by CCW | 8 January 2023 10:00
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.
Epiphany is nothing less than the light of God in the world, the making known of the things of God in and through the humanity of Jesus Christ. Here is redemption seen in terms of teaching and learning and acting upon what is taught and learned. The Collect puts this brilliantly. Its prayer is that we “may both perceive and know what things [we] ought to do”. It assumes what is necessarily assumed: there are things to be known.
This is an undeniable truth about what it means to be human. We are inescapably knowers even when we deny that there is truth – claiming as truth that there is no truth, for instance, or defaulting to the solipsism of our own minds in thinking that reality or truth is just what we think. Epiphany launches us upon the quest for wisdom which is more than information or technical know-how; it is about knowing what is to be known and loved. It embraces the different forms of human knowing, both things empirical and things rational through things revealed. Like the Magi, it is the quest for wisdom.
Epiphany shows us the redemption of what is known imperfectly through our senses and imperfectly through rational cognition by revelation. It seeks the perfection of our knowing which is found, as Jesus explains to Mary, in “my Father’s business.” What does this mean? It has altogether to do with his being found in the temple at age twelve, the only story of Christ’s boyhood in the canonical Scriptures of the New Testament. It marks his bar mitzvah, we might say, to express things in a Jewish context, the transition from childhood to adulthood. Epiphany suggests that there might be something more to us in and through the journey of human experience. Something glimpsed, something learned. Trasumanar, Dante suggests in a neologism, is something which goes beyond human speech yet points us to who we are by grace.
Epiphany in all its moments is about the grace which perfects but does not destroy nor diminish our humanity. It enlarges us. It has to do with the desire to know. Thus the Gospel for the First Sunday after Epiphany focuses on Jesus as human student and divine teacher; a manifestation at once of his essential divinity and his essential humanity but also of the human vocation to know and love. It is expressed most wonderfully in the exchange between Jesus and Mary. There is the anxiety and critical question of Mary after having finally “found him in the temple”. “Son,” she asks, “why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.” Jesus responds with two questions which illuminate who he is and who he is for us. “How is it that you sought me? Did ye not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” or “in my Father’s house”; at the very least, about the things of God, the heavenly Father. The verb forms for seeking or sought appear four times in this passage.
This complements the Epiphany of the Magi-Kings with their “sacred gifts of mystic meaning”, gifts which teach and reveal Christ as King, as God and Sacrifice, as man. It complements another doctrinal moment that belongs to the idea of Epiphany, the baptism of Christ, an Epiphany of the Trinity, the opening out to us of the self-related and mutually indwelling life of God revealed in and through the humanity of Jesus. Jesus in the water of Jordan, the Holy Spirit descending like a dove, the voice of the Father saying, “this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased”. These words will be repeated at the Transfiguration, itself an epiphany that also speaks to the divine will for our humanity. But there we will also hear what is assumed here: “Hear ye him.”
This Gospel reveals that Christ is God and Man. The teaching is theological. He is found engaged with the doctors of the Law, “and all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers”. There is more here than the antics of a precocious pre-teen. Something profound about God and our humanity is shown. The exchange with Mary highlights the idea of the Epiphany, the making known of God in the midst of the world, in the very being of our humanity. The challenge for us, like on the Octave Day of Christmas, is to be like Mary who “kept all these sayings in her heart”. Sayings that have happened, words that illumine our minds, that transform our souls, our very being, through the Word made flesh. This is the epiphany journey. There are things to be learned, things that are taught and learned if we seek to know, if we will be teachable.
The doctrine of the Epiphany does not extinguish the light of natural reason nor the light of the Law but redeems both and fulfills them by gathering them into the light of grace, the grace which seeks our human perfection and good. Trasumanar, transformed by the renewing of our minds, is not anti-human, it belongs to the holy truth of our humanity as found in God.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany I, 2023
In the Octave
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