Transfiguration

We live in an age when most people believe in the reality of the material world. In fact, most people believe that that’s all there is to the world. Blame the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, Science, and of course, Groucho’s 2nd cousin, Uncle Karl (Marx). 

But it was not always so. At one time, people thought of the material world as a gossamer web of illusion (maya) masking an immaterial (spiritual) reality. Blame the Vedas, the Buddha, Parmenides (Aletheia & Doxa) and British Empiricism (Hume & Berkley). 

Christianity (at least the Catholic version) stakes out a somewhat unique position in this debate: The material (physical) world is absolutely real. After all, Christians expect a resurrection of the physical body (albeit ‘glorified’) after death! But materiality is not the final world; it’s not substructural. 

Throughout the New Testament, the ‘relativity of materiality’ is clearly demonstrated. Even before his public ministry began, Jesus changed water into wine at the request of his mother. (I’ve prayed for the very same thing many times…but I guess Mary has more clout.) 

Later, Jesus satiated 5,000 pilgrims with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish…and then gathered 12 baskets of scraps. (Today, we can barely feed 5 people on 2 paychecks.)

Toward the end of his ministry, Jesus took Peter, James and John to the summit of Mt. Hermon where his material body was transfigured into light, revealing him in perpetual dialog with Moses and Elijah.

At the Last Supper, Jesus transubstantiated ordinary bread and wine into his body and blood. And finally, after his crucifixion and burial, Jesus remained in the world via a resurrected body that was fully physical but no longer restricted by the ordinary laws of spacetime physics. 

Post-Resurrection, Jesus appeared to his disciples on multiple occasions but generally, he was not recognized, at least not immediately. His identity was revealed only through the things he said and did (interpreting scripture, breaking bread, etc.).   

It’s hard to be a Christian today; but cheer up! It was much harder 125 years ago when we were at the apex of philosophical materialism. We can date it: January 1, 1900.  That was the last day on which it was reasonable to believe that everything is as it appears to be. It was the high water mark for materialism and realism. It’s been all downhill since...

…And thank God for that! After Planck, Einstein, the Quantum Mechanics, and John Bell, we may state with conviction that almost nothing is as it seems to be. But this is not a new discovery; it is a reaffirmation of the basic insight that lies at the heart of Western philosophy…and Christian theology.

The father of Western science, Parmenides (c. 475 BCE) defined the philosophical project for the millennia that followed. He based the West’s first extant work of systematic philosophy (On Nature) on the distinction between Truth (Aletheia) and Appearance (Doxa).

Parmenides, his followers and his rivals took it for granted that there was more to reality than mere phenomena. Even Aristotle, 125 years later, wrote a Metaphysics. It would be 2,000 years before anyone seriously challenged the pre-Socratic paradigm.

Between Parmenides and Machiavelli (c. 1500 CE) comes Jesus, the Christ. On one hand, Jesus’ ministry is very much in the here and now: dodging the law, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, forgiving the desperate. But on another level, Jesus was a poster boy for the struggle against naïve realism.

I define realism simply as the belief that x = x. In other words, identity rules. Everything is what it is, exactly. Bread is bread and only bread; wine is wine; water water. “A rose is a rose is a rose.” (Gertrude Stein) When 5 loaves of bread are distributed among 5,000 people, each person receives exactly 0.1% of a loaf…and not a crumb more.

What a miserably stingy world! Thank God that’s not the world we live in. Realism places reality in a straitjacket.  

Prior to the Renaissance, these violations of simple identity did not pose much of a problem for most people. Most everyone agreed that appearances were intrinsically detached from reality. The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment challenged that assumption. We learned to ‘trust the science’. As we progressively ‘disenchanted’ the World, it became harder and harder to believe in Christianity’s model.

We came to trust our senses and began to doubt that there was anything beyond them. Whole philosophies developed around the notion that only propositions subject to scientific verification could be meaningful. Reality was reduced to the repeatable and the phenomenal. Anything else was ‘nonsense’. 

It became more and more difficult to square Christianity’s focus on the novel and the noumenal with modern epistemology. As the cognitive dissonance intensified, Christian hegemony cracked. Many abandoned the faith, many more just stuck it in a desk drawer to be consulted once a week, or only ‘at the hour of our death’.

Roman Catholic Christianity is rooted in the concept of Transfiguration, the relativity of materiality. Efforts to make Christian doctrine compatible with materialism, realism, and/or positivism (logical or otherwise) are doomed to failure. If 2,000 years of wisdom is to survive, believers must stop apologizing for their views and firmly declare, whenever confronted by materialist or realist dogma, that the Emperor has no clothes.  

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