The figure of Moses seems to be linked, throughout the Scriptures to the theme of the transfiguration of the human body by the Holy Spirit.
The natural place to begin is 2 Cor 3:18 (NRSV):
And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
This is an explicit reference to Moses (verse 15), who
did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God… he put a veil on his face, but whenever Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he would take the veil off… the Israelites would see the face of Moses, that the skin of his face was shining; and Moses would put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with him. (Ex 34:29, 33–34, 35 NRSV)
The intimate presence of God transformed Moses’ face. It shone of light. It was transfigured. God’s presence with Moses did not leave Moses’ physical appearance and his body alone; God touched him “even down to his fingertips” as the Eastern Fathers said – or, more accurately in this case, down to the lines of his face.
The previous verses of Saint Paul’s letter point out that one who is not transformed in Christ puts a veil between himself and God; but the one who is close to God has no veil and becomes transformed like Moses.
The New Testament and the Old Testament both testify to Moses’ experience when speaking openly of the transformation of the body by the presence of the Holy Spirit and the indwelling of the Trinity. Even the Gospel reinforces the link: When Jesus is transfigured on Mount Tabor, Moses is present (Mt 17:3; Mk 9:4; Lk 9:30).
The tradition, too, has been (relatively) faithful to keeping Moses and his experience in sight when speaking of how contemplative and loving union with God reaches down to our face, our bones, and “the tips of our fingers”. Marie-Joseph Le Guillou OP, in a book highlighting the greatness of the theme of transfiguration in the Church, writes,
The Christian is one who looks in the mirror of Christ, sees the glory of the Father, and allows himself to be metamorphosed, transfigured in the light of God. Because of this transformation, the glory of God is manifested in the face of the Christian like it was manifested on Moses’.
And Saint Alphonsus, who seems to never tire of pointing out the transfiguration of Saint Francis de Sales’ face, writes in his Treatise on Prayer,
It was in the privilege of constant access to the Lord that Moses gloried –
glory, of course, being, in the case of Moses and his veil, a physical thing – as it was, too, on Mount Tabor. The physical is not separated from the spiritual in terms of the effects of contemplation. We may not predict the effects of transfiguration in any one human body. They are obscure; they are known perhaps only to God. However, the tradition is clear. They are real. The image of Moses is perhaps one of the clearest – or more easily accessible – testimonies to this.*
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* Perhaps this is why Western Christians, in those centuries that they were slowly sliding into a pagan anti-Semitism and forgetting the fact that Gentiles are grafted onto the still subsisting faith of Israel, were also forgetting the reality of the transformation of the body as explicitly taught by the Fathers, John of the Cross, and – though he himself lived through those terrible, slipping centuries – Alphonsus Liguori. You can’t normally keep transfiguration in view without the historical experience of Moses and Israel. It would seem to require a miracle to keep one while ignoring the other. That’s just the way God wrote salvation history. We can only take it or leave it!
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Contemplative in the Mud 