by CCW | 31 January 2019 11:19
Christ’s Transfiguration is also an Epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ. But it also points to another consideration, the idea of the transformation of our humanity through what is made known and grasped by us. “Be not conformed to the world,” Paul tells us, “but be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds.” This is like Aristotle’s point about being thoughtful and contemplative, “do[ing] all that we can to live in conformity with the highest that is in us” for “the best and most pleasant life is the life of the intellect since the intellect is in the fullest sense the person.”
To live in conformity with the highest that is in us is to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It means learning to appreciate the traditions of wisdom that are inescapably part of our history and story. Such is the counter to our easy acquiescence to the technocratic culture which so easily overwhelms and invades our souls and which reduces us to algorithms, to thinking like machines.
Paul’s account of his ‘conversion’ reveals the interplay of cultures that belong to the emergence of both Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity. They cannot be understood apart from the Hellenistic world of Greek culture and language and the Roman culture of governance and law. They cannot be thought about without each other. Paul’s ‘conversion’ is really only possible within a Jewish context of questions about the nature of the Messiah and about the vocation of Israel. His ‘conversion’ is not to Christianity since that doesn’t yet exist.
The complex of cultures in their interaction is instructive. As Amin Maalouf argues, we have more than one identity, and, indeed, the more we restrict ourselves to just one identity culturally, linguistically, ethnically, even sexually, the more we cut ourselves off from any kind of common humanity. Diversity becomes all and nothing; unity a nullity. We are endlessly divided and constantly in competition for attention among ourselves in the culture of ‘likes’, ironically unable to connect with one another face to face. Talking to machines but not to one another. Maalouf argues for a more profound sense of our common humanity in and through the realization of our hybrid or multiple identities. Identity politics divides the more exclusive it becomes. It leads to the unending conflict of them versus us. Identity becomes, as he says, one of our false friends. We are thinking about who we are in all of the wrong ways.
“Know thyself” is the ancient Greek maxim which has its Judeo-Christian counterpart in the idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Knowing ourselves is more than psychological introspection; it is knowing about our place and sense of ourselves within an ethical and spiritual order, a cosmos. In the Christian understanding that cosmos is creation and creation as redeemed by God.
Christ’s transfiguration is a learning moment. Like Paul’s conversion, it reminds us that ideas which change things are not simply about the repudiation of the things of the past but about their being re-thought and recapitulated. A separation and then a deeper unification. The deeper logic of conversion is about repudiation and then recapitulation, a gathering into a new understanding the things of the past that nothing be lost.
Christ’s Transfiguration affirms the Law and the Prophets represented in the vision by Moses and Elijah. This is passed on to the disciples. But even more, the vision of Christ transfigured is about ideas shared and exchanged in conversation. Such things literally light us up. In Exodus, Moses was transfigured by his encounter with God in the giving of the Law; Elijah is one of the great prophets who is said to have ascended into heaven with God. Christ’s transfiguration is about that intersection between the human and the divine which enriches our understanding of ourselves. It is about the power and the truth of things intellectual and spiritual.
Buddhism cannot be comprehended apart from its roots in Hinduism. Christianity cannot understand itself apart from Greek culture and philosophy, Jewish law and ethics, Roman governance and order. So, too, for what will become Rabbinical Judaism and, then, much later, Islam. They, too, cannot be understood about apart from their relation to those previous developments. They have to be thought about in relation to these profound moments of cultural, spiritual, and intellectual intersection. We forget this at our peril and are left with the narratives of confusion masquerading as truth but only adding to division and tension. We forget the more intriguing and powerful moments of convivencia, the ways in which different religious and ethnic communities found ways to live together respectfully and in ways which enriched each other. Such moments are transformative. To recall them and to let them live in our hearts and minds is the modern challenge.
Christ’s transfiguration is about the ethical and the spiritual, about his essential identity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, on the one hand, and with respect to our humanity, on the other hand. His transfiguration is the hope of our transformation. It is about becoming who we truly are not as automatons or robots nor as Jihadis or assassins; in short, not as nihilists who have “lost the good of intellect,” to use an image from Dante. It is about who we are in the sight of God, more than nothing and yet less than nothing, but all in God. It happens in and through our interactions with one another, face to face, in conversation and in the exchange of thoughts and ideas. “We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory,” Paul says. Such is the transformative power of an education that is alive and open to ideas that matter and that abide forever.
(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2019/01/31/kes-chapel-reflection-week-of-30-january/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.