Written by: Dan Smolnik
Transparency is a word currently more often assigned to human character than it is to inanimate objects. “Window” and “transparent” are so interchangeable that any window not fully transparent is allocated special architectural descriptors, such as stained glass or glass block.
The same quality in people is, in contrast, typically followed by a period when described in the written word. A person’s quality of transparency needs, and typically receives, no further explication. Someone is described as transparent as an homage to their perceived honesty and accessibility. Transparency in a person implicates an unreserved rhetorical analogy to clear glass windows. The light must pass freely from within and without.
This valued quality, however, gets no literary treatment in the Bible. The abstraction of transparency had no place to anchor in the physical world of the times.
That result is not for lack of trying by Biblical authors. Paul, in his first letter to the church at Corinth, provides us with a memorable analogy near the end of the thirteenth chapter.
In that chapter, Paul effectively explicates agape, or divine love. This chapter may be among the most quoted in scripture, with its passages of “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels,” “For we know in part and prophecy in part,” “When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.”
Paul’s final metaphor in this chapter is perhaps his most curious because it invokes something of a Hellenistic or even Roman notion that was not part of the common construct. He merges the present with the infinite in conjuring the transitional nature of our shared spirituality: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (ESV). The light, Paul assures us, will shine from within and from without, but only when we meet God. The transparency we seek we shall not obtain until that moment. Paul’s promise is that we shall obtain it.
Paul’s invocation of the esoptrou (ἐσόπτρου) (Latin: specularis – more on that later) or polished metal reflector here must have left his audience puzzled. The sort of mirror to see one’s face was an affectation of the conspicuously wealthy. His reference to the reflective surface elegantly illustrates his face to face analogy. Corinth was, in A.D. 55, a trading crossroads inhabited by many wealthy Romans. A robust pagan culture surrounded the early Christian enclave here, and Paul had learned of the persistently ‒ shall we say, louche ‒ deportment of the community. His invocation of a symbol of the values with which he took issue may have raised more than a few eyebrows in his audience. The city-state of Corinth remained under the sway of the Greek pantheon with, according to Pausanias (c. A.D. 120-180), no fewer than 55 statuary and other representations of Greek gods and goddesses, most of them dedicated to Aphrodite and Dionysius. The esoptrou familiar to the Corinthians were commonly decorated with images of Pan, Eros, and Aphrodite. ‘Nuf sed.
The mirrors of the time were, indeed, dim. The chemistry of clear glass was still 500 years away and available metals such as copper or tin, or their alloy, bronze, made for poor reflections and, more importantly, were invariably hammered to a convex shape, thereby providing a distorted image for the user. Nonetheless, as signals of wealth, these tools by which one could master light commanded a year’s salary for a Roman officer.
Light might be said to be the prevailing motif in the Bible. From God’s first utterance in Genesis to the angel’s tour of the New Jerusalem in Revelation, light is a thing to be desired. Throughout, though, it is not brought under human control. Rather, in the times of the Bible, light simply is; it passes through openings, it emanates from the heavens, but it passes through nothing fashioned by human hands. The only reference to that possibility is the fantastical description in Revelation of the New Jerusalem as a city of pure gold, emphasized by the then-imaginary comparison to “clear glass.”
Transparency as a human-made tool did not appear in history until mid way through imperial Rome when household windows sealants made of alabaster, mica, or selenite appeared.[*] These could all be processed, laboriously and expensively to be sure, into sheets thin enough to allow light and vague images to pass. For those with means, a household window no longer presented a risk of invasion by weather. Those who possessed such rare substances could now capture daylight and deliver it almost anywhere they desired. These materials collectively became known as lapis specularis, or mirror stone (told ya’). The language had not yet acquired an expression for luminous transparency, but simply expanded the well-understood idea of the reflection of light.
Hence, the transmission of light through human made materials was an inaccessible concept in Biblical times. Even among the multitude of biblical theophanies (broadly, the physical expressions of the presence and character of God), light never shines through something. Rather, God’s very essence is expressed, among other ways, as fire, such as with the burning bush of Exodus and the fourth man in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace in Daniel or as unearthly bright light, as in the narratives of the transfiguration of Jesus in the synoptic gospels.
It is in the transfiguration that God’s light emanates from within, rather than reflects from a corporeal presence. The light shining from Moses’s face in Exodus certainly reflected God’s glory – an image with which the people could find affinity in the time of the specularis. Now, at the transfiguration, light took on a life of its own.
Light emanating from within a physical presence, whether a person or a structure, would have required an unearthly event. The accounts of the transfiguration in Matthew (“his face shone like the sun,” and “his clothes became white as light”), Mark (“he was transfigured before them,” and “his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them,” and Luke (“the appearance of his face was altered,” and “his clothing became dazzling white”) all imply not merely the appearance of light but the very production of it from within. One imagines that, had these narratives been written in times where clear window glass was part of the landscape, and seeing through material things was a common experience, the descriptive analogies might have been quite different.
In short, Paul’s injunction to the church at Corinth demonstrates a deliberate restraint on his part in providing a metaphor of reflected light to which the people could relate. He might have gone further in his face to face reference and articulated his aspiration of transparency and for God’s light to shine through these new Christians, but no one, literally, on Earth could have understood his message.
Spoiler alert: We still cannot fully understand until we are face to face. But we can model the transparency enjoined by Paul.
In Luce Tua Videmus Lucem
Dan Smolnik is a member of Spring Glen Church in Hamden, Connecticut
[*] To be sure, windows in homes remained a structural challenge, given the building materials and techniques of the day. Fenestration, where it existed, was typically scarcely other than a small door. The most common window covering elaborations were screened in a sort of wood or reed latticework, such as referenced in Judges 5:28 (“Out of the window she peered, the mother of Sisera wailed through the lattice”). Windows sealed against the elements would remain a rarity for a millennium.
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