Review
Title: The Spiritual Physics of Light: How We See, Feel, and Know Truth
Author: Aaron D. Franklin
Publisher: BYU RSC & Deseret Book
Genre: Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2021
Number of Pages: 184
Binding: Paper
ISBN: 9781950304073
Price: 19.99
Reviewed by Conor Hilton for the Association of Mormon Letters
The Greg Kihn Band preaches, “They just don’t write ‘em like that anymore.” In many ways, Aaron D. Franklin’s The Spiritual Physics of Light challenges that age-old assertion (if the Greg Kihn Band was singing about a particular style of early 20th-century Mormon writing that fused science and Mormonism together—a la James E. Talmage and John Widstoe, and not “the same old song with the melancholy sound”).
Franklin’s book does quite a bit of what I was hoping—making wild, fascinating, speculative, and enlightening hypotheses about light and what rules govern it in the spiritual realm. Coupled with these intriguing musings is a fairly grounded sense of the actual science surrounding light in a variety of ways, which Franklin recaps in the first chapter and briefly as appropriate in subsequent chapters. Franklin is also, appropriately, circumspect about the ideas he’s exploring here, explicitly and repeatedly reminding the reader that what he offers is only one or two of many possibilities and that new scientific discoveries and further thought would undoubtedly suggest other ways of understanding the spiritual and scriptural ideas that he’s exploring.
So! Let’s get to a few examples of what I found so fascinating here!
Franklin describes how we each likely radiate ‘spiritual light’ and in thinking about what this might mean, how it would be useful, and particularly how it relates to the Light of Christ and the Holy Ghost, Franklin says, “I suggest that it is our righteousness and corresponding closeness to the Holy Ghost that determines our radiation of spiritual light” (48). Here, Franklin is engaging, implicitly, with some ideas from the New Testament and the Doctrine & Covenants about the nature of resurrected bodies and visible differences. He extends this to all bodies, suggesting that there’s potentially some difference in the spiritual light folks radiate tied to various states of righteousness. I think there are some dangerous ripples from this idea, but I still find it fascinating and compelling by itself.
Building on the possibilities of light containing information, Franklin offers a compelling reading of this verse from the New Testament and Doctrine & Covenants: “I am the light which shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not”. Franklin suggests that the failure of the darkness to comprehend the light is in some sense, literal. As in, there is information and knowledge contained in the Light that is Christ, and that this knowledge and information is incomprehensible without a corresponding level of light (tied to righteousness/goodness/etc. (83). I love this sort of surprisingly literal reading of scriptures in a way that brings a different perspective and ultimately enriches other more figurative readings of the verse, I think.
And finally, one of my favorite moments in the book, which literally had me yelling “aw heck yeah!” from the couch as I read it—a reading of Samuel the Lamanite. Franklin states that “In modern times, human-made technology uses beams of light to destroy missiles and flying drones moving at hundreds of miles per hour; could not the spiritual light of the omniscient and omnipotent Lord have been used to deflect some stones and arrows from hitting Samuel the Lamanite?” (97). Do I need to say anything else? Awesome. Love, love, love it.
If you, like me, long for a return to the days of wild, speculative, science-positive Mormon thinking and writing, then The Spiritual Physics of Light may be a book for you! It is also at times devotional, sometimes a bit dry as Franklin explains the scientific principles he’s drawing into his understanding of scripture, and quite plain as far as the prose goes. But! Packed in there are lots of fascinating ideas and nuggets that have forever changed how I will think about the role of light in the scriptures.