Do you remember where Jesus said - "The light of the body is the eye?" 

That's in Matt. 6:22-23 That passage has always been unclear to me, especially where He says, "If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" 

How can light be darkness? What a paradox? 

I was reading Martineau's commentary on this, and he explained it like I've never heard before. His writing is antiquated so I ran it through ChatGPT for an interpretation. This is the result -- 

"This passage is saying:

To live in spiritual or moral darkness is not merely to lack truth, but to live inside a false reality that your own mind actively constructs — a reality in which the good looks evil, 

the simple looks threatening, 

the innocent looks corrupt, 

and the beautiful looks trivial or false.

The tragedy is not that such a person sees nothing —

it is that they see wrongly, 

and cannot tell that they are seeing wrongly.

So the darkness is “great” because:

• it is internal,

• it is self-reinforcing,

• it feels convincing,

• and it replaces reality rather than merely obscuring it.

In short:

Darkness does not just blind — it hallucinates.

And when the soul lives by those hallucinations, 

it becomes estranged from truth, 

from others, 

and from itself.

That is what makes “that darkness” so great."

I love that, and I think it's sooo true! If you want to read more, I'll include what Martineau said, and all that Chat said. 

James Martinuea’s commentary really shed light on this statement; although hard to understand; He said - 

 “Great indeed is that darkness!! 

Because it not only hides realities, 

but produces all kinds of deceptive unrealities; 

to the blinding character of all darkness, 

adding the creative activity of light; 

suppressing the clear outline and benign face of things, and throwing up instead their twisted and malignant shadows.” 

I had a sense of what he meant but I asked ChatGPT to interpret it, this is what it said -- 

 

1. “If you live in darkness, how great is that darkness?”

This echoes Jesus’ saying in Matthew 6:23 — “If the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”

The “darkness” here is not ignorance alone, but a condition of the inner life: a person’s moral, spiritual, and perceptual world.

It means:

When someone’s inner guide (conscience, truth, love, humility) is corrupted or absent, then the very faculty meant to see truth is what distorts it.

So the darkness is “great” not because it is dramatic, but because it is internal, pervasive, and unnoticed by the one who has it.

 

2. “Because it not only hides realities…”

Darkness normally conceals things.

But this passage says it does something worse:

It doesn’t just hide truth — it replaces truth.

So the person in darkness doesn’t merely miss reality — they live inside a false version of it.

 

3. “…but produces all kinds of deceptive unrealities”

This is the key idea.

The mind in darkness becomes productive, not passive:

• It invents explanations that justify itself.

• It projects motives onto others that are not there.

• It interprets events through fear, pride, resentment, or self-interest.

So instead of seeing the world as it is, the person sees:

• Enemies where there are none,

• Threats where there is safety,

• Corruption where there is innocence,

• Or virtue where there is actually vice.

This is why the darkness is dangerous — it becomes self-confirming.

 

4. “…to the blinding character of all darkness, adding the creative activity of light”

This is a paradoxical and very subtle line.

Light is normally creative — it reveals, gives form, brings clarity.

But here, the darkness borrows the power of light and uses it wrongly.

Meaning:

The mind still thinks, imagines, reasons, and creates — but it does so under false premises.

So the person is not empty or dull — they may be very articulate, very convinced, very emotionally vivid — but the whole creative faculty is misaligned.

That makes the deception richer, more persuasive, and harder to escape.

 

5. “Suppressing the clear outline and benign face of things…”

Reality, in its true form, is described as:

• having a “clear outline” (truth is coherent),

• having a “benign face” (reality is not fundamentally hostile).

Darkness suppresses both:

• It blurs clarity.

• It makes the world seem harsher, more cruel, more threatening than it is.

So instead of a world that is structured, meaningful, and ultimately good, the person sees a world that is chaotic, hostile, and ugly.

 

6. “…and throwing up instead their twisted and malignant shadows.”

Shadows are distortions of real things.

So what the person sees are:

• exaggerations,

• caricatures,

• warped reflections.

People become villains, motives become sinister, events become conspiracies, and suffering becomes meaningless cruelty rather than something that can be redemptive.

So the mind lives in a shadow-world, not a world of solid things.