Literal

Absence of light

We do not live in our own time alone, we carry our history with us. Goethe said that "He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth". We shortchange ourselves if we choose to limit our reasoning to specific confines or epochs; to certain Only-s, only this and only that. But we often do so because it is comforting; the unknown frightens. Just like darkness or the absence of light. To stop at a particular epoch is to miss out on on all the discoveries of the next age. To stop at Augustine or Plato is to miss out on Aquinas or Aristotle. And what a big loss that would have been or has proven to be.

"Aquinas created the great synthesis between faith and knowledge by embracing the philosophy of Aristotle... He believed that God has revealed himself to mankind through both the Bible and through reason. Therefore, reason and the Bible are both aspects of the truth which overlap... The Bible says that it is wrong to harm people. But we all know that it is wrong to harm people even if we haven't read in the Bible that we must 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'."
~ excerpts from Sophie's World, Jostein Gardner.