by Sr. Joanna
At the foot of Mount Sinai where Moses encountered God - why does the icon of Christ’s Transfiguration fill the great apse of Emperor Justinian’s basilica?
To be sure, while the miracles of the Exodus occurred some 1250 years earlier, both events center on Christ. The Father is manifested in the world through the Son, and Orthodox Christianity identifies the Lawgiver on Sinai with Christ Himself – before He became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man, as the “asarkos,” pre-incarnate Logos.”
Further similarities connect the two events, His Eminence, Archbishop of Sinai, Damianos has pointed out, for the Holy Trinity is mystically revealed to Moses on Sinai, foreshadowing the theophany that takes place during the Transfiguration, when the voice of the Father is heard from a cloud representing the Holy Spirit.
Not to be overlooked also is the role played in each event by the Uncreated Light. “Unable to gaze on the lightning-like radiance of the transfigured Christ, His apostles fall to the ground; on Sinai, an “excess of light” infinitely beyond what human eyes can bear appears as “luminous darkness.”
Unable to distinguish between the sun’s life-giving properties and their Source, pagan cultures maintained their fixation with light throughout the ages preceding Christ’s assumption of human nature. Was not Moses obliged to dispel belief in Egypt’s entrenched cult of sun-worship by calling darkness over the land for three days? Did not Elias dispel the darkness of idolatry in his own era by casting divine fire on the earth?
Indeed, as a metaphor for spiritual ascent, did not Elias’ fiery chariot displace imagery of the pagan sun god riding across the sky in a chariot with four horses? Who, then, could better witness to Christ at the Transfiguration as the only Sun of Righteousness than the Old Testament figures whose lives served as an indictment against worship of the creation over the Creator?
His face shone like the sun, and His garments became white as the light.
Not that creation is to be trivialized. Saint Maximos the Confessor accentuates that it is not just Christ who appears transfigured on the mountain, but His garments as well: Creation itself reveals the power of the Creator who wears it at the Transfiguration as a garment., through which He Himself shines forth to those who are able to see.[1]
For it is written that even the saints ‘will shine forth like the sun’ which is to say, entirely permeated by Divine Light as they gaze upon Christ, divinely and inexpressibly shining forth His Radiance. (Saint Gregory Palamas, “On the Holy Transfiguration of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ”)
In fact, God hides His divinity amongst men to lead not just human beings to Himself, but all creation, stresses the Saint. “Through His immeasurable love for humankind,” the eyes of His apostles are opened to gaze not just on His face radiating like the sun, but upon the raiment which represents creation in its transfigured state as well. Thus, while His face shone like the sun …His garments became white as the light.
The imagery of Sinai’s great apse, then, calls forth the glory of the Resurrection as well, announced by an angel from heaven whose countenance was like lightning, with his clothing white as snow.[2] And together with Christ’s resurrection – the glory of our own. Did the Word Himself not promise that the righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father?[3]
The luminosity of Christ’s white garments is further dramatized in the Sinai mosaic by the blue strata that encircle Him glazing steadily darker as they converge on His glistening figure – for no one can look on the “excessive superessential light” of Christ that Moses was protected from on Sinai by a luminous cloud. The divine darkness bears not only on the divinity of Christ (as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity) but on the promise of Him who, as Saint Paul said, has called us to become participants of the divine nature through knowledge of Him.[4] In fact, viewed through the witness of the patristic saints for whom knowledge of God ultimately means participation in the Uncreated Light, Sinai’s mosaic Transfiguration reads like an illustration of Saint Paul’s text:
His divine power has given us all things toward life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness. Through these He has given us His precious and magnificent promises, so that through them you might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by desire.
KNOWLEDGE OF GOD COMES FROM HIS GOODNESS
If inanimate creation is recalled to eternity by Christ’s glory and goodness, how much more so, the rational beings created in His own image and likeness! Indeed, Christ puts on creation as a garment – but only after wrapping humankind in the garment of His own Uncreated divinity. Wrapped about with the grace of God, man originally wore Him as a glorious garment, said Saint John of Damascus.[5] Thus, from the Great Vespers of the Feast:
“He who of old conversed with Moses on Mount Sinai through symbols, saying, "I am The Being," was transfigured on Mount Tabor today for His Disciples to see. And since He had assumed human nature in Himself, He showed them the original beauty of the image.”
On the Mountain of the Knowledge of God, the Burning Bush reveals the mystery to Moses of the Virgin unconsumed by the fiery flames of divinity, the temple where human nature is bestowed on the Savior who bestows divinity on His followers.
Having cast aside this beauty as not quite good enough, man remains naked, with no recourse but to don the skins of dead animals, i.e. the fallen human nature now subject to death. Reduced to nothing but the material creation he can see, man would have no knowledge of God, did Christ in His immeasurable love for humankind not turn it into the vehicle of theophany. A dry bramble in remotest desert is chosen by the excess of His humility to become the conflagration of fiery revelation, disclosing not only the Name of His unknowable essence, but the fiery energies of His salvation, through a womb pure enough to contain their power without being consumed by it.
While the earthbound Moses symbolizes what we can understand of creation taking place within time and having a finite end; the more ethereal persona of heaven-bent Elijah calls forth rather the imperishable, eternal creation whose mystery remains hidden from human beings – thus drawing us ever closer to its Creator. As a result, says Saint Maximos, the Transfiguration teaches us to think in terms both of what we can know about God, and what we cannot: the two modes, positive and negative, of Orthodox theology.
On the Mountain of the Knowledge of God, gazing up into the heavenly apse of the Sinai basilica, it should not be surprising that both modes radiate from on high. It is by the light flashing from the face of the Lord that the divine essence is made known to us “beyond ineffability and unknowability,” says Saint Maximos, leaving us not the slightest idea of how God is both Three and One. The “unlimited” is not comprehended “by what is limited.” On the other hand, almost quoting Saint Basil’s affirmation of the divine energies by which we know our God intimately,[6] Maximos asserts the possibility of this through what we do know of God – the creative acts, providence, and judgment that support our own transformation from mortal creatures to heavenly.
Given the relentless focus of monastic life on the practical, even on this holy ground of theological revelation a monk instinctively searches out the practical applications of truth. What do the two ways of knowing God have to do with everyday struggle for Christ?
Is not every rational creature obliged to keep what (he thinks) he knows because of what he sees, in perspective of that which (he knows) he doesn’t see? Regarding personal opinions then, “Always keep a doubt,” said Sinai’s Elder Pavlos. “Above all – run from judgment, even when you see a person sin with your own eyes. Because, while you saw him sin, as Dorotheos of Gaza says, you did not see the struggle he waged before falling. Only God saw that, and you don’t know whether that struggle outweighed the sin itself in His judgment.” Turning to Sinai’s own school of ascetic theology, the Elder cited Saints John Klimakos and Anastasios of Sinai who noted that neither do we see the efforts a person makes to repent for his sin, through which God’s forgiveness may have made him the dwelling of the Holy Spirit …
Preparing to learn the divine Name at the Burning Bush, Moses symbolically rejects the sin of this earth by removing the sandals that come in contact with it.
Anastasios of Sinai is therefore uncompromising on purity of heart as the only conduit of divine knowledge. Indeed, the “practical” pursuit of purity opens doors that no amount of study can budge open. Thus Father Pavlos never missed a chance during speaking tours of American universities to tell the story of the derelict monk who was saved simply because he never judged – the discounted price of humility, without the hard labor of the monastics who hunger and thirst and martyr themselves to the truth of Christ in ways the world will never see, nor should it. Monasteries do not manufacture humility – careful living does. Attempting to search out the depths of God without purity of heart, Anastasios says, one might as well dive to the depths of the ocean without knowing how to swim. Whereas, in struggle for purity from the passions, every Orthodox becomes theologian, mystic, saint ..
Just to know creation, one has to know its Creator, says Saint Maximos. As creation is made perceptible by the rising of the physical sun, the mystical Sun of righteousness rises within the mind, wishing to make the inner knowledge – the spiritual meanings – of both visible and invisible creation known together with Himself.
A lifetime of struggle against the passions amidst desert wastes devoid of their allure leads Moses to the Burning Bush and the Mountain of the Knowledge of God, notes His Eminence, Archbishop Damianos, recalling Saint Maximos’ allegory on this point. “The meekest of all men on the earth,”[7] Moses receives not only the Decalogue on Sinai following this period of purification, he adds – but the entire history of the creation “out of nothing.”
Companion icons of Moses at the Burning Bush and receiving the Law on Sinai are situated above the arch of the Transfiguration apse, on the eastern wall of the basilica adjacent to the Burning Bush.
Sinai’s mosaic icon of Moses on the Holy Summit illustrates just this point. A close look shows him to be receiving not the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, but a closed scroll. An ancient Jewish tradition supported by Sinai’s iconographic history says that besides the Ten Commandments, Moses received the entirety of the Pentateuch written in tiny script on a stone, meaning a parchment, which was then rolled into a scroll.[8]
To summarize then, purity of soul forms the basis for all knowledge, for all was created by the mystical Sun of righteousness – the Logos of God who granted us logic with which to receive His own. On a parallel path, Plato also looked past visible creation to the principles underlying its order; a knowledge he believed fully derivable only through the transcendental qualities of goodness. Like the sun, he wrote in the voice of Socrates, the good sheds its light, bestowing understanding of truth as its very cause.[9] The similarities to patristic thought are disarming to this point – but the parallel paths will never meet ….
This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; listen to Him.[10]
Just as our eyes cannot see without light, Socrates says, the mind needs another thing in order to fully function – goodness. But as the voice of the Father makes clear at the Transfiguration, goodness is not a thing. Herein lies the chasm separating Orthodox spirituality from every other faith system laying claim to its ideals: Goodness and truth are not merely ideals but divine attributes by which we experience Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. There is only one path to goodness and that is union with Him. Neither is Christ a “higher power” but a Person, and not only a Person, but one we can participate in, because we were created in the image of His divinity. Indeed, this is exactly why we were made according to the divine image and likeness, according to Saint Anastasios of Sinai.
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change or shifting shadow.
For Plato, then, goodness is intrinsic to the creation. For Orthodox Christianity, goodness, as an attribute of God, is intrinsic to the Creator. What does Jesus Himself say? No one is good, except God alone.[11]
But a picture postcard is worth a thousand words, and illustrating the true parameters of goodness, Father Pavlos shared the story of the Sinai ascetic who labored for seven years to be restored by God to the monastic ranks following nothing more than a judgmental “ouph” at another’s expense. … It would seem the meaning of “goodness” is not quite so elastic in heaven as on earth … If God’s love extends to the mercy of not condemning us while we are in the process of failing that love, does tolerance mean something different in our own case?
What then might the vision of such love look like to the eyes of mere mortals, were they enabled to gaze on it?
"One day one of the brothers visited the holy and righteous ascetic Joseph of Raitho with a question about a thought. When he knocked, he got no answer. Peering in through the entrance he saw him standing entirely from head to toe like a flame of fire. Filled with fear and trembling, his body went weak, and he collapsed on the ground like dead for an hour. Then he stood up again and sat down at the door. The saintly old man was still occupied with his vision and did not know what had happened. Five full hours passed before he appeared to be human once more. Then he opened the door and let the brother inside. After they sat down he said to the brother, ‘When did you come?’ He replied to the old man, ‘It has been four or five hours ago since I came by, but I did not knock till now, so as not to disturb you.’
The old man realized that the brother was aware of what had happened to him, yet he said nothing about it. Instead he answered all the questions he was asked and cured the brother of his thought, then released him in peace. Afterwards he disappeared because he feared receiving fame among humans.
… Six years later someone knocked on the door of the cell. The elder’s disciple Gelasius went to the door was amazed to see his abba standing outside. Having said a prayer, Gelasius received him with joy and they embraced each other with a holy kiss. ‘Venerable Father, why did you separate yourself from your community, leaving me an orphan?’ asked the disciple. The old man said to him, ‘God knows the reason I did not appear. And yet, to this day I have never been away from this place, nor has a single Lord’s Day passed that I have not shared with all of you in the holy, life-giving Mysteries of Christ.’ The brother was amazed … The old man then said, ‘Today I am migrating to the Lord from this wretched body.’ After conversing with the brother about the soul and the good things to come, he fell asleep in peace, delivering his venerable, holy soul to the hands of the living God.
Brother Gelasius ran off to assemble us all. With psalm-singing and palm leaves we went and conveyed him to the Lord’s house. His face was brighter than the sun. We laid him to rest with the holy fathers who had fallen asleep before him.”
For this reason, said Elder Pavlos, the desert ascetic united to Christ in purity of soul remains closer to the problems of those in the world than would be possible if he lived amongst them.
If the elder was asked one question more than another during his tours of American universities and theological schools, and he was, it was, “How can I retain inner peace amidst the pressures of this world?”
It was a good question, a profound one, for, as the inquirers well knew, there is no peace without the inner Presence of God. Many things masquerade as peace or happiness, but all that glitters is not gold. Were they real, would they vanish so precipitously, between one blink of an eye and the next? Father Pavlos broached the matter in the classic video filmed at St. Catherine’s many years ago by Lydia Carras, “Where God Walked on Earth.”[12]
“In the garden the monk is not losing that simplicity and peace which is dear to him because the trees, although each one of them can be seen as an entire factory, have been created by God to work secretly as man works within his own heart. When a monk is tending to the garden, he can pray at the same time and feel God very close to him, and not lose that peace of soul. It’s physically tiring of course, but then, a monk too should get tired.
“Saint John Klimakos stressed that one's breath should be united with the thought of Christ. The fathers devised a short form of prayer, the well-known Jesus Prayer, the prayer of the heart, as we call it. ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me the sinner.’ What can one say about the power of this prayer, the joy it instills into the heart ... Man in this world is often tired and under pressure. The Jesus Prayer fills him with a sense of peace."
Steps descend to the portal of the Sinai basilica.
Built – literally – on the roots of the Burning Bush where God revealed the knowledge of His name in fire as I am The Being, the Sinai basilica ceaselessly serves humanity – ever since its construction by the builder of the Great Church of the Wisdom of God, Hagia Sophia – as the repository the knowledge of that which cannot be revealed.
Ceaselessly functioning since at least the third century, the Sinai brotherhood remains the living expression of humanity’s response to that revelation. Why then did Justinian’s skilled and theologically informed artists place the Transfiguration above the altar on Mount Sinai?
Interestingly, the name “Tabor” does not exist in the biblical accounts of the Feast, which describe the site of Christ’s Transfiguration only as “the holy mountain” and “high.” The multiple correlations between the Law-giving and Transfiguration have have led some to speculate whether both events occurred on Sinai. Besides its ancient repute as “the holy mountain,” Sinai’s summit soars to 7500 feet, as opposed to Tabor’s 1890.
Deeper theological parallels (such as the manifestation of the Holy Trinity on both occasions) abound amidst more circumstantial data. An intriguing example is the inclusion of the word “exodus” in the Transfiguration account, which states that Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus regarding His approaching exodus.[13] (A connection obscured by most English editions of the New Testament, which substitute “exodus” with “death,” “decease,” “dying,” or “departure.”) Some liturgical hymns for the Feast mention Tabor; others pointedly do not, reflecting the mystery surrounding such associations.
Greater tension, however, infuses the mystery linking the pre-incarnate Christ (who cannot be seen clearly by His devoted servants) with the Lord of the Transfiguration who enables the eyes of His disciples to suddenly gaze on him, no longer as fallen man like themselves, but as deified one, shining like the sun.
Equating light with good fortune like the philosophers and cultists preceding him, Roman statesman Cicero thus unknowingly spoke for all humanity when he asked what could restore him to the lost light of his former prosperity. Actually, he called this his ἀρχαῖον light, meaning not “previous” but “ancient” or “original light.” As though in response on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus manifests not only the “ancient beauty” of our creation, but the transformation His followers will undergo at the regeneration of creation (ἐν τῇ παλιγγενεσίᾳ). When the Son of man sits on the throne of His glory – are not all things born anew?[14]
“You were transfigured on Mount Tabor, and thus demonstrated the transformation mortal men shall, with Your glory, undergo at Your fearful Second Coming, O our Savior.”[15]
As the apse over the altar of an Orthodox basilica represents eternity, portrayals of Christ there typically evoke the Second Coming: What could more powerfully remind those gathered underneath not only why we are present in church – but on this earth?
Παλιγγενεσία – the restoration of all things – which to Cicero means restoration from exile with his return to Rome – for ancient Christianity means restoration from exile with its return to God at the Second Coming of Christ, when all sorrow will be erased in the light, not of a lamp, or of the sun, but of the Lord God.[16]
The presence of Moses and Elias at the Transfiguration thus serves as a graphic illustration of the fulfillment of the Law and Prophets in the light of the kingdom of Heaven – shortly to be made possible at the exodus of Christ from the passions of this life by “the glorious – through the Cross – and saving Resurrection.”[17] Thus, in an intimately personal way, both prophets see the now-incarnate Christ at the Transfiguration with the clarity they longed for on Sinai, which was impossible to them then.
As Moses and Elias can now see Jesus clearly – so can we – enabled by the Holy Spirit whose kingdom Christ has opened to all those who reach, not as Moses with his hands for the precursory Law, but as His Most Pure Mother with her heart, for the Law of grace that perfects and fulfills it.
If classical philosophy prepares civilizations for knowledge of the divine energies by its own inability to recognize them – and if every human being’s greatest longing is for the experience of those energies – the apse over Divine Liturgy on the Holy Mountain of Sinai encompasses the answers held in trust by Christ since the inception of the age.
Holding a candle to their mystery the way monks hold a candle to liturgical readings in the darkness before dawn, the hushed calm of the unlit cathedral exudes ageless wisdom. The reverence of Christian antiquity, the insight of the saints, the architecture of the church itself whose apse unseals the gates of heaven – and above all – the stirrings of the holy of holies placed within each soul by the Creator as His most-treasured sanctuary, all conspire to share those secrets.
At the intersection of Old and New Testament revelation, then, the Transfiguration of Christ mystically encompasses not only the Creation but the Second Coming. In a remarkable departure from iconographic custom, with the cosmos depicted only by colored bands encircling the mosaic’s rim, neither Tabor nor Sinai appears in the basilica’s brilliantly-restored mosaic. Instead of a high and holy mountain, Christ reigns surrounded only by the infinity of heaven, with gold tiles skillfully placed by sixth century artisans at angles designed to reflect the dazzling resplendence of His kingdom upon the Liturgy below.
And, at the intersection of heaven and earth, Christ’s Transfiguration discloses the icon of our own. For, as the God-bearing fathers and mothers say, the Second Coming lies perpetually before each soul in that no one knows the hour of his exodus from this fallen life. The hour when, released from the ever-shifting shadows of its fears and uncertainties, His true servants will depart them all, as the Israelites from Egypt, to meet the Savior Christ upon the clouds of His glory …
Footnotes:
[1] Professor David Bradshaw, University of Kentucky, Christianity East and West: Some Philosophical Differences, p. 26 at https://uky.academia.edu/DBradshaw/Conference-Presentations; Saint Maximos the Confessor, Ambiguum 10.
[2] Matthew 28.3
[3] Matthew 13.43
[4] II Peter 1.3-4
[5] Saint John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in St. John of Damascus: Writings, tr. Frederic H. Chase Jr. (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), p. 232.
[6] Saint Basil the Great, Epistle 234, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), Second Series, Vol. 8, p. 274.
[7] Numbers 12.3
[8] Sinai: Treasures of the Monastery, ed., Konstantinos Manafis, (Ekdotike Athenon, 1990), p. 64.
[9] Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 508a-e.
[10] Matthew 17.5
[11] Luke 18.19
[12] Excerpts from the video are found at https://www.facebook.com/ForStCatherinesMonastery/posts/2507987049265956
[13] Luke 9.30-31
[14] Matthew 19.28
[15] From the Matins of Transfiguration
[16] Revelations 22.5
[17] From the Great Vespers of the Feast.