The Transfiguration of the Greek Word, Doxa
Is it the fulcrum of Western History?
Preface
Admittedly, I’m moving in a different direction than many—a third, secret direction, so to speak. I understand that many American conservatives see Christianity as a bulwark of conservatism against the annoying perversions of progressive liberalism, but there’s something in Christianity which I cannot unsee that seems revolutionary, democratizing, and liberating.
I do not focus on seeing Christian practice in contrast to modern American (“liberal”) norms; instead, I am focused on seeing Christianity as it emerged in contrast to first century Roman and first century Judean norms and realities. In the essay that follows, I am chasing what seems to me like a very suggestive clue. It doesn’t turn out to be a closed-case… but I think it might slow some conservatives down, or encourage them to reexamine Christianity’s meaning and implications. For me, this was a two or three day research project. Obviously, it could be a much longer investigation. I did my best!
Happy to receive criticism, of course—but I think if you mess around with this term for a day, you’ll find that it really does indicate something a) important and b) not exactly hierarchical and/or conservative.
Glory and Opinion: The Unlikely Journey of Doxa
In the muddled and strange overlap of language, philosophy, and theology lies a single word that I suspect quietly reflects the intellectual shift from classical paganism to Christianity. That word is doxa. It’s the doxa in orthodox, paradox, doxology, etc. At its root, it’s simple enough—just “opinion” in Greek. Not knowledge, not certainty, not divine revelation. Doxa is what the masses think. What seems true. What you hear on the street. In the world of Plato, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, that was nothing to boast about. Think of it as the false-wisdom of crowds.
But in the Christian scriptures, doxa suddenly takes flight. It’s used to translate the Hebrew term kavod—the glory of God. And it doesn’t stop there. Throughout the New Testament, doxa becomes a crucial theological term. God is glorified. Christ is glorified. Believers, too, are promised doxa—a share in divine splendor. Somehow, “opinion” becomes “glory.” What once marked the fallibility of man now marks the majesty of God. This is where I started with this essay. I feel like I’m at the cusp of some important idea here. But it’s elusive.
This shift is more than lexical. It reflects a deeper transformation in how truth is conceived, how it is experienced, and—most curiously—who gets to know it.
The Philosophers and the Problem of Perception
Let’s begin where the Greeks began—with a deliberate suspicion of appearances.
In his fragmentary but foundational poem, On Nature, Parmenides introduces two paths that a man might follow: the way of aletheia (truth) and the way of doxa (opinion). The first is the way of reason, eternal and changeless; the second, the way of mortals, who “know nothing,” who are “two-headed,” who mistake being for non-being. Here is one of the starkest declarations:
Keep your thought back from this way of inquiry,
nor let habit force you along this path,
to direct your eye and your ear and your tongue along it,
but judge by reason the heavily contested proof
spoken by me.
Perception deceives. Only “pure reason” can reveal what is. Famously, the same anxiety pervades Plato’s work. In the Republic, doxa exists in the lower tiers of the Divided Line—beneath epistēmē (scientific knowledge), beneath what he calls noēsis (intellection). The world of opinion literally is the infamous cave described by Socrates. Doxa is the flicker of shadow on the wall, while truth blazes outside, seen only by the rare philosopher who ascends into daylight.
Even Heraclitus, often seen as more poetic than systematic, warns of the masses’ inability to perceive the logos that underlies all things:
Though the logos is common, the many live as though they had a private understanding.
The many. The crowd. The average person. Greek thought holds a deep suspicion of the collective’s grasp on truth. Truth is hidden, veiled, paradoxical. It is the rare man, not the average one, who sees it. Remember, it was forbidden to speak about the initiation rites of Eleusis.
Enter Christianity: When the Lowly See Glory
Then comes a true upheaval.
The New Testament repeatedly uses doxa—now not to describe errant opinion, but divine radiance instead. Slow your brain down and think about that. It’s so perplexing to me. In the Gospel of Luke, angels proclaim at Christ’s birth:
Doxa to God in the highest, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests. (Luke 2:14)
In John 1:14, the Word becomes flesh—and:
We have seen his doxa, the doxa of the one and only Son, full of grace and truth.
Doxa, here, now, is something visible. It is what is seen and beheld—not deduced, not philosophically derived. You might even say it’s experiential. You might even say it involves subjective perception (!!). And what’s most radical: those who see it are not sages or aristocrats, not the upper echelon of any existing hierarchy, but fishermen, tax collectors, and prostitutes. The beatitudes of Matthew 5 echo the same idea: it is the meek, the pure in heart, the persecuted who will “see God.” The last shall be first.
What the Greeks believed was only accessible to the few through rigorous reasoning—the Christian tradition proclaims as revealed to or even experienced by the humble, to children, to “the foolish things of the world.”
Translating Kavod into Doxa: A Subtle Revolution
Obviously, I’m not some master linguist. A lot of this is me doing my best with Biblehub.com interlinear translations. But as far as I can tell, this conceptual shift was made possible by a crucial translation decision.
When the Hebrew Bible was rendered into Greek in the Septuagint (3rd–2nd century BC), translators had to find a word for kavod—a term signifying the weight, dignity, or splendor of God’s presence. Kavod is what Moses sees as God passes by. It fills the Temple. It brings trembling and awe. Think “grandeur,” or “majesty,” words like that.
But they chose doxa.
It seems like an extremely odd choice to me. Kavod is deeply physical; it connotes substance, grandeur, almost a heaviness. Doxa, by contrast, connotes impression, belief, appearance. The choice of doxa may have been the best available in the Greek lexicon—but it also smuggled in a radical reorientation (and, I think we can wonder, how intentional was this reconfiguration?): God’s glory would now be known through something akin to perception, rather than by way of pure reason (epistēmē).
Plotinus and the Old Guard
This shift didn’t go down easy with everyone. In fact, it seems that the most philosophically trained Greeks resisted Christianity the longest. Plotinus (3rd century AD), father of Neoplatonism, offers an alternative vision. In his Enneads, he writes of ascending to the One, the source of all being and goodness. But this ascent is inward, contemplative. There is no divine descent into flesh. Plotinus never suggests the One would take on human nature, suffer, or allow itself to be “seen.” His metaphysics are anti-incarnational to the core, and that is what we would expect from anyone acquainted with Platonic ideas about doxa. Plotinus says,
Withdraw into yourself and look. If you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue…cut away all that is excessive…until you see the perfect splendor.
This is the ancient elitism of knowledge. The truth is for those who carve away illusion, who philosophize. The Christian idea—that truth became flesh and dwelt among us—is, for Plotinus, philosophically absurd. Glory (doxa) can’t dwell in a man hanging from a cross. That would be a contradiction in terms.
Lucian and the Satire of Belief
Lucian of Samosata, a 2nd-century Greek satirist, gives us another glimpse into elite Greek skepticism toward religious claims. In works like The Passing of Peregrinus, he mocks the widespread credulity of his generation. Christianity, in particular, is painted as a movement full of irrational adherents—people eager to believe outlandish things, driven by zeal and martyrdom rather than reason. Lucian writes:
The poor wretches have convinced themselves that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, in consequence of which they despise death and even willingly give themselves into custody.
This isn’t the language of epistēmē. It’s the old contempt for doxa—for belief, perception, hearsay. Christianity appears here not as a philosophy but as a mass movement of the gullible. Lucian has not accepted the new associations of doxa. He sees in Christianity a faith of the unphilosophical.
But maybe that’s the point.
The apostles were not sages. Paul, in particular, delights in flipping the intellectual tables:
Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? (1 Corinthians 1:20)
Before the scholastics took the reins, Christianity was, well, something for everyone. Like explicitly, etymologically even—that’s what defined it to those most familiar with existing Greek thought. What Christianity introduces is not the abandonment of truth, but the reconfiguration of how truth is accessed. It goes something like this: The wise resist because they want to ascend. But God descends. The way of epistemology has changed. And with it, the status of doxa.
So far, we’ve seen how doxa—once a pejorative term for mere opinion or appearance—was reborn in Christian scripture as the very word for divine glory. This really doesn’t seem like a semantic accident. It coincided with a broader revolution in how truth was imagined, encountered, and shared. The early Christian proclamation turned the classical epistemology inside out: what philosophers had dismissed as subjective or lowly became the medium of God’s self-revelation.
But this transformation didn’t happen in a vacuum. It took place on a cultural battlefield—one in which the most educated classes often proved the most reluctant converts.
The Learned Delay
There is a striking and potentially embarrasing irony in early Christian history: the unlettered converted first. The fishermen, the women, the slaves. The philosophers and rhetoricians, the Platonists, the Stoics—who had spent their lives honing the rational faculties, pursuing epistēmē—often hesitated. This was noted by the Church Fathers themselves. Tertullian, a brilliant North African Christian writing around 200 AD, took a combative stance against the philosophical establishment, famously (and mockingly) asking:
What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
For Tertullian, Greek philosophy was not helpful to faith—but seemed a kind of rival. In fact, he saw it as the seedbed of heresies:
It is the philosophers who are the patriarchs of the heretics.
Tertullian’s sarcasm reveals a deeper anxiety: Christianity had won the hearts of the masses but still had to prove itself to the minds of the educated. And that wasn’t easy. Philosophy had trained them to be skeptical of the senses, to be slow in trust, and to recoil at anthropomorphism in theology. That God would be “seen,” that doxa could be visible in the face of a crucified man—this was offensive to reason. It was, as Paul put it, “foolishness to the Greeks.”
To drive the point home, I suppose the closest analogy is to think of the way you, a very discerning and worldly person of the 21st century, watches videos of David Blaine doing his “magic.” You see him on the street, or in locker rooms with basketball players, and people freaking out and running away from him, screaming that he “is some kind of demon.” But you, a rational person, simply presuppose that he isn’t actually doing magic. He’s just an illusionist. This is how the most learned among the pagans first encountered the gospel.
Epistemic Humility vs. Epistemic Elitism
Here we find one of the defining tensions between pagan and Christian ways of knowing. Pagan philosophers typically assumed that truth was rare, reserved for the few, discovered through training, dialectic, and the purgation of illusion. It’s worth noting that “gnostic” theology often seems to have been deeply influenced by Greek (rather than Jewish) thought. That should make sense here. But Christian theology introduced the possibility that truth might come uninvited, clothed in flesh, and be most fully received by the poor in spirit.
The Greek suspicion of doxa reflected this elitism. Even when it took on a more refined role in Hellenistic and Neoplatonic thought—as a necessary but inferior kind of cognition—it remained subordinate to true insight. The higher mind ascended toward the Forms or the One. Appearances were to be bracketed, overcome, transcended.
But Christianity offered no path of ascent. It was a story of descent. The Logos descended into the womb of Mary. Glory—doxa—was born in a stable. Paul’s astonishing claim is that this glory is seen not with the eyes of philosophers, but by ordinary believers. As he writes to the Corinthians:
We all, with unveiled face, beholding the doxa of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of doxa to another. (2 Corinthians 3:18)
Maybe I’m missing some nominees, but this seems like one of the most daring epistemological claims in antiquity. That all—not just the learned—behold glory. That the experience of divine truth does not require metaphysical training but purity of heart, openness, even suffering. You’re gonna hate this, but: it seems democratizing, doesn’t it?
The Conversion of Doxa in the Fathers
Okay, but relax. That said, the early Church Fathers did not abandon philosophy altogether. Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine—all attempted to reconcile the riches of Greek thought with the scandal of the Gospel. And one of the most intriguing figures in this regard is the mysterious Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. I know about him primarily from an awesome book by Denys Turner, by the way, called The Darkness of God (1995). ← Book recommendation! Anyway… I acknowledge an assist from ChatGPT in the following couple of paragraphs, but keep in mind that I knew what to ask it, and suspected it would find something like this:
The Christian transfiguration of doxa did not stop with Paul’s letters or the Gospel of John—it deepened in complexity through the Church Fathers, especially among the Greek-speaking theologians who wrestled with classical metaphysics. The most intellectually ambitious reworking of doxa comes from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a Christian Neoplatonist writing under a pseudonym sometime in the late 5th or early 6th century.
If Parmenides exiled doxa to the world of illusion, Pseudo-Dionysius canonized it in heaven.
In his Celestial Hierarchy, Dionysius refers explicitly to the divine glory using the term δόξα in a passage that fuses cosmology, angelology, and theology:
The highest order [of angels] is illuminated by the first ray of divine glory (θείας δόξης). (Celestial Hierarchy 7.2)
Here, doxa is not “opinion,” nor is it mere “appearance.” It is radiant participation in divine being. The very structure of reality is described as a descending cascade of light from God, which is received and reflected by different ranks of angels—each according to its capacity. Glory is not fame or public renown (as it might still have been in Homer), nor is it the false seeming of the world (as in Parmenides). It is theophany.
Again, in The Divine Names (1.1), he writes:
His ineffable and incommunicable glory (δόξα) has shone forth.
In these formulations, δόξα becomes something like the energetic radiance of God—eternally present, but only partially apprehended by created beings. We do not “have opinions” about God’s glory—we are enveloped by it, illuminated through it, and drawn upward toward it.
This is the capstone of a slow metamorphosis: doxa has been inverted—and this reflects (I think!?) a larger worldview inversion that is maybe almost lost on us now because we have slid back nearer to the pre-christian worldview without being conscious of the slide. From subjective opinion (δόξα) to objective radiance (δόξα), from mortal presumption to divine communication.
Anyway, this usage in Pseudo-Dionysius is deeply Neoplatonic in its structure, but also distinctively Christian. It links the Hebrew kavod (glory) with the Platonic notion of the Good, but filters both through the Incarnational theology of the New Testament. It reflects John’s vision of Christ as “the radiance of the glory (δόξα) of God” (Hebrews 1:3), and anticipates the mystical ascent of the soul described in later medieval theology.
So when we say that Christianity “converted” the term doxa, it’s not a metaphor. The entire cosmos was now to be understood as a procession of glory—of doxa—from God, through the angelic orders, and back again in a circular return. And this idea had linguistic consequences.
What once meant “mere opinion” had been installed as the cornerstone of metaphysical reality. I know I haven’t written the dissertation on this that needs to be written—but I’m very confident that this is highly significant stuff!
Philo and the Transitional Moment
If Pseudo-Dionysius shows the Christian culmination, Philo of Alexandria offers a fascinating transitional moment. A Hellenized Jew writing in the 1st century AD, Philo reads the Hebrew Scriptures through the lens of Platonic allegory. He, too, speaks of doxa, translating the Hebrew kavod into Greek.
Philo is caught between worlds. He’s one of the most interesting writers in all of history because of that—you know I love his Against Flaccus essay, but I also have read a lot of his commentaries on the Old Testament texts, and they are fascinating. He believes in divine transcendence, but also in revelation. He writes of Moses seeing the doxa of God—not His essence, but His afterglow. In one passage, Philo explains:
To see God is impossible, but to see His doxa is possible.
This echoes both Exodus and Plato’s image of the sun: we can’t look directly at it, but we see by its light. Philo thus preserves the Platonic distrust of appearance—but opens a door for Christian revaluation. For, watch this: if doxa is how God is known, then perception is no longer a liability. It’s the gift.
Modern Reverberations
And for what it’s worth, and to the extent that I’m “onto something,” this ancient reorientation still echoes today. Our culture is often torn between two poles: on one side, a scientific fixation on objectivity, measurable truth, and epistemic rigor (the Enlightenment); on the other, a growing emphasis on experience, perception, and testimony (postmodernity). These poles map, however imperfectly, onto epistēmē and doxa.
Christianity, at its best, refuses to flatten this tension. It does not reject rationality. It certainly honors truth. But it also insists that the highest truths may not be demonstrable by reason. That they may come not to the wise, but to the little ones. You know, “be as little children.” And that the God who is unseen has made Himself visible—not in abstract propositions, but in the face of Christ, in the flesh of a man, in the tears of the poor, in bread and wine, in stories, songs, and testimony. That’s all awesome, of course… but it’s also a difficulty. After all, it’s been 2,000 years. We don’t, actually, see his glory—not in that collectively-revealed way that they did in the first century. It’s as if we are being forced back into a Greek mindset because the revelation is not ongoing, not still available to the masses as it once was.
If the Greeks were right to guard against doxa as deceptive, Christianity offers a corrective: doxa can be redeemed. Not by becoming epistēmē, but by becoming glory. It is no longer a rival to truth, but a witness to it—fragile, partial, and perceptual, but real. But to access this corrective, to sort of “be in Christ,” one has to accept the role of the perceptual in defining the real.
Okay, well, conclusion for now: the transformation of this one fascinating word might provoke us to recognize or remember that truth may not always look like truth. Sometimes, it looks like glory. And also, sometimes, it looks like weakness. Sometimes, it looks like the cross.
Sources
Denys Turner, The Darkness of God
Lucian, Collected Writings
Plotinus, Enneads
Parmenides, On Nature
Plato, Republic
Tertullian, Prescription Against Heresies