The view from a chair ...

... A funny thing happened at the opticians.

Bonaventure thought of light as a metaphor for God. He argued that if God can be said to sustain the universe, then God would also have to be invisible in the universe. As God said to Moses, no-one can see God and live. It’s a bit like the notion of God as the ground of existence. If God is such a ground then God cannot be said to exist. Neither can God be said not to exist. God, like light, is somehow beyond existence, beyond seeing – ‘found’ only in the cloud of unknowing.

Compare that to this:

... when the philosopher of existence calls man existence, he wants to express the view that being-conscious-in-the-world constitutes the essence of man. This being-conscious is that through which man is man and not a thing, a pure spirit, or a divine Being. Accordingly, we must say that things, pure spirits, and God do not exist, i.e., they are essentially distinct from man. Being-conscious-in-the-world constitutes what man essentially is. Man does not enter into the world because there happens to be a world and it is up to him to enter it or not or to withdraw from it at his discretion.

- William A. Luijpen, Existential Phenomenology