "sacred order," used again in a broad sense. Is that how it's used now? I only interject that factoid to remind you that the meanings of words and ideas change over time by way of translation between languages and cultures and yet somehow their basic original meanings touch us like the shadows of tree limbs.

If the number One means a whole, indivisible and original, what does the number Two mean to the human mind? I believe that it can be assimilated in three ways: as opposition, as analogy, or as paradox. Two is one thing and its opposite. Or Two is one thing and its mirror image. Or Two is both at the same time. In the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite these fundamental dualities are explored in the relationship between light and darkness as analogies for spiritual understanding and its absence, spiritual mystery.

In the first section of On the Celestial Hierarchy Dionysius describes God explicitly in terms of light. This is the first level of his sacred order. Yet in his smaller work, Mystical Theology, he begins with an enigmatic and paradoxical ode to the light/dark duality that confronts our mind when we think of God:

Triad supernal, both Super-God and super-good, Guardian of the Theosophy of Christian men, direct us aright to the super-unknown and super-brilliant and highest summit of the mystic Oracles, where the simple and absolute and changeless mysteries of theology lie hidden within the super-luminous gloom of the silence, revealing hidden things, which in its deepest darkness shines above the most super-brilliant, and in the altogether impalpable and invisible, fills to overflowing the eyeless minds with glories of surpassing beauty.

In the passage above Dionysius is describing the human relationship to Divine Knowledge in what we would now call epistemological terms-he is talking about how we know what we know. Our minds BOTH limit us AND drive us toward the light of knowledge in all of its paradoxical glory. When he wrote the Mystical Theology he was concerned with laying out how we think about what we cannot know about God. When he wrote On the Celestial Hierarchy, on the other hand, he was concerned with describing what we do know about God. He was thinking as a plant and as a human, respectively, (maybe as an Aristotelian and a Platonist, too). Whoever Dionysius was, and wherever and whenever he wrote, he apparently did not see the contradiction in these two approaches. Neither do I; they are both necessary for knowledge.

Time to meet the chloroplast. Plant cells receive the light of the sun by way of photo-sensitive pigments, the most common example in green plants being the chlorophylls found in semi-autonomous organelles called chloroplasts. The word "semi-autonomous" is the kind of a mind-bender that reminds me why I'm writing this paper. You either are autonomous or you're not, right? Scientists think that chloroplasts in plants are the result of an evolutionary collision in the far past, during which a eukaryotic cell subsumed an independent prokaryotic organism that contained photosynthetic pigments. In a cartoon you can imagine one spaceship swallowing another and the smaller one becoming a semi-independent engine room. How that process went down, we'll never know. Well, never say never, I guess, but our chances of arriving back at that moment through some miraculous paleo-botanical (fossil-hunting) achievement are slim to none. What's important, though, is that the chloroplasts that drive photosynthesis (along with the mitochondria that produce the energy that drives animal life through respiration) occupy a unique evolutionary space, neither independent nor fully dependent of the cells they occupy. Chloroplasts have their own DNA, RNA, and ribosomes (nerves and brains), but the genetic codes of chloroplasts have both their own sequences and they receive sequences from the nucleus of the cell they occupy (their brains have built in operating instructions that come from the outside.)

This anomalous evolutionary relationship between the chloroplasts and the plant cells makes photosynthesis possible. It also serves as a reminder that the story of sunlight and life on earth reaches out to us from a distant and obscured past beyond our conception of time during which two independent organisms came together and became a third entity that harvests sunlight. Dates: that could have been 330 million years ago or it could have happened on the third day of creation, depending on how you choose to mark time. What's most important to this paper is that you carry away the idea that when two things come together, they form a relationship. This relationship has the potential both to animate each organism and to create in their communion a third entity that it is not merely a synthesis of the characteristics of the original two.
The third chapter of this thesis will focus on the number Three, and on its significance in the Christian notion of the Holy Trinity. St. Gregory of Nazianzus (329-391 CE), a.k.a. St. Gregory the Theologian is recognized as the lesser light of the three great Cappadocian fathers-Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nyssa, Basil's brother, are the other two. All of these men were from Pontus, an area now in Western Turkey that bears the historical moniker Asia Minor. Gregory's defining moment came in 381 CE at a great council in Constantinople during which he delivered five theological orations in the presence of the council of bishops and the Emperor. The primary concern of Gregory's orations was to establish that the Holy Spirit was a co-equal partner in God's tri-partite identity and to refute opposing factions who believed that since only God and Christ are mentioned directly in Scripture that God's identity is two-fold.

Gregory's Oration 32: On the Holy Spirit was the most coherent account of the function and identity of the Holy Trinity that had ever been delivered and we still use its basic outline as the conceptual basis for the Holy Trinity. Like Origen and Dionysius, Gregory is both revered and regretted by the Church of Tradition. We still use his most influential contribution to Christian thought , yet his view that evil was essentially immaterial and passive and his conviction that the resurrection was therefore meant for the totality of creation was later rejected. I'll let you decide why. Any way you look at it, Gregory was a Christian thinker at a crucial crossroads for the Faith. Faced with the stark duality of Godhood and Humankind, categories that are mutually exclusive yet somehow combined in Christ, Gregory developed a way of explaining their union by way of Three-ness and in doing so articulated the current identity of the Holy Trinity. Guess what metaphor he uses to describe how the three persons of God can be one?

"The Father was the True Light which lighteneth every man coming into the world. The Son was the True Light which lighteneth every man coming into the world. The Other Comforter was the True Light which lighteneth every man coming into the world. Was and Was and Was, but Was One Thing. Light thrice repeated; but One Light and One God."

What separates two things? The coy answer is it depends what you're separating. If you're separating concepts, it's boundaries. If you're separating the earth from the sky, it's the horizon. If you're separating intercellular spaces, it's membranes. If you're separating countries, it's borders. If it's you and another person, it's bodies. Or is it identities? What separates theory from practice? What separates Plato from Aristotle? What separates ideas from things? Light from Dark? One from All? Separation is as complicated a process as connection. Boundaries rely, fundamentally, on the one who perceives them; and paradoxically, boundaries are also what connect things. Simply put, a boundary is a third space that defines a relationship.

Let me introduce two massive placeholders in theological discourse that I will use and then hopefully undermine by combining: Plato and Aristotle. In theology and philosophy writers often oppose the basic schools of Plato and Aristotle, as if they were in-state rivals like Texas and Texas A&M. Let me offer you a thumbnail sketch of these two opposing philosophical systems as they are most often presented. Very intelligent, dedicated people spend their lives studying these men as individual thinkers, so take what follows with a grain of salt. But also take to heart the fact that most of the people who don't spend their lives studying these two men throw their names around constantly and often times do so on no other basis than the thumbnail sketches they've inherited from years of osmotic indoctrination at the hands of professors who have their own clear thumbnails of the totality of intellectual history. So here goes my account, a new addition to the pocketful of chewed on thumbnails.

Plato and his followers describe the world we live in as the imperfect impression of a perfect heavenly template. This is where we get the Logos concept I outlined earlier. Everything on earth, therefore, can be described in relation to its perfect image, which unfortunately we can't see but which our mind intuits, since it has as its own template in the Logos, or mind of God. So for Platonists God and human are connected the way mirror images are connected, mainly by the perception of the mind by way of the imperfect surface of the mirror of knowledge. In contrast, Aristotle and his followers describe the world we live in as the totality of the real things that are in it. For Aristotelian thinkers everything on earth can be described as the result of the initial cause of all things, and therefore can be traced genealogically back to its origin. So for Aristotelians God and human are connected substantively through creation. The opposition between Platonists and Aristotelians has been transmitted through centuries of heated mutations into the notion today that Aristotelians are scientific and rational while Platonists are logical and idealistic. The dichotomy of the schools, in my opinion, radicalized during the German enlightenment. Idealist philosophers (Platonic) and the burgeoning scientific thinkers (Aristotelian), intoxicated by the hope they could solve all of the questions that re-emerged during the Reformation, partitioned the realm of thought between Plato and Aristotle, the way European princes split religion between Catholics and Protestants after Westphalia.

I will argue that there is no concept fundamental to any Christian thought system that takes the prologue to the Gospel of John seriously that is not both Aristotelian and Platonic, because of the uniquely Christian formulation that "the Word (Logos) became flesh and lived among us." Perfect template and original substance came together and changed us. I'm offering to you the idea that sunlight is the best way to express the unity not only of ideas and of things, but also the reaction the two of them cause in our brains when they come together.

"You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension- a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone."

We're going inside the plant now, imagining a world we have never seen, and when it is fully imagined we can begin our journey through photosynthesis.

To understand what happens in the chloroplast when light hits it, you need to know something about how a chloroplast is organized internally. Chloroplasts are often drawn in textbooks as oblongs, like blimps whose walls consist of two concentric envelopes. Think of peanut M&Ms, there's a candy shell (outer envelope) with chocolate inside of it and then a peanut (inner envelope) with its own more complicated make-up inside. Inside the inner envelope (the peanut), the chloroplast is characterized most distinctively by an interconnected membrane structure called a thylakoid membrane. A cross-section of a thylakoid under an electron microscope looks like an aerial photo of a Siberian lake on which thousands of logs are floating.

The logs float into rafts of different sizes and configurations and each raft of logs is connected to the next by strings of single logs of different lengths, so that if you were skillful at walking on logs you could reach every single log on the lake by walking from raft to raft. But the aerial photo is only useful to evoke an idea of a cross-sectional or two-dimensional view of what is actually a three-dimensional network of walls that defines a continuous interconnected space the same way your intestine does. Switching from two to three dimensions, think of the logs as links of sausages folded and stacked, where each stack is connected to other stacks of sausages by a single sausage link that runs between them. Just like sausages, if they were unstacked and unfolded they would form a continuous tube that bounded an internal space from an external one. Now to throw some terms at you for the shapes I've just described.

The thylakoid membrane (the whole structure) is folded into discreet stacks called grana (stacks of sausage), composed of granal lamellae (single sausages that live in stacks), which are connected by single lengths of thylakoid (single sausages that live alone) called stromal lamellae to other granal stacks. The entire thylakoid is interconnected and forms a bounded internal space called a lumen. In three dimensions the thylakoid might look like a complex of sausages hanging messily in a butcher's window. If you were inside the thylakoid you could travel to any single link of sausage without leaving the comfort of the internal space. The space outside the thylakoid is called the stroma. It's like a primordial soup. You'll see all this stuff over and over again as you read this paper and by the time you get to the end it'll be old hat. You'll be telling your friends about the singular characteristics of stromal lamellae and digging the way the words roll off your tongue.