By Walt Garlington
Southerners, like most folks in the post-Orthodox West, don’t quite know what to make of the Gospel story of the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ upon Mt Tabor. While both Roman Catholics and Protestants get some of the technical details right – that Christ was transfigured to prepare the Apostles for the great trial of their faith as He was crucified and buried, to reveal His divinity, and so forth – they do so with the attitude that they have bigger fish to fry elsewhere in the Holy Scriptures.
And for those two congregations, there are more weighty matters. For the Roman Catholics, Christianity is mainly defined as submission to the Pope: ” . . . we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff” (Pope Boniface VIII, Unum Sanctum). They would rather dwell on Bible passages dealing with the Apostle Peter and his supposed primacy.
For Protestants, there is the focus on the legal resolution of one’s sin debt: “Christ, by His obedience and death, did fully discharge the debt of all those that are thus justified, and did make a proper, real, and full satisfaction of His Father’s justice in their behalf” (The Westminster Confession of Faith, 11.3). They would rather dwell on Bible passages that use that sort of transactional language.
For the Orthodox, the Transfiguration is precisely the point of human existence: the union of humanity with the Uncreated God (i.e., attaining the likeness of God (Genesis 1:26), partaking of the divine nature (II Peter 1:4)). Thus, like Peter, we say, “Lord, it is good for us to be here” (St Matthew’s Gospel 17:4): “Henceforth there is no longer any distance between matter and divinity, for in the body of Christ our flesh is in communion (without confusion or separation) with the Prince of life. The transfiguration of the Word gives a glimpse of the fullness of what the Word inaugurated in His Incarnation and manifested after His baptism by His miracles: namely, the truth that the body of the Lord Jesus is the sacrament that gives the life of God to men” (Fr Jean Corbon, johnsanidopoulos.com). For this reason, the Orthodox are fond of those passages that speak of man becoming a new creation, a god by Grace, the “winged horse” spoken of by C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity.
The Protestant and Roman Catholic preoccupations take them away from the royal path of deification into unproductive side paths (down rabbit trails, as we say in Dixie). Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos says it well: “The theology of the Transfiguration is integrally connected with the method we must use to experience this great light [i.e., the Uncreated Light that shone forth from Christ on Mt Tabor—W.G.], and the Orthodox faith is connected with Orthodox hesychasm, because when one is disconnected from the other, then we arrive either at metaphysics or external ethics, which do not save man” (johnsanidopoulos.com). Those latter two – metaphysics and external ethics – are precisely the errors that Roman Catholics (complicated Thomist philosophical systems) and Protestants (obsession with outward behavior rather than inner transformation), respectively, fall into because of their faulty teachings and practices.
Now, obviously, God’s Grace is not wholly absent from Roman Catholics and Protestants. We have enough experience here at the South to see that. We have put off the humanistic rationalism and pagan superstitions that clung to our people in the 17th and 18th centuries and become an ethnos that is still known rather well for our strong Christian faith.
But as we have seen, Protestantism isn’t the fulness of the Faith. Yes, many Southerners have thrown off the gloom of sin, but we still only stand in a lesser light, the light of the moon. However, as Cleanth Brooks explains via William Faulkner, the moon is a symbol of fertility – in the moonlight, a pear tree explodes in strange growth and blossoms:
The moonlight transforms the world. Across the road from them there is a pear tree “in full and frosty bloom,” with its “twigs and branches springing not outward from the limbs but standing motionless and perpendicular above the horizontal boughs like the separate and upstreaming hair of a drowned woman sleeping upon the uttermost floor of the windless and tideless sea” (p. 281). The pear tree seems to rise “in mazed and silver immobility like exploding snow” (p. 312).”
— Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, LSU Press, Baton Rouge, La., 1990, pgs. 169-70
So it has been here at the South – in the moon-like light of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, we have produced a number of praiseworthy things – good literature, formidable leaders, memorable architecture, and so on.
And yet moonlight is only a reflection of the sun. Things greater than these accomplishments await Dixie in the full Light of Christ, the noetic Sun Who enlightens the Orthodox Church with His brilliance and before Whom all other light is as darkness. It is there that the Lord bids us go, up the mountain where we too may be transformed, able to behold the Glory of God and bring It with us back into the fallen world to heal it and fill it with God’s Radiance:
People, come listen to me.
Let us climb that mountain, holy and heavenly, and immaterially
stand in the city of the living God.
Let us noetically see
the immaterial Divinity
of the Father and the Spirit,
shining forth in the Only-begotten Son.”
— Matins for the Feast of Transfiguration
Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer and editor of the website Confiteri: A Southern Perspective. This longtime Southern Baptist, then Anglican, was united to the Orthodox Church in 2012 and makes his home in Louisiana where he attends a GOA parish.
Feature image source: Damascene Gallery, Wayne, West Virginia.
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