At the transfiguration, the apostles saw our Saviour's face shining as the sun, and his raiment white as light, also a lucid cloud, or body of light, out of which the voice came; which visible light and splendour were, not many centuries ago, maintained by the Greek church to have been Divine, and uncreated, and the very glory of God; as may be seen in the History wrote by the Emperor John Cantacuzene. And of late years Bishop Patrick gives it as his opinion, that in the beginning of the world the Shechinah, or Divine presence, which was then frequent and ordinary, appeared by light or fire. In commenting on that passage, where Cain is said to have gone out from the presence of the Lord, the Bishop observes, that if Cain after this turned a downright idolater, as many think, it is very likely he introduced the worship of the sun, as the best resemblance he could find of the glory of the Lord, which was wont to appear in a flaming light. It would be endless to enumerate all the passages of Holy Scripture, which confirm and illustrate this notion, or represent the Deity as appearing and operating by fire ; the misconstruction of which might possibly have misled the Gnostics, Basilidians, and other ancient heretics into an opinion that Jesus Christ was the visible corporeal sun.
Berkeley, Siris 187. However, Berkeley does not share in the opinion he attributes to the Greeks; this is just part of his argument that there is a universal tendency to regard Deity and Fire as intimately related. He holds that the aethereal fire is the World Soul, i.e., its animal spirit, which is used as an intermediary by the Divine Mind:
Force or power, strictly speaking, is in the Agent alone who imparts an equivocal force to the invisible elementary fire, or animal spirit of the world (sect. 153, 156, 157); and this to the ignited body or visible flame, which produceth the sense of light and heat. In this chain the first and last links are allowed to be incorporeal: the two intermediate are corporeal being capable of motion, rarefaction, gravity, and other qualities of bodies. It is fit to distinguish these things, in order to avoid ambiguity concerning the nature of fire.
Siris 210. (Note that when Berkeley talks about light or elementary fire, he doesn't mean visible light or physical fire.) Thus on Berkeley's view of the world everything is fundamentally fire or light (he uses the two interchangeably); or, to be more exact, he thinks that it is a reasonable hypothesis from the phenomena that light or 'invisible elementary fire' is fundamental to the nature of the world, and that with this hypothesis we can explain the phenomena. The particles of elementary fire are, as it were the letters which the Divine Mind organizes according to general laws into the words of sensible phenomena. This may seem to be an odd view; but it's actually in great measure based on Newton's Optics; he uses Newton's discoveries about light to argue that there is no need for light to have a medium, and that when natural philosophers of the day (like the Cartesians) appealed to an elastic medium distinct from light, they were appealing to something entirely otiose. All you need to explain the phenomena are light and its laws of operation (which he thinks, based on phenomena like gravity and magnetism, include attraction and repulsion). Berkeley's Siris is intended as a defense of Isaac Newton's physics. This is often overlooked when people read it, quite unfortunately. Consider this passage as just one example:
The ancients had some general conception of attracting and repelling powers (sect. 241, 242) as natural principles. Galilaei had particularly considered the attraction of gravity, and made some discovery of the laws thereof. But Sir Isaac Newton, by his singular penetration, profound knowledge in geometry and mechanics, and great exactness in experiments, hath cast a new light on natural science. The laws of attraction and repulsion were in many instances discovered, and first discovered, by him. He shewed their general extent, and therewith, as with a key, opened several deep secrets of nature, in the knowledge whereof he seems to have made a greater progress than all the sects of corpuscularians together had done before him. Nevertheless, the principle of attraction itself is not to be explained by physical or corporeal causes.
Siris, 245. The last sentence is Newtonian as well. The Newton is not immediately recognizable, because Berkeley is primarily looking at the Newton of the Optics; and if you read the Optics you will find a picture of the world very similar to, although less poetically expressed than, Berkeley's. Newton, too, is concerned to deny that light requires an elastic medium (See especially Book 3, Part 1). he too insists that the purpose of natural philosophy is to ascend the scale of the phenomena, from effects to particular causes to more general causes to the First Cause. He too is very clear that the order and uniformity of the world is the work of an intelligent Author. He too seems to imply that the principle of attraction is not physical or corporeal but is ultimately grounded in the Divine Will. Berkeley may sound odd, but he is defending the Newtonian approach to science -- and doing so in terms that are broadly Newtonian.
For a post on a related set of issues about Berkeley's view of the natural world, see Kenny Pearce's A Note on Middle Knowledge and Berkeleian Philosophy of Science.
