Three wise men came from the East... but who were they? Sandra Miesel considers what the Magi have meant to Christians across the ages
The Wise Men – not yet called kings – make only a single appearance in Holy Scripture. St Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 2:1-12) tells of their arrival in Jerusalem shortly after the birth of Jesus. They have come seeking the newborn King of the Jews because they had seen his star rise in the East. Herod, the current ruler, knows nothing of an upstart princeling but learns that prophecies place him in Bethlehem. Herod directs the Wise Men to search there for the Child and keep him informed. Following their star, the Wise Men find Jesus with his Mother. They worship him and bestow gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Warned by an angel, they do not reveal the Child’s location to jealous Herod but return secretly to their own land.
In ancient texts of Scripture the Wise Men are Magoi in Greek and Magi in Latin. The singular form, Magos/Magus, is the source of our English word “magician” but had multiple meanings in biblical times. A magus could be a Zoroastrian priest from Persia, an occultist, a magician, or a charlatan. Because the New Testament Magi study the stars, their mystic wisdom presumably includes astrology. Hence some recent Bible translations call them “astrologers”, a less evocative term than the more traditional “Wise Men”.
Some early Christians equated the Magi with Chaldean star-readers from Babylon, masters of the occult familiar throughout the Roman Empire.
St Justin Martyr and Tertullian thought they were Arabians, but most believers in Patristic times took their Persian origin for granted.
The Church Fathers were quick to see deeper symbolism in this curious episode, first through its Old Testament parallels. Origen suggested that the Magi were descendants of the pagan prophet Balaam, who had predicted that “a star shall rise out of Jacob” (Numbers 24:17). Other Old Testament figures, including the priest-king Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18-20), the generous Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 10), and the faithful Three Young Men in the Fiery Furnace (Daniel 3), were also seen as counterparts of the Wise Men from the East.
Strangers who worship the new King of Judah and bring gifts fulfil Messianic prophecies. “The kings of Tarshish and the Isles shall offer gifts; the kings of Arabia and Seba shall bring tribute,” (Psalm 72:10). “All they from Sheba shall come, bearing gold and frankincense, and proclaiming the praises of the Lord,” ( Isaiah 60:6)
Because the Scriptures speak of tributary kings, Tertullian called the Magi kings. Origen specified that they numbered three to match their gifts and their named kingdoms. St John Chrysostom preached about 12 Wise Men but his interpretation failed to find favour.
These foreigners, the first Gentiles to see the Light, recognise what Herod and the Temple priesthood cannot: the newborn Saviour. The wealthy, learned, alien Magi of St Matthew’s Gospel complement the poor ignorant, local shepherds of St Luke’s Gospel. Foreshadowing the universality of the Church, these Gentiles and Jews worship God Incarnate to show that salvation is offered to all men.
St Irenaeus of Lyons was the first Church Father to equate the Wise Men’s gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh with Christ’s roles as King, God, and Sacrifice. This became the dominant reading, still familiar through the beautiful Victorian Christmas carol “We Three Kings of Orient Are”. But other interpretations also appeared in which the gifts stand for the virtues of faith, chastity, and purity of heart or else for almsgiving, prayer, and mortification.
The Christ Child’s adoration by the Magi is known as his Epiphany (“Manifestation”) because it announces his mission to redeem the world. Ancient Christendom spoke of multiple manifestations (initially including the Nativity) by linking the revelation of the newborn Christ with his later baptism in the Jordan and his first miracle at Cana. These key points in his mission, which were imagined to have occurred on the same calendar date, also used to be celebrated in the pre-Vatican II Roman breviary. As an Epiphany antiphon at Vespers proclaims: “We honour the holy day adorned with three miracles: today the star led the Magi to the crib: today wine was made from water for a wedding: today Christ willed to be baptised by John in the Jordan.” In medieval Europe, Epiphany was often connected with the miracle of the loaves and fishes and with the raising of Lazarus.
The traditional date of Epiphany is January 6, although in some places, including the United States and Britain, the feast has now been transferred to the nearest Sunday. Epiphany is an older feast than Christmas for it is attested in the East from the first half of the third century, at least 75 years before Christmas is mentioned as a holy day in Rome.
By the late fourth century Christmas was also being celebrated in the East, so Epiphany lost its Nativity connection there. The Baptism of the Lord became the chief focus of Epiphany and the subject of its special feast-day icon. The public manifestation of Christ as the Divine “beloved Son” outranked the private homage of the Magi, who were relegated to the background of Nativity icons.
Nevertheless, the Adoration of the Magi has been a popular subject for artists since late antiquity. The earliest surviving examples are catacomb paintings from the second and third centuries and carvings on stone coffins from the first half of the fourth century. On the coffins, three nearly identical Magi process toward the enthroned Madonna and Child. Their gifts allude to the alms the deceased person had given in his lifetime. Famous mosaics depicting the Magi also appear in the churches of St Maria Maggiore in Rome (440 AD) and St Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (561 AD). The Magi are represented in exotic “Eastern” garb, wearing tunics, leggings, and soft peaked caps. They observe imperial Roman court etiquette by presenting their gifts with covered hands or on trays. The gold is often in the form of a royal wreath and the star appears as an emblem of divine kingship.
By the 10th century western artists are portraying the Wise Men with crowns. They grow distinguishable because they have come to stand for the three ages of man, the three known continents of the Old World, and three races descended from the sons of Noah. In later medieval art the Magi lay aside their crowns to interact with the Christ Child and receive his blessing. Their garments become increasingly fantastic and their faces are often modelled on contemporary rulers. By the 14th century, the youngest Magus is portrayed as a black African in many Northern European paintings. In subsequent centuries, other racial types joined the trio, including East Indians, Asians, Incas, and Canadian Indians, so that the Wise Men could represent all nations.
The 13th-century Golden Legend gives the Magi’s names in Greek as Apellius, Amerius, and Damascus; in Hebrew as Galgalat, Malgalat and Serchin; and in Latin as Caspar, Balthasar and Melchior – the favourite set. There are inconsistencies about which Magus is which but in Germanic lands, Caspar (gold) is elderly, Melchior (frankincense) is middle-aged and Balthasar (myrrh) is young. The gifts are presented in order of age.
The centre of the Magi’s cult is Cologne. The cathedral there boasts a splendid golden shrine holding their relics that has drawn swarms of pilgrims since the 12th century. The Kings’ protection is traditionally invoked against travel dangers, plague, fever, and sudden death. Their initials C+M+B form a protective acronym for Christus mundum benedicat (“Christ blesses the world”). The faithful carry this symbol on holy cards or chalk it over their doors to ward off evil.
The alleged remains of the Magi are claimed to have been discovered in the East by St Helena and brought to Milan in 400 AD, whence they were looted by Frederick Barbarossa in 1162 and given to Cologne. Historian Patrick Geary has argued persuasively that Milan never had any relics of the Wise Men.
Yet the bones in the shrine were wrapped in genuine purple silk from St Helena’s lifetime, so some ancient parties unknown have been passing as the Magi for eight centuries.
Regardless of authenticity, the Three Holy Kings have had great cultural impact on Cologne as the city’s male patron saints. Their crowns appear on the arms and banner of the city as well as on the seals of her archbishop and university.
The Magi themselves bear heraldic arms. Caspar’s are a golden star and crescent on a blue field; Melchior’s six gold stars on a blue field, and Balthasar’s a red-clad Moor holding a lance with pennant on a golden field.
Thus Scripture and legend have combined to honour the Wise Men of the East as universal symbols of mankind adoring God Incarnate. May these first pilgrims who traveled by the light of a star “guide us to the Perfect Light”.
Sanrda Miesel, 'Long day's journey into holy night', The Catholic Herald
Friday, December 29, 2006
Saturday, December 23, 2006
On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family
The family may fairly be considered, one would think, an ultimate human institution. Every one would admit that it has been the main cell and central unit of almost all societies hitherto, except, indeed, such societies as that of Lacedaemon, which went in for "efficiency," and has, therefore, perished, and left not a trace behind. Christianity, even enormous as was its revolution, did not alter this ancient and savage sanctity; it merely reversed it. It did not deny the trinity of father, mother, and child. It merely read it backwards, making it run child, mother, father. This it called, not the family, but the Holy Family, for many things are made holy by being turned upside down. But some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the family. They have impugned it, as I think wrongly; and its defenders have defended it, and defended it wrongly. The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.
It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.
We can see this change, for instance, in the modern transformation of the thing called a club. When London was smaller, and the parts of London more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it still is in villages, the opposite of what it is now in great cities. Then the club was valued as a place where a man could be sociable. Now the club is valued as a place where a man can be unsociable. The more the enlargement and elaboration of our civilization goes on the more the club ceases to be a place where a man can have a noisy argument, and becomes more and more a place where a man can have what is somewhat fantastically called a quiet chop. Its aim is to make a man comfortable, and to make a man comfortable is to make him the opposite of sociable. Sociability, like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. The club tends to produce the most degraded of all combinations-- the luxurious anchorite, the man who combines the self-indulgence of Lucullus with the insane loneliness of St. Simeon Stylites.
If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo. He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pretends to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a camel. And in all this he is still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of this flight he is always ready with his own explanation. He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; if he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals--of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself. The street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures are indeed very different from himself. But they do not put their shape or colour or custom into a decisive intellectual competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this. The camel does not contort his features into a fine sneer because Mr. Robinson has not got a hump; the cultured gentleman at No. 5 does exhibit a sneer because Robinson has not got a dado. The vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke. The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours is that they will not, as we express it, mind their own business. We do not really mean that they will not mind their own business. If our neighbours did not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their rent, and would rapidly cease to be our neighbours. What we really mean when we say that they cannot mind their own business is something much deeper. We do not dislike them because they have so little force and fire that they cannot be interested in themselves. We dislike them because they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in us as well. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it. And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character. They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.
Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere--a very powerful description in the purely literary sense--of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbour. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation. We may work in the East End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East End, or because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting. The most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, may be the result of choice or a kind of taste. We may be so made as to be particularly fond of lunatics or specially interested in leprosy. We may love negroes because they are black or German Socialists because they are pedantic. But we have to love our neighbour because he is there-- a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident.
Doubtless men flee from small environments into lands that are very deadly. But this is natural enough; for they are not fleeing from death. They are fleeing from life. And this principle applies to ring within ring of the social system of humanity. It is perfectly reasonable that men should seek for some particular variety of the human type, so long as they are seeking for that variety of the human type, and not for mere human variety. It is quite proper that a British diplomatist should seek the society of Japanese generals, if what he wants is Japanese generals. But if what he wants is people different from himself, he had much better stop at home and discuss religion with the housemaid. It is quite reasonable that the village genius should come up to conquer London if what he wants is to conquer London. But if he wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically hostile and also very strong, he had much better remain where he is and have a row with the rector. The man in the suburban street is quite right if he goes to Ramsgate for the sake of Ramsgate--a difficult thing to imagine. But if, as he expresses it, he goes to Ramsgate "for a change," then he would have a much more romantic and even melodramatic change if he jumped over the wall into his neighbours garden. The consequences would be bracing in a sense far beyond the possibilities of Ramsgate hygiene.
Now, exactly as this principle applies to the empire, to the nation within the empire, to the city within the nation, to the street within the city, so it applies to the home within the street. The institution of the family is to be commended for precisely the same reasons that the institution of the nation, or the institution of the city, are in this matter to be commended. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man to be besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to be snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is not a thing from outside, but a thing from inside. Above all, they all insist upon the fact that life, if it be a truly stimulating and fascinating life, is a thing which, of its nature, exists in spite of ourselves. The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.
Those who wish, rightly or wrongly, to step out of all this, do definitely wish to step into a narrower world. They are dismayed and terrified by the largeness and variety of the family. Sarah wishes to find a world wholly consisting of private theatricals; George wishes to think the Trocadero a cosmos. I do not say, for a moment, that the flight to this narrower life may not be the right thing for the individual, any more than I say the same thing about flight into a monastery. But I do say that anything is bad and artificial which tends to make these people succumb to the strange delusion that they are stepping into a world which is actually larger and more varied than their own. The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.
This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family. It is romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is everything that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there. So long as you have groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist; for an adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge--in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.
This colour as of a fantastic narrative ought to cling to the family and to our relations with it throughout life. Romance is the deepest thing in life; romance is deeper even than reality. For even if reality could be proved to be misleading, it still could not be proved to be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the facts are false, they are still very strange. And this strangeness of life, this unexpected and even perverse element of things as they fall out, remains incurably interesting. The circumstances we can regulate may become tame or pessimistic; but the "circumstances over which we have no control" remain god-like to those who, like Mr. Micawber, can call on them and renew their strength. People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, "to be continued in our next." If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right. But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. He can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards if he chooses. And the same civilization, the chivalric European civilization which asserted freewill in the thirteenth century, produced the thing called "fiction" in the eighteenth. When Thomas Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, he created all the bad novels in the circulating libraries.
But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events. They are dull because they are omnipotent. They fail to feel adventures because they can make the adventures. The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect. It is vain for the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings. To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance. Of all these great limitations and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important. Hence it is misunderstood by the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty. They think that if a man makes a gesture it would be a startling and romantic matter that the sun should fall from the sky. But the startling and romantic thing about the sun is that it does not fall from the sky. They are seeking under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations--that is, a world where there are no outlines; that is, a world where there are no shapes. There is nothing baser than that infinity. They say they wish to be, as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves.
G.K. Chesterton, 'On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family', Heretics, 178-95.
It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.
We can see this change, for instance, in the modern transformation of the thing called a club. When London was smaller, and the parts of London more self-contained and parochial, the club was what it still is in villages, the opposite of what it is now in great cities. Then the club was valued as a place where a man could be sociable. Now the club is valued as a place where a man can be unsociable. The more the enlargement and elaboration of our civilization goes on the more the club ceases to be a place where a man can have a noisy argument, and becomes more and more a place where a man can have what is somewhat fantastically called a quiet chop. Its aim is to make a man comfortable, and to make a man comfortable is to make him the opposite of sociable. Sociability, like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. The club tends to produce the most degraded of all combinations-- the luxurious anchorite, the man who combines the self-indulgence of Lucullus with the insane loneliness of St. Simeon Stylites.
If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. First he invents modern hygiene and goes to Margate. Then he invents modern culture and goes to Florence. Then he invents modern imperialism and goes to Timbuctoo. He goes to the fantastic borders of the earth. He pretends to shoot tigers. He almost rides on a camel. And in all this he is still essentially fleeing from the street in which he was born; and of this flight he is always ready with his own explanation. He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; if he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals--of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself. The street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles. These creatures are indeed very different from himself. But they do not put their shape or colour or custom into a decisive intellectual competition with his own. They do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this. The camel does not contort his features into a fine sneer because Mr. Robinson has not got a hump; the cultured gentleman at No. 5 does exhibit a sneer because Robinson has not got a dado. The vulture will not roar with laughter because a man does not fly; but the major at No. 9 will roar with laughter because a man does not smoke. The complaint we commonly have to make of our neighbours is that they will not, as we express it, mind their own business. We do not really mean that they will not mind their own business. If our neighbours did not mind their own business they would be asked abruptly for their rent, and would rapidly cease to be our neighbours. What we really mean when we say that they cannot mind their own business is something much deeper. We do not dislike them because they have so little force and fire that they cannot be interested in themselves. We dislike them because they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in us as well. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it. And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character. They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.
Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out. Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description somewhere--a very powerful description in the purely literary sense--of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.
We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty towards one's neighbour. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation. We may work in the East End because we are peculiarly fitted to work in the East End, or because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting. The most monstrous martyrdom, the most repulsive experience, may be the result of choice or a kind of taste. We may be so made as to be particularly fond of lunatics or specially interested in leprosy. We may love negroes because they are black or German Socialists because they are pedantic. But we have to love our neighbour because he is there-- a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident.
Doubtless men flee from small environments into lands that are very deadly. But this is natural enough; for they are not fleeing from death. They are fleeing from life. And this principle applies to ring within ring of the social system of humanity. It is perfectly reasonable that men should seek for some particular variety of the human type, so long as they are seeking for that variety of the human type, and not for mere human variety. It is quite proper that a British diplomatist should seek the society of Japanese generals, if what he wants is Japanese generals. But if what he wants is people different from himself, he had much better stop at home and discuss religion with the housemaid. It is quite reasonable that the village genius should come up to conquer London if what he wants is to conquer London. But if he wants to conquer something fundamentally and symbolically hostile and also very strong, he had much better remain where he is and have a row with the rector. The man in the suburban street is quite right if he goes to Ramsgate for the sake of Ramsgate--a difficult thing to imagine. But if, as he expresses it, he goes to Ramsgate "for a change," then he would have a much more romantic and even melodramatic change if he jumped over the wall into his neighbours garden. The consequences would be bracing in a sense far beyond the possibilities of Ramsgate hygiene.
Now, exactly as this principle applies to the empire, to the nation within the empire, to the city within the nation, to the street within the city, so it applies to the home within the street. The institution of the family is to be commended for precisely the same reasons that the institution of the nation, or the institution of the city, are in this matter to be commended. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man to be besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to be snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is not a thing from outside, but a thing from inside. Above all, they all insist upon the fact that life, if it be a truly stimulating and fascinating life, is a thing which, of its nature, exists in spite of ourselves. The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.
Those who wish, rightly or wrongly, to step out of all this, do definitely wish to step into a narrower world. They are dismayed and terrified by the largeness and variety of the family. Sarah wishes to find a world wholly consisting of private theatricals; George wishes to think the Trocadero a cosmos. I do not say, for a moment, that the flight to this narrower life may not be the right thing for the individual, any more than I say the same thing about flight into a monastery. But I do say that anything is bad and artificial which tends to make these people succumb to the strange delusion that they are stepping into a world which is actually larger and more varied than their own. The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.
This is, indeed, the sublime and special romance of the family. It is romantic because it is a toss-up. It is romantic because it is everything that its enemies call it. It is romantic because it is arbitrary. It is romantic because it is there. So long as you have groups of men chosen rationally, you have some special or sectarian atmosphere. It is when you have groups of men chosen irrationally that you have men. The element of adventure begins to exist; for an adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge--in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.
This colour as of a fantastic narrative ought to cling to the family and to our relations with it throughout life. Romance is the deepest thing in life; romance is deeper even than reality. For even if reality could be proved to be misleading, it still could not be proved to be unimportant or unimpressive. Even if the facts are false, they are still very strange. And this strangeness of life, this unexpected and even perverse element of things as they fall out, remains incurably interesting. The circumstances we can regulate may become tame or pessimistic; but the "circumstances over which we have no control" remain god-like to those who, like Mr. Micawber, can call on them and renew their strength. People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, "to be continued in our next." If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right. But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. He can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards if he chooses. And the same civilization, the chivalric European civilization which asserted freewill in the thirteenth century, produced the thing called "fiction" in the eighteenth. When Thomas Aquinas asserted the spiritual liberty of man, he created all the bad novels in the circulating libraries.
But in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events. They are dull because they are omnipotent. They fail to feel adventures because they can make the adventures. The thing which keeps life romantic and full of fiery possibilities is the existence of these great plain limitations which force all of us to meet the things we do not like or do not expect. It is vain for the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings. To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance. Of all these great limitations and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important. Hence it is misunderstood by the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty. They think that if a man makes a gesture it would be a startling and romantic matter that the sun should fall from the sky. But the startling and romantic thing about the sun is that it does not fall from the sky. They are seeking under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations--that is, a world where there are no outlines; that is, a world where there are no shapes. There is nothing baser than that infinity. They say they wish to be, as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves.
G.K. Chesterton, 'On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family', Heretics, 178-95.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
On Lying In Bed
Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the premises. I think myself that the thing might be managed with several pails of Aspinall and a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way, and laid on the color in great washes, it might drip down again on one's face in floods of rich and mingled color like some strange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages. I am afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form of artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use; in fact, it is the only use I think of a white ceiling being put to.
But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have discovered it. For years I have been looking for some blank spaces in a modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any really allegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says, "Il me faut des geants." But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms such as we all live in I was continually disappointed. I found an endless pattern and complication of small objects hung like a curtain of fine links between me and my desire. I examined the walls; I found them to my surprise to be already covered with wallpaper, and I found the wallpaper to be already covered with uninteresting images, all bearing a ridiculous resemblance to each other. I could not understand why one arbitrary symbol (a symbol apparently entirely devoid of any religious or philosophical significance) should thus be sprinkled all over my nice walls like a sort of smallpox. The Bible must be referring to wallpapers, I think, when it says, "Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do." I found the Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colors, rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the sweetmeat called Turkish Delight. I do not exactly know what Turkish Delight really is; but I suppose it is Macedonian Massacres. Everywhere that I went forlornly, with my pencil or my paint brush, I found that others had unaccountably been before me, spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the furniture with their childish and barbaric designs.
Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision, that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom. But alas! Like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found to be unattainable; it looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the window. For my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged - never mind by whom; by a person debarred from all political rights - and even my minor proposal to put the other end of the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been conceded. Yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that all the original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces and cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods. I am sure that it was only because Michelangelo was engaged in the ancient and honorable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realized how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens.
The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous that the exaltation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse that the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made essential and godliness is regarded as an offence. A playwright can attack the institution of marriage so long as he does not misrepresent the manners of society, and I have met Ibsenite pessimist who thought it wrong to take beer but right to take prussic acid. Especially this is so in matters of hygiene; notably such matters as lying in bed. Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.
Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candor. If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail. A man can get use to getting up at five o'clock in the morning. A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions; the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected. I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue.
For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed (like journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.
G.K. Chesterton, 'On Lying in Bed', from Tremendous Trifles,
But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have discovered it. For years I have been looking for some blank spaces in a modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any really allegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says, "Il me faut des geants." But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms such as we all live in I was continually disappointed. I found an endless pattern and complication of small objects hung like a curtain of fine links between me and my desire. I examined the walls; I found them to my surprise to be already covered with wallpaper, and I found the wallpaper to be already covered with uninteresting images, all bearing a ridiculous resemblance to each other. I could not understand why one arbitrary symbol (a symbol apparently entirely devoid of any religious or philosophical significance) should thus be sprinkled all over my nice walls like a sort of smallpox. The Bible must be referring to wallpapers, I think, when it says, "Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do." I found the Turkey carpet a mass of unmeaning colors, rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the sweetmeat called Turkish Delight. I do not exactly know what Turkish Delight really is; but I suppose it is Macedonian Massacres. Everywhere that I went forlornly, with my pencil or my paint brush, I found that others had unaccountably been before me, spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the furniture with their childish and barbaric designs.
Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching until this occasion when I prolonged beyond the proper limit the process of lying on my back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision, that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom. But alas! Like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found to be unattainable; it looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the window. For my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged - never mind by whom; by a person debarred from all political rights - and even my minor proposal to put the other end of the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been conceded. Yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that all the original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces and cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods. I am sure that it was only because Michelangelo was engaged in the ancient and honorable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realized how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens.
The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous that the exaltation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse that the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made essential and godliness is regarded as an offence. A playwright can attack the institution of marriage so long as he does not misrepresent the manners of society, and I have met Ibsenite pessimist who thought it wrong to take beer but right to take prussic acid. Especially this is so in matters of hygiene; notably such matters as lying in bed. Instead of being regarded, as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom; but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite.
Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon. This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candor. If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us we may fail. A man can get use to getting up at five o'clock in the morning. A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions; the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected. I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue.
For those who study the great art of lying in bed there is one emphatic caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed (like journalists), still more for those whose work cannot be done in bed (as, for example, the professional harpooners of whales), it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this: if you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse; then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac.
G.K. Chesterton, 'On Lying in Bed', from Tremendous Trifles,
Monday, December 18, 2006
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT
It was said to the men of old, "You shall not swear falsely, but shall perform to the Lord what you have sworn." - Matt. 5.33
2464 The eighth commandment forbids misrepresenting the truth in our relations with others. This moral prescription flows from the vocation of the holy people to bear witness to their God who is the truth and wills the truth. Offenses against the truth express by word or deed a refusal to commit oneself to moral uprightness: they are fundamental infidelities to God and, in this sense, they undermine the foundations of the covenant.
2466 In Jesus Christ, the whole of God's truth has been made manifest. "Full of grace and truth," he came as the "light of the world," he is the Truth. "Whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness." The disciple of Jesus continues in his word so as to know "the truth [that] will make you free" and that sanctifies. To follow Jesus is to live in "the Spirit of truth," whom the Father sends in his name and who leads "into all the truth."260 To his disciples Jesus teaches the unconditional love of truth: "Let what you say be simply 'Yes or No.'"
2467 Man tends by nature toward the truth. He is obliged to honor and bear witness to it: "It is in accordance with their dignity that all men, because they are persons . . . are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth."
2468 Truth as uprightness in human action and speech is called truthfulness, sincerity, or candor. Truth or truthfulness is the virtue which consists in showing oneself true in deeds and truthful in words, and in guarding against duplicity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy.
2469 "Men could not live with one another if there were not mutual confidence that they were being truthful to one another." The virtue of truth gives another his just due. Truthfulness keeps to the just mean between what ought to be expressed and what ought to be kept secret: it entails honesty and discretion. In justice, "as a matter of honor, one man owes it to another to manifest the truth."
2470 The disciple of Christ consents to "live in the truth," that is, in the simplicity of a life in conformity with the Lord's example, abiding in his truth. "If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth."
2471 Before Pilate, Christ proclaims that he "has come into the world, to bear witness to the truth." The Christian is not to "be ashamed then of testifying to our Lord." In situations that require witness to the faith, the Christian must profess it without equivocation, after the example of St. Paul before his judges. We must keep "a clear conscience toward God and toward men."
2472 The duty of Christians to take part in the life of the Church impels them to act as witnesses of the Gospel and of the obligations that flow from it. This witness is a transmission of the faith in words and deeds. Witness is an act of justice that establishes the truth or makes it known.
All Christians by the example of their lives and the witness of their word, wherever they live, have an obligation to manifest the new man which they have put on in Baptism and to reveal the power of the Holy Spirit by whom they were strengthened at Confirmation.
2473 Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith: it means bearing witness even unto death. The martyr bears witness to Christ who died and rose, to whom he is united by charity. He bears witness to the truth of the faith and of Christian doctrine. He endures death through an act of fortitude. "Let me become the food of the beasts, through whom it will be given me to reach God."
2474 The Church has painstakingly collected the records of those who persevered to the end in witnessing to their faith. These are the acts of the Martyrs. They form the archives of truth written in letters of blood:
Neither the pleasures of the world nor the kingdoms of this age will be of any use to me. It is better for me to die [in order to unite myself] to Christ Jesus than to reign over the ends of the earth. I seek him who died for us; I desire him who rose for us. My birth is approaching. . .
I bless you for having judged me worthy from this day and this hour to be counted among your martyrs. . . . You have kept your promise, God of faithfulness and truth. For this reason and for everything, I praise you, I bless you, I glorify you through the eternal and heavenly High Priest, Jesus Christ, your beloved Son. Through him, who is with you and the Holy Spirit, may glory be given to you, now and in the ages to come. Amen.
2475 Christ's disciples have "put on the new man, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness."By "putting away falsehood," they are to "put away all malice and all guile and insincerity and envy and all slander."
2476 False witness and perjury. When it is made publicly, a statement contrary to the truth takes on a particular gravity. In court it becomes false witness. When it is under oath, it is perjury. Acts such as these contribute to condemnation of the innocent, exoneration of the guilty, or the increased punishment of the accused. They gravely compromise the exercise of justice and the fairness of judicial decisions.
2477 Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury. He becomes guilty:
- of rash judgment who, even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor;
- of detraction who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another's faults and failings to persons who did not know them;
- of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them.
2478 To avoid rash judgment, everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbor's thoughts, words, and deeds in a favorable way:
Every good Christian ought to be more ready to give a favorable interpretation to another's statement than to condemn it. But if he cannot do so, let him ask how the other understands it. And if the latter understands it badly, let the former correct him with love. If that does not suffice, let the Christian try all suitable ways to bring the other to a correct interpretation so that he may be saved.
2479 Detraction and calumny destroy the reputation and honor of one's neighbor. Honor is the social witness given to human dignity, and everyone enjoys a natural right to the honor of his name and reputation and to respect. Thus, detraction and calumny offend against the virtues of justice and charity.
2480 Every word or attitude is forbidden which by flattery, adulation, or complaisance encourages and confirms another in malicious acts and perverse conduct. Adulation is a grave fault if it makes one an accomplice in another's vices or grave sins. Neither the desire to be of service nor friendship justifies duplicitous speech. Adulation is a venial sin when it only seeks to be agreeable, to avoid evil, to meet a need, or to obtain legitimate advantages.
2481 Boasting or bragging is an offense against truth. So is irony aimed at disparaging someone by maliciously caricaturing some aspect of his behavior.
2482 "A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with the intention of deceiving." The Lord denounces lying as the work of the devil: "You are of your father the devil, . . . there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies."
2483 Lying is the most direct offense against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error. By injuring man's relation to truth and to his neighbor, a lie offends against the fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord.
2484 The gravity of a lie is measured against the nature of the truth it deforms, the circumstances, the intentions of the one who lies, and the harm suffered by its victims. If a lie in itself only constitutes a venial sin, it becomes mortal when it does grave injury to the virtues of justice and charity.
2485 By its very nature, lying is to be condemned. It is a profanation of speech, whereas the purpose of speech is to communicate known truth to others. The deliberate intention of leading a neighbor into error by saying things contrary to the truth constitutes a failure in justice and charity. The culpability is greater when the intention of deceiving entails the risk of deadly consequences for those who are led astray.
2486 Since it violates the virtue of truthfulness, a lie does real violence to another. It affects his ability to know, which is a condition of every judgment and decision. It contains the seed of discord and all consequent evils. Lying is destructive of society; it undermines trust among men and tears apart the fabric of social relationships.
2487 Every offense committed against justice and truth entails the duty of reparation, even if its author has been forgiven. When it is impossible publicly to make reparation for a wrong, it must be made secretly. If someone who has suffered harm cannot be directly compensated, he must be given moral satisfaction in the name of charity. This duty of reparation also concerns offenses against another's reputation. This reparation, moral and sometimes material, must be evaluated in terms of the extent of the damage inflicted. It obliges in conscience.
2488 The right to the communication of the truth is not unconditional. Everyone must conform his life to the Gospel precept of fraternal love. This requires us in concrete situations to judge whether or not it is appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it.
2489 Charity and respect for the truth should dictate the response to every request for information or communication. The good and safety of others, respect for privacy, and the common good are sufficient reasons for being silent about what ought not be known or for making use of a discreet language. The duty to avoid scandal often commands strict discretion. No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it.
2490 The secret of the sacrament of reconciliation is sacred, and cannot be violated under any pretext. "The sacramental seal is inviolable; therefore, it is a crime for a confessor in any way to betray a penitent by word or in any other manner or for any reason."
2491 Professional secrets - for example, those of political office holders, soldiers, physicians, and lawyers - or confidential information given under the seal of secrecy must be kept, save in exceptional cases where keeping the secret is bound to cause very grave harm to the one who confided it, to the one who received it or to a third party, and where the very grave harm can be avoided only by divulging the truth. Even if not confided under the seal of secrecy, private information prejudicial to another is not to be divulged without a grave and proportionate reason.
2492 Everyone should observe an appropriate reserve concerning persons' private lives. Those in charge of communications should maintain a fair balance between the requirements of the common good and respect for individual rights. Interference by the media in the private lives of persons engaged in political or public activity is to be condemned to the extent that it infringes upon their privacy and freedom.
2493 Within modern society the communications media play a major role in information, cultural promotion, and formation. This role is increasing, as a result of technological progress, the extent and diversity of the news transmitted, and the influence exercised on public opinion.
2494 The information provided by the media is at the service of the common good. Society has a right to information based on truth, freedom, justice, and solidarity:
The proper exercise of this right demands that the content of the communication be true and - within the limits set by justice and charity - complete. Further, it should be communicated honestly and properly. This means that in the gathering and in the publication of news, the moral law and the legitimate rights and dignity of man should be upheld.
2495 "It is necessary that all members of society meet the demands of justice and charity in this domain. They should help, through the means of social communication, in the formation and diffusion of sound public opinion." Solidarity is a consequence of genuine and right communication and the free circulation of ideas that further knowledge and respect for others.
2496 The means of social communication (especially the mass media) can give rise to a certain passivity among users, making them less than vigilant consumers of what is said or shown. Users should practice moderation and discipline in their approach to the mass media. They will want to form enlightened and correct consciences the more easily to resist unwholesome influences.
2497 By the very nature of their profession, journalists have an obligation to serve the truth and not offend against charity in disseminating information. They should strive to respect, with equal care, the nature of the facts and the limits of critical judgment concerning individuals. They should not stoop to defamation.
2498 "Civil authorities have particular responsibilities in this field because of the common good. . . . It is for the civil authority . . . to defend and safeguard a true and just freedom of information." By promulgating laws and overseeing their application, public authorities should ensure that "public morality and social progress are not gravely endangered" through misuse of the media. Civil authorities should punish any violation of the rights of individuals to their reputation and privacy. They should give timely and reliable reports concerning the general good or respond to the well-founded concerns of the people. Nothing can justify recourse to disinformation for manipulating public opinion through the media. Interventions by public authority should avoid injuring the freedom of individuals or groups.
2499 Moral judgment must condemn the plague of totalitarian states which systematically falsify the truth, exercise political control of opinion through the media, manipulate defendants and witnesses at public trials, and imagine that they secure their tyranny by strangling and repressing everything they consider "thought crimes."
2500 The practice of goodness is accompanied by spontaneous spiritual joy and moral beauty. Likewise, truth carries with it the joy and splendor of spiritual beauty. Truth is beautiful in itself. Truth in words, the rational expression of the knowledge of created and uncreated reality, is necessary to man, who is endowed with intellect. But truth can also find other complementary forms of human expression, above all when it is a matter of evoking what is beyond words: the depths of the human heart, the exaltations of the soul, the mystery of God. Even before revealing himself to man in words of truth, God reveals himself to him through the universal language of creation, the work of his Word, of his wisdom: the order and harmony of the cosmos-which both the child and the scientist discover-"from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator," "for the author of beauty created them."
[Wisdom] is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. For [wisdom] is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior, for it is succeeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does not prevail. I became enamored of her beauty.
2501 Created "in the image of God," man also expresses the truth of his relationship with God the Creator by the beauty of his artistic works. Indeed, art is a distinctively human form of expression; beyond the search for the necessities of life which is common to all living creatures, art is a freely given superabundance of the human being's inner riches. Arising from talent given by the Creator and from man's own effort, art is a form of practical wisdom, uniting knowledge and skill,295 to give form to the truth of reality in a language accessible to sight or hearing. To the extent that it is inspired by truth and love of beings, art bears a certain likeness to God's activity in what he has created. Like any other human activity, art is not an absolute end in itself, but is ordered to and ennobled by the ultimate end of man.
2502 Sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corresponds to its particular vocation: evoking and glorifying, in faith and adoration, the transcendent mystery of God - the surpassing invisible beauty of truth and love visible in Christ, who "reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature," in whom "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily." This spiritual beauty of God is reflected in the most holy Virgin Mother of God, the angels, and saints. Genuine sacred art draws man to adoration, to prayer, and to the love of God, Creator and Savior, the Holy One and Sanctifier.
2503 For this reason bishops, personally or through delegates, should see to the promotion of sacred art, old and new, in all its forms and, with the same religious care, remove from the liturgy and from places of worship everything which is not in conformity with the truth of faith and the authentic beauty of sacred art.
2504 "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor" (Ex 20:16). Christ's disciples have "put on the new man, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness" (Eph 4:24).
2505 Truth or truthfulness is the virtue which consists in showing oneself true in deeds and truthful in words, and guarding against duplicity, dissimulation, and hypocrisy.
2506 The Christian is not to "be ashamed of testifying to our Lord" (2 Tim 1:8) in deed and word. Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith.
2507 Respect for the reputation and honor of persons forbids all detraction and calumny in word or attitude.
2508 Lying consists in saying what is false with the intention of deceiving one's neighbor.
2509 An offense committed against the truth requires reparation.
2510 The golden rule helps one discern, in concrete situations, whether or not it would be appropriate to reveal the truth to someone who asks for it.
2511 "The sacramental seal is inviolable" (CIC, can. 983 § 1). Professional secrets must be kept. Confidences prejudicial to another are not to be divulged.
2512 Society has a right to information based on truth, freedom, and justice. One should practice moderation and discipline in the use of the social communications media.
2513 The fine arts, but above all sacred art, "of their nature are directed toward expressing in some way the infinite beauty of God in works made by human hands. Their dedication to the increase of God's praise and of his glory is more complete, the more exclusively they are devoted to turning men's minds devoutly toward God" (SC 122).
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part Three, Section Two, Chapter Two, Article Eight.
Sunday, December 17, 2006
The Christian Evidences
In the last chapter, I invited my reader to put his hand across the page (so to speak) and leave out of sight all that has happened since the beginning of the Christian era; to treat the year 1 B.C. as if it were the limit of his historical knowledge. I will now ask him, if I may pursue the same metaphor, to take his hand away, all except the top finger --to blot out from memory all that he knows of what happened between 1 B.C. and A.D. 100, and to look with fresh eyes at the literature of the period which immediately follows the Twelve Caesars; the literature, roughly speaking, that dates between A.D. 90 and 120.
You find the world still pagan; the same tradition of Greco-Roman culture persists, not menaced hitherto by grave corruption within, or formidable competition from without. Meanwhile, the Jewish race has disappeared from view, for the time being, as completely as it has ever disappeared in history.
Jerusalem has been sacked, not one stone left on another; and with the loss of its nerve-centre the active life of Judaism seems temporarily suspended; the Roman satirist only connects it with the soothsayers, who practised upon the fashionable superstitions of the day.
At the same time, in Bithynia, a province very far distant from Judea, a Roman governor with great conscientiousness and some mildness of disposition, the younger Pliny, is becoming exercised over a pressing imperial problem. He writes to the Emperor Trajan to know if he has been right in the policy which he has adopted towards the troublesome sect of the Christians.
There is no reason to think that the difficulty was merely local; that Bithynia was more infested with Christians than other provinces in the Hellenised portion of the Roman world. We have no statistics, but it is evident that the criminals in question were sufficiently numerous; both Pliny and Trajan are anxious to discourage the activities of the informer (a sure sign that you are afraid of learning the true strength of your adversaries); and not a few, it would appear, of the accused renounced their opinions under the threat of punishment--the movement, therefore, was already sufficiently fashionable to be attracting half-hearted supporters. Pliny has heard various tales to the discredit of these strange votaries, tales of incestuous marriages and of child-eating; but he confesses that in all his inquiries he has found no evidence to support such charges. On the contrary, it appears that the Christians are bound by an oath or sacrament to abstain from all crime against their neighbours, and their secret meetings involve nothing more serious than a religious service which includes a sacramental meal, and the singing of a hymn "to Christ as God." Those who consent to offer sacrifice to the emblems of the heathen deities and of the Emperor himself are dismissed with a caution; those who remain obstinate are ordered, by a convenient euphemism, to be "led away."
This need for repressive action against the Christians-- breaking the butterfly sect upon the wheel of imperial efficiency--had been felt, though perhaps dimly felt, much earlier. A historian, Tacitus, Pliny's contemporary and friend, describes how Nero, fifty years before, had sent Roman Christians to the stake. Tacitus is an unfriendly witness, and describes the Christians as "hated on account of their crimes"; but then, so doubtless would Pliny until he acquired first-hand experience in Bithynia. In a great city like Rome one does not know one's neighbours; and the most fantastic reports gain easy credit when they are circulated against a religion which is practised in secret. No hint of revolutionary or unpatriotic action on the Christians' part is ever dropped, unless it be in the statement of Suetonius that the Jews were banished from Rome because they were "making continual disturbances under the instigation of Christus", which may conceivably have reference to differences between Christians and Jews.
That the founder of this sect suffered under Tiberius, we have Tacitus' evidence; for a fuller account of his character we might go to the Jewish historian Josephus, who, writing a little earlier, gives a thumb-nail sketch of the career of one Jesus of Nazareth, whom he identifies with Christus in a footnote. But the suspicion of Christian additions to the text forbids us to accept without hesitation the further details of this remarkable passage. There is no reason whatever to suspect the allusions in Tacitus of being later, Christian interpolations; there is a complete absence of external proof, and the references themselves proclaim their genuineness by their moderation; a Christian interpolator would assuredly have made a better job of it.
So much we should know (I am giving only the more salient instances, and the outlines of them, not the details) even if Christian literature had wholly disappeared from the face of the planet. We should know that between the years 60 and 120 the Jewish people had lost the limited political importance which it had hitherto enjoyed, and that, during the same years, a sect which originated on Jewish soil (but was certainly quite unconnected with official Judaism) had spread across Asia Minor to the coasts of the Black Sea, and across Greece to the imperial capital itself; that in spite of rigid persecution its determined opposition to idolatry, and therefore to Caesar-worship, had become an imperial problem which needed constant reference to headquarters; and that a central part of its creed was the Divinity of Christus, a Man who suffered under Tiberius somewhere about A.D. 30. The record would surely strike us as a curious one. No public action had had to be taken, as far as we know, against any religion as such, since the (purely local) suppression of the Bacchanals at Rome early in the second century B.C. That there were other secret religions which enjoyed some popularity during the first century we are well aware. Orphic mysteries and Isis-worship and so on. No doubt Christianity resembled them as it resembles many other religions, in having its secret pass-words, its ceremony of initiation, its sacramental meal; it may even have adopted into its language some of their jargon about initiation, illumination, and the rest. But the most fantastic speculations have failed to prove any trace of interconnection; and meanwhile it is obviously unscientific to classify Christianity among the mystery cults. For Christianity has salient qualities which utterly distinguish it from them. The mystery religions not only contrived to live on terms with the old heathen worship, but actually busied themselves in tracing their origin to one or other of the well-known figures in classical mythology. Christianity, from the first moment of its appearance, dates its origin quite frankly from the year A.D. 30, and regards all the figures of heathen mythology as abominations. Consequently Christianity, unlike the mystery religions, was persecuted in the name of pagan theology, and its tenets were supposed to be incompatible with the duties of a good citizen. As a mere matter of observation, Christianity is from the first "sui generis," and Judaism is the only system which approaches in any way to its strangely exclusive and intolerant attitude.
Let us now turn our attention to the documents of the same period (A.D. 90- 120) which come to us from Christian sources--the Epistles, let us say, of Ignatius and Clement. Here you find the record of an institutional religion already firmly established, with a definite creed and a definite system of Church government. You find abundant material to corroborate Pliny's statement that the Christians worshipped Christ as God; you find the explanation of this attitude in the conviction that Christ rose from the dead. You find a marked antagonism towards the whole genius of paganism, and a firm belief that death suffered in defiance of heathenism is the preface to a glorious immortality. You find a habit of epistolography--the individual addressing his message to an assembled "church"--which assumes the existence of an established model (a Pauline model, as we shall see later). You find the clear confidence that the whole of Judaism was only a preparation for Christianity. You find the assumption that Christianity is everywhere represented by a common type, with an overseer (or "bishop") in control. You find that the centre of all this system is already fixed at the metropolitan city of Rome; since Clement, in the name of the Church there, addresses his expostulations to fellow-Christians on the other side of the Adriatic who had revolted against their "priests," and Ignatius credits the same Church with an imperfectly defined title to presidency. So much for Christianity in the second generation, an impressive proof of its uncompromising attitude and its rapid development, even if no earlier documents were available. But, as we know, we have a set of documents in Our possession, most of which are certainly anterior in date to the period we have been considering--I mean the documents which go to form the New Testament scriptures. I need hardly remind the reader that in this and the next three chapters those documents will be treated, not as if they had any claim upon our faith as authoritative formulas of religion, but merely as historical documents whose value must be estimated according to historical principles.
We have a series of "epistles," some of them genuine letters, written to satisfy an immediate demand, some of them treatises in epistolary form. A round dozen of these come from the same hand; the incoherence of their style, the embarrassed egotism of the author's attitude, his insistent and sometimes irrelevant reiteration of a few favorite doctrinal principles, are the hall-mark of their unity. Nor is there any serious doubt, on internal or external grounds, that they are what they profess to be--the work of Paul, a propagandist of the new religion who had been particularly active in European Greece and on the sea-board of Asia Minor. His principal preoccupation's in writing seem to have been (i.) to define the exact relations, at that time sufficiently obscure, between Christianity and its foster-parent Judaism; (ii.) to collect money for the needs of the poor Christians at Jerusalem; (iii.) to assert his own accredited position as a Christian missionary, in answer to various critics who tried to represent him as a free-lance. But he also deals individually with local problems; as, the exaggerated enthusiasm of Corinth, the premature fears of a world- upheaval felt in Macedonian, and the danger of contamination from superstitious cults at Ephesus and Colossae.
These letters, from internal evidence or from comparison with another document to be mentioned presently, have to be dated earlier, for the most part, than A.D. 60. In reading them, the unbiased critic can hardly fail to be struck by the following points:--
(i.) That in spite of the confusion introduced by the competition of rival missionaries, it is constantly assumed that the Christians of the world form a single body. The local "church" is only the model of a potentially world-wide institution, the Church.
(ii.) That this Church consists of those who have made an act of faith in Christ, which is identified in significance with the outward ceremony of baptism.
(iii.) That the Christian Church, young as it is, has already traditions which are to be maintained, and a fixed deposit of belief.
(iv.) That faith in Christ implies assent to the doctrine that he rose from the dead, a fact attested by various witnesses, of whom, in virtue of a particular moment of mystical experience, Paul considers himself one.
(v.) That Christ is, in a few texts, explicitly identified as God; and that the general place assigned to him in the scheme of "Redemption" is inconsistent with the supposition that his dignity is other than Divine.
(vi.) That the covenant under which the Jewish Church claimed to be the chosen Assembly of God has now been superseded by a fresh covenant with an international Assembly, the Christian Church.
(vii.) That idolatry, or even co-operation in idolatry, is directly contrary to the Christian profession; Christians have a sacrificial meal or ceremony of their own, the supernatural character of which is elsewhere explicitly asserted.
Side by side with these epistles goes a book which even the more rigorous critics attribute to a companion of Paul, and date before A.D. 70 or very soon after it, the Acts of the Apostles. The first part of this book gives a historical sketch of this Christian Church in its earliest beginnings, of which the whole tone is obviously primitive; the second part contains an account of Paul's missionary activities, and shows for the most part the work of an eye-witness. This document entirely bears out the account of Christianity which we have already derived from Paul's epistles, and adds something to the definiteness of the picture; e.g., it describes assemblies of leading Christians which clearly regard themselves as empowered to legislate for the welfare of the Church, and it records the ceremonial imposition of hands, both upon the newly baptised and upon men singled out to take part in the work of evangelisation. We need not consider the other "epistles," of non-Pauline or doubtfully Pauline origin, since they do not add much to the picture for our present purposes.
Suppose that were all. Suppose, "par impossible," that we had no Gospels. What would be, and what ought to be our attitude towards the Catholic Church? We should at least have to admit that this extraordinary institution has persisted for nearly nineteen hundred years, accused, sometimes, of over-definition, but never of cancelling its beliefs, of development, but never of any break in its historic continuity. We should have to admit that its career is highly documented back to the very date of its Founder's death, or at worst to within twenty years of it; that its main structure, the more intimate of its doctrines and the more prominent of its ceremonies, had remained unaltered through the centuries. That its chief credential, from the first, had been this amazing story of a dead Man coming to life; and that it had imposed this belief, in the first instance, on people who were that Man's contemporaries, and had been living in the very country, in the very city, where his death took place. That it had absorbed into itself, before long, the energies of that religious movement which John the Baptist had initiated; that it had claimed to fulfil the age-long expectation of the Jewish people at the moment when its fulfilment was expected. We should have had to admit that it was worth while questioning an institution like this, and finding out what story it had to tell.
And it would have told us its story, handed down by word of mouth through the centuries, and verifiable only by stray allusions, here and there, in the literature of those centuries. How its own Founder was miraculously born, in fulfilment of Isaias' prophecy; how John bore witness to him; how he fasted and was tempted in the desert; how he went about doing good, and how he taught, and, how his teaching roused against him the envious spite of the Jewish leaders; how he performed miracles, fed five thousand men with five loaves, and walked on the sea, and raised the dead, even, to life; the circumstances of his betrayal, judgment, and death. All this would have been enshrined in the oral traditions of the Church, as it must have been in the days before the Gospels were written--those first converts, surely, asked questions? And the apostles who had lived with the Christ had some answers, surely, to satisfy their curiosity. We should have been in the same position; only that an occasional literary allusion could have been quoted, here and there, in support of the traditional statement.
We are not left to depend on an oral tradition. For the tradition itself was written down, before the scent (you may say) had had time to grow cold, by four separate chroniclers. The story they tell is a curiously incomplete one, if you judge it by the principles of modem biography. It is only a fragment, but it has left an ineffaceable picture upon the imagination of mankind. It takes back the oral tradition, not indeed to the very earliest times of Christianity, but to a period so little removed from them that there is little fear of its misrepresenting apostolic belief. Three of these chronicles, at least, must have been written when men still lived who had had speech with the Christ, and could check the facts recorded. It is to this documentary tradition, then, that we go for our picture of Christ's Life. Indeed, for practical purposes it is all we have left to us. For the documentary tradition replaces, and so kills, the oral tradition. It is extraordinary how few legends there are, with any respectable claim to authenticity, to supplement the Gospel story. It is extraordinary how few sayings of our Lord have been preserved (there is one in Acts xx. 351) which are not recorded in the Gospels themselves. Men will not trust their memory when they have written sources to refer to.
The text of these four documents is as well established as any text could be. Owing to their frequent transcription, the manuscripts must have divided very early into different "families," and it is unlikely that the text of any one "family" should have become extinct. This division into families has left its traces, naturally, on the manuscripts we still possess, but none of the differences is sufficiently serious to concern our present purpose. The text of the Gospel record can be taken as a fixed quantity; and it is only by risking all their reputation as textual critics that scholars can have the hardihood to question the genuineness of a single verse (as some have questioned Matthew xxviii. 19), so strong is the consensus of manuscript evidence.
There is far less general agreement as to the authorship of the Gospels and the written sources, if any, which lie behind them. A mass of ponderous learning has been accumulating, these hundred years past, over the "Synoptic problem," and we are no nearer the solution of it. The fact is that in our day we have no real qualifications for pronouncing on "documentary hypotheses"; for deciding whether document A was copied from document B, or vice versa, or whether both were copied from a lost source C; whether, in that case, C was another document or an oral tradition; how much revision and "editing" is to be expected from the men who finally put the documents into shape. Infinite ingenuity has been bestowed upon the task, but we lack experience. Printing has made everything so easy for us that we have no longer any means of judging what was probable or improbable in the first century, what were the chances of a document getting lost, getting mutilated, getting surreptitiously altered; how much authors worked by memory, how much by consulting their authorities- how much they allowed their order of arrangement to be interfered with by considerations of practical convenience. I propose, then, in the following chapter to treat the Synoptic record as a promiscuous whole. It is enough for us to notice that the wilder extravagances of criticism are now obsolescent, and that we can, without attracting the derision of scholars, treat the first three Gospels as documents dating back behind A.D. 70--that is, documents written within the lifetime of people who were grown up when the events in question took place.
The Fourth Gospel--I must repeat, we are not here treating the Bible as an inspired record--we must use more charity. If we accept the tradition of its authorship, it seems probable that it was the work of a man in extreme old age, and the objector might legitimately question whether his memory was still accurate. Many modern scholars refuse to accept the tradition, and would put the record outside the first century altogether. From its very nature it is a baffling subject of study. People will tell you that it is, for the most part, a work of philosophic reflection, casting Christian doctrine, by a dramatic device, into monologue or dialogue form. For myself, I confess that it reads to me much more like the laborious recollections of a very old man, meticulously accurate about unimportant details, merely in order to show that he does remember them, and constantly forgetting what stage he has reached (as old men will) in the story or in the argument. But, whatever be said of it, it seems clear at least that in some of its main outlines it preserves an independent tradition. The very fact that it corrects the ideas we might otherwise have formed about the length of our Lord's ministry, the day of his Passion, etc., is good proof that it does not depend entirely on the other Gospels for its representation of the incidents. This fourth record, then, must also be taken into account if we are to form a complete view of the evidence at our disposal.
In order to confine our considerations as far as possible to matters of practical importance, I shall make no attempt to recall to the reader the details of a Life so familiar as that of our Lord. I shall pursue, in the two following chapters, two isolated lines of argument; asking first whether the Founder of Christianity did himself claim to be God, and then, granting that he did, how far his claim can be justified by a study of his Personality and of his career.
ENDNOTES
1. ". . . remember the word of the Lord Jesus, how he said: It is a more blessed thing to give than to receive."
Ronald Knox, 'The Christian Evidences,' The Belief of Catholics
You find the world still pagan; the same tradition of Greco-Roman culture persists, not menaced hitherto by grave corruption within, or formidable competition from without. Meanwhile, the Jewish race has disappeared from view, for the time being, as completely as it has ever disappeared in history.
Jerusalem has been sacked, not one stone left on another; and with the loss of its nerve-centre the active life of Judaism seems temporarily suspended; the Roman satirist only connects it with the soothsayers, who practised upon the fashionable superstitions of the day.
At the same time, in Bithynia, a province very far distant from Judea, a Roman governor with great conscientiousness and some mildness of disposition, the younger Pliny, is becoming exercised over a pressing imperial problem. He writes to the Emperor Trajan to know if he has been right in the policy which he has adopted towards the troublesome sect of the Christians.
There is no reason to think that the difficulty was merely local; that Bithynia was more infested with Christians than other provinces in the Hellenised portion of the Roman world. We have no statistics, but it is evident that the criminals in question were sufficiently numerous; both Pliny and Trajan are anxious to discourage the activities of the informer (a sure sign that you are afraid of learning the true strength of your adversaries); and not a few, it would appear, of the accused renounced their opinions under the threat of punishment--the movement, therefore, was already sufficiently fashionable to be attracting half-hearted supporters. Pliny has heard various tales to the discredit of these strange votaries, tales of incestuous marriages and of child-eating; but he confesses that in all his inquiries he has found no evidence to support such charges. On the contrary, it appears that the Christians are bound by an oath or sacrament to abstain from all crime against their neighbours, and their secret meetings involve nothing more serious than a religious service which includes a sacramental meal, and the singing of a hymn "to Christ as God." Those who consent to offer sacrifice to the emblems of the heathen deities and of the Emperor himself are dismissed with a caution; those who remain obstinate are ordered, by a convenient euphemism, to be "led away."
This need for repressive action against the Christians-- breaking the butterfly sect upon the wheel of imperial efficiency--had been felt, though perhaps dimly felt, much earlier. A historian, Tacitus, Pliny's contemporary and friend, describes how Nero, fifty years before, had sent Roman Christians to the stake. Tacitus is an unfriendly witness, and describes the Christians as "hated on account of their crimes"; but then, so doubtless would Pliny until he acquired first-hand experience in Bithynia. In a great city like Rome one does not know one's neighbours; and the most fantastic reports gain easy credit when they are circulated against a religion which is practised in secret. No hint of revolutionary or unpatriotic action on the Christians' part is ever dropped, unless it be in the statement of Suetonius that the Jews were banished from Rome because they were "making continual disturbances under the instigation of Christus", which may conceivably have reference to differences between Christians and Jews.
That the founder of this sect suffered under Tiberius, we have Tacitus' evidence; for a fuller account of his character we might go to the Jewish historian Josephus, who, writing a little earlier, gives a thumb-nail sketch of the career of one Jesus of Nazareth, whom he identifies with Christus in a footnote. But the suspicion of Christian additions to the text forbids us to accept without hesitation the further details of this remarkable passage. There is no reason whatever to suspect the allusions in Tacitus of being later, Christian interpolations; there is a complete absence of external proof, and the references themselves proclaim their genuineness by their moderation; a Christian interpolator would assuredly have made a better job of it.
So much we should know (I am giving only the more salient instances, and the outlines of them, not the details) even if Christian literature had wholly disappeared from the face of the planet. We should know that between the years 60 and 120 the Jewish people had lost the limited political importance which it had hitherto enjoyed, and that, during the same years, a sect which originated on Jewish soil (but was certainly quite unconnected with official Judaism) had spread across Asia Minor to the coasts of the Black Sea, and across Greece to the imperial capital itself; that in spite of rigid persecution its determined opposition to idolatry, and therefore to Caesar-worship, had become an imperial problem which needed constant reference to headquarters; and that a central part of its creed was the Divinity of Christus, a Man who suffered under Tiberius somewhere about A.D. 30. The record would surely strike us as a curious one. No public action had had to be taken, as far as we know, against any religion as such, since the (purely local) suppression of the Bacchanals at Rome early in the second century B.C. That there were other secret religions which enjoyed some popularity during the first century we are well aware. Orphic mysteries and Isis-worship and so on. No doubt Christianity resembled them as it resembles many other religions, in having its secret pass-words, its ceremony of initiation, its sacramental meal; it may even have adopted into its language some of their jargon about initiation, illumination, and the rest. But the most fantastic speculations have failed to prove any trace of interconnection; and meanwhile it is obviously unscientific to classify Christianity among the mystery cults. For Christianity has salient qualities which utterly distinguish it from them. The mystery religions not only contrived to live on terms with the old heathen worship, but actually busied themselves in tracing their origin to one or other of the well-known figures in classical mythology. Christianity, from the first moment of its appearance, dates its origin quite frankly from the year A.D. 30, and regards all the figures of heathen mythology as abominations. Consequently Christianity, unlike the mystery religions, was persecuted in the name of pagan theology, and its tenets were supposed to be incompatible with the duties of a good citizen. As a mere matter of observation, Christianity is from the first "sui generis," and Judaism is the only system which approaches in any way to its strangely exclusive and intolerant attitude.
Let us now turn our attention to the documents of the same period (A.D. 90- 120) which come to us from Christian sources--the Epistles, let us say, of Ignatius and Clement. Here you find the record of an institutional religion already firmly established, with a definite creed and a definite system of Church government. You find abundant material to corroborate Pliny's statement that the Christians worshipped Christ as God; you find the explanation of this attitude in the conviction that Christ rose from the dead. You find a marked antagonism towards the whole genius of paganism, and a firm belief that death suffered in defiance of heathenism is the preface to a glorious immortality. You find a habit of epistolography--the individual addressing his message to an assembled "church"--which assumes the existence of an established model (a Pauline model, as we shall see later). You find the clear confidence that the whole of Judaism was only a preparation for Christianity. You find the assumption that Christianity is everywhere represented by a common type, with an overseer (or "bishop") in control. You find that the centre of all this system is already fixed at the metropolitan city of Rome; since Clement, in the name of the Church there, addresses his expostulations to fellow-Christians on the other side of the Adriatic who had revolted against their "priests," and Ignatius credits the same Church with an imperfectly defined title to presidency. So much for Christianity in the second generation, an impressive proof of its uncompromising attitude and its rapid development, even if no earlier documents were available. But, as we know, we have a set of documents in Our possession, most of which are certainly anterior in date to the period we have been considering--I mean the documents which go to form the New Testament scriptures. I need hardly remind the reader that in this and the next three chapters those documents will be treated, not as if they had any claim upon our faith as authoritative formulas of religion, but merely as historical documents whose value must be estimated according to historical principles.
We have a series of "epistles," some of them genuine letters, written to satisfy an immediate demand, some of them treatises in epistolary form. A round dozen of these come from the same hand; the incoherence of their style, the embarrassed egotism of the author's attitude, his insistent and sometimes irrelevant reiteration of a few favorite doctrinal principles, are the hall-mark of their unity. Nor is there any serious doubt, on internal or external grounds, that they are what they profess to be--the work of Paul, a propagandist of the new religion who had been particularly active in European Greece and on the sea-board of Asia Minor. His principal preoccupation's in writing seem to have been (i.) to define the exact relations, at that time sufficiently obscure, between Christianity and its foster-parent Judaism; (ii.) to collect money for the needs of the poor Christians at Jerusalem; (iii.) to assert his own accredited position as a Christian missionary, in answer to various critics who tried to represent him as a free-lance. But he also deals individually with local problems; as, the exaggerated enthusiasm of Corinth, the premature fears of a world- upheaval felt in Macedonian, and the danger of contamination from superstitious cults at Ephesus and Colossae.
These letters, from internal evidence or from comparison with another document to be mentioned presently, have to be dated earlier, for the most part, than A.D. 60. In reading them, the unbiased critic can hardly fail to be struck by the following points:--
(i.) That in spite of the confusion introduced by the competition of rival missionaries, it is constantly assumed that the Christians of the world form a single body. The local "church" is only the model of a potentially world-wide institution, the Church.
(ii.) That this Church consists of those who have made an act of faith in Christ, which is identified in significance with the outward ceremony of baptism.
(iii.) That the Christian Church, young as it is, has already traditions which are to be maintained, and a fixed deposit of belief.
(iv.) That faith in Christ implies assent to the doctrine that he rose from the dead, a fact attested by various witnesses, of whom, in virtue of a particular moment of mystical experience, Paul considers himself one.
(v.) That Christ is, in a few texts, explicitly identified as God; and that the general place assigned to him in the scheme of "Redemption" is inconsistent with the supposition that his dignity is other than Divine.
(vi.) That the covenant under which the Jewish Church claimed to be the chosen Assembly of God has now been superseded by a fresh covenant with an international Assembly, the Christian Church.
(vii.) That idolatry, or even co-operation in idolatry, is directly contrary to the Christian profession; Christians have a sacrificial meal or ceremony of their own, the supernatural character of which is elsewhere explicitly asserted.
Side by side with these epistles goes a book which even the more rigorous critics attribute to a companion of Paul, and date before A.D. 70 or very soon after it, the Acts of the Apostles. The first part of this book gives a historical sketch of this Christian Church in its earliest beginnings, of which the whole tone is obviously primitive; the second part contains an account of Paul's missionary activities, and shows for the most part the work of an eye-witness. This document entirely bears out the account of Christianity which we have already derived from Paul's epistles, and adds something to the definiteness of the picture; e.g., it describes assemblies of leading Christians which clearly regard themselves as empowered to legislate for the welfare of the Church, and it records the ceremonial imposition of hands, both upon the newly baptised and upon men singled out to take part in the work of evangelisation. We need not consider the other "epistles," of non-Pauline or doubtfully Pauline origin, since they do not add much to the picture for our present purposes.
Suppose that were all. Suppose, "par impossible," that we had no Gospels. What would be, and what ought to be our attitude towards the Catholic Church? We should at least have to admit that this extraordinary institution has persisted for nearly nineteen hundred years, accused, sometimes, of over-definition, but never of cancelling its beliefs, of development, but never of any break in its historic continuity. We should have to admit that its career is highly documented back to the very date of its Founder's death, or at worst to within twenty years of it; that its main structure, the more intimate of its doctrines and the more prominent of its ceremonies, had remained unaltered through the centuries. That its chief credential, from the first, had been this amazing story of a dead Man coming to life; and that it had imposed this belief, in the first instance, on people who were that Man's contemporaries, and had been living in the very country, in the very city, where his death took place. That it had absorbed into itself, before long, the energies of that religious movement which John the Baptist had initiated; that it had claimed to fulfil the age-long expectation of the Jewish people at the moment when its fulfilment was expected. We should have had to admit that it was worth while questioning an institution like this, and finding out what story it had to tell.
And it would have told us its story, handed down by word of mouth through the centuries, and verifiable only by stray allusions, here and there, in the literature of those centuries. How its own Founder was miraculously born, in fulfilment of Isaias' prophecy; how John bore witness to him; how he fasted and was tempted in the desert; how he went about doing good, and how he taught, and, how his teaching roused against him the envious spite of the Jewish leaders; how he performed miracles, fed five thousand men with five loaves, and walked on the sea, and raised the dead, even, to life; the circumstances of his betrayal, judgment, and death. All this would have been enshrined in the oral traditions of the Church, as it must have been in the days before the Gospels were written--those first converts, surely, asked questions? And the apostles who had lived with the Christ had some answers, surely, to satisfy their curiosity. We should have been in the same position; only that an occasional literary allusion could have been quoted, here and there, in support of the traditional statement.
We are not left to depend on an oral tradition. For the tradition itself was written down, before the scent (you may say) had had time to grow cold, by four separate chroniclers. The story they tell is a curiously incomplete one, if you judge it by the principles of modem biography. It is only a fragment, but it has left an ineffaceable picture upon the imagination of mankind. It takes back the oral tradition, not indeed to the very earliest times of Christianity, but to a period so little removed from them that there is little fear of its misrepresenting apostolic belief. Three of these chronicles, at least, must have been written when men still lived who had had speech with the Christ, and could check the facts recorded. It is to this documentary tradition, then, that we go for our picture of Christ's Life. Indeed, for practical purposes it is all we have left to us. For the documentary tradition replaces, and so kills, the oral tradition. It is extraordinary how few legends there are, with any respectable claim to authenticity, to supplement the Gospel story. It is extraordinary how few sayings of our Lord have been preserved (there is one in Acts xx. 351) which are not recorded in the Gospels themselves. Men will not trust their memory when they have written sources to refer to.
The text of these four documents is as well established as any text could be. Owing to their frequent transcription, the manuscripts must have divided very early into different "families," and it is unlikely that the text of any one "family" should have become extinct. This division into families has left its traces, naturally, on the manuscripts we still possess, but none of the differences is sufficiently serious to concern our present purpose. The text of the Gospel record can be taken as a fixed quantity; and it is only by risking all their reputation as textual critics that scholars can have the hardihood to question the genuineness of a single verse (as some have questioned Matthew xxviii. 19), so strong is the consensus of manuscript evidence.
There is far less general agreement as to the authorship of the Gospels and the written sources, if any, which lie behind them. A mass of ponderous learning has been accumulating, these hundred years past, over the "Synoptic problem," and we are no nearer the solution of it. The fact is that in our day we have no real qualifications for pronouncing on "documentary hypotheses"; for deciding whether document A was copied from document B, or vice versa, or whether both were copied from a lost source C; whether, in that case, C was another document or an oral tradition; how much revision and "editing" is to be expected from the men who finally put the documents into shape. Infinite ingenuity has been bestowed upon the task, but we lack experience. Printing has made everything so easy for us that we have no longer any means of judging what was probable or improbable in the first century, what were the chances of a document getting lost, getting mutilated, getting surreptitiously altered; how much authors worked by memory, how much by consulting their authorities- how much they allowed their order of arrangement to be interfered with by considerations of practical convenience. I propose, then, in the following chapter to treat the Synoptic record as a promiscuous whole. It is enough for us to notice that the wilder extravagances of criticism are now obsolescent, and that we can, without attracting the derision of scholars, treat the first three Gospels as documents dating back behind A.D. 70--that is, documents written within the lifetime of people who were grown up when the events in question took place.
The Fourth Gospel--I must repeat, we are not here treating the Bible as an inspired record--we must use more charity. If we accept the tradition of its authorship, it seems probable that it was the work of a man in extreme old age, and the objector might legitimately question whether his memory was still accurate. Many modern scholars refuse to accept the tradition, and would put the record outside the first century altogether. From its very nature it is a baffling subject of study. People will tell you that it is, for the most part, a work of philosophic reflection, casting Christian doctrine, by a dramatic device, into monologue or dialogue form. For myself, I confess that it reads to me much more like the laborious recollections of a very old man, meticulously accurate about unimportant details, merely in order to show that he does remember them, and constantly forgetting what stage he has reached (as old men will) in the story or in the argument. But, whatever be said of it, it seems clear at least that in some of its main outlines it preserves an independent tradition. The very fact that it corrects the ideas we might otherwise have formed about the length of our Lord's ministry, the day of his Passion, etc., is good proof that it does not depend entirely on the other Gospels for its representation of the incidents. This fourth record, then, must also be taken into account if we are to form a complete view of the evidence at our disposal.
In order to confine our considerations as far as possible to matters of practical importance, I shall make no attempt to recall to the reader the details of a Life so familiar as that of our Lord. I shall pursue, in the two following chapters, two isolated lines of argument; asking first whether the Founder of Christianity did himself claim to be God, and then, granting that he did, how far his claim can be justified by a study of his Personality and of his career.
ENDNOTES
1. ". . . remember the word of the Lord Jesus, how he said: It is a more blessed thing to give than to receive."
Ronald Knox, 'The Christian Evidences,' The Belief of Catholics
Saturday, December 16, 2006
A New York Fairytale
Fairytale of New York is a complex emotional package, and arguably the best Christmas song ever written. It is best understood in relation to Irish emigration and the reality that, for many, lay behind the American Dream, writes Joe Cleary
Fairytale's success - artistic and commercial - owes much to its combining of several genres. It is at once a twisted love song, an emigrant ballad, and an anthem to the capital city of the 20th century. And it is perhaps for that reason that it is the only "Christmas classic" that one can hear without wincing in July.
Maybe Fairytale is also the best-known Pogues song because it sounds more like a mainstream pop song than most of their works do. Its lush melodies clearly make concessions to the schmaltziness of the Christmas-song genre, and the lyrics trade on the combined appeal of romantic love, New York and the American Dream to create a winning formula. It lacks the punk aggressiveness of some of their more rambunctious classics - The Sickbed of Cuchulainn, Sally MacLennane and If I Should Fall From Grace with God - and the republican politics and the macabre delirium tremens of many of their standards.
But even if sounds "soft", Fairytale is still a complex emotional package. The wonderfully slow, low-key piano lead-in is followed by the sudden surge of raw energy when the whole band comes in and the tempo speeds up and Kirsty MacColl's high-pitched voice edges aside Shane MacGowan's more wistful tones. Then the two leads spar magnificently, trading foul-mouthed insult ("You scumbag/ You maggot/ You cheap lousy faggot") for abusive put-down ("I could have been someone/ Well so could anyone"). The song manages a deft tightrope-walk between starry-eyed hope and world-weary disenchantment. The city evoked in Fairytale is neither a dazzling urban wonderland nor a spiritless wasteland. Instead, the song juggles both the utopian and the dystopian sides of the modern metropolis, weaving sinuously between a youthful sense of big-city excitement and promise ("You were handsome/ You were pretty/ Queen of New York city") and a jaded atmosphere of burnt-out wretchedness ("You're a bum/ You're a punk/ You're an old slut on junk/ Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed"). Very few pop songs, let alone Christmas songs, have nearly this edge or range.
LIKE MANY OF the best Pogues songs, Fairytale draws on an Irish tradition of the carnivalesque-violent knockabout or donnybrook - jousts of verbal wit, boasting, insult and repartee, and an outsized or grotesque indulgence of carnal appetite, whether for food, drink or sex. The tradition is of great antiquity, but in its modern form it has survived chiefly as a ballad tradition that records a peasant or plebeian sense of anarchy and excess that must be understood as a comic-serious riposte to the brutalities of colonial poverty and scarcity or to the travails of migrant communities swept by domestic economic underdevelopment into the great industrial maws of England, Scotland and the United States. In this tradition may be numbered masterpieces as various as Fled Bricend, Cúirt an Mhean Óiche, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, King Goshawk and At Swim-Two-Birds. The comic street songs that it inspired continued to be performed into recent times by the likes of the Dubliners or the late Frank Harte.
This tradition's spirit of gargantuan festive exaggeration features, in its most basic physical forms, in several Pogues favourites, such as The Irish Rover or Fiesta. In somewhat more politicised versions, such as Galway Races, the same sense of bibulous bonhomie is married to a demotic republicanism that celebrates the mingling of "the Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew, the Presbyterian" in the festive, non-working license of the race-meet.
The music of the Pogues was always connected to ideas of carnival and excess, and it is appropriate then that their single greatest hit should be a song about New York, the capital of capitals, on Christmas Eve, that late-20th century carnival of carnivals that has become a byword for demented 24-hour shop-till-you-drop extravaganzas of mass consumption. Fairytale of New York is a tribute to "the American Dream" that New York incarnates. The city's allure depends on the idea that the United States offers the abundance beyond appetite that was always central to carnival's appeal. Yet, though its affection for the US's most swinging city is sincere enough, Fairytale also shows the Pogues at their slyly subversive best, and the song's tribute to Christmas, New York, and the American Dream are all double-edged. Fairytale is, after all, a Christmas song that simultaneously manages to be an exceptionally foul-mouthed anti-Christmas song. It is a tender love song that is also a biting duet of mutually reciprocated disappointment. And it is an aria that invokes the city it hymns not as a place where emigrant dreams come true, but as a dream-busted landscape of the down-and-out - the lonely, the drug-addicted, the drunken, the homeless, the old, the incarcerated.
The wonder of New York is that it offers all of the extravagantly exaggerated carnal promise of the old mythical lands of Cockaigne. Yet, while acknowledging this, Fairytale is never so mesmerised as to forget the alienation behind all the hype. In sum, what we get is not a Sinatra-type eulogy to Manhattan's capacity to take one from "vagabond shoes" to being "king of the hill/ top of the heap", but rather a remarkable duet between an English socialist and an Irish republican hymning not so much the US itself as the dreams of abundance that emigrants have always attached to the country - dreams that the Empire State has always successfully exploited, and only rarely redeemed.
SONGS TAKE THEIR meaning, however, not just from their own words or music, but also from cultural contexts. When Fairytale was released in 1987, the Irish economy was in the doldrums and Northern Ireland was an unacknowledged war-zone. Ireland, North and South, was a production line for the low-skilled, turning out labourers and child-minders, barmen and waitresses, hotel-workers and janitors for London, New York, and Boston. Back then, whole sections of New York's north Bronx were populated by recently arrived "New Irish", living, often acrimoniously, between older, more assimilated Irish-American and Italian-American communities and African-Americans and other poor migrant peoples - Dominicans, Mexicans, Jamaicans, and Puerto Ricans. In the one-roomed Irish bars that studded the streets snaking from Bedford Park and Webster Avenue across Mosholu Parkway to Bainbridge Avenue, Gun Hill Road and northwards up to the more gentrified and "whiter" districts of Woodlawn and McLean Avenue, the Pogues were rarely off the jukeboxes. In the run-up to December 25th, the few with Green Cards (and savings) returned home for Christmas, while those without Green Card or savings or yen for home hunkered down for another makeshift festive debauch in Gotham.
Fairytale's combination of jaunty excitement, nostalgia, acrimony and washed-out despair is of that time and place. The young Irish who congregated over Christmas week in the Roaring Twenties, the Phoenix, the Black Thorn, the Village, Ireland's Thirty Two, Fiona's, Fibber Magees or Rumours, knew the economic and the emotional condition that the Pogues had captured.
Today, the "New Irish" are home. Ironically, many of them now employ people who are themselves labelled the New Irish and when Irish people travel to New York these days it is often on those demented overseas shopping extravaganzas that mark the time of the Tiger. And if Ireland has changed, so has New York. The al-Qaeda bombers of September 11th punctured as great a hole in the American Dream as they did in downtown Manhattan. New York may have been the capital of the 20th century, but it is unlikely to be the capital of the 21st.
But back in the 1980s, when the Irish were still a dirty job people, the celebration of lumpen excess that was the trademark of so many of the Pogues songs had a radical edge. They sang of the unrepentantly shiftless world of the "undeserving poor" - ne'er-do-well navvies, brawling republicans, and free-spending rakes. To many here it all smacked of a wretchedly stereotyped Ireland of Victorian caricature, but the songs played back then to Irish communities from Queens to Cricklewood that had some idea of what it was like to be one of the hod-carrier peoples of the world and, as such, to be associated with lawlessness, fecklessness, squalor, spongerism, the wrong side of emigration law, and terrorism.
THIS CHRISTMAS, MOST Irish-born people over 40 will have either experienced emigration themselves or had family members who went away; few under 30 know anything of it. To them, the notion of the Irish as migrant menials, spongers or terrorists seems distinctly "foreign". And so, when Fairytale plays in the shops of Temple Bar, Tullamore or Templemore, it may well be the "New Irish" who now most viscerally appreciate its curious mix of expectancy and despondency.
When the bubble bursts here, will the cycle of emigration begin again? One hopes not; it would be a remarkable achievement if that cycle of human export could be relegated to folk-memory and folk-song. But for now at least, Fairytale can be a reminder to the rest of us that capitalism - in New York, here, wherever - divides its spoils no less unevenly today than two decades ago. And when our home-grown neoliberals summon up the sorry ghost of the 1980s to remind us we have never had it so good, MacColl's and MacGowan's duet can be a reminder that not all back then was misery and despair; there was also resilience and resistance.
Joe Cleary, 'A fairytale steeped in truth', The Irish Times, 16 December 2006, Weekend Review 7,
It was Christmas Eve babeThe single of Fairytale of New York was first released in December 1987, reaching number one in the Irish and number two in the British charts that year. Now, nearly 20 years later, Shane MacGowan's and Jem Finer's masterpiece has established itself as the soundtrack to Christmas for a whole generation, and as one of the great secular carols of our times. With the exception of Joyce's The Dead or Patrick Kavanagh's Advent, no work of the 20th-century Irish imagination has managed to illuminate a particular sense of Christmas so well as that song has done.
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, "won't see another one"
And then he sang a song
'The Rare Old Mountain Dew'
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you
Got on a lucky one
Came in 18 to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true
Fairytale's success - artistic and commercial - owes much to its combining of several genres. It is at once a twisted love song, an emigrant ballad, and an anthem to the capital city of the 20th century. And it is perhaps for that reason that it is the only "Christmas classic" that one can hear without wincing in July.
Maybe Fairytale is also the best-known Pogues song because it sounds more like a mainstream pop song than most of their works do. Its lush melodies clearly make concessions to the schmaltziness of the Christmas-song genre, and the lyrics trade on the combined appeal of romantic love, New York and the American Dream to create a winning formula. It lacks the punk aggressiveness of some of their more rambunctious classics - The Sickbed of Cuchulainn, Sally MacLennane and If I Should Fall From Grace with God - and the republican politics and the macabre delirium tremens of many of their standards.
But even if sounds "soft", Fairytale is still a complex emotional package. The wonderfully slow, low-key piano lead-in is followed by the sudden surge of raw energy when the whole band comes in and the tempo speeds up and Kirsty MacColl's high-pitched voice edges aside Shane MacGowan's more wistful tones. Then the two leads spar magnificently, trading foul-mouthed insult ("You scumbag/ You maggot/ You cheap lousy faggot") for abusive put-down ("I could have been someone/ Well so could anyone"). The song manages a deft tightrope-walk between starry-eyed hope and world-weary disenchantment. The city evoked in Fairytale is neither a dazzling urban wonderland nor a spiritless wasteland. Instead, the song juggles both the utopian and the dystopian sides of the modern metropolis, weaving sinuously between a youthful sense of big-city excitement and promise ("You were handsome/ You were pretty/ Queen of New York city") and a jaded atmosphere of burnt-out wretchedness ("You're a bum/ You're a punk/ You're an old slut on junk/ Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed"). Very few pop songs, let alone Christmas songs, have nearly this edge or range.
LIKE MANY OF the best Pogues songs, Fairytale draws on an Irish tradition of the carnivalesque-violent knockabout or donnybrook - jousts of verbal wit, boasting, insult and repartee, and an outsized or grotesque indulgence of carnal appetite, whether for food, drink or sex. The tradition is of great antiquity, but in its modern form it has survived chiefly as a ballad tradition that records a peasant or plebeian sense of anarchy and excess that must be understood as a comic-serious riposte to the brutalities of colonial poverty and scarcity or to the travails of migrant communities swept by domestic economic underdevelopment into the great industrial maws of England, Scotland and the United States. In this tradition may be numbered masterpieces as various as Fled Bricend, Cúirt an Mhean Óiche, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, King Goshawk and At Swim-Two-Birds. The comic street songs that it inspired continued to be performed into recent times by the likes of the Dubliners or the late Frank Harte.
This tradition's spirit of gargantuan festive exaggeration features, in its most basic physical forms, in several Pogues favourites, such as The Irish Rover or Fiesta. In somewhat more politicised versions, such as Galway Races, the same sense of bibulous bonhomie is married to a demotic republicanism that celebrates the mingling of "the Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew, the Presbyterian" in the festive, non-working license of the race-meet.
They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
The music of the Pogues was always connected to ideas of carnival and excess, and it is appropriate then that their single greatest hit should be a song about New York, the capital of capitals, on Christmas Eve, that late-20th century carnival of carnivals that has become a byword for demented 24-hour shop-till-you-drop extravaganzas of mass consumption. Fairytale of New York is a tribute to "the American Dream" that New York incarnates. The city's allure depends on the idea that the United States offers the abundance beyond appetite that was always central to carnival's appeal. Yet, though its affection for the US's most swinging city is sincere enough, Fairytale also shows the Pogues at their slyly subversive best, and the song's tribute to Christmas, New York, and the American Dream are all double-edged. Fairytale is, after all, a Christmas song that simultaneously manages to be an exceptionally foul-mouthed anti-Christmas song. It is a tender love song that is also a biting duet of mutually reciprocated disappointment. And it is an aria that invokes the city it hymns not as a place where emigrant dreams come true, but as a dream-busted landscape of the down-and-out - the lonely, the drug-addicted, the drunken, the homeless, the old, the incarcerated.
The wonder of New York is that it offers all of the extravagantly exaggerated carnal promise of the old mythical lands of Cockaigne. Yet, while acknowledging this, Fairytale is never so mesmerised as to forget the alienation behind all the hype. In sum, what we get is not a Sinatra-type eulogy to Manhattan's capacity to take one from "vagabond shoes" to being "king of the hill/ top of the heap", but rather a remarkable duet between an English socialist and an Irish republican hymning not so much the US itself as the dreams of abundance that emigrants have always attached to the country - dreams that the Empire State has always successfully exploited, and only rarely redeemed.
You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night
The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing 'Galway Bay'
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day
SONGS TAKE THEIR meaning, however, not just from their own words or music, but also from cultural contexts. When Fairytale was released in 1987, the Irish economy was in the doldrums and Northern Ireland was an unacknowledged war-zone. Ireland, North and South, was a production line for the low-skilled, turning out labourers and child-minders, barmen and waitresses, hotel-workers and janitors for London, New York, and Boston. Back then, whole sections of New York's north Bronx were populated by recently arrived "New Irish", living, often acrimoniously, between older, more assimilated Irish-American and Italian-American communities and African-Americans and other poor migrant peoples - Dominicans, Mexicans, Jamaicans, and Puerto Ricans. In the one-roomed Irish bars that studded the streets snaking from Bedford Park and Webster Avenue across Mosholu Parkway to Bainbridge Avenue, Gun Hill Road and northwards up to the more gentrified and "whiter" districts of Woodlawn and McLean Avenue, the Pogues were rarely off the jukeboxes. In the run-up to December 25th, the few with Green Cards (and savings) returned home for Christmas, while those without Green Card or savings or yen for home hunkered down for another makeshift festive debauch in Gotham.
Fairytale's combination of jaunty excitement, nostalgia, acrimony and washed-out despair is of that time and place. The young Irish who congregated over Christmas week in the Roaring Twenties, the Phoenix, the Black Thorn, the Village, Ireland's Thirty Two, Fiona's, Fibber Magees or Rumours, knew the economic and the emotional condition that the Pogues had captured.
You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last
Today, the "New Irish" are home. Ironically, many of them now employ people who are themselves labelled the New Irish and when Irish people travel to New York these days it is often on those demented overseas shopping extravaganzas that mark the time of the Tiger. And if Ireland has changed, so has New York. The al-Qaeda bombers of September 11th punctured as great a hole in the American Dream as they did in downtown Manhattan. New York may have been the capital of the 20th century, but it is unlikely to be the capital of the 21st.
But back in the 1980s, when the Irish were still a dirty job people, the celebration of lumpen excess that was the trademark of so many of the Pogues songs had a radical edge. They sang of the unrepentantly shiftless world of the "undeserving poor" - ne'er-do-well navvies, brawling republicans, and free-spending rakes. To many here it all smacked of a wretchedly stereotyped Ireland of Victorian caricature, but the songs played back then to Irish communities from Queens to Cricklewood that had some idea of what it was like to be one of the hod-carrier peoples of the world and, as such, to be associated with lawlessness, fecklessness, squalor, spongerism, the wrong side of emigration law, and terrorism.
THIS CHRISTMAS, MOST Irish-born people over 40 will have either experienced emigration themselves or had family members who went away; few under 30 know anything of it. To them, the notion of the Irish as migrant menials, spongers or terrorists seems distinctly "foreign". And so, when Fairytale plays in the shops of Temple Bar, Tullamore or Templemore, it may well be the "New Irish" who now most viscerally appreciate its curious mix of expectancy and despondency.
I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you
When the bubble bursts here, will the cycle of emigration begin again? One hopes not; it would be a remarkable achievement if that cycle of human export could be relegated to folk-memory and folk-song. But for now at least, Fairytale can be a reminder to the rest of us that capitalism - in New York, here, wherever - divides its spoils no less unevenly today than two decades ago. And when our home-grown neoliberals summon up the sorry ghost of the 1980s to remind us we have never had it so good, MacColl's and MacGowan's duet can be a reminder that not all back then was misery and despair; there was also resilience and resistance.
Joe Cleary, 'A fairytale steeped in truth', The Irish Times, 16 December 2006, Weekend Review 7,
Friday, December 15, 2006
Waiting
'Every tear brings the Messiah closer.' For centuries, religious people offered that prayer to God while they waited for the Messiah to come. As a child, growing up in the Canadian prairies, i prayed it too, unconsciously, with my family, as we waited for Christmas. Advent was special season for us. We felt the joy of Christmas, but as an anticipation that, while longed-for, already coloured our days wonderfully.
My mother set both the tone and the rituals for our Christmas preparations. We had an Advent wreath, plus a crib with an empty manger. The manger was empty both of the baby Jesus and of any straw for Him to lie on. We had to produce the straw, one piece at a time, by doing good deeds and making sacrifices during Advent.
Every time we sacrificed something for someone else, we were allowed to put a piece of straw into the crib, to make a bed for Jesus when He came at Christmas. If we'd done a good deed during the day, we could put a piece of straw in the manger before the family rosary each night.
Beyond this, my mother had other, less spiritual, rituals. Throughout Advent the house smelled of baking. Our old wood-stove churned out pan after pan of Christmas delights, mostly cookies and cakes, but none of them were to be touched until Christmas Eve. Christmas decorations were readied, but not put up until a day before Christmas.
The idea was that we were preparing to celebrate and we could, literally, smell and see the joy, but it was not to be tasted, yet. Advent for us was a time of sublimation in the very face of the feast, a time when the coming joy was palatable and near enough to be both touched and smelled, but our task was still to prepare ourselves for it. The tasting was to come later and all the waiting and anticipation made that tasting all the sweeter.
In essence, this expressed the meaning of Advent: For something to be sublime there must first be sublimation; fasting is the necessary prelude to feasting; greatness of soul is contingent on first nobly carrying tension; great joy is not experienced if one is not first properly prepared; and what's truly divine can only appear after a certain kind of gestation. Advent is about proper waiting.
It should not be confused with Lent. The crimson-purple of Advent is not the black-purple of Lent. The former symbolises yearning and longing, the latter repentance. The spirituality of Advent is not about repentance, but about carrying tension without prematurely resolving it so that what's born in us and in our world does not short-circuit the fullness that comes from rejecting love's rhythms.
How does carrying tension help lead to the sublime? It does it by helping to produce the heat required for generativity. An image may be helpful here. John of the Cross, in his book The Living Flame of Love, compares our pre-Advent selves to green logs that have been thrown into a fire, the fire of love. Green logs, as you know, do not immediately burst into flame. Rather, being young and full of moisture, they sizzle for a long time before they reach the kind of kindling temperature and absorb the fire that is around them so as to participate in it. So too the rhythm of love. Only the really mature can truly burst into flame within community. The rest of us are still too self-contained, too green, too selfish, too damp. We don't burst into flame when love surrounds us. Rather our dampness helps extinguish the communal flame.
What helps change this is precisely the tension in our lives. In carrying properly our unfulfilled desires we sizzle and slowly let go of the damness of selfishness. In carrying tension we come to kindling temperature and are made ready for love. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as a scientist, noticed that sometimes when you put two chemicals in a test-tube they do not automatically unite. They only merge at a higher temperature. They must first be heated to bring about unity.
In one of her early books, Annie Dillard shares how she once learned a lesson, the hard way, about the importance of waiting. She had been watching a butterfly slowly emerge from its cocoon. The oh-so-slow process of transformation was fascinating, but at a point, she grew impatient. She took a candle and heated the cocoon, though only slightly, in order to speed up things. It worked. The butterfly emerged a bit more quickly, but because the process had been unnaturally rushed, it was born with wings that were not properly formed and it was not able to fly.
The lesson wasn't lost on Dillard. She understood immediately what was wrong, a certain chastity had been violated. She had short-circuited Advent.
One of the motifs we celebrate in this season is the idea that the Messiah must be born of a virgin. Why? Is it beneath Jesus to be conceived and born in the normal way? Sometimes those false understandings have been put forth. The real reason, however, for connecting Advent and virginity is quite different: first, it underscores that Jesus, being the incarnate son of God, does not have a human father. Second, and crucial in terms of the spirituality of Advent, is the idea that the Messiah could only come forth from a virgin's womb because for something "divine" to be born, a proper time of waiting, a proper chastity, must first take place.
Chastity is not something specific to sex. It's about how we experience all of reality in general. To be chaste is to live in such a way as to be fully and properly respectful of others, nature and God. Chastity, properly defined, means living in such a way that our own needs, desires, agendas, and impatience do not get in the way of letting gift be gift, other be other, and God be god. Obviously this depends upon proper respect and proper waiting.
We can learn this by looking at its antithesis. We lack chastity when, for whatever reason (lack of respect, lack of reverence, impatience, selfishness, callousness, immaturity, undisciplined desire) we relate to others in such a way that they cannot be fully who they are, according to their own unique rhythms and preciousness. We do this when we short circuit patience and respect.
In essence, Annie Dillard's metaphor says it all: there's a fault in our chastity when we put a candle to the cocoon to unnaturally pressure the process.
And, as is obvious, the key element in all this is waiting. Chastity is 90 per cent about proper waiting. It's for this reason that one of the rich metaphors of Advent is that of preparing a virgin's womb so that the Divine can be born in a proper way. Advent calls us to patience, carrying the frustration that we suffer when we have to wait for what we desire.
In Jewish apocalyptic literature there are a number of wonderful refrains that try to teach us this. They give us the idea that, before the messiah can be conceived, gestated and born, there must first be proper time of waiting. In shorthand, these aphorisms express the theology of Advent: "People are always in a hurry; God is never in a hurry." "Every tear brings the Messiah closer." "It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth."
Carlo Caretto, one of the great spiritual writers of recent times,spent many years alone - a hermit in the Sahara desert. During these long, quiet years, he tried to hear what God was saying to us. In one of his books, written from this desert solitude, he suggests that perhaps the most important thing that God is trying to tell us today, especially in Western culture, is this: Be patient! Learn to wait - for everything: each other, love, happiness, God. The message of the great Advent figures (Mary, John the Baptist and Isaiah) is the same.
And waiting is also very much about hope. To wait properly is to live in hope.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as even his critics admit, was a man of hope. Indeed his whole vision of things is generally criticised for being too hopeful. So, in trying to explain hope and Advent, allow me a story about Teilhard.
Teilhard was a scientist, and a good one, but he was also a Christian, a priest, and a man whose ultimate vision of life was formed by the Gospels. Central to his whole system of thought was his rock-bottom belief that ultimately all of history, cosmic and human, would come together, in Christ, in one community of life and love (as promised by Jesus and as summarised in the early Christian hymn, Ephesians, 1, 3-10). the vision was the wide framework within which he ultimately set his scientific theories. But he was surrounded by colleagues, both Christian and secular, who had a far less hopeful view of things. One day he was challenged: "You have an enchanted view of history, believing that everything will one day culminate in a wonderful 'kingdom' of peace and love, but suppose we blow up the world in a nuclear war, what happens to your scheme of things then?"
His response to that question is a textbook definition of hope: "If we blow up the world it would be a great tragedy because it wopuld set things back millions of years. But history will still one day culminate in a kingdom of peace and love, not because my theory says so, but because God promised it and in the Resurrection He has shown the power to bring this about, despite the things we do." That's hope, to be able to say : "It might take a million years or so, but it will happen because God promised it."
Hope is not wishful thinking, the simple longing for something wonderful to happen to us. Neither is it optimism; a natural temperament, however pleasant, which is perenially upbeat and always sees the positive side of things. Finally, hope is also not a positive diagnosis based upon a shrewd assessment of the facts. Jim Wallis once quipped: "Put not your faith in CNN!" One does not ultimately base one's hope on whether the world situation seems to be improving or worsening. Hope does not go up and down like the stock market because, in the end, it is not based upon empirical facts. Hope is believing in the promise of God and believing that God has the power to fulfil that promise.
What is that promise? God has promised that history will one day come together in paradise, a community of life around Christ and in God, within which there will be no tears and no death. This will be a community that takes its very breath from love, justice, peace, friendship and affection, and shared delight in the Holy Spirit.
And what power will bring this about? The power of the ressurection of Jesus, the power to bring a dead body back to life, to redeem what's been lost, to straighten crooked lines, and to bring people together, despite hatred, sin, and selfishness. To live in hope is to live in the face of that promise and that power, and to fundamentally shape both our memories and our future. To hope is to look back on our lives and see no need to count the losses, underline the hurts, play the victim, or stew in bitterness because all our wounds and losses can be redeemed as part of a much greater promise. the same holds true for our future. All our plans and schemes must reflect the wider plan of God and we, like Teilhard, should be prepared to live in great patience as we wait for the finished symphony.
Mary, Jesus' Mother, shows us hope. Not only did she believe the promise; she became pregnant with it, gestated it, and gave it her own flesh. She went through the pains of childbirth to give it reality, and then nursed a fragile new life into a powerful adulthood that saved the world. In that, she needs imitation, not admiration. Advent is the season for us to imitate that hope and, like Mary, to give real flesh to God by learning in patience how to wait.
Ronald Rolheiser, 'The Key to Joy is waiting', The Catholic Herald Advent Supplement 2006, 3-4.
My mother set both the tone and the rituals for our Christmas preparations. We had an Advent wreath, plus a crib with an empty manger. The manger was empty both of the baby Jesus and of any straw for Him to lie on. We had to produce the straw, one piece at a time, by doing good deeds and making sacrifices during Advent.
Every time we sacrificed something for someone else, we were allowed to put a piece of straw into the crib, to make a bed for Jesus when He came at Christmas. If we'd done a good deed during the day, we could put a piece of straw in the manger before the family rosary each night.
Beyond this, my mother had other, less spiritual, rituals. Throughout Advent the house smelled of baking. Our old wood-stove churned out pan after pan of Christmas delights, mostly cookies and cakes, but none of them were to be touched until Christmas Eve. Christmas decorations were readied, but not put up until a day before Christmas.
The idea was that we were preparing to celebrate and we could, literally, smell and see the joy, but it was not to be tasted, yet. Advent for us was a time of sublimation in the very face of the feast, a time when the coming joy was palatable and near enough to be both touched and smelled, but our task was still to prepare ourselves for it. The tasting was to come later and all the waiting and anticipation made that tasting all the sweeter.
In essence, this expressed the meaning of Advent: For something to be sublime there must first be sublimation; fasting is the necessary prelude to feasting; greatness of soul is contingent on first nobly carrying tension; great joy is not experienced if one is not first properly prepared; and what's truly divine can only appear after a certain kind of gestation. Advent is about proper waiting.
It should not be confused with Lent. The crimson-purple of Advent is not the black-purple of Lent. The former symbolises yearning and longing, the latter repentance. The spirituality of Advent is not about repentance, but about carrying tension without prematurely resolving it so that what's born in us and in our world does not short-circuit the fullness that comes from rejecting love's rhythms.
How does carrying tension help lead to the sublime? It does it by helping to produce the heat required for generativity. An image may be helpful here. John of the Cross, in his book The Living Flame of Love, compares our pre-Advent selves to green logs that have been thrown into a fire, the fire of love. Green logs, as you know, do not immediately burst into flame. Rather, being young and full of moisture, they sizzle for a long time before they reach the kind of kindling temperature and absorb the fire that is around them so as to participate in it. So too the rhythm of love. Only the really mature can truly burst into flame within community. The rest of us are still too self-contained, too green, too selfish, too damp. We don't burst into flame when love surrounds us. Rather our dampness helps extinguish the communal flame.
What helps change this is precisely the tension in our lives. In carrying properly our unfulfilled desires we sizzle and slowly let go of the damness of selfishness. In carrying tension we come to kindling temperature and are made ready for love. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as a scientist, noticed that sometimes when you put two chemicals in a test-tube they do not automatically unite. They only merge at a higher temperature. They must first be heated to bring about unity.
In one of her early books, Annie Dillard shares how she once learned a lesson, the hard way, about the importance of waiting. She had been watching a butterfly slowly emerge from its cocoon. The oh-so-slow process of transformation was fascinating, but at a point, she grew impatient. She took a candle and heated the cocoon, though only slightly, in order to speed up things. It worked. The butterfly emerged a bit more quickly, but because the process had been unnaturally rushed, it was born with wings that were not properly formed and it was not able to fly.
The lesson wasn't lost on Dillard. She understood immediately what was wrong, a certain chastity had been violated. She had short-circuited Advent.
One of the motifs we celebrate in this season is the idea that the Messiah must be born of a virgin. Why? Is it beneath Jesus to be conceived and born in the normal way? Sometimes those false understandings have been put forth. The real reason, however, for connecting Advent and virginity is quite different: first, it underscores that Jesus, being the incarnate son of God, does not have a human father. Second, and crucial in terms of the spirituality of Advent, is the idea that the Messiah could only come forth from a virgin's womb because for something "divine" to be born, a proper time of waiting, a proper chastity, must first take place.
Chastity is not something specific to sex. It's about how we experience all of reality in general. To be chaste is to live in such a way as to be fully and properly respectful of others, nature and God. Chastity, properly defined, means living in such a way that our own needs, desires, agendas, and impatience do not get in the way of letting gift be gift, other be other, and God be god. Obviously this depends upon proper respect and proper waiting.
We can learn this by looking at its antithesis. We lack chastity when, for whatever reason (lack of respect, lack of reverence, impatience, selfishness, callousness, immaturity, undisciplined desire) we relate to others in such a way that they cannot be fully who they are, according to their own unique rhythms and preciousness. We do this when we short circuit patience and respect.
In essence, Annie Dillard's metaphor says it all: there's a fault in our chastity when we put a candle to the cocoon to unnaturally pressure the process.
And, as is obvious, the key element in all this is waiting. Chastity is 90 per cent about proper waiting. It's for this reason that one of the rich metaphors of Advent is that of preparing a virgin's womb so that the Divine can be born in a proper way. Advent calls us to patience, carrying the frustration that we suffer when we have to wait for what we desire.
In Jewish apocalyptic literature there are a number of wonderful refrains that try to teach us this. They give us the idea that, before the messiah can be conceived, gestated and born, there must first be proper time of waiting. In shorthand, these aphorisms express the theology of Advent: "People are always in a hurry; God is never in a hurry." "Every tear brings the Messiah closer." "It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth."
Carlo Caretto, one of the great spiritual writers of recent times,spent many years alone - a hermit in the Sahara desert. During these long, quiet years, he tried to hear what God was saying to us. In one of his books, written from this desert solitude, he suggests that perhaps the most important thing that God is trying to tell us today, especially in Western culture, is this: Be patient! Learn to wait - for everything: each other, love, happiness, God. The message of the great Advent figures (Mary, John the Baptist and Isaiah) is the same.
And waiting is also very much about hope. To wait properly is to live in hope.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as even his critics admit, was a man of hope. Indeed his whole vision of things is generally criticised for being too hopeful. So, in trying to explain hope and Advent, allow me a story about Teilhard.
Teilhard was a scientist, and a good one, but he was also a Christian, a priest, and a man whose ultimate vision of life was formed by the Gospels. Central to his whole system of thought was his rock-bottom belief that ultimately all of history, cosmic and human, would come together, in Christ, in one community of life and love (as promised by Jesus and as summarised in the early Christian hymn, Ephesians, 1, 3-10). the vision was the wide framework within which he ultimately set his scientific theories. But he was surrounded by colleagues, both Christian and secular, who had a far less hopeful view of things. One day he was challenged: "You have an enchanted view of history, believing that everything will one day culminate in a wonderful 'kingdom' of peace and love, but suppose we blow up the world in a nuclear war, what happens to your scheme of things then?"
His response to that question is a textbook definition of hope: "If we blow up the world it would be a great tragedy because it wopuld set things back millions of years. But history will still one day culminate in a kingdom of peace and love, not because my theory says so, but because God promised it and in the Resurrection He has shown the power to bring this about, despite the things we do." That's hope, to be able to say : "It might take a million years or so, but it will happen because God promised it."
Hope is not wishful thinking, the simple longing for something wonderful to happen to us. Neither is it optimism; a natural temperament, however pleasant, which is perenially upbeat and always sees the positive side of things. Finally, hope is also not a positive diagnosis based upon a shrewd assessment of the facts. Jim Wallis once quipped: "Put not your faith in CNN!" One does not ultimately base one's hope on whether the world situation seems to be improving or worsening. Hope does not go up and down like the stock market because, in the end, it is not based upon empirical facts. Hope is believing in the promise of God and believing that God has the power to fulfil that promise.
What is that promise? God has promised that history will one day come together in paradise, a community of life around Christ and in God, within which there will be no tears and no death. This will be a community that takes its very breath from love, justice, peace, friendship and affection, and shared delight in the Holy Spirit.
And what power will bring this about? The power of the ressurection of Jesus, the power to bring a dead body back to life, to redeem what's been lost, to straighten crooked lines, and to bring people together, despite hatred, sin, and selfishness. To live in hope is to live in the face of that promise and that power, and to fundamentally shape both our memories and our future. To hope is to look back on our lives and see no need to count the losses, underline the hurts, play the victim, or stew in bitterness because all our wounds and losses can be redeemed as part of a much greater promise. the same holds true for our future. All our plans and schemes must reflect the wider plan of God and we, like Teilhard, should be prepared to live in great patience as we wait for the finished symphony.
Mary, Jesus' Mother, shows us hope. Not only did she believe the promise; she became pregnant with it, gestated it, and gave it her own flesh. She went through the pains of childbirth to give it reality, and then nursed a fragile new life into a powerful adulthood that saved the world. In that, she needs imitation, not admiration. Advent is the season for us to imitate that hope and, like Mary, to give real flesh to God by learning in patience how to wait.
Ronald Rolheiser, 'The Key to Joy is waiting', The Catholic Herald Advent Supplement 2006, 3-4.
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