CHAPTER 11

That Jacob also beholds the Before-named as Both God and Lord, and also as an Angel in Human Form in Common with Abraham, in the Course of the History that so tells.

[Passage quoted, Gen. xxxii. 22-31.]

IT was said to Moses, No one shall see My face and live. ( But here Jacob saw God not indefinitely but face to face. ( And being preserved, not only in body but in soul, he was thought worthy of the name of Israel, which is a name borne by souls, if the name Israel is rightly interpreted "Seeing God." Yet he did not see the Almighty God. For He is invisible, and unalterable, and the Highest of all Being could not possibly change into man.

But he saw Another, Whose name it was not yet the time to reveal to curious Jacob. And if we were to suppose that he saw an angel, or that one of the divine spirits in heaven whose duty it is to bring oracles to the holy, we should - 256 - clearly be wrong; firstly, because He is called Lord and God, for certainly Holy Scripture calls him God in distinct terms, and names Him Lord, honouring Him with the name signified by the Tetragram, which the Hebrews only apply to the unspeakable and secret name of God: and secondly, because when Scripture desires to speak of angels, it clearly distinguishes them as such, as when the God and Lord Who replies to Abraham no longer thinks the sinners of Sodom worthy of His presence, and Holy Scripture says: 

"And the Lord departed, and ceased speaking with Abraham. And the two angels departed to Sodom at evening." 

And to Jacob:

" There came two angels of God: and he saw them, and said, It is the camp of God. And he called the name of that place, Encampments."

Here, then, the godly man clearly distinguished the nature of the visions, since he now called the name of the place Encampments, from his seeing the encampments of the angels. Whereas when he communes with God, he calls the name of the place, Sight of God, adding, "For I have seen God face to face."

And when an angel appears to Moses, Holy Scripture also makes it plain, saying: "The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire in a bush." But when it refers to the actual being who replies, it calls him God and Lord, and no longer an angel. It is equally clear in its distinction between the angel and the Lord in the account of what happened at the Red Sea, where it says:

"And the angel of the Lord that went before the children of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of the cloud also removed from before them." 

And as in the former passage the Lord is introduced as answering the men of the old time in human form, so also is He here by the cloud. For it is said afterwards:

"And it came to pass in the morning-watch, that the Lord looked upon the camp of the Egyptians in a pillar of fire and cloud. And God answered Moses in the pillar of the cloud through the whole of the wanderings in the wilderness."

So Scripture is quite exact when the nature of an angel is meant, for it calls him neither God nor Lord, - 257 - but simply Angel. But when it knows that He that appears was Lord and God, it clearly uses those terms. And that by Lord and God they do not mean the First Cause, the passages of Holy Scripture clearly shew which call Him the Angel of God, Who had previously been called Lord and God in the part concerning Jacob. It only remains for Him then to be God and Lord among beings, after the Almighty God of the Universe. And He would thus be the Word of God before the ages, greater than all angels, but less than the First Cause.