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Matthew 17:2 (transfiguration)
Greek (key clause):
καὶ μετεμορφώθη ἔμπροσθεν αὐτῶν, καὶ ἔλαμψεν τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ὡς ὁ ἥλιος, τὰ δὲ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο λευκὰ ὡς τὸ φῶς.
English:
“And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as the light.”
St John of Damascus says Christ’s flesh is glorified as the glory of the Godhead becomes the glory of the body, and that God is “seen and discerned in the energy of his wisdom and love.”
The fathers speak of the light of the Transfiguration as an uncreated divine energy: truly God, yet not the divine essence in its incomprehensibility. Gregory the Theologian insists that what is proper to God’s essence remains utterly beyond sight or comprehension; what is revealed are God’s operations, “comings forth,” or energies, by which He creates, sustains, illumines, and deifies. Gregory of Nyssa uses Exodus 33–34 to similar effect: Moses does not see “what God is,” but God’s “back,” that is, the traces of His activity in the world and in the soul.
Maximus the Confessor deepens this: every creaturely good, beauty, truth, or virtue is a participation in a particular divine energy or “logos.” In Christ these logoi are united in the one Logos, and in the Transfiguration He allows His disciples to experience, to the extent they can bear, the deifying energy that will one day permeate all creation. Yet their bodily eyes see this energy through His humanity: the light is not an optical metaphor but the sensible form of a real divine operation communicated to His flesh.
John of Damascus gives this its classic formulation. The flesh of Christ, he says, is “deified,” not by being changed into Godhead, but by personal union and by sharing in the natural energies of the Word. The glory proper to the divinity becomes the glory of the body, while the nature of the body remains created and circumscribed. Thus God is “seen and discerned in the energy of His wisdom and love”: the disciples truly encounter God Himself, yet precisely in His self‑manifestation as light, grace, and love, not in the bare essence. Later hesychast theology (Gregory Palamas) makes this explicit: the same uncreated light seen on Tabor is what deifies the saints in every age, the inexhaustible radiance of the divine energies communicated by the incarnate Christ and the Spirit.
