Nostalgia is the climate of Quietism, the anemic spirituality that basks in God’s goodness without doing anything about it.

The Transfiguration of the Church

by Rev. George W. Rutler

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Christ’s glory filled the sky as he predicted his death, to strengthen his disciples for the time when the sky would be darkened. Peter wanted to stay on top Mount Tabor in its afterglow, like a fly in amber. Christ had more in mind: not nostalgia, but tradition, which passes the glory on to the disciples, filling them “with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19). Nostalgia is the climate of Quietism, the anemic spirituality that basks in God’s goodness without doing anything about it. It does not go down from Tabor to go up to Jerusalem. It inverts the Christian life by being of the world but not in it. This is religion as a virtue turned into religiosity as a vice, confusing grace with rectitude and sanctification with perfectionism. The perfectionist wants to be good, and that is a subtle blasphemy: “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments” (Matt. 19:17). This same Christ, who cannot contradict himself, had already said: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48). Goodness is from within, while perfection is from without. The perfectionist wants to make himself good, better, and best. But the Perfect Man said, “…apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). That is why He gave us the Church as His Body, and by so doing saves mortal man from the degradation of trying to feel good about himself.

Perfectionists are easily scandalized by what is not good. Saints are scandalized only by what is not glorious. We may say in cliché, “nobody’s perfect,” but the fact is, saints are perfect, and they are precisely so because they do not try to be good, better, and best. The more they are transfigured by the Light, the more they seem to themselves bad, worse, and worst. Perfectionists resent the weaknesses that saints boast of: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). The perfectionist misses this whole point and so, like the narrow kind of Pharisee, he casts a cold eye on the failings of humans, as if the failings abolish the humanity. The saints, having seen the glory on the mountaintop, do not gaze at themselves, but “see only Jesus” who, rather than transforming them into goodness, transfigures them into glory. From his own lofty height, Saint Maximos the Confessor could say, “All that God is, except for an identity of being, one becomes when one is deified by grace.” And he was not the first to say it. Peter, who wanted to tarry on the mountain would soon enough be speaking of “precious promises” by which “you might be partakers of the divine nature” (1 Peter 1:4).

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