To See or not to See: On the Early History of the Visio Beatifica

Abstract

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 Beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount set the agenda for two millennia of Christian mysticism 1 .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 background 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 mysticism 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 education 2 .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 circumstances 3 .Scho-