Abstract
Reading this book feels like marvelling at the patterns of filigree on a finely wrought goldwork. The wonderful exegetical skill of the author detects tiny details in ancient texts and through them opens up an unexpected world, structured by a celestial hierarchy where a heptad of angelic spirits minister in a manner previously concealed. His learned and insightful book makes a significant contribution to the study of early Christian pneumatology.
Bucur revives and develops an obscure thesis developed by Christoph Oeyen in the mid 1960s concerning Engelpneumatologie in Clement of Alexandria. He argues that Clement’s fragmentarily preserved works have been unjustly sidelined in scholarship, and while he draws some texts from the Stromateis (esp. 4.25.125; 5.6.35; 7.2.9), he focuses chiefly on Exc 10-11, 27 and Ecl 56-57. He shows that Clement probably received a tradition from the ‘elders’ of seven ‘first-created’ angels (protoctists), placed third in the hierarchy of the universe, below the Face of God and the Son/Logos but above the archangels, angels and humans. The elders envisaged the possibility of rising by transformation from one rank into the next, but Clement interiorised this idea of ascent. Although Clement’s theology remains fundamentally binatarian – only God and the Son/Logos are objects of worship – the protoctist pneumatology is central to how he conceives the Christ’s unity as multiplicity. God is unknowable and one, but Christ is knowable and ‘one thing as all things’. This is interpreted through a particular form of ‘Spirit christology’. The term ‘Spirit’ can be used interchangeably with ‘Christ’, while the ‘spirits’ prove to be the dynamic power of the Logos. The interplay between the one ‘spirit’ and the angelic ‘spirits’ belongs to Clement’s sensitivity to Christ’s unity as multiplicity. Thus Bucur shows that while Clement did not envisage a hypostasised spirit as did later theologians, he did have an interesting pneumatology, far beyond what has previously been recognised by scholarship. Bucur prefers the term ‘angelomorphic pneumatology’ to ‘angelic pneumatology’ (pace Oeyen’s Engelpneumatologie) because the angelic qualities of the spirits do not yet allow them simply to be identified as angels.
Bucur argues that similar angelomorphic pneumatology is detectable in other early Christian texts: he focuses on Revelation, Shepherd of Hermas, Justin Martyr, and Aphrahat the Persian Sage. In Justin and Aphrahat, as in Clement, he finds a combination of Matt 18:10; Zech 3:9; 4:10 and Isa 11:2-3 informing the idea of seven angelomorphic spirits, while in Hermas and Aphrahat he detects a link with ascetic teaching on the indwelling of the Spirit. His readings involve digging deep into details and concentrating closely on ideological connections, but despite the paucity and fragmentary character of his material, his arguments are sure-footed and compelling.