Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2013, Page 27

[And I will withdraw my hand,
and then you will see my back,
but my face will not be seen by you.]
As Augustine sees it, Moses is well aware that in the previous divine
appearances and visions, he had only seen God through some created
medium, and thus in 33:13 he asks to see God immediately and without
a veil. Augustine sees a tension in God’s reply. On the one hand, God
promises to go before him personally (v. 14) in his glory (v. 19) and to
allow him to see his back (v. 23); on the other hand, God makes clear that
no human being can survive the vision of himself (v. 20). To resolve this
tension, Augustine makes a contrived use of the shifts in tense among the
verbs and the polysemy of the verbs “antecedam” (v. 14) and “transeo” (v.
22). In this interpretation of these two verbs, he takes them entirely out of
the given context.
In Ex 33:14, God promises that he will “antecedere [i.e. “go out in front
of” = “lead”] Mose and the people” during their further wanderings from
Sinai into the promised land. Augustine, however, interprets antecedere
as meaning that God will “go out (separately) in advance of them”. In
Ex 33:19.22, God promises that he will lítransire [i.e. “pass in front of”]
Moses”. Augustine interprets this as meaning that God will “pass before him
(separately) [i.e. in advance of him]”.
Augustine resolves the tension between 33:20 [God cannot be seen] and
33:23 [Moses will see the back of God] in a complex argument consisting
of a series of steps. First, he observes that God announces the vision of his
back as a future event. But, he notes that, in fact, this vision is not narrated
in what follows, hence, Augustine concludes, it did not happen in fact at
that time; instead God was speaking of an event in the distant future. Thus
Augustine can interpret the future transire ante (33:19.22) christologically. He
calls attention to the use of transire in Jn 13:1, where it is said that Jesus will
“transire” [= will pass] from this world to the Father and argues that by this
“transitus”, Christ “went out in advance” of the Jews who would be converted
to him after Pentecost. Having thus removed YHWH’s promise to a point
in a so distant future, Augustine was then free to interpret the protecting
cleft in the rock mentioned in v. 21 and 22 as referring to the Church. Thus
he concludes that in Ex 33 God did not speak to Moses in his function as
the leader of Israel at the time of the Exodus, but rather to Moses as a type
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