Origen, Vladimir Lossky and Henry Corbin

The Kontakion (hymn) of the Feast of the Transfiguration in the Eastern Orthodox Church sings:

On the Mountain You were Transfigured, O Christ God,

And Your disciples beheld Your glory as far as they could see it;

So that when they would behold You crucified,

They would understand that Your suffering was voluntary,

And would proclaim to the world,

That You are truly the Radiance of the Father!

According to Vladimir Lossky, the disciples saw the divine glory "according to their capacity". That is a rather interesting choice of words as it corresponds to how Henry Corbin has translated several passages from the Acts of Peter and Acts of John.

Corbin points out the following from Origen's Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew:

For when he has passed through the six days, as we have said, he will keep a new Sabbath, rejoicing in the lofty mountain, because he sees Jesus transfigured before him; for the Word has different forms, as He appears to each as is expedient for the beholder, and is manifested to no one beyond the capacity of the beholder. (Book XII, Chapter 36)

It would seem there are shades of familiarity with Origen in Lossky's translation as he references Origen more than a few times in his works.

What is striking is how differently such an idea is interpreted in each. Lossky is straight up orthodox (Eastern Orthodox in particular) in his thinking; Corbin's approach is of a Gnostic nature, following this idea of "capacity" not in the kenotic sense of Orthodox Christianity but to the idea of the Qa'im, the final Imam, in Shi'ite, and in particular Ismaili Shi'ite, Islam.

Though it is apparent that the Imam bears resemblance to a Christ-like "type" of figure, Corbin points out that the figure of the Imam bears resemblance not to the Jesus of historical Christianity but to the Ebionite variety in which, in Jesus, the True Prophet has found "the place of repose".

This also cracks open the shell of the idea of "influence" a bit further than the "causal reduction peculiar to historism" and the reductionism of a scientific worldview so popular today in which "before" equates to "influence" which is ultimately a superficial approach to how religious ideas develop. As Corbin notes, "the concrete spiritual fact of 'transformation' itself cannot be causally deduced" (Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, p. 66)