Vladimir Gradev
Abstract: This text explores the essence of the event of Transfiguration that transforms the structure of monotheism and the origin of the oblivion of the theme of Transfiguration in the modern world in the separation made by Luther between theologia gloriae and theologia crucis and proposes to try to see not only the Transfiguration in view of the Cross, but also the Cross in view of the Transfiguration.
PDF Keywords: Transfiguration, Glory, Cross, catholicism, protestantism, symbols
Teilhard de Chardin calls in a letter the Transfiguration of Christ „le plus beau mystère”. The Transfiguration (Mt 17: 1-9; Mk 9: 2-8; Luc 9: 28-35) is the central event in the public life of Jesus, when the Christ manifests himself in Glory. This epitome of the whole New Testament is beautifully symbolized by the dazzling white of the dress of the transfigured Christ: „His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.“ (Mk 9:3), splendidly paint by Raphael in his famous Transfiguration.
Raphael, Transfiguration, 1520, fragment, Public Domain
The exclamation: “it is good (καλόν ἐστιν) for us to be here” (Mt 17:4) reveals the vocation of the artist: to make the invisible visible and to discover us the image of that beauty that we, poor pilgrims on this earth, never succeed to see by ourselves. That is the reason I think that the feast of Transfiguration should be the feast of the artists, men of the renewal and the transfiguration of the world.
The divine glory (gr. doxa, lat. gloria, claritas, maiestas), biblically, signifies the God’s being, as it manifests and communicates itself in the world, remaining transcendent at the same time.
“The glory of Him who moves all things penetrates through the universe and shines forth in one place more and less elsewhere”.[1]
Glory, the word, that opens the Paradiso of Dante, signifies the visible manifestation of the presence of God in the creation, understood as shining, as light. In the Letter to Cangrande Dante argues that we are to find the glory of God’s Being reflected in all that exists in His creation. The Glory is “the divine light, namely the divine goodness, wisdom, power that shines everywhere in the world”. Power, wisdom, goodness are the three attributes of the Trinity, the same that are carved on the doors of Hell: God is present in the lowest as well as in in the highest place in the world. The divine action as visibility, as light gives the poet the possibility to discover his world beyond and to describe it.
The Glory pervades the whole world. It penetrates all beings, build them in their essence and shines through them and it is reflected by all of them. God is present and acts in the whole creation, there is no separation, but unity between the natural and supernatural world. The Divine Comedy tells the journey from the lowest to the highest point of the world, journey, in which God is always present.
The Transfiguration shows that God’s Glory, His creative and redemptive Power, is manifest in the Son. The Transfiguration is not just an anticipation of the eschatological becoming of Jesus, neither just a confirmation of His divine origin, but the Transfiguration is the revelation in the human existence of Jesus of His divinity.
With the Transfiguration Jesus transforms the structure of the monotheism, as He reveals the presence of the Son, of Himself in God. That transfigures the one God in Father and Son. Nevertheless, the monotheism is not put in doubt: Father and Son have the same essence, but this essence is revealed as not static but dynamic and distinct. The Christian God is living God. God is Love. God does not reside in splendid solitude, but God is the living communion of the divine persons (for the catholic believers the Holly Spirit is the love, the communion, the relationship between the Father and the Son), divine communion that is unending source of life. God is Love, God is dynamics, God is life: that is the great revelation of the Transfiguration.
The Transfiguration asks the question of the relationship between the divine and the human nature of Jesus, accordingly the question of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural world.
Glory is a relative concept, it demands somebody to see, to confess and to praise God’s grandeur, God’s presence, and action in the world, and in the case of artist with the ability to express his experience – with its related difficulties, of course.
“In the heaven that receives most of his light, continues Dante, have I been, and I have seen things that one who comes down from there cannot remember and cannot utter…”
The mystic experience goes beyond the language, ends in silence, but Dante is poet, his art is the language. The saying of the unsayable is the most difficult problem for the poetry and Dante resolves it writing Paradiso. In the same manner Raphael responds to the challenge of representing the unrepresentable.
The divine shining and the wind of the Holy Spirit with their unbearable intensity throw down the three apostles, dazzled and illuminated at the same time. They cover their eyes, incapable to bear the shining of the Transfigured Christ. Typical for Raphael, the spiral movement traverses their darkened bodies in reversed “levitation” of the flying bodies of Elijah, Jesus and Moses in the sky. Jacob, Peter, and John are not only thrown down on earth, but also taken by the divine impulse, but they still can’t bear and understand the Glory of the Lord.
The transfiguration of Jesus gives the vision of God that the blessed enjoy in heaven. There are two, in the picture of Raphael, kneeled in the left on the summit, who contemplate in prayer and ecstatic admiration the Transfiguration.
Raphael, Transfiguration, 1520, fragment, Public Domain
For some historians as Burckhardt, they are Stefan e Laurence, the holy deacons, par excellence, for others they are Felix and Agapitus, also commemorated in the liturgy of the feast of Transfiguration. Today is largely accepted the interpretation of Herbert von Einem that they are Just and Pastor, saint patrons of the Cathedral of Narbonne, for which Giuliano de Medici commissioned the work. The important in our case is that they are the spectators, they see the Christ in His Glory, they have the gift of visual revelation of the supernatural realities.
In ecstatic adoration, kneeled, with united hands, with open palms, the two abandoned themselves to the super-rational evidence of the divine Glory. They invite the spectator to have the same humble and praying attitude. Only then the blue and the yellow that shines through the dazzling white of Jesus, will capture and elevate his spirit in the shining sky and the swift wind. That is, if I dare say, the central message of the picture. Raphael invites the spectator to rise his eyes and sees this world in the shining light of the Transfiguration: a message difficult to detect and to accept in our days. It is not by case that Raphael’s Transfiguration is not anymore, the best and the most famous picture of the world, and the modern refusal of figurative painting is also a sign of the renunciation of the quest of the Glory. Professor Kleinert rightly observes, in this sense, the oblivion and the insignificance of the theme of Transfiguration in the modern world.
If we explore the history of la longue durée of this oblivion, we see to emerge some privileged names as Luther in first place, in reason of his distinction, something more, his strong opposition between theologia gloriae, the essential feature, according to him, of the roman Catholicism, and the theologia crucis, that was for him not only critique of the Catholic church, but the central and specific feature of the protestant Reformation.
The other name that I would like to mention is that of Goethe, whose beautiful and important pages on the Transfiguration of Raphael, inaugurated not only the critical fortune of the picture of Raphael, but also the return of the appeal of the Transfiguration in the modern culture. In the “neo-antic esthetic” of Raphael, Goethe sees reborn the grandeur of the classics, the art as second nature, and Raphael embodies for him the “heroic-elegiac mood” that is the cipher of his Italian journey. Goethe also defends the grandiose unity of “double action” of the picture and he concludes that „Raphael is always right, and most profoundly so when we understand him least”.
From Goethe the insistence on the unity and compositional harmony of Rapahael’ Transfiguration goes through the Esthetics of Hegel and the Cicerone of Burckhardt (1855) to the Birth of Tragedy of Nietzsche (1876), where the reciprocal necessity of the two parts becomes a symbol of the interaction between the “Apolline world of beauty” and “the terrible wisdom of Silenus” paint in the lower half of the picture. In this manner not only the interest in Raphael’s picture, but also for the Transfiguration’s motive was reintroduced in the modern world.
I think our task today, as prof. Kleinert stimulates us to do, is to continue this reflection and to rethink in first place the separation effectuated by Luther of theologia gloriae and theology crucis. What if we try to see not only the Transfiguration in view of the Cross, but also the Cross in view of the Transfiguration?
I just want to mention than there are four symbols that have universal value: the centre, the circle, the square, the cross. The singular thing is that the Christian cross can take the figure of the centre, of the circle, or of the square. That shows the importance of the Cross in the Christian life and thinking. The symbol envelops the whole life of a community. It has not only a value of representation of a culture, but the symbol is a principle and life force for the members of a society. In this sense a study the pictorial representations of the Cross could show the different modes of representation of the Cross as centre, as circle of expansion, or as a surface, enclosing in its four sides the secret of a mystery of love.
To limit myself to a precise case, we can easily see that the representation of the Cross by Tintoretto as circle and radiance of an expansive glory of multiple colours is very different of an analogous representation, more intimate and less coloured by Rembrandt.
How is it possible? Is not the Cross the malediction of all vital values, according to the critique developed by Nietsche? The suffering for the sake of the suffering itself, something more: the delectatio morosa of the suffering, elevated as supreme value. Delectation associated with the malediction of the creative powers of the true life, not only by the impotence to understand them, but by the strong ressentiment that enjoys itself to transform the positive values in negative ones.
But if we turn to the first chapter of the first letter to the Corinthinas, we can see that it is about the Word of the Cross non as pure suffering for the sake of suffering, but as opening to another conception of the divine. The strong images of weakness and foolishness are there as critique of the traditional images. They are not an apology of the negative for the sake of the negative, but they invite us to go beyond the current evidence that became common sense. The provocative novelty of these images of weakness and foolishness scandalize because it is disturbing, and we don’t like to be disturbed in our most tenacious convictions and habits. Every true creation or novelty provokes the same effect of scandal. The heliocentric theory of Copernicus was perceived in the age of Reformation as scandal and foolishness (as testimonies the bitter dispute between Giordano Bruno and the Oxford luminaries).
The difference is that Saint Paul seems to attribute the foolishness and the weakness as essential properties of the divinity, that was at least the impression of the Jews and the Greeks. They saw the weakness and foolishness of the Word of the Cross as reversal of the major divine attributes of Power and Wisdom. But we should understand better the meaning that gave saint Paul to these “weakness and foolishness”. The two epithets don’t have the value of attributes because Paul clarifies straight away than “this foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and this weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor. 1:25). Then, we should not give to these qualifiers, alternately negative and positive, the function of constitutive elements of the divine essence. They serve as simple supports of one movement of transcendence that exceeds the negative as the positive and allows to catch a glimpse of the beyond of our determinations, always too human and limited. It is not about a systematic depreciation of such positive values as power and wisdom by the ressentiment and the diminished vitality. Saint Paul doesn’t take leave of this power and this wisdom, he practices them, and likes to practice them, but he knows well than they can’t be the last word when it is about this divine element that surpasses and challenges every language. In any case, the important here is the direction of the gaze toward a divine beyond the traditional religious and philosophical images and concepts. The excessive tonality of the terms adopted by Saint Paul, symbolizes the excess that must take us when it is about “the name that is above every name” (Phil 2:9) and that gives us the movement to go always beyond. The Cross itself invites us to go beyond ourselves as beyond every other thing.
It is, by the way, the same scandalous index of foolishness that we observe in the beatitudes of the Gospel which are at the heart of the message of the Cross. “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Mat 5:38-39). Here again it is less about to oppose one contrary to another contrary, than to turn our attention to the other as other, to transform our mind and become able to enter in the new world called by Jesus Kingdom of the Sky. The proposed mutation exceeds the order of the justice of equivalence: an eye for an eye, this for that. It’s impossible to content ourselves with the common sense or le bon sens. The Transfiguration and the Beatitudes joint to the Cross exceed the common sense in its everyday experience, because the Transfiguration is about a new creation and a new man, or if you prefer about new values that transcend the old values.
Finally, The Transfiguration effectuated by Cross doesn’t stir the interest only of the men that should be saved. It concerns the whole creation. At least, that is what we can read in the Letter to the Romans for the creation that in bondage, in the groaning and the pains of childbirth, “waits with eager longing” not only for the revealing of the sons of God”, but “in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:19-23).
The cross is raising not only on the earth of men and for the men only. It is raising on the whole creation. A huge hope, also theological, in its manner, traverses the world in all its composing universes. It is important to separate not the man from his world: the anthropology is also cosmology. Crux spes unica.
The Transfiguration invites us to conversion, to recreation of our vision and mind. Then we can discover its true sense: the blessed transfiguration of everything in us and in front of us, the divine that shines through all creatures, the whole transfigured world in the Crucified, that is what Teilhard calls “the most beautiful mystery”.
[1] Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradiso, I:1-3, transl. Durling, Martinez, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Philosophia 31/2023, pp. 16-26
Philosophia 