Guy G. Stroumsa To See or not to See: On the Early History of the Visio Beatifica "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God." (Mat. 5:8). The sixth Beati- tude of the Sermon on the Mount set the agenda for two millennia of Christian mysticism1. In Christian territory, the vision of God is possible, but only under certain conditions, having to do both with purity and interiority. The Beatitude also points to the origin of the Christian ideal of seeing God: the Jewish back- ground of the Sermon on the Mount. While Christianity and Judaism do not have the same age, rabbinic Judaism was born, like Christianity, in the first century C.E. It would stand to reason, therefore, to study the early development of mys- ticism in the two religions together, from a comparative perspective. It thus comes as a painful surprise to discover how little such an exercise is practiced, and that religious historians remain too often prisoners of theological ideas and religious polemics of old or of their education2. It is in this perspective that the following pages will seek to follow some trajectories in early Christian mystical traditions. In the first chapter of his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem argued that the phenomenon called mysticism may appear only in certain specific stages of religious evolution, not at any time, and under any circumstances3. Scho- 1 See for instance H. D. Betz, The Sermon on the Mount (Minneapolis 1995) 134-137, esp. 136. Betz notes the contrast between the rarity of visions of heaven and of God Himself in both the Old and the New Testaments and their frequency in apocalyptic and rabbinic ju- daism, as well as in Jewish and Christian mystical literature and in Gnostic texts. For a clas- sical analysis of some seminal texts in the history of Latin mystical literature, see Dom C. Butler, Western Mysticism (London 1926). For a metaphorical use of vision, see K. E. Kirk, The Vision of God: the Christian Doctrine of the Summum Bonum (London, Toronto 1931). The mystical visio divina in the Eastern tradition has been masterly studied by V. Lossky, The Vision of God (Wing Road, Bedfordshire 1963). A. Guillaumont has pointed out that the deep ambivalence toward visions in Eastern monastic literature is due precisely to the insist- ence on a pure heart in the sixth Beatitude: Les visions mystiques dans le monachisme orien- tal chrétien, in his: Aux origines du monachisme chrétien (Spiritualité orientale 30; Abbaye de Bellefontaine 1979) 136-147. 2 See for instance A H. Armstrong, Gottesschau ( Visio beatifica), in: RAC 12 (1983) 1-19. In his treatment of early Christianity, Armstrong seems to ignore the existence of its Jewish substratum. Same attitude in Festugière, La révélation d'Hermès Trismégiste, I, ch. 3: La vi- sion de Dieu (Paris 1959) 44-66. 3 G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York 1944). 68 Guy G. Stroumsa lem's remark may not have been particularly original, but it was no doubt correct: mysticism reflects attempts to reach some kind of concrete contact with the Deity, and is by definition a phenomenon of the individual, entailing, more often than not, his (or her) transformation in the process: ecstasy or divinisation. In that sense, the first Christian centuries, in the Near East and around the Mediterranean, which saw the birth and early growth of Jewish as well as of Christian mysticism, are a particularly interesting period, as it also saw some rad- ical mutations in the very concept of religion4. To a great extent, it was the new concept of the emerging person which rendered such mutations possible, or even imperative. I am referring to the complex processes of internalization. Michel Foucault has well perceived the radical transformations involved in the new "care of the self" (le souci de soi), although he did not really analyze its implications for a new concept of religion5. In late antiquity, religion was no longer perceived, first and foremost, as something happening essentially in the public space - which had usually been the case in ancient societies. The Roman Empire sealed the fate of the polis as an ideal of civilization, while Christianity brought an end to the centrality of political thought. More and more, the locus of religion was identified as the human heart - although the collective dimensions of religion never disappeared, but were drastically reinterpreted in early Christianity. According to this new per- ception of things, the final aim of religion entailed a transformation of the self, its merge with (or into) the Divine. In that sense, mysticism became, in late antiquity, the ultimate goal of religious life, at least for "over-achievers", those whom Max Weber called religious virtuosi. A topical example, which reminds us that the mys- tical ideal was far from being reserved only for Jews and Christians, is provided by Plotinus' descriptions of how the interior eye can eventually enable man to behold God6. Plotinus argues that no eye has ever seen the sun without becoming sun- like. Hence, "You must become first all god-like and all beautiful if you intend to see God and beauty." For Plotinus, the mystical, spiritual vision of God is not quite unattainable though it is only rarely achieved (Porphyry tells us that his teacher reached that stage only four times during his life7). In any case, it is not simply a passive vision, but a real transformation of the self, which can be achieved only after having been actively and persistently sought after through "spiritual ex- ercises" during a long time. Carlo Ginzburg has pointed out that the transformation of Christianity from an aniconic religion to an iconic religion, in the fourth century, remains to this day fundamentally unexplained, despite the many studies devoted to the appearance of images, and their passage to the fore with the Constantinian revolution and its 4 I have studied these mutations in my La fin du sacrifice: les mutations religieuses de l'an- tiquité tardire (Paris 2005). The transformation of the very idea of religion in late antiquity is no less significant than that of the Achsenzeit identified by Karl Jaspers in the middle of the first millenium BCE. 5 See in particular M. Foucault, L'herméneutique du sujet (Paris 2001). 6 Enneads 1.6.9; I, 258-263 LCL. 7 Vita Plotini 16. On the Early History of the Visio Beatifica 69 sequels8. This intriguing phenomenon would eventually have dramatic conse- quences for the development of European culture. In our present context, it should be noted that simultaneously with this transformation of Christianity into a religion of images, Christian mysticism underwent a radical shift. In its earliest stages, Christian mystical texts sometimes speak about very concrete visions, in- cluding those of the divine world and of god Himself, who is sometimes described as having a shape, or a body. Later on, the language of mystical experience changes, the bodily, physical descriptions disappear, and the mystical vision is usually described in terms of light, in the kataphatic trends - or sometimes of darkness, when apophatic language is used9. In other words, the concrete language of vision all but disappears precisely at the time when images of the Divine burst out in public and ubiquitous display. The intellectual background of the new lan- guage of Christian mysticism is of course Platonism, which Christian thinkers adopted, as they thought, wrongly, that it provided a perfect intellectual frame for their theology (only in the twelfth century, with the discovery of Aristotle, would they eventually try, with limited success, to free themselves from this burdensome heritage)10. In order to better understand how the almost total disappearance of the con- crete, physical vision of God in Christian mysticism happened, we need not only connect it to the growing importance of Platonic influence, but must also perceive it in connection with the aniconic character of Judaism (a character perhaps less clear than the rabbis would want us to believe), which did by no means prevent visions. Perhaps, on the contrary, it may be argued that the lack of any concrete representation of the Jewish God (in strong opposition to the ubiquitous statues of the gods in cities throughout the Mediterranean) could only encourage mental representations of God and imagining His form(s). The various visions in Apoc- ryphal literature, from the time of the Second Temple, are a potent testimony to Jewish imaginative powers. As is well known, such visions, which did not disap- pear with the destruction of the Temple, formed the basis of both Rabbinic and Early Christian speculations. As the eschatological dimension of early Jewish thought became more and more blurred (among both Jews and Christians), these traditions of visions turned into what we usually call mystical experience. Without attempting to offer yet another definition of mysticism, I can at least suggest that it involves a personal attempt at a direct contact with the Divinity; this contact is bound to effect a transformation of the person, and is usually prepared by a series 8 C. Ginzburg, Idols and likenesses: Origen, Homilies on Exodus VIII. 3 and its reception, in: J. Onians (ed.), Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in honour of E. H. Gom- brich at 85 (London 1994) 55-72. 9 On apophatic and kataphatic language, see Y. de Andia, Négative (théologie), in: J. Y. La- coste (éd.), Dictionnaire de Théologie (Paris 1998) 791-795. 10 See E. von Ivanka, Plato Christianus. See further J. Rist, Plotinus and Christian philos- ophy, in: L. P. Gerson (éd.), The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge 1996) 386- 413.