The Form of God and Vision of the Glory: Some Thoughts on the Anthropomorphite Controversy of 399 AD

published in Romanian translation by I. Ica Jr., in Mistagogia: Experienta lui Dumnezeu

in Orthodoxie (Sibiu: Deisis, 1998) 184-267.

Part I: A Controversy at the turn of the Fifth Century

In late winter of 399 the annual paschal epistle of the Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria took occasion to condemn at length the teaching that God has a human form. The letter itself is no longer extant, but John Cassian, together with Palladius and the Church historians, Sozomen and Socrates, all agree that it hit a nerve among the monks of Egypt [1]. Cassian tells us that in three of the four churches at Scete the priests refused to read the patriarch's letter aloud [2], while Socrates and Sozomen report a mob of angry ascetics converging on the patriarchal residence bent on lynching the offending prelate [3]. Although both historians leave the reader with the impression that they would have quite liked to see Theophilus dangling from the nearest lamp-post, neither evinces any sympathy for the views of the protesting monks. The latter are portrayed rather as ignoramuses whose naivte regarding both biblical interpretation and ecclesiastical politics allows the cunning patriarch to use their anger against his enemies in the Egyptian church, notably the Origenist "Tall Brothers" and their associates [4]. According to the historians, Theophilus redeems the situation, and possibly his life, with a single remark: "In seeing you", he tells the mob, "I behold the face of God" [5]. The answering demand that he prove his bonafides by condemning Origen provides him with the opportunity he is seeking to begin a purge of his "Origenist" opposition.

Other scholars, most notably Elizabeth Clarke, have dealt at length with Theophilus and the other players in this, the first Origenist controversy [6]. I would like to inquire into the thinking of the protesting monks. Were they, I wonder, the simpletons our sources make them out to be? What did it mean for them to believe, as it seems they did, that God has a "human form"? What or whom did they mean by "God"? Which tradition, or traditions, might they have been drawing upon, other than, or in addition to, the obvious anthropomorphisms of the scriptures? I believe that this controversy had to do with two issues: first, that the monks thought the question important because they believed that it touched on the very goal of their lives as Christian renunciates, the vision of God; and, second, that their "anthropomorphism" represented in fact a Christology of very ancient provenance, with roots in the vision tradition of pre-Christian apocalyptic and with possible parallels in the interests some rabbinic circles maintained in mystical speculation on the chariot, or merkabah, of Ezekiel 1. This Christology had, moreover, been rendered anachronistic by -- and was, to be sure, incompatible with -- the revolution of the Nicene homoousion. While my first point has been recognized by a number of scholars, Graham Gould for example and Georges Florovsky [7], the second, save for a passing suggestion by Gedeliahu Stroumsa, has so far escaped scholarly notice [8]. In support, I shall begin by calling the following three texts to witness: John Cassian's Xth Collatio, chapter LXX of Epiphanius of Salamis' Panarion, and the Coptic Life of Apa Aphou of Pemdje [9]. Later on, I shall also have recourse to more distant points in the Christian world of the late fourth century, from the Persian frontier to the Numidia of Augustine of Hippo.

I.A: The Primary Witnesses: Cassian, Epiphanius, Apa Aphou

Cassian's tenth Conversation provides the most extensive discussion and rebuttal of the Egyptian anthropomorphites. Like Palladius, Socrates and Sozomen, Cassian was an admirer of Evagrius Ponticus, the Origenist of the Egyptian desert, and was deeply influenced by Evagrius' emphasis on "imageless prayer", together with his interiorization of the visio Dei [10]. It cannot be an accident, therefore, that the discussion of anthropomorphism shows up at the beginning of Cassian's "conversation" with Abba Isaac on the highest form of prayer. A certain simple monk, Serapion, whom Cassian characterizes all the same as both an "elder and a holy man" [11] is enlisted as Isaac's foil. The poor little fellow is aghast at the Patriarch Theophilus' "new-fangled teaching [novella persuasio]" on the incorporeality of the "image of God" as taught by Genesis 1:26. After registering his protest, though, he is promptly pounded into submission by the arguments of a learned deacon, Photinus, visiting from Cappadocia. The latter explains that the "divine nature is incorporeal, without composition, and simple", and that God's "majesty [maiestas]" is therefore "incomprehensible and invisible" [12]. The imago Dei of Genesis 1:26 must thus be understood "spiritually [spiritualiter]", and the archbishop was correct to "deny that almighty God [Deus omnipotens] is of a human form" [13]. Serapion is silenced, but later that evening cannot contain his distress: "They have taken my God away from me", he weeps at vespers, "and now I no longer know whom I may take hold of, or whom I may call upon anymore or whom adore" [14].

The old fellow's trouble leads Cassian into the real subject of the Conversation, prayer in its highest form. Abba Isaac is asked how so good and pious an old man could have been so wrong - indeed, put in peril of his soul - as to subscribe to the anthropomorphite "heresy" [15]. Isaac replies that Serapion's lack of instruction in the "nature and substance [natura atque substantia] of the Godhead is at fault. The matter of his "abominable interpretation [detestandae huius interpretationis]" of Gen.1:26 betrays a residual paganism, like that condemned by St. Paul in Rom.1:23, "exchanging the glory [gloriam] of the incorruptible God for a human likeness", or Jeremiah's complaint (Jer.2:11) about Israel exchanging "their glory for an idol" [16]. True prayer, on the other hand, requires an inner eye purged of everything material and earthly, and the latter includes even the memory of any shape or form [forma] [17]. In order to see Jesus in the splendor of his maiestatis, one must be free as well of that "Jewish weakness" also condemned by St. Paul in 2 Cor. 5:16: the Lord is no longer to be known according to the flesh [18]. Isaac continues with a clear evocation of the Transfiguration. It is purified eyes, by which Isaac means the eyes of the soul cleansed of matter and form, that gaze [speculantur] on Jesus in his divinity [18]. The monk, therefore, withdraws with Christ to the "mountain of solitude" in order that, even if not so clearly as to Peter, James, and John on Mt. Tabor, the Lord "may reveal the glory of his countenance and the image of his splendor" [gloriam vultus eius et claritatis revelat imaginem] [19]. It is in this way that, even in this life, one may enjoy the foretaste of heaven and, filled with the indwelling [love] of Father and Son (citing Jn 17:22 and 24-26), may be joined with them and become oneself a single, unending prayer [20].

According to Cassian the dispute with the anthropomorphites is thus first of all over the proper interpretation of Gen.1:26, the meaning of the imago Dei, and, secondly, over the content of the visio Dei given through Christ. For Serapion, that content appears to be the glorious form of God, according to which pattern we humans were made. For Cassian, however, it is Christ in his divinity, which is to say, in the formless and incorporeal majesty and glory of the simple divine nature which, I would add, the Son of God shares with the Father and Spirit and which, given the appeal to the Transfiguration, I would further suggest is made manifest to the pure eye of the soul as light [21]. Thus, thirdly, for Cassian anthropomorphism is an absurd heresy (inepta haeresis) regarding the divine nature or substance, or even regarding the Father, Deus omnipotens. Serapion, the vir simplicissimus, must be corrected since he risks his soul by clothing divinity itself with a body of parts and passions. His error is characterized at once as pagan, idolatrous, and as "Jewish weakness". Finally, I should like to underline the importance of the following terms and scriptural loci as they emerge in Cassian's discussion. The terms are: Deus omnipotens (presumably the Father), and the others relating to the godhead generally, divinitas, gloria, claritas, maiestas, conspectus, and vultus, together with the image words, imago, forma, and figura. The scriptural references are Gen.1:26, Rom.1:23, and Jer.2:11, with both the latter relating to the "glory" of God. Anticipating my discussion later, I suggest that this combination of terms, together with the these and the other scriptural texts which will shortly emerge, add up to a pattern which itself will be illumined by Abba Isaac's brief and ostensibly stereotypical allusion to "Jewish weakness"

In our next witness, Epiphanius of Salamis, writing decades earlier and hundreds of miles away from Egypt, we discover a strikingly similar set of concerns and emphases [22]. Like Cassian, Epiphanius in Panarion 70 is arguing with an order (tagma) of ascetics, though his particular interlocutors are Mesopotamian in origin [23], and once more the argument is over the both the interpretation of Gen.1:26 and the vision of God. There is, however, one striking difference from Cassian. No one has ever accused Ephiphanius of being reluctant to level the charge of heresy, but in this case he never even breathes the word. Quite to the contrary, he declares the faith of his target group, both in general and specifically on the Trinity, "most orthodox [orthotata]" [24], and goes on to sing the praises of their founder, Audius, as a true ascetic, a truth-teller who bore persecution and abuse because he was not shy about calling the higher clergy to task [25]. The bishop of Salamis' ire is reserved for the Audians' refusal to commune with the rest of the Church because - and how familiar this sounds to the modern Orthodox ear! - of a calendrical dispute: the Audians are Quartodecimans [26]. As for their faith, there is only, he says, "one little point [en mikro tini]" that is off-kilter and to which they stubbornly cling. They read Gen.1:26 literally, attaching to it both Gen.2:7, the making of Adam from the earth, and 9:6, the divine prohibition of murder, addressed to Noah, because "God made man in his own image" [27]. The Audians thus believe that the imago Dei is identical with God's corporeal form, hence the attachment to Gen.2:7, and that the image persisted after the Fall, thus Noah and Gen.9:6.

Epiphanius agrees with the first point, the preservation of the image, and spends a good deal of time taking on and dismissing the several theories of the image's "location" in the human being. It is not, for example, to be spiritualized and identified with the soul, nor with virtue more generally. Neither has it been lost with the Fall [28]. The imago, he insists, is a mystery. It subsists in the "whole man" and no "where" in particular [29]. If, though, it somehow mysteriously includes both the soul and the body, this certainly does not mean that it is simply to be identified with the body's form [30]. Otherwise, Epiphanius protests, we make God himself corporeal who is instead "all eye, all glory[31].

Now, and again significantly, it is just at this point that the argument shifts to the visio Dei. For the Audians, the issues of the image and the content of the vision are clearly linked. In support of their position, they call to witness a number of Old Testament theophany texts, most notably Isaiah 6:1ff and Daniel 7:9-13, but including other references, such as to God's throne and footstool in Is.66:1 and Ps.10:4, as well as the divine hands and eyes (Psalms 10:4 and 33:16, and Isaiah 41:20) [32]. Once more, Epiphanius both agrees and disagrees. Yes, he admits, God did indeed appear to the saints of Israel as the theophanies testify, just as he also appeared to the protomartyr, Stephen, in Acts 7. Nor did these manifestations take place on a purely spiritual plane, either - that is, in the mind or heart - but before the fleshly eyes of those so favored [33]. So much for Deacon Photinus' spiritualiter! As in his remarks concerning the image, Epiphanius is obliged to take refuge in paradox. The invisible God becomes visible as and when he chooses, and to whom he chooses, so far as the created nature of those who encounter him can bear it [34]. He follows thus up with a pair of comparisons illustrating the point that, even in revealing himself, God retains his mystery. One may truly see the sky through a tiny aperture, just as one may look out at the sea from a mountain top, but in neither case does the whole of either sea or sky appear [35]. The Audians, he argues, are therefore simply wrong to insist that God requires a corporeal form -- literally, is in need of "hands or eyes or the rest" - in order to appear to created vision. His interlocutors, he adds, are also confusing the Trinity with the specific act and fruit of the Incarnation, for, to quote at length from Frank Williams' translation of Panarion 70.8.6-8:

That he really appeared - yes, he appeared as he chose and truly looked as he

appeared. For God can do all things, and nothing is impossible for him. But he

is incomprehensible, unfathomable spirit...And as is the Father in his divinity, so is

the Son, and so is the Holy Spirit. But only the Only-Begotten came and assumed

the flesh in which he also rose, which he also united with his godhead, <and> [in

which] he sat down in glory at the Father's right hand...after uniting it with spirit...

[So] all that is said of him [panta ta legomena autou] is true, but there is no understanding any of God's attributes, and how he exists in incomprehensible glory. [36]

This constitutes, to be sure, an admirable testimony to Epiphanius' own trinitarian and christological

orthodoxy, but, given the subject under the discussion, the legomena of the theophanies, it cannot hide a certain confusion, or at least ambiguity. Just exactly who or what is it that appeared in the Old Testament manifestations, as well as to Stephen in Acts? Epiphanius seems to be unclear. Is the autou of the legomena the Son? or God in general, the divine nature itself, thus the "unfathomable spirit" and "incomprehensible glory" which recall Cassian on the vision of the Son's divinitas? The tradition that we find often in such Pre-nicene writers as Justin Martyr, Clement, Tertullian, or most of the rest whom I am aware of [37], that the subject of the Old Testament theophanies is the Second Person, appears to have been obscured. Indeed, I think that Nicea may be the difficulty. Ephiphanius is struggling to be fully Nicene, and running into a problem, specifically: what to do with the imago and, relatedly, the visio Dei. If it is the Second Person who, while homoousios to patri, has uniquely taken on flesh in order to unite the latter to the same, unique and shared divinity, it also appears to be the case that, for this church father, it is the divine nature or essence which comprises at once the basis of the image in Adam and that glory which is disclosed in the theophanies of the Old and New Covenants. Once more, we also find the same language of glory which we met in Cassian, and which we also saw linked to the same issues, divine essence, the imago, and the vision or manifestation of God, save that now we have a broader array of disputed texts: Gen.1:26, together with 2:7 and 9:6, with respect to the image of God, and a cluster of other Old Testament passages, among which I would especially like to underline Is. 6:1ff, 66:1, and Dan.7:9ff, with their common imagery of the glorious figure of God enthroned, whether in the temple, as in Is.6, or in heaven, Is.66:1 and Dan.7:9. But the question remains, just who is that figure, and what does his form signify?

I think it might be useful at this juncture to bring another witness to the bar, even if he is not speaking directly to the issue of anthropomorphism. Some ten to fifteen years after Epiphanius' Panarion, Gregory of Nyssa delivers a homily on the feast of St. Stephen the first martyr [38]. At two points he takes up the question of Stephen's vision, and in his treatment of it we find, first, the echoes of those archaic elements that I maintain are also operative in Cassian's opponents and the Audians, and second, the adjustments to Nicea which Epiphanius is struggling to make, if not altogether successfully. The first passage discusses the "what" of Stephen's vision, and the second the "how":

For when he had gone outside of [his] nature, and before having departed his

body, he [Stephen] sees with pure eyes the heavenly gates parted, and that which

is within the sanctuary [to entos ton adyton] shining through: both the divine Glory

itself [auten ten theian doxan] and the ray [apaugasma] of the Glory. Now, while

it is not possible for [mere] reason to sketch any feature [kharakter] of the paternal

glory, the athlete [Stephen] beheld its ray in the form [eidos] which has appeared

to men: to the degree that this is possible for human nature, in this way it ap-

peared. Thus he who had gone outside of human nature, and who had been changed into [what] approached angelic dignity with respect to the form of his [own] countenance, both saw what is unseeable [atheata] and announced the grace which had appeared to him. [39]

This is very interesting, in particular Gregory's use of eidos (does he mean the form of the Incarnation, or the older theophanies as well?), of glory, here the Father, and of the "ray" of the glory, the Son. Of note, too, is Stephen's exaltation to angelic status, signified by the brightness of his countenance, and, last, the note of the heavenly sanctuary whose gates are parted to allow the vision. Each of these elements plays a role in the tradition, or complex of tradition, that I believe underlies the anthropomorphite dispute.

For now, though, let me complete Gregory's witness. "How", he asks, "did Stephen see the Glory above the heavens [hyperouranios doxa]? Who was it who parted those gates for him?" He replies that this did not happen by means of either human or angelic agency:

Because, as the prophet says, light does not appear unless it appears by means of

light, for "In your light", he says, "we shall see light"...how would it be possible

to look into the sun outside of its rays? Since, therefore, it is in the light of the

Father -- which is to say, in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from him -- that the

Only-Begotten light is beheld, so it is because of this that, after being illumined

beforehand [prokataugastheis], he [Stephen] enters into the comprehension of the

glory of the Father and the Son...For it is not by remaining in [his] human nature

and power that Stephen sees the divine, but rather, having been mingled [ana-

krastheis] with the grace of the Holy Spirit, he is exalted by means of the latter

to the perception of God...[for] wherever the Spirit is, there, too, is the Son

contemplated, and the paternal glory comprehended. [40]

Here we find a number of things: the echo of Nicea-Constantinople in "light of light" and the procession of the Spirit; the mingling language so prominent in the Macarian Homilies and Syriac Christianity generally [41]; and a new element, the identification of the Spirit with light, such that the Father is the Glory, the Son its "ray", and the Holy Spirit its light. We also have, I think, an indication of what part of the answer will be (at least in the East) to the issues raised by the "anthropomorphites" -- or, better, by those older currents which I believe the latter represented.

Turning back thus to the Audians, we might say of them that, in contrast to Epiphanius, while they undoubtedly welcomed Nicea's defense of the Son's divinity, they were not quite so far along in working out the consequences of the council's homoousion. Their Christology, like that which I believe belongs to Serapion and company as well, is an older one, closer to some of the possibilities intimated by Gregory's enigmatic phrase, "the form which appeared to men", as I trust my next witness will help to clarify.

The Life of Apa Aphou of Pemdje comes from a Coptic manuscript rescued from fragments, reassembled and published by Revillout late last century. It has since provided the subject of an important article on the anthropomorphite controversy by Edouard Drioton, in 1915-1917, and then of two more by Georges Florovsky, responding to Drioton, in the 50's and 60's [42]. All three of these scholars, together with Elizabeth Clarke and Graham Gould later on, read the Life as a rare -- not to say unique -- source from the people whom Cassian, Socrates, Sozomen et. al. were writing against [43]. The document's value as a witness is enhanced by the fact that the Egyptian editor or compiler seems blissfully unaware of any controversy, coming perhaps from a later period when the heat had died down and been forgotten. He is thus free of polemics [44]. The Life features a purported interview between its hero, Apa Aphou, and none other than the Patriarch Theophilus on the subject of the latter's paschal letter. This is, of course, what is of primary interest to us, as it was to Drioton and Florovsky. The former includes the Coptic text and supplies a French translation. As I am not versed in Coptic, I shall be obliged to depend on his French, as well as the English rendering which Florovsky secured and quotes.

The scene opens with Aphou troubled by the infamous encyclical which, according to the Life, had sought to "exalt the glory [mpeooy] of God" by denying the image in man. Armed with angelic encouragement, the old man goes off to Alexandria to have a heart to heart with the patriarch [45]. In the first section of the ensuing exchange, Aphou reproaches Theophilus with Gen.1:26, and the patriarch replies by stating that the imago was lost with the Fall. Aphou, and we recall Epiphanius' exchange with the Audians, counters by citing Gen.9:6. Theophilus objects that the imago is not consonant with human weakness. Can the "true and unapproachable light [I Tim.6:16]", he asks, have anything to do with a beggar engaged in defecation [46]?

So far, we find the familiar references to Genesis, together with the language of light and glory, but in what follows we break into new and interesting territory. Aphou appeals to the Eucharist. If, he argues, the latter is truly the body [epsoma] of Christ, and if Christ, who said "I am the living bread come down from heaven" (John 6:51), is the very same who warned Noah against murder because "man has been created according to the image of God", then the Archbishop, by acknowledging the sacramental reality, must perforce recognize the imago's continuing presence even in fallen humanity [47]. The elder concludes (translating from Drioton's French):

As for the glory of the greatness [peooy de mpmegethos] of God, which it

is impossible for anyone to see because of its incomprehensible light, and as

for human weakness and imperfection...we think that it is like a king who

orders the making of an image which everyone is to acknowledge as the image

of the king. Yet everyone knows perfectly well that it is only [made] of wood

together with other elements...but...the king has said, 'This is my image'...How

much the more so, then, with man....? [48]

Let me pause here simply to note the following equivalences: the image of God, Christ, the body "come down from heaven", and the "glory of the greatness of God" clothed with "incomprehensible light", or, more simply still: image=Christ=heavenly body=glory/greatness /light. It seems scarcely necessary to add, though I will do so anyway, that this sequence or constellation of terms is quite in agreement with the grouping, glory-light-image-form (eidos, figura, forma) that we have already met, at least partially, in Cassian, Epiphanius, and even, to a degree, Gregory. With respect, then, to the question of Gen.1:26, while it is certainly true that, for Aphou, our human bodies are of a different "stuff", thus his differentiation above between the wood of the king's picture and the sovereign's living body, and so human flesh in contrast to incomprehensible light, it is also clear for him that they nevertheless reflect a heavenly reality, specifically, the Second Person of the Trinity.

Drioton was therefore quite correct to note the parallels between Aphou, Cassian, and Epiphanius [49]. He was wrong, though, and justly criticized by Florovsky, for reading Apa Aphou as an "Audian" and, in consequence, for understanding "anthropomorphism" as a heresy newly imported from Mesopotamia [50]. Florovsky was also quite correct in putting his finger on the Second Person of the Trinity as the subject of the anthropomorphite discussion of the image and form of God [51]. Cassian, an "Origenist", together with Epiphanius, definitely not an "Origenist", muddy the waters by giving their readers the impression that the "anthropomorphites" were speaking either of the Father (Cassian's Deus omnipotens) or of the divine essence (both Cassian and Epiphanius). I must part company with Fr. Georges, however, on two, related points. First, even though Epiphanius does not consider the Audians to be heretics, both he and Cassian seem to me to be on the same side in this debate. They are both speaking to the same questions, and both come up with similar results. Both are cultivated pro-Nicenes, for one thing, and both thus see similar errors in their adversaries' position, chiefly a materializing of divinity. I do not therefore think that we can characterize the "anthropomorphite controversy" - as do Florovsky and, later on, Gould - as a sort of Origenist "plot" cooked up in order to discredit a more purely "incarnationalist" - and thus more orthodox - school of thought among the monks. Fr. Georges effectively puts Epiphanius in the camp of Cassian's foil, Abba Serapion, and that is simply incorrect [52]. Second, and relatedly, I think Florovsky quite wrong in his insistence that the Christ whom the targeted monks are talking about is, exclusively, the Second Person incarnate. Here I would underline one of Drioton's observations: Apa Aphou clearly believed in a divine body, "clothed with incomprehensible light", according to which model our bodies were made [53]. This is surely the thrust of Aphou's recourse to the Eucharist and his citation of John 6:51. Had he simply intended a sort of literalist equivalence -- i.e., that if one believes the phrase, "this is my body", then one is equally committed to accepting "this is my image" -- he could simply have cited one of the Synoptic narratives, or I Corinthians 11:24. He did not, though, but chose instead the text from John with its unmistakeable evocation of the descent of the Heavenly Man [54].

For Aphou thus, together with the other "anthropomorphites", including Epiphanius' Audians, the subject of the debate is indeed the Second Person, though not simply Christ incarnate, but rather -- and to anticipate myself somewhat in borrowing from Phillipians 2:6 -- the pre-existent "form of God". As the Audian witness indicates, and as I hope to show later on with other examples from Mesopotamia, as well as from Augustine's Numidia, Palestine, and the Epirus of Diadochus of Photiki, this understanding was not confined to Egypt. It was, rather, exceedingly widespread, and it is not accidental that it shows up as an issue of some concern exactly when the Nicene definition is becoming, or has just been, accepted as the faith of the Christian ecumene, which is to say, towards the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries. To elaborate briefly on my cryptic reference to Paul in Phillipians 2, at least sufficiently to state my thesis, "Glory" and "Majesty", or "Greatness", are for that certain current of Christian thought, particularly of the ascetic Christian thought represented by our examples above, not merely attributes or qualities of a shared divine essence, but, together with the notions of a divine "form" and the imago Dei, often have a specific referrent in the Second Person. It is the Son who is the eternal image and form and indeed - to recall both Clement of Alexandria and Theophilus' answer to the lynch mob - the "face" of the Father [55]. He is thus also at once our template, the original heavenly man (cf. I Cor.15:47) and, as by nature the Father's manifestation, the subject of the visio Dei. Whether thus as shining through the assumed flesh of his Incarnation, such as in the Transfiguration, or, in the theophanies of the Old Testament, as the Kavod YHWH appearing to Moses in the cloud on Sinai (e.g., Ex.24 and 33-34), in the temple to Isaiah (Is.6), enthroned on the chariot to Ezekiel, or as approaching -- or even, in some versions of the Septuagint, assimilated to -- the figure on the heavenly throne in Dan.7 [56], it is the same heavenly or divine being who is beheld. The theophanies in Exodus and -- perhaps especially -- to Ezekiel will appear quite prominently in what is to follow, and once again in connection with questions of both the imago and the visio Dei. A third important theme appears in what I take to be signaled by, for example, Cassian's reference to an ascent of the "mountain of solitude", taking this motif of ascent together with what we saw of the heavenly sanctuary and/or throne alluded to in Epiphanius and Gregory. The "image" or "form" of God, the human being as image, Christology, the visio Dei, and the theme of ascent are all of them linked. Before discussing this linkage, though, I should like to consider some of the questions raised by Graham Gould with regard to the appearance of these motifs in the ascetic literature of Egypt.

I.B: Supporting Evidence from Egypt

In his thoughtful article for the collection, Origeniana Quinta, Gould lends apparent reinforcement to Florovsky's interpretation of the anthropomorphite controversy of late fourth century Egypt. He provides a brief examination of important documents in Egyptian monasticism, including the Greek Vita Prima of Pachomius, the Apophthegmata Pateron, the Letters ascribed to St. Antony, and the short treatise, On Prayer, by John Cassian's mentor, Evagrius Ponticus [57]. The second pair of works, he notes, are both in the Origenist tradition, yet although Evagrius for one is certainly keen on preventing any notions "which attribute to God some kind of corporeal form (morphe)", ascribing such thoughts to demonic inspiration, Gould does not find any specific mention of anthropomorphism [58]. With regard to the Vita Prima and Apophthegmata, he admits the former's mention of Pachomius' anti-Origenism, but adds, fairly enough, that the Vita is a couple of generations later than the founder and, moreover, offers no particular explanation as to why the great ascetic disliked the Alexandrian master [59]. As for the Apophthegmata, here again there is nothing to suggest actual anthropomorphism, nor even any great hesitancy toward the allegorical interpretation of scripture. The desert elders, at least as they appear in Sayings collections that were edited toward the end of the fifth century [60], appear to be quite free of any such concern or error as drew the reproaches of Cassian or Socrates. Gould's conclusion is thus that "allegations of anthropomorphism...should be questioned", because there is "no first-hand evidence for the existence of anthropomorphism among the Egyptian monks in the late Fourth Century". Since our only witnesses to this supposed deviation are Cassian and the Church historians, all of them admirers of Origen, "there is serious reason to believe [the latters' accusations] are serious misrepresentations of their opponents' theological outlook" [61].

With Gould's last remark I can certainly agree. We have seen how two opponents of "anthropomorphism", both Cassian and Epiphanius, did alter or misconstrue the position of their interlocutors. God per se, the divine substance or ousia, is not at issue, nor is the Person of the Father. It is the Second Person who is identified with the glorious body. Here I think Gould shares somewhat, together with Florovsky and everyone else, in Cassian's and Epiphanius' own misunderstanding. In consequence, he finds something that is certainly true, that there was no real problem regarding the divine essence, but his conclusion that the "Origenists" therefore invented a problem is not true, and I think that by taking another look at the materials he inventoried, the Apophthegmata and Pachomiana, especially a Coptic version of the latter, together with certain other texts from monastic antiquity, we will find at least a few suggestions of that tradition or complex of traditions which I believe underlie Cassian's concern.

Let me begin with Abba Sopatros, whose dictum Gould takes as typical of the Apophthegmata [63]. Asked for a rule to live by, the old man replies:

Do not allow a woman to come into your cell and do not read apocryphal liter-

ture. Do not get involved in discussions about the image [me ekzeteses peri tes

eikonos]. Although this is not a heresy, there is too much ignorance and liking

for dispute between the two parties...It is impossible for a creature to understand

the truth of it. [64]

Although Gould is right to point to the similarity with Epiphanius here, it is still clear that there is a dispute going on, and a heated one at that. Further, I think that Abba Sopatros' warning against "apocryphal literature" can be taken as a suggestion of where one side of the argument might be finding some of its inspiration - but more on that score later on.

My next two passages recall Aphou and his appeal to the Eucharist. Mark the Egyptian is tempted by the devil to think the celebrating priest unworthy of his ministry, and therefore to doubt the efficacy of his prayer. He prays about it and is answered by a vision which he reports:

For when the cleric was going to stand before the holy table...I saw an angel of

the Lord come down from heaven and place his hand on the cleric's head, and the

cleric became like a pillar of fire. And while I was wondering at the vision, I heard

a voice saying to me: "Man, why are you amazed at this matter? If an earthly king

will not allow his great ones to stand before him with soiled clothing...how much

the more so will not the divine power purify the ministers [leitourgoi] of the holy

mysteries, who stand before the heavenly Glory?" [65]

Holy men becoming pillars of fire occur elsewhere in the Apophthegmata [66], and the echo of Exodus is certainly clear. In the passage above, I would point out particularly the act of clothing with light or fire, the operation of the divine power, and the court imagery involved in "standing before the heavenly Glory". The second eucharistic reference appears in Daniel 7. Daniel doubts the reality of the eucharistic presence, and is favored with the grisly vision of an angel chopping the Christ Child up into the chalice. The old men who had argued with him, told of his vision, explain that:

...the bread itself is the body of Christ and the cup his blood, and this in all truth

and not a symbol. But as in the beginning, God, taking dust from the earth,

formed man in his image, without anyone being able to say that he [i.e., presum-

ably the man of dust] is not the image of God, even though it is incomprehensible.

Thus it is with the bread which he said is his body. [67]

This sounds quite like Epiphanius on the image, as well as what Aphou is usually taken to be saying. We should note, though, the juxtaposition and presumed harmony of Gen.1:26 and 2:7.

Two passages speak of reverence for one's neighbor in a way that may be significant for our purposes. Abba Apollo refers to the theophany at the Oak of Mambre in Gen.18:1ff, as well as to the ensuing angelic visit to Lot in Gen.19:3ff, in order to conclude "that we must venerate the brothers who come [to us], for we do not venerate them, but God. For, he says, [when] you have seen your brother, you have seen God" [68]. Even more interesting is Abba Isaiah's definition of slander. Hostility toward one's neighbor, he tells us, "is not to recognize the Glory of God" [69]. Now, both these passages may have been preserved as expressions, simply, of the virtues of hospitality and community harmony, yet they also strike a familiar note, one that we have heard before in Theophilus' reply to the mob, or in Aphou's honoring of the image. We shall also find Augustine including the story of the visitation at the Oak of Mambre among his list of Old Testament theophanies to be explained.

The notion of glory brings me, in addition to the pillars of fire we have already noted, to the series of monastic transfigurations mentioned in the Apophthegmata. My first belongs to a saying about Abba Pambo:

They used to say that, just as Moses received the image of the glory of Adam

when his countenance was glorified, so too with Abba Pambo, that his face shone

like lightning, and he was as a king seated upon his throne. And the same thing applied as well to Abba Silvanus and Abba Sisoes. [70]

Here I would underline the following: the connection between "glory" and Adam, the reference to Moses' encounter with the Glory of God on Sinai and subsequent descent with shining face in Ex.33-34 (so important for St. Paul in 2 Cor.3:7 - 4:6); and the image of a king enthroned, which should recall Epiphanius' citation of Is.66:1 and Dan.7:9. The mention of Slivanus and Sisoes leads me next to the latter's justly famous deathbed scene [71]. While the holy Abba lies dying, his face becomes progressively brighter and brighter as, one by one, he announces the arrival (unseen by his well-wishers) of Antony, the prophets, the apostles, and angels, until:

Suddenly, his face again became like the sun, and they were all afraid. And he

says to them, "See, the Lord has come, and he is saying 'Bring me the vessel from

the desert'". And straightway he gave up his spirit, and there was as it were a

lightning flash, and all the house was filled with fragrance.

The heavenly court, together with its king, is present at the old man's death, and light is the order of the moment. Another of Sisoes' sayings, though somewhat cryptic, also points us in a similar direction: "Abba Sisoes said, 'Seek God, and do not seek the place where he dwells" [72]. In that second half of the apothegm, I think, there lies a certain key that will illumine -- eventually, since I must ask for patience -- Abba Sopatros' remark about apocryphal literature. For now, let it suffice us to say that "the place where God dwells" suggests to me exactly the heavenly court and throne.

It is in fact just precisely the latter which form the subject of two visions ascribed to Abba Silvanus [73]. In the first, he is taken up to heaven in ecstasy and sees the judgement to come. Afterwards, we are told, he is regularly found covering his face with his cowl, and saying: "Why should I want to see this temporary light which profits nothing?", presumably in comparison to the light of eternity. On the second occasion, his disciple comes to speak with him at several different points over the space of a number of hours, only to find him rapt. Finally:

...he found him at rest, and says to him, "What happened to you today, Father?"

And the other said, "I was sick today, child." But he, seizing his feet, said, "I

won't let you go unless you tell me what you saw." The old man says to him, "I

was caught up into heaven, and I saw the Glory of God, and I was standing there

until now, and now I have been sent away."

One cannot help recalling St. Paul's own rapture to the third heaven in 2 Cor.12:2-4. I would also emphasize the "standing", estamen, of the saint before the Glory. There is one more story about Abba Silvanus:

One of the fathers said that someone once chanced on Abba Silvanus, and when

he saw the latter's face and body shining like an angel's, he fell on his face. And

he said there were also certain others who had received this grace. [74]

Two elements emerge clearly here: first, the transfigured body of the saint is accorded angelic status; and, second, this status is explicitly said to be attainable in this life, even if only to a few.

Summing up the witness of the Apophthegmata and working backwards, we find ascents into heaven and visions of the Glory, transformations into light or fire and likening to the angels, clothing with glory, parallels drawn between the human being - via Adam and Moses - and the Glory, intimations of the court and throne of heaven, the "image" as an issue in controversy, and a warning against apocryphal literature. Of biblical texts, we have caught references or allusions to Gen.18, Ex.33-34, 2 Cor.3-4 and 12, together with much of the earlier array we found in Epiphanius et alii. I do not think it is stretching things too far to say that this material bears points of contact with what we found in the witnesses for and against "anthropomorphism". If Gould is correct in saying that there is no explicit anthropomorphism in these texts, then it is also clear that there are things going in them which, at the least, suggest connections with that archaic spirituality I claim to have found in Aphou and company, and which even the later editing of the Desert Fathers' logia could not entirely remove.

Abba Sopatros' warning against apocrypha brings me to the Pachomiana [75]. The discovery at Nag Hammadi of a "gnostic" library close to the former site of the Pachomian monastery at Chenoboskion, together with the marks of monastery manufacture which several of the codices reveal, have led some to postulate an eager readership of gnostic writings among the monks. While Phillip Rousseau has issued a salutary warning against any too rapid jumping to scholarly conclusions [76], I cannot help recalling the command of Patriarch Athanasius, recorded in the Pachomian Lives, to throw out any apocrypha, and the compliance of Abba Theodore, Pachomius' second successor, which is also specifically noted [77]. Presumably, the monasteries did have reading material that fell under the Archbishop's ban. This is not to say that I am claiming the Pachomians were gnostics. Rather, I think they may have been interested in currents of religious thought which both long antedated the rise of gnosticism (whatever that word can be said to signify nowadays), and which also show up embodied in a number of the documents found at Nag Hammadi, chiefly the accounts of heavenly ascent and some of the Adamic speculation. Now, little of this sort of thing appears in the Greek Pachomiana, and Gould is quite right to point to the Vita Prima as innocent of anthropomorphism. I note, however, that he does not include the Coptic Vitae in this assessment. The Bohairic Life records three visions, one experienced by Pachomius alone, one together with Theodore, and one by Theodore alone, which are not recorded explicitly in the Vita Prima and which I think are significant [78]. To what degree these represent actual visions enjoyed by Pachomius or Theodore I shall leave to the experts [79]. What does strike me about each of them is the revelation of Christ as a glorious form enthroned, and thus the echoes of the great Old Testament theophanies, in particular of Ex.24:10 (specifically invoked in one of them), Is.6:1ff, and Ezk.1:26-28.

To quote from the relevant sections of each, and beginning with the earliest vision:

This is the revelation that our father Pachomius saw in his prayer. Looking

toward the east wall of the sanctuary [i.e., the apse or altar], [he saw] the wall

become all golden; and on it there was a large icon, like a large picture [of

someone] wearing a crown on [his] head. That crown was glorious in the extreme

...Before the icon were two great and very august archangels, motionless and

contemplating the Lord's image...

Pachomius is overcome by the "ray of fear" emanating from the image, then comforted by the

"sheen of mercy...like a rich, holy chrism" which succeeds the fear. When he tells the brothers later on about the apparition, "the old men were greatly struck with fear, and they said, 'These holy men are like those of heaven'" [80].The second vision has Pachomius taking Theodore with him into the room of the synaxis, where the two of them pray

...from the sixth to the ninth hour. While they were praying, they saw appearing

above them, as high as a tower, a great throne on which God was seated under

the form in which he chose to be seen by them.

I would recall Gregory of Nyssa's phrase on the eidos here. The third vision comes to Theodore after Pachomius' death. He hears a voice at night telling him:

"Get up quickly and go to the church for the Lord is there." He got up as the

voice had instructed him, for he always used to walk with great vigilance and

with unshakeable trust because his thoughts were always in heaven beholding the

Glory of the Lord[recall Silvanus!]...when he came to the doorway of the church,

he went in and saw an apparition. Where his [i.e., the vision's] feet were, there appeared to him something like a sparkling sapphire and he was unable to look at his face because of the great light which unceasingly flashed forth from him...[Theodore]was troubled and overcome with fear...He thought about all Israel long ago in the desert and how such great fear came upon them...when the Lord revealed himself to them...they all saw him on Mt. Sinai, the whole mountain was so filled with fire, flashes of lightning, clouds and darkness and trumpets...

The glorious form on the throne is the same who appeared in the theophanies of Exodus, and we are surely to understand this figure as the Second Person. When Pacomius is overcome by fear in the first vision, he cries out, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me", and mercy indeed replaces terror. Whether or not the glorious form is simply the incarnate and glorified Christ is not altogether clear, particularly when we find, as just noted, that this is the same one who appeared to Moses and Israel at Sinai, or when we take into account the resemblances each of the visions has to the following OT texts: Isaiah 6, and so, too, the church or synaxis in place of the prophet's temple; Isaiah 66:1, in the great height of the throne in the second vision; or Ezk.1 in the "great light" of the figure's face, as well in the sapphire on which the figure stands. It therefore seems to me that these accounts, especially the third, place us in roughly the same territory that we glimpsed in Aphou and the Audians, and what a contrast, I might add, to the way in which the anthropomorphites' chief opponent in the Egyptian desert, Evagrius Ponticus, treats the theophany at Sinai, also in the context of the visio Dei [81]. Likewise, Evagrius' contemporary in Mesopotamia, the anonymous author of the Macarian Homilies, is another who addresses himself in much the same way to Exodus, but who also makes special use of Ezekiel 1 [82]. Augustine, to whom I shall turn a little later on, himself takes up the Exodus theophanies in de Trinitate, but his treatment is strikingly different again and, indeed, marks a genuine revolution, if not an actual rupture, with regard to prior traditions.

But I am not yet done with the Egyptian evidence, or, at least, with materials about the Egyptian monks. Once again toward the end of the fourth century, in the account of a pigrimage of Palestinian monks to visit the great ascetics of Egypt, the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, we find an interesting response to the sort of visions the Bohairic Life reports. Abba Or, whom the Historia holds up as one of the great old men, describes, in the third person, a temptation he had himself endured:

The demons came to him in a fantasy, showing up as the angelic hosts together

with a chariot of fire and many spear-carriers, and [a figure] like a king on tour

who says to him, "O man, you have accomplished everything! Worship me, and

I shall take you up like Elijah!" [83]

Or is not fooled. He counters with the confession of Christ as king, "and straightway that [false king] became invisible". Here we find several of the elements we have noted above: "angelic" presence, though here fake angels; a royal figure enthroned on a chariot of fire, though here the devil; and, not in Pachomius but certainly in the visions of Silvanus, the promise to take the monk up, alive, into heaven, here of course a lie. Given Silvanus and the others, it is difficult not to suspect that this sort of vision might not have been all that uncommon, or, at the least, that it was a known type. The resemblance to Ezekiel 1, for reasons to be made clear later on, I take as especially significant, together with the promise of a visit, while alive, to heaven.

This episode is all the more interesting in that the Historia Monachorum is relatively full of ascents to heaven. There are several stories reminiscent of Sisoes' deathbed scene, with angels carrying off the soul of the dying monk to strains of celestial hymnody [84]. We also find angels feeding the ascetics [85], and even actual trips to Paradise. Abba Patermuthius, for example, not only gets taken up alive to Paradise, but comes back with a basket of heavenly produce to prove it [86]. Abba Sourous similarly speaks of his visions of the heavenly court, while Macarius the Egyptian takes his own trip to something like Paradise and returns to tell of it [87]. The general theme of equality, or at least of society, with the angels permeates the book throughout. The Prologue invokes the "angelic life" and "heavenly citizenship" of the monks [88], while John of Lycopolis characterizes the ascetic as one who "stands in the presence of God" participating in the eternal praises of the angelic choirs [89]. There are also the occasions of the angelic intercourse already noted, together with the fact that the ascetics of two of the monasteries described in the Historia are regularly dressed in white [90]. One wonders, therefore, if perhaps Abba Or's temptation was just a false version of the real thing.

Before I take leave of Egypt, I want to cite one more witness, the Letters of Ammonas [91]. I think we may take their provenance as late fourth or early fifth century, and thus falling within the period under discussion here. Whether they are actually the work of Antony's disciple, as S. Brock suggests, I leave once again to the experts to decide [92]. For our purposes, the Letters are of interest as pointing to a number of the elements we have been uncovering. In Letter VI, Ammonas echoes 2 Cor.12 and the note of ascent to heaven, while expressing the hope that "the Power of God may increase" in his correspondent, "and reveal to you the great mysteries of the Godhead which it is not easy for me to utter". "The soul", he adds, "cannot mount upwards until it receives heavenly joy...[and] few are they to whom God reveals secrets set in heaven" [93]. Letter VII has a passage which continues the themes of ascent and the vision of angels. Speaking of the rewards of obedience, Ammonas takes the patriarch Jacob as his model, whose obedience to his parents was rewarded by the "sudden" vision of the Ladder in Genesis 28. Ammonas concludes that "as soon as men have been blessed by their [spiritual] fathers, and have seen the hosts of heaven, nothing is able to move them" [94]. He will return, somewhat cryptically, to Gen.28 in Letter XIII. The idea of an ascent to heaven is repeated in Letter X, quite specifically, and here we also encounter an example of that sort of "apocryphal literature" which Abba Sopatros may have had in mind. Ammonas is speaking of the perfecting of the soul, and he chooses as an example of the soul's progress a text from the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah, specifically the prophet's ascent through the heavens to the Glory of God in chapter eight of that work. "Therefore", Ammonas concludes, "the soul of the perfectly righteous [person] progresses and goes forward until it mounts to the heaven of heavens". "There are", he adds significantly, "even now men on earth who have reached this stage" [95]. The suggestion of an interiorization of Isaiah's ascent is reinforced when we come to Letter XIII where, admittedly extant only in the Syriac version, Ammonas takes up the theophany of Ezekiel 1 [96]. He treats the latter allegorically, as a "pattern [of those who are] perfect". It is specifically the cherubim of the vision that draw his attention, the "living creature" with the four faces of a cherub, a man, a bull, and an eagle. These represent different moments of the spiritual life including, in the case of the eagle, the Spirit-moved flight on high and remaining close to God. Ammonas concludes, rather tantalizingly, that he has only touched lightly on this subject and has more to say about it, but does not want, it seems, to commit it to paper. Thus he adds, alluding once more to Jacob's vision at Bethel:

But if you pray I will come to you, and you will enter into 'Bethel', and there we

will perform our vows and offer up our whole burnt offerings...[cf. Ps.66:13].

And then we will interpret this living creature according to our ability. For Bethel

is interpreted "the House of God". God, therefore, contends for his house which is

called by his name. And Ezekiel is he who saw this living creature.

The note of interiorization appears to me to be pretty clear. Bethel, the house or temple of God, is the living soul of the perfected Christian, who is also the meaning of Ezekiel's cherubim supporting the throne of the Glory. Ammonas thus represents at once certain of the currents we have been tracing -- ascent to heaven, vision of glory, angelic society -- and indicates the path that the Eastern ascetic tradition would take, or indeed was taking in several different places at the same time, in response to the issues regarding the visio Dei which had arisen in the late fourth century, of which the anthropomorphite controversy of 399 that we began with was but a single instance. Indeed, Ammonas' handling of Ezekiel 1 startlingly recalls the Macarian Homilies' treatment of the same text.

I think it time for a summary of our findings so far. The first difficulty we noted in Cassian concerned the proper interpretation of Gen.1:26, and then we saw quickly how that question was intimately related to a debate over the object of the visio Dei. In Epiphanius on the Audians, and in Apa Aphou's Life, we found how these two issues were futher linked with an entire constellation of Old Testament texts, with Gen.2:7, the formation of Adam from the earth, and 9:6 being connected not only with 1:26 and the question of the image, but also with an impressive array of theophanic passages, notably those cited in the Panarion: especially Ps.10:4, Is.6:1ff, 66:1, and Dan.7:9. All four of the latter describe God on his throne, whether in heaven (Ps.10, Is.66, and Dan.7) or in the temple (Ps.10 again and Is.6). Aphou seems clearly to have believed in a humanlike, though divine, form of glory which provided the prototype for the human body, and he adds to our collection of texts the evocation of the descent of the heavenly man in John 6, together with a reference to the "unapproachable light" of divinity in I Tim.6:16. Gregory of Nyssa, though quite without any reference to, or apparent worry about, anthropomorphism, echoes Epiphanius' citation of Stephen's vision in Acts 7, a vision of "the supra-heavenly Glory itself", and adds the notes of the sanctuary on high and of fellowship with angels or, rather, of transformation into angelic status. Passages from elsewhere in Egyptian monastic literature, while not touching directly on the specific question of anthropomorphism, provided a certain wider context and, I think, something close to a confirmation of what I believe we found in Aphou, the Audians of Mesopotamia, and Cassian's Abba Serapion. These amplifications include references or allusions to still other, primarily Old Testament theophany texts, thus the pillar of fire (cf. Ex.13:21 and 16:10), the sapphire of the divine footstool in Theodore's vision (cf. Ex.24:10 and

Ezk.1:26-28), Ammonas's explicit invocation of Ezekiel's cherub, a divine figure on a throne (cf. again Is.66:1), Ex.33-34 in Silvanus' and others' change of countenance, which also echoed 2 Cor. 3:18 and Gen.1:26, and finally the appearances of God at Mamre (Gen.18) and at Bethel (Gen.28). We heard echoes of Paul's trip to Paradise in 2 Cor.12, together with his vision of light in Acts 9 and 22. We have seen that themes of ascent to heaven were in fact quite common, together with suggestions of transformation, and the acquisition of angelic fellowship or status. The key to all, or nearly all at any rate, of these stories and themes is, first, the notion of the "Glory of God"'; second, the latter's identification with other terms we have run across, e.g., majesty, greatness, light, splendor, etc.; and, third, their shared association with both the Second Person of the Trinity and the form or image of God in Gen.1:26.

I.C: Evidence from Mesopotamia, Numidia, Palestine, Greece, and Syria

To this cloud of witnesses, I would like to add four more, though this time taken from widely separated points in the Christian world of the late fourth and early fifth centuries: eastern Mesopotamia at or over the Roman-Persian border, Numidia, Palestine (via certain letters of Cyril of Alexandria), and Greece. My first witness, the anonymous author of the Syriac ascetical work, the Liber Graduum [97], confirms my last point above. Mimro 28, paragraph 10, discusses God's revelation of the worship of the tabernacle to Moses. Citing Ex.33:11, the author remarks that "The Glory of God Almighty [shoubho dmoryo ahid koul] was revealed to Moses on the mountain as a man [a(i)h bar nosho]". In the paragraph immediately following, he repeats the statement, but with a significant difference: "And our Lord [moran] appeared to all the prophets as a man [a(i)h bar nosho]" [98]. I note first of all the parallelism between "the Glory" and "our Lord". To the best of my knowledge, the phrase "our Lord", moran, when appearing in Syriac Christian writers, invariably designates the Second Person, the Son. Secondly, the "Glory" of the first passage is obviously distinct from "God Almighty". The latter denotes the Father, since the Syriac moryo ahid koul, like our English phrase, is a rendering of theos pantokrator, just as is the Deus omnipotens we found in Cassian. What makes these passages still more interesting is that the Liber is not fighting with anyone, or at least not about this particular point. He makes these statements as a matter of course, assuming it as a given that it is the Son who is the Glory of the Father, and who appeared to Moses and the other saints of Israel "as a man".

Now it is against just exactly this understanding that we find Augustine of Hippo writing, and doing so at or about the same time fifteen hundred to two thousand miles away in Roman North Africa. According to my limited knowledge of Augustine, this idea takes center stage chiefly in his Epistles 147 and 148, as well as Books II and III of de Trinitate [99]. The Confessions, especially Books VII and VIII, with their preoccupation regarding divine non-corporeality, might be added as a fourth source, but I will leave them for another day [100]. De Trinitate, Book II, is specifically addressed to the question of the Old Testament theophanies and, in the process of discussing them, Augustine lands on virtually every single one of the texts I have noted above. Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1 are missing, but we are awarded a few extra in compensation, thus we begin with Gen.3, God's conversation with the guilty Adam in the Garden [101], move on to the visitation to Abraham in Gen.18 [102], to the burning bush of Ex.3 [103], to the pilllars of fire and cloud in Ex.13 and 16 [104], on to manifestations of the maiestas of God as fire and as human form to Moses in Ex.19-20, 24, and 33-34 [105]; and conclude with the question of the divine throne in Is.66:1 [106] and Dan.7:9ff [107]. We may expand the inventory if we include the passages discussed in Epistle 147. Although the latter confines itself mostly to discussion of New Testament sources on the visio Dei, Augustine also touches in Isaiah 6 [108], Gen.32:20 [109], Job 38:1 and 42:9, and I Kings 22:9 [110]. Exodus 33:11 appears frequently [111], and in one place together with Num.12:6-8 [112]. The great bishop's argument is consistent throughout. He is dead set against those who would make the Second Person the visible manifestation of the invisible Father. De Trinitate II.15 will serve for many other statements:

[There are] those who prefer to take them [i.e., I Tim.1:17 and 6:15-16] as

applying only to the Father, and ...say that the Son is visible not merely in the

flesh which he took of the Virgin, but even, before that, in himself [sed etiam

antea per se ipsum]. [113]

The grounds these people cite for their assertion are precisely the theophanic texts we have been discussing. They claim that it was uniquely the Son who "appeared to our fathers before he was born of the Virgin Mary, and not in one guise [specie] either, but in many different forms [multiformiter]" [114]. Augustine has no use for this opinion. Commenting on one of the most important Old Testament passages, Ex.24:10, he asks sarcastically:

So we must believe, I suppose, that the Word and Wisdom of God stood in a

small space of earth [in spatio loci terreni stetisse]...and that the Word of God

...somehow expands and contracts [modo se contrahet, modo distendet]...? [115]

The answer to his question is, of course, "No". How then did the Word - or whatever Person was involved - appear? "It was", Augustine replies, "by control of created [materials] that all these visible and perceptible exhibitions were staged [per subjectam creaturam exhibentur haec omnia visibilia et sensibilia]" [116]. A little later, taking up Moses' reqest in Ex.33:18 to be shown God's maiestas, he asks how it was possible that, in all these manifestations, God could have revealed his substantia which, like Cassian, he equates with the maiestas: "What does 'show me yourself' mean", he demands, "if not 'show me your substance'?" [117]. Augustine's solution to the question of the theophanies is quite the most drastic I know of in the literature of the period [118]. Properly speaking, the Old Testament manifestations were not really theophanies at all. If by God we can only really mean the shared substance of the Holy Trinity, it is obvious that the latter, being in no way a physical body, can never have appeared to the human body's senses. Augustine sums up his conclusions in Book III, having added, on the basis especially of Heb.2:1 and Acts 7:51, the mediating element of the angels:

It has been established by all rational probability...that wherever God was said to

appear to our ancestors before our saviour's incarnation, the voices heard and the

physical manifestations [species corporales] were the work of angels. They either

spoke or did things themselves, or else they took created materials distinct from them-

selves and used them to present us with symbolic manifestations of God. [119]

There were thus no theophanies until Christ. There were only angelophanies, or mere symbolophanies. Augustine requires the radical closure of a tradition of Christian, and before that of Jewish, thought that I take to be very old indeed. The ascetic writers in the East, as we have glimpsed them in Cassian, Ephiphanius and Gregory of Nyssa, were not willing to embrace so absolute a rupture - if, in fact, it ever even occurred to them to do so.

Now, it may be the case that Augustine, in the passages just cited, was arguing primarily against Arians or, more precisely, Homoians, as my colleague at Marquette, Michel Barnes, tells me [120]. The Bishop of Hippo does, in the passage cited above from de trinitate II.15, go on to say that the people who argue that the Word is visible in se ipsum also hold that he is a creature, mortal, and he repeats the same accusation in Ep. 147, adding the specific qualifier, "Arian" [121]. This would appear to mean that the people he is dealing with are very different from the targets addressed by Cassian and Epiphanius. Neither Apa Aphou nor Abba Serapion, let alone the "most orthodox" Audians, were "Arians" of any stripe whatever. I suppose that it is just possible that some "Homoian" group used the same collection of theophany texts for its own Christological purposes, or else came from fundamentally the same tradition as the Egyptian "anthropomorphites", Audians, et al., but which carried on and extended the latters' implicit subordinationism, that is, the Son as in se the manifestation of the Father, to the point where they were led to declare the Second Person a creature, but I know of no evidence for such a group from any other sources of the period. Then, too, as we shall see momentarily, Cyril of Alexandria confronts a phenomenon remarkably like Augustine's anthropomorphites, and he, too, accuses them of falling into the Arian heresy, but only unwittingly. So I am not convinced that Augustine's interlocutors are necessarily exactly who he seems to say or think they are.

It is indisputable in any case that he did know of anthropomorphites who had nothing at all to do with the anti-Nicene opposition. Immediately after his letter on the visio Dei, in Epistle 148, he writes to a fellow bishop, Fortunitianus, in order to defend some sharp remarks he had made on this very issue, since they had hurt the feelings of another episcopal colleague, who remains unnamed [122]. The latter, judging from Augustine's explanation, was both a fellow member of the local synod, thus in no way anti-Nicene, and an anthropomorphite. While Augustine apologizes for having grieved the man (he had probably said stulti and miseri a few times too often), he remains quite firm about his views:

I do not regret having written in such a way as to say that the eyes of this body

do not see God...[I said this] to prevent the belief that God is himself corporeal

or visible in any locality [123];

and, a little later, adds concerning

that theory of a corporeal God with separate parts occupying separate places...

I am entirely sure that such a god does not exist, and I wrote that letter to

forestall belief in such a one [124];

in order to end up, still futher on, by repeating what we have already met in de Trinitate with regard to the theophanies:

...those testimonies of Scripture are not repudiated wherein it is said that God

has been seen, because he is both invisible by the essential nature of the godhead,

and can be seen when he wills by means of a created form taken according to

his pleasure. [125]

Apparently his colleague, innocent of philosophical subtlety, had read the texts we have been coming across in much the same way as our examples from Egypt and Mesopotamia, and had taxed Augustine with them.

Two of the great bishop's remarks deserve to be particularly underlined for our purposes here. There is first his sarcastic question in de Trinitate II.25, with reference to Ex.24:10, on the Word's "somehow expanding and contracting". I take to him to mean that his opposition believed that the glorious form of the Second Person, who is properly enthroned in and filling the heavens with the earth his footstool (cf. Is.66:1), had been obliged to become "small" enough, as it were, to appear to Moses and the elders of Israel on the mountain. Thus I think that the second passage, Augustine's reference just above to a God "with separate parts occupying separate places", is not to be taken simply as the philosophical cum theological difficulty of a god with a physical body and limbs, but perhaps as referring to just exactly that particular vocation of the Second Person which is to come down from the throne on high in order to appear to us, while the Father remains above and invisible. "Parts of God" would therefore point to the Word or Glory as the manifestation of the Father's hidden divinity. If my supposition is correct, then Augustine's anthropomorphite colleague was indeed representative of the same tradition I have been tracing, a tradition which was a great deal older than the conflict over the Nicene definition and, given the range of territory we have already covered, very widespread indeed.

A generation, or less, after Augustine wrote his two epistles, another figure of great importance for the development of Christian doctrine, the Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, nephew and successor of Theophilus himself, found himself asked by a group of Palestinian monks, faced with troublesome interlopers from an unspecified locale, to reply to a set of doctrinal questions that the newcomers had raised [125a]. According to Lionel Wickham's estimation, this took place sometime quite shortly after Cyril's triumph at the Council of Ephesus, between 431 and 434 [125b]. Of interest to us is the fact that this correspondence uncovers a set of beliefs strikingly like the God "of separate parts", "expanding" and "contracting", that we saw in Augustine's targets. The new arrivals, Wickham writes, "held that God is human in form, because man was made in God's image ("Answers 1, 2, 3, and 10), and that the consubstantiality of Father and Son had to be understood in a literal, 'physical' manner" [129c]. For our purposes, it is especially in Cyril's first three replies that we shall find echoes of the traditions which we have been pursuing, although three others in the collection of fifteen "Answers" will also prove to have items of interest.

In his first "Answer", extant only in Syriac and in Wickham's translation, Cyril replies to the assertion that "God has a human form" with a barrage of New Testament citations, beginning with the familiar appeal to Rm.1:23, and following that up with an explanation of Phil.2:7, the self-emptying of the divine Son to which, as we will see in "Answer 2", his opponents also appealed. The archbishop, however, understands the kenosis and taking on of the "form of a slave" as demonstrating that "God's form is different than ours", and that Phil.2:7 thus indicates the Son's change of form [125d]. In itself, the divine form is other, incorporeal, without quantity, which idea Cyril supports with appeals to Gal.4:19, the "forming" of Christ within the believer, Jn.5:37, the invisibility of the Father's "shape", and then, quite interestingly, the Son as the Father's "radiance" and "stamp", from Heb.1:3, and finally Rm.8:29 ff., the calling of the elect to share in Christ's "form". All these, he argues, show that "form" in the Godhead is quite different from the physical shape of human beings [125e]. It is in "Answer 1's" conclusion, though, that we catch a glimpse of why this question is so exercising Cyril's interlocutors. God is incorporeal, the patriarch insists, but "He is, indeed, seen", even if this "viewing" occurs, as for Cassian, Evagrius, and "Macarius", "intellectually, in the reality of the heart", where God is encountered "as one possessing supra-mundane glory". Therefore, he concludes, these silly people should shut their mouths and "seek, rather, to find in Christ the world above by leading lives...[of] special amendment of conduct" [125f]. Here, surely, we may detect the echoes of the visio Dei and ascent to heaven that we have already met so consistently. There are, for Cyril, to be no trips, whether in or out of the body, to heaven in order to see the body of glory. Hard work instead - sobriety [nepsis], asceticism, and labors [ponoi] - are the way to win the vision within [125g].

"Answer 2" takes up the question of the Son of God's trip down to earth. The resemblance to Augustine's plaint against the "God of separate parts" in Ep. 148 is astonishing. Here, it is Cyril's targets who are appealing to Phil.2:7, because "[the Son's] entire filial hypostasis, they say, was emptied out [kekenoto ek] of heaven and the paternal bosom itself" [125h]. As Wickham points out, "...the implication is that the individual beings of the Trinity, though of the same physical stuff, cannot be united physically, and, if one of them descends to earth, heaven loses the individual, but the common stuff...remains behind" [125i]. The Son appears thus to be literally obliged to shrink himself in order to become man, so recalling quite precisely the "expansion" and "contraction" that Augustine's opponents had been guilty of above in de Trinitate II.25. Cyril responds with the objection that his targets "have quantified [peposotai] the divine ousia", and calls upon another series of texts, including Jn.4:24, together with an interesting combination of, again, Heb.1:3 and I Cor.1:24, in order to argue that Christ, the eternal Son of God, who both defined God as "Spirit" and is himself the Father's radiance [apaugasma], wisdom, power, and stamp [charakter], and, further, as indwelling the Father (Jn.14:10), cannot be circumscribed in physical terms or, more simply, reduced in his divinity to the level of created beings, [tois] ethesin ton ktismaton [125j]. Even the pagan philosophers, Cyril snorts at the "Answer's" conclusion, can do better than this [125k].

The same issue, Christ's being obliged to "leave the heavens empty [kenous] of his divinity", reappears in "Answer 3" [125l], and a similar, if abbreviated, array of arguments and citations are marshalled in reply. Hebrews 1:3 appears again, this time in the company of Jer.23:24 and Ps. 138(139). On this occasion, however, Cyril fires a "parting shot", in Wickham's phrase, with which to sting his adversaries: the accusation that they have "fallen" unwittingly into Arianism [125m]. To ascribe, he argues, bodily characteristics to the Son's divinity is to make him of a "different nature [heterophyes]" than the Father who fills all things [Jer.23:24], and, by thus robbing "him of divinine attributes", reducing "the Creator to the level of the creatures" [125n]. If this is not Arianism, he implies, than what is?

Three other "Answers" are of interest to us. In "Answer 6", Cyril has to argue that the Son's human body has not been merged into his divinity [126o]. This sounds quite like the "mingling" language characteristic of Syrian Christian literature [126p], but it may point instead -- or also -- toward the way in which these particular ascetics, and perhaps our other ascetic visionaries as well, combined the idea of the preexistent "Body of Glory" with the historical incarnation of the Word, in order to understand the object of their vision and goal of their ascent to heaven. Cyril, of course, objects vehemently to the idea of a confusion, sygkrasis, between divinity and humanity that would result in a tertium quid [125q]. "Answer 12" appears to address an exaggerated idea about the possibilities of dispassion, apatheia, in this life, and it thus recalls one of the accusations launched against the Messalians, and so, perhaps, together with "mingling", offers us another clue about the origins of the interlopers [125r]. "Answer 15" is quite curious and seemingly unrelated to the foregoing. The monks ask the archbishop whether or not "incorporeal demons" could have intercourse with human women. The context, clear from Cyril's reply, is the descent of the "Sons of God" in Genesis 6:1-4 [125s]. The patriarch answers by identifying the "Sons of God" with the descendents of the righteous Enosh who fell from their progenitor's virtue in order to mate with the daughters of Cain. Any identification of these figures with angels is specifically ruled out [125t]. Yet, it is precisely with angels that the grandfather of apocalyptic literature, the so-called "Book of the Watchers", comprising chapters 1-36 of I Enoch, identifies the "Sons of God", and it is in order to preach -- in vain, as it happens -- to these fallen angels that the patriarch, Enoch, is called to ascend to the heavenly throne of the Glory [125u]. Here, surely, as with Ammonas' reference to the Ascension of Isaiah and Abba Sopatros' warning against apocrypha, we have an indication of the reading matter, as well as of the general thought world, of our ascetics. Like his great predecessor, Athanasius, Cyril will have none of it.

In the "Letter to Calosirus", included among the collection Wickham edited, Cyril addresses his suffragan, the bishop of Arsenoite, the modern Fayyum, to address the problem of anthropomorphism among the latter's monks. The document is quite bland in comparison to the "Answers to Tiberius". As Wickham rightly observes, while the issues of Gen.1:26 and God's putative human form are to the fore, there are no traces of any discussion about the experience of God, nor of heavenly ascent [125v]. There do, however, appear appear to be some among the monks who also betray traits reminiscent of "Messalianism", notably doubts about the Eucharist and an unwillingness to work [125w]. I would myself add the question whether it was not a milieu like this one that produced the Life of Apa Aphou. I am not suggesting that the latter was written in Calosirus' diocese, but the document does bear witness to the fact, as we noted above, that the traditions we have been examining did manage to persist, and to do so, moreover, in an atmosphere of relative tranquillity and assurance. Might perhaps the story of Aphou's victory over the redoubtable Theophilus have been written to provide a reply to the latter's still more formidable nephew?

My last witness to the conflict over the nature of "anthropomorphism", at least as I have been presenting the latter, comes to us from northwestern Greece a generation or so after Cyril's correspondence, sometime around the middle of the fifth century, though this, too, will require yet another excursion into Syria and Mesopotamia. Diadochus of Photiki was a signer of the Chalcedonian definition and an important contributor to the course of Eastern Christian sprituality [126]. There is nothing explicit about anthropomorphic conceptions of God in any of his writings, but there is a considerable amount of material devoted to the question of the visio Dei, and some of it contributes significantly to the subject under discussion in this essay, the matter of the "Glory of God" and the form, or lack of form, proper to divinity. Diadochus is, first of all, usually understood in those sections of his Gnostic Chapters which address these issues, as well as in his short Vision treatise, to be engaging in polemic against the Syrian sect of the "praying ones", Euchites or Messalians [127] - hence our need to refer once again to the Near East.

Messalians, whether an actual group, or else simply a bundle of opinions and tendencies with roots in Syrian ascetic tradition [128], are not to my knowledge generally connected with the specific issue of anthropomorphism. Yet the texts gathered by Kmosko in the latter's "Introduction" to his edition of the Liber Graduum [129], in particular the selections from Marutha of Maiphercatensis (ca.early fifth century), Theodoret of Cyrrhus (d.466), and Philoxenus of Mabbug (d.523), to limit myself to the writers who fall roughly within our period, present a number of similarities to the "anthropomorphites" of Augustine and the Egyptian desert. In a brief condemnation of the Audians which Kmosko, rather interestingly, includes in his dossier of anti-Messalian authorites, Marutha shows none of Epiphanius' approval:

These people say that the Trinity exists in composition [i.e., construction, fabri-

cation, roukobo'] with each other, and that the Persons [qnoume] are composed/

composite [mrakbe] with one another. [130]

Marutha seems to have had in mind something like Augustine's God of "separate parts", or Cyril's aggregate of divisible hypostases. Theodoret, in Hist.Eccl. IV.10, tells us that the Messalians claimed not only to perceive the visitation of the Holy Spirit (not the Son) "sensibly and visibly [horatos]", but to foresee future things and "behold the divine Trinity with their eyes" [131]. He repeats the same charge later on in anothe work [132].

Philoxenus is more interesting still. In his Letter to Patricius, the Syrian bishop provides examples of the sort of visions the Messalians claimed to have had. The two stories he cites should remind us of Abba Or's experience in Historia Monachorum 2. In the first story, Satan appears to a gullible ascetic "in a form of light [btoupso dnouro]", identifies himself as the Spirit, and demands worship. He gets it, since, as Philoxenus remarks, this poor fool (saklo, like Augustine's stultus) did not know the reply of that "famous anchorite" (Or? Anthony?), unnamed, who turned away a like apparition with becoming modesty. This monk instead is deceived into believing himself the beneficiary of a vision of "the glory [shoubho] of the great ones", and goes away filled thus with demonic hallucinations posing as divine vision [133]. The second story features a violent death. Satan leads another naive hermit from his cell up to a high mountain in order to show him a chariot, markabto, and promise him a trip to heaven, like Elijah. The monk climbs in only to have the illusion dissolve in mid-flight and leave him to tumble to his "ridiculous death" [134]. The impressions left by these three writers are less clear than the stories and accounts we have been dealing with, perhaps because of the distorting effects of second-hand reporting, time (especially in Philoxenus' case), hostility and confusion on the part of the reporters, and a body of by now more or less traditional materials [135], but the notes of a "composite godhead", forms of light, and, not least, the chariot and heavenly ascent remain.

Thus, in turning to Diadochus, we find ourselves on familiar ground. "Let no one", he writes in Chp.36, "who, on hearing of a perception [aisthesis] of the intellect, hope that the Glory of God will appear to him visibly". This, he states, does not happen in the present life, and

Therefore, if anything should appear to one of those struggling [in asceticism],

whether light or some fiery form [schema ti pyroeides], let him in no wise accept

such a vision, for it is an obvious deceit of the enemy. [136]

He repeats the warning in Chp.40:

Everything which appears to him [i.e., the ascetic] as a shape [schema], whether

as light or as fire, comes about by the machinations of the enemy.

Trust in such apparitions involves the soul in deadly perils [137]. Do then what des Places calls, in reference to these forms of light and fire, "classically Messalian traits" [138], "become for Diadochus purely a metaphor" [139]? I, for one, am not willing to go so far. First, the "traits" against which Diadochus is warning are hardly confined to "Messalians". If anything, the latter seem to have a good deal more in common on this score with the "anthropomorphism" we have been tracing than has hitherto been noticed, and it might therefore be more useful to categorize them - to the extent, of course, that they did in fact constitute a distinct group or movement - as one particular instance of a larger, underlying tradition, or complex of traditions, a kind of substratum which appears to have been practically coterminous with the geographical spread of Christianity itself by the late fourth and early fifth centuries. The fact that our attention is drawn to this layer of popular belief, particularly among the ascetics, in the period under discussion does not necessarily signify that it originated then. Quite to the contrary, I think we can safely assume that it had been around for a very long time. The disturbance which forced this substratum more or less simultaneously into view at many different points of the Christian compass was the great seismic shift of the Nicene homoousion, not so much as enunciated at Nicea itself, since that council had only begun the process, but in particular following the acceptance of its definition as the faith of the ecumene under Theodosius I. The old Logos Christology had had after all to be junked, how much the more so this archaic complex, with its God of "separable parts"? In fact, I would hazard a guess that the old Alexandrian Christology of Clement and Origen, following Philo's speculations on the Logos, may well have itself been, in part at least, an adjustment of this archaic stratum to sensiblities refined by the requirements of later Platonism. The reception of Nicea simply brought that process of adjustment to a conclusion, and did so universally.

Secondly, regarding Diadochus himself, who can fairly represent for us what occurs in such slightly earlier writers as Evagrius, Cassian, the author of the Macarian Homilies, and any number of other ascetic writers throughout the Christian East, including Ammonas, several of the Fathers of the Apophthegmata, and the Liber Graduum itself, the focus on the visio Dei shifts from the "outer man" of the physical senses to the "inner man" of the spiritual [140]. Here Origen had certainly blazed a trail [141], but the process is occurring in other writers of our period who did not necessarily have any direct acquaintance with the great Alexandrian's theology, people such as Ephrem of Nisibis or, again, the Liber [142]. Yet to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the individual writer, all the old terms remain: glory, light, fire, rapture or ecstasy, ascent, etc. Furthermore, this shift of the primary locus of the visio, which could look to precedents within the New Testament itself [143], did not entail any supposition that the experience to be obtained within was any less real, for all its change of venue. Des Places is perfectly happy to acknowledge the experiential force of Diadochus' "certain ineffable perceptions" by which Christ "reveals his presence to the heart" [144], and likewise notes the Bishop of Photiki's language of ascent and rapture [145]. But light, fire, and glory also have a place in the latter's account of the experience of God, and that place, I submit, is quite real, not just a metaphor. Evagrius on the "light of the Holy Trinity", for example, is a perhaps a bit tentative, but the Macarian Homilies are not tenative at all, nor, really, is Cassian [146]. Neither, I think, is Diadochus. He makes use of these key terms several times in the course of his Chapters. In the same Chp.85, where he speaks of "ineffable perception", he also writes of the fire of grace perceptibly burning up the "tares of the human earth", and concludes by associating that perception with light: "When then the man of struggle puts on all the virtues, and especially non-possession, then [grace] shines round [periaugazei] his whole nature with a certain, deeper perception" [147]. The "light of the soul" is glimpsed in the "treasury of the heart" [148], and likewise we struggle and pray in order to have:

...the Holy Spirit rest [anapauein] in the peace of the soul, that we may have the

candlestand of knowledge shining ever in ourselves. For, when he flashes within

the treasuries of the soul, not only do all those bitter and dark provocations of

the demons become perfectly clear to the intellect, but they are exceedingly

weakened as well, being reproved by that holy and glorious light. [149]

This is not, to be sure, a physical light, nor an exterior one, nor is it seen by the eyes of the body, but it still sounds real enough to me. As with Cassian, this light is not just to be identified with some feature of the soul, but with divinitas, and, as with Gregory of Nyssa, it is here equated with the Spirit. Thus I do not think it a metaphor when, early in the Chapters, Diadochus reprises the old theme we have been tracing: the soul, "soberly drunk...with the love of God" and goodness of the Spirit, delights in the "Glory of the Lord" [150].

There is more, however, to Diadochus than his Chapters. In his little treatise, The Vision, he takes on explicitly the matter of God's self-manifestation in the scriptures, and the theme thus of the divine Glory [150a]. Early in the work he addresses the Spirit's appearance as a dove at Christ's baptism. The questioner, Diadochus himself in this piece, asks what the form, eidos, of that manifestation meant. The reply, placed in the mouth of John the Baptist, appears to make a remarkable distinction, quite different, I think, than what we found in Augustine:

It was not the invisible and unchangeable nature [physis] of the Spirit which was

changed [metablethe] into the form of a dove...the form was shown to the one

who beheld it...by [His] will [boulei]...

This distinction is then applied to the Old Testament theophanies:

Thus...it was in this way that the prophets saw God, as in the vision of a form

[eidos]. For he did not appear to them by changing himself into a shape [schema],

but they rather saw the Formless One [ton aschematiston] in, as it were, a form of

glory [hos en eidei doxes], his will, not his nature, being shown [bouleseos...ou

physeos deiknymenes] to them in a form. For the action [energeia] of the will

appeared to them in the visions thus as in a form of glory, because of him who

willed that he himself be seen in the form of his will. [151]

I suppose some might argue that this is roughly the same as Augustine's solution. No one of the Persons is mentioned specifically as appearing, save the Spirit in the instance of the baptism. It is God who acts, presumably the whole Trinity, and he does not reveal his nature, but his will. On the other hand, Diadochus says nothing about the resulting "form" being a created effect. It is rather the operation or action of the divine will itself which appears as the Glory in a form. The saints of Israel saw God himself, in other words, but God as distinct from his hidden nature or substance. While Diadochus' language is more refined, I take him to be in the same territory as Epiphanius' agreement with the Audians that God does appear when and as he wills. This more refined version is also, of course, remarkably like the fourteenth century distinction Gregory Palamas draws between the divine essence and actions, energeiai, and, as with Palamas, it, too, is offered in order to allow for the possiblility of the vision of light or the Glory, of the radiance of God himself, without at the same time compromising the divine transcendence [152].

I.D: Preliminary Conclusions from the Fourth/Fifth Century Evidence

This concludes the evidence that I have so far gathered about the anthropomorphite controversy and its results. It is first of all clear that "Egyptian" anthropomorphism was neither confined to a few naive peasants in that country's desert hermitages, nor indeed to Egypt itself. We have discovered in Epiphanius' Audians, in Syria's and Diadochus' "Messalians", in the interlopers troubling Cyril's Palestinian correspondents, and in Augustine's anthropomorphites traits and concerns which appear to be substantially identical. Put broadly and a little loosely, the phenomenon appears at different points from the Atlas range to the Zagros, and from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf. If the Nicene confession brought this huge mass into view, then the answers which these controversies -- or, rather, this single controversy -- provoked have continued to shape Christian life and spirituality to the present. I say answers in the plural quite deliberately. The East, on the one hand, had fundamentally one dominant reply. The hope of the visio Dei, even in this life, the experience of light or glory, was preserved, save that now the vision becomes an event within the soul, while the Glory, in its turn, loses its occasional specificity as a proper name for the Son in order to become instead the radiance of the Triune God, imparted to the believer in the Holy Spirit through the deified flesh of Christ. The line which stretches from Evagrius, "Macarius", Epiphanius and Cassian on to Diadochus, Barsanuphius of Gaza, Isaac of Nineveh, John of Dalyatha, Symeon the New Theologian and the fourteenth century Byzantine Hesychasts seems thus to me to be pretty clear [153]. In the West, on the other hand, things work out a little differently. Cassian, certainly, heads off to Gaul carrying the reply just sketched, but another, much louder and more powerful voice had spoken to the issue as well. Augustine allows the theophanies no true appearance of God at all. The vision of God is the vision of the substance of the indivisible Trinity, of the substance which is Trinity, and that vision, so far as I can tell - with two possibly significant exceptions in his corpus - is restricted to the eschaton [154]. To say the least, this had to have complicated matters considerably, and I leave it to experts in Augustine, Cassian's heirs, and Western spirituality generally the task of describing how this difference has played itself out in Latin Christian spirituality -- or, perhaps better -- spiritualities. What does seem to me clear is that there was a difference, and that this difference must have had its effects, but with this issue we really end up squarely in the middle of late twentieth century Christian dialogue, which I will happiliy defer to other people at other times and places.

Part II: The Substrate

It is time for me instead to ask about this hitherto hidden layer of Christian faith, associated particularly with Christian ascetics, that we have found attracting the attention and ire of so many distinguished bishops and spiritual writers in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Where did this talk of the Glory, of the form of God and of man, of fire and light and ascents to heaven, of angelic fellowship, or transformation into angels, and, not least, of fiery chariots and thrones come from? It is obviously rooted in the theophanies of Exodus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, as well as elsewhere in the Old Testament, but what is it that carries us from the pre-exilic temple of Isaiah's vision, or from the exile and early second temple theology of the kavod YHWH native to Ezekiel and the "priestly" source [155], to use the language of Wellhausen, up to the late second temple and early Christianity? From Ezekiel to the early Church is a gap of six hundred years. What bridges that gap?

It is the dream ascent of Daniel 7 ff. that provides the key, of course. Together with the other theophanies, this text has turned up at several points in our investigation, and we have had the added hints of Abba Ammonas' citation of the Ascension of Isaiah, Abba Sopatros' warning against "apocryphal literature", and the interests of Cyril's Palestinian interlocutors in the fallen "Watchers" prominent in I Enoch, not to mention, more remotely, Cassian's reference to "Jewish weakness". We are in the world of apocalyptic literature, whose importance for the nascence of Christianity has long been recognized [156], and whose significance for earliest Christian asceticism, the ambient in which we have found most of our "anthropomorphites" [157], has been pointed out more recently [158]. Many of the better known features of the apocalyptic genre, including the background in oppression of or party strife among Jews, the elaborate symbolism, the use of distinguished figures from the scriptural past for contemporary messages, the preoccupation with the imminent end of the reign of evil, the sharp distinctions between good and evil, light and dark, features which include several of the elements bearing on the origins of Jewish and Christian asceticism, do not particularly concern us here, but rather certain other characteristics of this literature which have been much less remarked upon until quite recently. These elements include precisely those ideas we have been running across consistently: the Glory of God in relation both to the Second Person and to the imago Dei in Adam, thus the vision of the Glory and, associated with it, the related themes of ascent and transformation.

At this point, and for what follows, I must acknowledge my own scholarly deficiencies. I do not have the vast array of ancient languages needed to probe all the texts in the original (or, more often, in the surviving translations), nor am I intimately familiar with the great majority of Old Testament and New Testament pseudepigrapha even in the English language versions provided by the collections edited by Charles, Sparks, Schneemelcher and Charlesworth [159], let alone the huge body of rabbinica. These desiderata must await another day. I am in consequence wholly dependent upon a group of scholars headed by the late Gershom Scholem, and including, in loosely chronological order, Giles Quispel, Jarl Fossum, Joseph Blank, Gedeliahu Stroumsa, Alan Segal, Steven Fraade, Martha Himmelfarb, and, most recently, April de Conick [160]. I might add the names of Ithmar Gruenwald, David Halperin, and Joseph Dan on merkabah mysticism, Gary Anderson and Jacob Neusner on rabbinic traditions, together with David Winston and David Runia on Philo [161], but the contributions of this second group will not feature prominently in what follows. Most of the first group, save Scholem and Quispel, have published only relatively recently, and, because their works do not date back much more than two decades, their views have not yet had all the impact which I think they deserve. So let me testify now that I could not have picked up from the "anthropomorphites" the different themes mentioned just above, nor have seen the unity underlying their several manifestations, had I not been introduced to Scholem by my former teaching assitant (now professor in her own right), Rebecca Moore, and to Quispel, Fossum, and Segal by my colleague and friend, Michel Barnes.

It is Scholem who began the process. The second chapter of his epochal study, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, supplemented later on by Jewish Mysticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Talmudic Tradition and The Origins of Kabbalah, describes his foundational discoveries. Seeking the ancestry of medieval kabbalah, he was led to find it in the hekhalot texts of the "descenders of the merkabah", mystical documents purporting to show the way to ascent through the angelic hierarchies, or heavens, to the chariot throne, hence merkabah, of the Glory of the Presence. These texts had been thought very late, and it was Scholem who successfully demonstrated their essential antiquity, and who further linked them with the earlier literature of apocalyptic and, back still farther if only glancingly, with Ezekiel's vision itself [162]. In the process of tracing this trajectory, he touches significantly on parallel developments -- or, better, a parallel stream of the same tradition -- in early Christianity, most notably St. Paul's ascent in 2 Cor. 12:2 ff. [163], a text we have found echoed several times and which has with some justice been called the "template" of Christian mysticism [164]. One element in Scholem's analysis of particular importance to us is the notion of the body of God's kabod, an idea especially to the fore in a sixth century merkabah text called the Shi'ur Qomah ("the measurement of the body"). Although this particular piece is obviously late, he provided convincing arguments for the great antiquity of the idea it expresses: the vision of the divine body as goal of the mystical ascent [165].

In 1980, Giles Quispel took up the connection between the body of the Glory seen on the chariot throne by Ezekiel, and early Christian tradition in an article for Vigiliae Christianae. He begins by relating Ezekiel's vision of the brilliant form to the eschatological hope voiced by Is.40:5, that "all flesh shall see the Glory of God", then to apocalyptic literature, notably the ascent and vision of I Enoch 46:1, then to the Jewish current Scholem uncovered, and on to Mandaean and Gnostic speculations about the primal man, as well as to pagan works like the Poimandres of the Corpus Hermeticum, and then to Mani himself [166]. In the articles's second half, he turns to St. Paul and, in particular, the following texts: 2 Cor.12:2-4, Phil.2:6-11, and I Cor.1:24 [167]. With regard to our subject today, his remarks on the passage from Phillipians are perhaps most to the point: Christ as originally "in the form [morphe] of God...alludes to the Jewish-biblical concept...that God has a shape, and, still more shocking, that the image of God in man is to be found not in his soul...but in the outward bodily appearance...the implication of the morphe is obviously that it is the divine body, identical with the kavod, Glory, and equivalent with eikon. For man is made after the eikon of God and is therefore a faint copy of the divine morphe, demuth" [168]. It is difficult not to recall Apa Aphou's dismay at the Patriarch Theophilus' letter which, as we recall, "sought to exalt the Glory of God" by denying the image, and now perhaps easier to understand the soothing force of the Patriarch's reply to the crowd of angry monks: "In you I see the face of God", as well as to accord a new weight to Cassian's apparently stock reference to Abba Serapion's problem with biblical interpretation as a "Jewish weakness" [169].

Quispel's article was brief and limited in its documentation. Three longer articles appeared over the next three years, however, which filled in a great deal of detail: G.Stroumsa in Revue biblique (1981) and Harvard Theological Review [170], and J. Fossum on "Jewish-Christian Christology and Jewish Mysticism" for, once again, Vigiliae Christianae (1983). All three articles, particularly Stroumsa's second, "On the Form(s) of God", and Fossum's, support Quispel (and Scholem before) at the same time as they deepen and extend the range of texts. Here I would like to draw attention to two of Stroumsa's observations as throwing a certain light on that pair of Augustine's remarks which I underlined above, the "contraction and expansion" of the Word in de trinitate II.25, and the God of "separate parts occupying separate places" in Epistle 148, remarks which we saw echoed in Cyril's second and third "Answers". In "Form(s) of God", Stroumsa sets out his view that the kenosis of Phil.2:7 "can be best understood as reflecting an originally mythical conception, rather than being simply metaphorical...When Christ was in the 'form of God', his cosmic body filled the whole world...[while the] Incarnation...implied that Christ emptied the world...in a sense himself...giving up the greatness of his previous cosmic dimensions" [171]. This sounds to me quite a bit like modo se contrahet, modo distendet. Regarding "separable parts and places", Stroumsa remarks, in the course of his article for Revue biblique, that "the concept of the form of God...refers in effect occasionally to an anthropomorphic conception [of God himself], but also on occasion to a divine hypostasis, anthropomorphic but other than God himself" [172]. Lastly, quoting Scholem in Major Trends, he notes the "'belief in a fundamental distinction [in the Shi'ur Qomah texts] between the appearance of God the Creator, the Demiurge...and his indefinable essence" [173]. This would seem to fit in with an understanding of the Second Person as manifestation of the hidden Father, that is, the Son as the glorious form who is both revealed in heaven on the throne, to the saints of the Old Testament, and finally and radically, leaving the heavens temporarilily kenous, in the Incarnation, thus separable parts and, at least for purposes of theophany here below, separate places.

In two mutually supporting monographs, The Name of God and Two Powers in Heaven, Fossum and Alan Segal, respectively, pursue the distinction between the manifest Creator and the hidden God, a distinction based on the Glory tradition, into the origins of Gnosticism, where they discover a surprising coherence, or at least continuity [174]. The prevelance of just these themes of Glory, Form, Power, and primal Man, together with the notes of ascent and transformation, in the materials discovered at Nag Hammadi, brings me back to that suggestion I made above concerning reasons why Pachomian monks might have been interested in those documents. On the basis of the visions we noted in the Bohairic Life, I think it safe to say that they were curious about a number of the same things as are discussed in the "gnostic" texts. Not all of the latter are classically gnostic in any case, that is, posit the dualism between evil demiurge and good God. The Gospel of Thomas comes to mind particularly in this connection as less about metaphysics than as a document advocating asceticism, and it had certainly been around for some time in Egypt [175]. Its own possible links with the merkabah tradition and mystical ascent to the Presence, very recently explored by April de Conick [176], lend additional weight to the thought that it may well have been deemed quite appropriate for monastic reading, as appears clearly to have been the case in the Syrian literature of the Liber Graduum and Macarian Homilies, where Thomas was freely read and cited [177]. It is also easier to understand what Pachomius may have greatly disliked about the platonist spiritualizing of an Origen, who in addition had directed some very sharp remarks -- the ancestor of Cassian's and Evagrius' criticisms of anthropomorphism, or forms, in prayer -- against the very set of concepts we have been discussing here [178]. The "mythical" (using this adjective with all due care) world of the visions recounted in the Coptic Life, drawn straight from the language of apocalyptic, did not sit comfortably with an intellectual universe which understood biblical images as metaphors. Abba Sopatros' warning rings true, as does a certain cause for Athanasius' decree against undesirable literature in the monasteries.

The matter of visions leads me to the mystical aspect of the ancient documents and its relation to that expectation of the vision of God which we found among the monks. Quispel's article begins with a reference to the fourteenth century Athonite controversy over the "light of Tabor" [179]. While he does not explain his reasons for this historical reminiscence, he does go on to describe Ezekiel's vision as not only of the glorious form, but of light, and the latter seems to have been a great preoccupation of our ascetic combatants as well, whichever side of the fray they supported [180]. Thirty years ago Scholem spoke of the Shi'ur Qomah "as the deepest chapter [of divinity] opened to the Merkabah mystic for his inspection" [181], and Fossum observes, twenty years later, regarding the first century text of 2 Enoch 13, that, although "the idea of the unbelievably vast measurements of the Lord purports that God really is immeasurable, still, and this is the paradox of this kind of mysticism, the visionary actually is able to behold the divine body in ecstasy" [182]. Segal pursues this idea into the writings of St. Paul in his recent book, Paul the Convert, seeking to find in the Apostle an undeniably first century witness to the roots of Merkabah traditions in later rabbinic literature. He thus reads the account of Saul's vision of light in Acts 9 and 22 as precisely an example of merkabah mysticism, and argues that this insight provides invaluable background for properly assessing Paul's understanding of Christ: the Apostle identifies "Jesus with the Glory of God" [183]. Moreover, comparing the transformation into angelic status experienced by Enoch in I Enoch 71 with Paul on the experience of Christ in 2 Cor.3:7-4:6, Segal goes on to suggest that the lattter understood that, by gazing on the Glory which is Christ, he, Paul, had himself been "transformed into a divine state", which state would "be fully realized after his death", and that, unlike Enoch, this condition was not reserved for him alone, but constituted the "calling for all believers" in Jesus [184]. Transformation is further connected for Paul with certain physical/spiritual phenomena or signs, in Segal's words: with "the spiritual glow, radiance, or splendor, the special resemblance of Adam to God before the Fall, which is imparted only to those who, like Moses, have been called to the presence of God" [185]. Of this transformation, "the Holy Spirit...present in Baptism, is a pledge that the process has begun" [186].

Glory and light thus, the link between the divine body, Christ, and the imago Dei in the human being, together with the assumption that the vision of this splendor is available for some believers even in this life [187], and in fact carries with it on occasion certain transformative effects, however temporary short of the eschaton: all this sounds remarkably like both parties to the fourth/fifth century controversy we have been tracing. It certainly recalls the stories, to recall but one example, of Silvanus' glowing face and ascent to heaven. What I found truly remarkable in Segal's account, and I think perhaps even corroborative of his reading of Paul, was his utter unawareness that the themes he sketches as central for the Apostle continued in the Christian ascetic tradition, particularly in the East [188]. For our purposes here, though, it is the specific issue of Paul's understanding of the glorious body of Christ in his divinity, as linked simultaneously to Gen.1:26 and the visio Dei, which is so striking. Could it be, I wonder, that poor Abba Serapion, weeping uncontrollably at vespers, had actually been closer to the Apostle's own thinking on these matters than that learned deacon whose sophisticated arguments had just overwhelmed him? That would be wonderful irony, indeed. In any event, I think we have gotten a lot closer to the linkage between the imago and the visio Dei, and the understanding regarding that relationship, which underlay the Anthropomorphite Controversy, than postulating it as either a conflict between simple rustics and philosophical sophisticates, or else as an Origenist plot fabricated in order to discredit the more conventionally "orthodox" monks.

There is one more set of ideas discussed by these recent scholars that I should like to touch on before concluding this essay. In every one of the instances of "anthropomorphism" so far encountered, with the possible exception of Augustine's targets (but note the addressee of Ep. 147!), we have been dealing with a group or party of ascetics. The issues of vision and eschatological transformation appear thus as linked to the sources and continuing practice of Chrisitan asceticism, not merely in the fourth century and subsequently, but long before [189]. In this last section I should like to bring up this linkage with respect to the themes of ascent and angelic fellowship that we noted in our fourth/fifth century texts. Here, too, recent scholarship contributes a number of illuminating connections. I have in mind especially the study by Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, as well as April de Conick's still more recent monograph on the Gospel of Thomas, Seek to See Him. Against the background of these two works, particularly Himmelfarb's, details from the stories of the Apophthegmata and Historia Monachorum, to name but two, take on a surprising familiarity: from Abba Patermuthis' return trip to Paradise, complete with shopping basket, to the company of heaven at Abba Sisoes' deathbed, and even to such an apparently trivial detail as those two monasteries with their assemblies of white-clad monks.

Himmelfarb begins her book with a passage from 2 Enoch 22:8-10, the seer's stripping and anointing with the oil of glory in order to become "like one of the glorious ones", and she describes this procedure as a priestly investiture, against the background of heaven itself as the great temple with the angels its priests [190]. Her summary of this picture is her thesis: "The claim...that a human being can become the equal of angels...stands at the the center of a group of eight early Jewish and Christian apocalypses...[spanning] almost four hundred years" [191]. She goes on to develop this argument, particularly in her opening two chapters. In the first chapter [192] she traces the shift from pre-exilic notions of God's presence in the temple to the adjustments required by the Babylonians' destruction of Solomon's shrine, adjustments apparent in the two different adaptations to the situation represented, on the one hand, by the Deuteronomist (cf. Dt. 12:15 and, relatedly, 4:12), and, on the other hand, by Ezekiel, with his mobile throne, and the Priestly tradition. Ezekiel she reads as the basis for the singular development of the earliest apocalypse and template for the rest, I Enoch 1-36 (the "Book of the Watchers"), with its transposition to heaven of the earthly temple and transformation of the earthly priesthood into the angelic ministers, a transposition featuring a number of interesting details such as, most notable for our purposes, the shining vesture of the glorious figure on the throne and of his heavenly clergy as based on the linen vestments prescribed in Lev.16:4 for the high priest's annual entry into the holy of holies [193].

She can then move, in her second chapter, to a discussion of the apocalyptic motif of heavenly ascent as signifying participation in the angelic priesthood: "The process by which Enoch becomes an angel is a heavenly version of priestly investiture...[such that] when Paul speaks of [the] spiritual body (I Cor.15:42-50)...he seems to have in mind something similar to these heavenly garments" [194]. Here we might recall Abba Mark the Egyptian's description of the robe of fire enveloping the celebrating priest, cited above, together with the several accounts of transformation we have run across. Not only do the shining faces, etc., recall the glow of Moses' face and hark back to Adam's reflection of the heavenly archetype, but they also point toward this connection with the celestial liturgy [195]. The white-robed monks of the Historia Monachorum are surely in accord with this apocalyptic theme as well [196]. Abba Silvanus' ascent to the Glory features him "standing", estamen, before the Presence. Here, too, precisely in the use of that verb, "standing", we may detect an echo of the same idea. As April de Conick remarks, in connection with logia 23 and 16 of Thomas, "'standing' is associated with angelic behavior...when a person ascended and was transformed, he took his place with the angels 'standing' around God's throne...[in order] to participate in the cultic service [of heaven]" [197]. This, for Thomas, comprises the great calling of the monachos, the ascetic single one, and that association between the ascetic and "standing" before the Glory is thus a notion that not only goes back into apocalyptic, but carries on in the monastic literature, as in the case of Silvanus, and, perhaps most strikingly, in the ascetic tradition of Syrian Christianity, both before the arrival of Egyptian monastic patterns in the ancient local institution of the bnai qeiama [198], and forward as well in compositions as varied as the Syriac Life of Symeon Stylites and the Corpus Areopagiticum [199]. The ascetic struggles, in short, to become an "equal of the angels", isaggelos, and this desire is again fully in accord with the other elements we have been sketching. We can, indeed, pick up the early resonances of this idea in the Gospels, particularly in the Lucan variant of Christ's reply to the Sadduccees on the resurrection (Lk.20:35-36), with its suggestion, different from its parallels in Mark and Matthew, of this "isangelic" status as a present posibility [200]. It is an idea thus coeval with Christian asceticism, and the latter in turn coeval with Christianity itself. The ascetic seeks at once to imitate and to become a participant of Christ, a beholder of the Glory who is Christ, and thereby an equal and concelebrant of the angels, transformed through his (or her) recovery through Christ, the second and archtypal Adam, of the radiant splendor of the imago. Abbas Serapion and Aphou, together with Epiphanius' Audians and, quite possibly, the anthropomorphites of Numidia and the "Messalians" of Mesopotamia, were, I believe, all representatives of these ancient currents. But then, so, too, was their "opposition", as represented by Evagrius, Cassian, the Macarian homilist, Diadochus, Ammonas, and indeed Antony himself [201]. This brings me to my concluding remarks.

Conclusions

In support of his argument against genuine anthropomorphism among the fourth century monks of Egypt, Graham Gould cites a very interesting text at the end of his article, a manuscript edited and published by J.-C. Guy in 1962, and entitled "Un entretien monastique sur la contemplation" [202]. The text is late, being dated by both Guy and Gould to the latter half of the sixth century and as probably of Palestinian provenance. It is nonetheless of interest to this inquiry, and I shall take the liberty of translating the relevant section from pp. 234-5 of Guy's article. The "Conversation" is composed as a series of questions and answers:

Q: What ought such a person [a monk at prayer] do to attend to comtemplation?

A: The scriptures have made it clear how to [do so].

Q: How?

A: Daniel beheld [God] as the ancient of days, while Ezekiel [saw him] on a

chariot of cherubim, Isaiah on a high and exalted throne, and Moses clung to

the invisible as seeing [him].

Q: How can the intellect behold what has never been seen?

A: You have never seen the emperor enthroned as [he is depicted] on [his] images.

Q: And ought the intellect to depict the divine?

A: Isn't it better to depict [it] than to get caught up in unclean thoughts?

Q: Wouldn't that be reckoned a sin?

A: This [depicting] holds for the present, just as the prophets reported seeing [God], and [for when] the perfect [vision] itself comes, as the

Apostle says, "Now we see as through a mirror darkly, but then face to face".

He means, when thought shall have been perfected, then [one] sees with bold-

ness [parresia].

The text then goes on to speak of that perfection of thought as a present possiblity [203]. As Guy points out, the "then" of this passage has a double sense [204]. It is not merely eschatological, in the sense of referring only to the life to come, but looks as well toward possible perfecting of the nous here below, toward a parresia in this life. Like a prisoner released from captivity no longer wishes to go back to the dark, the "Conversation" continues, so the intellect, on arriving at the point where it can see its own "ray", pheggos, has also arrived at the condition where it can remain "on high" [205]. The visio Dei is thus a present possibility toward which the Old Testament experiences point.

Gould does not stress the last part, but takes this text's use of the theophanies as signaling the absence of anthropomorphism as "a living reality to be combatted" [206]. He is certainly correct to see this little work as significant. For one thing, it touches on what are doubtless the four most important theophany texts that we have run across. But he is wrong, I think, simply to project the Entretien back into late fourth century Egypt (and elsewhere). This little piece bears, among other things, the distinct mark of Evagrius, down to the use of pheggos for the light of the intellect [207]. So far as I can tell, what this text in fact signals is rather the general acceptance of what people like Evagrius, the Macarian homilist, Ammonas, etc. were struggling to implement: the interiorization of apocaplyptic imagery inherited from Christianity's origins. Now, as we have just seen with the Old Testament theophany texts, it is also a general rule of theology or spirituality, according to a friend of mine, that whenever a hitherto traditional element is rejected at some stage of later thought, it rarely disappears altogether, but tends to find a way back, albeit returning in a manner consonant with the adjusted intellectual terrain. The outward visions an Evagrius or a Diadochus so deplore never vanish entirely, and even these writers' careful excision of horatos, with reference to divine manifestation in this life, does not remain absolute [208], but the general principles they established do abide. Christ and his light are henceforth to be sought first and foremost within the intellect or heart, and one is to find him by living out the virtues, acquiring humility, long-suffering, etc., and thus cleansing the inner chambers of the soul - the "treasuries of the heart", as Diadochus puts it - in order that the latter may become a shrine in truth, the reality toward which Solomon's temple pointed, the place of encounter between heaven and earth, the topos theou [209]. Everything changes, yet everything is still present -- ascent, vision, angelic likeness -- in the liturgy of the heart become heaven [210].

Regarding interiorization, it is also true that the fourth and fifth century opponents of "anthropomorphism", as I have sketched the latter, had precedents of their own, not only in the great Alexandrian tradition of Philo, Clement, and Origen (who themselves, likely as not, were in part responding to aspects of the kabod traditions [211]), but in the New Testament itself. One can point, for example, to texts like I Cor.3:16 and 6:19-20, the Christian as temple of God or the Holy Spirit, to the promise accorded the pure in heart in Mt.5:8, and perhaps especially to passages in the Gospel of John, such as 14:21-24 and 17:22-24. These texts appear with great frequency in the ascetic literature I have been discussing [212]. Interiorization was no new thing, nor was caution against seeing God in a human form, thus for example Dt.4:12 [213]! What interests me, though, and what prompts this essay is at once the universalization of what I just called an "interiorized apocalyptic", and the continuity which this process also sought to ensure. Giles Quispel began his article on Ezk.1:26 with a reference to the Byzantine Hesychasts, in a somewhat sly, or at least coy, allusion to a continuity he seems to have felt existed between his declared subject and a dispute in the late Byzantine middle ages [214], but which he did not choose to develop. I hope that what I have discussed in these pages helps point the way toward understanding how the Christian tradition, particularly the Eastern Christian tradition, both Greek and others (Syrian, Copt, Armenian, etc.), made the transition from apocalyptic and the frankly anthropomorphic or mythical language of Ezekiel and the Priestly source into the post-Nicene era. For it was Nicea, I am convinced, or rather the general reception of Nicea following the Council of Constantinople in 381, and the latter's enforcement by Theodosius I, which necessitated this empire-wide adaptation. The Second Person could no longer serve as, in esse, the hypostatic form of the Father's immanence or manifestation, anymore (or, in fact, less) than he could continue to act as the subordinate Logos, if he were at the same time to be confessed as of one being with the Father, coeternal and coequal. Nicea required that the Second Person make his own the Father's hidden divinity. God, as Augustine -- or, for that matter and so far as I gather, Arius himself -- insisted, could have no "parts", a higher and a lower, a hidden and a manifest, or, worse, a greater and a lesser. What we then see in the Egyptian controversy is what we also find at several other points in the Christian world around 400 AD: one of the popular effects resulting from the catholic confession of the homoousion. Athanasius orders the removal of the apocryphal literature Abba Sopatros warns against (and that we found Abba Ammonas using), and the Pachomian communities comply -- hence the Nag Hammadi trove [214a]? More openly, Theophilus pontificates on the imago, and the monks of Scete and elsewhere rise up in a protest fated ultimately to fail.

To be sure, as the monks' doomed resistance indicates, this universalization of Nicea required the reconfiguration of certain cherished and ancient ideas, demanding in our particular case the identification of the "glory" and "majesty" of the godhead with the esse of divinity (or, the will, as in Diadochus?) rather than with the Second Person. The "form" and "body" of God do remain the exclusive prerogative of the Son, but are firmly reserved for his historical manifestation as Mary's Son [215]. Yet, as I noted just above, the old language never disappears entirely. Witness the Eastern (and some Western)