Friday, September 24, 2021

E. R. Wolfson on the Corporeality of God in Genesis 1

 

It seems that the problem of God’s visibility is invariably linked to the question of God’s corporeality, which, in turn, is bound up with the matter of human likeness to God. . . . Although the official cult of ancient Israelite religion prohibited the making of images or icons of God, this basic need to figure or image God in human form found expression in other ways, including the prophetic vision of God as an anthropos, as well as the basic tent of the similitude of man and divinity. The biblical conception is such that the Anthropos is as much cast in the image of God as God is cast in the image of the anthropos. This is stated in the very account of the creation of the human being in the first chapter of Genesis (attributed to P) in the claim that Adam was created in the image of God. (E. R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994], 20, cited in Andrei Orlov, The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology [Jewish and Christian Texts in Context and Related Studies 31; London: T&T Clark, 2019], 12)