Smilen Markov
Abstract: In his treatise On the Transfiguration John of Damascus asserts that in the event of the Transfiguration Jesus Christ does not undergo an ontological change by becoming what he is not. At stake is a revelation of the person of Christ which transforms its addressees. The disciples perceived the deified state of Christ’s human nature and they themselves enter deification. This is a phenomenological conduit to the transformative relation between the hypostasis and its nature. In the case of Christ this relation activates God’s salvific plan. This mystery is revealed not in opposition of the natural order, but – in the transfiguration of natural being according to the dynamics of hypostatic life. Christ’s Transfiguration manifests the importance of the body within divinization. It also demonstrates that the world is the center of divine knowledge. Thus, the Transfiguration is the main reference point of Christian cosmology and ecology.
PDF Keywords: Transfiguration, nature, hypostasis, energy, deification
The main question discussed by St. John of Damascus in his treatise On the Transfiguration concerns the vision of the disciples: what is it that the disciples see? Certainly, Jesus Christ does not undergo an ontological change by becoming what he is not, and afterwards returning to his previous state. At stake is not a change of essential properties but self-revelation. He reveals the true dimension of his existence, the true and full form of his presence to his disciples by enabling them to perceive it as far as possible. So, if there is a change in Christ in the event of the Transfiguration, it is in the realm of phenomenology. Consequently, rather than asking “In what way did Christ change?”, the meaningful question is: “What aspect of his being did Christ reveal in the Transfiguration?”. John of Damascus asserts that Christ revealed the transformed, deified state of human nature, i.e., the existential mode of nature when the latter is enriched with divine life.
This transformed state of natural being is seen within the hypostatic countenance. Revealed is not merely a natural state, but a person. Personhood is manifested through a name which denotes a relationship: this is the name “Son” which is higher than any other name (ὄνομα ὑπερ παν ὄνομα)[1]. In other words, at stake is the personal identity of the Son: “This is my beloved Son”. This personal revelation attests to the Trinitarian life and the order of relations between the Father and the Son. Being a revelation of who Christ truly is and how he truly lives, the Transfiguration is a personal encounter within a supernatural state of being. The phenomenological structures that refer to a reality beyond and above human nature are activated within the interpersonal communion between the disciples and Christ. The mystery revealed here is a mystery of the divine Person. So the Transfiguration activates a perception of a personal communion which is beyond human nature.
Based on this definition of the Transfiguration John of Damascus enumerates the precise phenomenological structures of divine presence that are activated here. On the first place, this experience is consciously reflected by the disciples as something beyond intellect (ὑπερ νοῦν). At stake is not an idea, a concept, an image produced by the intellect (or by any other human cognitive faculty, for that matter) in which the divine life is contemplated. This is experience above the intellect, guaranteed by the personal relationship with Christ.
John asserts that everything else that the disciples perceive as properties of the state of human nature revealed by Christ in the event of the Transfiguration – sanctity, glory, virtue, etc. – is subsumed by the revealed structure of temporality. “He shows Himself as without beginning”. In the Transfiguration Christ is perceived as aionic being, i.e., as someone who is not subject to the flow of time. This aionic nature of the Transfiguration is commensurate with the ontological structure Christ’s subjectivity – he is the eternal Son of God who has become man within historic time. Contemplating the mystery of the Transfiguration requires reflecting upon the structures of Christ’s being that are revealed; grasping his manifested subjectivity. This contemplation is based on the phenomenological structures that are activated when perceiving Christ in the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration is perceivable, because the state of Christ as a person and, more specifically, the state of his human nature is knowable to us.
The Epistemologial prerequisites
John of Damascus asserts that, before his Transfiguration, Jesus calls the first Church council to discuss the question “Who am I?”. This is the central and ultimate question of Christian theology. Jesus himself conducts the discussion of his true person by a two-tier examination of the different opinions about his personal identity. 1) Whom they say that I am; 2) Who do you say that I am. The opinions of the public refer to analogies between the person of Jesus and paradigmatic figures from the prophetic tradition of the bible (Elijah, Jeremiah) or to John the Baptist. These answers circumvent the focus of the question because they do not indicate Christ’s personal identity. The answer of the disciples is articulated by Peter: “Thou are the Christ, the Son of the living God!”[2]. Peter’s proclamation at this council refers to the hypostatic identity of the Son not only as a Son of God, but also as a human-being.
Jesus accepts this this assertion but hints that Peter does not understand its true scope. Peter is saying something correct, but he does not grasp the meaning of what he is saying. His answer is inspired by the Holy Spirit and this fact is not fully reflected by Peter either. In that sense the Transifuguration enables Peter and the two other disciples Jacob and John to acquire real phenomenological experience of what they prophetically proclaimed and to grasp the source of this revelation.
The Subjects of the Transfiguration
The Transfiguration reveals the man Jesus as the Christ. This name indicates a change on the level of natural existence: the existential act of human nature is being divinized. What is revealed in the Transfiguration is the existential transformation of human nature. The guarantor of this change is the hypostatic union of human nature with the Son of God. The change at stake here cannot be conceptualized through Aristotle’s categories. The reason is that this transformation is possible through a special relation between the Son and human nature. Its ontological structure is formed by the unique hypostatic countenance of the Son. And this relation bears the connotation of historicity – something completely aliens to any Aristotle-like metaphysis.
John enumerates three dimensions of transformation of human nature in Christ revealed in the Transfiguration:
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- ἀντίδοσις ἐν ἀλλήλοις – mutual exchange of properties (refers to the light of the Transfiguration);
- ἀσύγχυτος περιχώρησις καθ’ ὑπόστασιν – co-habitation of the two natures in the hypostasis of the Son;
- τὰς ἄκρας ἔνωσις – union of the extremes[3].
Τhese three aspects of the transformation of human nature are conceptually-driven characterizations of the human nature of Christ as a subject of the Transfiguration. They are validated and grounded in the speculative oeuvre of John Damascene, namely his work Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. And all of them refer to the personal identity of Christ manifested through the interplay of the essential energies of his two natures.
The mutual exchange of properties refers to the revelation of the hypostatic union of the two natures ad extra. The exchange of properties is causal and asymmetrical. Human nature is being impregnated with the properties of the divine, and not vice versa. This exchange is reveled whenever Christ performs supernatural acts. For instance, when Christ gets hungry or cries, He manifests his human nature[4]. When He brings the dead girl to life, He exhibits his divine nature.[5] This is a representation, rather than a self-revealing. Heidegger calls this type of revelation being ‘Erscheinung’.[6]
The existential co-habitation (περιχώρησις) of the two natures is interpreted by the Damascene as a symmetrical existential synergy. It is manifested through the acts of the two natures (ἐνέργειαι — in the strict sense), not through particular actions. At stake is not a property of divine nature to divinize the human nature, or of the human nature—to be passively permeated by divine energies. The interpenetration is mutual, but it displays an asymmetry. This aspect is manifested when Christ exhibits his human weakness: lack of knowledge about the future, exhaustion, fatigue, fear of death, etc. The weakness reveals the essential properties of his human nature, but the manifestation of these properties is salvific, it contributes to his plan for the salvation of the world.
The natural weakness of the human nature reveals its transfigured status according to the personal identity of the Son. This identity is called by John ‘mode (τρόπος) of the advent corresponding to divine economy (οἰκονομία)’.[7]And it implies the idea of temporality, as Christ became what He was not, and this existential change is relevant to His personal identity. His revelation in human nature is constitutive for the hypostatic countenance of the Son, not because it adds anything to his personal identity, but because it is the space in which the salvific plan of the Trinity can be revealed in a specific mode. This is what the Damascene means when He writes that ‘Christ is realized in his essences’ and ‘is composed by them’.[8] This tropos of the hypοstatic revelation (sich selbst Zeigen—Heidegger) manifests the uniqueness of the hypostasis of Christ, which, through the incarnation, historically realizes his divine-human state.
The third aspect, the union of extremes, hints the fact that the form of hypostatic union in Christ is unique since the hypostatic being of the Son bridges an endless ontological gap between a created and an uncreated entity.
These three aspects of the Transfiguration reveal the personal identity of the incarnate son – an indirect manifestation mediated by specific acts corresponding to each of the two natures. It shows the natural dimensions of the hypostatic being, but it does not show the meaning of each of the natures for the hypostatic being. By revealing Christ’s personal identity, the Transfiguration is indicative of an ontological dimension of Christ’s being: the active relation of the hypostasis towards the nature is constitutive for the being of the single thing. Pivotal is Damascene’s assertion that the Transfiguration took place not only through the two natures of Christ, but in them as well[9]. Through this relation, the hypostasis is related to all beings.
By revealing his personal being to the disciples, Christ transforms not only their senses, their perception and their existence, but created reality itself. The transfiguration reveals a new mode of created being in which Christ is encountered in everything, he becomes “all in all”[10]. The last point is crucially important because it shows both the intimacy and the radicalism of the Transfiguration. The subject of this radical existential transformation are not only the disciples, but the entire creation – engaged in an intimate dialogue with Christ. And from this perspective the Transfiguration is a revealed transformation of human nature, empowered to bear the divine prototype.
The Concept of ἐννούσιον
Τhe ontological relation in which the hypostasis reveals itself through the natural energy is called by Damascene ennousion (ἐννούσιον). This concept implies that essential being is historical, the paradigm of historicity being the event of the Incarnation of the Son of God. Through his ἐννούσιον in human nature Christ becomes Son of man, thus confirming historically his eternal hypostatic unique property – the sonship.
The Damascene draws special attention to the issue of historicity when clarifying the role of the hypostasis of the Son. Assuming human nature Christ deifies it in himself, by bring the image to the archetype. This is a second historical mode of communion between God and man after Eden. It is closer and stranger than the first one. The ennousion is not merely a manifestation of a hypostasis in a nature. It is self-revelation of hypostasis (sich-Zeigen) which is the closest thinkable way of bringing together two extremely disparate ontological entities, such as the created and the uncreated. As such it has a historical significance for the existence of the entire human nature. In that sense the Subject of the Transfiguration enables the phenomenological experience of eternity.
Damascene’s speculation on the Transfiguration demonstrates that this event cannot be interpreted as a pedagogical tool for the disciples to conceptualize Christ’s mission. This is a revelation of the transformative and salvific activity of Christ which has the scope of a mystery of the person. This mystery is revealed not in opposition of the natural order, but – in the transfiguration of natural being according to the dynamics of hypostatic life. This revelation is transformative for the entire world. Christ’s Transfiguration not only reveals the importance of the body within divinization. It demonstrates that the world is the center of divine knowledge. Thus the Transfiguration is the main reference point of Christian cosmology and ecology.
[1] John Damascene, Homilia in Transfogurationem salvatoris nostri Jesu Christi 3, in: P.B. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vol. 5 [Patristische Texte und Studien 29. Berlin – New York: De Gruyter, 1988]: 436-459.
[2] John Damascene, Ιn Transfogurationem 6, 10-27.
[3] John of Damascus, In Transfigurationem 2.
[4] John of Damascus, De duabis in Christo voluntatibus 25, 207-8, in: P.B. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vol. 4 [Patristische Texte und Studien 22. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981]: 173-231.
[5] John of Damascus, De duabis in Christo voluntatibus 42, 228.
[6] According to Heidegger the appearance (Erscheinung) implies the showing of an entity through something else, whereby the latter indicates the entity without revealing it. Thus appearance is differentiated from revealing (sich selbst zeigen), manifesting oneself [cf. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), 29].
[7] John of Damascus, Contra Jacobitas 52, 54-55, in: P.B. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vol. 4 [Patristische Texte und Studien 22. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981]: 109-153.
[8] John of Damascus, Contra Jacobitas 12, 7 Kotter.
[9] John of Damascus, In Transfigurationem 18, 21.
[10] John of Damascus, In Transfigurationem 18, 22.
Philosophia 31/2023, pp. 27-35
Philosophia 