Articles for tag: modern man, self-actualization, Transfiguration

GIVING WITNESS TO THE TRUE CHURCH

Orthodox Christians all over the world have received the unchanging Christian Faith, passed down from the Holy Apostles to their successors, and continue to practice it today in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church – The Orthodox Church.
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Be all that you can be: TRANSFIGURED

“O LORD, … You have made man a little lower than God,
and crowned him with glory and honor” (Ps. 8:5).

What is the human being

If we attempt to understand what a human being is based on empirical observations of his constitutionality, behavior and characteristics, we will arrive at an incomplete and distorted picture. It would be better to ask, “What is the potentiality of the human being?” Yes, this is what the human being is, not what it is but what it can be. Just as when we look at an infant we envision what it will be when it grows up, so with every human being; we reflect on what it might be when it becomes what it can be. The human potentiality is not theoretical and abstract, because it has been fully realized, and we see it in Christ Jesus.

Our potentiality

On Mount Tabor Christ showed us His transfigured humanity, and at the same time He showed us our potentiality. The third Sticheron Idiomelon of the Feast says:

“O Lord, when You were transfigured on a high mountain in the presence of Your foremost disciples, You radiated with glory, showing how those who lead an outstanding life of virtue will be made worthy of the glory of heaven.”

Therefore, today, in the transfigured Christ, we see the potentiality of the human being in its highest degree attainable, a perfect human being, a model for each and every one of us. The glory of Mount Tabor is available

“to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality” (Rom. 2:7).

Now, through Christ, His glory is available to everyone

“and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God” (Rom. 5:2).

The “ascent”

The Fathers teach that in order to be able to ascend to God we must purify our senses and our heart from the passions and cleanse our mind (nous) from all earthly and mundane thoughts, as we chant in the Cherubic Hymn, or else we will not be able to comprehend the mysteries of God (cf. Lk. 8:10) and reach the theoria (vision) of God. The Saints are those who have arrived at the vision of God, and thus have reached their potentiality–perfection, union with God, which is the goal and purpose of life of all of us. The Saints are the complete human beings.

“When a person’s heart is cleansed he becomes more sociable, balanced. He behaves properly within society, because his selfishness has given way to love for God and love for man. Selfish love is transformed into unselfish love… Thus, when selfish love is changed into unselfish love, one speaks of the person as having become a real human being. And it is this transformation which is considered the cure of man.”1

A static view of man

While this is the teaching of the Church concerning man’s ascent to achieve a transfigured life, unfortunately far from engaging in a struggle to achieve his potentiality, man dismisses it, accepting himself for what he is. There is nothing to achieve, there is no potentiality. The potentiality is a static “me.” The genes made me, and, if not, society is to be blamed. This is the new norm: I am what I am–without apologies, without excuses–in fact with some (unwarranted) pride. Homosexuality, gluttony, obesity, alcoholism, drug dependency—any unnatural physical and mental tendency, any moral depravity and uncontrollable passion we might have—are now accepted and tolerated by our permissive society.

Is man only matter?

Humanity has been on the quest of the elixir of perennial youth. Today serious efforts are being made through genetic engineering to preserve and prolong the human life. Yet this has been achieved by Christ and we ignore it and spurn it.

With our science we have exempted the human being from all responsibility to himself and to society, from any accountability of his actions, since we have accepted that he can make very few choices, and what he is and what he can achieve are “programmed” in his genes. We have come to believe that a human being is only quantitatively higher among the primates, and in essence no different than inorganic matter, which is constituted of the same basic elements of existence.

Modern biology managed to deprive the human being of his volition, and thus of any possibility of change and transformation. With the human genome decoded there are no longer any “secrets” with the human being. To understand ourselves and our potentiality we can analyze our chromosomes and the genetic code of the human being—and we should do that. We caution the researcher, however, that such an examination will not yield findings that will reveal what the human being is, any more than a chemical analysis of the paints used by Monet reveal his artistry to us.

Discover our potentiality

In the midst of our insolence and most despicable behavior, in our utter alienation from God, we should still be able to see our potentiality for “high flights”, for redemption,

“for transformation and radical change on both the moral and religious levels [of] the very people who by their own low spiritual condition simply tend to frustrate any attempt at transformation.” 2

We must reorient ourselves, discover our potentialities, and pursue the life for which God has destined us: to behold His glory. The transfigured life is not the privilege of a few predestined, “lucky” souls. It is the potentiality of everyone, though in actuality, it is realized only by those very few who want it, desire it, strive eagerly for it,

“with all their heart, and with all their soul, and with all their mind, and with all their strength (cf. Mk. 12:30).

Our cooperation for a transfigured life

The Lord revealed Himself in His glory to His disciples, “as they could bear it,”3 in order to strengthen them before His upcoming suffering. We too should gaze upon the glory of the transfigured Lord, at the glory of our transfigured human nature, whenever the vicissitudes of life beset us, whenever doubts creep up in our minds, whenever darkness and gloom envelop us. The glory of the transfigured Lord, the theosis of our nature, should give us hope and strength to continue the arduous climb towards the transfigured life. But let us understand one thing clearly: Transfiguration does not happen in a vacuum, without our cooperation—though ultimately it is a unique gift of God’s ineffable love for us. We would be sorely mistaken if we were to believe that such a change would be as natural of a process as the transformation of the larva into a butterfly. We must

  • exhibit the will
  • equally show the effort
  • and produce the results

To share the glory of God we need to “ascend” the mountain.

“Living within the Church by grace, man must first cleanse his heart of the passions; attain the illumination of the nous—Adam’s state before the Fall—and then ascend to theosis, which constituted man’s communion and union with God and is identified with salvation. These are the steps of spiritual perfection—the foundations of Orthodox spirituality.”4

As we’ve seen the steps of Christian perfection are three:

  1. With God’s grace man should repent and cleanse his heart of the passions — stage of purification
  2. Attain illumination of his mind — stage of illumination, and then
  3. Reach the stage of “theosis,” or deification, that is union with God.

Salvation is transfiguration

Salvation is for us, Orthodox Christians:

“A radical transformation of ἄνθρωπος [the human being] wrought by the grace of God”.5

Let us take courage, my friends, for, as St. John Chrysostom says,

“Christ did not take another flesh but this very one beset with troubles.”6

It is the same, crucified and suffering flesh which shone more brilliantly than the sun, in the splendor of the uncreated light. In Christ, the goal of theosis is complete, perfect. In Christ, the entire human nature has achieved union with God. With Christ and in Christ the path is cleared for the entire human race to follow on His footsteps.

Isn’t it wonderful, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, wonderful beyond our wildest imagination, that God is sharing with us the riches of His gifts with His lowly creation?

“To make known the riches of His glory for the objects of mercy.” (Rom. 9:23)

Humanity has been on the quest of the elixir of perennial youth. Today serious efforts are being made through genetic engineering to preserve and prolong the human life. Yet this has been achieved by Christ and we ignore it and spurn it. It’s here on Mount Tabor, free for our taking. Together with Christ and in Christ we too can be the same today and always, as

“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Heb. 13:8).

Sharers of Christ’s eternity

What is the human being? a creature denigrated, scoffed at, brought down to the level of primates, stripped of its dignity, honor and divine call and, therefore, deprived of the gentlest and noblest aspects of its humanness? What has the human being been reduced to in our technological and technocratic age? a machine? a random encounter of molecules and genes, a total sum of parts?

My dear fellow Christians: beyond the changing, fleeting, corrupt realm subject to our senses, lies a spiritual, incorrupt reality, the crown and glory of which is the deified human nature of the Theanthropos Jesus Christ. In Him we realize our potentiality. In Him we realize our perfect state. May we pursue it and attain it with God’s grace. Amen.

Fr. E.H./00

  1. Archim. [now Metropolitan] Ierotheos Vlachos, Orthodox Spirituality: A Brief Introduction, p. 64).
  2. Metropolitan Demetrios, Being Transformed: Chrysostom’s Exegesis of the Epistle to the Romans, p. 5). Translation slightly edited.
  3. Kontakion of Holy Transfiguration

    You were transfigured upon the mountain
    and Your disciples as they could bear it
    Your glory, O Christ our true God, contemplated;
    so that when they would see You on the Cross, O Lord,
    they would know that You suffered on Your own free will
    and proclaim to the Universe
    that You are most truly, Word Divine,
    of the Father the Splendor.

  4. Metropolitan Ierotheos Vlachos, o.c., p. 44.
  5. o.c., p. 14.
  6. On Romans, Homily 13; PG 60.514, in o.c., p. 15.
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GIVING WITNESS TO THE TRUE CHURCH

Orthodox Christians all over the world have received the unchanging Christian Faith, passed down from the Holy Apostles to their successors, and continue to practice it today in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church – The Orthodox Church.
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The Transfiguration: Was Christ Transformed?

transfiguration
“After six days Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves; and He was transfigured before them, and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became white as light.”

(Mk. 9:2 and Mt. 17:2).

August 6th is the feast of Holy Transfiguration in which the Church celebrates an event in the life of Christ narrated by all three synoptic gospels. Christ foretold His disciples His impending passion, and then after six days revealed His divinity to them in a marvelous way.

The question we want to address here is: Was Christ transformed into something He was not or did He allow the eyes of the three disciples to become receptive to see Him the way He always was?

In the Orthodox understanding, what occurred on Mt. Tabor was not a momentary change from the human form Christ had assumed (which was in every respect like ours) to the form He would assume after His resurrection (as Western scholarship often sees it), because Christ was actually always the same, resplendent with the divine light emanating from His divinizing flesh. He did not appear glorious in a brief transformation of His body, but He was always in His divine glory (John 17:5), which, however, was veiled for those who were unworthy to contemplate it, while others saw it and testified about it (John 1:14).

Christ is Always the Same

The witness of the Fathers of the Church is that Christ’s humanity after His resurrection is not different from what it was before. St. Gregory the Theologian states:

In my view, He will come as He appeared or was manifested to the disciples on the Mountain.1

St. John Damascene as well explicates somewhere what took place:

His holy Body at no time remained deprived of the divine glory. From the moment of the hypostatic union of the two natures, the divine and the human, the body of Christ was enriched with the glory of the invisible divinity.

St. Gregory Palamas elucidates further this understanding, declaring that Christ has one body, one human nature, not three: one at His Transfiguration, another outside His Transfiguration, and yet another after His resurrection. Thus, he states,

when Christ was transfigured He neither received anything different, nor was He changed into anything different, but was revealed to His disciples as He was.2

Elsewhere St. Gregory Palamas returns to the subject stating:

Indeed, not only will Christ be eternally thus in the future, but He was such even before He ascended the Mountain.3

He then adduces St. John Damascene as his witness:

Christ is transfigured, not by putting on some quality He did not possess previously, nor by changing into something He never was before, but by revealing to His disciples what He truly was, in opening their eyes and in giving sight to those who were blind. For while remaining identical to what He had been before, He appeared to the disciples in His splendor; He is indeed the true light, the radiance of glory.4

St. Gregory Palamas also offers the following comment in the form of a rhetorical question:

Moreover, the transformation of our human nature, its deification and transfiguration—were these not accomplished in Christ from the start, from the moment in which He assumed our nature?5

Then at the end of the following unit he adds:

Therefore Christ possesses this light immutably, or rather, He has always possessed it, and always will have it with Him.6

Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlahos states:

Christ revealed what He had been concealing, He manifested the glory of the divinity with which His human nature was united from the moment of His conception in the womb of the Theotokos.7

A contemporary theologian also states concisely the Orthodox faith received:

His human nature was glorified from the womb of the Theotokos, but until then it was not shown … Now for the first time the eyes of the disciples were opened to see what Christ had from the moment of His incarnation. That is, in reality it was not Christ who was transfigured, but the eyes of His disciples, to be able to behold the uncreated light.8

We Need to be Transformed to See Him as He Is

This last statement, i.e. that it was not Christ who was transfigured, but the eyes of His disciples, to be able to behold the uncreated light, is the teaching of St. Maximos the Confessor, who writes:

They passed over from flesh to spirit before they had put aside this fleshly life, by the change in their powers of sense that the Spirit worked in them, lifting the veils of the passions from the intellectual activity that was in them.9

St. Gregory Palamas confirms:

At that moment, the initiate disciples of the Lord ‘passed…from flesh to spirit’ by the transformation of their senses, which the Spirit wrought in them, and so they saw that ineffable light, when and as much as the Holy Spirit’s power granted them to do so.10

Elsewhere he also states that,

He was divine before, but He bestowed at the time of His Transfiguration a divine power upon the eyes of the apostles and enabled them to look up and see for themselves.11

The Agioreitikos Tomos incorporates this teaching of the Orthodox Church:

He is transfigured, not by assuming what He did not possess, nor by changing into what He was not, but by revealing Himself as He was to His disciples, opening their eyes and healing their blindness.12

Therefore the appearance of the Lord in His glory did not add anything to the glory that He possessed since His conception. It was a revelation and a manifestation of His eternal glory, an unveiling of the underlying splendor of His divine body in a way visible to the transformed eyesight of His disciples. The disciples were granted the grace to behold Christ’s glory, veiled oeconomically in the “form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7), in order to carry on the plan of salvation.

Thus we see that for a brief time, the veil was drawn aside, and the disciples were enabled to contemplate the radiance of His glory, “not entirely, so that they may not lose their life together with their eyesight”13 that revealed Him as He truly was.

The Hymnology of the Church

The Transfiguration was witnessed “so that when they would see [Christ] on the Cross, they would know that [He] suffered willingly.” —Kontakion of the Transfiguration

The hymnology of the Church as well declares that the eyes of the disciples were allowed to see on Mount Tabor what was Christ’s habitual or natural appearance. Both the Troparion and the Kontakion of the Feast of Holy Transfiguration mention that the disciples saw as much of Christ’s glory as they could bear.14 Christ lifts up the veil a little so that the disciples would get a glimpse of the glory with which He was surrounded, or rather the glory emanating from His divinizing human body. The purpose of it is stated in the Kontakion: “so that when they would see You on the Cross, they would know that You suffered willingly,” because it was obvious that He was God almighty in the flesh, and therefore if anything would happen to Him, they would know that it would happen voluntarily; only if He would allow it.

It is as if the Lord had told His disciples, “Look at me.” Indeed I am “the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16:16) you confessed me earlier, confirmed by the voice of my Father, “This is my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” (Mt. 17:5) Know then that the Passion is not forced upon me, but I walk voluntarily toward it, to save the lost sheep… This explains why Christ appeared to them in “garments of skin” (Gen. 3:21), the garb of man after the fall, whereas being the “heavenly One” (1 Cor. 15:49) He was always clothed in the splendor of uncreated light.

The glory of the Lord is seen in the iconographic depiction of Holy Transfiguration.15 We see that the light does not come from the outside, but emanates and radiates out of the Light-giver Christ. The light did not appear temporarily, to shine for a time and then fade away. It is the uncreated eternal light, His light, the light of His glory, which always radiates from His “glorious body” (Phil. 3:21).

The “cure” of fallen man consists in his participation in the uncreated light that originates from the divine body of Christ. We are all called to resemble Christ, because only then, as a hymn states, “those who attain the height of virtue will also be counted worthy of the divine glory.” (Third Idiomelon of Vespers)

So, was Christ transformed? From the perspective of the three disciples, He was, as from our perspective the sun rises and sets, while remaining the same.

The subject of Christ’s holy Transfiguration is treated together with that of His holy Baptism in Unit 42 (pp. 428-39, particularly in pp. 434-39), of Fr. Emmanuel’s book, Jesus: Fallen? The Human Nature of Christ Examined from an Eastern Orthodox Perspective (Orthodox Witness 2013).

  1. Letter to Cledonius 101.
  2. hom. in Transfig. 34.13.
  3. Triads 3.i.15.
  4. hom. 34.12-13.
  5. Triads, 3.i.15.
  6. Triads, 3.i.16.
  7. “The Transfiguration of Christ” in The Feasts of the Lord, p. 147.
  8. Meletios Vadrahanis, “What Reveals the Transfiguration of Christ,” Orthodoxos Typos, No. 1890, Aug. 5, 2011.
  9. To Eutropius 2.10.
  10. hom. 34.8.
  11. Triads, 3.i.15.
  12. PG 150:1232C.
  13. Third Sticheron of the Lite of the Vespers of August 6.
  14. The Great Horologion, p. 434.
  15. See the study The Uncreated Light, An Iconographic Study of the Transfiguration in the Eastern Church by Solrunn Nes, 2007.
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