Image, Word and God in the Early Christian Centuries

Mark Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317118831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Christianity proclaims Christ and the incarnate word of God; the Bible is described as the Word of God in both Jewish and Christian tradition. Are these usages merely homonymous, or would the ancients have recognized a more intimate relation between the word incarnate and the word proclaimed? This book investigates the concept of logos in pagan, Jewish and Christian thought, with a view to elucidating the polyphonic functions which the word acquired when used in theological discourse. Edwards presents a survey of theological applications of the term Logos in Greek, Jewish and Christian thought from Plato to Augustine and Proclus. Special focus is placed on: the relation of words to images in representation of divine realm, the relation between the logos within (reason) and the logos without (speech) both in linguistics and in Christology, the relation between the incarnate Word and the written text, and the place of reason in the interpretation of revelation. Bringing together materials which are rarely synthesized in modern study, this book shows how Greek and biblical thought part company in their appraisal of the capacity of reason to grasp the nature of God, and how in consequence verbal revelation plays a more significant role in biblical teaching. Edwards shows how this entailed the rejection of images in Jewish and Christian thought, and how the manifestation in flesh of Christ as the living word of God compelled the church to reconsider both the relation of word to image and the interplay between the logos within and the written logos in the formulation of Christian doctrine.

Chapter 1
Seeing and Hearing God in the Old Testament

The Septuagint – the Greek version of the Hebrew Torah, augmented by original compositions – was a common treasury of revelation for Jews and Christians of the early Roman Empire. And not only for Jews and Christians: educated Greeks, it appears, were familiar with those verses in which ‘the Lawgiver of the Jews’ ascribes the origin of all things to the simple command of God (Genesis 1.2–3). These verses, while they may not be the earliest in date of composition, have stood for centuries at the beginning of the Torah, and it is fitting that they should be the most widely known because they illustrate that primacy of hearing over seeing which the present chapter will demonstrate to be generally, if not ubiquitously, characteristic of the whole corpus. This is to not to say that ocular revelations are rare or illusory, but that speech affords stronger evidence than any visual sign of the presence of God, and imparts a clearer understanding of his will. Authors who do not hesitate to credit God with an audible voice are apt to represent what is seen as something other than God himself – a fire, an angel, the vague similitude of a human form. As fear of anthropomorphism becomes more acute, the word, the voice or the name may become grammatical substitutes for the tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God himself; as we shall see, however, this verbal proxy seldom acquires the substance of an angel or active deputy, let alone of a second god, in works that have not been deeply coloured by Greek or Christian traditions. If palpable existence could be accorded to the word as a thing distinct from God himself, that was because of the palpability of the scriptures, which to their latter-day interpreters were what God had been to their forebears, now that even vocal prophecy was as much a miracle of yesterday as the burning bush.¹

Creation by the Word

‘And God said, Let there be light’ (Genesis 1.3).² These are the most famous of God’s words in a book the whole of which is traditionally revered, by Jews and Christians alike, as the Word of God. By ‘the whole’ we may mean simply the work that in Greek and most European tongues is entitled ‘Genesis’; we may mean the corpus of literature that Jews call the Torah or Tanakh, though where Christians predominate the Greek is known as the Septuagint and the Hebrew as the Old Testament; or we may mean the uneasy but fruitful coupling of two canons which forms the scripture of the Church, and for which the usual designation is the Bible, derived from the Greek for ‘book’. Such terms were not available to the author of the Greek treatise On the Sublime or On the Grand Style, who, while drawing all his other illustrations from pagan literature, concludes from this one passage that the ‘Lawgiver of the Jews’ can have been no ordinary man. A more shallow judgment is expressed by Galen, a physician to us but in his own day a philosopher, who considers it more rational to imagine the Creator as an artisan working on matter than to take refuge, as the Jews and Christians do, in the notion of an omnipotent fiat curbed by no antecedent laws.³ Galen’s name for this divine artificer is Demiurge; biblical literature, as we shall see, reserves this term for a manufacturer of idols, while the appellation that Jews and Christians came to of God in his role was ktistês, a rarer term in Greek, and one that was held consistently, if not invariably, to be applicable to no being but God himself.

But is it to be presumed that God, as ktistês, effects his purposes without a material substrate? The first sentence of the book proclaims that ‘in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth’. Immediately we hear that ‘the earth was without form and void’ and that ‘the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’. The prophet Jeremiah appears to know the first half of this text, since he envisages the future ruin of Israel as a return to this primordial tohu-bohu, or state of chaos. Allusions in Gnostic writings and in the work of the philosopher Numenius suggest that the words describing the motion of the Spirit, which challenge comparison with Plato’s account of the animation of matter by the world-soul, were as notorious in some circles as the following verse, which records the creation of light.⁴ But did the tohu-bohu originate, like the light itself, in the unconditioned will of God, or was this inchoate mass coeternal with him, as a Platonist like Galen would have urged? If we take the first view, we must postulate two creations, first of the substrate, then of the world itself; if we adopt the second, the opening sentence (‘in the beginning God created’) must be construed not as the exordium to the narrative, but as a rubric: the true narrative commences, on this view, with the creation of light, and the intermediate verse describes a state anterior to this creation.⁵ There is in fact no passage of the Septuagint which plainly attests the creation of the world from nothing, unless it be 2 Maccabees 7.28, where the power of God to bring things into being from ‘that which is not’ is cited as evidence of his ability to restore life to his elect. But 2 Maccabees is a work preserved only in Greek, an item in the ‘apocryphal’ or ‘deuterocanonical’ portion of scripture, and in any case the locution ex ouk ontôn (‘from things which are not’) may as easily refer to an indeterminate substrate as to an absolute state of non-existence.⁶ In conclusion, therefore, we cannot say with confidence whether the author of Genesis 1, or any of his readers before the Christian era, held that creation by the Word of God was incompatible with the existence of a primordial chaos upon which this divine utterance imposed the present contours of the world.

An utterance, we may say: but is there a voice? Audible speech is addressed to the ear, but no interlocutor is mentioned in the text or in any Jewish or Aramaic exegesis of the early Christian era. Nor does the text encourage us to reify God’s word as a thing distinct from himself: that, as we shall see, was left to a later and more philosophical generation. Genesis 1.3 was understood by the rabbis to mean that the world was created without a coadjutor,⁷ and for some it became a dogma that it was created out of nothing, though the strength with which they assert this attests the credibility of the opposing doctrine. We read at Psalm 33.6 that the heavens were made by the word of God, where the Greek is logos and the Hebrew dabar: in neither language, however, is the word even an instrument, let alone a person. The expression is circumlocutory, a symptom of the same diffidence that caused Hebrew writers to say that it was not God, but his name, that possessed the sanctuary, not God but his glory that will fill the earth.⁸

We have seen that God was not to be conceived as an artisan; it was not, for all that, unlawful to describe the world as a piece of architecture. For those who held, with Hillel against Shammai, that the earth was created before the heavens, the former represents the foundation, the latter the superstructure.⁹ The edifice most suited to the comparison was the Temple in Jerusalem not because it was fashioned with the same ease, but because it was unique and a consummate specimen of the builder’s art. It was always to be remembered that this earthly house was built for the sake of the worshipper, not as a domicile for the uncontainable God, and that its predecessor, the tabernacle carried by the Israelites in the wilderness, was merely the simulacrum of a heavenly archetype revealed to Moses. The relation between the world and the Temple is one of prolepsis rather than of analogy; in the language of hermeneutics it is typological rather than allegorical, where the former term connotes the adumbration of one event by another, the latter a figurative expression of an atemporal truth. More accurately, we see here an inversion of the typological principle as this is commonly understood by Christians, for in this case it is the paradigm that comes first, while what follows is the ectype, realizing only the shadow of its original.

The Image of God

Heaven and earth are God’s creation, not his likeness. This is an obvious point but not a barren one, for no book was more often compared to Genesis in antiquity than Plato’s Timaeus, the closing sentence of which declares that the cosmos is the unique (monogenes) image of its eternal paradigm. We shall see later, in Chapter 7, that some Platonists held the Demiurge and the paradigm to be one entity, and for such thinkers it would follow that the world exhibits not only the power, but the lineaments of its maker. The ‘priestly writer’ whom most scholars hold responsible for the narrative of creation in six days does not suggest that God is visible in any of his works before the sixth day. Only then, and adopting the plural pronoun for the first time, does he proclaim ‘Let us create man in our image and likeness’. Forthwith he appears to do something less than this, for we are told that man was created in the image of God, as though man were a single entity, and nothing is said of the likeness. An appended clause, which states that ‘he created them male and female’ seems, if anything, to indicate an unlikeness between the creature and the one God who is commonly spoken of in the masculine gender. To the male and female together the Creator issues an ordinance to populate the earth, attaching to this a promise of dominion over all the other inhabitants of water, land and air.

This enigmatic passage raised as many questions for the ancient as for the modern reader. What does it mean to speak of an image of God, and is this the same thing as a likeness? There are scholars of high authority who maintain that the words mean here what they would signify in any other context, which is to say that the author imagined the first human being to be a replica of his Maker.¹⁰ Physical similarity is undoubtedly implied in the occurrence of the phrase at Genesis 5.3, where a different author, who probably antedates the priestly writer, speaks of Seth as the image and likeness of his father Adam. If man resembles God, it follows that God resembles man, and we learn from both rabbinic and Christian sources in antiquity that this anthropomorphic tenet was widely held. In all our sources, however, it is the error of someone else, the untenable alternative which an author must ceremoniously repudiate to secure a hearing for his own position. There are scholars, again of good repute, who cannot believe that even the narrator of Genesis 1 was so ingenuous;¹¹ some, looking for a gloss in the ambient text, propose that the meaning of the term ‘image’ is conveyed in the words investing man with authority over the denizens of the three elements. God’s vicegerent, on this view, is the image of God insofar as he is the sole representative of their common Author to the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air and the four-footed beasts of the land.

This is one of the readings entertained in ancient sources. Both ancient and modern exegetes are apt to ignore a third occurrence of the term ‘image’ at Genesis 9.6, where it is stipulated that one who sheds the blood of his human neighbour must pay with his own because man was made in the image of God. Here the thought appears to be that a human being is God’s must precious chattel, so that to say that man is made in the image of God is to say that he bears God’s seal as a mark of ownership and affection. Yet, though this sealing is predicated in biblical texts of Israel, of the Christian elect and of Christ himself, it has not been so frequently invoked in the elucidation of Genesis 1.26 as other notions which are grounded not in parallel with cognate texts from the scriptures, but in received beliefs concerning the nature of God. Since God is supposed to be eminently rational, it may be surmised that the image consists in the exercise of reason or in the possession of a capacity for free decision, not vouchsafed to any other creature. Or, again. it may be urged that, as God is supremely good, his image is retained so long as we persevere in rectitude. No resemblance in corporeal attributes is posited here; on the contrary, the usual view is that, if there is any natural affinity between God and man, it is grounded in man’s possession of an incorporeal soul. This is a philosophical, not a biblical, hypothesis, a legacy of the Greek occupation of the Jewish world after Alexander – though it would not be good philosophy to infer that it is therefore an unlawful speculation for a Christian, or an inauthentic belief when embraced by Jews.

So far we have only begun to broach the difficulties that arise from the gnomic style of the priestly writer. If (for example) God undertakes to make man in his image and likeness, but goes on to create in the image alone, does this entail that likeness and image are one, as both fourth-century and twentieth-century critics have opined, or is it rather that the likeness is a gift to be superadded to the image, but provisionally withheld? This speculation seems to be confirmed by the asseveration at Genesis 9.6, which was quoted above, that every man is the image of God, without any mention of the likeness. The next question is, if the likeness has been withheld, how are we to acquire it? Righteousness is a universal duty, but if this means the virtue that is perfected by resistance to odds and the conquest of temptation, it can find no mirror in God, whom we must presume to be incapable of failure or of being less than he is. One answer might be that humans live under two ordinances: to manifest the image in such attributes as wisdom and benevolence, which appertain also to God; and to realize the likeness in those attributes which set us apart from God but admit of perfection in their own kind. Yet, even if we grant that God and man share such a commonwealth of properties, we may doubt whether any such casuistry was imagined by the author of this text.

Enigma succeeds enigma when we are told that the man in the image of God was created male and female. Greek and English renderings imply a collective rather than an individual subject, but according to an early rabbinic construction of this verse the first created human was a hermaphrodite. This, one might maintain, was a necessity, since no being of either sex could possess the image of a Creator who has none. By a naive inversion of the same conceit one might conclude that, if his image is literally bisexual, God himself must be not so much sexless as androgynous.¹² Any such hypotheses, however, will prove baseless if we assume that the same event is represented in the narrative which we now describe as the second chapter of Genesis. According to this account, the protoplast, or first created human entity, is not the species but a solitary male, who receives the designation Adam (man) as a proper name. He is not summoned out of nothing by a word, but fashioned from the clay of the earth, and is not said to bear the image of his Maker. The female is not coeval with the male, but is fashioned later from his rib because it is deemed ‘not good that man should be alone’. Both man and woman fall so far short of God in wisdom that it is the hope of ‘becoming like gods’ that tempts them to violate his ordinance and pluck the fruit of knowledge. It is only when they have both acquired the knowledge of good and evil that God says, with a curious permutation of singular and plural, ‘the man is become as one of us’.

If we regard the first episode as a proleptic abbreviation of the second, we shall understand ‘God created man’ to mean ‘God fashioned man’, and ‘male and female’ to signify ‘first the male, then the female’. As the second omits, but does not deny, the bestowal of the likeness, we are free to guess that image, likeness or both reside in the inner man, or even in the body; on the other hand, we may wonder what addition or amercement it may have received from the desire to ‘be as gods’. But is it necessary to educe one narrative from discordant passages? Might one not argue, rather, that there are i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Titale Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Seeing and Hearing God in the Old Testament
• 2 Seeing and Hearing God in the New Testament
• 3 Word and Image in Classical Greek Philosophy
• 4 Philosophers and Sophists of the Early Roman Era
• 5 Image, Text and Incarnation in the Second Century
• 6 Image, Text and Incarnation in the Third Century
• 7 Neoplatonism and the Arts
• 8 Image, Text and Incarnation in the Fourth Century
• 9 Myth and Text in Proclus
• 10 The Christianity of Christian Platonism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index