6th August ~ The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Practices contrary to this are suggested by self-love, not by the spirit of God; they are a disguised pride and a dangerous illusion
THE TRANSFIGURATION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
Our divine Redeemer, in order to show that the sufferings of His servants are usually intermingled with spiritual comforts and to give us a sensible demonstration of the truth of His promises of an eternal glory reserved for us in the world to come, was pleased to manifest His majesty in the mystery of the Transfiguration. Being in Galilee about a year before His passion, He chose to be witnesses of His glory the same three beloved disciples who were afterward to be witnesses of His agony in the garden, namely St Peter, and the two sons of Zebedee, SS. James and John. He took three, that their evidence might be unexceptionable; but He would not publicly show His glory, to teach His followers to love the closest secrecy in all spiritual graces and favours. Practices contrary to this are suggested by self-love, not by the spirit of God; they are a disguised pride and a dangerous illusion. Every true servant of God loves to be hidden; his motto, even when he most warmly invites all creatures to magnify the Lord with him, is: “My secret to myself, my secret to myself” (Isaias xxiv 16). He fears lest he should be at all considered or thought of in what belongs purely to God alone. Jesus therefore showed this miracle in retirement, and He led these three apostles to a lonely mountain, as He was accustomed to go often to some solitude to pray.
The tradition of the Christians in Palestine, of which St Cyril of Jerusalem, St John Damascene, and other fathers speak, assures us that this was Mount Tabor, which rises, something like a sugar-loaf, in the middle of Galilee. This was the place in which the God-man appeared in His glory. He was transfigured whilst at prayer, because it is usually then that the soul receives the dew of divine consolations, and tastes how infinitely sweet God is to those who sincerely seek Him. Many Christians indeed are strangers to this effect of prayer because they do not apply themselves to it with perseverance and fervour, or neglect to disengage their affections from creatures by humility, self-denial and mortification of the senses. Without purity of heart no man shall see God; but a Christian worthily disposed and fitted by the Holy Ghost to receive the spirit of prayer purifies his love more and more, transforms his affections, and renders them ever more spiritual and heavenly. Of this, the transfiguration of our Lord was, among other transcending prerogatives, a most noble and supereminent prototype.
In the East the tendency to commemorate incidents of the gospel history by special feasts is more pronounced than in the Western church, and it is probable that we must look there for the earliest traces of such a celebration as the present. What is certain is that the Transfiguration was widely and solemnly honoured in the Byzantine church on August 6 before the year 1000. See the Synaxarium Constant., edited by Delehaye, p. 897, and Nilles, Kalendarium Manuale, vol. i, pp. 235–238. The feast seems to have been adopted sporadically and on different days by certain local churches in the West, but it did not become of general observance until Pope Callistus III, to commemorate the victory gained over the Turks in 1456 by G. Hunyady and St John of Capistrano, required the Transfiguration to be everywhere honoured on this day.
From Butler’s Lives of the Saints