301 - Aidan Hart - Transfiguration: The End of Symbolism

The Symbolic World

Jonathan Pageau

Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 824 Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is a discussion from the Princeton Scala Foundation conference that took place in April 2023 with the title, “The Transfiguration: Glory and Grace in the World”. I sat down with Margarita Mooney Clayton and iconographer and author Aidan Hart to discuss the Transfiguration of Christ, how God's glory fills the world, and that the ultimate goal of the spiritual life is encountering God face to face.
Original YouTube version of this episode: https://youtu.be/J3u9jWeA6BM

- A previous discussion I had with Aidan Hart - The Dance between Sacred and Secular: https://youtu.be/hzQkolwWkwE
- My talk at the conference - The Role of Art in Identity: https://youtu.be/mfDm4VefkJg
- Aidan Hart’s talk - Liturgical Art as Prophecy and Priesthood: https://youtu.be/07KxzJABskY
- Playlist of all the talks at the event: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRZHnw30gpFeBFtZE-wsj5or0BdQtIMjh
- Scala Foundation website: https://scalafoundation.org/
- Aidan Hart's icons and books: https://aidanharticons.com/
—
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Preview
00:00:45 - Intro music
00:01:10 - Introduction
00:01:58 - The value of images
00:03:08 - Principles of liturgical art
00:04:25 - The Nous
00:05:57 - How do I know this isn't just imagination?
00:07:32 - The Transfiguration and Light
00:10:04 - The culmination of symbolism
00:12:38 - Poetry and Typology
00:13:46 - Clothes of glory / The Feast of Tabernacles
00:16:17 - Anti-Symbolism
00:17:09 - The point of symbols
00:19:31 - Word/logoi
00:21:48 - The basic elements of the Transfiguration icon
00:24:27 - What are Moses and Elijah doing there?
00:26:04 - Peter, James, and John
00:27:29 - The sandal falling off
00:30:03 - The person and the divinity of Christ
00:32:26 - Divine Darkness
00:35:12 - His garment is transfigured
00:44:37 - The tension between extremes
00:51:41 - Scala
—
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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before I met Jonathan in the flesh, I might have a photograph of Jonathan there on my living room.
0:05.0	Jonathan comes in and he moves into the house. I don't need the photograph.
0:08.0	It's redundant. I've got Jonathan himself.
0:10.0	And so there's that, it's interesting because, you know, I'm so bound up in the question of symbolism.
0:15.0	But you, in the Orthodox, especially in the Orthodox iconographic tradition,
0:19.0	there's some aspect of it which is you could call anti-symbolic in the sense that moving toward saying, Christ
0:25.2	is the finality of these images.
0:27.6	And so when you have Christ, you're not necessarily wanting to represent him in these shadows,
0:32.5	but you have the thing itself.
0:33.6	It doesn't mean that symbolism doesn't continue to exist in this typological way, but there's a sense in which Christ is the end of the symbolic pyramid.
0:42.3	This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.
0:58.0	My name is Margarita Mooney Clayton. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Practical Theology here at Princeton Theological Seminary.
1:15.6	I'm also the founder and executive director of Scholar Foundation,
1:19.6	which is a nonprofit whose mission is to renew culture through liberal arts, education, beauty, and worship.
1:26.6	I'm joining you here today from the studios at Princeton Theological Seminary,
1:31.3	where I have the pleasure of hosting Aidan Hart, an iconographer,
1:35.3	born in England, raised in New Zealand, now residing in England,
1:39.3	and Jonathan Peugeot from Quebec, Canada, who was also an iconographer and icon sculptor.
1:46.0	Both Aidan and Jonathan are here this weekend for the conference on art, the common good, and
1:52.7	the sacred, being hosted by Scala and Princeton Theological Seminary.
1:57.0	And before we do that public event, I wanted to sit down with them and talk to the two of them as artists about how they think about the relationship between scripture, image, and symbol.
2:09.6	Specifically, we're going to talk a bit about one particular icon, that of the transfiguration.
	...

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