Janet Sidaway: Liminal or subliminal? Perceptions of the Transfiguration and Ascension in the fourth century West.

The concept of “liminality”, although technically referring only to a threshold, has come to imply an undefinable “no-man’s land”: when something is “in- between” either physical or metaphysical states, or “both one thing and another”, or perhaps “either one thing or the other”, and occasionally, “neither one thing nor the other”. The ambiguity inherent in the term makes it particularly appropriate to use when interpreting the mysterious episodes of the Transfiguration and Ascension. The paper will examine how the liminality of these narratives was interpreted by three writers in the fourth century: Hilary of Poitiers (the first known interpreter of the Transfiguration in the West), Jerome and Ambrose. It will assess the extent to which these interpretations were either shaped by, or in their turn shaped, the Christological assumptions which ultimately influenced the Chalcedonian definition of the two natures of Christ, and set them in the context of their subordinationist and modalist opponents who rejected such an approach.