Quicumque Christum quæritis,
oculos in altum tollite:
illic licebit visere
signum perennis gloriæ.

You who seek Christ
Lift your eyes to heaven
There you shall see
The sign of eternal glory.

Prudentius, Cathemerinon, IV

In 1456, the Ottoman Empire, led by Sultan Mehmet II, besieged Belgrade, a strategic fortress defended by Christians under the command of John of Capistrano and John Hunyadi, Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Christian victory, achieved on July 22, 1456, was a crucial event that temporarily halted the Ottoman advance in Europe. The battle ended shortly before the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, celebrated on August 6, and the success was interpreted as a sign of heavenly protection.

Pope Callistus III, who had called for a Crusade and ordered prayers throughout Christendom for the defense of Belgrade, attributed the victory to divine intervention. In thanksgiving, he established the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord as a universal celebration in the Catholic Church, symbolically linking it to the triumph of Belgrade. He also ordered church bells to be rung at noon to commemorate the victory, giving rise to the tradition of praying the Angelus.

The ancient hymn for Vespers and Matins on this feast, attributed to the poet Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (348-413), was initially composed for the Solemnity of the Epiphany and then adopted for the Transfiguration: the theme of the manifestation of Christ’s divinity is in fact common to both celebrations. One of the Responsories for Matins on August 6 uses the formulas of January 6: Surge et illuminare, Jerusalem, quia venit lumen tuum, et gloria Domini super te orta est (Is 60:1). Arise, receive light, O Jerusalem, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. The new Jerusalem, the Holy Church, is the Bride honored by the Divine Bridegroom on Mount Tabor, habens claritatem Dei (Rev 21:11), resplendent with the glory of God.

It is precisely this theophany that we contemplate today, in that blinding blaze of light from the Lord’s face and robe, and in the voice of the Eternal Father: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; listen to Him. Elijah and Moses summarize the homage of the Prophets and the Law to the One who fulfills and incarnates in Himself the ancient promises; to the King, the Priest, and the Prophet who embodies the Law and the Prophets in Himself. In a few days, on the occasion of the Assumption of Mary Most Holy into Heaven, we will contemplate the heavenly homeland to which Our Lord and His most august Mother have preceded us in body and soul; and we will see how this Mystery is for us an incentive not to seek on this earth a surrogate for what instead awaits each of us in the eternal glory of Paradise.

Today we see the Apostles Peter, James, and John accompany the Master up Mount Tabor, and Peter asking Him to allow him to pitch three tents and remain there, absorbed in a divine and transcendent dimension. Let us not forget that six days earlier Peter had proclaimed Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God (Mt 16:16) and the Master had predicted to the Apostles that He would have to go to Jerusalem to face His Passion and Death and that He would rise again on the third day (Mt 16:21).

The Apostles’ desire to remain on Mount Tabor is humanly understandable, but it is an illusion that we, like them, do not succeed in shaking off; for we are, like them, in humanitatis corporibus obvoluti, entangled in the materiality of this present life, as the Ambrosian Preface of today’s feast says. We believe it is possible to achieve paradise on earth, and too often we confuse this vale of tears with the ultimate goal of eternity, forgetting that we are exsules, exiles from our heavenly homeland. Our fallen nature continues to keep us tied to the world and its allurements, and this is what the Lord was referring to when he exhorted his Disciples: If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Mt 16:24-25).

We believe we can save our lives by seeking a compromise with the world – of which Satan is the prince (Jn 12:31) – without understanding the warning that Saint Paul addressed to us in last Sunday’s Epistle: For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live (Rom 8:13). This is what denying oneself consists of: not living according to the flesh, according to the spirit of the world, according to the horizontal mentality of those who delude themselves into thinking they can create a simulacrum of paradise on earth, be it socialist, liberal, globalist, pacifist, green, inclusive, ecumenical, or synodal. We cannot make the transitory eternal, nor the eternal transitory; we cannot adapt God to our needs, but we must conform to His holy will. Not my will, but yours be done (Lk 22:42), says the Lord to the Eternal Father in the agony of Gethsemane. And He commands us to ask for the same, in the Our Father: Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Yet we persist in chasing the chimera of an impossible Eden that we unconsciously wish would last forever, without needing to wait for the eternal reward in the afterlife.

This Hic manebimus optime, however cloaked in good intentions like Peter’s Bonum est nobis hic esse, is ontologically impossible on this earth, because the life each of us spends here is a time of trial, not of reward; it is a time of war, of battle, of failures, and not of peace and idleness; it is an opportunity to fulfill Charity through good works, atoning for our own and others’ sins and thus meriting the Paradise for which we are destined, not a comfortable refuge in which to enjoy undeserved comforts. Indeed, if Paradise could be achieved here and now – without trial and without merit – then there would be no need for a God who judges and rewards, much less for a God who redeems, who becomes Incarnate and offers Himself to atone for sins we do not acknowledge having committed. Ultimately, it would mean falling into Satan’s most cunning trap, which deludes us into thinking we can do without God by erasing His name, removing His images, and making Him superfluous by replacing Him, as always happens, with idols: money, power, pleasure, the gratification of the most abject instincts, technology, the mad ὕβρις of artificial intelligence or the androgynous humanoid. Behind all this, dear brothers, lies the Devil’s hatred and envy for the ineffable privilege granted to us humans – and not to pure spirits – of seeing the Second Person of the Holy Trinity incarnate in a human creature, to communicate to humanity the eternal bliss of God.

The hymn of today’s feast responds to this temptation to exclude eternity from our spiritual horizon: Quicumque Christum quæritis, oculos in altum tollite – You who seek Christ, turn your eyes to heaven.

Let us consider the parable of the man who had enjoyed an abundant harvest: “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry!” But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded of you” (Luke 12:19-20). If this were our homeland, the mere prospect of death would threaten us with endless exile, and we would end up transforming our lives – very brief compared to eternity – into an antechamber to Hell, paradoxically unable even to give meaning to our present suffering. We would end up desperately seeking, like certain infamous self-styled philanthropists, an artificial immortality that would make us eternal; and we would find new charlatans ready to sell us modern elixirs of long life. Only with a supernatural and genuinely Catholic gaze can we take part in the race, reach the finish line, and deserve the final prize: Bonum certamen certavi, cursum consummavi, fidem servavi (2 Tim 4:7), knowing full well that the final goal is in eternity.

This is not a way to escape the Christian militia and bearing witness before the world, as if to achieve the ataraxia of the Epicureans or the annihilation of one’s individuality of Buddhist nirvana. Rather, it is a restoring order to things, according to the hierarchy established by God, healing in the light of supernatural Grace the wound inflicted by sin on the divine κόσμος.

The Transfiguration of the Lord – just as it occurs on the Second Sunday of Lent, almost as if to offer a moment of comfort in penance and fasting – constitutes a sort of glimpse into the earthly life of the Savior, in which the humanity of Our Lord allows its divinity to shine forth. Peter, James, and John see in this theophany an anticipation of the glory of Heaven, where the Risen One will ascend forty days after Easter. But precisely because this Transfiguration is momentary and a foretaste of the transfiguration that awaits each of us in Paradise, the Lord orders the Disciples to speak of it to no one until the Son of Man has risen from the dead (Mt 17:9), so that Faith may nourish the Charity of those who recognize Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior; and so that the historicity of this event would be corroborated by the testimony of the Apostles, spectatores illius magnitudinis (2 Pt 1:1), spectators of His greatness. Saint Peter confirms this in the Epistle we read a short while ago: We did not follow cleverly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty (2 Pt 1:16); we heard this voice coming from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain (2 Pt 1:18).

Dom Guéranger writes:

Although the Lord, having crossed the torrent of suffering, has already personally entered into His glory, the mystery of the Transfiguration will not be complete until the last member of the elect, having also passed through the laborious preparation of the trial and tasted death, has reached the head in His resurrection.

This is the meaning of the Collect of today’s Mass: 

O God, who by the glorious Transfiguration of your Only-Begotten Son confirmed the mysteries of faith with the testimony of the fathers, and by the voice that came from the luminous cloud wonderfully proclaimed the perfect adoption of sons, grant, in your goodness, that we may become co-heirs and sharers in his glory.

And so may it be.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

6 Agosto MMXXV
In Transfiguratione D.N.J.C.

NOTE

1 – Pope Callixtus III, Bull Cum his superioribus annis, 29 June 1456. Callistus III ordered priests to recite this prayer to invoke the victory of the Christians over the Turks: Almighty and eternal God, to whom belongs all power and in whose hands are the rights of all nations, protect your Christian people and crush with your power the pagans who trust in their own ferocity.

2 – Eight Sunday after Pentecost.

3 – Dom Prosper Guéranger,The Liturgical Year, II. Eastertide and After Pentecost.