There is an old oak tree in the West Bank city of Hebron that the Russian Orthodox Church venerates as the tree beneath which the patriarch Abraham was visited by the Holy Trinity. This tree is. It has a specific physical referent. This tree was reported to have died just recently, in 1996, but its veneration continues today. Abraham lived not simply in times past, but in a past so distant that time itself is altered. It is a past not measure in years, but in epochs and ages. When the great floods of time are pulled back they leave across the surface of history pools rich with life. It is a wonder that any such primordial moments are remembered, but some stories are so robust that they grow legs and learn to crawl, take to the land, and become entire races of humankind. The children of Abraham told stories beneath this oak before there were Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. When their stories are retold their days become nearer, the way that legends come to life in the imagination. Historical claims, like the temporal existence of Abraham’s oak, wrestle with the legendary. What is this oak tree doing here and now? Can this tree reveal something about our cultural differences today? It is the argument of this essay that the metaphorical affordance of this tree is a development of Western materialism, and that the Eastern church is holding tight to a vision of reality threatened by globalization.
The method of this essay is to begin with the tree itself, today in Hebron, and the Eastern Orthodox philosophy surrounding this tree. Next, the tree will be presented through the eyes of the pilgrims who visited it in the mythological past – a past, even as yesterday, when fact and fantasy have no difference as history. Then the theoretical developments will be considered, leading finally to a thought for this present moment.
Like a human frame that suggests suffering, the oak in Hebron today embodies a great struggle of comprehension. Its dry grey hull leans forcefully, as though it longs to rest but cannot, for steel girders and wooden props hold its limbs suspended. It appears to have died after years of writhing in a concrete planter and the paved earth that cements its roots below. A chain-link fence describes the short breadth of its perimeter, just down the hill from Abraham's Oak Holy Trinity Monastery, the lone Christian confines in Hebron, surrounded on all sides by a Muslim and Jewish battle to control this holy city.
The Russian Orthodox Church’s claim to the tree is more than just property rights, it is also historically philosophical. Of all the Abrahamic branches of faith, the Eastern Christian tradition has the greatest investment in its material being. In the Orthodox tradition each church itself is an icon of the Holy Trinity, an indwelling of the Abrahamic god’s energies, and the unique iconic representation of the Holy Trinity itself is a scene beneath this oak.1 This mystery is first revealed to Abraham in Genesis 18:
And The Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men stood in front of him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them, and bowed himself to the earth, and said, “My lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree, while I fetch a morsel of bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on — since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.” And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes.” And Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds, and milk, and the calf which he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.2
The appearance of Abraham’s god in the appearance of three men is a theological and linguistic conundrum. The Hebrew word for The Lord in the above text is the proper name of YHWH, the name revealed to Abraham by his god, and therefore this event is a unique theophany: it is God appearing in three human forms.3 Theologian Esther Hamori has given special attention to this appearance and its etymological nuance:
Several unusual features of the text have caused scholars difficulty. Firstly, there is the juxtaposition of verses 1–2. In the introduction to the story in verse 1, it is stated that "Yahweh appeared" (wayyera elayw yhwh) to Abraham [lit. "him"]; in verse 2, Abraham looks up and sees three men. This has often been read as a discrepancy in the number and identity of Abraham's visitors. Secondly, there is the shifting between singular and plural forms, as in verses 3–5 and 9–10. Abraham's initial invitation in verse 3 is to an individual; the rest of his address in verses 4–5 uses the plural. Similarly, in verse 9, the visitors (plural) inquire as to Sarah's whereabouts; in verse 10, it is an individual who tells Abraham that he will return in a year's time, and that Sarah will have a son.4
The conceptual difficulty of the Trinity is in the numbers: three men appeared to Abraham and he addressed them in the singular. The Yahwist identified the three visitors specifically as Abraham’s god. This mystery is foundational to Eastern Orthodox theology. According to the Eastern tradition the visitors were angels who represented the Trinity, but they were not the Holy Trinity itself, not Yahweh’s essence (ousia). At the same time, Abraham is visited by his god, the Holy Trinity itself, because representations, such as angels, contain the energies of God (energeia). This is also the power behind an Eastern Orthodox icon painting. The iconic type for the pictorial representation of the Holy Trinity is the Hospitality of Abraham as derived from this narrative. The most famous example is Andrei Rublev’s Trinity. The omni-dimensional synergeia of this mysterious indwelling was recreated by the contemporary Hungarian storyteller Laszlo Krasznahorkai:
Abraham could have reflected for a long time on what he saw and whom he saw, and what had been said to him under the oak, well then, after all this, from this renowned encounter of Our Father with Abraham, from this meeting's sacred Ordinance preserved namely in Moses 1:18, the precept of the Synod was established as such, after a good few hundred variations - in consequence of which, the divine grace descended upon Andrey Rublev, and his gentle hand and his humble soul, through the agency of his continuous prayer, and from the inspiring strength of the Unnamable Himself at the commission of Abbot Nikon of Radonezh, in memory of St. Sergius, it bore the title of “The Holy Trinity” and came into being, and was preserved, the extraordinary news of which, like a kind of storm of beauty, swept across the whole of Russia….5
Andrei Rublev’s famous early 15th century icon is not only one of Russia’s most valuable cultural treasures, it is also the only officially permitted image of God in Orthodoxy.6 The matter-of-fact significance of its earthly manifestation was stated by Pavel Florensky: “There exists the icon of the Holy Trinity by St. Andrei Rublev; therefore, God exists.”7 Florensky, an Orthodox priest, philosopher, and physicist, composed his study of icons in the 1920s. His theories about divine substantiality combine the mysticism of Eastern theology and the physical sciences of special relativity: the creation of an icon is a mystical revelation that fits an eternal form like a “fully prepared nest.”8 Florensky’s understanding of material being requires a special vision of time and reality: present material forms manifest not only a past memory of Abraham, and therefore the Holy Trinity, and therefore God, but also their future revelation.
The iconic subject of three angels seated at table existed long before St. Andrei. In this sense, he invented nothing new, and (archaeologically speaking) his Trinity icon is one of a long series of depictions of Abraham’s hospitality that begins somewhere in the 4th to the 6th centuries. Archaeologically, these depictions were iconic illustrations of a person’s life (namely Abraham’s) and, in being so, they also foreshadowed the revelation of the Holy Trinity… the image of the three strangers at Abraham’s table at Mamre could, abstractly considered, have produced the dogma of Trinity; but it could not, in itself, paint the icon.9
9 The appearance of the three strangers to Abraham, Rublev’s creation of the icon, and the writing of Pavel Florensky are all such images. Donald Sheehan, expounding Florensky’s philosophy, included Florensky’s own “immense love” in writing his book as a revelation: “every sentence acts to manifest the ontological fullness of both icon and and beholder.”10 For the Russian Orthodox Church the historical credibility of this oak is immaterial: the oak that is present is the revelation – the present representation of the Holy Trinity in the image of this tree. Any tree might thus show forth. Any large oak in the vicinity of Hebron near Mamre has a precious form for this transcendence, but the oak on the property of the Russian monastery is the form presently venerated. 10 Hebron, Mamre, and Western Asian tree lore, are unusual properties for a Slavic religion. Hebron is the geographical place where all of the Abrahamic faiths are made flesh. Adam is formed from this earth, adamah, just as the tree, etz, is rooted in this land, eretz. The red clay of Adam’s formation is specifically the soil of Hebron and the land is the land promised to the children of Abraham, as numerous as the stars, promised to Abraham beneath this tree. The Abrahamic topos is pre-Abrahamic itself, belonging to a larger mythos. Abraham is a larger-than-life father figure, and friend of God, who often planted trees. When he first called on The LORD, a new deity in his pantheon, Abram built an altar beneath a large oak tree on the plains of Moreh. A tree, by nature, lends itself as a sanctuary. As a mythic type, Abram is a journeying Everyman in a land of many gods and nations. Later in the story, after the birth of his son Isaac, he planted a tamarisk tree and again called on The LORD. Since his first worship he has received a new name and has been visited by the three strangers. He has learned more about this god and now calls him YHWH El-Olam, the Everlasting God. This is more than the progression of a Jewish folktale, it is also the development of a conceptual philosophy. The theological character of the Abrahamic god, and its influence on world cultures, is defined alongside the character of Abraham. It is also more than Hebrew mythology, for it spreads and intertwines to become the deep history of Greece, Rome, Europe, and Russia. For the Slavic people the Jewish origin myths were grafted into their cultural memory late in the 9th century. That these stories held fast and blossomed in Russian literature can be credited to the evangelizing and alphabetizing of the Byzantine brothers, Cyril and Methodius. Dimitri Obolensky, in a 1965 paper on the brothers’ mission, considered the close ties between the biblical narrative and its new linguistic codification, particularly in the Russian Primary Chronicle, also known as the Tale of Bygone Years, a compilation of the earliest Slavic histories. Summarizing the beginning of the Chronicle, Obolensky wrote: [The Tale] begins with the story of the division of the earth among the sons of Noah after the Flood, and ends with a brief account of the building of the Tower of Babel. The Russian version of the latter episode… states that when the Lord scattered His people over the face of the earth, the pristine linguistic and ethnic unity of mankind gave way to a multiplicity of languages and nations.11 11 This is followed by an early history which names the Slavs among the postdiluvian scattered peoples as the sons of Japheth, the son of Noah. Russia’s heritage, therefore, although not genealogically Semitic, is mythologically Jewish. Furthermore, Russians Christians might yet be heirs to the promised land and its wonders by accepting the gospel claims: “Understand, then, that those who have faith are children of Abraham.”12 Obolensky argued that the chronicler also seemed to suggest that the new alphabet was itself a unique indwelling of God’s energies: “the Slavonic letters are an extension of the miracle of Pentecost whereby the Holy Spirit rescinded the confusion of tongues which sprang from the Tower of Babel.”13 The Russian people are thereby also a chosen people and the Eastern Orthodox philosophy of the indwelling energeias of God has a special synergetic grace in the Slavic language. Just as the missionary, linguistic, and diplomatic envoy from Constantinople is written into the story of the Russian faithful, so too the Russian pilgrim narratives helped define their faith. 12 13 In the early 12th century the abbot Daniel from Kievan Rus' began a long trip to “see the holy city of Jerusalem and the Promised Land.”14 The tale he recorded became both a testimony of faith and a Russian literary tradition. Daniel encouraged his readers to keep the holy places present in their minds even if they could not go there themselves. “For many good men living at home in their own places, by their thoughts, charity to the poor, and their good deeds, attain the holy places and receive a great reward from God our Saviour Jesus Christ.”15 The best pilgrim tales are full of adventure and miraculous witness. Some went only so far as Constantinople, where the great churches and shrines offered their charms. For those who went on to Palestine, the legendary landscape required an equal effort of imagination. Abbot Daniel wrote what he saw at Mamre: 14 15 The holy oak is close by the road on your right hand as you proceed, and it stands splendidly on a high hill, and around its roots God has paved the ground with white marble so that all round this fine oak is paved like a church and it is wonderful to see this sacred oak growing up from the stone in the middle of the pavement. On top of the hill near this oak is a place like the foundation of a house, level and clear without stones, and here stood the tent of Abraham near the oak and to the east of it. The oak is not very tall but very gnarled and with dense branches and there is much fruit on it. Its branches bend down near to the ground so that a man standing on the ground can reach its branches. In thickness it is two fathoms round as I measured it with my arms, and the trunk is one and a half fathoms up to the first branches. It is to be marvelled and wondered at that this tree has stood for so many years on such a high mountain unharmed and undecayed but stands as firm, by the grace of God, as when it was first planted. And under this oak came the Holy Trinity to the patriarch Abraham and dined with him and here the Holy Trinity blessed Abraham and Sarah his wife and granted them a son, Isaac, in their old age; here too the Holy Trinity showed Abraham a spring and there is a well there to this day at the foot of the hill near the road. And all the land round the oak is called Mamre, which is why the oak is called the oak of Mamre.16 16 Daniel wondered and marveled that this ancient oak still persisted, and offered the reader an opportunity to contemplate what is possible by the grace of God. He saw Abraham’s oak with his eyes of faith, discovering a capable container for the Holy Trinity even in a “not very tall” tree. The physical presence of Mamre was representative of a spiritual reality for Daniel, just as the visit from the angels was for Abraham. As a material object, the “not very tall” tree performed like a relic, which in the 12th century would be a familiar conceptual approach for an abbot from Kiev, a Byzantine Rite metropolis on a trade route with Constantinople. Like a bejeweled reliquary, its gnarled trunk and dense branches with much fruit decoratively encased the hidden power which brought Daniel into communion with his god. The “Wanderer” of Stephen of Novgorod was a continuation of this literary tradition two hundred years later. It is a culturally important document for its description of the arrangement of churches and relics in Constantinople, particularly the treasures of the Hagia Sophia. It is also a testimony to a fully developed pilgrim tourism industry. Stephen ends his account with a few words of advice for fellow travellers: “it is impossible to get around without a good guide, and if you attempt to get around stingily or cheaply you will not be able to see or kiss a single saint unless it happens to be the holiday of that saint when you can see and kiss the relics.”17 Even as a tourist, Stephen had the mystical percipience necessary for transcendence. Constantinople must have appeared like a city located along vertical coordinates, somewhere between heaven and earth, presenting a kaleidoscopic spectrum of every color and shadow of spiritual reality for the eyes of faith. Here is how Stephen enters the church of Holy Wisdom: 17 I arrived in the city during Holy Week, and we went to St. Sophia where stands a column of wondrous size, height and beauty; it can be seen from far away at sea, and a marvelous, lifelike Justinian the Great sits on a horse on the top…. From this Justinian Column you enter the doors of St. Sophia, the first doors. Going a little farther, past the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth doors, and thus it is that by the seventh doors you enter the Great Church of St. Sophia…. As you go from there into the sanctuary there are very beautiful columns, like jasper, and in the main sanctuary itself there is a fountain which appeared from the holy Jordan River…. Nearby is the stone table of great St. Abraham to whom God appeared in Trinity under the oak of Mamre. (This oak has green leaves winter and summer, and will always have them until the end of the world….)18 18 For Stephen, perception of the holiest realities required a passage through many doors into a sanctuary where the wonders were revealed. Like Daniel, he offers his reader an opportunity to enter the sanctuary and see for ourselves, with the inner vision of contemplation, the everlasting mysteries of God. A much later, possibly 15th century, “Anonymous Description of Constantinople” remembered that “Abraham placed bread before the Trinity at this table and dined with the Trinity.19 Christian people worship at this table, for healing comes from it.”20 George Majeska, in his comprehensive Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, commented that “The ‘oak of Mamre’ has a long history as a Christian relic; Emperor Constantine the Great built a sanctuary at the site.”21 19 20 21 A living tree requires a different method of relic translation than a stone table. A table relic might be moved from its holy place, such as Mamre, and installed elsewhere, such as in Constantinople. Leaving its low associations behind it could acquire conceptual and material splendour. Surrounded by fountains, jasper columns, and gilded icons, a stone table could enter an eternal realm of reflection. The tree that Daniel saw required a different translation; it required his envisioning. Through his remembering the story and making the journey the oak of Mamre was prepared before him– all Daniel had to do was see it. The journey and the writing of his tale were active participations which translated an earthly tree into an image manifest with “ontological fullness.” Through his own words Daniel also prepared its future revelation: “I have set down everything which I saw with my own eyes, so that what God gave me… to see may not be forgotten.”22 22 This opens a new perspective on the church that Constantine constructed in Mamre. The emperor is so well known for his expansion of Roman territory that his placement of churches in Palestine is skeptically critiqued as a political strategy. He also has a reputation for the opportune translation of the Holy Land’s sacred artefacts to his new imperial capital, however this program may have begun with his son, Constantius II.23 If caricatured for his policies of expansion and acquisition, Constantine might be considered one of the architects of Western Christianity’s cultural materialism. Constantinople was the Byzantine capital, but also the capital of the Roman Empire. At the Council of Constantinople in 359 any further use of ousia in theological discourse was forbidden, thereby removing the Eastern oisia-energeia distinction.24 The theology that went west was rooted entirely in Aristotle’s energeia. Aristotle developed his notion from Plato’s use and possession dichotomy, so that “use” first became activity (energeia) and then actuality (entelecheia).25 Western Christianity developed alongside the resulting scientific causality, specifically in the notion that divine activity revealed its essence, a progression from Aristotle’s unmoved mover to Augustine’s metaphorical reality in the 5th century, Scholastic actus purus in the 13th century, Natural theology during the Enlightenment, and even today’s mass–energy equivalence. At Constantine’s 359 Council, the Eastern vision that material forms, such as a tree, mysteriously contained the spiritual reality they signify, was forfeit for Western affordance. 23 24 25 This cultural difference, despite appearances, is not of spiritual viewpoints, but of how the material world is seen. For the Eastern church the historical credibility of the Mamre oak is immaterial: the oak that is present today is the revelation of the Holy Trinity. For Daniel, the material nature of the tree was its manifestation of divine realities; for Constantine, the material reality itself was divine. Western materialism has roots beneath his church. Eusebius recorded Constantine’s order for the Mamre basilica in detail, including the reprimand that he and the bishops of Palestine received for not having noticed “the abandoned folly of impious men.”26 The emperor’s mother-in-law, Eutropia, touring the Holy Lands in 326, was troubled by what she saw at a place called Terebinthus and she notified her son. Fifth century church historian Sozomen confirmed the hilltop’s mythological associations: 26 Here the inhabitants of the country and of the regions round Palestine, the Phoenicians, and the Arabians, assemble annually during the summer season to keep a brilliant feast; and many others, both buyers and sellers, resort thither on account of the fair. Indeed, this feast is diligently frequented by all nations: by the Jews, because they boast of their descent from the patriarch Abraham; by the Pagans, because angels there appeared to men; and by Christians, because He who for the salvation of mankind was born of a virgin, afterwards manifested Himself there to a godly man. This place was moreover honored fittingly with religious exercises. Here some prayed to the God of all; some called upon the angels, poured out wine, burnt incense, or offered an ox, or he-goat, a sheep, or a cock.27 27 Terebinthus was anciently known as Ramat el-Khalil, where the infamous Botnah Fair was held. Construction began with a tenemos wall enclosing the oak by Herod in the first century and rebuilt by Hadrian in the second.28 Constantine’s basilica was built on this foundation and reused three walls in keeping with his practice of damnatio memoriae.29 His dictate to the bishops was clear: “The place itself we have directed to be adorned with an unpolluted structure, I mean a church; in order that it may become a fitting place of assembly for holy men.”30 In his letter to Eusebius he articulated the site’s holy history: 28 29 30 For you are not ignorant that the Supreme God first appeared to Abraham, and conversed with him, in that place. There it was that the observance of the Divine law first began; there first the Saviour himself, with the two angels, vouchsafed to Abraham a manifestation of his presence; there God first appeared to men; there he gave promise to Abraham concerning his future seed, and straightway fulfilled that promise; there he foretold that he should be the father of a multitude of nations. For these reasons, it seems to me right that this place should not only be kept pure through your diligence from all defilement, but restored also to its pristine sanctity; that nothing hereafter may be done there except the performance of fitting service to him who is the Almighty God, and our Saviour, and Lord of all.31 31 For Constantine, the Mamre hill was where holy events once happened, not where a divine indwelling might be presently met. In fact, his letter has no instructions for an oak. In 333 the Anonymous Pilgrim of Bordeaux recorded what he saw from his Western approach: “Here Abraham dwelt, and dug a well under a terebinth tree, and spoke with angels, and ate food with them. Here a basilica of wondrous beauty has been built by the command of Constantine.”32 32 In addition to historical accounting, the texts from Sozomen and Constantine also reveal their counting: they profess that Christ himself, the 2nd person of the Trinity, appeared to Abraham at Mamre. In however so far Christianity defined two cultures, so too are these cultures divided by this number. For the Eastern tradition, the essence of God can not be materially divided; for the Western tradition, material realities, even theophanic artifacts, are merely signs of divine realities. The cultural affordances are significant. For the West, material culture belongs to the city of man, as Augustine designated; for Andrei Rublev, Pavel Florensky, and the Russian Orthodox Church in Hebron, an icon, a sentence, and a tree, are all material manifestations of an indwelling spiritual reality. These methods of seeing also have an opposite implication: if material reality is merely a metaphor for spiritual realities, then material being has a greater phenomenological credibility, and whatever is mysterious about humankind, natural or supernatural, whether imagination, intelligence, anguish or love, is subservient to material forms, including those produced by the same mysterious human attributes. To further complicate matter, metaphors are also productions of mysterious human ingenuity. The metaphorical approach to Abraham’s oak begins with Philo Judaeus, a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher mythologically contemporary with Jesus of Nazareth. In his work On Abraham Philo produced an allegorical reading of the Genesis text: when, therefore, the soul is shone upon by God as if at noonday, and when it is wholly and entirely filled with that light which is appreciable only by the intellect, and by being wholly surrounded with its brilliancy is free from all shade or darkness, it then perceives a threefold image of one subject, one image of the living God, and others of the other two, as if they were shadows irradiated by it. And some such thing as this happens to those who dwell in that light which is perceptible by the outward senses, for whether people are standing still or in motion, there is often a double shadow falling from them.33 33 Richard Hanson, in Allegory and Event, described the Hellenistic use of allegory as an attempt to un-situate the historical fact from its realizable meaning: “It was not only arbitrary; it required no sense of history at all; the results of its allegorization were general statements of a philosophical or psychological or scientific nature.”34 Philo defined Mamre as “a life of contemplation… which name is derived from seeing,” and Abraham sat before his tent, “since sitting is a state of tranquility and peace of body.”35 Origen, writing in the early 3rd century, followed Philo’s interpretation: “Mambre in our language is translated ‘vision’ or ‘sharpness of sight.’” Abraham sat outside because his mind “was far from bodily thoughts, far from carnal desires.”36 Origen eventually was condemned for removing the soul too far from the body. 34 35 36 Familiar with Philo’s On Abraham, and following Origen, Augustine fully removed the threefold image from its material beings.37 37 It is not stated in Gen 18:1 whether the Father or the Son appeared to Abraham at Mamre. In any case, we are told that these three men appeared to him; in these three we should more probably understand the Trinity, which is one God. It is clear from the story that Abraham regarded them simply as men.38 38 If Augustine’s city of man is the globally dominant and expanding culture, then it follows that the alternate vision of the East is steadily being translated for Western cultural affordance, angels, trees, and other possible realities included. The history of the Russian monastery in Hebron is a tale of abiding in a changed time – a time which tomorrow changes again. In 1868 the Archimandrite Antonin Kapustin acquired property in Palestine to “resist the active missionary activity of Protestants and Catholics buying up the earth and building establishments.”39 The land around the Mamre oak was his first purchase. In 1871 the tree was served the Divine Liturgy, which transcended space and time, and manifested the mystical union of saints, angels, and believers. Around the tree Antonin constructed stone houses for the Russian pilgrims. In 1925 a temple was consecrated. During the Soviet era the monastery took refuge in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia – headquartered on East 93rd Street in New York. It was returned to Russia by force in 1997, at the request of Alexei II to Yasser Arafat: “a blacksmith was enlisted to break the compound's locks and enable Alexy to enter and pray,” said church guard Anwar Zablah.40 Reporter John Donnelly interviewed Zablah in 1996, when the oak was declared dead. 39 40 Zablah took a postcard from his pocket. The picture was taken around 1960. Green leaves grew from only one of the two main trunks. In the foreground stood a man, a little boy and a herd of goats. The boy was Zablah. “Now all we have left are Abraham's daughters,” the caretaker said, walking away. And there, in a corner of the fenced-in plot, were two large oak trees, perhaps 30 years old and 30 feet high - just where the British botanist Hepper thought they might be. The daughters of Abraham's Oak. Perhaps the progeny of the most sacred tree in the Middle East.41 41 On June 10, 2014, the third day of the Feast of the Trinity, which is Pentecost, the Divine Liturgy was performed again, transcending space and time. 2015 begins the United Nations’ International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies. As John Dudley, president of the European Physical Society, told Physics World magazine: "photonics is a technology that underpins modern life and provides real solutions to global problems.”42