Êxodo 33
Origen of Alexandria · Comentário Patrístico (catena)
Êxodo 33:23
For it is well known that he, that is, the one who gave the oracles to Moses, says, "You shall not see my face but my back." Certainly these statements must be understood by the aid of that symbolism which is appropriate to the understanding of divine sayings, and those old wives' fables, which ignorant people invent on the subject of the front and back parts of God, must be utterly rejected and despised. Nor indeed must anyone suppose that we have entertained some impious thought in saying that the Father is not visible even to the Savior, but he must consider the exact meaning of the terms we use in controverting the heretics. For we have said that it is one thing to see and be seen, another to perceive and be perceived or to know and be known. To see and be seen is a property of bodies, which it would certainly not be right to apply either to the Father or to the Son or to the Holy Spirit in their relations one with another. For the Trinity by its nature transcends the limits of vision, although it grants to those who are in bodies, that is, to all other creatures, the property of being seen one by another. But incorporeal and above all intellectual nature is capable of nothing else but to know and be known, as the Savior himself declares when he says, "No one knows the Son save the Father, neither does any know the Father save the Son, and he to whom the Son wills to reveal him." It is clear then that he did not say, "No one sees the Father save the Son" but "No one knows the Father save the Son." — ON FIRST PRINCIPLES 2.3
Êxodo 33:23
Like to these is the saying of God to Moses: "Lo, I have set you in a cleft of the rock, and you shall see my back parts." That rock which is Christ is therefore not completely closed but has clefts. But the cleft of the rock is he who reveals God to men and makes him known to them; for "no one knows the Father, save the Son." So no one sees the back parts of God—that is to say, the things that are come to pass in the latter times—unless he be placed in the cleft of the rock, that is to say, when he is taught them by Christ's own revealing. — COMMENTARY ON THE SONG OF SONGS 3.15