And he said,
You can not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.
All Commentaries on Exodus 33:20 Go To Exodus 33
Augustine of Hippo
AD 430
And as a matter of fact the words which the Lord later says to Moses … are commonly and not without reason understood to prefigure the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus the back parts are taken to be his flesh, in which he was born of the Virgin and rose again, whether they are called the back parts [posteriora] because of the posteriority of his mortal nature or because he deigned to take it near the end of the world, that is, at a later period [posterius].But his face is that form of God in which he thought it not robbery to be equal to God the Father, which no one surely can see and live. … After this life, in which we are absent from the Lord, where the corruptible body is a load upon the soul, we shall see “face to face,” as the apostle says. (For it is said of this life in the Psalms, “Indeed all things are vanity: every man living,” and again, “For in your sight no man living shall be justified.” In [this] life too, according to John, “it has not yet appeared what we shall be. For we know,” he said, “that when he shall appear we shall be like to him, because we shall see him as he is.” And he certainly meant this to be understood as after this life, when we shall have paid the debt of death and shall have received the promise of the resurrection.) Or [is it] that even now, to whatever extent we spiritually grasp the Wisdom of God, through which all things were made, to that same extent we die to carnal affections…. Since we regard this world as dead to us, we also die to this world, and may say as did the apostle: “The world is crucified to me and I to the world.” .
