Transfiguration of the Lord

The Gospel narrative

Three Evangelists tell the event, and a fourth witness — the Apostle Peter himself, in his second Epistle — testifies to it in his own person. The Church reads all four together, and the differences between them are part of the feast's substance rather than an embarrassment to it.

Matthew (17:1–9) sets the scene immediately after the confession at Caesarea Philippi and the first prediction of the Passion. "And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him." Peter breaks in — "Lord, it is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias" — and while he is yet speaking "a bright cloud overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him." The disciples fall on their faces and are sore afraid; Jesus comes and touches them, saying, "Arise, and be not afraid"; and when they lift up their eyes they see "no man, save Jesus only." Coming down, he charges them to tell the vision to no man until the Son of Man be risen from the dead.

Mark (9:2–9), the shortest and the most physical, has the same six days and the same three disciples, and describes the garments with the detail of a man who has watched a fuller at work: "his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no fuller on earth can white them." Mark alone remarks that Peter spoke "for he wist not what to say; for they were sore afraid," and it is Mark who records the disciples questioning one another on the descent "what the rising from the dead should mean," and the conversation that follows about Elijah who must first come.

Luke (9:28–36) diverges in three ways that the tradition has weighed carefully. He gives "about an eight days after these sayings" where Matthew and Mark give six. He alone says that Jesus "went up into a mountain to pray," and that "as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering" — so that in Luke the Transfiguration is an event of prayer, as the Baptism is in his Gospel. And Luke alone tells what Moses and Elijah were saying: they "spake of his decease (τὴν ἔξοδον αὐτοῦ, his exodus) which he should accomplish at Jerusalem." Luke adds too that "Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they saw his glory" — the same heaviness that will overtake them in Gethsemane — and that they entered the cloud in fear.

The frame of the story is the same in all three: the confession at Caesarea Philippi, the first open announcement of the Cross, the hard saying about taking up the cross and losing one's life, and then the promise that "there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom" (Matthew 16:28) — a promise which the Evangelists place immediately before the Transfiguration, so that the vision on the mountain is offered as its first and partial fulfilment. The glory is given precisely to those who have just been told about the Cross.

Six days, or eight

Matthew and Mark say "after six days"; Luke says "about eight days after these sayings." The oldest and simplest resolution is arithmetical: Luke counts inclusively in the Greek manner, reckoning both the day of the sayings at Caesarea Philippi and the day of the vision into his total, so that his eight and their six describe the same interval; his own "about" (ὡσεί) shows that he is not pressing the number. But the Fathers were unwilling to leave a number in the Gospel merely arithmetical, and both figures were read for their meaning.

The six days are read against Exodus 24:16, the first of the three Old Testament readings appointed at the Vespers of the feast: "And the glory of the Lord abode upon mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days: and the seventh day he called unto Moses out of the midst of the cloud." The six days of waiting before Moses entered the cloud are answered by the six days before the three disciples enter the bright cloud on the second mountain — the whole Sinai theophany deliberately rehearsed and surpassed. The six days are read also as the six days of creation, so that the vision belongs to a seventh and eighth day beyond the making of this world.

The eight days carry that further. Eight is in the patristic reckoning the number of the age to come — the day after the sabbath, the day of the Resurrection, the day that has no evening — and Luke's number was taken to signal that what the apostles saw on the mountain belongs not to the seven days of this creation but to the Eighth Day. Gregory Palamas, preaching on the feast, makes exactly this the key: the Transfiguration is "the mystery of the Eighth Day, that is, of the age to come." He also offers, as an additional reading rather than a replacement, a count of persons: six were visible on the mountain — Jesus, Peter, James, John, Moses and Elijah — while the Father in his voice and the Spirit in the cloud were invisibly present, making eight, so that the two numbers of the Gospels are both true of the same scene, one counting what was seen and the other what was there.

Moses and Elijah

The two who appear beside the transfigured Christ are chosen with precision. Together they are the Law and the Prophets — Moses the lawgiver, Elijah the greatest of the prophets before the Forerunner — standing on either side of the one to whom Law and Prophets alike bear witness, and yielding to him: when the cloud passes, they are gone, and the disciples see "Jesus only." The scene is the visible form of the claim that Christ came not to destroy the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil them.

They are also the two men of the Old Covenant to whom God granted a theophany upon a mountain, and both those theophanies are read at the Vespers of this feast. Moses on Sinai asked, "Shew me thy glory," and was set in the cleft of the rock and covered with God's hand while his glory passed by, and saw only his "back parts," for no man could see God's face and live (Exodus 33:11–23; 34:4–6, 8). Elijah at Horeb, after the forty-day fast, stood at the mouth of the cave and found the Lord not in the great wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, but in the sound of a fine stillness (3 Kingdoms 19:3–16). What was denied to Moses on Sinai and given only obliquely to Elijah at Horeb is given plainly on Tabor: they now behold, face to face and in the flesh, the God whose glory they once glimpsed from behind and in a whisper. Both, too, had fasted forty days before their vision, as Christ fasted forty days in the wilderness — the ascetic pattern the Church still keeps.

And they are set there as a pair for a further reason that the hymnography never fails to draw out: one of them died and the other did not. Moses died in the land of Moab and was buried by God in a grave no man knows (Deuteronomy 34:5–6); Elijah was carried up alive in the chariot of fire and has not tasted death (4 Kingdoms 2:11). They come to the mountain from the two conditions in which the human race is found, and their standing together before Christ declares that he is Lord of both — of the living and of the dead, of those in Hades whom he will raise and of those alive whom he will meet. The feast's stichera say it directly, and the point is not decorative: the Transfiguration is placed under the shadow of the Cross, and the two prophets are there as witnesses that the death he is about to die touches every state of humanity.

Luke supplies the content of their conversation, and it is the hinge of the whole feast: they "spake of his exodus which he should accomplish at Jerusalem." The word is exodus — a departure, a going-out, and unavoidably the Exodus that Moses himself led. What is discussed in the light is the Passion. The glory is not an escape from the Cross but its interpretation.

Peter, James and John

The same three are taken apart at the raising of the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:37) and again into the depth of the garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:37); they are the witnesses of the greatest glory and of the greatest anguish, and the tradition insists that the pairing is the point. They saw the face shining as the sun so that they might be able to bear the face covered with spittle; they saw the raiment white as light so that they might endure to see it stripped away. This is precisely what the kontakion of the feast says: they beheld the glory "that when they should see thee crucified they might understand that thy suffering was willing."

Why these three and no others? Three, first, because the Law required that a matter be established at the mouth of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15), and the vision was to be testified. Beyond that the Fathers offer a reading of each: Peter, because he loved Christ ardently and had just confessed him the Son of the living God; John, because he was loved, the disciple who leaned on his breast and who would write that "we beheld his glory"; James, because he was to be the first of the Twelve to drink the cup and die for him, beheaded by Herod (Acts 12:2). The three were also, though they did not know it, being prepared for their office: the vision was sealed under silence "until the Son of Man be risen from the dead," and was released for preaching only afterwards.

Peter's proposal of three tabernacles is treated by the tradition with a mixture of affection and severity. Luke and Mark both note that he did not know what he was saying. The proposal is generally read as the natural desire to arrest and domesticate the vision — to build and stay — and, since the Feast of Tabernacles was near at hand in the season, as an impulse to keep the feast of booths on the spot; the Fathers add the sharper criticism that to build three equal booths was to set the servants beside the Master, a levelling that the voice from the cloud immediately corrects: this is my beloved Son; hear ye him.

The voice itself repeats what was said at the Jordan (Matthew 3:17) with one addition — "hear ye him" — which is a quotation of Moses' own promise, "a Prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear" (Deuteronomy 18:15). The Father thus identifies his Son in the words by which Moses, standing there, had foretold him. And the cloud which overshadows is the cloud of the Exodus and of the tabernacle, the visible sign of the divine presence; the verb Matthew uses for its overshadowing (ἐπεσκίαζεν) is the verb used of the Spirit at the Annunciation. The three disciples fall on their faces, as prophets fall before glory, and are raised by the touch of a hand.

The mountain: Tabor and Hermon

Not one of the Evangelists names the mountain. Matthew and Mark say "an high mountain apart"; Luke says only "a mountain." From at least the fourth century the Christian tradition of Palestine identified it as Mount Tabor, the isolated dome that rises some 575 metres out of the plain of Esdraelon in lower Galilee — a mountain whose perfect separateness from the ranges around it made it a natural image of "apartness," and which the psalm names together with Hermon: "Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in thy name" (Psalm 88:13 LXX), a verse the festal hymnography takes up with delight. Cyril of Jerusalem and Jerome name Tabor without hesitation, Origen is cited for the identification earlier still, and by the sixth century the summit carried churches and by the Crusader period a monastery; a Greek Orthodox and a Latin monastery stand there now, and Tabor's name has passed so completely into the theology of the feast that the light itself is called the Taboric light.

The identification is nonetheless contested, and the entry records the case honestly. The objection is one of geography and of history. Of geography: Matthew places the episode "after six days" from the neighbourhood of Caesarea Philippi (Matthew 16:13), which lies at the southern foot of Mount Hermon, some hundred and thirty kilometres north of Tabor and rising to 2,814 metres — by far the more obvious "high mountain" in the immediate narrative, and the one to which a party at Caesarea Philippi would naturally have gone up. Of history: Tabor's summit was not a solitude. Polybius records that Antiochus III took a town on it in 218 BC, and Josephus fortified its summit against the Romans in AD 66; the objection, pressed by Henry Alford in 1868 and by many since, is that a fortified and inhabited hilltop is a poor place to be "apart." Defenders answer that the fortification of 66 is later than the event and that a settlement need not have occupied the whole summit. Other proposals — Mount Meron, and even Mount Nebo — have had occasional advocates, and a considerable body of modern exegesis declines to choose, treating "the high mountain" as the theological topography of Scripture, the place where God and man meet, from Sinai and Horeb and Carmel to this one.

The Church's liturgy has settled on Tabor and sings it by name — the exapostilarion of the feast begins "in thy light which hath appeared this day on Tabor." That is a liturgical, not a topographical, commitment: what the feast confesses is the light, and the mountain is named because the light must have shone somewhere.

The apostolic witness: 2 Peter

Uniquely among the events of the Lord's life, the Transfiguration has an eyewitness deposition outside the Gospels, and it is read as the Epistle of the feast. "For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount" (2 Peter 1:16–18). The passage claims the vision as the ground of apostolic preaching against the charge of myth, and its language — epoptai, "eyewitnesses," a word from the vocabulary of the mysteries — asserts that what was seen was really seen.

The Church's choice of the surrounding verses (the reading runs 1:10–19) is theologically deliberate, for the same chapter contains the sentence on which the whole doctrine of deification is built, nine verses earlier: that we are called "by glory and virtue" and given "exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). And the reading ends where the light is turned toward the hearer: "we have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts" (1:19). The glory on the mountain, the promise of participation in the divine nature, and the dawning of the light within the believer are set in one apostolic paragraph — which is precisely the argument of the feast.

The uncreated light and the hesychast controversy

What the three disciples saw is the doctrinal heart of August 6, and it became, in the fourteenth century, the most consequential theological dispute of the later Byzantine world.

The patristic tradition had long insisted on two things at once. First, that Christ did not change. The Transfiguration added nothing to him and altered nothing in him; the formula repeated through the homilies and the hymns is that he was transfigured not by receiving what he was not, but by showing forth to his disciples what he was — the divinity that his flesh ordinarily veiled shining out through the flesh. Second, that the disciples were changed: their eyes were opened, their senses were altered by grace to see what flesh cannot see, so that, as the troparion puts it with careful restraint, he showed them his glory "so far as they were able" to bear it. The light was not projected into their eyes from outside; they were raised to it.

The question left open was what kind of light it was. In the 1330s the Calabrian monk Barlaam came to Constantinople and, learning of the hesychast monks of Athos who in stillness and unceasing prayer claimed to behold the divine light, pronounced their experience delusion and the light of Tabor a created symbol — a phenomenon produced by God for the occasion, like any other sign, which came into being and passed away. Behind this lay a theology of God as simply and wholly unknowable, in whom nothing can be distinguished and with whom no real contact is possible.

The answer of Gregory Palamas — monk of Athos, later Archbishop of Thessalonica — is the theology of this feast. In the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts and in the Hagioritic Tome of 1340, which the elders of the Holy Mountain signed as their common confession, he drew out a distinction implicit in the Fathers and made it explicit: in God one must distinguish the essence (οὐσία), which is utterly transcendent, imparticipable and unknowable, from the energies (ἐνέργειαι), the uncreated operations by which God himself goes forth, is truly known and is truly shared. The light of Tabor is neither a created thing nor the divine essence: it is God himself in his energy, the uncreated glory of the Godhead, seen by bodily eyes made capable of it. To call it created is to make the vision of God impossible and salvation a matter of created intermediaries; to call it the essence is to claim what no creature can bear. The energies are the ground on which the promise of 2 Peter 1:4 stands, for it is by them that the saints become partakers of the divine nature without ceasing to be creatures — which is what the Church means by theosis.

The dispute was tried before councils at Constantinople in 1341, which condemned Barlaam; through the years of civil war and the opposition of Gregory Akindynos and Nikephoros Gregoras, during which Palamas was excommunicated and imprisoned; and decisively in 1347 and 1351, when the essence–energies distinction was defined as the faith of the Church and its deniers anathematised. The definition was written into the Synodikon of Orthodoxy read on the First Sunday of Lent, and Palamas himself was glorified in 1368 and given the Second Sunday of Great Lent as a second Sunday of Orthodoxy. He left two homilies on the Transfiguration, and it is one of these that the OCA still prints in place of a synaxarion notice on August 6 — a fair sign of how completely the feast and the doctrine have grown together.

The consequence for the feast is that August 6 is not merely the memorial of a past luminous event. It is the Church's public confession that God is genuinely knowable and genuinely partaken; that the vision granted to Peter, James and John is of the same order as the light given to purified hearts in prayer; and that the transfiguration of the human person — body included, for the apostles saw with their eyes — is the actual content of salvation. "God became man," runs the ancient formula that the feast enacts, "that man might become god" by grace.

The history of the feast

The observance is old, and its beginnings are not fully recoverable. A commemoration of the Transfiguration was kept in the Christian East well before it can be documented in the West, and its origin is commonly connected with the dedication of the churches on Mount Tabor — the tradition of three basilicas on the summit, corresponding to the three tabernacles Peter proposed, is recorded from an early date, and dedications of shrines regularly generated fixed feasts in the calendar (the Elevation of the Cross is the clearest parallel). By the eighth century the feast was fully formed and of the first rank in the Byzantine world: its two canons are the work of Cosmas of Maiuma and John of Damascus, and Andrew of Crete preached on it — three men of the same generation and the same Palestinian milieu, which places a solemn August 6 in the churches of Palestine and Syria by about the year 700 at the latest. Thereafter it is universal in the East, and the Slavs received it with the rest of the Byzantine calendar as Preobrazhenie Gospodne. In the Arabic of the Antiochian patriarchate it is ʿĪd al-Tajallī, "the feast of the shining-forth."

The Armenian Church keeps the Transfiguration on a movable date — the fourteenth Sunday after Pascha — under the name Vardavar, a festival that absorbed and christianised an older summer water-festival and is still marked by the drenching of passers-by with water.

In the West the feast was kept locally in various places from an early period, but it entered the universal Roman calendar late and for a particular reason: Pope Callixtus III made August 6 a feast of the whole Western Church in 1457, in thanksgiving for the raising of the Ottoman siege of Belgrade by John Hunyadi and John of Capistrano, news of which had reached Rome on August 6, 1456. The date the West adopted was the date the East had long kept.