6 AUGUST – THE TRANSFIGURATION OF OUR LORD
Dom Prosper Guéranger:
“O God, who in the glorious transfiguration of your only-begotten Son, confirmed the mysteries of the faith by the testimony of the fathers: and who, in the voice which came from the bright cloud, did in a wonderful manner fore-signify our adoption as sons: mercifully vouchsafe to make us fellow-heirs of that King of glory, and the sharers of His bliss.” Such is the formula which sums up the prayer of the Church and shows us her thoughts on this day of attestation and of hope.
We must first notice that the glorious transfiguration has already been twice brought before us on the sacred cycle, viz., on the second Sunday of Lent and on the preceding Saturday. What does this mean but that the object of the present solemnity is not so much the historical fact already known as the permanent mystery attached to it: not so much the personal favour bestowed on Simon Peter and the sons of Zebedee, as the accomplishment of the great message then entrusted to them for the Church? “Tell the vision to no man, till the Son of man be risen from the dead” (Matthew xvii. 9).
The Church, born from the open side of the Man-God on the Cross, was not to behold Him face-to-face on Earth. After His Resurrection when he had sealed His alliance with her in the Holy Ghost sent down from Heaven,
it is on faith alone that her love was to be fed. But by the testimony which takes the place of sight, her lawful desires to know him were to be satisfied. Wherefore, for her sake, giving truce one day of His mortal life to the ordinary law of suffering and obscurity He had taken on Him for the world’s salvation, He allowed the glory which filled His blessed soul to transpire.
The King of Jews and Gentiles revealed Himself on the mountain where His calm splendour eclipsed forever more the lightnings of Sinai: the covenant of the eternal alliance was declared, not by the promulgation of a law of servitude graven on stone, but by the manifestation of the Lawgiver Himself, coming as Bride groom to reign in grace and beauty over hearts. Elias and Moses, representing the prophets and the Law by which His coming was prepared, from their different starting points met beside Him like faithful messengers reaching their destination. They did homage to the Master of their now finished mission, and effaced themselves before Him at the voice of the Father: “This is my beloved Son!” Three witnesses, the most trustworthy of all, assisted at this solemn scene: the disciple of faith, the disciple of love, and that other son of thunder who was to be the first to seal with his blood both the faith and the love of an Apostle. By His order they kept religiously, as beseemed them, the secret of the King, until the day when the Church could be the first to receive it from their predestined lips.
But did this precious mystery take place on the 6th of August? More than one Doctor of sacred rites affirms that it did. At any rate it was fitting to celebrate it in the month dedicated to eternal Wisdom. It is she, the brightness of eternal light, the unspotted mirror and image of God’s goodness (Wisdom vii. 26) who, shedding grace on the Son of man, made Him on this day the most beautiful among all His brethren and dictated more melodiously than ever to the inspired singer the accents of the
Epithalamium: “My heart has uttered a good word: I speak my works to the king” (Psalm xliv. 2, 3). Seven months ago the mystery was first announced by the gentle light of the Epiphany, but by the virtue of the mystical seven here revealed once more, the beginnings of blessed hope which we then celebrated as children with the child Jesus have grown together with Him and with the Church: and the latter, established in unspeakable peace by the full growth which gives her to her Spouse, calls upon all her children to grow like her by the contemplation of the Son of God, even to the measure of the perfect age of Christ. We understand then why the Liturgy of today repeats the formulas and chants of the glorious Theophany: “Arise, be enlightened, O Jerusalem: for your light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you” (Isaias lx. 1). It is because on the mountain together with our Lord the Bride also is glorified, having the glory of God.
While the face of Jesus shone as the sun, His garments became white as snow (Matthew xvii. 2).
Now these garments so snow-white, as Saint Mark observes, that no fuller on Earth could have bleached them so,
are the just men, the royal ornament inseparable from the Man-God, the Church, the seamless robe woven by our sweet Queen for her Son out of the purest wool and most beautiful linen that the valiant woman could find. Although our Lord personally has now passed the torrent of suffering and entered forever into His glory, nevertheless
the bright mystery of the Transfiguration will not be complete until the last of the elect, having passed through the laborious preparation at the hands of the Divine Fuller and tasted death, has joined in the Resurrection of our adorable Head.
O Face of our Saviour that ravishes the heavens, then will all glory, all beauty, all love shine forth from you. Expressing God by the perfect resemblance of true Son by nature, you will extend the good pleasure of the Father to that reflection of His Word, which constitutes the sons of adoption and reaches in the Holy Ghost even to the lowest fringes of His garment which fills the temple below Him. According to the doctrine of the Angel of the schools, the adoption of sons of God, which consists in being conformable to the image of the Son of God by nature, is wrought in a double manner: first by grace in this life, and this is imperfect conformity. And then by glory in patria, and this is perfect conformity, according to the words of Saint John: “We are now the sons of God ; and it has not yet appeared what we will be. We know that when He will appear, we will be like Him: because we will see Him as He is” (1 John iii. 2).
The word of eternity, “You are my Son, this day have I begotten you,” has had two echoes in time, at the Jordan and on Thabor. And God, who never repeats Himself, did not herein make an exception to the rule of saying but once what he says. For although these terms used on the two occasions are identical, they do not tend, as Saint Thomas says, to the same end, but show the different ways in which man participates in the resemblance of the eternal filiation. At the baptism of our Lord, where the mystery of the first regeneration was declared, as at the Transfiguration which manifested the second, the whole Trinity appeared: the Father in the voice, the Son in His Humanity, the Holy Ghost under the form, first of a dove, and afterwards of a bright cloud: for if in baptism this Holy Spirit confers innocence symbolised by the simplicity of the dove, in the Resurrection He will give to the elect the brightness of glory and the refreshment after suffering which are signified by the luminous cloud.
But without waiting for the day when our Saviour will renew our very bodies conformable to the bright glory of His own divine Body, the mystery of the Transfiguration is wrought in our souls already here on Earth. It is of the present life that Saint Paul says, and the Church sings today: “God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Christ Jesus” (2 Corinthians iv. 6). Thabor, holy and divine mountain rivalling Heaven, how can we help saying with Peter: “It is good for us to dwell on your summit!” For your summit is love, it is charity which towers above the other virtues, as you tower in gracefulness, and loftiness, and fragrance over the other mountains of Galilee, which saw Jesus passing, speaking, praying, working prodigies, but did not know Him in the intimacy of the perfect. It is after six days, as the Gospel observes, and therefore in
the repose of the seventh which leads to the eighth of the Resurrection, that Jesus reveals Himself to the privileged souls who correspond to His love. The Kingdom of God is within us when, leaving all impressions of the senses as it were asleep, we raise ourselves above the works and cares of the world by prayer, it is given us to enter with the Man-God into the cloud: there beholding the glory of the Lord with open face, as far as is compatible with our exile, we are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord (2 Corinthians iii. 18). “Let us then,” cries Saint Ambrose, “ascend the mountain. Let us beseech the Word of God to show Himself to us in His splendour, in His beauty, to grow strong and proceed prosperously, and reign in our souls. For behold a deep mystery! According to your measure, the Word diminishes or grows within you. If you reach not that summit, high above all human thought, Wisdom will not appear to you. The Word shows Himself to you as in a body without brightness and without glory.”
If the vocation revealed to you this day be so great and so holy, “reverence the call of God,” says Saint Andrew of Crete: “do not ignore yourself, despise not a gift so great, show not yourself unworthy of the grace, be not so slothful in your life as to lose this treasure of Heaven. Leave Earth to the earth, and let the dead bury their dead. Disdaining all that passes away, all that dies with the world and the flesh, follow even to Heaven, without turning aside, Christ who leads the way through this world for you. Take to your assistance fear and desire, lest you faint or lose your love. Give yourself up wholly. Be supple to the Word in the Holy Ghost, in order to attain this pure and blessed end: your deification, together with the enjoyment of unspeakable goods. By zeal for the virtues, by contemplation of the truth, by wisdom, attain to Wisdom, who is the principle of all, and in whom all things subsist.”
The feast of the Transfiguration has been kept in the East from the earliest times. With the Greeks it is preceded by a Vigil and followed by an Octave, and on it they abstain from servile work, from commerce, and from law-suits. Under the graceful name of Rose-flame,
rosae coruscatio, we find it in Armenia at the beginning of the fourth century, supplanting Diana and her feast of flowers by the remembrance of the day when the divine Rose unfolded for a moment on earth its brilliant corolla. It is preceded by a whole week of fasting, and counts among the five principal feasts of the Armenian cycle, where it gives its name to one of the eight divisions of the year. Although the Menology of this Church marks it on the sixth of August like that of the Greeks and the Roman Martyrology, it is nevertheless always celebrated there on the seventh Sunday after Pentecost. And by a coincidence full of meaning, they honour on the preceding Saturday the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, a figure of the Church.
The origin of today’s feast in the West is not so easy to determine. But the authors who place its introduction into our countries as late as 1457 when Callixtus III promulgated by precept a new Office enriched with indulgences, overlook the fact that the Pontiff speaks of the feast as already widespread and “commonly called of the Saviour.” It is true that in Rome especially the celebrity of the more ancient feast of Saint Sixtus II, with its double Station at the two cemeteries which received respectively the relics of the Pontiff-Martyr and those of his companions, was for a long time an obstacle to the acceptance of another feast on the same day. Some Churches, to avoid the difficulty, chose another day in the year to honour the mystery. As the feast of our Lady of the Snow, so that of the Transfiguration had to spread more or less privately, with various Offices and Masses, until the supreme authority should intervene to sanction and bring to unity the expressions of the devotion of different Churches.
Callixtus III considered that the hour had come to consecrate the work of centuries. He made the solemn and definitive insertion of this feast of triumph on the universal Calendar the memorial of the victory which arrested, under the walls of Belgrade in 1456, the onward march of Mahomet II, conqueror of Byzantium, against Christendom. Already in the ninth century, if not even earlier, martyrologies and other liturgical documents furnish proofs that the mystery was celebrated with more or less solemnity, or at least with some sort of commemoration, in divers places. In the twelfth century Peter the Venerable, under whose government Cluny took possession of Thabor, ordained that in all the monasteries or churches belonging to his Order, the Transfiguration should be celebrated with the same degree of solemnity as the Purification of our Lady, and he gave for his reason, besides the dignity of the mystery, the “custom, ancient or recent, of many Churches throughout the world, which celebrate the memory of the said Transfiguration with no less honour than the Epiphany and the Ascension of our Lord.”
On the other hand at Bologna in 1233, in the juridical instruction preliminary to the canonisation of Saint Dominic, the death of the Saint is declared to have taken place on the feast of Saint Sixtus, without mention of any other. It is true, and we believe this detail is not void of meaning, that a few years earlier, Sicardus of Cremona thus expressed himself in his
Mitrale: “We celebrate the Transfiguration of our Lord on the day of Saint Sixtus.” Is not this sufficient indication that while the feast of the latter continued to give its traditional name to the eighth of the Ides of August, it did not prevent a new and greater solemnity from taking its place beside it, preparatory to absorbing it altogether? For he adds: “Therefore on this same day, as the Transfiguration refers to the state in which the faithful will be after the resurrection, we consecrate the Blood of our Lord from new wine, if it is possible to obtain it, in order to signify what is said in the Gospel: ‘I will not drink from henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I will drink it with you new in the kingdom of my Father.’ But if it cannot be procured, then at least a few ripe grapes are pressed over the chalice, or else grapes are blessed and distributed to the people.”
The author of the
Mitrale died in 1215, yet he was only repeating the explanation already given in the second half of the preceding century by John Beleth, Rector of the Paris University. We must admit that the very ancient
benedictio uvoe found in the Sacramentaries on the day of Saint Sixtus has nothing corresponding to it in the life of the great Pope which could justify our referring it to him. The Greeks, who have also this blessing of grapes fixed for the 6th August, celebrate on this day the Transfiguration alone, without any commemoration of Sixtus II. Be it as it may, the words of the Bishop of Cremona and of the Rector of Paris prove that Durandus of Mende, giving at the end of the thirteenth century the same symbolical interpretation, did but echo a tradition more ancient than his own time.
