Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
In this essay I examine a rather quirky and possibly novel teaching of Faustus Socinus (1539--1604): what George H. Williams calls a "pre-Ascension ascension" (hereafter PAA) of Christ into heaven. Faustus claimed that this bodily ascent into heaven took place before Christ's final visible ascension to heaven some time between his baptism and the commencement of his earthly teaching ministry. The theory states in brief that Christ, "after he was born a human, and before he began to discharge the office entrusted to him by God, his own Father, ... was in heaven, and abode there for some time." Christ took this heavenly sojourn "that he might hear from God himself and ... see in his very presence what he was soon to proclaim and reveal to the world in God's own name." 1 In another place Socinus states that Jesus, "after his birth from the virgin, and before he announced the gospel, was raptured into heaven (in caelum raptus fuerit). There he learned from God himself what he was to reveal to the human race."2
Possible Sources of Influence
How did Socinus come by this unusual theory? The possible sources and influences on Socinus, beyond the biblical arguments that he sets forth, remain obscure. Williams speculates, without drawing any definitive conclusions, that Italian Neoplatonist thought, influenced by the Arab philosopher Avicenna, would have influenced Socinus. The idea of a mystical celestial ascent, applied to the Prophet Muhammad in Avicenna, came from Neoplatonist Christians, who adapted it to Enoch, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, and Paul. For example, Williams cites Marsilio Ficino of Florence (d. 1499), who "opened his Commentarius in Epistolas D. Pauli with a proemium on Paul's ascent to the third heaven for 'the arcane mysteries' in the tradition of Plotinus."3 Although we have no evidence of any direct influence of this on Socinus, Williams says that "the important fact is that this kind of thinking was abroad, whether in approval or disapproval, in Italian circles in which Socinus had once moved."4 Williams does note that the "ascent" in all of these other instances indicates a purely mystical and not a spatial one. Furthermore, the Neoplatonic literature does not apply any of these...