Excursus: Divine
Corporeality and Invisibility
It is often taken for granted that invisibility implies incorporeality.
Already Plato equated αορατος aorotos (invisible) and ασωματος asomatos (incorporeal) (cf. Tim. 46d, 36e). Hellenistic Judaism and
Patristic Christianity inherited this Platonic conflation. For Philo of
Alexandria (first century C.E.) the divine essence is both αορατος and ασωματος (Vita M. I,
158; Mut. Nom. 7) and Origen (d. 254 C.E.) cites John 4:24 (“God is spirit”)
as evidence of God’s incorporeality and therefore invisibility. However, an
older Greek (and, as we shall see, Hebrew) view made no such necessary connection.
A being or object could be both ασωματος (corporeal)
and αορατος (invisible) at the
same time. In Classical Greek invisibility is normally affected by materially
obstructing visibility. Thus, in the Homeric poems and in Hesiod invisibility
is “(o)ften described in terms of a ‘covering’ or ‘clothing”, usually by a cloud,
mist, or storm:
The early Greeks, in describing invisibility, attribute it to a visible,
but tenuous, agency (cloud, mist, etc) . . . For that which renders unseen in
Homer and Hesiod is a covering material, which is external to the concealed
body (emph. orig.). (R. Renehan, “On the Greek Origin of the Concepts
Incorporeality and Immateriality,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 21
[1980]: 108-9 [art.= 105-138])
Classical Greek notions of divine invisibility therefore affirmed rather
than denied corporeality.
the gods have a body that they can at will make (or keep) totally
invisible to mortal eyes—and it does not cease to be a body . . . In order to
manifest his presence, the divinity chooses to make himself visible in the form
of a body, rather than his body. From a divine perspective, the opposition
visibility/invisibilty is no longer entirely pertinent. Even in the framework
of an epiphany, the god’s body may appear to be perfectly visible and
recognizable to one of the spectator’s while remaining, at the same time and in
the same place, completely hidden to the eye of others (emph. orig.). (Vernant,
“Dim Body,” 35. Cf. Balam in Num. 22)
The later development of the notion of incorporeal invisibility went
hand-in-hand with the philosophic rejection of Homeric anthropomorphism. This
rejection is especially associated with the Greek author Xenophanes (fifth
century B.C.E.), whose “pioneering for a purer conception of God” (Jaeger, Theology
of the Early Greek Philosophers, 45) laid the foundation for the development
of the transcendent, incorporeal deity of theism. And as Th. Kortweg has shown,
this rejection of anthropomorphism was catalytic to the emergence of the
philosophic θεος αορατος, Deut aoratos.
(Th. Korteweg, “The Reality of the Invisible: Some Remarks on St. John XIV 8
and Greek Philosophical Tradition,” in M.J Vermaseren [ed.], Studies in
Hellenistic Religions [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979], 60-86 [art.= 50-102) This
deity is best summed up in Maximus of Tyre’s Eleventh Discourse, Who is God
according to Plato? Informing his audience of the nature (φυσις) of the invisible deity
(θειον . . . αορατον
αφθαλμοις XI 9b) Maximum wrote:
Here is the Mind which is Father and Maker of All . . . ‘The divine is
invisible to the eyes, unspeakable with the voice, untouchable with the flesh,
unknown to the hearing, only by the most beautiful, most pure, most
intellectual . . . aspect of the soul is it seen through its likeness and heard
through its kinship, the whole together being present to the whole understanding
. . .’ God has no size, no color, no form, nor any other accident of matter,
but he has a beauty unlike any other beauty (9 c-d; II e). (Quoted from Young, “God
of the Greeks,” 49-50)
There is no Hebrew equivalent to the Greek aoratos. The latter
appears in the LXX three times: it translates תהו in MT Gen 1:2, which
describes the chaotic state of the pre-cosmic earth; it translates מסתרים in Isa
45:3, a description of riches divinely hidden in secret places; in II Macc. 9:5
it describes the ‘blow’ or sickness with which God struck Antiochus. But as
Cécile Blanc observes: “Il n’y a pas d’example oú il (i.e. αορατος) se rapporte á Dieu.”
Arthur Stanley Pease, in his discussion, ‘Some Aspects of Invisibility,’
assumed that the prophet Isaiah, when he speaks of אל מסתתר, ‘ēl mistatēr,
“God who hides himself” (Isa. 45:15), is speaking of the incorporeal θεος αορατος, Deus aoratos. But as Samuel E. Balentine has
shown, Yahweh’s hastārāt or hiding in the HB refers not to any
ontological invisibility, but inactivity as a consequence of Israel’s violation
of the covenant. (The Hidden God: The Hiding of the Face of God in the Old Testament
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983]) According to Richard Friedman,
this divine hiddenness also involves “the continuing diminishing apparent presence
of Yahweh among humans.” (“The Hiding of the Face: An Essay on the Literary
Unity of Biblical Narrative,” 215) Friedmann traces this diminution from Yahwe’s
active and visible involvement with humanity in the Garden (Gen. 1-3), through
the patriarchal theophanies (where specific individuals, rather than communities,
encounter ‘a sort of emanation from the Godhead that is visible to human eyes’
[13]), through the post-Mosaic prophetic period of divine encounters in dreams
and visions, to Elijah’s experience on Mt. Horeb and ‘the deity’s blatant
refusal to appear as before’ (I Kgs 19;11, 12): ‘The period of visible, audible
encounters with the divine gradually passes, not subtly, but expressly in the
text.” (Friedmann, Hidden Face of God, 16). Friedmann’s schema
may be more systematic than the texts actually support, but it is clear that the
biblical Deus absconditus is not the same as the Deus philosophorum
who is Deus aoratos. (W. Wesley Williams, “Tajallī
wa-Ru-ya: A Study of Anthropomorphic Theophany
and the Visio Dei in the Hebrew Bible,
the Qur’ān and Early Sunnī Islam” [PhD Thesis; The University of
Michigan, 2008], 30-34)
Arthur Stanley Pease, “Some Aspects of Invisibility,” Harvard Studies
in Classical Philology 53 (1942): 10-11 notes: “Man’s invisibility may
occur . . . as a result of concealment in mist or dust, natural or
artificial-like the modern smokescreen-, in a tempest of wind or rain, during a
solar eclipse, into darkness, in fire, into water, in fissures in the earth, by
putting to sleep or temporary blinding of ones enemies, by simply slipping away
and evading ones companions, or by methods not clearly stated, and hence . . .
mysterious.” (Ibid., 31 n. 136)