Day: January 8, 2023

“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds”

The Magi-Kings, having come to Bethlehem, complete the Christmas mystery and launch us into another journey, the journey of the understanding. It is Epiphany, not just as event, but as doctrine. It means manifestation, the idea of the making known, of things coming to light. This speaks to the meaning of ourselves as knowers, as intellectual and spiritual beings, embodied in the particularities of culture and circumstance but not fundamentally defined or limited to such things. Epiphany signals the idea of the true universality of our humanity. We enter into the greater journey of learning, a learning which is entirely about what God wants us to know, and thus about what is, in principle, knowable. We cannot be knowers without a kind of faith that there are things to be known. At issue is our wanting or seeking to know, our desire to learn, what Plato calls the eros, the passionate desire to know.

This is transforming. The true transformation of our humanity happens by our being changed by what we have been given to see. The Magi-Kings, about whom we know next to nothing empirically or factually, are those who teach us that we are more though not less than sensual, material creatures; we are knowers and lovers. They go together, they are inseparable. We are launched on the journey of fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, as Anselm famously put it, echoing Plato and Augustine. This journey belongs to the dignity of our humanity because it is about becoming “partakers of the divine nature”. That is the true transformation of our humanity. We don’t become other or less than what we are; we become who we are in the knowing love of God; knowing even as we are known.

God’s purpose for our humanity is about the truth and perfection of our humanity. It is a true universal over and against the false universals of our times in the endless illusions of the self in its own projects and fantasies; on the one hand, fleeing the determinisms of technocratic and material culture, and, on the other hand, completely beholden to them, lost in the false sense of our own completeness and sense of perfection. Epiphany as feast and doctrine recalls us to the truth of our humanity as grounded in the will and purpose of God. Our seeking what God seeks for us.

It is not found in our conformity to the deceits of the world materially and technologically, but “by the renewing of our minds”. This is the true transformation because it speaks to what is most true about our humanity. That renewing of our minds is not about becoming machines, or thinking like machines, being transformed into bots which serve the interests of technocratic power and domination. Nor is it about a fantasy flight into some imagined view of ourselves in the illusions of liberalism, freed to be whatever we think we want to be. Epiphany teaches us about what transforms us in and through the world and not in a gnostic flight from the world.

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