Beauty is all around. It is the language of the divine: we are converted not primarily by syllogisms, but by revelation and transfiguration

Beauty And Transfiguration

By ROD DREHER

For us Orthodox Christians following the Old Calendar, today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, or as I like to call it, the High Holy Day of Christian Neoplatonists. Here, from Matthew 17, is the event we commemorate on this day:

After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.
Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”
While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”
When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.” When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.

This is an important moment in the life of Jesus for several reasons, among them, it is a Sinai moment in which the New Covenant is revealed to the disciples. That the greatest Hebrew prophets appeared alongside Christ revealed his identity as the Messiah. More importantly, at least to me, is how this event shows — doesn’t tell, shows — how things Really Are. The veil was lifted, and the disciples saw the Uncreated Light. If you’ve been following my blogging about Dante’s Paradiso, you will understand that the entire canticle is about beholding the Uncreated Light, and seeking to be joined with it.

To live is to be open at all times for those Transfiguration moments, episodes of mystical clarity in which the doors of perception are briefly cleansed, and reality is revealed as it truly is. These are transfigurative moments not because we understand that we have been previously observing an illusion, but rather because we grasp that we have not seen the whole truth — that we have mistaken a partial, limited truth for the whole.

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As St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of all Western theologians, said after a mystical vision near the end of his life, that he could write no more because after what he had seen, all he has written was like straw. Aquinas never told a soul what his vision was, but he surely saw the Uncreated Light. In 2002, then-Cardinal Ratzinger called on Christians to rediscover the transfigurative power of Beauty, which is not the same as “superficial aestheticism” or “irrationalism.” More:

True knowledge is being struck by the arrow of Beauty that wounds man, moved by reality, “how it is Christ himself who is present and in an ineffable way disposes and forms the souls of men.”
Being struck and overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real, more profound knowledge than mere rational deduction. Of course we must not underrate the importance of theological reflection, of exact and precise theological thought; it remains absolutely necessary. But to move from here to disdain or to reject the impact produced by the response of the heart in the encounter with beauty as a true form of knowledge would impoverish us and dry up our faith and our theology. We must rediscover this form of knowledge; it is a pressing need of our time.

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