The Light of Tabor

The Transfiguration, kept on 6 August, commemorates the event on a mountain (tradition names Tabor) where, before three of his disciples, Christ is described as transfigured, his face and clothing shining, and Moses and Elijah appearing with him, while a voice from a cloud declares him the beloved Son. In Christian reading it is a disclosure of Christ's divine glory granted before the passion, a pledge of the glory to come.

The feast has particular weight in the Christian East, where it is one of the twelve Great Feasts and where the "light of Tabor" became the centre of a major theological controversy. In the fourteenth century the hesychast monks of Mount Athos, defended by Gregory Palamas, held that this uncreated divine light can genuinely be experienced by the purified, a position affirmed by councils at Constantinople and now standard in Orthodox theology. The day also carries a harvest custom, the blessing of grapes and first fruits. In the West the general observance was fixed in 1457 by Pope Callixtus III in thanksgiving for a victory over the Ottomans, so the same feast anchors a subtle mystical theology in the East and a more incidental history in the West.