Vedere la voce: dall'Apocalisse di Giovanni all'Ascensione di Isaia, passando per l'Apocalisse di Abramo

In the very complex framework of Jewish and early Christian visionary literature – which is literally dominated by both eye-centred and anthropomorphic representations of the otherworld – what Andrei A. Orlov has called as the “experience of the voice” or of the “divine name” is well attested. According to such a descriptive/epistemological mechanism, several elements deriving from the heavenly world stand out as primarily connected to aural experiences. But it is not difficult to find, also within these texts, a specific anthropomorphic mechanism concerning the heavenly voice, which seems to emerge like a kind of visible being. This aspect appears especially in the Apocalypse of John, where the seer turns “to see whose voice it was that spoke to me” (1.12) as well as in the Apocalypse of Abraham, where the voice could literally fall from the sky “in a stream of fire” (8.1) and reach the seer like this had motor abilities like that of an anthropomorphic being. If in the Apocalypse of John the relationship between the voice and Jesus is quite ambiguous, this is very much manifest in the Ascension of Isaiah, especially in 9.2, 5, where one of the speaking voices of the text is clearly identified with “Your Lord” (according to the Ethiopic version) or also with “the Son of God” (according to other versions). This essay aims at highlighting these forms of “anthropomorphization” of an aural experience, interpreting it as a direct vision of the other-world, which are, in turn, put in writing (or “textualized”) according to an “eye-centred”, or visual, perspective, in order to better adhere to specific social and/or cultural functions.