God after Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic

8. The Sabbath of Experience

143 This brief passage from the ninth book of the Confessions marks the culmination of Augustine’s beatific vision in the garden of Ostia—the third and last garden that would play an eminent role in the development of his narration . Augustine’s story is structured as an ascent—from “the bodily pleasure” to “the whole compass of material things in their various degrees” and from there to “the heavens” and the planets until, moving ever higher, he passes from the meditation of “our own souls” to the contemplation of “that Wisdom by which all these things that we know are made, all things that ever have been and all that are yet to be.” This ecstatic Himmelflug is constructed in such a way as to stand as a close textual parallel of another, famous ascent of ancient literature. I refer, of course, to the ladder in Diotima’s speech as it is recorded in Plato’s Symposium . There, too, the philosopher is initiated into a gradual anabasis that mirrors that of Augustine: from the beauty of one body to that of many, then from physical beauty to that of theories, until one reaches the idea of the Beautiful itself. The parallelism between the two passages becomes all the more accentuated not on account of their many similarities (of structure and language) eight The Sabbath of Experience you touched me, and I am inflamed with love —Augustine, Confessions, X, 27 and while we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it. —Augustine, Confessions, IX, 10 God after Metaphysics 144 but thanks to one difference: attingimus eam. Augustine, unlike Socrates, reaches out and touches what lies beyond creation, intangible. Augustine’s “vision” ceases to be a mere apparition and becomes experience at that very moment when he can touch what the philosopher can only see: Especially significant here is the fact that as the spiritual senses are made (in Gregory of Nyssa, for example) to correspond to various degrees of a mystical nearness or ascent to God, there is an inversion in the traditional (Platonic) hierarchy of the senses which placed sight far above all. In the spiritual senses, sight and hearing are lowest (though not scorned), whereas smell and, even more, taste and touch are the most exalted. This was a development whose importance was to be second to none in the history of Western mysticism.1 How does this inversion that upsets the old hierarchy of the senses and their symbolism take place? How are we to explain that what Plato describes as “absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other rubbish of mortality” (Symposium, 211e) can now be touched? The answer lies hidden in a cave in the hills of Bethlehem. It is indeed thanks to the singular event of the Incarnation, contrary to all reason and logic, that the Bishop of Hippo can succeed there where the Philosopher of Athens fails. For it is God who in His kenosis runs against the philosophical anabasis and, instead of moving away from the contingent human nature, as the philosopher would instruct us, comes and assumes the very “rubbish of mortality” from which reason has fled with contempt. God is no longer reserved and inaccessible, but He has come into contact with our nature on account of the human body that He assumed in the Incarnation.2 His is a body available to our touch and willing to touch us. It is precisely at this point that Christianity parts ways with both classical antiquity and the other monotheistic religions. For both Judaism and Islam remain within the realm of religion which, following human reason, allows of no contact between the human and the divine—as is put by Plato, “the god cannot be mingled with the human” (θεὸς δὲ ἀνθρώπῳ οὐ μείγνυται; Symposium 203a)—a deep-seated position in Greek thinking, it seems, if we judge by its recurrence in ancient thought (most notably, Anaxagoras’s maxim “other things have their portion in everything, but nous alone is infinite and self-powerful and mixed with nothing, but it exists alone itself by itself”).3 Contrary to all religious thinking of pre- and post-Christian times, Christ is the God who, by deed and by speech, reaches out and touches us. Thus, at the end of the sermon on the mount, the evangelist adds a comment regarding the reception of...