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"Like a Gleaming Flash": Matthew 6:22-23, Luke 11:34-36 and the Divine Sense in Origen
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2006 by Hauck, Robert J
While the modern maxim says that the eye is the window of the soul, Jesus said that the eye is the lamp of the body. This essay relates one of the more opaque Gospel sayings to one of the distinctive themes of Origen's spiritual theology. In his interpretation of Jesus' saying that "The eye is the lamp of the body," Origen finds a reference to the mind, which serves as eye of the soul. In the context of Hellenistic theories of vision, which represent the eye as a light-emitting organ, Origen argues that the mind reaches out its ray to coalesce with the light of the Logos to produce vision for the soul. His interpretation provides insight into his understanding of how the divine sense works and its role as a faculty of spiritual perception.
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Origen of Alexandria is one of the founders of Christian spiritual theology, and his doctrine of the divine senses provides a unique and influential contribution to that tradition. Origen believed that the soul has spiritual senses analogous to the five physical senses. Through these spiritual senses, the soul perceives divine rather than physical truths. This notion has provided both a fertile field for the development of mystical theology, and has stimulated a number of questions about his thought.
In a similar vein, Jesus' parable about vision in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:22-23; Luke 11:34-36) proves to be both puzzling and stimulating. Jesus' proverbial statement that the eve is the lamp of the body flies directly in the face of the modern maxim, which asserts that the eye is the window of the soul. In what way can the eve be considered a lamp, and what kind of light might it provide? How did people in the prescientific world of antiquity understand this passage? This essay examines Origen's interpretation of this passage and argues that it contributes to a fuller understanding of his view of the divine sense of vision and how it works. The parable also provides an example of how this passage was interpreted in early Christianity.
The Eye is the Lamp of the Body
In what is a Q-logion (Matthew 6:22-23; Luke 11:34-36), Jesus says that the eye is the lamp of the body. The two canonical versions1 of the saying are:
Matthew 6:22-23: The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body is full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
Luke 11:34-36: Your eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is sound, your whole body is full of light; but when it is not sound, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness. It then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light.
Modern commentators have struggled with this passage, at least partly because it does not harmonize with contemporary understandings of the physics and physiology of vision.2 For moderns, the eye is the window of the soul, since we know that the eye contains a lens which acts as a window to transmit light from outside the body to the interior of the eye.3 Often, modern interpreters have simply adapted the ancient proverb to modern understandings, and Jesus' lamp becomes the modern window. Barclay, for example, says:
The eye is regarded as the window by which the light gets into the whole body. . . . If the window is clear, clean, and undistorted, the light will come flooding into the room, and will illuminate every corner of it. . . . So, then, says Jesus, the light which gets into any man's heart and soul and being depends on the spiritual state of the eye through which it has to pass, for the eye is the window of the whole body.4
According to Mounce, "In the physiology of Jesus' day the eye was thought of as a window that brought light into the body."5
Recent critical scholarship has, however, changed the context for interpreting this passage. Hans Dieter Betz bas argued that this saying presupposes ancient theories of vision that provide a setting far different from those provided by modern optics and physiology. Betz surveys Greek philosophical treatments of vision and notes two dominant views. Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plato hold the "extramission" view in which vision occurs through an effluence from the body-light flows out from or through the eye to the object. The "intromission" theory, depending on Democritus, holds that atoms flow from the object into the eye. Betz concludes that the Jesus saving implicitly rejects the latter view and presupposes the former.6 The definition of the eye as a lamp reflects what can thus be considered the proverbial notion that light flows out from the eyes-the eye is a lamp because, like a lamp, it produces and emits light.
Dale Allison, in response to Betz, agrees that the context for the saying and its proverbial quality are ancient understandings of the eye as a light-producing organ. It is analogous to the sun, and its flashing gaze is similar to flashes of lightning or the rays of the sun.7 The glowing eyes of animals at night, the gaze as a beam directed at the object, and the dangerous sweep of the evil eye all reflect this view. However, he argues that this should not be limited to the Greek philosophical tradition. Rather, there is a wide background in antiquity in general, and in biblical and other Jewish literature in particular, of viewing the eye as a source of light. According to Allison, as a Q-logion, the earliest form of this saying accepts the extramission theory of vision as a commonplace-the eye is a lamp that produces and transmits rays or beams of light from inside out.8 As Via says, the statement "the eye is the lamp of the body" would strike the ancient reader as both a truism and a scientific fact: "This reader would experience a succinct statement of conventional wisdom, one accorded in a straightforward way with the current theory of vision. The eye in fact is a lamp."9
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