Anthropomorphism and the Beatific Vision

 

James L. Kugel describes two distinct concepts of God in the Bible (pp. 107-118). The early Hebrew God is a tribal deity, proudly superior to Ba'al but still a face in a polytheistic crowd, possibly paired with a goddess. He wasn't the sole god but merely the god that his chosen tribe was obliged to worship no others "before" (Exodus 20:5). Like Athena, Apollo, and Santa Claus, he is supernatural but corporeal, a gendered person with hands and feet, a front and a back, located in time and and space. In Genesis 2-3, after creating the world, Yahweh breathes, speaks, walks with audible footsteps, and can't see Adam and Eve when they hide. 

The same corporeal deity, appears on Mount Sinai--a particular place at a specific time, refuting his omnipresence--and tells Moses, “When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen” (Exodus 33:21-23). The Mercy Seat on the Ark is his throne; he is physically present in the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur. "Surely, the Lord is in this place," says Jacob at Bethel (Genesis 28:16). All of this is nonsense in the terms of a transcendent God who grounds the being in the entire universe and is not absent anywhere.

The creation story in the first chapter of Genesis, a historically later strata according to source analysis, contains no trace of a deity who walks on dirt and sees locally in a garden. In this later account, God--called Elohim (a generic term for God, like Allah)--is a spirit or wind (Hebrew ruah). The only anthropomorphic thing Elohim does is speak, bringing the world into being (or bringing chaos into order) with a spoken command. His later creation of men and women in his likeness has been interpreted many ways and was a barrier to the conversion of Augustine of Hippo (354-430), who asked, "Does God have hair and nails?" Augustine became Christian only after Ambrose introduced him to allegorical readings of scriptures, which harmonized them with the one God of Platonism and Rabbinical Judaism: the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and impassible Father in classical Christian theology.

A century and a half before Augustine--in De Principis, perhaps the first book of systemic Christian theology--Origen condemned Christians who read the Old Testament literally and attribute to God "things as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of mankind" (Book 4, Section 8). Origen described the Eden story as absurd on its face and calls for a reading in the spirit of the text, not its flesh. "Who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a garden in Eden towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by bodily teeth obtained life? And again, that one was a partaker of good and evil by masticating what was taken from the tree?" 

These, like Yahweh's walking in the garden and the seven days of creation, "figuratively indicate certain mysteries" and must be read as such. They are true only allegorically (4. 16). Thus all of the corporeal references to God--his hand, his face, his presence, his absence, his throne, and his gender--are dissolved into an omnipresent spirit, and there is nothing to see or approach except figuratively. Concrete statements on the subject, read literally, are like "earthen vessels" containing treasure, "the hidden splendor of doctrines" (4.7). God has no visible form.

The historical Jesus gives Christians a visible human form, but the divine essence he embodies has been understood from the beginnings of classical theology to be describable only by (1) saying what it isn't, such as finite (the via negativa) or by (2) naming imperfect human traits, such as goodness, that exist perfectly in God (analogy). This emphasis on transcendence is uncompromising in Islam, which not only shuns or allegorizes the divine anatomical parts of the Jewish Torah, but rejects the incarnation of Christ as beneath the Father.

Say, "He is God, the One.

God the, the Absolute.

He begets not, neither was He begotten,

And there is none comparable to Him" (Quran, 112:1-4).

Arabic has no equivalent to the English pronoun it (the sun and moon are he and she), so the pronoun He above need not represent God as male in the human sense. He isn't like a man as opposed to like a woman. Indeed, in Islam, representing God in terms of any created being is idolatry--shirk in Arabic, the unforgivable sin of setting up "partners with God" (Quran, 4:48). Zulfiqar Ali Shah summarizes the transcendence of Allah in his exhaustive 1997 dissertation, A Study of Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in the Bible and Qur'an: "His attributes and qualities are absolute and are never connected with any physical object, part or organ of the body" (p. 314). In God there is no movement, substance, or location, no "left, right, in front of, behind, above, below; no place comprehends him, no time passes over him" (p. 328). He cannot be seen or localized because "He infinitely transcends anything which the mind can perceive or comprehend, the senses can grasp, imagine, or explain" (p. 302). Shah blames absurd doctrine of an anthropomorphic creator, a personal God in the naive sense, for the rise in atheism (p. 389).

Parts of the Qur'an, called ambiguous verses, that seem to challenge pure transcendence are, Shah maintains, for poetic effect and must be interpreted metaphorically (pp. 318-321). The challenge is greater outside the Qur'an, especially in Muhammad's Night Journey, which many Muslims believe was a bodily experience, not a dream or vision. It is alluded to in Surah 17:1 of the Qur'an, and expanded in second and third-hand accounts of Muhammad's words: hadiths taken as authoritative, if less so than the Qur'an.

Muhammad's Seven Heavens over Jerusalem

Falling asleep in Mecca, the prophet is awakened by Gabriel and carried to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on the back of a magical white steed. In Jerusalem, he leads a group of historic prophets in prayer and climbs a ladder through seven gates and seven heavens. In each heaven, he meets a figure from the Abrahamic tradition, beginning with Adam and passing by Jesus and Moses to Abraham himself. Beyond the seventh heaven, Muhammad is allowed into the divine presence beyond the "Lote Tree of the utmost boundary," where he's commanded to have his followers to pray fifty times a day. On his way back down the ladder, the Prophet meets Moses, who advises him that many prayers would burden his people, so Muhammad returns to the divine presence and negotiates a reduced number. In turn, Moses advises that this number is too high, and Muhammad returns repeatedly, finally reducing daily prayers to five. So Muhammad is said to have had face-to-face encounters with a God who was localized beyond a tree and changed his mind, not the omnipresent, omniscient, and impassible God of theology. 

This kind of concrete personal God may be more appealing to unsophisticated worshippers than the transcendent Being of theology, knowable only by negatives and divine names. But, to Shah, it makes no sense to climb a ladder in Jerusalem to approach an omnipresent God, who is no more located in the sky over Jerusalem than at ground level in Mecca, and so the story is nonsense except as allegory. Sam Shamoun addresses the question with traditional sources in "Can Allah Be Seen and Did Muhammad See his Lord?" and concludes that the tradition is ambiguous. It glorifies Muhammad that he was summoned for an audience with God, and some suppose that he saw God only as a dazzling light, but even that would be local, not transcendent.

In The Perennial Philosophy (1941), Aldous Huxley proposes a common denominator of all religions to be the existence of a spiritual absolute or divine ground (not necessarily God) such that "the ultimate reason for human existence is the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground" (p. 21). In Eastern religions, unitive knowledge means realizing that individual being is inseparable from universal being--that self is Self or "Thou art that." In Christianity (outside of semi-heretical schools such as the Rhineland mystics) a clear line of separation is drawn between the human and the divine, so that the goal of human existence is not becoming God, but seeing God, the Beatific Vision. Despite the widespread anthropomorphism in scripture, Christian theology shares with Islam the idea of a Creator outside of time, space, and change, a God who is ultimately unknowable. The greatest happiness, then, is to see the invisible, to know the unknowable. This paradox has been resolved in several ways.

The orthodox God became officially incomprehensible when the 325 Council of Nicaea repudiated Arianism, a heresy that had made mathematical sense of the Trinity by seeing the Son as a separate creation. Nicaea embraced nonsense (or mystery) by ruling that the three persons of the Trinity were both (1) different from each other and (2) one and the same, so that, as a self-contradiction at the most basic level of logic, God was unintelligible. He could not be "seen" even in the mind's eye. In the Eastern Church, the pseudo-Dionysius (c. 500) affirmed a tradition of accepting this mystery as a thing to be contemplated, not philosophized on. It was an irresolvable paradox like the Zen "one hand clapping." The divine can be approached by contemplating the unintelligible, but God's essence is beyond even existence as we understand it. God is "super-essential," having no humanly comprehensible nature. God is like the solar disk that cannot be seen by human eyes because its overwhelming brightness blinds us. He is darkness at noon.

In the Western Church, Augustine of Hippo affirmed more nuanced incomprehensibility. Yes, God's fullness transcends human understanding--the unity of Trinity is a mystery--but some comprehensible truths do reveal God's uncreated nature. The darkness of the divine solar disk is the blindness of sin, and through grace we can "see" God, even if indirectly, "in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12). An intelligible relationship with God is, for Augustine, part of redeemed human nature. 

Still, Augustine's piecemeal intelligibility falls short of the Beatific Vision, the "face to face" promise of Paul's letter that theologians have seen as the final reward of the saved in heaven (and the hope of mystics before death). If resurrected humans are still human, the incomprehensible Trinity must still incomprehensible to them. The successors of the pseudo-Dionysius' had little interest in logical explanations, but Thomas Aquinas invented one in the doctrine of a "super-natural" grace, a superpower answering prior objections. 

Maybe it's time to back off from the layers of formal doctrine that, as Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers (1799), encrust original religious intuitions and may betray them. Without flinging ourselves into an abyss of nonsense, we can remember that scriptures tend to be symbolic expressions of experiences that may be distorted, even crushed beyond recognition, by attempts to force them into logical doctrines. Experiences of the divine (not only the dazzling, transcendent kind, but Augustine's partial vision, and Schleiermacher's "feeling of absolute dependency") are fountainheads of religion. Religious visionaries use all sorts of figurative language to share these experiences. 

We take these figures of speech literally at our peril, especially the anthropomorphism that crops up when we speak anything above humanity (such is our speciesist vanity). As Shah argues, such corporeal literalism opens the door to an atheism of dead Paul Bunyan Titans.

References

Cary, Phillip. The History of Christian Theology. The Great Courses, 2008. Lecture 13 informed my overflight of the Beatific Vision from the pseudo-Dionysius to Aquinas.

Huxley, Aldous. The Perennial Philosophy. Harper, 1945.

Kugel. James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now. Free Press, 2007.

Origen. De Principiis. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0412.htm. Accessed August 22, 2020.

Shah, Zulfiqar Ali. A Study of Anthropomorphism and Transcendence in the Bible and Qur'an: Scripture and God in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Traditions. A Ph.D. thesis at the University of Wales, March 1997. 

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers. Translated by Richard Crouter. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Shamoun, Sam. "Can Allah Be Seen and Did Muhammad See His Lord." https://www.answering-islam.org/Shamoun/allah_seen.htm. Accessed August 22, 2020.