The Transfiguration of Our Lord

At the end of this Leap Year February, I attended an Eighth Day Institute Seminar on Holiness: in The Bible, the Fathers, the Liturgy, and Literature. A small group of us read and discussed The Song of Songs, a passage on the Transfiguration of Our Lord from St. Maximus the Confessor, the Vespers of the Feast of the Transfiguration, and Flannery O'Connor's short story "Revelation".

O'Connor has been much in the news since Loyola University of Maryland cancelled her, citing racist passages in her letters. Jessica Hooten-Wilson cited "Revelation" in a defense of Flannery O'Connor and so did Lorraine V. Murray.

But the standout of the readings was Saint Maximus the Confessor's Ambiguum 41 on the Transfiguration of Our Lord. This blog cites the entire passage, but I will highlight just a few of the sections that were astounding to me, as Maximus describes what God wanted to achieve in His Creation by finally creating Man:

This is why man was introduced last among beings— like a kind of natural bond mediating between the universal extremes through his parts, and unifying [1305C] through himself things that by nature are separated from each other by a great distance — so that, by making of his own division a beginning of the unity which gathers up all things to God their Author, and proceeding by order and rank through the mean terms, he might reach the limit of the sublime ascent that comes about through the union of all things in God, in whom there is no division, completely shaking off from nature, by means of a supremely dispassionate condition of divine virtue, the property of male and female, which in no way was linked to the original principle of the divine plan concerning human generation, so that he might be shown forth as, and become solely a human being according to the divine plan, not divided by the designation of male and female (according to the principle by which he formerly came into being), nor divided into the parts that now appear around him, [1305D] thanks to the perfect union, as I said, with his own principle, according to which he exists.

Then, once he had united paradise and the inhabited world through his own proper holy way of life, man would have fashioned a single earth, not divided by him in the difference of its parts, but rather gathered together, for to none of its parts would he be subjected. After this, having united heaven and earth through a life identical in virtue in every manner with that of the angels (as much as this is humanly possible), he would have made the sensory creation absolutely identical and indivisible [1308A] with itself, not in any way dividing it into places separated by distances, for he would have become nimble by means of the spirit, without any corporeal weight holding him to the earth, and thus proceed unhindered in his ascent to the heavens, for his nous would no longer behold such things, but hasten purely to God, and in the wisdom of his gradual ascent to God, just as if he were traveling on an ordinary road, he would naturally overcome any obstacles standing in his way.

But we know what happened: Adam and Eve sinned and broke away from God through disobedience--and so the Father sent His Son to restore the original wholeness coming as "perfect man, having assumed from us, and for us, and consistent with us, everything that is ours, lacking nothing, but without sin . . .

Then, having sanctified our inhabited world by the dignity of His conduct as man, He proceeded unhindered to paradise after His death, just as He truly promised to the thief, saying: Today, you will be with me in paradise. Consequently, since there was for Him no difference between paradise and our inhabited world, He appeared on it, and spent time together with His disciples after His resurrection from the dead, demonstrating that the earth is one and not divided against itself, for it preserves the principle of its existence free of any difference caused by division. Then, by His ascension into heaven, it is obvious that He united heaven and earth, for He entered heaven with His earthly body, which is of the same nature and consubstantial with ours, [1309C] and showed that, according to its more universal principle, all sensory nature is one, and thus He obscured in Himself the property of division that had cut it in two. Then, in addition to this, having passed with His soul and body, that is, with the whole of our nature, through all the divine and noetic orders of heaven, He united sensory things with noetic things, displaying in Himself the fact that the convergence of the entire creation toward unity was absolutely indivisible and beyond all fracture, in accordance with its most primal and most universal principle. . . .

And with us and for us He encompassed the extremes of the whole creation through the means, as His own parts, and He joined them around Himself, each with the other, tightly and indissolubly: paradise and the inhabited world, heaven and earth, the sensory and the noetic, since like us He possesses a body, sense perception, soul, and nous, to which (as His own parts) He associated individually the extreme that was thoroughly akin to each one of them (i.e., His parts), according to the mode described above, and He recapitulated in Himself, in a manner appropriate to God, all things, showing that the whole creation is one, as if it were another human being, completed by the mutual coming together of all its members, inclining [1312B] toward itself in the wholeness of its existence, according to one, unique, simple, undefined, and unchangeable idea: that it comes from nothing. Accordingly, all creation admits of one and the same, absolutely undifferentiated principle: that its existence is preceded by nonexistence.

You have to read this passage several times to comprehend the vision of unity, integrity, and holiness Saint Maximus is conveying. In our divided, troubled, uncertain world, it is clear that Jesus Christ is only way to wholeness and holiness, the only icon of God the Father's plan for us.

Image Credit: 15th century Icon of the Transfiguration by Theophanes the Greek.