Journal of Comparative Theology · Jurgen Moltmann’s questions to be relevant, and his theology of play compelling; and as I read and consider his work, I hear Jewish answers

Journal of Comparative Theology at Harvard Divinity School

Issue 1 Volume 4 JUNE 2013

Journal(of(Comparative(Theology(Vol.%4%Issue(1(June%2013%

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Index Editor’s Introduction………………………………………………………………….2 About the Contributors………………………………………………………………4 Creating Space for Transformation: Moltmann’s Theology of Play in

Conversation with the Jewish Sabbath, by Yaira A. Robinson……………………….5

(Re)interpreting the Cosmic History of the Mormon Temple Experience: Theological Connections between Jewish and Catholic Sacred Space, by Brandon Ro…………..21

The Sounds of Silence: A Comparative Reading of Mystical Theology and the Kena Upanishad, by Emily Henson……………………………………………………...74

The Hinterlands of the Qur’ān: The Edges of the Eternal and the Temporal in Early Ḥanbalite Thought with Analogs to Catholic Theology, by George Archer………..86


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Editor’s Introduction THE FOURTH VOLUME of the Journal of Comparative Theology received the most submissions yet, and thus I am delighted to see it continue to grow at an encouraging pace. There are many up-and-coming graduate students showing interest in the field as well, as demonstrated by the amount of inquiries the Journal receives not only nationwide but also from abroad. In addition, from my own local standpoint the number of students both at Harvard and in the greater Boston area who wish to engage the field remains on the rise.

While the discipline of comparative theology began from within the academic sphere of Catholic theology, the Journal received many submissions from non-Catholic theologians and students of theology. This implies that comparative theology is expanding beyond its original provenance of Catholic theology. This growth brings new and inspiring variations and permutations to comparative theology, offering unique theological insights that continue to surprise our reviewers.

The first two articles are an example of this fruitful development. Yaira A. Robinson is a Jewish student who earned a Masters at a Christian seminary. She has put Moltmann’s theology of play into conversation with some aspects of the Jewish practice of Shabbat in her article entitled “Creating Space for Transformation.” Brandon Ro, an adherent to the Latter-day Saint tradition, breaks new ground in comparative theology in “(Re)interpreting the Cosmic History of the Mormon Temple Experience” by putting Mormon sacred architecture into conversation with Catholic and Jewish theology of sacred space.

Emily Henson, in her article entitled “The Sounds of Silence,” places Pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology into interpretive proximity with the Kena Upanishad with the goal of “further disturbing the boundaries of knowledge each text seeks to transcend.” In the final article, entitled “The


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Hinterlands of the Qur’ān,” George Archer performs a bold comparison between the traditional Islamic school of thought known as the Ḥanbalites and Christian incarnational theology in order to understand better the ways in which God is fully with creation.

My short summaries do not do the articles justice, and so I encourage you to delve into them forthwith and enjoy the theological insights each article has to offer. I would like to give a special thanks to the Masters and Doctoral students at Harvard Divinity School who helped me prepare this issue for publication. Furthermore,# I# am# continuously# grateful# for# and# honored# by# the# advisement# of # Francis# X.# Clooney,# S.J.,# Parkman# Professor# of # Divinity# and# Professor# of # Comparative# Theology# at# Harvard# Divinity# School# and# director# of # the# Center# for# the# Study# of # World# Religions.# Let me end by thanking all of the Journal’s readers for their support as well. Enjoy this issue and continue to spread the word about the Journal of Comparative Theology to religious and theological studies departments both nationwide and abroad! Axel Marc Takács Editor, Journal of Comparative Theology


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About the Contributors Yaira A. Robinson is the Associate Director of the Texas Interfaith Center for Public Policy and Texas Interfaith Power & Light. She has a Master's of Theological Studies from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is an active member of Congregation Agudas Achim in Austin. She lives with her husband and their two boys, who make her laugh every day.

Brandon Ro is an award-winning designer who earned his professional degree in architecture (B.Arch) from Cal Poly Pomona. He is currently a Master of Architectural Studies candidate focusing on Sacred Space and Cultural Studies at The Catholic University of America. His present thesis, funded by the Magi Endowment for the Liturgical Arts, advances a method for evidence-based design for sacred spaces by identifying an approach to link the “subjective” (i.e., phenomenology of spiritual experience) and “objective” (i.e., built or measurable conditions of architecture). Similarly, both his research and design interests include exploring ways to improve the dialogue between architecture, religion, ritual, culture, ecology, and human experience.

Emily Henson is a first year Masters of Theological Studies student at Harvard Divinity School. She is currently a student intern at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard where she works on educational programming. She holds a B.A. in Religion from Furman University and an M.A. in Higher Education Administration from the University of Mississippi.

George Archer received his BA from Stony Brook University in Religious Studies, and his MA in Religion from George Washington University, both with specialization in Islamic studies. He is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Theology at Georgetown University in Washington DC. His dissertation research involves the early Qur'ānic conception of the intermediate state of the afterlife (barzakh) and its relationship to late antique Christian saint cults.

Journal of Comparative Theology Vol. 4 Issue 1 June 2013

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As part of my job, I do a lot of speaking. I speak with individual volunteers from different congregations and with clergy, with interfaith groups and with Sunday school classes. The topic of conversation usually relates in some way to a shared religious call to care for the environment, of which we are a part. Almost without fail, someone asks, “Where do we find hope?” Sometimes the question is worded a little differently; it might be more like, “What can we possibly do?” Or this one: “What do you expect to accomplish?” All of these questions emerge in a context of looking honestly at some of the environmental—and related human—challenges facing us today. They come from religious people of different faith traditions who care deeply about the world we share and the life in it, and who know enough of the facts to feel some amount of despair. Anyone working on environmental issues today—or any other social justice issue, as far as I can tell—must wrestle with this question. If people are unable to find a meaningful answer, they won’t be able to keep working for very long—and I’ve seen this, too. People burn out, give up, shut off some piece of their hearts. Without some kind of deep wellspring, the struggle is just too much. Jurgen Moltmann, in his Theology of Play, asks essentially the same question: “How can we laugh, how can we rejoice without care, when we are worried, depressed, and tortured by the state of the

Creating Space for Transformation: Moltmann’s Theology of Play in Conversation with the Jewish Sabbath BY YAIRA A. ROBINSON


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world in which we live?”1 He gives the example of Tevye and his Jewish congregation “singing the Lord’s song in an alien land”2 in the Fiddler on the Roof and wonders, “Is there really such a thing as freedom in the midst of slavery, joy in the midst of suffering, and praising God in the groaning of his creatures?”3 He goes on to suggest an answer. “In playing,” he writes, “we can anticipate our liberation and with laughing rid ourselves of the bonds which alienate us from real life.” I am a Jewish student studying at a Christian seminary, and the Coordinator of Texas Interfaith Power and Light, the environmental program of the Texas Interfaith Center for Public Policy. Doing this work requires that I remain open to the realities of global warming and environmental degradation—and the negative effects these have on all life, including people. It also requires that, even when the facts are difficult and prospects bleak, I stay engaged and continue calling for a better way. And it requires me to offer guidance and inspiration to others, that they might also remain open and engaged, and work for change. In my life and work, I find Jurgen Moltmann’s questions to be relevant, and his theology of play compelling; and as I read and consider his work, I hear Jewish answers to his questions. In this paper, I will put Moltmann’s theology of play into conversation with some aspects of the Jewish practice of Shabbat, or the Sabbath, exploring how Shabbat can be understood as a practice of play that can move us toward liberation and transformation. In the first section, I will explore Moltmann’s critique of our current culture and his theology of play. In the next section, I will examine Jewish understandings about the meaning of the Sabbath as articulated primarily by Abraham Joshua Heschel in The Sabbath. Finally, I will consider how the Jewish practice of Shabbat might be understood as liberating play. As I write, I hold in my thoughts those who have opened their hearts enough to ask, somewhat fearfully, about hope and meaning and the significance of individual human efforts. These are important questions.

Moltmann’s Theology of Play Moltmann describes our culture as an “achievement-centered society”4 whose priorities are out of alignment; the “emphasis of our lives is on service, on our labor.”5 In a society whose central focus is work, achievement, and production, people who are not accomplishing or contributing “enough” do not have value. “When a man sees the meaning of life only in being useful and used, he

1 Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Play, trans. Reinhard Ulrich (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972), 1. 2 Ibid., 3. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 8. 5 Ibid.


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necessarily gets caught in a crisis of living, when illness or sorrow makes everything including himself seem useless.”6 Our overemphasis on productivity also leads to a seemingly obsessive drive to do more, more, more. Reverend Dr. Cynthia Rigby, working with Moltmann’s theology of play, summarizes the situation: “We live in a time and culture in which even people of faith believe there is ‘no other way’ than to live lives full of stress that emphasize, above all, the importance of work. Surely,” she writes, “there is a better way.”7 In contrast to this condition, Moltmann lifts up an ideal of freedom: “To be happy, to enjoy ourselves, we must above all be free.”8 Our society, though, is not free. In societies like ours, games serve a “safety-valve” function, allowing people to release pent up stresses in order to maintain the status quo.9 “Temporary suspensions… are part of the economy of any regime unreconciled to freedom.”10 In our society, Moltmann argues, vacation time performs this safety-valve function: “As the term ‘vacation’ implies, we get away for a while to become better achievers and more willing workers. Conversely, we are not working to enjoy better vacations or to live our lives more freely.”11 Our values and priorities, he suggests, are out of whack—and our leisure time offers no challenge or alternative. In our system, vacations and “free play” reinforce the status quo, helping to maintain the “structures of authority and labor and their respective disciplines and moral systems. They serve as temporary suspensions of the normal state of affairs…. But in this process the abnormal state is strictly limited to a supporting role for the normal life situation: the purpose of relaxation is to restore a person’s fitness for coming demands.”12 This, Moltmann believes, is a problem. When our leisure time exists only for the sake of supporting our work time, then our leisure begins to mirror our work. He laments, “people have lost their capacity for leisure; they no longer know how to do nothing, since constant and ‘full employment’ has become their ideal. So they have to ‘do something’ even with their leisure time. Having mastered their work they have to master their leisure as well. Leisure then 6 Ibid., 19. 7 Cynthia Rigby, “’Beautiful Playing’: Moltmann, Barth, and the Work of the Christian,” in Theology as Conversation: The Significance of Dialogue in Historical and Contemporary Theology, ed. Bruce L. McCormack and Kimlyn J. Bender (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 116. 8 Moltmann, 1. 9 Ibid., 7. 10 Ibid., 8. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 9.


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becomes a continuation of the rhythm of work by other means….”13 The ideal of freedom that Moltmann describes, though, does not serve the values of production and work, nor does it mirror it; it is altogether different: “Freedom has a way of coming by itself to those who are open and receptive. Those who feel they must master it are destroying freedom even in their leisure.”14 Moltmann holds that our current leisure practices—our current games—allow for the release of pent-up societal pressures, but they by no means challenge the existing order: “They are games of liberation played by those in bondage in support of their own bondage.”15 Even though play as it exists in our society now reinforces our “bondage” rather than leading to liberation, Moltmann insists that play itself is not the problem—it’s that we’re not playing the right games, or in the right way. He writes, “to accomplish a humanizing emancipation of man in a given society, it makes more sense to wrest control of the alienated games of that society from the ruling interests and to change them into games of freedom which prepare men for a more liberated society.”16 Moltmann calls us to “move from a merely reproductive imagination, which in its leisure recapitulates the rhythm of the working world, to an imagination productive of a more liberated world.”17 Somehow, our playing should give us a taste of life lived more freely, and move us toward liberation: “We enjoy freedom when we anticipate by playing what can and shall be different and when in the process we break the bonds of the immutable status quo.”18 The games Moltmann suggests we play would be an experiential testing ground for a liberated, transformed reality. They would offer encounter with other modes of being that contrast with our usual patterns and experience, pointing us toward new possibilities. “We are then no longer playing merely with the past in order to escape it for a while, but we are increasingly playing with the future in order to get to know it.”19 The games we play, then, would challenge the status quo and open us to the possibility of change and transformation. Moltmann writes, “in a world, which is not yet complete, where there is still laughing and weeping, eternity may indeed be understood as a future state which is present now without ceasing to be future. Conversely, eternity is a now which is always more

13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 10. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.


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than a mere now.”20 Our playing gives us an experience of and connects us to this “future state,” to “eternity,” to the Kingdom, to the reality of God—all of which are nows that are more than mere nows. When we play in this way, we find ourselves participating in a kind of Divine game, one to which we’ve been invited all along. Moltmann makes the case that creation is God’s play: “When he creates something that is not god but also not nothing, then this must have its ground not in itself but in God’s good will or pleasure. Hence the creation is God’s play, a play of his groundless and inscrutable wisdom. It is the realm in which God displays his glory.”21 As part of this creation, we are part of God’s play, and creation is the realm in which we exist and can play in relation to God. Rigby explains that through play, we engage in a relational connection with God: “Both Moltmann and Barth believe play is possible only because, and appropriate only when, it is engaged by the creature in relationship to the sovereign Creator.”22 Moltmann’s concept of play is connected to ideas of God’s revelation, human-Divine encounter, and an experience of grace. At its heart, playing is about being aware of the reality of God and living in that awareness, something made possible not through human effort alone, but through God’s free gift to us: “The freedom to talk with God and of God is being opened by God’s joy…. Being aware of God is an art and—if the term may be permitted—a noble game.”23 The way we play this “noble game”—to delight and play in creation, in relationship with God—is by expressing joy and gratitude: “The glorification of God lies in the demonstrative joy of existence. Then man in his uninhibited fondness for this finite life and by his affirmation of mortal beauty shares the infinite pleasure of the creator.”24 As God delights in the creation, so we delight in relationship with God. Joyful playing in gratitude to God for the gifts of life, creation, and relationship with God, doesn’t mean that we take the world, work, or productivity lightly; on the contrary, this kind of playing teaches us how to engage meaningfully in the work of the world without becoming overly attached to it:

The moral and political seriousness of making history and of historical struggles is then being suspended by a calm rejoicing in existence itself. This does not make seriousness superfluous. Rather it preserves and protects it against the demonic, against despair, against man’s self-deification and self-vilification, against the mania of perfection and of despondency in the face of imperfection. Our social and

20 Ibid., 37. 21 Ibid., 17. 22 Rigby, 102. 23 Moltmann, 27. 24 Ibid., 21.


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political tasks, if we take them seriously, loom larger than life. Yet infinite responsibility destroys a human being because he is only man and not god.25

In other words, playing before God teaches us how to be in the world without being consumed by it, how to do our work purposefully without turning it (or ourselves) into an idol, and how to calmly “rejoice in existence itself” without succumbing to despair. Because the beginning point of play is an encounter with, and connection to, God, we resist it. In our culture, we are reluctant to be still, to stop our relentless stream of activity and productivity, to open ourselves to possible encounter with God. Rigby writes, “there are good reasons to resist ‘a theology of play’ even when it is properly understood. In short, playing is risky business.”26 Playing is risky, she says, in two ways: “First, it is to risk recognizing that our work is not all that important…. And second, it is to risk recognizing that our work is of eternal significance.”27 Opening ourselves to this kind of relationship with God challenges us to see that we are limited, finite beings whose work and production is a tiny, small effort in the grand scheme of Eternity, while at the same time, our work and production is of the highest importance because it is (or should be) work for and in and towards the Kingdom. Here is the key—all this talk of playing and opening and transformation is really about transformational encounter with God and our response to that gift. Rigby writes, “it is to risk first being changed by God, and then being vehicles of change in the world.”28 Engaging in the “work of play” means opening ourselves to grace: “Grace can, when truly perceived, only overwhelm us. The risk is that we may drown in it. Becoming like children, we plunge into the water, anyway.”29 This is how people of faith should operate in the world, in relationship with God: “They learn to play, and in their playing risk the ongoing transformation of themselves and the world.”30 Playing in this way leads us to a deeper engagement with the troubles of the world. “Only those who are capable of joy can feel pain at their own and other people’s suffering.”31 Partly, this is a result of the contrast we see, having experienced something of the Divine reality: “Where the Kingdom of God is at hand, we feel the abyss of God forsakenness.”32 A life that is reconciled to freedom is

25 Ibid., 23. 26 Rigby, 115. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 116. 31 Moltmann, 31. 32 Ibid.


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one that is aligned with God and the Kingdom, and is not at peace with the world as it is. A faithful, liberated person will work to make the world freer. Moltmann writes:

Easter freedom does not permit us to escape from the world or to forget about it. Rather it leads us critically to accept the world situation with its unacceptable moments and patiently to bring about change in the world so that it may become a place of freedom for men. Thus both the laughter of Easter and the sorrow of the cross are alive in liberated men.33

We are to simultaneously experience both joyful gratitude in playing with and before God, and also the reality of pain of the world, holding these two in creative tension. Rigby explains, “at the same time that we imagine the Kingdom, we grieve that which is not the Kingdom. As people of hope, we live with a great deal of dissatisfaction and despair.”34 Most people, though, are not experiencing life, God, hope, despair, or play in this way. Moltmann suggests that we should make space in our lives for possible transformation through an approach that includes practice:

Inner and outward liberation belong together. One cannot be derived from the other. Marx therefore was right when [he said] that the changing of self and of conditions are bound together in revolutionary, i.e., liberating, practice. The changing of self and of human personality without changing conditions is an idealistic illusion which theologians too should abandon. The changing of conditions without changing man, on the other hand, is a materialistic illusion which the Marxists also should gradually leave behind.35

In other words, liberating transformations need to occur in both inner and outer realms, not just one or the other—because change in one may or may not lead to change in the other—or there will be no real liberation. Moltmann suggests that we need liberation of self and social conditions, through a practice that brings both together for mutual transformation. Moltmann calls for a practice of play that is rooted in religion, which he finds necessary to defend from its modern-day cultured despisers. He argues that the visioning capacity offered by religion is a necessary ingredient in any recipe for liberating transformation. “Religious myths and images are not just ideological tranquilizers

33 Ibid., 32. 34 Rigby, 110. 35 Moltmann, 53.


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which compensate for unbearable conditions or mitigate suppressed misery,” he writes, “they are daydreams of human communities in which the totally-other is made manifest…, and where consequently the transformation of the here and now is already being anticipated.”36 He laments that churches unwisely fill leisure time with activities that mimic the world of work: “I am speaking of the realm of leisure, of relaxation, entertainment, and culture, the realm of purpose-free sociability. Christian congregations really don’t know what to do with this area. So they fill it with theological workshops and charitable or social activities.”37 Instead, he argues, they should try something completely different and “experiment with the possibilities of creative freedom.”38 Moltmann calls for churches to open, for their members, time for free play, thereby inviting encounter with the Kingdom, with God. It is through such playful encounter, Moltmann believes, that transformation is possible. Heschel and the Jewish Practice of Shabbat Writing twenty years earlier, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had similar objections to our culture’s misplaced priorities and its obsession with productivity and work—in his terminology, the things of “space”: “Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely, time…. But time is the heart of existence.”39 In his classic work, The Sabbath, Heschel speaks of time and eternity as the spiritual realities that are, in fact, where our attention should be focused. He is careful, as Moltmann is, to avoid disparaging the physical world of creation: “Our intention here is not to deprecate the world of space.… Time and space are interrelated. To overlook either of them is to be partially blind. What we plead against is man’s unconditional surrender to space, his enslavement to things.”40 Heschel calls us to “fight for inner liberty,” a call that is echoed in Moltmann’s ideal of “freedom.” Heschel writes, “inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people. There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things. This is our constant problem—how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent.”41 He goes on to assert that the central way to achieve this “inner liberty” in the Jewish tradition is by participating in the

36 Ibid., 58. 37 Ibid., 70. 38 Ibid. 39 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 3. 40 Ibid., 6. 41 Ibid., 89.


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Sabbath. Heschel writes, “we must conquer space in order to sanctify time. All week long we are called upon to sanctify life through employing things of space. On the Sabbath it is given us to share in the holiness that is in the heart of time.”42 Heschel’s teachings and much of Jewish tradition about Shabbat encourage an awareness and orientation in life that has as its center the reality of God. In order to understand how Shabbat fits into the larger framework of Judaism and the connection between Shabbat practice and achieving the “inner liberty” of a God-centered life, it is important to understand the role of practice in Jewish tradition. Rabbi Arthur Green writes, “we may have moments of great insight, but we are humans. We backslide, we forget. The oneness of Being is not immediately obvious to us on the plane of existence where we live most of our lives.”43 Because it is so easy for us to forget and get caught up in the world of work and things and space, we need reminders. We need practice. Practice plays an important role in Jewish tradition. Judaism begins with an understanding that we humans are limited, physical beings who are completely dependent on God for life and sustenance. And yet, we are created in the image of God (b’tselem elohim) and are in close, covenantal relationship with God. Jewish practice, in the form of mitzvot, or commandments, can be understood to be a system of religious training, designed to remind us of our Divine partnership in the midst of day-to-day life. As Rabbi Jonathan Slater summarizes, “this is Judaism: following a religious practice to open our hearts and minds toward others and to God.”44 In Jewish thought, opening our hearts and minds to the reality of God—to revelation or Divine encounter—leads to a response from us in the form of action, and the system of mitzvot as spiritual practice encourages both. Slater explains, “Judaism is a spiritual discipline, a practice that leads us to an awakened awareness of God’s being and existence…. When we see most clearly, when we recognize the truth of the moment and what it demands of us, we then sense the necessary obligation of response; we are commanded.”45 The practice opens us to revelation, which then demands as response, practice and action. The sixteenth-century Kabbalist, Meir ben Ezekiel ibn Gabbai, writes in his Avodat ha-Qodesh (2:16) that practice and “ritual life” are means of attuning our lives with the Divine. Likening the devotee and God to two musical strings, he “noted that when the strings are perfectly attuned to one another, should one begin to 42 Ibid., 101. 43 Arthur Green, Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 95. 44 Jonathan P. Slater, Mindful Jewish Living: Compassionate Practice (New York: Aviv Press, 2004), xxv. 45 Ibid., 351.


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vibrate, the other necessarily follows, resonating at precisely the same pitch. Ritual life, ibn Gabbai suggested, serves as a spiritual ‘tuning fork’ enabling the devotee to attune himself to the celestial music and so, add to its chorus.”46 Picking up on this musical metaphor, Eliot Ginsburg emphasizes that opening ourselves to God through practice and ritual can be transformational: “Ritual life attunes the devotee to the celestial music in dual fashion: it enables him not only to properly hear it but to be filled with it and play it, as well.”47 In Jewish ritual life, Shabbat practice is central. “The transformations wrought by Sabbath celebration are uniquely powerful. Although all rituals afford temporary contact with the Sacred, the entire Sabbath day is considered one uninterrupted period of holiness, affording ongoing contact with the Sacred.”48 The Sabbath contains within it all of the major moments of the Jewish religious story, both those of the past and those yet-to-come:

The Sabbath is an extraordinary and holy day, the occasion for and sign of God’s heightened intimacy with Israel. The Sabbath not only commemorates the Creation and Exodus from Egypt, but recalls that third Sacred Moment: the giving of the Torah (TB Shab. 86b), itself a token of God’s special relationship with Israel. Sabbath observance is salvific in nature, serving as a “foretaste of the World-to-Come” and paving the way for Messianic redemption.49

The practice of Shabbat creates time and space in the midst of our busy lives to connect to all of those stories—all of those moments—and thereby to make room in our lives for the eternal. Shabbat is an experience of being open and fully present, in the present, while at the same time commemorating the creation (the past) and inviting the World-to-Come (the future). Experienced this way, it has tremendous transformational potential. Heschel explains that Shabbat’s connection with the olam ha’ba, the World-to-Come, is a longstanding one: “That the Sabbath and eternity are one—or of the same essence—is an ancient idea.”50 The World-to-Come can be understood in different ways, though it includes elements of the Messianic Age, a time when creation (including people) will be perfected and brought into union with God’s Being. As Heschel points out, though, focusing on defining the World-to-Come would miss the point. “Jewish tradition offers us no definition of eternity,”51 he writes, but it does tell us how to taste it in this life—and that should be our

46 Elliot K. Ginsburg, The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 194. 47 Ibid., 197. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 65. 50 Heschel, 73. 51 Ibid., 74.


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focus. Heschel warns, “unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath while still in this world… one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.”52 Seen in this light, Shabbat is a kind of portal to another layer of God-reality, a doorway that allows us access to the World-to-Come, even in the midst of our lives in this world. Heschel explains that the function of the Sabbath is to re-orient us to God. “The law of the Sabbath tries to direct the body and the mind to the dimension of the holy.”53 We are directed to the holy by direct encounter and experience: “The Sabbath is the presence of God in the world, open to the soul of man. It is possible for the soul to respond in affection, to enter into fellowship with the consecrated day.”54 Shabbat is an open invitation from God, then, for us to actively delight in God’s presence in the world and in our lives. To put this in Moltmann’s terminology, on Shabbat we are especially invited to play. The experience of Shabbat holiness is shared by both human and Divine life. Heschel writes, “the Sabbath is meaningful to man and is meaningful to God. It stands in a relation to both, and is a sign of the covenant entered into by both.”55 Furthermore, the Sabbath is not complete without the participation of both people and God: “God has sanctified the day, and man must again and again sanctify the day, illumine the day with the light of his soul. The Sabbath is holy by the grace of God, and is still in need of all the holiness which man may lend to it.”56 While Shabbat comes as a gift freely given by God, it finds completion only with human participation. Shabbat is a time of connection and play, we could say, for both God and people—a time to delight in each other’s shared presence. Although there are many ways that Jews are instructed to make, in action and practice, a clear delineation between the Sabbath and the other days of the week in order to keep the day, its holiness is meant to spill over into the other days of the week. The Sabbath “needs the companionship of all other days,” Heschel writes. “All days of the week must be spiritually consistent with the Day of Days. All our life should be a pilgrimage to the seventh day.”57 It is our participation in Shabbat—and in the other, regular days of the week—that connect the two. “The thought and appreciation of what this day may bring to us should be ever present in our minds,”58 Heschel writes. It is our kavanah, or our mindful intention,

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 75. 54 Ibid., 60. 55 Ibid., 53. 56 Ibid., 54. 57 Ibid., 89. 58 Ibid.


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that brings Shabbat into the other days of our week, allowing it to fill our lives. Another approach to the relationship between Shabbat and the other days of the week is brought forth in a teaching of the Hasidic rabbi, Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, also known as the Sefat Emet: “Shabbat was within the category of days, he taught. When it became exceptional, it did so not only to teach us of the Sabbath but to show us how to regard time during the week as well, how to make the weekday sacred.”59 When we truly understand and connect with Shabbat, then the rest of our week—the rest of our lives—can be made holy, transformed. This is the transformation that allows us to play before, with, and for God, while remaining engaged in the world. Heschel explains:

This, then, is the answer to the problem of civilization: not to flee from the realm of space; to work with the things of space but to be in love with eternity. Things are our tools; eternity, the Sabbath, is our mate. Israel is engaged to eternity. Even if they dedicate six days of the week to worldly pursuits, their soul is claimed by the seventh day.60

The Sabbath is meant to transform us so that our whole lives become centered in an awareness of God. With this awareness, we move in the world without being overly attached to things, or space, or our work—although we do participate in the world. Heschel explains, “the faith of the Jew is not a way out of this world, but a way of being within and above this world; not to reject but to surpass civilization. The Sabbath is the day on which we learn the art of surpassing civilization.”61 Shabbat practice, he asserts, reorients and liberates us, and while we continue to work in the world, our attachment is not to that work; our attachment is, instead, to the Eternal, the Sacred, the Holy. Through Shabbat practice, our lives open to encounter and relationship with the Holy, which makes transformation possible.

Shabbat as Transformational Practice of Play “Where is the dwelling of God?” This was the question with which the rabbi of Kotsk surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting with him. They laughed at him: “What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of his glory!” Then he answered his own question: “God dwells wherever man lets him in.”62

59 Green, 143. 60 Heschel, 48. 61 Ibid., 27. 62 Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Book Two: The Later Masters (New York: Schocken Books, 1947), 277.


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In this paper, I contend that the Jewish practice of Shabbat is one example of the kind of practice of play for which Moltmann calls. Because it is well-developed, time-tested, and Biblically-rooted, Shabbat practice is a particularly compelling example of what Moltmann describes as “play,” though by no means is it the only possible example. Similarly, the teachings, traditions, and history of Shabbat practice involve much more than what I outline in this paper. In other words, Moltmann’s play should not be limited to the Jewish practice of Shabbat, and the Jewish practice of Shabbat should not be understood merely in terms of Moltmann’s theology of play. Still, the conversation between the two is a rich one. Moltmann and Heschel both call for us to create spaces in our lives to let God in; Moltmann through an imagined but unspecified practice of “play,” and Heschel through the very specified Jewish practice of Shabbat. Moltmann yearns for leisure time that is not filled with activities or constructed in order to serve our labor. He envisions free time that is truly free, unencumbered by work—or by activities that mimic work—and open to connection with God. In Jewish practice, Shabbat is structured in exactly this way; work and actions resembling work are prohibited, and its purpose is holy connection. Heschel writes, “the Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.”63 While work is prohibited on the “day of rest,” the Sabbath is not a do-nothing day. Encouraged are actions that bring us into closer connection to our families and friends, to community, to God, and to creation. We connect with these elements not by manipulating the things of space, but by paying joyful, grateful attention in the realm of time. We celebrate a festive Friday evening Shabbat meal with friends and family, we drink wine, we join in community to worship and to connect with God, and we appreciate the simple gifts of creation—of food, our bodies, and holy time bounded by two sunsets. Moltmann says that “freedom comes to those who are open and receptive.”64 The Jewish Sabbath is a time of open receptivity; we do not create Shabbat—we receive and welcome it. The Friday night liturgy includes a dramatic welcoming of the Sabbath Queen, in the form of the Shekinah, or the Divine feminine. Shabbat happens every week, whether we participate in it or not. It is a sacred time, a gift from God, and open to us—we need only live into it, enter in, and move in concert with its sacred rhythm. Doing so has very real effects on the rest of our lives.

63 Heschel, 14. 64 Moltmann, 9.


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The practice of stopping our regular tasks and activities on the Sabbath in order to tend to the holy is a powerful antidote to the human tendency to overinflate our significance. No matter how many items remain on our weekly to-do list, or how important we think they (and our actions) are, when the Sabbath comes, we let them sit. Shabbat is a regular, weekly reminder that attention to the Holy is more important than are our as-yet unfinished tasks. Once attuned to the Holy, we carry that awareness into the “rest of the week,” which really means, “the rest of our lives.” When we carry awareness of God, then any pretense of ultimate human importance or, as Moltmann puts it, “man’s self-deification,”65 falls away. In our place and time, the practice of Shabbat is counter-cultural. It goes against the grain of individualism, consumerism, and anthropocentrism. As such, it offers a challenge to the status quo, something Moltmann calls for again and again. The practice of Shabbat offers a glimpse of other, deeper, truer realities; whether we call it the “Kingdom” or the “World-to-Come,” an encounter with future, holy alternatives changes the way we view our world—and our place in it. People who awaken to God and experience other Holy realities and dimensions see clearly how far off the mark the world is, and become change agents. Rigby connects Moltmann’s call for play with human efforts to create a more just world:

…An adequate ‘theology of play’ is about far more than issues related to personal spirituality. Rather, it is about the politics of the Kingdom. It is about the ‘transfiguration of politics,’ in fact—about doing the will of God in the world as those who pray constantly the prayer that Jesus taught us, demanding that God’s Kingdom come, imagining what it looks like, and participating in its reality.66

Through Divine encounter made possible through play, God awareness spills over into all aspects of our lives, demanding as response our participation in God’s work in the world. Arthur Green agrees that living in such awareness manifests in a response: “As we discover [the fact that we are all one with God, the force of Being], we are called upon to give, to act in ways that strengthen that core of Being we call Y-H-W-H.”67 When our lives are centered in the Holy, we become servants of God in the world. He asserts that the “great truth we are here to discover and proclaim” is that we are not separate from our Source: “This discovery, when allowed to spread throughout our lives, liberates and transforms us. It is a discovery of exultation and joy, a cause for

65 Ibid., 23. 66 Rigby, 106. 67 Green, 161.


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celebration.”68 This uplifting, celebratory joy is bound up also with obligation, as it “brings us along onto the road of responsibility…. When we set out on that journey, in deed as well as in word, we have begun the process of redemption…. Redemption is essentially a human task, that wrought by our living in active and engaged response to revelation.”69 Ultimately, it is revelation, encounter with God, and experience of the Holy that is transformational. Living in awareness of the reality of the Sacred and in relationship with God liberates us and enables us to freely and joyfully work for redemption—or in Christian terms, the Kingdom. As both Moltmann and Heschel point out, though, it is all too easy to go through life without awareness of God. Consumed by our tasks and our work, filling even our “free time” with distractions and activities, we put ourselves at the center of the universe and ignore, deny, and forget holy dimensions. Play as called for by Moltmann and the Jewish practice of Shabbat challenge this status quo by creating space in our lives to connect with the reality of God. Shabbat is a weekly reminder that our lives and the work we do, while important, are fleeting. When the sun sets on Friday evening and we welcome the Sabbath, we are reminded that God and the eternal are bigger and truer realities than any to-do list or aspirational goals we might set for ourselves. And yet, our actions do matter. Being connected to the Holy and living in aware relationship with God calls us to respond in love, purpose, and action—with all our heart, and all our soul, and all our might. To the weary, frightened, and disheartened environmentalists and social justice activists of the world, Shabbat practice and the space for holy connection it creates in our lives offer important teachings about how we can be in the world without being consumed by it. Our tasks, as Moltmann points out, “loom larger than life.”70 But Shabbat teaches us that while our tasks are never done, we set them aside anyway—because they are not the most important thing. Our work is not the most important thing. We are not the most important thing. The most important thing is the reality of God. Once we awaken to that, we joyfully give our whole selves in service to that Truth—and our tasks, goals and objectives are no longer the central focus of our lives and actions. Instead, the central focus of our lives and actions is participation in and service to the Holy. Being grounded in that awareness is what makes possible “freedom in the midst of slavery, joy in the midst of suffering, and praising God in the groaning of his creatures.”71 68 Ibid., 163. 69 Ibid. 70 Moltmann, 23. 71 Ibid., 3.


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So when people ask me about hope and meaning and the significance of individual human effort, I tell them what I’ve come to understand through regular Shabbat practice and the transformation it has offered me. I tell them that it does not matter whether or not we achieve a certain goal; what matters is that we are faithful in all that we do, and that we do all we can. I tell them that serving God in this way is a joy and a blessing, and that there are so many ways to serve. Perhaps, too, I should tell them to make room in their lives for play—to allow room for God to enter in. From what I can see, the whole wide world is waiting for Shabbat.

Bibliography Buber, Martin. Tales of the Hasidim, Book Two: The Later Masters. New York, NY:

Schocken Books, 1947. Clooney, Francis X., S.J. Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious

Borders. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Evans, James H., Jr. Playing. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010. Fishbane, Eitan. The Sabbath Soul: Mystical Reflections on the Transformative Power of

Holy Time. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2012. Ginsburg, Elliot K., trans. Sod Ha-Shabbat: The Mystery of the Sabbath. From the

Tola’at Ya’aqov of R. Meir ibn Gabbai. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Ginsburg, Elliot K. The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah. Albany, NY: State

University of New York Press, 1989. Green, Arthur. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition. New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2010. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Sabbath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

1951. Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, Daniel. “Comparative Theology and the Status of Judaism:

Hegemony and Reversals.” In The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, edited by Francis X. Clooney, S.J., 89-108. New York, NY: T & T Clark International, 2010.

Moltmann, Jurgen. Theology of Play. Translated by Reinhard Ulrich. New York:

Harper & Row, 1971. Rigby, Cynthia. “’Beautiful Playing’: Moltmann, Barth, and the Work of the

Christian.” In Theology as Conversation: The Significance of Dialogue in Historical and Contemporary Theology. Edited by Bruce L. McCormack and Kimlyn J. Bender, 101-116. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009.

Slater, Jonathan P. Conversation by phone, December 14, 2011. Slater, Jonathan P. Mindful Jewish Living: Compassionate Practice. New York: Aviv

Press, 2004.


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Introduction

The study of sacred architecture, over the past few decades, has become a topic that is “integrative (interdisciplinary), diverse (ecumenical), cutting edge (at the forefront of research), rigorous, and open.”1 In the expanding study of sacred architecture, however, a more contemporary religious building type that has often been neglected is the Mormon temple. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (whose members are often referred to as “Mormons”) has been characterized as one of the fastest growing Christian faiths in the world.2 The Church’s growth is especially connected with the built environment. In December 2009, the Presiding Bishop H. David Burton stated that the Church would

!* This article is an unpublished, revised, and expanded version of Brandon Ro, "The Mormon Temple Ritual-Architectural Experience: Connections to Jewish and Catholic Ritual Contexts and Sacred History" (paper presented at the 30th Meeting of the Southeast Society of Architectural Historians, Athens, GA, October 17-20, 2012). 1 For the full argument, see Tom Barrie et al., "Architecture, Culture & Spirituality: Creating a Forum for Scholarship and Discussion of Spirituality and Meaning in the Built Environment,"(2007), accessed Nov. 8, 2010, <http://www.acsforum.org/ACS_proposal.pdf>. 2 See Hugh Hewitt, Searching for God in America (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1996), 121. Cf. Douglas James Davies, The Mormon Culture of Salvation: Force, Grace, and Glory (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 241-67.

(Re)interpreting the Cosmic History of the Mormon Temple Experience: Theological Connections between Jewish and Catholic Sacred Space* BY#BRANDON#RO#


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“likely build more building square footage” that year than Wal-Mart.3 This statement seems to confirm the suggestion of one scholar, who writes that Mormonism is “an intensely American story, and also one intimately associated with the molding of a physical environment.”4 This type of environmental growth may have been a reason why sociologist of religion, Max Weber, calls Mormonism “half-way between monastery and factory.”5

The Mormon temple is often referred to as a “house of learning” because one of the main rites comprises a symbolic ritual drama called the “endowment.”6 According to religious scholar Douglas Davies, “the temple is a kind of educational environment teaching by action and educating through ritual.”7 Each temple provides a unique ritual context for the presentation of the endowment ceremony and has been referred to as a “theatrical setting.”8 The setting consists of a series of lecture rooms used both “for performing ritual acts and for viewing ritual acts.”9 The endowment rite is presented “part by dramatization, part by question and answer, part by lecture, [and] part by picturization on the walls.”10 Consequently, the symbolic and ritualistic learning experience “involves the physical, aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual human faculties through art, drama, symbols, and scriptural representations.”11 The Mormon temple experience places a high priority on visual aesthetics12 since both “art and architecture were developed to convey a world of beauty and transcendence where

!3 H. David Burton, "These Are the Times," (Provo: Brigham Young University Devotional, December 1, 2009). 4 Peter W. Williams, Houses of God: Region, Religion, and Architecture in the United States, Public Expressions of Religion in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 216. 5 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), 264. Cited in Davies, Mormon Culture of Salvation, 3. 6 See Doctrine and Covenants 88:119; 109:8 (hereafter referred to as D&C).

7 Davies, Mormon Culture of Salvation, 78.

8 David John Buerger, The Mysteries of Godliness: A History of Mormon Temple Worship, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Smith Research Associates, 2002), 166. More specifically, “the murals are used to create a sense of theatre in the Creation Room, Garden Room, and World Room—spaces that act as metaphors for mankind’s progression through life.” Josh E. Probert, "The Latter-Day Saint Architectural Tradition," Faith & Form 44, no. 3 (2011): 33.

9 Davies, Mormon Culture of Salvation, 78.

10 Harold B. Lee, The Teachings of Harold B. Lee: Eleventh President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, ed. Clyde J. Williams (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1996), 578.

11 Victor L. Ludlow, Principles and Practices of the Restored Gospel (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), 365; cf. Alma P. Burton, "Endowment," in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 455.

12 “Temple rites furnish a rich visual symbolic medium for gaining access to the truth of the faith…In terms of the history of religions, Mormonism resembles the Christian sacramental traditions of Catholicism and of Orthodoxy much more than the Reformed traditions as far as its preferred visual environment within temples is concerned.” Davies, Mormon Culture of Salvation, 78-79.


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time and eternity might interpenetrate.”13 One Mormon explains“ it’s like going to heaven and coming back again.”14 This type of transformative ritual-architectural experience is occasioned by the temple’s ritual context, providing a “heightened sort of awareness that goes well beyond mere education to a kind of spiritual awakening.”15 As one Latter-day Saint historian writes, “in temples, we have a staged representation of the step-by-step ascent into the presence of the Eternal while we are yet alive.”16 The Mormon temple experience thus appears to “facilitate some sort of ‘trip to heaven’ insofar as they expedite salvation, bring worshippers closer to God, or maybe even facilitate a state of unity with the divine.”17 Consequently, it is not difficult to understand why the temple and its rites remain one of the “most profound expressions” of Mormon theology.18 During the past twenty years Mormon temples have more than doubled in number and closely paralleled the increase in Church membership, yet the architectural experience of the temple remains (mis)understood and (mis)interpreted because of its inaccessibility to non-Mormon scholars.19 In recent years, however, the more frequent construction of temple projects has resulted in an increased number of open houses where non-Mormons receive a glimpse of the interior before the structure is dedicated and closed to the general public.20 Other temple resources have recently become available through the Church’s publication of interior photographs, exterior renderings, historic architectural drawings,

!13 Ibid., 79.

14 Mark P. Leone, "The Mormon Temple Experience: A Non-Mormon Look at a Latter-Day Saint’s Most Sacred Ritual," Sunstone (May 1985): 6.

15 Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, 2 vols., Religions of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1:97. 16 Andrew F. Ehat, "'Who Shall Ascend into the Hill of the Lord?' Sesquicentennial Reflections of a Sacred Day: 4 May 1842," in Temples of the Ancient World: Ritual and Symbolism, ed. Donald W. Parry (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1994), 55. 17 Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, 1:97. 18 Gordon B. Hinckley, "Of Missions, Temples, and Stewardship," Ensign (November 1995). 19 Of this challenge, one scholar has written, “The important yet secret nature of Mormon temples raises the obvious problem for non-Mormon scholars that they cannot be involved either as a mere observer or as a participant observer in what takes place there.” Davies, Mormon Culture of Salvation, 68. 20 Davies, a non-Mormon scholar, was able to visit three temples prior to their dedication. He suggests that “Some benefit is derived from having seen something of the inside of temples during periods when they have been open to the public, either after being built and before they have been dedicated, or else during periods of refurbishment.” Ibid.


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and new site plan proposals.21 These research opportunities demand the attention of both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars in conducting refocused comparative theological studies of the architectural experience of the temple as it sits in dialogue with sacred spaces of other faiths.

A (Self)Identifying Confession

An important aspect for any project in comparative theology is to confess one’s religious identity in order to establish the lens from which one has come to view the world.22 An obvious minimal requirement, since one is dealing with a “theological discipline confident about the possibility of being intelligently faithful to tradition even while seeking fresh understanding outside that tradition.”23 To engage in this type of project, both writer and reader must strive for humility in reciprocal listening, the empathy towards learning a foreign tradition, the dedicated patience and mutual respect that is needed in assessing difference and similarity, and the honest evaluation of the final comparative journey of faith.24

As a faithful adherent to the Latter-day Saint tradition, the odyssey that has led me to this project in comparative theology originates in my interest in the powerful spiritual experiences that frequently occur in sacred spaces – a phenomenon that has led me to visit over 120 religious buildings of various faiths around the globe. My interest in exploring the architectural experience of the Mormon temple stems from time spent serving as an ordinance worker (a type of ritual specialist) in the San Diego California Temple as well as my undergraduate efforts in designing a theoretical proposal for a Latter-day Saint temple in Rome, Italy. The conversation specifically between the Mormon temple and Jewish and Catholic sacred spaces comes in part from my own tradition’s emphasis on

!21 For example, some historic documents, such as the Salt Lake and Nauvoo temple architectural drawings, are available online at the Church History Library, <http://churchhistorylibrary.lds.org>. Site plans and exterior renderings for new temples can be found at <http://mormontemples.org>. The often rare interior photographs are published online after a temple is either open to the public or dedicated at <http://www.mormonnewsroom.org>. Exterior photographs and other relevant information about each temple, such as the endowment room sequence, can be found at the non-official Church website <http://www.ldschurchtemples.com>. A large cut-away architectural model of the Salt Lake Temple (located just south of the actual temple in a visitor center) has given scholars another method at understanding the temple architectural experience. See photographs in "Scaled Model Provides Salt Lake Temple Open House Experience," Church News – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints(May 28, 2010), accessed Aug. 9, 2012, <http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/scaled-model-provides-salt-lake-temple-open-house-experience>. 22 See Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 16-19, 70. 23 Clooney, Comparative Theology, 11. 24 See Clooney, Comparative Theology, 162. Cf. Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2009), 6-7.


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Judeo-Christian theology but also from various life experiences with interreligious dialogue.

As a Latter-day Saint missionary in Chile, an architecture student in both China and Italy, and the “rare” Mormon graduate student studying at the national university of the Catholic Church, I have been exposed to a small sliver of the world’s diverse religious landscape. Consequently, my awareness of other religious traditions has been enriched through opportunities to engage in some sort of interreligious dialogue – at times ranging from casual conversations on dirt roads in the Andean countryside to more formal presentations and discussions in the academy. In each case, my experiences were, as Francis X. Clooney describes, “simply interpersonal conversations among persons of different religious traditions who are willing to listen to one another and share their stories of faith and values.”25

Members of the Latter-day Saint tradition are encouraged to seek truth and “learning even by study and also by faith” (D&C 88:118; 109:7, 14). While this includes a vast array of topics, it should include the study of other religious traditions – especially as manifested in comparative theology.26 As defined by Clooney, comparative theology “marks acts of faith seeking understanding which are rooted in a particular faith tradition but which, from that foundation, venture into learning from one or more other faith traditions…for the sake of fresh theological insights that are indebted to the newly encountered tradition/s as well as the home tradition.”27 Consequently, Mormons should view comparative theology as a means of “learning by study and faith,” since it is “about learning across religious borders in a way that discloses the truth of my faith, in the light of their faith.”28 The search for truth and understanding, especially in the academic sense of rigorous scholarship, can and should be viewed by Latter-day Saints as a form of dedicated discipleship to God. As Neal A. Maxwell, a noted member of the Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, explains:

For a disciple of Jesus Christ, academic scholarship is a form of worship. It is actually another dimension of consecration. Hence one who seeks to be a disciple-scholar will take both scholarship and discipleship seriously; and, likewise, gospel covenants. For the disciple-scholar, the first and second great commandments frame and prioritize life. How else could

!25 Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 10. 26 See arguments in Spencer J. Palmer et al., Religions of the World: A Latter-Day Saint View (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University, 1997), 3-13. Cf. D&C 88:78-79; 91:1-6. For an example of such a project, see Alonzo L. Gaskill, Know Your Religions: A Comparative Look at Mormonism and Catholicism (Orem, UT: Millennial, 2008). 27 Ibid. 28 Clooney, Comparative Theology, 15-16, see also 9, 36, 165.


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one worship God with all of one's heart, might, mind, and strength? (Luke 10:27)29

Mormons come to perceive and interpret the world around them through their knowledge and understanding of God’s truth. The disciple-scholar, therefore, “responds to religious testimony reflectively” and in return shares his or her understanding of God’s truth with the world.30 This is essentially a type of hermeneutical practice under the rubric of theology. In general, hermeneutics “explores how we read, understand, and handle texts”31 or (more broadly speaking and for our purposes) how we interpret religious “texts” comprising scriptures, ritual practices, religious art, spiritual experiences, and sacred architecture.32 The hermeneutical interpretation of these religious texts “can awaken us again to the witness they offer, the witness of a divine call.” Then, the disciple-scholar is able to read “his or her religion reflectively, testifying hermeneutically of the divine transcendence witnessed in those texts,” writes James E. Faulconer. This is “among the acts appropriate to religious life. It is testimony.”33 Consequently, there is a strong correlation between comparative theology and hermeneutics, because the latter “produces habits of respect for, and more sympathetic understanding of, views and arguments that at first seem alien or unacceptable.” In essence, hermeneutics is an effort “to establish bridges between opposing viewpoints” that are commonly found in religion.34

The Prospectus

In light of the above (self)identifying confessional, the prospectus of this paper seeks to (re)interpret the cosmic history of the Mormon temple experience – the focus resting on the “endowment” ordinance and its ritual drama spatial sequence. As a comparative theological project designed to enhance one’s learning across religious borders, the Mormon tradition is compared to the ritual contexts and episodes of cosmic history for Jewish and Catholic sacred spaces.

To assist in the comparative procedure and produce the architectural hermeneutic, I have chosen to use the “morphology of

!29 Neal A. Maxwell, "The Disciple-Scholar," in On Becoming a Disciple Scholar, ed. Henry B. Eyring (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1995), 7. Emphasis in original. 30 Donald W. Musser and David L. Paulsen, eds., Mormonism in Dialogue with Contemporary Christian Theologies (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press,1999), 434. 31 Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 1. 32 For more on how architecture can be viewed as a text, see Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, 1:121-33. 33 Musser and Paulsen, eds., Mormonism in Dialogue with Contemporary Christian Theologies, 434. Benjamin Huff even goes so far as to suggest that “Mormons may have more reasons than Catholics for approaching theology hermeneutically” because of the belief in continuing revelation. Ibid., 482. 34 Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 5-6.Clooney, Comparative Theology, 162.


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ritual-architectural priorities” (as outlined in the second volume of The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture by Lindsay Jones). The framework is specifically designed to help researchers (such as myself) to “give serious consideration to versions of the interrelations between built forms, ritual processes, and human experiences that might otherwise have escaped their attentions, thus providing points of departure for endlessly diversified avenues of interpreting…architecture.”35

The prospectus of the project also incorporates comparative theological practices to enhance one’s learning across religious borders. The journey of faith turns its attention to the commemorative content of sacred architecture – namely the spiritual messages and symbolic meanings that it offers. The ritual environments of each religion are compared in terms of their narrative sequence of spaces and stage-like backdrops. These comparisons are an attempt to advance how the spatial experience of architecture can help religious participants (re)live episodes of cosmic history. Mormons, for instance, are given a lens through which the “plan of salvation,” as taught through the temple experience, can be (re)interpreted in light of Jewish and Catholic symbolism.

The central thesis of the paper, therefore, is to explore how Jones’ hermeneutical method of comparing and interpreting sacred architecture is compatible with the methods of comparative theologians. When the two are combined, their synergy helps enrich our understanding of the architectural experience for a specific religious building typology as it is compared non-historically, cross-culturally, or inter-religiously to other cases of sacred architecture. It is my hope that readers, especially those from the religious traditions discussed in this paper, will gain greater appreciation for the commonalities that exist between each case of sacred architecture so that we might attempt to bridge the chasm of difference and (mis)understanding. The ultimate success of the project will be in what types of “spiritual insights”36 seekers actually receive from this dialectic and then how those “fresh

!35 Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture, 2:295. 36 Lindsay Jones, "Architectural Catalysts to Contemplation: Unexplored Alliances between Ancient Monuments and Religious Sensibilities" (paper presented at the Interdisciplinary Symposium - Transcending Architecture: Aesthetics and Ethics of the Numinous, The Catholic University of America, October 6-8, 2001). Jones’ paper will soon be published in the forthcoming book Julio Bermudez, ed. Transcending Architecture: Aesthetics and Ethics of the Numinous (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press,2013?).


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theological insights”37 can foster yet additional opportunities for future interreligious dialogue.

(Re)interpreting Cosmic History

Many configurations of sacred architecture offer a prescribed sequence of spaces known as the “spiritual path.” The goal of such an architectural move is to provide “a dynamic experience where symbolic themes are expressed three-dimensionally and experienced visually, haptically, and emotionally,”38 writes Thomas Barrie. In most cases, the “path can be described as a series of stations or even separate rooms that the faithful go through in a defined order to prepare to come in contact with the ‘other world.’”39 Consequently, each series of stations or separate rooms along the “spiritual path” provide unique stage-like settings and theatrical backdrops that communicate some kind of thematic message.

There is a strong presence of this type of theatrical presentation in Mormon, Jewish, and Catholic architectural configurations. In each case, episodes of cosmic history are commonly represented by different rooms. For instance, early Mormon temples dedicated each one of their endowment rooms to a specific episode of cosmic history, which Latter-day Saints would more readily recognize as the “plan of salvation.” Given that the primary focus of the current project is on (re)interpreting episodes of cosmic history within the Mormon temple, the five-room spatial sequence will be used to frame the intriguing cross-sections between religions. The definition for each episode of cosmic history has been expanded to address a broader Judeo-Christian audience, as the terminology for Mormon temple rooms (i.e., Celestial, Terrestrial, and Telestial) is typically unfamiliar to outsiders. Building upon Harold Turner’s original episodes of cosmic history that he attributed to the Latter-day Saint temple,40 the five themes discussed in this paper include: 1) the cosmogonic primordial era; 2) the paradisal world of Eden; 3) the fallen, disordered world; 4) the Messianic paradisiacal era; and 5) the perfected Heavenly realm. The journey of faith in learning

!37 Clooney, Comparative Theology, 10. Since Jones is both a student of Mircea Eliade and has followed in his footsteps as editor for the Encyclopedia of Religion, it is relevant to point out that a similar assessment was recently made between Eliade’s hermeneutical methodology and the hermeneutical methods employed in comparative theology. See, for instance, Oludamini Ogunnaike, "Myth and the Secret of Destiny: Mircea Eliade’s Creative Hermeneutics and the Yorùbá Concept of Orí," Journal of Comparative Theology 3, no. 1 (April 2012). 38 Thomas Barrie, The Sacred in-Between: The Mediating Roles of Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2010), 107. 39 D. Kirk Hamilton and David H. Watkins, Evidence-Based Design for Multiple Building Types (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 167. 40 Harold W. Turner, From Temple to Meeting House: The Phenomenology and Theology of Sacred Space (Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, 1979), 46. It should be noted that Turner left out the Terrestrial room which is associated with (what I have termed) the Messianic paradisiacal era.


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across religious borders begins as each of the five episodes is compared against the others. The hermeneutical “texts” that will be “read” for each tradition includes holy scripture, ritual practices, spiritual experiences, religious art, and sacred architecture.

Episode I: The Cosmogonic Primordial Era

The first episode in the comparative theological sequence is the cosmogonic primordial era. Several similar themes are interwoven between the three religions and include the following: spiritual creation, darkness, formlessness, and pre-created light.

Mormon

The Latter-day Saint temple five-room endowment sequence begins in a space representing the primordial era or preexistent state before the earth’s creation.41 It is not ironic that it is named the Creation room. In this space, initiates are taught a “course of instruction [which] includes a recital of the most prominent events of the creative period.”42 An important part of the creation story or cosmogonic myth43 is the “spiritual creation [that] occurred ‘in heaven.’”44 This event is believed to have occurred during a preexistent state before the earth’s physical creation, a period when “matter [was] unorganized.”45

!41 Examples of temples with a five-room sequence include those in Salt Lake City (UT), Manti (UT), Mesa (AZ), Laie (HI), and Los Angeles (CA). There are a total of eleven Mormon structures that were designed with a five-room endowment sequence. 42 James E. Talmage, The House of the Lord: A Study of Holy Sanctuaries, Ancient and Modern (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1962), 83. 43 The term “myth” in relation to Mormon temple traditions may seem peculiar and even offensive to some Latter-day Saints. One LDS scholar explains that this should not be the case: “The use of the word ‘myth’…should not unsettle Latter-day Saints as it often does. In this context, ‘myth’ refers to sacred stories that explain the interventions of the divine into human affairs—the interventions that reveal covenant laws, temple rites, and the purpose of human existence.” John M. Lundquist and Stephen D. Ricks, eds., By Study and Also by Faith: Essays in Honor of Hugh W. Nibley on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, 27 March 1990, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book,1990), 1:442. 44 Lynn M. Hilton, The Kolob Theorem: A Mormon's View of God's Starry Universe (Orem, UT: Granite Publishing & Distribution, 2006), 85-86. 45 Terry John O'Brien, "A Study of the Effect of Color in the Utah Temple Murals" (MA thesis, Brigham Young University, 1968), 29. The LDS Book of Abraham reads, “We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell” (Abr. 3:24). Mormon doctrine proclaims a belief in creatio ex materia (creation out of pre-existent matter) instead of the mainstream Christian belief in creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). Nevertheless, it should be noted that up until the third century early Christians did not adopt the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. See arguments in Jonathan A. Goldstein, "The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo," Journal of Jewish Studies 35, no. 2 (1984): 1; James Noel Hubler, "Creatio Ex Nihilo: Matter, Creation, and the Body in Classical and Christian Philosophy through Aquinas" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995), 102-27.


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In the earliest temple configurations, Creation rooms were simple, unadorned, and dimly lit to reinforce the primordial era when the “earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2).46 Later, Creation rooms were adorned with painted mural scenes depicting the creation of heaven and earth. For example, in 1915 the Creation room’s plain walls in the Salt Lake Temple were embellished with “an encompassing wall and ceiling mural, depicting the stages of the earth’s creation.”47 In this case, the murals served as a new symbolic message suggesting how the earth’s spiritual creation or blueprint was planned and designed prior to having been constructed in physical form.48 William Hamblin suggests that “we should understand the LDS Endowment as a ritual and dramatic participation in the…divine council of God, through which God reveals to the covenanter his…secret plan of salvation—the hidden meaning and purpose of creation and the cosmos.”49 It is in the Creation room, therefore, that Latter-day Saints are taught about the cosmogonic primordial era through lecture, murals, and spatial sequence. As we shift our attention to Judaism, we find important theological parallels to Mormon creation myths.

Jewish

Similar to the Mormon endowment, creation accounts and symbolism played an important role in the liturgy of the Judaic

!46 This was the case in both the Nauvoo and Salt Lake temples. See Lisle G Brown, "The Sacred Departments for Temple Work in Nauvoo: The Assembly Room and the Council Chamber," BYU Studies 19, no. 3 (1979): 371; Talmage, The House of the Lord: A Study of Holy Sanctuaries, Ancient and Modern, 156; O'Brien, "A Study of the Effect of Color in the Utah Temple Murals", 21. 47 C. Mark Hamilton, "The Salt Lake Temple: An Architectural Monograph" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1978), 114; cf. O'Brien, "A Study of the Effect of Color in the Utah Temple Murals", 21. While the wall murals helped to enhance the ritual backdrop, it should be noted that they were designed to be “subdued in tones” and not distract from the proceedings. Talmage, The House of the Lord, 204. 48 Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1979), 210-11. For related scriptural ideas found in LDS sources, see Moses 3:5-9; 6:63; Abra. 4:31; 5:3-5; D&C 77:2. See also Job 38:4-7. One Church leader has referred to the creation account in the LDS Book of Abraham 4:1-5:21 as “The Lord's Blueprint of Creation” since it is here that “Abraham gives an account of the planning in heaven for this earth and its inhabitants, before the work of building was done.” Joseph Fielding Smith, Doctrines of Salvation: Sermons and Writings of Joseph Fielding Smith, ed. Bruce R. McConkie, 3 vols. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1954), 1:75. 49 William J. Hamblin, "The Sôd of Yhwh and the Endowment," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 4(2013): 151.


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temple50 and tabernacle.51 One example emphasizing the importance of creation in Jewish sacred space can be seen in the symbolic connection of the Genesis creation account and the construction of the Mosaic tabernacle. Temple scholar Margaret Barker explains that the “six days of creation described in Genesis 1” are intimately linked with the “six stages of building the desert tabernacle.”52 In fact, the tabernacle’s “most holy place” (Exodus 26:34), known as the Holy of Holies (debir), was believed to represent Day One of creation when light emerged and was divided from darkness (Gen. 1:3-5).53 Somewhat reminiscent of the early Mormon Creation rooms, the Holy of Holies was a simple cube-shaped room kept in complete darkness and interpreted as the primordial state or Day One of creation (Genesis 1:1-2). In Jewish literature, however, God’s presence or dwelling place was often associated with light.54 In fact, the “Holy of Holies, although in the temple a place of darkness, was [also] symbolically the place

!50 According to N. A. Dahl, the great festivals associated with temple worship included cosmogony. He asserts that “In the common worship, the creation was commemorated and re-enacted, and the future renewal for which Israel hoped, was prefigured.” Cited in W. D. Davies and D. Daube, eds., The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1956), 424); cf. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, Bollingen Series, 46 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 59-62. “It has been suggested that the creation account of Genesis 1:1-2:4 was used in the temple liturgy of Israel at the New Year's Festival before the Babylonian exile, when the enthronement of the Lord was celebrated,” yet it remains only an attractive hypothesis. More concrete evidence does confirm, however, the usage of creation accounts during the Second Temple Period. See Stephen D. Ricks, "Liturgy and Cosmogony: The Ritual Use of Creation Accounts in the Ancient near East," in Temples of the Ancient World, ed. Donald W. Parry (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1994), 120-22; cf. E. O. James, Creation and Cosmology. A Historical and Comparative Inquiry (Leiden: Brill, 1969), 29. “Even in modern Judaism the Genesis creation account is accorded an honored place in the liturgy, being read in toto on Simhat Torah (the final day of the Feast of Tabernacles) and in part (Genesis 2:1-3) on Friday evening, twice during the service and once at kiddush, when the Sabbath is solemnly blessed following six days of labor.” Ricks, "Liturgy and Cosmogony," 122. 51 It should be noted at this point in the paper that the temple built by Solomon was based upon the sacred precedent of the desert tabernacle built by Moses. As the tabernacle “was planned according to the scriptural model of the cosmos, and was meant to symbolize it,” the temple also retained much of this unique symbolism. Michael Chyutin, Architecture and Utopia in the Temple Era, Library of Second Temple Studies 58 (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 35. Since both tabernacle and temple often share the same theological interpretations, references to both instances of sacred space will be made throughout the paper. 52 Margaret Barker, Temple Theology: An Introduction (London: SPCK 2004), 17. For a diagram of the temple and its creation symbolism, see Ibid, 18. “The builders of the Temple not only constructed the world; they also constructed cosmic time.” Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, 77-78. 53 Barker, Temple Theology: An Introduction, 17. 54 Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (London ; New York: T&T Clark, 2003), 185-87.


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of pre-created light,” writes Barker.55 Raphael Patai, a Jewish temple scholar, builds upon the symbolism of the Holy of Holies as the origin place of light. He explains:

The light created on the first day of creation, which is not identical with the light of the sun, the moon and the stars, which were created only on the fourth day, is in the legends closely connected with the Temple. It was from the spot on which later the Temple was erected that the first ray of light issued and illuminated the whole world. This light continued to emanate from the spot also after the Temple was built on it. Its source was the Holy of Holies in which the Holy Ark stood, and it lit up the Temple itself and shone forth through the windows. These windows were built not to let the light in from the outside, as windows usually do, but to let out the light from within. In accordance with this reversed function the form of the windows was also reversed. They were narrow on their inner side and widened towards their outer side.56

Besides their association with light, both Day One of creation and the Holy of Holies are believed by some to represent the invisible, spiritual creation of the world “before the dimensions of solidity [existed] in the material world.” As Barker has noted, the earth’s blueprint was associated during a time when “everything was deemed to exist in a flat state ‘engraved.’”57 One Jewish text, for instance, specifically states that several “things preceded the creation of the world. Some of them were [actually] created, and some of them [merely] arose in the thought [of God] to be created” (Gen. Rab. 1:4).58 In each of these examples, we find the theme for a type of spiritual blueprint that precedes physical creation. This connection is not surprising since the scriptural traditions often speak of God as an architect-builder who plans, designs, and

!55 Ibid., 185. For the Holy of Holies as a place of darkness, see Victor Avigdor Hurowitz, "Yhwh's Exalted House—Aspects of the Design and Symbolism of Solomon's Temple," in Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel, ed. John Day (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 77. 56 Raphael Patai, Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual, 2d enl. ed. (New York: KTAV Pub. House, 1967), 84-85. 57 Barker, The Great High Priest, 183. 58 While “The Tora and the Throne of Glory were [actually] created,” we find that “The Fathers, Israel, the Temple and the name of the Messiah [only] arose in the thought to be created.” Cited in Raphael Patai, The Messiah Texts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 19. Similarly, another Jewish text reads as follows: “Seven things were created before the world was created, and these are they: the Tora, Repentance, the Garden of Eden, Gehenna [i.e. destination of wicked], the Throne of Glory, the Temple, and the name of the Messiah” (B. Pes. 54a; B. Ned. 39a); also cited in Patai, The Messiah Texts, 19.


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produces blueprints for his creations.59 As we move on to Catholic sacred spaces, more connections between “creation” symbolism and the three religions are yet to strengthen the interreligious dialogue.

Catholic

From its beginning, the creation story has played an important role for Roman Catholic architecture and liturgy. Specifically, parallels to both the Mormon and Jewish temples are found in Catholic liturgical practices from the middle Ages. For instance, in York, England “mystery plays” were largely derived from the creation story found in Genesis 1-2. During these ceremonies the “medieval audiences of the plays felt themselves to be deeply implicated in this presentation of sacred history” which included the creation of the world.60

Other examples demonstrate how Catholic creation symbolism is further connected to both ritual and spatial configurations. The Catholic Holy of Holies, similar to the one in the Jewish temple, came to represent a place of heavenly light amidst darkness because of early Christian rituals at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The “new Holy of Holies” in this building was believed to be the tomb of Christ and was rightfully named the “Anastasis, or cave of the resurrection.”61 A component of the daily services in this church included a ceremony known as the “Holy Light” or “Fire” (lucernare) ritual and required that “all the lamps and candles were lit from a [single] flame that was kept constantly burning in the cave.”62 As time progressed, the Holy Sepulcher’s “Holy Light” ritual eventually refined its parallels to Jewish temple

!59 Several biblical references speak of the creative process in architectural terms. See, for instance, Prov. 8:27-30; Ps. 24:1-2; 102:25; 104:2-6; Job 26:10-13; 38:4-6; 2 Esdr. 6.1-6. We also find in II Baruch 4:2-7, a Jewish pseudipigraphic text, that a heavenly Jerusalem and temple were “prepared beforehand here from the time when [God] took counsel to make paradise.” Robert Henry Charles, ed. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1913), 2:482. One temple scholar writes, “In the scriptural tradition, God is the architect of the universe and also the architect of Israel’s temples, which were built according to a detailed divine plan that was conveyed to God’s messenger’s in the world.” Chyutin, Architecture and Utopia in the Temple Era, 12. See also Hubler, "Creatio Ex Nihilo", 79-89. 60 Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, York Mystery Plays : A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 1. Paralleling the Mormon temple experience quite closely, “The essential episodes were the Creation of the world and of man, man’s deception by the Devil, resulting in the Fall and the expulsion from Paradise, and his Redemption through the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ…[and] Christ’s second coming at the Last Judgment.” Beadle and King, York Mystery Plays : A Selection in Modern Spelling, xi. 61 Allan Doig, Liturgy and Architecture from the Early Church to the Middle Ages (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2008), 34. 62 Ibid., 35.


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rites.63 Remnants from this ceremony were also carried over into the “old Paschal Vigil of the Catholic ritual at Eastertime.”64

Another important example linking the Catholic sanctuary or apse to darkness and light is found in Michelangelo’s ceiling murals in the Sistine Chapel. While his “vision is truly cosmic,” write Peter and Linda Murray, Michelangelo’s painting “begins with God creating order from the primeval chaos, separating night from day.”65 It is interesting to note that Michelangelo strategically located his painting of Day One of creation in the western sanctuary directly above the altar, since it is a rather strong link to the creation symbolism of the Jewish temple’s western Holy of Holies as discussed above.66 While some may argue that this is merely a coincidence, we find that “the Christian church throughout the Middle Ages retained the Judaic understanding of sacred architecture as a microcosm of creation.” This is in spite of the fact that a majority of churches reoriented their apse to the east after the fifth century.67

As the first episode of cosmic history concludes, the journey of faith has merely commenced. The theological dialogue, thus far, between the Mormon, Jewish, and Catholic traditions has been successful in connecting the overlapping themes associated with the cosmogonic primordial era. It is evident how the Jewish Holy of Holies and the Mormon Creation room share symbolic messages of pre-existence and spiritual creation. Likewise, it has been shown that the story of creation, especially of Day One and its associations with darkness and pre-created light, are intertwined in various ways within the Mormon Creation room, the Jewish Holy of Holies, and the Catholic sanctuary. The common threads found in their first episodes of cosmic history are a means to facilitate a continual (re)interpretation of theology through architectural comparison. The attention now shifts to the second episode of cosmic history and learning deeply across religious borders.

!63 For instance, during the “Holy Light” ritual the Greek “Orthodox Patriarch enters the Tomb alone on Easter—broadly paralleling the solitary entrance of the high priest into the Holy of Holies of the Temple on the Day of Atonement—and emerges with a miraculously lit candle that is used to light hundreds of candles in the church.” William James Hamblin and David Rolph Seely, Solomon's Temple: Myth and History (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 106. 64 Marcus Von Wellnitz, "The Catholic Liturgy and the Mormon Temple," BYU Studies 21(1981): 15. 65 Peter Murray and Linda Murray, A Dictionary of Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 132-33. 66 For other connections to Jewish temple symbolism, see Benjamin Blech and Roy Doliner, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 67 Helen Ratner Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," in Benedict Xvi and Beauty in Sacred Art and Architecture: Proceedings of the Second Fota International Liturgical Conference, 2009, ed. D. Vincent Twomey, Janet E. Rutherford (New York: Scepter, 2011), 134.


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Episode II: The Paradisal World of Eden !The paradisal world of Eden is portrayed both literally and symbolically in Mormon, Jewish, and Catholic sacred space. Themes common between the three faiths include symbolic trees, tropical vegetation, abundant fertility, cherubic gatekeepers, and a period without physical death. According to Mircea Eliade,

the myths of many peoples allude to a very distant epoch when men knew neither death nor toil nor suffering and had a bountiful supply of food merely for the taking. In illo tempore, the gods descended to earth and mingled with men; for their part, men could easily mount to heaven. As a result of a ritual fault, communications between heaven and earth were interrupted and the gods withdrew to the highest heavens. Since then, men must work for their food and are no longer immortal.68

Mormon

As Mormon initiates leave the Creation room they proceed upwards to an elevated ritual space called the Garden room.69 The Garden room represents the paradisiac world of Eden or “terrestrial state which existed when the Lord God finished the creative enterprise.”70 In essence, it is a period of time after the “earth was clothed with a physical body and…passed through a veil.”71 Referring to the Salt Lake Temple’s Garden room, architectural historian C. Mark Hamilton, suggests that the space represents the “earth as it was before sin entered and brought with it a curse; it is the Garden of Eden in miniature.”72 Both the doctrinal instruction and the Edenic décor on the walls are consistent in theme; they convey “the condition of our first parents

!68 Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, 91. 69 The Garden room is typically higher in elevation than the previous Creation room (sometimes by as little as four inches and can go up to as high as several feet) giving initiates an experience of ascent. Such is the case in most five-room endowment spatial sequences. One exception is found in the original endowment spatial sequence of the Nauvoo Temple (1846) which was presented in a large linear attic with a series of spaces separated by canvas curtains. For interior descriptions, see Lisle G Brown, "The Sacred Departments for Temple Work in Nauvoo: The Assembly Room and the Council Chamber," BYU Studies 19, no. 3 (1979): 371-73; Buerger, Mysteries of Godliness, 74-78. The recently rebuilt Nauvoo Temple (2002) endowment rooms do not follow its original single level design but incorporate the ascending narrative sequence. See interior descriptions and floor plans in Roger P. Jackson, "Designing and Constructing the 'New' Nauvoo Temple: A Personal Reflection," Mormon Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 218; Steven Daniel Cornell, "William Weeks and the Ephemeral Temple at Nauvoo" (M.Arch.History thesis, University of Virginia, 2008), Fig. 107. 70 McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 494. 71 Hilton, Kolob Theorem, 85-86. 72 C. Mark Hamilton, The Salt Lake Temple: A Monument to a People, 4th ed. (Salt Lake City: University Services Corporation, 1983), 92.


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[Adam and Eve] in the Garden of Eden” along with “their disobedience and consequent expulsion from that blissful abode,” writes James Talmage.73

The paradisiacal theme is evident in many Garden rooms through the use of living plants and continuous floor to ceiling painted murals. Some of the earliest temple records indicate that living potted plants and trees were used in the Garden rooms of the Nauvoo Temple,74 the Salt Lake Endowment House,75 and the Salt Lake Temple.76 Adding to this paradisal atmosphere, many temples also included painted wall murals of garden scenes. One study concluded that the paintings in the early Utah temples produced a “feeling of a lush, and often times tropical, garden.”77 The murals of some temples even include a symbolic tree of life or tree of knowledge, including its forbidden fruit, which are used during the ritual drama.78 In the Biblical narrative, readers are reminded that after Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit, God places cherubim and a flaming sword to guard the way leading back into paradise just prior to expelling them from the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:24; Moses 4:31). A painted representation of this scriptural scene is found in the Los Angeles Temple World room, which “shows Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden [and] entering the lone and dreary world.”79 Behind the fleeting couple one notices a glimpse of a garden that is being protected by a flaming white sword. In similar fashion, above the threshold between the Endowment House’s Garden and World rooms hang a pair of “flaming swords.”80 One last example is seen along the pathway from the Garden room to the World room in the Salt Lake Temple. Within the upper hallway, initiates pass “a Tiffany stained glass window depicting the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden” where a human-like cherubim holds a sword in his right hand and signals with his left hand for the couple to depart.81 Garden rooms thus provide theatrical backdrops reinforcing the paradisal world of Eden. Common threads between the Mormon and Jewish traditions continue to be identified as we further compare this episode of cosmic history.

!73 Talmage, The House of the Lord, 99-100. 74 Brown, "The Sacred Departments for Temple Work in Nauvoo: The Assembly Room and the Council Chamber," 371-72. 75 Lisle G Brown, "'Temple Pro Tempore': The Salt Lake City Endowment House," The Journal of Mormon History 34, no. 4 (2008): 40-41. 76 Hamilton, "The Salt Lake Temple: An Architectural Monograph", 115. 77 O'Brien, "A Study of the Effect of Color in the Utah Temple Murals", 46. 78 This is the case for several of the early Utah temples, see Ibid., 42-43. 79 Edward O. Anderson, "The Los Angeles Temple," The Improvement Era 58, no. 11 (Nov. 1955): 806. For color photographs of the temple’s wall murals, see the insert between pp. 824-825 of the same issue. 80 “It is not clear if these were actual swords or representations painted on the wall,” but they hung on the World room side of the doorway. Brown, "'Temple Pro Tempore': The Salt Lake City Endowment House," 41. 81 See descriptions and photographs of the window in Hamilton, The Salt Lake Temple: A Monument to a People, 94-95, 119; cf. Talmage, The House of the Lord, 157.


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Jewish

In the Jewish temple, the Holy Place (hekal) was similar in symbolic meaning to the Mormon Garden room. The first intimation that the Holy Place is connected to the paradisal world of Eden is through its interior decoration and furnishings. Similar to the vegetal-themed murals of the Mormon Garden room, the scriptural tradition holds that the walls of the Holy Place were ornamented with carvings of palm trees and flowers – a type of garden imagery (1 Kings 6:29).82 Another parallel between the Holy Place and the Garden of Eden is found in the table of shewbread and its relation to the tree of knowledge. A link is established between the priests’ eating of the shewbread “in the holy place” (Lev. 24:9) and Adam and Eve’s eating “of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil…within the Garden of Eden.”83 While this parallel symbolism is quite probable, a rabbinical text from the late period (c. 1000-1200 CE) helps clarify the connection: “The Table is in the north corresponding to the Garden of Eden in which all sorts of pleasures are kept for the Righteous.”84 A further relationship linking the Holy Place to Eden is the seven-branched candlestick and its symbolism with the tree of life; a theme that will be explored in more depth in the fourth episode of cosmic history to follow.

As the expulsion narrative plays an important role for Jewish sacred space, another similarity to the Mormon temple is identified. After Adam and Eve partake of the forbidden fruit, one recalls that they are expelled from the Garden of Eden. Some biblical scholars, such as Donald Parry, argue that it is likely the couple was driven out towards the east, since it is at the eastern gate of the garden

!82 “The image of the temple as a garden can be further explained by reference to the descriptions of Solomon's temple found in the Bible, which state that the inner walls of the sanctuary were covered with carvings of gourds, flowers, and palm trees, all overlaid with gold. Rabbinic traditions about this ‘gold of parwayim’ (2 Chronicles 6) associate it with the Garden of Eden, from which it was said to come, and say that the trees made from this gold bore golden fruit.” C. R. A. Morray-Jones, "Paradise Revisited (2 Cor 12:1-12): The Jewish Mystical Background of Paul's Apostolate. Part 1: The Jewish Sources," The Harvard Theological Review 86, no. 2 (1993): 206. 83 James L. Carroll, "The Reconciliation of Adam and Israelite Temples," Studia Antiqua 3, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 99-100. 84 "Midrash Tadshe," in Mi-Kadmoniyyot Ha-Yehudim, ed. Abraham Epstein (Vienna: 1887), xxviii; cited in Patai, Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual, 115-16.


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where God placed cherubim and a flaming sword (Gen. 3:24).85 Imagery of an eastern gate to Eden is reinforced through depictions of cherubim that are believed to have been carved into walls, doors, and panels of the Jerusalem Temple (1 Kings 6:29-35; 7:29, 36) as well as embroidered into the curtain-like veil of the Tabernacle (Exodus 26:31; 2 Chron. 3:14). Each cherub played a similar role to those at Eden’s gate by functioning “as divine sentinels, guarding the path leading to the presence of God, preventing the trespass by unauthorized persons.”86 Jacob Milgrom maintains that the cherubim were protectors of “eternal time and space, the mysterious, transcendent reality beyond the portal.”87 Moving westward into the temple was a return to paradise, while leaving the temple to the east was to enter the fallen world. As temple scholar Jon Levenson explains,

The Temple is the world before the divine contraction [i.e., the Fall], the world in a state of grace and perfection. No wonder temples in the ancient Near East sometimes contained a paradisal garden and no wonder that Zion…was equated with the Garden of Eden. The Temple offers the person who enters it to worship an opportunity to rise from a fallen world, to partake of the Garden of Eden.88

The last important association between the Holy Place and the paradisal world of Eden is its location between the Holy of Holies and the courtyard. According to Flavius Josephus, the tripartite configuration of the temple was an “imitation and representation of the universe,”89 such that the courtyard corresponded to the sea or lower regions, the Holy Place to the earth or land, and the Holy of

!85 “This celestial blockade suggests that there existed an entrance to the garden established at the east end of the garden. If no such entrance existed, then why would a blockade be necessary? Or, if other entrances were found to the garden, then why did God not establish cherubim and swords at other locations around the garden? Once more the eastward orientation of the Mosaic tabernacle and Jerusalem temples, having entrance at the east,” reinforces the idea that the temple represented the Garden of Eden. Donald W. Parry, "Garden of Eden: Prototype Sanctuary," in Temples of the Ancient World : Ritual and Symbolism, ed. Donald W. Parry (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1994), 132-33. 86 Ibid., 139. 87 Jacob Milgrom, "Cherubim - Gateway to the Divine," Biblical Archaeology Review 21, no. 6 (Nov. 1995): 14-18; cf. Peter Thacher Lanfer, Remembering Eden: The Reception History of Genesis 3: 22-24 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 128-31. 88 Jon D. Levenson, "The Temple and the World," The Journal of Religion 64, no. 3 (1984): 297-98. 89 Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. III, 7:7, in Flavius Josephus, The Works of Flavius Josephus, the Learned and Authentic Jewish Historian and Celebrated Warrior, trans. William Whiston (Baltimore: Armstrong & Berry, 1839).


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Holies to heaven.90 In 2 Enoch 8:4, we learn that “paradise is in between the corruptible [or fallen earth] and the incorruptible [heaven].”91 Since the Jewish temple is an imitation of the heavenly archetype, it makes sense why the Holy Place might be associated with Enoch’s in-between paradisal realm. Hence, its placement between the Holy of Holies (heaven) and the courtyard (sea or lower region) seems appropriate. Consequently, the Holy Place, like the Mormon Garden room, was a theatrical backdrop for the Garden of Eden during the rituals of the priestly class.92 A similar symbolism is found in the Catholic tradition.

Catholic

While often more metaphorical and less representational, the Edenic theme is similarly important for Catholic ritual contexts. Similar to the Jewish temple’s Holy Place, the Catholic nave “stood for the earthly paradise once lost by Adam but now regained by Christ.”93 One example of a more direct, yet rare, representational depiction linking the Catholic nave to the Jewish temple’s Holy Place is found in the ceiling murals above the Sistine Chapel’s nave. Here, the paintings appear to establish a close link to the Judaic understanding of the days of creation that pertained to the temple’s Holy Place.94 As one recalls, anything after Day One of creation was believed to be part of the tangible, visible creation instead of the intangible, blueprint of creation.95 In light of the Judaic interpretation, therefore, it is not difficult to see how the ceiling murals in the Sistine Chapel’s nave could represent the paradisal world of Eden before the fall. Yet, if this interpretation is correct, it appears unusual that Michelangelo’s panel depicting the

!90 Ibid., Bk. III, 6:4; 7:7. Similar to Josephus, Rabbi Pinhas ben Ya’ir, a Talmudic sage of the second century writes: “The Tabernacle was made to correspond to the Creation of the world…The house of the Holy of Holies was made to correspond to the highest heaven. The outer Holy House was made to correspond to the earth. And the Courtyard was made to correspond to the sea.” Quoted in Patai, Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual, 108. 91 James H. Charlesworth, ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson,2010), 1:115-16. 92 Carroll, "The Reconciliation of Adam and Israelite Temples," 96. 93 Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," 134. Cf. St Simeon of Thessalonica, “Homily on the Transfiguration”, Patrologia Graeca, col. 565A. 94 With the assumption that the boundaries of the nave start at the marble partition grill and extend to the bottom of the stairs of the altar platform, the ceiling murals include: Day 4, the creation of the sun, moon, and planets; Day 2, the separation of the sky and water; Day 6, the creation of Adam; and Day 6 with the creation of Eve. Of all the panels of the creation, Day 1, the separation of light from darkness, is not included within the space. This makes sense since the first day of creation belonged to the temple’s Holy of Holies. For Catholics, we have already established how Day One was associated with the apse, sanctuary, and/or altar. 95 “[E]verything made on or after the second day was part of the visible world but the works of Day One were beyond matter, beyond the veil.” Barker, The Great High Priest, 198.


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temptation and expulsion is located outside the original placement of the nave’s white marble partition-screen. Not surprisingly, directly below this mural is a porphyry disk on the floor where “the pope himself knelt during many rites in the chapel.” Similar to the Israelite priests who entered through a veil into the tabernacle’s Holy Place, it was “immediately after this disk when one entered… [through] the great portal” into the nave.96 This exact spot in the Sistine Chapel, consequently, appears to be the symbolic gateway guarded by the cherubim and flaming sword discussed above. As Andrew Graham-Dixon extrapolates, the chapel’s gateway served as a “kind of hinge – a hinge on which the whole grand narrative of the ceiling turns” and by which the faithful passed through to another world.97 Could this spot of the chapel be none other than a symbolic gateway leading to the paradisiacal Garden of Eden and its tree of life? If the interpretation is correct, this particular Catholic painting in the Sistine Chapel is similar to the Mormon mural in the Los Angeles Temple by serving as the symbolic threshold between the Garden of Eden and the fallen world.

In Catholicism, another prominent link to the paradisal world of Eden is found in the rite of baptism and its architectural setting. As we recall from the Jewish ritual, only priests were allowed to enter the Holy Place. Similarly, up until the Council of Trent, the Catholic nave was only accessible by those who had accepted Jesus Christ and had been cleansed from sin through baptism.98 Christians began “their pilgrimage back to Eden beginning with the rite of baptism,” writes Robin Jensen.99 The connection between the fall and one’s return to paradise dates back to early Christianity. Over the font in the baptistery at Dura Europos, there is both “a figure of the Good Shepherd and his sheep above a smaller painting of Adam and Eve.” According to Jensen, the link between the two images is clear: “Adam and Eve were the perpetrators of the fall, which Jesus, the New Adam (and the Good Shepherd), reverses.”100 The Christian baptistery was eventually “designed to look like a mausoleum, but the interiors were often decorated to reflect the rich plant and

!96 Blech and Doliner, The Sistine Secrets: Michelangelo's Forbidden Messages in the Heart of the Vatican, 141-42. 97 He continues his explanation: “It is here that man sins, here that his fate is sealed. Adam and Eve break with God’s commands and are separated from God for ever. Unity gives way to alienation, harmony gives way to discord, oneness becomes fragmentation.” Andrew Graham-Dixon, Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel (New York: Skyhorse, 2009), 94. Cf. Genesis 3:23-24. 98 After the Council of Trent, the gradations of holiness and symbolic thresholds between the nave (i.e., the earthly paradisal world of Eden) and the narthex or courtyard (i.e., a fallen, sinful, disordered world) were dissolved. The Council “had the effect of transforming the entire church into a narthex, an unadorned anteroom where, according to the custom of the ancient Church, public sinners would wait to be absolved.” Martin Mosebach, The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and Its Enemy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 171. 99 Robin Margaret Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (New York: Routledge, 2000), 87. 100 Ibid.


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animal life in Eden.”101 It is in the Catholic tradition, therefore, that the “newly restored Eden” was “architecturally symbolized by the baptistery” and its rites.102

The theological comparisons between Mormon, Jewish, and Catholic traditions have engendered fresh insights that reinforce the themes from the paradisal world of Eden. For example, the use of either living or representational vegetal motifs in the Mormon Garden room, Jewish Holy Place, or Catholic nave and baptistery reinforce the symbolism of abundant fertility associated with Eden. Likewise, the symbolic associations of the furniture in the Jewish temple’s nave or the painted trees in the Mormon Garden room each reinforce the importance in the Garden of Eden narrative in partaking of the forbidden fruit. The expulsion theme is also prevalent between the three religions with the use of cherubic gatekeepers to protect the entrance to the Garden of Eden. The architectural hermeneutic between the three religions continues to clarify the overlapping themes. In the next section, cosmic history shifts from paradise to the fallen, disordered world.

Episode III: A Fallen, Disordered World

The next phase of the discussion is called the fallen, disordered world, and it marks the midway point of the journey through the episodes of cosmic history. Often with the starkest contrasts to the previous Edenic state, themes across the three religions include: opposition, contention, enmity, chaos, desolate landscapes, sacrifice, sin, repentance, and a period of time before redemption.

Mormon

After Adam and Eve’s fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the sacred narrative of the Mormon endowment leads the initiate into a space representing the fallen, disordered world. This space is often called the World or Telestial room because it “represents the world we now live in, [and] gives the impression of conflict, in sharp contrast to the peace and harmony of the Garden room.”103 Once again, floor to ceiling wall murals serve as theatrical backdrops for the World room in an effort to establish the desired thematic mood. The paintings in the Salt Lake Temple, for instance, depict a story of “struggle and strife; of victory and triumph or of defeat and death.”104 Other five-room temples in Utah promote a similar message, as “there is contention and strife apparent in [all] the murals.” In each case, the overarching purpose of the paintings

!101 Ibid., 212n71. For instance, see the Neonian baptistery in Ravenna and the baptistery of S. Giovanni in Fonte, Naples. 102 Ibid., 178. 103 V. A. Wood, The Alberta Temple: Centre and Symbol of Faith (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 1989), 54. 104 Talmage, The House of the Lord, 158.


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is “to instill in the participants a deep awareness of man’s purpose on earth, and his obligations and opportunities to rise above his present [fallen] status.”105

The World room and its portion of the ritual drama have been described as Adam and Eve’s “condition in the lone and dreary world when doomed to live by labor and sweat.”106 The scriptural tradition of the Latter-day Saints teaches that the couple was able to enjoy living in the presence of God while they lived in the Garden of Eden; however, it is after their fall that they lose that sacred privilege. A visual barrier appears to have shut them (mostly) “out from his presence” but yet there remains some level of connectivity since the couple was still able to hear “the voice of the Lord” speaking unto them “from the way toward the Garden of Eden” (Moses 5:4). The reality of only a partial connectivity with God must have been a constant reminder of their fallen condition in the lone and dreary world. A further reason that this stage of the endowment is depicted as a dreary place of chaos, sin, conflict, and death is because it is associated with Satan’s realm. Second Church President Brigham Young illustrates this doctrinal concept in these words: “We are here in this wicked world, a world shrouded in darkness, principally led, directed, governed, and controlled, from first to last, by the power of our common foe…the devil. Lucifer has almost the entire control over the whole earth, [since he] rules and governs the children of men and leads them on to destruction.”107 One method used in the original layout of the Nauvoo temple to aesthetically convey the mood of the lone and dreary condition of a fallen world included darkening a space so that is was “darker than any of the others.”108 Similarly, the World room in the Salt Lake Endowment House was kept “dark, [using] heavy curtains shutting out all but a few rays of light.”109

At first glance, the mood of the World room appears to present a message of doom and gloom; however, the message quickly transforms into one of hope and reconciliation. After Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden they are instructed to “worship the Lord their God, and…offer the firstlings of their flocks” as a sacrifice (Moses 5:5). It is explained to them by an angel that their offerings are “a similitude of the sacrifice of the Only Begotten of the Father, which is full of grace and truth” (Moses 5:7). According to Talmage, it is here that initiates learn of “the plan of redemption by

!105 O'Brien, "A Study of the Effect of Color in the Utah Temple Murals", 31. 106 Talmage, The House of the Lord, 83. 107 Statement by Brigham Young, in J. V. Long, George D. Watt, Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London: Latter-day Saints Book Depot, 1854-1886), 3:223. 108 Brown, "The Sacred Departments for Temple Work in Nauvoo: The Assembly Room and the Council Chamber," 372. 109 ———, "'Temple Pro Tempore': The Salt Lake City Endowment House," 41.


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which the great transgression may be atoned.”110 The Mormon World room acts as a transitional point, similar to the Sistine Chapel’s porphyry disk on the floor, because in this space true reconciliation is obtained by accepting the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. While not part of the endowment sequence, part of accepting Christ is following his example by being baptized. Specifically in the Mormon temple, a baptismal font (somewhat reminiscent of the Jewish laver with twelve oxen) and the rite of baptism by immersion help to facilitate one of the first physical acts of the reconciliation process to return to God’s presence in the Celestial Kingdom.111 In either case, it is through the Messiah that the faithful are able to return back into the paradisal world of Eden and once again enter God’s presence. As one will see, this is an important concept for all three religious traditions.

Jewish

Similar to the Mormon tradition, Judaism held the world of Eden to be in stark contrast to the fallen, disordered world. After having been cast out of the Garden toward the east, a reconciliation process needed to take place in order for Adam and Eve to return to paradise. According to one apocryphal text, these efforts are started “on that day in which Adam went forth from the Garden.” It explains that “he offered as a sweet savour an offering, frankincense, galbanum, and stacte, and spices in the morning with the rising of the sun from the day when he covered his shame” (Jubilees 3:27).112 Adam and Eve’s burnt offerings and sacrifices just east of the Garden of Eden’s gate are viewed as a first step in reconciling their transgression and returning to paradise. Peter Lanfer observes that “in Jubilees, the sacrifice of Adam allows for the possibility of perpetual access to Eden…Thus, the fiery swords of the cherubim are metaphorically and symbolically replaced or removed by the fire of Adam’s sacrifice.”113 Similar to these sacrifices at Eden’s gate, there is a close parallel to the sacrifices carried out in the courtyard also just east of the entrance to the temple proper.114

Conceptually speaking, the further a person was from the Garden of Eden the more chaotic, disordered, and unclean the world became. Adam and Eve’s transgression caused them to be driven out of the Garden of Eden towards the east and into the Land of Eden; likewise, when Cain murders his brother Abel he is driven out further east “from the presence of the LORD” and instructed to !110 Talmage, The House of the Lord, 83. 111 See John 3:5; D&C 76:51–52, 62, 70; 138:32-34, 58-59; Articles of Faith 1:3-4. Adam is also believed to have been baptized as part of his reconciliation process, see Moses 6:64–68. 112 Charles, ed. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, 2:17. 113 Lanfer, Remembering Eden, 134. 114 Ibid.


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dwell “in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden” (Gen 4:16). The gradations of holiness established with these events carry over into the spatial configurations of the Jerusalem Temple. The Holy of Holies, located in the west, symbolized God’s dwelling place, while the centralized Holy Place became the figurative Garden of Eden. It is the eastern temple “courtyard [that] represented the fallen world in which Adam and Eve found themselves after their expulsion from paradise.” In fact, it is “their attempted reconciliation that took place just eastwards of the Garden of Eden” that has strong liturgical parallels to “the altar and laver [that] were eastward of the holy place.”115

Building upon this model for gradations of holiness, any area beyond the courtyard or Israel’s camp, particularly to the far east, was regarded as a profane, chaotic, unclean wilderness. It was associated with nothingness, impurities, demons, death, and sin (Lev. 14:40-41, 45).116 Similar to the Mormon theological tradition, the “lonely wilderness” was regarded as the realm of the “leader of the rebellious angels” named Azazel (or Satan).117 According to Philip Jenson, “Azazel represented the extreme opposite of God’s holy presence in the Holy of Holies. The domain of Azazel is not neutral or undefined space, but imbued with a personal quality which is the mirror opposite to God’s presence in his holy sanctuary.”118 In light of Jenson’s observations, one can understand why the rite performed on the Day of Atonement at the temple with the two goats—one representing the goat of the Lord and the other the scapegoat (i.e., goat of Azazel)—was a “symbolical act [that] was really a renunciation of [Satan’s] authority. Such is the signification of the utter separation of the scapegoat from the people of Israel…Hence it was the practise in Jerusalem…to take the scapegoat to a cliff and push him over it out of sight. In this way the complete separation was effected.”119

After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve are reminded of the haunting truth that now they “shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17). In order to reverse the curse uttered at the fall, they must repent. One Hebrew verb for repent used in Ezekiel is shuwb, meaning “to return, turn back, reverse, restore, or bring back.” One scriptural example reads, “but if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die” (Ezekiel 18:21; emphasis added). Repentance signified that a person would turn

!115 Carroll, "The Reconciliation of Adam and Israelite Temples," 96-97. 116 See gradation of holiness charts, in Philip Peter Jenson, Graded Holiness: A Key to the Priestly Conception of the World (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1992), 47, 63, 90, 202-03. 117 Isidore Singer and Cyrus Adler, eds., The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, 12 vols. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company,1901-1906), 2:365-67. 118 Jenson, Graded Holiness, 203. 119 Singer and Adler, eds., Jewish Encyclopedia, 2:365-67.


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away from sin (death) in order to be restored unto God (life). In the context of returning to the Garden of Eden, we begin to see why repentance was so important in Judaism.

After Adam and Eve were expelled eastward, they turned around to look back towards their westward home in paradise. According to 3 Enoch 5:3, “the first man and his generation dwelt at the gate of the garden of Eden so that they might gaze at the bright image of the Sekinah,” a visible manifestation of God’s presence.120 A similar pattern is found in the Jerusalem Temple. Since God’s presence is believed to have resided in the Holy of Holies located in the west, to turn and face that direction was to turn towards God; whereas turning to the east signified the opposite. Consequently, it is understandable why, as outlined in Ezekiel’s vision, God considered the act of the temple priests turning “their backs toward the temple of the LORD, and their faces toward the east” to worship the sun a grievous abomination (Ezek. 8:16).121 Subsequently, during the feast of tabernacles the priests “came to the eastern gate, they turned round towards the west (to face the Holy Place), and said: ‘Our fathers who were in this place, they turned their back upon the Sanctuary of Jehovah, and their faces toward the east, and they worshipped towards the rising sun; but as for us, our eyes are towards the Lord.’”122

To repent was to be cleansed of sin so that one could return to God spotless. According to one Jewish text, the wicked must repent in order to be “accepted before the Shekhina [i.e., visible manifestation of God’s presence] like the pious and the saintly who never sinned.”123 One further step in the reconciliation process, paralleling the Mormon tradition, required each wicked person to be washed, anointed, clothed in garments, led by the hand, and then presented clean before the Holy One at “the gate of the Garden of Eden.” At this point, the Holy One “answers them and says: ‘Let them enter and see My glory.’”124 The large “molten sea” that sat on “twelve oxen” (yet another link to Mormonism) and the “ten lavers of brass” in the courtyard each reinforce the need to be ritually cleansed from sin before entering into God’s presence in the temple (2 Kgs. 7:23-39; 2 Chr. 4:1-6). As the Psalmist writes, “who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully” (Ps. 24:3-4; emphasis added). The interreligious dialogue continues as we turn to the Catholic conception of the fallen, disordered world.

!120 Charlesworth, ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1:259-60. 121 Cf. Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," 132. 122 Alfred Edersheim, The Temple, Its Ministry and Services, as They Were at the Time of Jesus Christ, New rev. ed. (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1881), 246-47. 123 Mid. Alpha Beta diR. Akiba, BhM 3:27-29; cited in Patai, The Messiah Texts, 252-53. 124 Mid. Alpha Beta diR. Akiba, BhM 3:27-29; cited in Ibid.


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Catholic

For Catholics, Adam and Eve lost their home in paradise after they partook of the forbidden fruit. In these regards, it is similar in theological understanding to both Mormonism and Judaism, since the fallen world was a place that needed to be redeemed and reconciled from original sin. As Eliade observes, “Christianity is dominated by the yearning for Paradise.”125 In many ways, the effects of the fall had to be reversed in order for mankind to be able to return to paradise, and the solution was to be found in Jesus Christ’s atonement. “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthian 15:21-22). Referring to architectural symbolism in “both the Eastern and the Western church, the narthex or vestibule stood for this earth before redemption.”126 Returning to Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel, the last three ceiling murals correspond to this symbolism. The less sacred vestibule outside of the marble partition in this chapel is located beneath murals depicting the fallen, disordered world before redemption127 – a familiar theme for some Mormon World room murals.

Building upon the above architectural symbolism, early Christian churches often possessed both an outer and inner narthex appearing to represent to some degree the disordered, sin-laden world under Satan’s influence. The outer narthex (exonarthex), more commonly known as the atrium or courtyard, was reserved for more grievous sinners and criminals. According to Tertullian, “they were expelled not only from the doors of the church, but from every place that might afford them any shelter or covering” as part of the penance process.128 Analogous to the courtyard of the Jerusalem Temple with its large basin of water used for purification rites, the Catholic courtyard also contained “a fountain, or a cistern of water, for people to wash their hands and face, before they went into

!125 Mircea Eliade, "The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition," Daedalus 88, no. 2 (1959): 261. 126 Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," 134. Cf. St Simeon of Thessalonica, “Homily on the Transfiguration”, Patrologia Graeca, col. 565A. 127 As the ceiling murals transition from the Garden of Eden to the fallen world, “Unity gives way to alienation, harmony gives way to discord, oneness becomes fragmentation. The three scenes that follow [the temptation and expulsion scene] – all tracing the subsequent life of man on earth, through the story of Noah – are characterized by a busy brokenness, a mood of nightmare, a deliberate compositional disharmony, entirely at odds with the breadth and the sweeping simplicity that characterize the earlier scenes depicting the Creation. In this way, the very rhythms and formal structure of the paintings of the Sistine ceiling conspire to define a mortal life – the life that follows the Fall – as disharmony, disconnection, alienation.” Graham-Dixon, Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, 94. 128 Cited in Joseph Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticae: Or the Antiquities of the Christian Church, ed. Richard Bingham, 9 vols. (London: William Straker, 1843), 402-03.


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church.”129 The inner narthex (esonarthex), on the other hand, was immediately in front of the doors of the church and was reserved for the penitent, uninitiated, and outsiders (e.g., catechumens, Jews, heathens, heretics, etc.). These groups “were allowed to stand here to hear the Psalms and Scriptures read, and the sermon made by the preacher.”130 It was also here in the narthex that “the priest absolved the penitent with the stroke of a long staff.” In essence, it was the responsibility of the priest to free the “people from the slavery of sin and subjection to the law by touching them with the staff.”131

The spaces where early Christian rites of initiation occurred during the fourth century appear to be another parallel with Mormon and Jewish ritual contexts associated with the fallen world. For example, at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, initiates entered the vestibule of the baptistery called the “outer chamber” – a space that was similar in meaning to the Jewish temple courtyard and Mormon World room.132 The baptistery’s outer chamber was similar to the church’s narthex because of its symbolic associations to the fallen world of sin and darkness.133 It is here in the “outer chamber” that initiates “faced westward,” stretched out their hand, and “renounced Satan as though to his face.”134 After this enactment, initiates turned “from west to east, the region of light,” to get a glimpse into the baptistery or “inner room” which represented paradise and the Holy of Holies.135 At this point initiates were told the following: “The gates of God’s Paradise are open to you, that garden which God planted in the east, and from !129 Ibid., 403. 130 Ibid., 409-10. 131 Mosebach, Heresy of Formlessness, 167-68. Emphasis in original. 132 Alexis James Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 86-88. 133 Cyril of Jerusalem explains, “The west is the quarter from which darkness appears to us; now the devil is darkness, and wields his power in darkness. So we look to the west as a symbolic gesture, and renounce the leader of shadow and darkness.” Edward Yarnold, The Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation: Baptismal Homilies of the Fourth Century (Slough, Great Britain: St. Paul Publications, 1972), 69. As we recall from the Jewish tradition, however, it is the east and not the west that is associated with the realm of sin, chaos, demons, and Azazel. It is puzzling why this reversal of the holiness spectrum completely reverses since even Origen, the early Christian scholar from Alexandria, “identifies Azazel with Satan.” Singer and Adler, eds., Jewish Encyclopedia, 2:365-67. Up until the fifth century, as noted earlier, there appears to be a conflict between the new Christian religious ideal for paradise in the east and the architectural configurations based on the Jewish temple that place the Holy of Holies in the western apse. For more on this, see George Gilbert Scott, An Essay on the History of English Church Architecture (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1881), 14-23; Walter Lowrie, Monuments of the Early Church, Handbooks of Archaeology and Antiquities (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901), 177-78. For the counter argument, see U. M. Lang, Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004). 134 Yarnold, Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation, 68-69. 135 Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue, 86-88.


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which our first parent was expelled for his transgression.”136 Although the directions are reversed in the Judaic tradition, the symbolism of repentance and turning unto the Lord remains the same.

At the conclusion of the journey through the fallen, disordered world, a greater appreciation has been gained in light of the comparative theological dialogue between Mormon, Jewish, and Catholic traditions. The religious interrelationships continue to be strengthened by comparisons between art, architecture, scripture, and ritual. The discussion during this episode of cosmic history includes the common story of Adam and Eve in all three religions and their posterity longing for paradise, immortality, and eternal life after the fall. Each person is seeking a way and means to be reconciled, saved, and restored from a world ruled by darkness. The goal in each case is to be cleansed from sin and (re)admitted back into God’s presence. Having reached the midway point in the journey through cosmic history, the next two stages incrementally get closer to God. Returning to paradise, the Messianic era is next in line.

Episode IV: The Messianic Paradisiacal Era

The fourth episode, similar to the second, is called the Messianic paradisiacal era. The symbolic themes associated with this period comprise peace, tranquility, earthly paradise, resurrection, prayer or confession at veils, and the return of a Messiah.

Mormon

The second to last room in the spatial sequence of the Mormon endowment is called the Terrestrial room and “represents the world during the Millennial period.”137 In Mormon theology, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ ushers in a Millennial era which causes the earth to be “renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory” (Articles of Faith 1:10). The renewal of the earth can be interpreted as a return to its former paradisal condition. As Bruce R. McConkie explains, “the earth is to go back to the primeval, paradisiacal, or terrestrial state that prevailed in the days of the Garden of Eden.”138 McConkie’s statement suggests how both the Terrestrial and Garden rooms share a similar symbolic association to some sort of paradisal realm; yet, each room pertains to a different and distinct episode of cosmic history within the Mormon plan of salvation.

The stage-like backdrops in Mormon Terrestrial rooms provide a similar atmospheric mood of “peace and order” as Garden rooms

!136 Yarnold, Awe-Inspiring Rites of Initiation, 73. 137 Wood, The Alberta Temple: Centre and Symbol of Faith, 56. 138 McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 211.


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but through different aesthetic strategies.139 While Garden room floor-to-ceiling murals depict scenes of tropical gardens and plant life, Terrestrial rooms, on the other hand, are prone to use less representational artwork and more “classical restraints” to convey their message.140 The Terrestrial room in the Salt Lake Temple is “articulated with proportionately spaced engaged pilasters,” large wall mirrors, and two crystal chandeliers to enhance “the effect of spiritualism.”141 In like manner, the Terrestrial room in the Los Angeles Temple was “planned for peace and comfort” by using “subdued colors and furnishings,” as explained by Church architect Edward O. Anderson.142 While most Terrestrial rooms do not have painted murals reinforcing the Messianic paradisiacal era, the Alberta Canada Temple includes a painted scene located above the veil showing “the Savior appearing to Mary following His resurrection.”143 Several thematic messages are derived from this example, such as the doctrine that death has been overcome through Christ’s resurrection and that all those who die during the Millennium will be changed in the twinkling of an eye to a resurrected, immortal state.144

Two important features within every Terrestrial room include an altar and a curtain-like partition called the veil of the temple. James Talmage clarifies that in order to enter the final endowment room, “passage leads through the Veil.”145 Prior to passing through this threshold, a special prayer ritual is conducted at an altar. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism states, “the prayer circle is a part of Latter-day Saint temple worship, usually associated with the Endowment ceremony. Participants, an equal number of men and women dressed in temple clothing, surround an altar in a circle

!139 Wood, The Alberta Temple: Centre and Symbol of Faith, 56. 140 Hamilton, "The Salt Lake Temple: An Architectural Monograph", 118. 141 Ibid., 117-18. 142 Anderson, "The Los Angeles Temple," 806. 143 Wood, The Alberta Temple: Centre and Symbol of Faith, 56. For an image of this room and its mural above the veil, see the pamphlet titled "The Mormon Temple, Cardston, Alberta," (Cardston, Alberta: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, c1961), 9. A copy of this pamphlet can be found at the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City, UT. 144 One LDS scholar writes: “During the Millennium there will, of course, be two kinds of people on earth. There will be those who are mortal, and those who are immortal. There will be those who have been changed or quickened or transfigured or translated (words fail us to describe their state), and those who have gone through a second change, in the twinkling of an eye, so as to become eternal in nature. There will be those who are on probation, for whom earth life is a probationary estate, and who are thus working out their own salvation, and those who have already overcome the world and have entered into a fulness of eternal joy. There will be those who will yet die in the sense of being changed from their quickened state to a state of immortality, and those who, having previously died, are then living in a resurrected state.” Bruce R. McConkie, The Millennial Messiah: The Second Coming of the Son of Man (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1982), 644. 145 Talmage, The House of the Lord, 159.


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formation to participate unitedly in prayer.”146 After this rite, individuals prepare to pass through the veil or symbolic “gate of heaven.”147 Douglas Davies suggests that the “veil symbolizes the division between the earth and the Celestial Kingdom of the heavenly realms” since “initiates do, literally, pass through it as they gain new status as endowed Saints invested with divine potential.”148 The cosmic symbolism of the Mormon veil crosses over into Judaism. As we recall from earlier, a veil separated the Jewish temple’s Holy Place (hekal) and the Holy of Holies (debir) – a boundary between heaven and earth. The Mormon temple veil, therefore, “is in similitude of [the] one in the Tabernacle of Moses and the temple of Solomon.”149

On other occasions, Mormons may interpret the veil of the temple with Christocentric symbolism. Paul writes that prior to Jesus Christ’s atonement, “the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest” (Heb. 9:8). In fact, access to the Holy of Holies was only available to “the high priest alone once every year” (Heb. 9:7) on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). For Latter-day Saints, the rending of the veil in the Jerusalem temple at Jesus Christ’s crucifixion (Matt. 27:51) symbolized the removal of the barrier between heaven and earth. This understanding is suggested by the experience of the Mormon temple endowment where followers of Jesus Christ actually do pass through a parted veil into the “holiest of all.” The Mormon theological understanding of the role of the Savior’s atonement in the temple might adequately be expressed in the words of Paul; all mankind might now have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh” (Heb. 10:19-20). The architectural experience of the Mormon temple reinforces the vivid imagery evoked by Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews since initiates are able to gain access to God’s heavenly realm through the veil. “To pass through it into the Celestial Room is to symbolize one’s passage and acceptance into the Kingdom of God or the highest degree of spiritual reward” made possible through Jesus Christ’s atonement.150 Theological parallels between the Latter-day Saint understanding of a Messianic paradisiacal era to Judaic thinking will be discussed in the next subsection.

Jewish

The progression back into the temple’s central nave or Holy Place, in !

146 George S. Tate, "Prayer Circle," in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1120. 147 Brown, "'Temple Pro Tempore': The Salt Lake City Endowment House," 44. 148 Davies, Mormon Culture of Salvation, 80. 149 Hamilton, The Salt Lake Temple: A Monument to a People, 97. This page also has a color photograph of the Salt Lake Temple Terrestrial room and its veil. 150 Ibid.


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Judaism, may have constituted a return to the paradisiacal realm during the Messianic era. The future paradisal world, the light of God’s presence, and the Tree of Life—as symbolized by the menorah151—are all interconnected and accessed as one passes through the eastern gates of the Garden of Eden. According to one interpretation found in 3 Enoch 5:1, the Tree of Life is the location where God’s presence (shekinah) can be seen: “From the day that the Holy One…banished the first man from the garden of Eden, the Sekinah resided on a cherub beneath the tree of life.”152 While this passage explains that God’s presence was associated with the Tree of Life, elsewhere we learn that God’s presence is also connected to light. One rabbinical text clarifies this connection: “The candlestick is in the south corresponding to the World to Come in which there is but the light of the Shekhinah (the Presence of God).”153 A passage from the Babylonian Talmud similarly reads: “In the future world…the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads feasting on the brightness of the divine presence, as it says, And they beheld God, and did eat and drink” (b. Berakoth 17a).154 In each case, the Menorah, Tree of Life, light, and God’s presence all appear to be associated with each other.

In Judaism, the fallen, disordered world will be transformed into a paradisiacal state during the Messianic era. Isaiah states that God “will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord” (Isaiah 51:3). Even the cursed “land that was desolate [shall] become like the garden of Eden,” reads another passage (Ezekiel 36:35). The earth’s transformation is reinforced aesthetically in the temple as priests moved from the courtyard to the ornate walls adorned with paradise sculptural motifs within the Holy Place. “It appears, then, that the interior of the sanctuary was both a replica of its celestial counterpart and an image of the primordial and future paradise, with which the heavenly temple

!151 One biblical scholar, Donald Parry, refers to Exodus 25:31-40 and calls the menorah a “a stylized tree of life” since it “must have had the appearance of a tree, possessing seven branches (a number of symbolic significance to the Israelite community) and a number of flowers (Almond blossoms?).” He further explains, “the actual, living tree of life was present in the garden, and symbolic representations of the tree of life, in the form of lampstands, were present in later Israelite temples.” Parry, "Garden of Eden: Prototype Sanctuary," 31. 152 Charlesworth, ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1:259. 153 "Midrash Tadshe," xxviii; cited in Patai, Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual, 115-16. 154 This quotation has reference to Exodus 24:9-11 when the 70 elders “saw the God of Israel” at the midway point up Mount Sinai. Here the elder’s vision of seeing God and the future world are both interpreted as food and drink. Because the Temple’s nave (Holy Place or heikal)—especially the south side with the menorah—symbolizes the future Messianic Era, the Sinai experience of seeing a vision of God (shekinah) at the midway point confirms the significance of tripartite eschatological symbolism. Charlesworth, ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1:259n5c.


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was closely connected if not identified,” asserts Morray-Jones.155

Accessing the future paradisiacal world, somewhat reminiscent of the Mormon conception of this episode of cosmic history, was made possible “through the eschatological renewal that comes with the appearance of the Messiah.”156 One Jewish text explains how this is to occur: “Then shall the Lord raise up a new priest…And in his priesthood shall sin come to an end…And he shall open the gates of paradise, And shall remove the sword which threatens Man, And give to the saints to eat from the Tree of Life…And he shall bound Belial [Satan], And give strength to his children to tread upon evil spirits” (Testament of Levi, 18).157 The Messianic figure is the individual who reverses the effects of the fall by putting an end to sin, binding Satan, opening the gates of paradise, removing the flaming sword, and letting the righteous partake of the Tree of Life. Also connected with the commencement of the Messianic era and the (re)opening of paradise is the theme of judgment. Both the “Day of Judgment” and the opening of the “gates of the Garden of Eden in the east,” for instance, occur on the third day of the Messianic era (Nistarot R. Shim’on ben Yohai, BhM 3:80-81).158 In like manner, it is at the hour of judgment that “the sinners of Israel will be shaken into Gehenna [i.e. destination of the wicked] for twelve months, and thereafter the Holy One…will bring them up, and they will sit in the Garden of Eden and enjoy its fruits” (Nistarot R. Shim’on ben Yohai, BhM 3:80-81).159 The examples in these texts closely resemble the Mormon sequence of events ushering in the Millennium.160

The Jerusalem temple Holy Place possessed both an altar and a veil – an interesting parallel to the Latter-day Saint Terrestrial room. The altar was overlaid with “pure gold” and was used daily to burn incense in the morning and evening (Exod. 30:1-10, 34-36). The rising smoke of the incense was symbolic of prayers ascending to God; as the psalmist writes, “let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice” (Ps. 141:2).161 Similarly, it is not by happenstance that both the burning of incense at the golden altar and the appointed time of prayer at the temple occurred at the same time: “And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the time of incense” (Luke 1:10). The burning of incense at the altar and its

!155 Morray-Jones, "Paradise Revisited (2 Cor 12:1-12): The Jewish Mystical Background of Paul's Apostolate. Part 1: The Jewish Sources," 206. See also Jon, "The Temple and the World," 297-98. 156 Lanfer, Remembering Eden, 108-11. 157 Cited in Patai, The Messiah Texts, 190-91. 158 Cited in Ibid., 217. 159 Cited in Ibid. 160 For instance, the Second Coming of Christ includes the binding of Satan, the end of sin, a partial preliminary judgment, and the resurrection of the just (similar to the figurative expression of partaking of the tree of life and receiving immortality). See D&C 88:95-110; 45:44-59. 161 John’s apocalyptic vision later reaffirms this symbolism, see Rev. 5:8: 8:3-4.


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connections to prayer are yet another link to the Mormon prayer circle rituals at an altar before a veil. Lastly, passage through the veil of the temple for both Judaism and Mormonism symbolized entering into the presence of God in the heavenly realm. As the discussion shifts to the Catholic tradition, the similarities among the religions continue to appear.

Catholic

Like Mormon and Jewish temples, the Messianic paradisiacal era is present in Catholic churches. As was discussed in the third episode of cosmic history, Catholic initiates who moved from the narthex into the nave were said to have symbolically re-entered “the earthly paradise once lost by Adam but now regained by Christ.”162 According to Jean Daniélou, we learn that “contrasted with Adam, who falls under the domination of Satan and is driven from Paradise, the catechumen is as though [he or she is] freed from such domination by the New Adam [i.e., Christ] and led back to Paradise.”163 Similar to the Mormon endowment, Christ is the messianic figure who makes a return to the paradisiacal era possible. In an effort to reinforce this theme, many Gothic and Romanesque church doors and entry portals depicted Christ as the gatekeeper-guardian of paradise because of his messianic role at the Last Judgment.164 The Gothic western Royal Portal at Chartres Cathedral is a prime example that emphasizes the Savior’s millennial role as judge and gatekeeper. Spiro Kostof describes the scene: “encompassed by apostles, angels, and the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse who witness His return, Christ sits in an aureole of glory…[Yet] Nothing is intimated of the punishments and rewards to be meted out at the Second Coming”165 On the other hand, the main west facade tympanum above the doorway of the Romanesque church Ste.-Foy at Conques portrays a more dramatic scene of the Last Judgment with the righteous receiving rewards on Christ’s right hand and the wicked banished to hell on His left.166 These types of scenes are both “a warning and an encouragement to the uninitiated as well as the laity. Its timeless message,” writes Thomas Barrie, “demands a commitment to die to the ways of the

!162 Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," 134. Cf. St Simeon of Thessalonica, “Homily on the Transfiguration”, Patrologia Graeca, col. 565A. 163 Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou, S.J., Bible et liturgie, la théologie biblique des sacrements et des fêtes d'après les Pères de l'Église (Paris, 1951), p. 47, cited in Eliade, "The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition," 261. 164 George Zarnecki, Romanesque Art (New York: Universe Books, 1971), 145; Thomas Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place: Myth, Ritual, and Meaning in Architecture (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), 60. See also Christine Smith, "Before and after the End of Time," in Before and after the End of Time, Architecture and the Year 1000, ed. Christine Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Design School, 2000), 23. 165 Spiro Kostof and Greg Castillo, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 336-37. 166 Ibid., 305-07.


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world and submit to God and the salvation promised by Christ.”167 Paralleling the cherubim guardians on the Jewish temple veil and doors, the Catholic church doors are similarly guarded by the Savior. “Only through Christ can one enter Paradise, for He is the door of Heaven,” observes Margaret Frazer.168 We are reminded that it was Jesus who declared, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture” (John 10:9).

On certain occasions special entry rituals occur in Roman Catholic churches which reinforce the symbolism of a Messianic paradisiacal era. During the Christmas Eve ritual during the Jubilee year, for instance, the Pope opens the Porta Santa or Holy Door at Saint Peter’s Basilica, symbolizing how Christ’s coming into the world opens the doors of salvation.169 In several seventeenth-century examples of commemorative Jubilee medallions, penitents are shown waiting for the Holy Door to be opened up unto them by the Savior who is the gatekeeper of paradise.170 While the “Holy Gate” ritual is performed in the narthex of several other important churches, on each occasion the Pope knocks three times on the door, whereupon the symbolic gate of paradise is opened and redemption from the fall is made possible. Alonzo Gaskill explains the symbolism of this rite in these words: “knocking three times has been associated with the idea that the opening of the veil or ‘gate of heaven’ would bring joy to (1) those in heaven, (2) those on earth, and (3) those bound in purgatory or spirit prison. Thus, three groups rejoice over God’s returning sheep, and hence the pope or bishop knocks three times.”171 Although each person passing through the sacred threshold is considered “saved,” one must still “leave behind them the burden of sin before entering the Holy Gate!”172 Similar to Adam’s reconciliation process before Eden’s gate, each person who entered the church must pass through the “doors in a spirit of contrition in order to receive pardon for their sins.”173 The Holy Door ritual also has close parallels to the temple gates at Jerusalem, as it “represents the return of the penitent into the presence of God.”174 Herbert Thurston claims that “the opening of the Holy Gate is further said to have been prefigured by the opening, on Sabbaths and Feasts, of the East Gate of the Temple at

!167 Barrie, Spiritual Path, Sacred Place: Myth, Ritual, and Meaning in Architecture, 225. 168 Margaret English Frazer, "Church Doors and the Gates of Paradise: Byzantine Bronze Doors in Italy," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 27(1973): 162. 169 Herbert Thurston, The Holy Year of Jubilee (St. Louis: Herder, 1900; reprint, 1980), 30, 243-44. 170 Ibid., 50, 99. 171 Alonzo L. Gaskill, Sacred Symbols: Finding Meaning in Rites, Rituals, and Ordinances (Springville, UT: CFI, 2011), 231. Cf. Thurston, The Holy Year of Jubilee, 244. 172 Gaskill, Sacred Symbols, 230. Cf. Thurston, The Holy Year of Jubilee, 53. 173 Thurston, The Holy Year of Jubilee, 243-45. 174 Gaskill, Sacred Symbols, 229.


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Jerusalem, which remained closed on other days.”175 For Christians, the main doors into the church represented “celestial doors”176 leading to another world; they were truly the “gates of paradise.”177

The Messianic and paradisal symbolism attributed to the nave of the church is further maintained by Catholic rituals performed at Christmas and Easter. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and its theological message that the gates of paradise are once again opened to humanity is commemorated during Easter rituals. In fact, “during Easter week, the great door to the altar remains open during the entire service” to reinforce how Christ’s resurrection has opened the doors of salvation.178 Likewise, the “Christmas reception of the Eucharist marked the end of the mournful but expectant season of Advent, during which time the Eucharist was not received by the laity and through which time the statues and pictures in the church, at least in some locales, were veiled from sight just as they were in Lent.”179 Thus, at the Christmas commemoration of the Savior’s birth, salvation is again restored to the laity through the liturgy of the Eucharist. In some artwork, such as Petrus Christus’ fifteenth-century painting titled Annunciation, one finds a type of Messianic-themed architectural symbolism. Here “the Virgin Mary is depicted standing in the narthex of a church because the Incarnation has not yet taken place. In the painting the doors to the nave, or earthly paradise, are as of yet closed,” explains Helen Dietz. “In Jan van Eyck’s Madonna in a church, on the other hand,” Dietz continues, “the Incarnation has already taken place; hence, Mary, her divine Child in her arms, is depicted standing in the nave which is the earthly paradise now restored by the advent of Christ.”180

Similar among all three religions is the use of curtain-like veils or partitions separating the heavenly and earthly realms. On certain sacred occasions, such as Holy Thursday, the sanctuary veil in medieval Catholic churches was pulled aside and allowed the laity to “experience a foretaste of the heavenly wedding feast, the veil between this life and the next having been, as it were, temporarily removed.” A few days later, writes Dietz, “the lay communicants on Easter Sunday were admitted not physically, but in spirit, into

!175 Thurston, The Holy Year of Jubilee, 244. Cf. Ezekiel 46:1. 176 Frazer, "Church Doors and the Gates of Paradise: Byzantine Bronze Doors in Italy," 162. 177 Ibid. See also Eloise M. Angiola, "'Gates of Paradise' and the Florentine Baptistery," The Art Bulletin 60, no. 2 (1978): 242. 178 Hans Sedlmayr, Die Entstehung der Kathedrale, Zurich, 1950, p. 119. Cited in Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane; the Nature of Religion, 1st American ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1959), 61-62. 179 Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," 139. See also ”Revelation through Veiling in the Old Roman Catholic Liturgy,” in Mosebach, Heresy of Formlessness, 161-73. 180 Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," 134-36.


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the sanctuary which symbolized heaven.”181 Early Church Father John Chrysostom similarly comments, “when you see the veils withdrawn, then think you see heaven opened, and the angels descending from above.”182 While the Catholic veil experience did not allow initiates to physically enter the heavenly realm, as in the contemporary Mormon experience, it yet retained the connection to Jesus Christ’s role in parting the veil and giving humanity a glimpse of eternity.

Christological symbolism, similar to the Latter-day Saint tradition, was connected directly to the veil of the early Christian church. “Jerome informs us that one fourth-century church in Anablatha (near Jerusalem) was discovered to have a veil hanging in the sanctuary that bore the image of Christ. Epiphanius, upon entering the church, was so unsettled by the discovery that he ripped it down and ordered a plain white veil to be hung in its place.”183 Another parallel to the Mormon veil experience is found in medieval confessions. Before wooden confession booths were prescribed, notes James White, “confessions had frequently been heard at the roodscreen, but without the distinct space to ensure secrecy.”184 At this symbolic boundary between heaven and earth, the penitent had the opportunity to speak with someone who represented the Lord as they confessed their sins through the veil.185 Catholic confession up until the Council of Trent,186 therefore, had clear references to the ancient Jewish temple veil as well as the “symbolic veil scene” of the Mormon temple where a “candidate appears before God, who alone can forgive sins.”187

The learning across the religious traditions in the Messianic paradisiacal era has continued to be a productive venture. Theological themes from this episode of cosmic history are interwoven deeply into the symbolism associated with the Catholic nave, Jewish Holy Place, and Mormon Terrestrial room as a renewed paradisiacal garden. Another particularly fascinating

!181 Ibid., 139. 182 Cited in Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticae, 436. 183 Gaskill, Sacred Symbols, 230. See Epiphanius, “Letter to John, Bishop of Jerusalem,” cited by Jerome in “The Letters of Saint Jerome,” Letter LI, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers—Second Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 14 vols. (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 6:89. Cf. Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticae, 436-37. 184 James F. White, Roman Catholic Worship: Trent to Today, 2nd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 4-5. 185 “Like Catholics, Latter-day Saints have also occasionally used the term ‘porter’ for an office associated with ritual. In early LDS practice the individual who stood on the celestial side of the temple veil, representing the Father, was sometimes referred to as a ‘porter.’” Gaskill, Sacred Symbols, 19n10. 186 The symbolism of the veil was partially obscured after this Council since it had “the effect of transforming the entire church into a narthex, an unadorned anteroom where, according to the custom of the ancient Church, public sinners would wait to be absolved.” Mosebach, Heresy of Formlessness, 171. 187 Von Wellnitz, "The Catholic Liturgy and the Mormon Temple," 29.


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insight that was (re)discovered in the Mormon temple endowment sequence during the theological dialogue with Jewish and Catholic traditions was the important role of the Messiah figure, who ushers in an era of Millennial peace by restoring humanity to the paradise once lost by Adam and allows the faithful to (re)enter God’s presence through a veil. The journey of comparative theology through this architectural hermeneutic shortly comes to an end as we enter the final episode of cosmic history.

Episode V: The Perfected Heavenly Realm

For Mormon, Jewish, and Catholic sacred space, the final episode of cosmic history is the perfected heavenly realm. In this episode, we find several themes common among the religions, which include God’s presence, the ark or altar as a heavenly throne, divine light, and notions of a heavenly paradise.

Mormon

The Mormon endowment sequence comes to an end as initiates pass through the temple veil and enter a space representing the perfected, heavenly realm. The space is given the name of the Celestial room since, in Mormon theology, the Celestial Kingdom is the highest degree and glory of heaven (D&C 76:70 [50-70]; cf. 1 Cor. 15:40-42). Allen Claire Rozsa remarks that entering the Celestial room is a symbolic “return to the presence of God, a place of exquisite beauty and serenity, where one may feel and meditate ‘in the beauty of holiness’ (Ps. 29:2).”188 The architectural experience of this space is unique because of its doctrinal significance.189 Juxtaposed against the other endowment rooms that require active ritual participation, the Celestial room is inherently different. As “a place of aesthetic splendor and quiet contemplation,”190 the Celestial room shifts its focus away from the theatrical presentation of the ritual drama.

Architectural features of Celestial rooms are used to symbolize the transition to the heavenly realm and enhance the contemplative atmosphere. Several examples include the use of verticality, domes, and increased levels of light. As initiates first enter the Celestial room, a noticeable difference in comparison to the other endowment rooms is the increased size in spatial volume and/or ceiling height – a strategy for reinforcing the eternal rewards

!188 Allen Claire Rozsa, "Temple Ordinances," in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, ed. Daniel H. Ludlow (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 4:1445. 189 Hamilton, "The Salt Lake Temple: An Architectural Monograph", 120. 190 Ludlow, Principles and Practices of the Restored Gospel, 367.


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associated with heaven.191 In the Salt Lake Temple, the Celestial room’s “spatial expansion was a deliberate effort to express visually a feeling of exaltation and a spiritual terminus,” writes Hamilton.192 Domes are another feature used in Celestial rooms to evoke a sense of verticality. While this is a more recent strategy in Mormon temple architecture, its use links it to the symbolism of the “dome of heaven” that is found in many Byzantine churches.193 The symbolism of light is yet another feature closely associated with the architectural message of the Celestial room, since light represents the brightness and glory of God’s Celestial Kingdom – often compared to the sun (see D&C 76:70). Consequently, many Celestial rooms are designed to be the most brightly lit space within the endowment sequence. The San Diego California Temple, for example, has “three times more glass than any other Mormon temple,”194 and its Celestial room is flanked by enormous vertical panels of art glass flooding the interior with heavenly qualities of light.

Another way the heavenly realm is commemorated is through painted murals, stained glass windows, and mirrors. In the Celestial room of the Vernal Utah Temple, there is a large painting of Jesus Christ with outstretched arms to greet initiates who symbolically enter God’s presence.195 Other artistic representations of the heavenly realm depict sky and clouds on either ceilings or walls.196 After passing through the veil in the San Diego California Temple, for instance, initiates enter a barrel-vaulted corridor painted with “soft clouds” leading them to the Celestial room.197 Other temples, such as those in Los Angeles, California and Hamilton, New Zealand, have light pastel-colored wall murals depicting heavenly

!191 “The hierarchical ascendency of the Celestial over the Terrestrial and Telestial kingdoms of reward is architecturally evident in the height difference among these emblematic rooms.” Hamilton, "The Salt Lake Temple: An Architectural Monograph", 120. See also Jackson, "Designing and Constructing the 'New' Nauvoo Temple: A Personal Reflection," 218. One of the tallest and most dramatic Celestial rooms is found in the San Diego California Temple. 192 Hamilton, "The Salt Lake Temple: An Architectural Monograph", 119. 193 Cf. Kathleen E. McVey, "The Domed Church as Microcosm: Literary Roots of an Architectural Symbol," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 37(1983). Several examples of Mormon Celestial rooms with domes can be found in the St. Louis Missouri, Redlands California, and Boston Massachusetts temples. For a photograph of the St. Louis Missouri Celestial room, see "Things Pertaining to This House," Temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1999): 48. 194 Ann Jarmusch, "Spiritual Spectacle | Traditional Design Takes a Back Seat at Freeway-Close Mormon Temple," The San Diego Union - Tribune, Febuary 21, 1993. 195 A photograph of this room can be found in the booklet Preparing to Enter The Holy Temple (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2002), 6. 196 Two examples are found in the Celestial rooms of the Washington D.C. and Brisbane Australia Temples. 197 Sandi Dolbee, "Public Gets First Look at Mormons' New Temple," The San Diego Union-Tribune, Febuary 19, 1993.


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gardens.198 Temple patrons who enter the Celestial room in the Idaho Falls Idaho Temple encounter wall murals portraying heavenly gardens dotted with groups of people dressed in white clothing.199 One theological message of this painting bears witness to the doctrine of eternal families; “And that same sociality which exists among us here [on earth] will exist among us there [in heaven], only it will be coupled with eternal glory” (D&C 130:2). Beyond painted murals, stained glass windows are another link to ideas about the heavenly realm. In several Celestial rooms, one finds stained glass depictions of the tree of life as a reaffirmation of John’s apocalyptic vision that this unique tree is near God’s heavenly throne (Rev. 22:1-2).200 One last important feature adorning several Celestial rooms is the presence of large wall mirrors. Often the mirrors are placed on parallel walls to produce a set of diminishing images that reinforce sacred time, eternity, and the endless rewards of eternal life.201 In the Mormon Celestial room, one finds the use of light, verticality, paintings, stained glass, and mirrors in order to assist temple patrons as they prayerfully contemplate within the space representing the heavenly realm. As Alonzo Gaskill explains, “that which is beyond the veil” and within the Celestial room truly “represents God’s abode—Heaven, the Celestial Kingdom.”202

Jewish

Somewhat similar in theological significance to the Mormon Celestial room is the ancient Jewish temple’s most sacred place or Holy of Holies (debir). As Flavius Josephus informs us, the Holy of Holies was meant to represent heaven; in fact, even the “proportion of the measures of the tabernacle proved to be an imitation of the

!198 Similar to these painted wall murals, the Celestial room in the Salt Lake Temple is “richly embellished with [sculptural] clusters of fruits and flowers” to convey the heavenly paradise. Talmage, The House of the Lord, 160. 199 For a photograph of this Celestial room, see "Things Pertaining to This House," 49. 200 This includes temples in San Antonio Texas, Accra Ghana, Palmyra New York, and Winter Quarters Nebraska. Val Brinkerhoff, The Day Star: Reading Sacred Architecture, ed. Sarah Cutler, 2 vols. (Honeoye Falls, NY: Digital Legend, 2011), 1:58, 142-43. The Palmyra New York Temple even has “twelve pieces of clear glass representing the fruit found on the tree” in parallel to John’s “tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits” (Rev. 22:2). See Chad S. Hawkins, The First 100 Temples (Salt Lake City, Utah: Eagle Gate, 2001), 211; cf. Gerald E. Hansen, Jr. and Val Brinkerhoff, Sacred Walls: Learning from Temple Symbols (Salt Lake City: Covenant Communications, 2009), 4. 201 Mexico City Mexico and Hong Kong China temples are two examples of Celestial rooms with mirrors, see photographs in "Things Pertaining to This House," 48. 202 Gaskill, Sacred Symbols, 240.


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system of the world.”203 More specifically, the perfect one to one (1:1) proportions of the cube-shaped Holy of Holies “is itself expressive of perfection, the perfection of deity, and within the mythology of ancient temple building is the typical shape of the heavenly temple,” asserts John Lundquist.204 In the Jewish tradition, we find that the perfected heavenly realm is reflected in the architectural form and proportions of the Holy of Holies. Possibly building upon this Judaic understanding of perfection, several Mormon Celestial rooms from the early twentieth century were designed to be cube-like.205

Moving beyond the geometrical form of the space, the spatial sequence or path leading into the temple demonstrates a level of hierarchy through material and technological gradation. Several studies have noted the various gradations by comparing architectural features (materials of doors, colors of woven curtains/veils), building materials and finishes (types of wood or metal paneling), furnishings (materials and finishes), and wall ornamentation (materials, finishes, and craftsmanship).206 What is apparent in the Jewish model of sacred space is that “the deeper one penetrates towards the innermost part, the more valuable and more technologically sophisticated its components become.”207 According to Victor Hurowitz, one of the purposes behind this hierarchy “was certainly to inspire a feeling of increasing holiness and grandeur while approaching the most sacred spot, and focusing attention on YHWH who sat enthroned in the debir.”208 Both spatial sequences in the Jewish and Mormon temple are similar in symbolism as they demonstrate a level of increasing holiness as one approaches God’s presence, yet the actual experience is different. As one approaches the Celestial room in the Mormon temple, the ceiling height and light levels increase; meanwhile, the path leading to the Holy of

!203 Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. III, 6:4; 7:7, in Josephus, The Works of Flavius Josephus, the Learned and Authentic Jewish Historian and Celebrated Warrior. Similar to Josephus, Rabbi Pinhas ben Ya’ir, a Talmudic sage of the second century writes: “The house of the Holy of Holies was made to correspond to the highest heaven.” Cited in Patai, Man and Temple in Ancient Jewish Myth and Ritual, 108. 204 John M. Lundquist, The Temple of Jerusalem: Past, Present, and Future (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 19. Cf. Jenson, Graded Holiness, 96-97. The perfect proportions of the cube continued to be used in later religious traditions such as in John’s apocalyptic vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem and the Ka’ba in Mecca. See “The Idea of the Temple within Christianity” and “The Idea of the Temple within Islam,” in Lundquist, The Temple of Jerusalem, 151-97. 205 This is suggested in the square proportions of the floor plans and cross sections of the Alberta Canada and Oakland California temples. See Nels Benjamin Lundwall, Temples of the Most High, 5th ed. (Salt Lake City,1945), 403-04; Hugh B. Brown, Continuing the Quest (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1961), 294-95. 206 See Menahem Haran, Temples and Temple-Service in Ancient Israel: An Inquiry into Biblical Cult Phenomena and the Historical Setting of the Priestly School (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995; reprint, 2nd), 158-65; Hurowitz, "Yhwh's Exalted House," 88-90; Jenson, Graded Holiness, 101-06. 207 Hurowitz, "Yhwh's Exalted House," 88; cf. Haran, Temples and Temple-Service, 164. 208 Hurowitz, "Yhwh's Exalted House," 89.


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Holies in the Jewish temple was an inverse of the Mormon configuration, since the ceiling height and lighting levels incrementally decreased. The association of God’s presence and symbolic light in the Holy of Holies, nonetheless, remains fixed despite the difference in experience.

A closer look at the Holy of Holies reveals its connection to the perfected heavenly realm. One factor reinforcing the idea of heavenly paradise was through its wall depictions of vegetation within the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 6:29). The décor of the walls, similar to the wall murals of Mormon Celestial rooms, professed that the “Holy of Holies was also beyond time. To enter was to enter eternity.”209 The Ark of the Covenant, encompassed by the cherubim, was placed in the exact center of the room and symbolized God’s heavenly throne in eternity; it was a place of oracle where one received divine revelation.210 Thus, when the high priest entered the Holy of Holies it was as if he were entering God’s presence in the heavenly realm.211 While painted representations of clouds in Mormon Celestial rooms evoke a sense of the heavenly realm, incense in the Jewish ritual could have stirred up a similar experience for the high priest. “Entering the Holy of Holies with a cloud of incense is the temple reality that underlies the visions of the human figure entering heaven with clouds or of the LORD appearing in clouds upon the throne,” Margaret Barker illustrates.212

Catholic

The sanctuary or apse within a Catholic church is connected to the symbolic association of the perfected heavenly realm. Some early sources link the arched and circular form of the apse to “the canopy of heaven.”213 In the early church, the sanctuary space was separated from the rest of the nave by railings, fences, veils, or screens; subsequently, access to it was restricted only to “ordained clergy.”214 Paraphrasing Eusebius, the “whole altar place was kept inaccessible to all but the clergy in time of divine service.”215 This imagery reminds us of the exclusive nature of the Jewish temple’s !209 Barker, The Great High Priest, 192. Cf. Philo, Questions on Exodus 2:91. 210 Ibid., 199. We know that in “Solomon’s Temple, the Holy of Holies (the innermost sacred sanctuary, which housed the Ark of the Covenant and the cherubim), was in the shape of a cube.” In fact, “Yahweh was said to speak to his people from above the ark and between the wings of the cherubim…[since] this was at the quincunx, or dead centre, of the cube, which vibrationally was the place of power and transformation, just as it is within any pyramid shape.” Gordon Strachan, Chartres: Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space (Poland: Floris Books, 2003), 56. 211 Barker, The Great High Priest, 189. 212 Ibid., 222. Cf. Isaiah 6:1-4; Dan. 7:13; Acts 1:9; Rev. 1:7, 10:1. 213 Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticae, 437. 214 Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," 134. Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticae, 2:431. 215 Bingham, Origines Ecclesiasticae, 2:433.


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Holy of Holies, which was accessed by the high priest but once a year. In many instances, the apse, altar, or sanctuary are sometimes referred to in language similar to the Holy of Holies discussed earlier.216 Thus, the Catholic sanctuary “stood for the heavenly paradise which is the abode of God.”217 The altar within the sanctuary had its parallels to the Ark of the Covenant. According to His Holiness Benedict XVI, Roman pontiff emeritus, “the altar is the place where heaven is opened up.” Accordingly, the closed end of the apse “does not close off the church, but opens it up—and leads it into the eternal liturgy.”218 The Catholic altar and sanctuary are reminiscent of the Jewish Holy of Holies and Mormon Celestial room as they become the place of revelation. “Like the architecture of the Jerusalem Temple with its three ascending levels which reach a climax at the Holy of Holies, the classic Christian church with its three ascending levels which reach a climax at a curtained and canopied altar, expresses through architecture God’s revelation of himself,” claims Helen Dietz.219 The connections between the apse and the temple’s Holy of Holies are further confirmed by looking at the ninth-century apse mosaic of Germigny-des-Pres Oratorio in France, which depicts cherubim and the Ark of the Covenant.220

Another way that the sanctuary and its apse reinforce heaven is through paradisal themes. Often a cross is placed in the apse of Catholic churches as a symbolic Tree of Life. This is precisely because, in early Christian art, “the cross replaces the tree of Eden and opens again the potential for eternal life and favor with God.”221 The Basilica of San Clemente in Rome has a fine example of a mosaic that reinforces this symbolism. According to one text, the cross in the mosaic “takes on the character of the Tree of Life of the Paradise, hitherto lost, but now restored by Christ. The Four Rivers of Paradise (Gen. 2:10), now springing from the foot of the Cross, are fed from ‘the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the Throne of God and of the Lamb’ (Rev. 22:1), i.e. from the Cross.”222 As one recalls from the earlier discussion, several Mormon Celestial rooms depict a similar paradisal theme to the San Clemente mosaic, but instead use stained glass windows to portray the Tree of Life. It is therefore in the Catholic apse that we have important theological connections to God’s perfected heavenly realm.

The journey of faith in learning across religious borders has come to

!216 Ibid., 2:430. 217 Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," 134. Cf. St Simeon of Thessalonica, “Homily on the Transfiguration”, Patrologia Graeca, col. 565A. 218 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. J. Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 71. 219 Dietz, "The Nuptial Meaning of Classic Church Architecture," 142. 220 Cf. Hamblin and Seely, Solomon's Temple, 115. 221 Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art, 154. 222 Mosaico Di S.Clemente, (Rome, Italy: Collegio S.Clemente, 1988), Figs. 1-3; cf. San Clemente, Roma, (Rome, Italy: Collegio S.Clemente, 1992), Figs. 6-8.


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an end with the perfected heavenly realm. The theological dialogue between the Mormon Celestial room, the Jewish Holy of Holies, and the Catholic sanctuary and apse has successfully identified several overlapping themes that the religions share in this last episode of cosmic history. The symbolism behind entering God’s divine presence through a veil carries over into each religious tradition and is portrayed through art, architecture, ritual, and scripture. Similarly, divine light is representative of heaven. Whether it is the Celestial room, the Holy of Holies, or the sanctuary-apse, each space represents a place where the divine and human are meant to touch – they are spaces for God’s revelations. Each of the common threads that have been identified have enhanced the (re)interpretation of the perfected heavenly realm and its place within the episodes of cosmic history.

Conclusions + Theological Reflections

The comparative theology employed throughout the paper has been a means to clarify various similarities among the three religions by analyzing their ritual experiences, religious ideals, spatial sequences, and cosmic episodes of history. Although the architectural configurations are formally and historically different, faith-promoting parallels are discovered along with divergent opportunities for interreligious dialogue. The reflections presented in this paper suggest how one’s understanding of the architectural experience of a specific typology of sacred space, such as the Mormon temple, can be enriched when it is compared cross-culturally, non-historically, and inter-religiously to other cases of sacred architecture. More specifically, I have found that Jones’ hermeneutical methods of interpreting and comparing sacred architecture, when combined with Clooney’s methods of comparative theology, appear to be compatible. The grouping of these methods has been fruitful in the “back-and-forth learning”223 of this paper, but also in the revealing of rare and important connections across Mormonism, Judaism, and Catholicism.

My personal apprehensions and understanding of sacred architecture has greatly been enriched by visits to many of the buildings mentioned in this project. In each encounter, I have gained a greater appreciation for both the variety and similarity that exists among the architectural configurations. Each building (to some degree or another) conveys some type of spiritual message or symbolic meaning and leaves me with a spiritual experience. It is at this time that I desire to share some of those personal architectural apprehensions and theological reflections.

The journey I have been engaged in over the past several years has revealed important overlapping relationships across the three religious traditions. This revelation has come by comparing !223 Ibid., 11.


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scripture, ritual, art, and architecture. Through an exploration of the five episodes of cosmic history, it is evident how the contemporary temple of Mormonism connects to both the ancient Jewish Temple and the Catholic Basilica. One finds in the story of creation, with its association to the light and darkness of Day One, a crucial pattern for the cosmogonic primordial era – a theme which is conveyed architecturally through the Catholic apse-sanctuary, Jewish Holy of Holies, and Mormon Creation room. The abundant fertility associated with the paradisal world of Eden is, likewise, correlated to art, ritual, and architecture found in the Jewish Holy Place, Mormon Garden room, and Catholic nave. After being cast out of the Garden, Adam and Eve enter the fallen, disordered world ruled by Satan. The need for reconciliation from sin is once again architecturally reinforced across religions with the use of courtyards, narthexes, or rooms representing mankind’s fallen condition. Later, one learns that the coming of the Messiah ushers in a paradisiacal era which (re)introduces Adam and his posterity into the Garden of the Lord. Here, prayer at altars, conversations at curtain-like partitions, and promises of resurrection for the faithful are found in the Mormon Terrestrial room, Catholic nave, and Jewish Holy Place. Finally, one encounters the perfected heavenly realm where the light of God’s presence is reverently revealed in the architecture of the Celestial room, Holy of Holies, and sanctuary. Consequently, I have found that the Mormon temple can be (re)interpreted in light of the cosmic symbolism of the Jewish temple’s tripartite spatial sequence and its themes of creation, fall, and atonement. Likewise, the Catholic tripartite architectural narrative and its eschatological meaning parallel the Mormon temple endowment sequence and its symbolic meaning.

It is as a Mormon studying Jewish and Catholic traditions that I have found the following comparative theological project to be a revelation full of faith-promoting insights and truths about God’s “plan of salvation.” First, I would suggest that Latter-day Saints can come to a better understanding of God’s plan through this Mormon-Jewish-Catholic architectural comparison. For example, most graphical representations of the plan of salvation published by the Church (here I am reminded of flip charts I used as a missionary and the diagrams published by the Church Education System) are typically depicted in a linear format. The design of these diagrams are meant to be read from left-to-right, beginning with the following sequence of events: 1) pre-mortal life, 2) the veil or birth, 3) mortality or earth life, 4) physical death or the grave, 5) the spirit world, 6) resurrection and judgment, and 7) the three degrees or kingdoms of glory. Out of the seven elements listed, only three (perhaps four) of the five episodes of cosmic history are represented. In other words, only three or four rooms of the temple’s five-room endowment sequence are conveyed in Church-published diagrams. Nowhere in this portrayal of God’s plan of cosmic history do we find the paradisal world of Eden or the Messianic paradisiacal era


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(except for the case of resurrection or judgment). Theoretically, if we were to apply this technique of representing the plan of salvation to the symbolism associated with a Catholic basilica, the entire nave would disappear. The exact same thing would happen to the Jewish Temple’s Holy Place if the symbolism of those episodes were removed. Similarly, if the presentation of the Mormon Temple endowment were to eliminate these episodes of cosmic history, then important aspects of God’s plan of salvation would be missing and lose their theological significance. As a Latter-day Saint, it would be difficult to imagine the endowment sequence without Adam and Eve’s Garden story and their subsequent fall and expulsion. Thus, an important insight that is (re)discovered by (re)interpreting the Mormon temple endowment sequence during its theological dialogue with other faiths is precisely how important these two episodes of cosmic history really are for God’s “plan of salvation.”

One last observation that was learned during my ongoing sojourn through comparative theology is the important role of the Mormon Temple’s five-room endowment sequence in conveying a cyclical vision of cosmic history. One finds in the symbolism of the Creation and Celestial rooms, for instance, the notion that a person ends their journey where they began – namely, in the presence of God. The theological significance of a cyclical vision of salvation history for both Mormons and Catholics is how Jesus Christ is both “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last” (Rev. 22:13). Latter-day Saints may more readily recognize the cyclical symbolism in the phrase, God’s “course is one eternal round” (D&C 3:2; 35:1; Alma 7:20; 37:12; 1 Nephi 10:19).224 When the tripartite layout of Jewish and Catholic sacred architecture is compared to the five-room sequence of the Mormon Temple, at first glance, the formal and spatial composition leads one to believe that there is no significant correlation between the religious buildings. After a closer examination of the episodes of cosmic history, however, one is able to (re)interpret the sacred architecture of Judaism and Catholicism in light of the Mormon Temple. Consequently, Jews and Catholics (though I venture with some hesitation) might be able to come to a new theological understanding of their linear configurations of architecture in light of the somewhat cyclical symbolism of the Mormon temple endowment.

During this journey of “faith seeking understanding,” specifically in (re)interpreting the five-room sequence of the Mormon temple endowment, I have discovered a type of comparative hermeneutic theology. As established earlier in this paper, the Mormon Temple

!224 The cyclical nature of the Mormon endowment also has ties to Mircea Eliade’s “myth of the eternal return” which he derives from non-Western or (so-called) primitive religions. See, for instance, Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History.


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is similar to both Jewish and Catholic sacred spaces; it “stands as a transitional location. It mediates between time and eternity, between the pre-existence, earthly existence and the post-mortem realm of the afterlife.”225 Thus, it is my hope that the reader will take these findings and allow them to become the means of alleviating some of the (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations among different religious architectural traditions as well as cultivating opportunities for future interreligious dialogue. As a self-identified Latter-day Saint and novice disciple-scholar who has honestly sought for truth and understanding, I have come to view my humble research efforts “to learn across religious borders as in harmony with God’s plan.”226 In conclusion, it is my testimony of God’s “plan of salvation,” as revealed in each religion’s architecture, which I have sought to share with the world.

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To see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.

-William Blake

As the opening of William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence” suggests, we live in a world ripe with paradox and fraught with uncertainties which far exceed our own cognitive capacities for understanding. How does one hold infinity in the finite space of the palm? How is eternity embraced within a standardized unit of time? Blake’s prose reminds us that while our minds are capable of many things, they are bound by the limits of human reason, unable to digest all that is possible beyond the narrow conceptions with which we have structured our world, rendering all that is possible impossible to understand. No where is this more true or evident than humanity’s search for God. Theologians Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and Gordon Kaufman affirm, “As reflective modes of thinking about God develop, awareness of the limitations of human knowledge of God become increasingly acute.”1 Each of the world’s great religious traditions maintains, in its own way, that God in God’s ultimate nature is beyond characterization within the limited range of words and concepts available to human thought.2 Thus, alongside the positive and affirmative theological perspectives of various religious traditions, there have also developed negative theologies as well, which underscore the hiddenness and 1 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and Gordon Kaufman, “God,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15. 2 John Hick , "Ineffability ," Religious Studies , 36, no. 1 (2000): 35.

The Sounds of Silence: A Comparative Reading of Mystical Theology and the Kena Upanishad BY EMILY HENSON


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ineffability of God which is beyond the realm of human knowing. In such cases, it is the not speaking of God which prompts further and more deeply penetrating theological inquiry as we are launched beyond the intellect’s final frontier—our minds stripped of all our intellectual scaffolding and conjecture so all that’s left is the raw, exquisite space where the human and divine touch. What follows in this essay is a comparative reading of two such apophatic theological texts from the Christian and Hindu traditions, respectively. From the Christian tradition I will read The Mystical Theology, a theological treatise that forms part of a larger corpus of the fifth century writer Pseudo-Dionysius, believed by scholars to be a Syrian monk writing under the biblical pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite.3 In this work, Dionysius emphatically presents his mystical theology which asserts that God is always the Other, hidden and inscrutable to human reason.4 Meditating on God’s ultimate mystery, Dionysius acknowledges the failure of language to capture God in God’s totality, and therefore proffers negative theology as an essential part of the theological process, complimentary to affirmative theologies, with the eventual goal that both negative and affirmative will be transcended in mystical union with God. Alongside Mystical Theology I will read a sacred scripture from the Hindu tradition: the Kena Upanishad. This Upanishad is an inquiry into the nature of human perception and knowledge. It focuses on the failure of human knowledge in knowing Brahman, the ultimate One True Reality. The reality we experience through our senses is transitory and impermanent, and therefore an unreliable source for knowledge of Brahman. Through negation and the renouncing of sense knowledge, the Kena Upanishad seeks to describe the truth of Truth—that Brahman cannot be known by the mind since it is infinite and beyond our intellectual capacities. Thus we only know Brahman when we know It not.5 Both Mystical Theology and Kena Upanishad present rich theological reflections on the absolute ineffability of God, and the failure of all positive language and imaginative conceptions we employ in our efforts to speak of God. As such, I suggest it will be a productive endeavor to read these two texts together in order to look more closely at the issues arising from not-speaking of God: What does this not-speaking say about God? What does it say about us? And what possibilities are offered (or thwarted) for encounter with God beyond words? These will be the guiding questions of my reading

3 Acts 17:34 “Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.” 4 Seely J. Beggiani, "Theology at the Service of Mysticism: Method in Pseudo-Dionysius," Theological Studies , 57 (1996): 201. 5 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 2:3.


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as I focus on the theme of God’s ineffability presented in Mystical Theology and Kena Upanishad. Of course, belonging to separate traditions, these texts are not intended to be read together. However, I believe this interpretative proximity will mutually illuminate and further disturb the boundaries of knowledge each text seeks to transcend. As these writings themselves reflect on the unsettled nature of human knowledge of God, by reading them together I hope to even further unsettle those boundaries and open new possibilities for interreligious learning, challenging the impulse to cling to more secure, stable, and ultimately more narrow theological perspectives. In carefully attending to each text, both the theological and existential possibilities at stake within each tradition separately become all the more potent as they are read and interpreted in tandem. Mystical Theology The constant that runs throughout Mystical Theology is the hidden, utterly inscrutable nature of God. The ultimate goal of theological inquiry, directed toward the fulfillment of the believer, is mystical union with God.6 In this way, theology articulates the journey of humans being pulled upwards towards the Divine. This union with God is above all expression and therefore best described as a plunge into darkness and divine silence. This is clear in the prayer that begins Mystical Theology as Dionysius implores the Lord:

Lead us up beyond unknowing and light, to the farthest peak of mystic scripture, where the mysteries of God’s Word lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of the hidden silence.7

Dionysius goes on to describe the mystic’s process of purification and understanding, which arises from an abandonment of both the senses and the intellect—all the objects of human thought —and, by way of negation, leads to a surrender of unknowing and mystical union with the One that transcends all:

In the diligent exercise of mystical contemplation, leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and nonbeing, that you may arise by unknowing towards the union, as far as is attainable, with it that transcends all being and all knowledge.8

6 Beggiani, “At the Service of Mysticism,” 202. 7 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 1. 8 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 1.


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It is in giving oneself over to this incomprehensibility and unknowing that one arrives at union with God. However, it should be clarified that “unknowing” is not the same as “ignorance,” in the way we ordinarily understand the concept. While ignorance speaks to a type of lack, unknowing speaks to an awareness—specifically, the awareness that there is no finite knowledge which can fully grasp the Infinite God. Instead, God can only be approached through a sustained attention to the unknowing, which is beyond and above all knowledge. This is the ultimate surrender and self-renunciation which brings one into the “superessential Radiance of the Divine Darkness.”9 Here a similar distinction applies as “Divine Darkness” is not to be understood as equivalent to the ordinary concept of darkness. Ordinary darkness again refers to a type of lack—specifically a lack or absence of light. Divine Darkness, by contrast, refers to an excess or abundance of light. As such, darkness can be said to symbolize ignorance, while Divine Darkness can be said to symbolize a transcendent unknowing, a superknowledge beyond that which is obtained by means of discursive reason. Using the example of Moses at Mt. Sinai, Dionysius provides a scriptural account of the “plunge into Darkness” which follows the “ascent above the topmost altitudes of holy places.” 10 He observes that even in this instance, Moses does not meet God himself, but saw only the place where God dwells. Therefore, our highest understandings “are but symbolical expressions of those that are immediately beneath it that is above all.”11 These “symbolic expressions” are not in perfect correspondence with the Highest One, they function as place holders which point us to God, but do not in themselves contain God.12 In that moment, Moses has reached the top of what is possible by human means, but is just beneath what is higher still. However, Moses then leaves all behind and plunges into the mysterious darkness of divine union:

But then he [Moses] breaks free from them, away from what sees and is seen, and he plunges into the truly mysterious darkness of unknowing. Here, renouncing all that the mind may conceive, wrapped entirely in the intangible, and the invisible, he belongs completely to him who is beyond everything.13

9 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 1. 10 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 1. 11 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 1. 12 God is even above the highest symbols our minds can contemplate. For example, in the sentence “God is beautiful,” beautiful is only a place holder. As the word beautiful itself presupposes ideas and concepts with which we are familiar and functions within a rational structure our minds can access. 13 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 1.


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It is here in the inactivity of all knowledge—the unknowing—that one enters the Divine Darkness and is absorbed in that which is beyond all knowledge. It is important to note that since God is beyond being, the spiritual goal is beyond speech, the mind, or being itself. As a result, it cannot be adequately described. This, therefore, necessitates negative statements about God to compliment and correct affirmations so that both may be transcended. At this point it is important for Dionysius to distinguish between affirmations and negations concerning God. The key issue seems to be the direction in which he conceives the two methods moving:

For with these latter [affirmative] we begin with the universal and primary, and pass through the intermediate and secondary to the particular and ultimate attributes; but now [with the negative] we ascend from the particular to the universal conceptions, abstracting all attributes in order that, without veil, we may know that Unknowing which is enshrouded under all that is known and all that can be known.14

In the affirmative discourse our contemplation descends from the highest things to the lowest, embracing an ever-increasing number of human concepts. But with the negative discourse, we ascend from the proliferation of concepts (the lowest) to the highest, so that we are moved to silence—being absorbed by the totally ineffable:

For the higher we soar in contemplation the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible; even as now, when plunging into the Darkness that is above the intellect, we pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence of thoughts and of words.15

In speaking negatively about God, we rule out that which the divine mystery is not as a way of speaking indirectly of what the divine mystery is; first by negating the lowest characterizations of God, and then proceeding to negate even the most honorable and lofty names for God that we can imagine. The final state of this practice is a silence that is predicated on the memory of the trajectory of negations, which serve as a way of indirectly conceiving of God beyond all names and categories. When we come to the point where all we do and say fails, then we have failed successfully because only then can we get to the point where we transcend all that we affirm and all that we negate:

14 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 3. 15 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 3.


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Nor can any affirmation or negation be applied to it, for although we may affirm or deny the things below it, we can neither affirm nor deny it, [for] the all-perfect and unique Cause of all things transcends all affirmation, and thesimple pre-eminence of its absolute nature is outside every negation, free from every limitation and beyond them all.16

In concluding, Dionysius affirms the incomprehensible, inscrutable, and ineffable reality of God which theology in all respects must deal with constantly. Here in an emphatic and unqualified way, he asserts that God, the ultimate One, transcends all categories of human thought. Both affirmation and negation are inadequate, and point beyond themselves to an absolutely transcendent reality. God’s transcendence should never be compromised for the sake of our theologies. Rather theology must remain in service to the contemplation of that which is beyond all. The Kena Upanishad The Kena Upanishad begins as an inquiry into the nature of perception. It derives its name from the first word of the text, kena, which means “by whom?” It represents the search for the power that lies behind the workings of the universe:

By whom is the mind directed to fall (on its objects)? Directed by whom does the foremost vital air move? By whom is wished this speech which the people utter? Who is the radiant being that unites the eye and the ear (with their objects)?17

This beginning underscores the importance of inquiry on the path to the realization of the Truth.18 In reply to these questions we learn that it is Brahman which makes possible our speech, our thoughts, our sounds, and our breath. Our search for Truth is determined by delving into oneself and searching new frontiers which are unknown, but which make our sensory experiences possible.19 Brahman is the permanent true reality, the “ear of the ear, the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech.” 20 However, it cannot be expressed or reached by the senses since Brahman is not an object subject to the mind, speech, or the senses:

The eye does not reach there, nor speech, nor mind, nor do we know (Its nature). Therefore we don’t know how to

16 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 5. 17 Panoli, Kena Upanishad ,1:1. 18 Nagesh D. Sonde, The Commentary of Sri Madhva on Isha and Kena Upanishad , (Bombay : Vasantik Prakashan, 1990), 57. 19 Sonde, Commentary of Sri Madhava, 57. 20 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 1:2.


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impart instruction (about It). Distinct indeed is That from the known and distinct from the unknown.21

Not being subject to hearing, seeing, thinking, or speaking, the ineffable Brahman is behind each of these. It is different from what is known, rather it is what knows; it is not what is seen, but what sees; it is not what is expressed by speech, but that which expresses speech.22 In this, the elusive but necessary presence of Brahman is revealed through the negation of our sensory experience. In so doing, the Kena Upanishad highlights the limits of human reason and language in knowing Brahman. Brahman is not contained by the speech or symbols we employ to talk about It. There is always something beyond what can be said, there is always more than humans are able to grasp by the mind. As such, these must be renounced and abandoned if one hopes to attain immortality.23 After explaining it in this way, the teacher goes on to elaborate the paradox of knowing Brahman:

If you think ‘I know Brahman rightly,’ you have known but little of Brahman’s (true) nature. What you know of His form and what form you know among the gods (too is but little). Therefore Brahman is still to be inquired into by you.24

In this we hear the all-important message that we do not know Brahman, especially when we think we know it well. Likewise, we do not know what we do not know either:

It is known to him to whom It is unknown; he to whom It is known does not know it. It is unknown to those who know, and known to those who know not.25 Only in unknowing is Brahman known. Since Brahman is infinite and beyond the capacity of our minds, we can only say we know It when we understand that Brahman is not limited to what we know of It. Only the wise are aware of their own limitations in knowing. We must apply an active mind and deconstruct what we are doing when we say we know something. We must know what it means to know, and not just know the object known. When we have discovered this self-reflexivity and subjectivity, then we have taken a step forward to a higher state of knowing. To this end, what is demanded is that each one must seek Brahman on his/her

21 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 1:3. 22 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 1:4-8. 23 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 1:2. 24 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 2:1. 25 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 2:3.


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own, since “we do not know how to impart instruction (about It).” 26 Only individually, by going inside oneself, can we come to know Brahman in reality:

When Brahman is known as the inner Self (of cognition) in every state of consciousness, It is known in reality.27

Thus the inward journey and withdrawal from the world make the wise immortal. The Self is the source of strength and vitality and through its awareness we gain knowledge and immortality, transcending both life and death. Having imparted these fundamentals, the Kena continues by illustrating these ideas through an allegory of the gods. The story goes that Brahman obtained victory for the gods, but they did not recognize this and vainly attributed their success to themselves: “Ours alone is the victory, ours alone is this glory.” 28 However, since it was Brahman who made the victory possible, after having seen the vanity of the gods, Brahman appeared before them. Neither of the three gods—Agni, Vayu, or Indra—understood what had appeared before them, so one by one each was sent forth to investigate and come to know what It was. Both Agni and Vayu failed in their encounters to showcase their own powers, or to know that it was Brahman before them. Finally, as Indra was sent forth and approached Brahman, It disappeared from him, but in that spot appeared a charming woman, who upon Indra’s questioning, finally revealed to him that it was Brahman who had been before him. As a result Indra became the greatest of the god’s for having known It was Brahman first.

He approached It, but It disappeared from him. In that space itself, Indra approached an exceedingly charming woman. To that Uma decked in god, he said: ‘Who is that spirit?’ She said: ‘It was Brahman. In the victory that was Brahman’s you were reveling in joy.’ Then alone did Indra know for certain It was Brahman.29

The teaching of this story is that Brahman is the cause of the god’s greatness, but even the god’s do not know it, nor are they able to understand it. It is only through Uma, the personification of wisdom, do the gods learn that they have come in contact with Brahman.30 By having touched Brahman their misconceptions are removed and they excel above the other gods. Likewise, individuals who come to know Brahman are better off than those who do not know. This knowledge, however, is fleeting. Just as Brahman abruptly disappeared from Indra, so too is knowledge of Brahman

26 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 1:3. 27 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 2:4. 28 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 3:2. 29 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 4:11-5:1. 30 Sonde, Commentary of Sri Madhava, 70.


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for us, “like a flash of lightning or like the winking of the eye.” 31 Furthermore, this knowledge can only be obtained by turning inward, whereby the Self continually remembers It. After all this, the disciple again implores his teacher to reveal the hidden Upanishad. But the teacher replies, “I have spoken Upanishad to you. Of Brahman truly is the Upanishad that I have spoken.”32 The Upanishad itself is Brahman, therefore there remains nothing more to be said. The student’s reiterating of this question, even after he has just been taught, confirms that the secret knowledge does not consist of words or information, but in further and sustained inquiry. 33 This is a continual internal journey. How to seek Truth on this journey is what matters. The Kena Upanishad ends setting forth the conditions for knowing Brahman, they are “austerity, self-restraint and action” as well as knowledge of the Vedas. One who is established in these things is established in the “infinite, blissful, and supreme Brahman.” 34 Throughout the Kena Upanishad we are compelled to inquire into how it is that we perceive or understand anything. The text confronts us with fundamental questions about the mystery of perception, the limits of our own understanding, and the ultimate ineffable reality of Brahman. It employs negative language to strip away our attachment to concepts of the mind, so that we can reach a higher state of knowing. It concludes that Brahman cannot be fully known since we cannot objectify It. Nor can It be said to be unknown, since It is the cause of all our experiences. As such, Brahman is beyond even our categories of known and unknown. Interreligious Reflections Both Mystical Theology and the Kena Upanishad speak eloquently of God’s mystery and remind us of our limitations in the face of it. This parallel reading across two different religious traditions further underscores that point by problematizing the boundaries within which we speak and think about God. Each text is speaking of God within a particular tradition, while also speaking of God that lies beyond those particularities. We are reminded by both texts that God is beyond the categories and words and specific images we use in our attempts to capture divine reality. This is not meant to dilute religious commitments, or make them overly generalized, or to suggest that these texts are ultimately speaking of the same thing (though that is one valid theological possibility). Rather, the point is for us to recognize that these texts are speaking in the same way, thinking through and wrestling with similar ideas and similar questions which open up the space and possibility for

31 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 4:4. 32 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 4:7. 33 Sonde, Commentary of Sri Madhava, 68. 34 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 4:8-9.


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dialogue between them. In the beginning of this essay I laid out three questions to guide our thinking through these texts: What does this not-speaking say about God? What does it say about us? And what possibilities are offered (or thwarted) for encounter with God beyond words? I will consider each in turn to focus my further reflections. In the face of a God that defies all categories of human thought and speech, and the uncertainties that gives way to for us as readers, both texts reassure us by underscoring that this uncertainty is a necessary and proper part of our speech about God. God is ineffable, infinite, and inscrutable. But God is also beyond all of those things. While it is true that words reveal, they also obscure. If God is beyond all our human concepts, beyond what we can say and think and believe about God, then eventually in our search for God we are brought to an inevitable silence. This is not because there is nothing left to say, but paradoxically because there is too much to say that cannot be put into words. What each of these texts reminds us is that silence is accompanied not by loss, but by invitation. An invitation to further inquiry and an invitation to penetrate more deeply into God’s mystery—to plunge into the Divine Darkness. Not-speaking of God does not make God less, but more. The negations that figure into both texts are not about denying what God is or making God meaningless. Rather, these negations point instead to a surplus of God’s ultimate meaning. The space between our words and God’s reality makes room—for art, for poetry, for transcendence. The limitations of language both Mystical Theology and the Kena Upanishad acknowledge are not only a function of who God is, but also a function of who we are. As we read and think through these texts we are confronted with the finite nature of our humanity. There is, however, a usefulness to our inadequacy. It forces our fundamental duty in the face of God’s truth: humility. As the allegory of the gods from the Kena Upanishad makes clear, we must resist the urge to self-aggrandize or to think that we know all there is to know. This does not mean we know nothing of God, but simply that we do not know everything. What we think we know is not all there is to know. This awareness allows us the opportunity for reflection, increases our desire for more knowledge, and makes learning from others possible and necessary. This point is particularly salient in light of the world’s religious diversity. This kind of humility can help all of humanity flourish, even as we bear the discomfort and friction that often accompanies learning across religious boundaries. As such I suggest that our “unknowing” carries with it a deeply ethical component, as all interreligious learning should, to be dynamic force of compassion and understanding in our polarized world.


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Moreover, this comparative reading reminds us that the search for God does not occur in a vacuum, and so we cannot ignore the reality of others’ searching and others’ traditions. The Divine is not something to be contained by the words we use to name it and conceive of it. Some might argue that affirming the ultimate divine ineffability diminishes the value of particular religious language, scriptures, or practices. However, neither Mystical Theology nor the Kena Upanishad reaches that conclusion. Dionysius uses the example of Moses from the Christian scripture to make this point, and thend of the Kena affirms the value of the Vedas as “the limbs” of our knowledge.35 It is not necessary to abandon these particularities while still acknowledging God’s ineffability. These are the bridges that carry the invisible, transcendent, intangible God to the visible, tangible world. They lead us forward in our spiritual journey, even if they are in some sense imperfect. One textual difference with respect to encountering God that deserves to be addressed in this comparative reflection is the difference in where each text locates God. In the Kena, Brahman is identified with the inner Self, and one must subjectively turn inward to know this Reality.36 Whereas in Mystical Theology, Dionysius speaks of being “wholly absorbed,” and losing oneself in an unknowable Other, making God distinct from creation.37 Faced with these disparities, we must ask: What difference does it make? If for Dionysius the goal is a complete union with God, where one loses every distinction to become part of that with is “beyond all,” then what is the difference between the self and God at this point? If it is a complete union, has the self become Self? I raise these questions not because I have an answer, nor to draw singular, definitive theological conclusions—quite the opposite, actually. In the very act of raising such questions, we further increase the uncertainty and the silence where the divine may be more fully encountered. These kind of questions characterize the orientation of unknowing with which one must approach our words and ideas about God. It is this awareness, this sustained inquiry, that keeps us moving towards our goal of touching something of the Divine. In closing, I am brought back again to the words of William Blake and the end of the poem which started this essay. His final words echo the truths spoken by both Mystical Theology and the Kena Upanishad:

God appears, and God is light, To those poor souls who dwell in night; But does a human form display, To those who dwell in realms of day.

35 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch. 1 and Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 4:8. 36 Panoli, Kena Upanishad, 2:4. 37 Versluis, “The Mystical Theology,” Ch.1.


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For those who “dwell in realms of day” and remain attached to the world and to the senses, God is only known in part, in a “form” which is but little, confined to the limitations of our words and concepts. But for those who “dwell in night” and dare to go beyond, to an unknowing which may seem like darkness, God appears and is an overwhelming luminescence. As we have considered seriously these two texts, and thinking across the religious boundaries that would usually divide them, we are compelled to go beyond our ordinary ways of knowing abandoning the senses to plumb the depths of “unknowing” of which they both speak. It is the human condition to seek security, to long for hard lines and clear concepts. But Mystical Theology and the Kena Upanishad totally disrupt that, and reading them together disrupts us even further. In mutual illumination they agree that true knowledge comes when you reach a threshold of unknowing. And as such, we are confronted with our own limitations and responsibilities in the face of God’s mystery. Our words fail because they must. This is not failure. This is possibility.

Bibliography

Beggiani, Seely J. "Theology at the Service of Mysticism: Method in Pseudo- Dionysius." Theological Studies 57 (1996): 201-223.

Hick, John. "Ineffability." Religious Studies 36, no. 1 (2000): 35-46. Panoli Vidyavachaspati V, trans. The Kena Upanishad. Accessed November 24,

2012. http://www.celextel.org/upanishads/sama_veda/kena.html Schüssler Fiorenza, Francis and Kaufman, Gordon. “God.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor, 136-159. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Sonde, Nagesh D. The Commentary of Sri Madhva on Isha and Kena Upanishad.

Bombay : Vasantik Prakashan, 1990. Versluis, Arthur, ed. “The Mystical Theology.” In Esoterica, Vol. II. East Lansing:

Michigan State University Press, 2000. Accessed November 6, 2012. www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/MysticalTheology.html.


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[W]e can gain a certain understanding of the second Person’s relation to the first, by considering the ‘inward speech’ or unspoken work which takes place in our act of thinking - the thought prior to all language, of which language is no more a sign for the purpose of communication, like the flesh assumed by the divine Word. This human ‘word’ is the source of all human activity, even as the divine Word is that through which all things were made.

- Augustine “O Messenger of God, I heard [Hishām] reciting the Sūra of the Criterion differently from the way that you had recited it to me.” The Messenger of God said… “Recite, Hishām.” And so Hishām recited as I had heard him recite. The Messenger of God said, “It was sent down like that.” He then said to me, “Recite,” and I recited the Sūra. And he said, “It was sent down like that. This Qur’ān was sent down in seven ways, so recite from it whatever is easy for you.”

-ʿUmar ibn al-Khattāb While both Islamic and Catholic theological traditions lay claim to Jesus as the Messiah, and as an expression of the one God, according to most visions of Catholicism, Christology is something unique and defining. Catholic theologians use Christology as the boundary between their own religious positions and the collective theologies of Islam. Specifically, the Incarnation is the criterion of Christianity; the rejection of the Incarnation marks Islamic belief.

The Hinterlands of the Qur’ān: The Edges of the Eternal and the Temporal in Early Ḥanbalite Thought, with Analogs to Catholic Theology BY GEORGE ARCHER


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However, it is not necessarily so simple. It is possible to understand even the most conservative Islamic theologies of the Qur’ān1 as analogous to Catholic theologies of Christ. My project here places the strictest vision of classical Islamic theology into a language known to Catholics and their vision of the fully divine Christ. If Catholics wish to see the living dialogue of Islam and Catholicism continue, it is necessary for Catholics to consider the analogy between the Qur’ān and the Christ much more seriously than we have in the past. Previous attempts of Catholic theology to investigate the Qur’ān have always looked a bit too aggressively for the familiar within the theology of its Islamic counterpart, and as a result the Qur’ān was often de-Islamized. For the Catholic theologian to understand the Qur’ān as a Christian, the place of the Qur’ān within Islam was ignored or suppressed. Historically, this pattern of investigation led to the medieval depiction of the Qur’ān as yet another Christian heretical text, and in the early modern period to representations of the Qur’ān as the Bible’s shadow-self. More recently, the Catholic Church acknowledged the beauty of the Qur’ān and its call to monotheism, but disagreed with the Qur’ān’s role as a penetrating revelation of the loving, personal divinity. For instance, in response to Nostra Aetate, John Paul II wrote, “Some of the most beautiful names in the human language are given to the God of the Qur’ān, but He is ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God-with-us.”2 Although this statement has a kind of sympathy to Islam that is historically new for Western Christianity, it is still an old criticism: Islam’s God is all transcendence - as remote from this world as the God of the philosophers. In a manner notably similar to their views of the early Reformers of the sixteenth century, Catholics (like other occidentals) have habitually painted the God of Islam as detached, moving the pieces of history from afar. Simply put, the God of Islam does not make contact and communion with the world because this is not God incarnate. Besides being a theological dead end, this is simply not the full truth. There is more than just the Christian vision of a reality that ‘builds bridges’ (pontifex) over the chasm between God

1 Notes on language, format, and classical references. Arabic terms have been adjusted to match the transliteration system used by the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, although for concerns of style, English plurals and other standard constructions are used (e.g., ḥadīths, or Ḥanbalism). Greek terms have been likewise transliterated according to the “Scientific” system of the Library of Congress standards for “Greek, Ancient and Medieval (before 1454).” Regarding citations of classical Islamic sources, there is unfortunately no standard that it meaningful in both Western critical and Islamic traditional literature. For this problem, I have used methods of citation that employ both. For Qur’ānic citations, I have used Ingrid Mattson’s hybrid system which includes both sūra names and numbers (e.g., al-Zalzala, 99:1). Ḥadīth references include compiler’s name, the bāb by name, and the reference number within the specific bāb (e.g., Muslim, Faḍā’il al-Qur’ān, 1). All translations are attributed to their English language source unless stated otherwise. 2 John Paul II. Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 92.


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and creation. For Muslims, God is encountered in the Qur’ān not just as a message received or as a law to be followed (although these are true as well), but as the living, perhaps breathing, presence of God-with-us on earth. How can this be? In every recognizable form of Christianity, God-with-us can be quantified in the biological limits of a single human figure: Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ. God’s revelation in a particular person at least seems to draw a clean line of demarcation around Christ where God meets creation—whatever is this specific person is the expression of God; whatever is not, is not. We can problematize this if we wish. For instance, where does a person begin and end on a molecular level? Or, are parts of a certain person—say her brain—more a part of her personhood than other parts—for instance, her left kneecap? But these are not typical Christian objections. Christians have historically had no serious concern over the spatiality of the Incarnation. Their real questions about Christ and Incarnation have almost always been ontological and chronological. On the other hand, the Islamic revelation of God in the Qur’ān is more difficult to box in. Even without metaphysical claims, it is more troublesome to determine the borders of a text in space and time. Is a text a collection of words, or meanings of words? Does the text reside where the reciter or author does, or does it move beyond him after it appears? Is the text confined in location or form, or can it be endlessly moved, copied, changed, or re-presented? And so to move to our theological ends, we first have to ask exactly what and where the Qur’ān is, in what respect(s) is it eternal and divine, and in what respect(s) it is temporal or material. As the margins reveal the center, this examination requires following the early history of Islamic traditionalism, leading up to Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) and the Ḥanbalites. This school of thought developed specifically in response to fears of Christian Incarnationalism, which both the Ḥanbalites and their enemies saw as a threat to Islamic monotheism. Noting some ‘orthodox’ objections to their conclusions, I will present the Ḥanbalites as the furthest limit of belief in God’s presence in the world within the Qur’ān. From here, I will turn to the most common traditional Christian formula for the limits of God’s presence in the world in Christ: the Chalcedonian definition. Within this comparison, I will examine the extent to which Ḥanbalism avoided some of the theological claims of the Christians, as well as how they unwittingly embraced them, to show how that God is fully with us. As Christianity has been an overwhelmingly creedal religion in most instances, I will not recount the developmental history of the doctrine of the Incarnation here. There is no need to, as the final creedal statements show the eventual outcomes of the Christological debates. And besides, the development of these


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creeds out of the narrative materials of primal Christianity has been infinitely well documented. And again, the very nature of a Christian creed is to act as a shorthand for the whole community. In the case of Islam though, there is little to say of universal testimonies of faith beyond the double shahāda: ‘[I testify that] there is no god but God and Muḥammad is the Messenger of God.’ With respect to the Qur’ān’s nature though, there are some opinions that can each be typically considered ‘orthodox’ without necessarily condemning counter-opinions. If we wish to compare the revelation in the Qur’ān to a similar or equivalent revelation in Christ, some excavation is required to arrive at what we might call ‘high Qur’ānology:’ the belief in the text and language of the revelation as eternal. Caveat lector: Islam does not formally use detailed doctrinal creeds in the way Christianity typically does, and so there is some need to address how the beliefs of a few particular Muslim scholars can stand in for the beliefs of the Muslim masses. A typical Muslim probably could not spout out a long, technical list of their doctrines on cue the way a typical Western ‘high Church’ Christian can quickly rattle off the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed (even if words like ‘consubstantial’ don’t mean much to said Christian). Moreover, as with Christianity, we should not falsely assume that because an Islamic doctrine has a history that it is an innovation. Muslims have asked what they ought to believe long before they attempted to express every iota of it systematically. This does not necessarily mean that the beliefs of the Islamic community have themselves changed with their doctrines, only the precision with which their beliefs can potentially be expressed. If a Muslim was so inclined, Cardinal Newman’s ‘Theory of the Development of Doctrine’ could prove the worthy sister of the Islamic history of Qur’ānology. The Qur’ān in the ‘Abbāsid Court It seems safe to say that, from the earliest period, the Muslim community of believers struggled with the physical and celestial reality of the Qur’ān. What constituted the revelation on earth and what is the ontological connection between that revelation and God? While it is true that the Qur’ān thinks of itself as an oral recitation3 with certain dimensions and borders, there is a longstanding concern for the Qur’ān as particular matter on one hand (be that sound, act, or text), and as something outside of the terrestrial order on the other. This instability arises within the words of the Qur’ān itself. There are certain indicators of a literature with an unclear ontology. Most notably, one finds references to the umm al-kitāb (“the mother of the scripture”) or the lawḥ maḥfūẓ (the “preserved tablet”). How exactly do this heavenly writ and the material speech-act which refers to it (or them?) relate to one another, and how do

3 cf. al-Nisā’ 4:153


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they both relate to God?4 Did God make some heavenly text and the heavenly text is the inspiration of the earthly Qur’ān that came to be in the days of Muḥammad? Or is the heavenly text the eternal speech of God (kalām allāh), perhaps one of God’s attributes, and was therefore never created? And what does this mean for the words of the Prophet in historical time? Is the Qur’ān’s message also eternal? Are its specific contents? Its specific language and grammar? Its specific pronunciation? To these concerns the Qur’ān offers no simple answers.5 These questions were the unvoiced concerns of even the earliest Muslims, who were not yet thinking in formalized theological terms. Like the undefined encounters with the plural aspects of the one biblical God was to the early Church, the oldest umma of believers may have had experiences of the eternal uncreated Qur’ān, the direct speech of God, but were not equipped to express those experiences formally as later theologians and other scholars would. Rather, there were any number of very early debates over the rituals surrounding the recitation and the writing of the Qur’ān that suggest proto-theology. When an object or action is treated as sacred, or ritually apart from other facets of life, the boundaries of the numinous and the material must be explored and explained. In a theistic setting: where does the Deity end and creation begin? For instance, around the end of the first Islamic century the earliest dirhams were struck that contained all the text of Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ save the command word “say” (qūl).6 Some individuals responded that this meant that anyone ritually unclean could not handle coins, since to touch the dirham was to touch the Qur’ān. These forerunners of Islamic traditionalism argued that Muslims would have to make ablutions before making any monetary transaction. And so we have to ask what exactly were people concerned was being touched: the text, the sound of the recitation ‘within’ that text, the divine ‘within’ that frozen recited sound? If even these early quibblers thought that Qur’ān was something ritually apart from other things—closer to God than humanity—it was only a matter of time before someone would conclude that the Qur’ān shares in (or actually is) God’s own attributes. The theological discussions about the exact relationship between God and the Qur’ān appeared clearly on the scene with the arguments for the created Qur’ān by Jaʿd ibn Dirham (d. 125/743), Jahm ibn Ṣafwān (d. 128/746), and John of Damascus (d. cir. 136/754).7 By the early 200s/820s, the issue became a political hot

4 Richard C. Martin, “Createdness of the Qur’ān,” in Encyclopedia of the Qur’ān Vol.1, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 467. 5 Daniel A. Madigan, “Revelation and Inspiration,” in Encyclopedia of the Qur’ān Vol. 3, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 446. 6 Travis Zadeh,“Touching and Ingesting: Early Debates Over the Material Qur’ān,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 129, no. 3 (2009): 443-466. 7 Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalam, (New York: Harvard University Press, 1976) 241.


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topic with the rise of the Muʿtazilite school and the two key figures who opposed them: Ibn Kullab and Ibn Ḥanbal. ʿAbd Allah ibn Kullab (d. cir. 240/855) argued that the speech of God was one of God’s attributes and therefore God’s speech was never created. God is eternal and changeless, and thus it stands to reason that, “God is eternally ‘speaking’ (mutakallim).”8 Clearly God is not identical with the speech of God, but how can a monotheistic system account for an uncreated reality besides the one eternal God? Is this a second god or an incarnation similar to the Christian doctrine? Muʿtazilite theologian ʿAbbād ibn ʿAbbād (d. cir. 230/844) accused Ibn Kullāb of crypto-Christianity on these very grounds.9 To maintain strict monotheism, Ibn Kullāb posited a certain gap between God’s speech, which is co-eternal with God, and the recitation of the Qur’ān in time. The Qur’ān that can be sensed and repeated, “is only an expression (ʿibāra) of God’s speech, its created phonetical form.”10 Conversely, God’s eternal speech itself is a kind of “inner speech” (kalām nafsī). This inner speech, in the later words of al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/936), “does not consist of letters and is not a sound. It is indivisible, impartible, indissectible and unalterable. It is one thing (maʿna) in God [...] the recitation (qira’a) of the Qur’an, the pronunciation (lafẓ) is a human act but what we understand from the words is God’s eternal speech.”11 For ibn Kullāb:

God’s real speech was something where He has all his revelations together, a coherent unity (shay’ wāḥid) which was not yet divided into different languages or sentences, separate statements or texts. If God is beyond language He does not use nouns or finite verbs, neither imperatives nor questions. Grammar is something terrestrian.12

Under observation this does not seem substantively different from the Muʿtazilites with whom ibn Kullāb is debating. The Qur’ān as it is sensed and lived in this world is created, but it is created by and refers to the eternal.13 This struggle for an argument against Muʿtazilism would be taken a step further by Ibn Ḥanbal. Although more open to a multiplicity of religious opinions in his youth, Ibn Ḥanbal came to agree with the strict traditionalists (aṣḥāb al-ḥadīth) in his maturity. He claimed that knowledge of God’s nature and will were beyond the bounds of analogical reasoning (qiyās) or personal opinion (ra’y). Insight into

8 Margaretha T. Heemskerk, “Speech,” in Encyclopedia of the Qur’ān Vol. 5, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 110. 9 Suleiman A. Mourad, “ʿAbbād b. Salmān,” in Encyclopedia of Islam. 3rd ed. (Leiden: Brill Online, 2012), accessed May 6, 2012, http://0-referenceworks.brillonline.com.library.lausys.georgetown. edu/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/abbad-b-salman-COM_23209. 10 Josef van Ess, “Verbal Inspiration? Language and Revelation in Classical Islamic Theology” in The Qur’ān as Text, ed. Stefan Wild (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 182. 11 Heemskerk, “Speech,”111. 12 Van Ess, “Verbal Inspiration,”183. 13 Ibid., 182.


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divine matters can come only from the Qur’ān and the ḥadīth material, and this via the readings of the elite traditionalist scholars alone. When even those scholars cannot penetrate the meaning of the revelation, it is to be accepted as it presents itself ‘without’ knowing or asking ‘how’ (bi-lā kayf). The blank space created by this anti-intellectualism, and the insistence on the utter authority of the prophetic literature, allowed Ibn Ḥanbal to conclude that not only was God’s speech co-eternal with God, but that the Qur’ān on earth is that very same speech. The Qur’ān is therefore “not produced” (lā muḥdath) but is “the speech of God, uncreated” (kalām allāh ghayr makhlūq). Although lacking explicit roots in the Qurʾān or the ḥadīth, this formula became, as Wilferd Madelung puts it, “a shibboleth of Sunnī orthodoxy.”14 Its origins are in fact vague and disputable. The traditionalist position prior to [Ibn Ḥanbal] was apparently merely hostile to rationalistic arguments that the Qurʾān is created, without using the term “uncreated” (ghayr makhlūq). Aḥmad's own view evolved gradually, but his conviction that the Qurʾān is God's knowledge (ʿilm), or part of it, and as such is uncreated led him to the final formula, which has since appeared in almost every traditionalist creed.15 The rise of Ibn Ḥanbal and the uncreated Qur’ān came to prominence not with detached theological hairsplitting but with the inquisition (miḥna) of the caliph al-Ma’mūn in 218/833. Five years earlier the rationalism of the Muʿtazilites had been made the official doctrine of the court. Amongst other tenets, Muʿtazilism argued for the creation of the Qur’ān (khalq al-qur’ān) both on rationalistic terms (how can something other than the one God be uncreated?) and scriptural interpretation (cf. al-Zukhuf 43:3). Indeed to argue otherwise seemed strikingly similar to another theological claim, as the caliph is said to have written in a letter: “[they are] like Christians when they claim that Jesus the son of Mary was not created because he was the Word of God.”16 However, it was not pure theology that truly concerned Ma’mūn as much as the political power of that theology. Indeed, it appears as though Ma’mūn himself had no strong personal theological stances one way or another.17 A temporal Qur’ān needs to be forever reread for the present by a lawgiver, and therefore it will always need an authority who can speak for it. Such an authority would have at least as much legal force as the Qur’ān itself, if not more. Therefore,

14 Wilferd Madelung, “The Origins of the Controversy Concerning the Creation of the Koran” in Orientalia hispanica, ed. J. M. Barral (Leiden:Brill, 1974) 521. 15 Livnat Holtzman, “Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal,” in Encyclopaedia of the Islam. 3rd ed. (Leiden: Brill Online, 2012), accessed May 5, 2012, http://0-referenceworks.brillonline.com.library.lausys.georgetown.edu/entries/ encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/ahmad-b-hanbal-COM_23414. 16 Wolfson, Philosophy of Kalam, 241. 17 Nimrod Hurvitz, The Formation of Ḥanbalism: Piety into Power (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 117.


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a created Qur’ān means an everlasting caliphate,18 but an eternal Qur’ān means legal might dwells with the scholars. In order to squash the political threat posed by scholars who might undermine Ma’mūn’s authority to command the law, a number of traditionalist scholars (Ibn Ḥanbal amongst them) were called in to testify that they agreed with the official teachings of the caliph. Of all the traditionalists brought in nearly all of them either agreed with the Muʿtazilites’ conclusions already, or they surrendered their personal claims and fell in the state line. One of the two that resisted was Ibn Ḥanbal, who by pure luck avoided being brought before the caliph himself by al-Ma’mūn’s sudden death. However, the new caliph, al-Muʿtaṣim (d.227/842) had Ibn Ḥanbal beaten and put on public trial. The details of this humiliation and torture, however, are a matter of opinion. Abū ʿUthmān al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869), a Muʿtazilite, claims that Ibn Ḥanbal could not argue against the Qur’ānic rationalists and like the other traditionalists he surrendered his argument about the uncreated Qur’ān.19 Ibn Ḥanbal’s traditionalist allies (several of whom were his own relatives) give a far different account. The inability of the man to explain how the Qur’ān must be at once uncreated and not a second divinity only outlines the mysteries of God. These are questions of faith, not enforceable dogma or demonstrable argumentation.20 Thus the imām managed to argue his case and maintain his position under threat and torture, and after his release Ibn Ḥanbal was greeted as a hero by the masses.21 Whatever the actual events, both of these versions of the history underscore the bi-lā kayf of Ibn Ḥanbal’s traditionalist stance—whether the theologian himself was silent as an obfuscation or as a realization of humility before God is another matter. The overwhelming agreement of Islamic scholarship (both traditional and Western) marks the miḥna as the epicenter of the doctrine of the eternal Qur’ān, with Ibn Ḥanbal as its champion. Before his political run-ins, Ibn Ḥanbal’s opinions on the status of the Qur’ān’s createdness were undefined, or at least were defined only by negation. He disagreed with the Muʿtazilites but could not or did not affirm anything otherwise. “Before the miḥna the

18 William Montgomery Watt, Islamic Creeds: A Selection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 7. 19 There is also some question about the true authorship of ibn Ḥanbal’s most notable defense of his beliefs, al-Radd ʿalā l-Zanādiqa wa-l-Jahmiyya: “[ibn Ḥanbal’s] best known work in the field of polemics and one quoted often by later Ḥanbalīs, treats almost every aspect of the Islamic creed, by presenting detailed arguments attributed to various heretical sects, mainly the Muʿtazila, and offering systematic refutations of them that demonstrate Aḥmad's skills in rational argumentation. The historian al-Dhahabī (d. 753/1352–3) doubted the authenticity of al-Radd (Siyar, 11:286–7; Shuʿayb al-Arnāʾūṭ, the editor of the Siyar, has endorsed al-Dhahabī's doubt in a well reasoned footnote)” Holtzmann. 20 Hurvitz, Formation of Hanbalism, 134. 21 Holtzmann, “Ahmad b. Hanbal.”


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formulaic use of the term ‘uncreated’ was at most rare, confined to the generation immediately preceding it […].”22 In the period after the miḥna, the specifics of the Qur’ān’s uncreated status became increasingly fixed in the records of the early Ḥanbalites. If Ibn Ḥanbal and the traditionalists did have reservations or omissions in their opinions early on, those impurities were removed by the fire of persecution. “Although Muʿtazilism remained the state doctrine until 851, the effort to impose it on the scholars proved counterproductive, and led to a hardening of the emerging Sunnī resistance to Muʿtazilism as a principle.”23 In a list of creedal statements which may have come from the pen of the later Ibn Ḥanbal himself, the matter is stated boldly and without further elaboration: “God speaks to human beings, and there is no interpreter between Him and them [...] The Qur’ān is the speech of God, uncreated. From wherever it is heard and recited, from that it begins and to that it comes back.”24 This is a vast leap beyond the minor objection of Ibn Kullāb to the Muʿtazilītes. The Ḥanbalītes (if not Ibn Ḥanbal himself) saw no distinction between the qirā’a and what was recited (maqrū’). There is no ʿibāra of the Qur’ān.25 The Qur’ān and the speech of God are one and the same in all ways, and the Qur’ān in all forms is thus eternal (qadīm) as God is. “Nothing of God is created, and the Qur’ān is of God (wa l-qur’ān min allāh).”26 Whether the Qur’ān is written, memorized, or spoken, it is the eternal speech of God on earth. God speaks without beginning, pause, or end, in a voice (sawt), in the Arabic language, with a particular pronunciation (lafẓ) and this speech has been relayed perfectly to the Islamic community by the prophecy of Muḥammad. The community has likewise protected this speech without error as both recitation and text (and thus not only in the Arabic consonant skeletons, ḥurūf, but in the vocalizations). Although the Ḥanbalites still “admitted that when the Qur’an is recited, the pronunciation is a human act [...] they declared that what we hear and read is God’s uncreated speech.”27 The Ḥanbalites disregard even the slightest possible misalignment or ambiguity between God’s eternal thought and the human reception of that thought. It would be amiss to not mention the long list of ‘orthodox’ figures of many stripes who rejected the Ḥanbalite claim to the eternity of the lafẓ. Al-Muḥasibī (d. 243/857), al-Bukhārī (d. 256/870), Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/885), al-Juwaynī (d. 478/1085), al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), al-Rūmī (d. 671/1273), and al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) all

22 Madelung, “Origins of the Controversy,” 518. 23 Khalid Blankinship, “The Early Creed” in Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 49. 24 Watt, Islamic Creeds, 32. 25 Van Ess, “Verbal Inspiration,” 183. 26 Madelung, “Origins of the Controversy,” 524. 27 Heemskerk, “Speech,” 111.


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claimed that the lafẓ was a creation.28 Even the spiritual heir of Ibn Ḥanbal, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), took issue with the claim.29 Generally their reasons were similar. If God has a voice identical to or indistinguishable from a human voice, anthropomorphism seems likely to follow. This also requires the avoidance of the pre-Islamic history of the Arabic language and its relationship to other languages. Furthermore, the tradition speaks of a plurality of revealed texts: previous revelations in other languages and the seven recitations of the Qur’ān. These are clearly not identical.30 Even the traditional accounts of Muḥammad’s reception of the Qur’ān suggests it takes multiple, distinct forms. Consider the famous ḥadīth appearing in both of the Ṣaḥīḥayn in which ʿĀ’isha asks her husband how the waḥy comes to him. The Prophet says: “Sometimes it is like the ringing of a bell, and it is hardest on me. Then it passes off of me when I grasp what it has said. And sometimes the angel is like a man to me, and he speaks to me and I grasp what he said [...].”31 Juwaynī (and Suyūṭī with some modifications) elaborates on this. Sometimes Gabriel “read something to [Muḥammad] from a text which was written down; this statement was verbally identical with God’s speech. But then, at another time, he repeated only virtually what God had told him, according to its meaning.”32 Flying in the face of all these authoritative figures who cover the full spectrum of Sunnī opinions between them ought to tell us that the Ḥanbalite vision of the uncreated lafẓ was and is deeply appealing. Although the Ḥanbalites were never in the majority on the global scale, the directness of their views of the Qur’ān provides an apparent clarity and airtightness which makes them useful indicators for the whole of the Sunnī community. Historically there is no sphere of living Sunnī Islam that has not been somehow influenced by them, if not directly defined by them. Muʿtazilites, as well as those who would abstain (wāqifa) from the discussion of the Qur’ān’s origins, remain on the margins in the Islamic histories, and are seen as heterodox, if not fully heretical. Generally, the near universal marginalization of these voices was accomplished through the appearance of the more moderate claims of the Ashʿarites a century after the miḥna. Although they did retain the use of some analogical reasoning as opposed to the Ḥanbalites, and they did not believe that the lafẓ was eternal, the Ashʿarites made Ibn Ḥanbal’s

28 Van Ess, “Verbal Inspiration,” 185-6. 29 “[...] Ibn Taymiyya undertook to deny the equation [of lafẓ to the kalām allāh]. He argued forcefully that the pious ancestors in affirming the uncreated nature of the Qur’ān had never meant to assert its eternity. The speech of God, he maintained, is eternal in its species (jins), since God has always spoken when he willed, but not in its individual manifestation (ʿayn),” Madelung 521. This objection bares striking similarity to Ibn Kullāb’s distinction between kalām nafsī and ʿibāra (above). 30 Madigan, “Revelation and Inspiration,” 446. 31 Bukhārī, al-Waḥy 2; cf., Muslim, al-Faḍāil 87, (translation mine). 32 Van Ess, “Verbal Inspiration,” 190.


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declaration of the Qur’ānic uncreation their own. And through them, it became emblematic of Sunnīsm in all its later forms.33 Christ: Catholic and Chalcedonian In Josef van Ess’ enlightening short piece on verbal inspiration in Islam, which specifically focuses on some of the traditionalist and Ḥanbalite sources I have discussed here, the author draws some excellent parallels between Islam and Christianity on the issue of God speaking with comprehensible human language. In particular, the identification of scripture to verbum Dei coinciding with the ‘rediscovery’ of the Hebrew scripture in the early Reformation and how this is “largely identical” to the views of Sunnī Islam regarding direct linguistic inspiration is a point well taken. 34 But this is a very limited comparison between the two traditions. Van Ess is not incorrect that the likenesses are there; they are certainly. He is perfectly right to say that Christian history has been awash (perhaps even submerged to the point of drowning) in those speaking from the belief in the verbal inspiration of some or all of the Bible. I would even go further and add many common readings of the texts of the major councils to this trend. However, a strict verbal inspiration, to the point of an eternal God speaking a particular language eternally, which is at some point relayed to a particular author who records it verbatim, is not the norm in Christian history. For instance, many or even most Christians who have ever lived may believe that the Pentateuch is dictated to Moses by God, and that specific revelation is eternally valid in some way. However, the claim that these words are pre-existent in a fixed linguistic form and are uncreated is highly unusual for Christianity. For a Muslim to believe in the uncreated lafẓ may be an extreme, but for a Christian to believe, say, in the (unfortunately named) King James Onlyist movement is extremism. Van Ess knows that this analogy ultimately falls short,35 but he does not flesh out the better one—he is addressing his work to MESA, not to theologians. Western Islamicists perpetually present the Incarnation in Christ as the better analogy to the Qur’ān than the Bible, and I do not disagree.36 This method frees us from trying to foist a distinctly Christian phrase like “verbal inspiration” onto Islam. Verbal inspiration as a category will almost always fail to account for the most distinctive claim of the Ḥanbalites, the uncreated lafẓ. And 33 Nader El-Bizri, "God: Essence and Attributes," Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 126. 34 van Ess, “Verbal Inspiration,”178-9. 35 Ibid., 192. 36 This now almost ubiquitous comparison between Christ and the Qur’ān in the literature was first proposed in the modern West by Nathan Söderblom and W.C. Smith independently of each other and about fifty years apart. For a short history of the matter, see Cantwell Smith. What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 261.


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the analogy to the Christ rather than the Bible is strengthened in this case by the critiques of Ibn ʿAbbād and al-Ma’mūn (above), both of whom fear that traditionalism is a form of Incarnationalism. There is also some evidence (beyond our project here) of the direct influence of the Christian doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation upon Islam and vice versa.37 Although the comparison of the Qur’ān to Christ is not perfect either (e.g., the Qur’ān cannot suffer like Christ; Christ is not a linguistic Word of God), it is a more productive analogy than the biblical one. If the collective community of churches were asked to explain the relationship of God to humanity in Jesus, the majority would respond by affirming the Chalcedonian definition of 451. Catholics of all kinds, as well as the bulk of Orthodox and Protestants adhere to it. Although there are many churches that reject the definition, and they are too often ignored, for our ends the definition is as close to complete affirmation as any major distinctive Christian creed is after the Constantinoplitan revision of Nicaea. However, for the sake of clarity and this project, let us simply consider the definition, a Catholic document historically grounded in the “Tome” of Pope Leo I (d. 461). The definition reads:

(...) Christ. The Son. The Lord. The begotten one in two natures (monogenē en duo phusesin), made known without confusion (asugchutōs), without change (atreptōs), without division (adiairetōs), without separation (achōristōs). The union does not at all remove the natures’ occurrence (diaphorá) but rather the properties of each nature are in the one person (en prosōpon) and one substance run together (hypostasin suntrechousēs), not divided or separated into two persons, but the one and the same Son and begotten one (alla ena kai ton auton gion kai monogenē), God. The Word. The Lord Jesus Christ (...)38

37 “In the comparative study of religions, the dispute about the created versus the uncreated or eternal nature of the Qur’a n is a theological problem of the proportions of the ancient problem in Christian theology concerning the divine versus the human nature of Jesus Christ. In fact, as Trinitarian debates are attested within Christian circles at Baghdad contemporaneous with the Muslim discussion on the createdness of the Qur’a n, the formulation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the Islamic debate on the createdness of the Qur’a n may have influenced one another (cf., Wolfson 240-2; for a rebuttal of Wolfson’s position, see van Ess, Theologie Und Gesellschaft, iv, 625-7).” Martin, “Createdness of the Qur’ān ,” 472. 38 This is my own jagged translation of the definition. For clarity, I have imposed a sentence structure which is foreign to the Greek; it is more densely punctuated than it ought to be. Also, I have inserted the word “without” several times (“without confusion, without change, without division, without separation”) to account for an adverbial structure which makes for odd English: unconfusedly, unchangingly, undividedly, unseparatingly.


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The theme throughout the definition is the duality of natures in Christ working in simultaneous harmony. This is expressed in a sense of harmonious movement that is lost in the English. The diaphorá of the two natures, here their “occurrence,” is more like “going hither and thither together,” or a ‘shared, common occurring.’ The defiantly Greek verb suntréchō is here “run together,” instead of the usual “united,” “combined,” or “concurring,” which in translation all falsely suggest blending. A more verbose definition of this word would be: ‘to unite in movement, like the movement of two armies running into each other on the battlefield,” or ‘to move like runners moving together in a race.’ The verb implies a dynamic relationship of two things (normally) separate, which are moving in a single way but without mixing into one thing.39 This is how the Catholic faith has ever after regarded the role of the dual realities of Christ; this two-part harmony makes the human race connect directly with the Divine.

The Church thus confesses that Jesus is inseparably true God and true man. He is truly the Son of God who, without ceasing to be God and Lord, became a man and our brother.40

This ontological overlap is the central distinction of the Catholic Christian creed from any of its orthodox Islamic counterparts, Ḥanbalite or otherwise. To explain, I will repurpose vocabulary used by Seyyed Hossein Nasr about classical and modern anthropologies:41 the role of the Incarnation and the Qur’ānic revelation is pontifical. To call the Qur’ān or the Incarnation in Christ pontifical is to say that they ‘bridge-build’ (pontifex) between God and the creatures, as God cannot be seen, known, or found in any conventional sense of the terms. To believe that the ultimate can be come to by cerebral cunning or physical effort alone, such as good works, ritual, or material philosophy, is like fire being stolen from Olympus, Nasr’s opposite term: prometheanism. Instead, both Christianity and Islam in most of their traditional forms posit that God is the agent. The unknowable, ineffable God makes itself known to the human race (and often by extension, everything created) by a revelation that bridges time and eternity. And so too this revelation of this eternal God must be, “indivisible, impartible, indissectible and unalterable” (al-Ashʿarī), or “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” (Chalcedon). This bridging can work in several different ways. In the case of traditional Catholicism, God is made available in the acts,

39 See the Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon entries for “0123452” and “67895:;<,” respectively. 40 Catechism of the Catholic Church: Second Edition (Washington, DC: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994), 118. 41 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred: The Gifford Lectures, 1981, (New York: Crossroads, 1981), 160.


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teachings, and will of Christ. Christ is at once on this side of the bridge (made flesh, in this world) and on the other side of the bridge (in, with, and as the unseen God). Christ is both human and divine. Christ is two things fully and simultaneously. “The union does not at all remove the natures’ occurrence but rather the properties of each nature are in the one person and one substance ‘run together’.” God’s speech is also God’s self. God is “the Word” in the gospel of John, or the “Good News” in the Synoptics, and also the one who sends that message. Christ moves on both sides of the divide, and is therefore a bridge over it (as the Savior and teacher): “I am the way, the truth, and the life. None come to the Father but through me” (John 14:6). The worlds of God and humanity meet and are bridged by an overlap where God and human refer fully to the same thing at once. Christ is pontifical in that he comes into the world and offers a way back out of it. Sacrosanctum Concilium thus dubs the Catholic pilgrimage to Christ as a meeting at the “true tabernacle,” the place people come to encounter God. Athanasius’ dictum comes to mind: God became human so that we might become divine. For Muslims, it is the Qur’ān that has a pontifical role. Again, the transcendent God stands apart from the human race in the heights of the unknowable. God is beyond the Lote Tree of the Furthest Limits, as it were. God speaks a “Word” and this bridges the gap to appear on earth as the Qur’ān. Conversely, the Qur’ān offers a ‘straight path’ back over the divide. However, unlike its Christian counterpart (the “one substance ‘run together’,” the hypostatic union), the Qur’ān is not typically painted as two things at once. As we have seen, “it is one thing in God.” There is no overlap, but rather an encounter of two borders. How the bridging of this border works in the Qur’ān can be addressed in two different ways. First, the exact meeting place of the divine and the temporal can be left consciously obscure. There is a continuum of the two worlds with the border somewhere indeterminate in the Qur’ān (e.g., in its meaning, reference, and/or beauty). This would include the will to abstain (waqf) from the discussion (‘...and God knows best’), or the trend to develop intermediate theological spaces like ecstatic mysticism,42 the rationalists’ use of qiyās, and the intercessory cults of imāms and shaykhs. All of these would be labeled by the Ḥanbalites as innovations and unbelief. And so the Ḥanbalites turn to a second schema for the Qur’ān-as-bridge: divide the Qur’ān into created and uncreated ‘parts.’ When pressed for more firm opinions, Muslims have turned to the discussion of which parts of the Qur’ān are divine and which are created. The miḥna of Ibn Ḥanbal is the quintessential example of this. In his case, or at least in the case of those who claim to speak for him, the division is between the lafẓ and the given individual presentation of the lafẓ. The human reciter is not divine herself, but everything that can be seen or heard of the

42 van Ess, “Verbal Inspiration,” 186.


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recitation is identical and the same as God’s uncreated speech in eternity.43 This exposes Ḥanbalism’s dilemma. Ibn Ḥanbal was neither trying to abstain from the discussion of the Qur’ān’s createdness altogether, nor posit a negotiable space of interpretation between humanity and God. In the process though, Ibn Ḥanbal drew out an opinion which ended up ironically, but not coincidentally, quite like the Christians’ Incarnation. If the lafẓ is eternal, than either God is just like a person, or people were divinized by the Qur’ān. Ibn Ḥanbal himself leaned towards the former argument: anthropomorphism (tashbīh). 44 Wesley Williams has at length convincingly argued that Ibn Ḥanbal was certainly an anthropomorphist in practice for any number of reasons, although he would have not recognized himself as such. He unabashedly believed that God has a spatial location and form with limbs, height, and organs of speech.45 It is following from this logic that the older Ibn Ḥanbal can claim the language and pronunciation of the Qur’ān is God’s speech and is therefore eternal. The only missing factor preventing the Ḥanbalite argument of the uncreated lafẓ from blossoming into a full-fledged Islamic Incarnationalism is the total overlap of human and divine natures in Christ as stated by the definition from Chalcedon. Indeed, that Islam has no notion akin to hypostatic union is why the borders of the eternal in the Qur’ān historically pushed and the temporal aspects of the Qur’ān receded. More and more parts of the Qur’ān were declared eternal—first the meaning, then the expression of the meaning, then the language of the expression—and so less and less of the Qur’ān was created. Eventually, the borders of the eternal and the temporal came to be halted in the living recitation of breathing individuals, a step short of making the given reciter hypostatically united with God, but still addressing the need to come as close to the divine as can be possible in this life. Does the Ḥanbalite vision of the eternal God fulfill the demand of John Paul II and the rest of the Catholic tradition for a God-with-us? We have seen that at the very dawn of historical Islam, some Muslims treated the Qur’ān as something more than just a message. Even under both the theological threat of Christian-like doctrines

43 Heemskerk, “Speech,” 111. 44 Ibn Ḥanbal and most ‘normative’ Islam would rather bend towards anthropomorphism rather than the alternative. But one could follow the uncreated lafẓ to this other conclusion: theopoiesis. We can hear and understand God’s speech because we are literally or mystically in the same space as God. We are subsumed by the eternal Qur’ān in history and so are made supra-historical ourselves. Of course this is not common, but neither is it unheard of for the most ‘drunk’ of the Sufis. 45 Wesley Williams, “Aspects of the Creed of Imam Ahmad Ibn Hanbal: A Study of Anthropomorphism in Early Islamic Discourse,” Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002): 441-463 and Wesley, Williams, “A Body Unlike Bodies: Transcendent Anthropomorphism in Ancient Semitic Tradition and Early Islam,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 129.1 (2009): 19-44.


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that could be taken as idolatrous association (shirk) with God, and the political threat of the caliphs, the tradition still gravitated towards the less rational creed of the later Ibn Ḥanbal: the Qur’ān is eternal down to its very pronunciation. Even a full array of other Sunnī religious authorities of the highest order could not dislodge Ḥanbal’s claim fully. The uncreated language of the Qur’ān, the Sunnī community seems to affirm, speaks to them in a way that disregards rationalizing counterarguments. While this is different from the way in which the Incarnation makes God present to the Christians in mechanics, it serves the same pontifical role. The Other Side of the Bridge “Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Muslims, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.”46 If the previous shortcomings in the exchanges between Catholicism and Islam have been anything, they have been failures of understanding. If the Church wishes to fully engage Muslims as Nostra Aetate implores, it must come to terms with the role of the Qur’ān as Muslims understand it. A specification or reevaluation of Catholicism’s own economic theologies and of its theologies of the Qur’ān (and through it, Islam) is in order. If, following this self-reassessment, the Church sees fit to make itself obviously distinct from Islam then it will require a finer wedge. Both Catholics and Muslims agree that God can be encountered fully and directly in the human form for something of God is utterly available in a human act, whether this is a specific historical event or a reoccurring liturgy. The only true distinction between Islam and Catholicism on this matter is that Islam stresses the connection between the ‘edges’ of created and the Creator, while Catholicism makes this pontifical contact an overlapping coincidence. Therefore, the distinction is not whether God meets humanity (as both traditions claim God does, and fully), but rather how (if at all) that humanity impinges back upon God. Does the Incarnation of God in Christ create a change in God that the revelation of the uncreated Qur’ān does not? It is not an easy question, but it requires a response, for Catholics may be able to argue that the Qur’ān does not make God one amongst us, but they can no longer honestly say that it does not make God-with-us.

46 Nostra Aetate, 3.


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