א In the Old Testament and in rabbinical Judaism, the kabhod assumes a particular meaning in eschatology. This will coincide with the full revelation of the glory of God,
which will appear in Zion as a cloud and a canopy (Isaiah 4:5). In the DeuteroIsaiah, it will appear not only to the Jews but to “all flesh” (“And the glory of the LORD shall be
revealed, and all flesh shall see it together”: Isaiah 40:5). According to Habakkuk 2:14: “For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD [YHWH], as the
waters cover the sea.” Ezekiel’s terrible vision, which with its winged “living creatures” and its throne of sapphire would so profoundly influence Christian apocalypticism, is presented by the prophet as a vision of glory: “This was the appearance of the likeness of the kabhod of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that
spake” (Ezekiel 1:28).
8.3. The Septuagint translates kabhod with doxa, and this Greek term (which the Vulgate will translate as “glory”) thereby becomes the technical term for
glory in the New Testament. But as occurs with any translation, in this passage
the biblical kabhod undergoes a profound transformation. What was originally
an element external to God, one that signified his presence, became—in confor-
mity with the new theological context—an expression of the internal relations of
the Trinitarian economy. This means that between oikonomia and doxa there is a constitutive nexus, and that it is not possible to understand economic theology
if one does not at the same time give an account of this connection. In the same
way that Christian theology had dynamically transformed biblical monotheism
by dialectically opposing within it the unity of substance and of ontology (the
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theologia) to the plurality of persons and practices (the oikonomia), so the doxa theou defines the operation of reciprocal glorification between the Father and the Son (and, more generally, between the three persons). The Trinitarian economy
is constitutively an economy of glory.
We can perhaps say that this glorious economy appears nowhere with the
same clarity as in the Gospel of John. It melodically resonates from one end of
the text to the other—in the same way that it does, with a different tone, in the
Letters of Saint Paul—and achieves its most vibrant expression in Jesus’s prayer
before his arrest: “Father, the hour is come; glorify [ doxason] thy Son, that thy
Son also may glorify [ doxasēi] thee [ . . . ] I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou
me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world
was” (John 17:1–5). A little earlier, when the betrayal was predicted, the same
theme was announced in the words of Jesus to his disciples, who sat around him
at the table: “Now is the Son of man glorified [ edoxasthē], and God is glorified
[ edoxasthē] in him. If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in him-
self, and shall straightaway glorify him” (John 13:31–32).
One is struck in these passages by the perfect circularity of the economy
that they describe. The work—the economy of salvation—that Jesus has accom-
plished upon earth is, in truth, the glorification of the father—that is, an econ-
omy of glory. But it is, to the same extent, the glorification of the son through
the work of the father. And this doxological circle is marked not only by the in-
sistent repetition of forms of the same verb, but seems to be perfectly completed
in the idea that glory precedes the very creation of the world and thus defines
the Trinitarian relationship from the beginning (“glorify thou me with thine
own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”). In Jewish
messianism, the name (“chem” is a concept intimately linked to that of glory) is
part of the five (or seven) things created before the world; but John, who takes
up this Jewish motif, turns it into the doxological nucleus of the intradivine
relation. And while the economy of salvation that was entrusted to the son is
accomplished in time, the economy of glory has neither beginning nor end.
However, the economy of glory in John’s Gospel includes men as well. Re-
ferring to those to whom he revealed the name of the father (that is, the glory),
Jesus adds: “And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified
[ dedoxasmai] in them” (John 17:10). And immediately afterward he expands
upon this: “And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them” (John 17:22).
Thus to the glorious economy of the Trinity corresponds the reciprocal glorifi-
cation of men and God.
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א The term that in Homeric Greek corresponds to the semantic sphere of glory
is not doxa but kleos. Kleos, which is a term etymologically connected with the sphere of words and of “that which is heard” ( klyō ), is not a property of the gods, and indeed it results from the activity of a special category of men: the poets. They of course need
the cooperation of divine beings, the Muses, who push them to “sing about the kleos of men” (Homer, The Odyssey, Book 8, 73); but the glory that they confer and that can get
“through heaven” (ibid., 74) is their jealously guarded and exclusive competence. For this very reason, it is not a case of knowledge, so much as of something that exhausts itself
entirely within the sphere of the word. “We poets,” says Homer, “hear the kleos and we know nothing” (Homer, Iliad, Book 2, 486).
Gregory Nagy has shown how the Iliad and the Odyssey are first of all poems of the kleos of Achilles and Odysseus and that it is precisely the theme of glory that unites the two poems. If Achilles, the best of the Achaeans, is the one who exchanges return
and life for glory (“there is no nostos for me, but there will be eternal kleos”: Homer, Iliad, Book 9, 413), Odysseus had both return and glory (Nagy, p. 29). But it is once again the poets who bestow glory. Both the Phaecian singer in the Odyssey (8, 72–82) and the poet of the Theogony present themselves as masters of glory, who look as much to the past as to the future (“that I might spread the fame [ kleioimi] of past and future”: Hesiod, Theogony, p. 12).
The Homeric world has therefore a figure of glory that is entirely the work of man,
mere glorification. For this reason, many centuries later, a Roman poet was able to push
this “glorifying” strain of poetry to the limit, writing that not just heroes, but “the gods too (if I may be allowed to say so) exist through poetry; even the majesty of one so great has need of the voice of someone to celebrate it” (“Di quoque carminibus, si fas est dicere, fiunt / tantaque maiestas ore canentis eget”: Ovid, The Pontic Epistles, Book IV, 8, 55–56, p. 455).
8.4. In the Second Letter to the Corinthians, Paul takes up again the kabhod
of Exodus 29ff., in order to found, by meticulously building up a series of optical
images, his theory of glory. The—provisional—glory that illuminates Moses’ face
after he received the tablets of the law from God (which were defined, follow-
ing Paul’s implacable critique of the law, as a “ministration of death,” diakonia
tou thanatou: 2 Corinthians 3:7) is incomparably less than that which results
from the “ministration of redemption” that the Messiah brought to mankind.
Nevertheless the members of the messianic community (the term “Christian”
is unknown to Paul)
have no need to place a veil ( kalymma) over their faces, as
Moses does—a veil that “even unto this day, when Moses is read [ . . . ] is upon
their heart” (2 Corinthians 3:15). In fact, the Messiah involves the deactivation
of the veil ( hoti en Christōi katargeitai: 2 Corinthians 3:14). When the Jews are
converted, the veil will be removed from them as well. “But we all, with open
face [ anakekalymmenōi prosōpōi] beholding as in a glass [ katoptrizomenoi] the
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glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory [ apo doxēs
eis doxan], even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18).
The economy of glory is expressed here in solely optical terms. And it is the
same image that Hebrews 1:3 specifies further. The son is apaugasma, that is, at
once reflection and radiation of God’s glory (the verb apaugazein in fact means
as much “to irradiate, to emit luminous rays” as much as it means “to reflect irra-
diating rays”). This is why in 2 Corinthians 4:6, God shines the light on Christ’s
face ( en prosōpōi Christou), “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.”
The optical phenomenology of glory unfolds in the following way: God, “the
Father of glory” (Ephesians 1:17), radiates his glory onto the face of Christ who
reflects it and radiates in turn like a mirror onto the members of the messianic
community. The celebrated eschatological verse 1 Corinthians 13:12 should be
read in this light: the glory that we now see enigmatically in a mirror ( di’ esoptrou en ainigmati), we will go on to see face-to-face ( prosōpon pros prosōpon). In the present, we await the “glorious appearing” (Titus 2:13), in the same way as all
that which is created impatiently waits to be “delivered from the bondage of
corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:13).
In contrast to John, here the stress lies not on the reciprocal glorification of
Father and Son, but on the radiation of glory by the Father onto the Son and to
the members of the messianic community. At the heart of Paul’s gospel lies not the
Trinitarian economy but messianic redemption.
8.5. It is necessary to explode the commonly held view, frequently repeated
in the lexicons, that a theory of glory is lacking in the Church Fathers of the
first centuries after Christ. Precisely the opposite is true. That is, as could be
expected, it is precisely those authors who develop the theology of the economy
who also produce the elements for a theology of glory. This is particularly true in
the case of Irenaeus. In the fourth book of Against Heresies, he takes up, through the canonical citation from Exodus 33:20 (“there shall no man see me [God],
and live”), the biblical theme of the unknowability of kabhod (of the “marvel-
ous glory,” anexēgētos doxa: Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 4, Chapter 20, §5, p. 366). But, to the unknowability of the biblical God he opposes the revelation
of God by way of the prophetic Spirit and, above all, through the son, the true
“exegete,” “administrator” or “dispenser,” and singer of glory:
From the beginning the Son is the interpreter [ exēgētēs] of the Father, since from the beginning he has been with him. It is by his song that the prophetical visions,
and the diversities of gifts, and his own ministries, and his Father’s glorification
[ doxologia], have been orderly and systematically revealed unto mankind, in meet
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time to profit withal. And so the Word [ Logos] became the dispenser of the father’s grace for the good of men, and for their sake He wrought such mighty and manifold economies; on the one side revealing God to men, on the other, presenting
man unto God: and as He guards the invisibility of the Father, lest at any time
man should become a despiser of God, and that he might always have something
to grow toward, so on the other hand through many and manifold economies
He reveals God unto men, lest men altogether falling away from God, should
cease to be at all. For the glory of God is a living Man, and the life of man is to
see God. (Ibid., §7, pp. 368–369)
In this extraordinary passage the glorification performed by the Logos is described in the same “economic” terms with which Irenaeus had described the economy
of salvation. Not only does the economy of salvation presuppose the economy of
glory, but the latter is the “exegesis” of what would otherwise remain “indescrib-
able,” as much in the life of the deity as in the world of men. Glory is, in other
words, the economy of economies; that which, inasmuch as it interprets the econ-
omies ( tas oikonomias exegeito), reveals how much YHVH remained unknown in the kabhod:
Therefore, if neither Moses saw God, nor Elias, nor Ezekiel, who did see many
of the celestial things, and if the things which they did see were resemblances
of the Lord’s glory and prophecies of things to come; it is plain that the Father
indeed is invisible, concerning whom also the Lord said, No man hath God seen at
any time. But his word [ Logos], at his own pleasure, and for the profit of such as behold, revealed the brightness of the Father and has interpreted the economies
(as the Lord has said, “The Only Begotten God, who is in the Bosom of the Father,
He hath interpreted Him”: John 1:18). (Ibid., §11, p. 372)
א Important cues for a theology of glory can also be found in the Adversus Praxean
by Tertullian, that is, precisely in the incunabulum of economic theology. Tertullian not
only knows perfectly well that what was, in the economy of salvation ( in ipsa oikonomia: Against Praxeas, §23, p. 91), a lessening and diminution for the son would have resulted in an economy of glory that was the complete opposite (“gloria tamen et honore coro-naturus illum in caelos resumendo”: ibid., p. 92); but also, through the strategic citation of John, he glimpses in glory the inseparable relation that ties the Father to the Son, the irrevocable abode of the Son in the Father: “Jesus said: ‘And God will glorify Him in
Himself,’ that is, the Father, the Son whom He ‘having Him in Himself,’ though He has
been sent forth to earth, will later glorify by resurrection” (ibid., p. 94).
8.6. The most condensed exposition of a theology of glory in the writings of
the Church Fathers of the first centuries is to be found in the digression—which
almost forms a peri doxēs treatise—that Origen inserts in the thirty-second book
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of his commentary on the gospel according to John. The theme of glory appears
to him so important that, at the end of the digression, the author feels he must
thank God because, despite the inadequacy of his arguments, what he wrote
appears to him to be “well above his abilities [ pollōi meizosin tēs hemeteras axias]”
(Origen, Commentaire, p. 345). He begins by taking his leave of the pagan,
purely acclamatory meaning of the term (glory as “praise by the multitude”:
ibid., p. 329), to which he opposes not only the canonical passage from Exodus
on the kabhod of God that is revealed to Moses, but also the interpretation of
this passage that Paul makes in the Second Letter to the Corinthians (2 Co-
rinthians 3:7–11). The interpretation of these passages that Origen proposes is
a perfect example of his exegetical method, which distinguishes the lite
ral from
the anagogical (or spiritual) meaning:
If, from the corporeal standpoint, a divine epiphany is produced under the tent
and in the temple and on the face of Moses after he spoke with God, from the
anagogical point of view one could speak of the “vision of the Glory of God,” that
which is known and is seen in God with an entirely purified intellect. The intel-
lect that has been purified and has overcome all material things so as to carefully
contemplate God, becomes divine through that which it contemplates. One can
say that that is what the glorification of the face of him who has contemplated
God consists in. ( Commentaire, pp. 333–335)
In other words, Origen interprets glory in terms of knowledge and, immediately
afterward, applies this exegesis to the passage in John according to which “the
son of man has been glorified and God has been glorified through him” (ibid.,
p. 335). The specific and ingenuous contribution made by Origen is to read into
this passage nothing less than the process of divine self-knowledge:
Thus, knowing the Father, the Son has been glorified through his very knowledge,
which is the greatest good and leads to perfect knowledge since it is that with
which the Son knows the Father. I believe, however, that he has been glorified by
his knowledge, since it is in this way that he comes to know himself [ . . . ] All
this glory, through which the Son of man is glorified, was glorified by a gift of the
Father. And of all the elements that lead to the full glory of man, the principal
one is God insofar as he is not glorified simply because he is known by the Son,
but is glorified in [ en] his Son. (Ibid., pp. 335–337)
The process of reciprocal glorification between father and son coincides with
God’s self-knowledge, which is to be understood as an autosophia (ibid.), and
this process is so intimate that the glorification cannot be said to be produced
by the son but only in the son. At this point it is clear why the “economy of
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passion” ( hē oikonomia tou pathos) is able to coincide perfectly with the glorious economy through which the son reveals the father ( ek tēs oikonomias apokalyptein
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