Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Dornbusch: Ich bin der ich bin ( I AM WHO I AM; ehyeh ) ; Metaphysik von Exodus; Tetragramm (Thomas)

Kurzinhalt: primacy of the divine esse, in opposition to the Platonic primacy of the divine bonum; if there is no metaphysics in Exodus, there is a metaphyics of Exodus

Textausschnitt: 52/12 The thornbush dialogue could be written only by a man who had an intimate knowledge of the spiritual events of divine revelation and human response. He was a prophetic mind of the first rank; and the fact that in the composition J and E sources were used allows us to place him at the earliest in the eighth century B.C. The question will have to be raised whether a work so distinctly prophetic in form contains a historical substance that can be assumed to go back in an unbroken tradition to the time of Moses. And in particular, we must ask whether the exegesis of the divine name as I AM WHO I AM can have had Moses as its author. Since these questions are today obscured by an immense controversy which, first, is not always too clear in the statement of the issues and, second, is all too frequently biased by progressive ideology, we must briefly clarify what in our opinion the nature of the problem is. (408; Fs) (notabene)

53/12 We must realize first of all that we are dealing with a revelation presumably received by Moses, and nothing but that revelation; and second, that with regard to the contents of the revelation we have no source but the episode just analyzed. Hence, the rich etymological debate concerning the name of Yahweh, with its variegated conjectures, some more plausible than others but none conclusive, must be excluded as irrelevant to our problem. The narrative itself does not refer to any meaning attached to the name of Yahweh that could have influenced the contents of the revelation. On the contrary,
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54/12 As far as the autonomous meaning is concerned, a formidable issue is injected into the controversy through the fact that since the time of the Patres, the divine self-interpretation (Ego sum, qui sum) has been the basis of Christian speculation on the nature of God. The primacy of the divine esse, in opposition to the Platonic primacy of the divine bonum, is so distinctively the great issue of Christian philosophy with regard to the essence of God that it has been justly called the philosophy of Exodus. The assumption now that the member of a nomad people in the thirteenth century B.C., or earlier, should have coined a formula which contains a metaphysics of being is preposterous to the enlightened, and too much even for more conservative historians. Oesterley and Robinson, for instance, say: (408f; Fs)
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56/12 The passages are illuminating for several reasons. In the first place, the authors take it for granted that nothing extraordinary can happen in history; no unique personality, even if God so wills it, can break the "stage of development." They can make their assumption, second, because they remain unaware that the revelation creates history as the inner form of human existence in the present under God and therefore inevitably must be a break with the "stage of development," at whatever time it occurs. The "development" would be no less broken if the break occurred a few centuries later. And third, since they are not aware of the nature of revelation as a "break," as the leap in being, they both confuse the exegesis of the name, which in fact is an explication of the experience of divine presence, with an etymology of the name "Yahweh." Obviously, the issue cannot be successfully treated on this rather low level of methodical precision. (409f; Fs) (notabene)
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... we cannot deny that the Christian interpretation is well founded on the text. While we cannot escape the dilemma either by doubting the text or by moving it down a few centuries, a solution suggests itself if we consider a distinction made by Gilson: (410; Fs)
One can, of course, not maintain that the text of Exodus bestowed a metaphysical definition of God on mankind. Still, if there is no metaphysics in Exodus, there is a metaphyics of Exodus.
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58/12 Gilson's distinction applies to a concrete case, in effect, our principle of evolution from compactness to differentiation. While the Exodus passage is not a metaphysical proposition, it contains in its compactness the meaning differentiated by the Christian philosophers. (410; Fs) (notabene)
59/12 Once we have recognized the exegesis of the thornbush episode as a compact symbolism in need of explication, not only will the philosophical interpretation appear well founded, but the labors of analysis bestowed by Christian thinkers on the episode in general can be accepted as an important aid for the understanding of the symbol. We shall use for this purpose the summary of the problem given by St. Thomas in the Summa Theologiae. Thomas considers the HE WHO IS the most proper name of God for three reasons: ...
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60/12 If now we place the issue of the "philosophical proposition" in the context of the Thomist analysis, the ehyeh will no longer appear as an incomprehensible philosophical outburst, but rather as an effort to articulate a compact experience of divine presence so as to express the essential omnipresence with man of a substantially hidden God. The "I will be with you," we may say, does not reveal the substance of God but the frontier of his presence with man; and precisely when the frontier of divine presence has become luminous through revelation, man will become sensitive to the abyss extending beyond into the incommunicable substance of the Tetragrammaton. As a matter of fact, the revelation of the thornbush episode, once the divine presence had become an historical experience of the people through the Berith, had no noteworthy sequel in the history of Israelite symbols and certainly no philosophical consequences. The unrevealed depth, however, that was implied in the revelation, has caused the name of God to become the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton YHWH. Philosophy can touch no more than the being of the substance whose order flows through the world. (411; Fs) (notabene)