Tabor Light

In Eastern Orthodox Christian theology, the Tabor Light (Ancient Greek: Φῶς τοῦ Θαβώρ "Light of Tabor", or Ἄκτιστον Φῶς "Uncreated Light", Θεῖον Φῶς "Divine Light"; Russian: Фаворский свет "Taboric Light"; Georgian: თაბორის ნათება) is the light revealed on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration of Jesus, identified with the light seen by Paul at his conversion.

Russian Orthodox icon of the Transfiguration (Theophanes the Greek, ca. 1408).
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As a theological doctrine, the uncreated nature of the Light of Tabor was formulated in the 14th century by Gregory Palamas, an Athonite monk, defending the mystical practices of Hesychasm against accusations of heresy by Barlaam of Calabria. When considered as a theological doctrine, this view is known as Palamism after Palamas.[1][2]

The view was very controversial when it was first proposed, sparking the Hesychast controversy, and the Palamist faction prevailed only after the military victory of John VI Kantakouzenos in the Byzantine civil war of 1341–1347. Since 1347, it has been the official doctrine in Eastern Orthodoxy, while it remains without explicit affirmation or denial by the Roman Catholic Church. Roman Catholic theologians have rejected it in the past, but the Catholic view has tended be more favourable since the later 20th century.[3] Several Western scholars have presented Palamism as compatible with Catholic doctrine.[4] In particular, Pope John Paul II in 1996 spoke favourably of hesychast spirituality,[5][6] and in 2002 he named the Transfiguration as the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Holy Rosary.[7]

In Eastern Orthodoxy

According to the Hesychast mystic tradition of Eastern Orthodox spirituality, a completely purified saint who has attained divine union experiences the vision of divine radiance that is the same 'light' that was manifested to Jesus' disciples on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration. This experience is referred to as theoria. Barlaam (and Western Christianity's interpretation of apophaticism being the absence of God rather than the unknowability of God) held this view of the hesychasts to be polytheistic inasmuch as it seemed to postulate two eternal substances, a visible (the divine energies) and an invisible (the divine ousia or essence). Seco and Maspero assert that the Palamite doctrine of the uncreated light is rooted in Palamas' reading of Gregory of Nyssa.[8]

Instances of the Uncreated Light are read into the Old Testament by Orthodox Christians, e.g. the Burning Bush.[9]

Identification with the fires of hell

Many Orthodox theologians have identified the Tabor light with the fire of hell. According to these theologians, hell is the condition of those who remain unreconciled to the uncreated light and love of and for God and are burned by it.[10][11][12] According to Iōannēs Polemēs, Theophanes of Nicea believed that, for sinners, "the divine light will be perceived as the punishing fire of hell".[13]

According to Iōannēs Polemēs, Palamas himself did not identify hell-fire with the Tabor light: "Unlike Theophanes, Palamas did not believe that sinners could have an experience of the divine light [...] Nowhere in his works does Palamas seem to adopt Theophanes' view that the light of Tabor is identical with the fire of hell."[14]

Roman Catholicism
The upper part of The Transfiguration (1520) by Raphael, depicting Christ miraculously discoursing with Moses and Elijah.

Palamism, Gregory Palamas' theology of divine "operations", was never accepted by the Scholastic theologians of the Latin Catholic Church, who maintained a strong view of the simplicity of God, conceived as Actus purus. This doctrinal division reinforced the east–west split of the Great Schism throughout the 15th to 19th centuries, with only Pope John Paul II opening a possibility for reconciliation by expressing his personal respect for the doctrine.

Catholicism traditionally sees the glory manifested at Tabor as symbolic of the eschatological glory of heaven; in a 15th-century Latin hymn Coelestis formam gloriae:

O wondrous type, O vision fair
of glory that the Church shall share
Which Christ upon the mountain shows
where brighter than the sun He glows
With shining face and bright array
Christ deigns to manifest today
What glory shall be theirs above
who joy in God with perfect love.[15]

Pope Gregory the Great wrote of people by whom, "while still living in this corruptible flesh, yet growing in incalculable power by a certain piercingness of contemplation, the Eternal Brightness is able to be seen."[16] In his poem The Book of the Twelve Béguines, John of Ruysbroeck, a 14th-century Flemish mystic beatified by Pope Pius X in 1908, wrote of "the uncreated Light, which is not God, but is the intermediary between Him and the 'seeing thought'" as illuminating the contemplative not in the highest mode of contemplation, but in the second of the four ascending modes.[17]

Roman Catholic pro-ecumenism under John Paul II from the 1980s sought for common ground in questions of doctrinal division between the Eastern and the Western Church. John Paul II repeatedly emphasized his respect for Eastern theology as an enrichment for the whole church, and spoke favourably of Hesychasm.[5][6] In 2002, he also named the Transfiguration as the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Holy Rosary.[7] The Eastern doctrine of "uncreated light" has not been officially accepted in the Catholic Church, which likewise has not officially condemned it. Increasing parts of the Western Church consider Gregory Palamas a saint, even if uncanonized.[18] "Several Western scholars contend that the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas himself is compatible with Roman Catholic thought on the matter."[19] At the same time, anti-ecumenical currents within Eastern Orthodoxy presented the Tabor Light doctrine as a major dogmatic division between the Eastern and the Western Church, with the Hesychast movement even described as "a direct condemnation of Papism".[20]

"Tabor Light" was also used in the popular press of 1938 in reference to a mysterious light seen around a cemetery named "Tabor" near Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, Canada.[21]

See also

References
  1. John Meyendorff, "Mount Athos in the Fourteenth Century: Spiritual and Intellectual Legacy" in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 1988
  2. R.M. French, Foreword to Nicolaus Cabasilas, Joan Mervyn Hussey, P. A. McNulty (editors), A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy (St Vladimir's Seminary Press 1974 ISBN 978-0-913836-37-8), p. x
  3. "the Western world has started to rediscover what amounts to a lost tradition. Hesychasm, which was never anything close to a scholar's pursuit, is now studied by Western theologians who are astounded by the profound thought and spirituality of late Byzantium." The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography (St Vladimir's Seminary Press 2005, ISBN 0-88141-295-3), pp. 215-216.
  4. Michael J. Christensen, Jeffery A. Wittung (editors), Partakers of the Divine Nature (Associated University Presses 2007 ISBN 0-8386-4111-3), p. 243
  5. "Pope John Paul II 11 August 1996 Angelus". www.ewtn.com. Retrieved 2018-01-09.
  6. Original text (in Italian) Speaking of the hesychast controversy, Pope John Paul II said the term "hesychasm" refers to a practice of prayer marked by deep tranquillity of the spirit intent on contemplating God unceasingly by invoking the name of Jesus. While from a Catholic viewpoint there have been tensions concerning some developments of the practice, the Pope said, there is no denying the goodness of the intention that inspired its defence, which was to stress that man is offered the concrete possibility of uniting himself in his inner heart with God in that profound union of grace known as Theosis, divinization.
  7. The "Luminous Mysteries", published in Rosarium Virginis Mariae, October 2002.
  8. Seco, Lucas F. Mateo; Maspero, Giulio (2009). The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa. Brill. p. 382. ISBN 978-9004169654.
  9. "Jewish and Christian Orthodox Dialogue".
  10. Chopelas, Peter (2016), "Uncreated Energies", Heaven and Hell in the Afterlife According to the Bible
  11. Mmetallinos, George (March 2009). "Paradise and hell in the Orthodox tradition". Orthodox Heritage. 7 (3).
  12. Vlachos, Hierotheos, Life after Death, pp. 254–261
  13. Polemēs, Iōannēs (1996). Theophanes of Nicaea: His Life and Works. Vol. 20. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. p. 99.
  14. Polemēs, Iōannēs (1996). Theophanes of Nicaea: His Life and Works. Vol. 20. Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. p. 100.
  15. Sarum Breviary, Venice, 1495; trans. Rev. John M. Neale, 1851
  16. Gregory the Great, Moralia, book 18, 89
  17. van Ruysbroeck, Jan (1913). The Book of the Twelve Béguines. Translated by Francis, John. London: John M. Watkins. p. 40.
  18. Pelikan, Jaroslav (1983). "Foreword". In Meyendorff, John (ed.). The Triads. Classics of Western spirituality. Paulist Press. p. xi. ISBN 978-0-8091-2447-3.
  19. Michael J. Christensen, Jeffery A. Wittung (editors), Partakers of the Divine Nature (Associated University Presses 2007 ISBN 0-8386-4111-3), p. 243
  20. "St. Gregory Palamas and the Pope of Rome", Orthodox Tradition Volume XIII, Number 2, Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies (1996). "Those who are enlightened by God know Him truly, as did some of the Orthodox Popes of Rome before that Church's fall, but this knowledge is solely the product of union with Christ, both in the case of the pauper and the Pope, as St. Gregory so eloquently argues in his essay Περὶ Θείας καὶ Θεοποιοῦ Μεθέξεως [On Divine and Deifying Participation] (Chrestou, op. cit., Vol. 3, pp. 212-261). The very structure of Palamite theology disallows any attribution of universal jurisdiction or authority, except in the traditional sense of 'honor' and 'eminence,' to anyone in the Church. St. Gregory resolutely and unequivocally identifies true teaching and all authority with spiritual enlightenment, which, in turn, is the product of a true and genuine encounter with God shared by all enlightened individuals in common and equally. Hesychasm is a direct condemnation of Papism." (pp. 26f., emphasis in original)
  21. Christensen, Jo-Anne (1995). Ghost Stories of Saskatchewan. Dundurn. p. 104. ISBN 9780888821775.

Further reading
  • Clucas, Lowell (1985). "The Triumph of Mysticism in Byzantium in the Fourteenth Century". In Vryonis, Jr., Speros (ed.). Byzantine Studies in Honor of Milton V. Anastos, Byzantina kai Metabyzantina. Malibu.
  • Lossky, Vladimir (1976) [1957]. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. St Vladimir's Seminary Press. ISBN 0-913836-31-1. A translation of Essai Sur la Theologie Mystique de L'Eglise D'Orient (in French). 1944.
  • Maloney, George Anthony (1978). A theology of uncreated energies. ISBN 978-0-87462-516-5.
  • Papademetriou, George C. (2004). Introduction to St. Gregory Palamas. ISBN 978-1-885652-83-6.
  • Meyendorff, John (1959). A Study of Gregory Palamas. Orthodox theological library. Faith Press.
  • Andreopoulos, Andreas (2005). Metamorphosis: The Transfiguration in Byzantine Theology and Iconography. St Vladimir's Seminary Press. ISBN 0-88141-295-3.
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