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The Roman Empire
stood appalled. Very well taken, though I wish Yeats had not capitalized "star," with its Hollywood overtones. T. S. Eliot, a younger contemporary of Yeats, was a believing member of the Church of England. In "Journey of the Magi" he wrote a dramatic monologue by one of the "Magi" or "wisemen" who came from the east because of that star. In fact, modern scholarship has found the star. Planetary and stellar movements are invariable and the heavenly scenario can be run backwards. It turns out that planets and stars were in a highly unusual alignment at about the time in question. The wise men from the East were very likely priestly astrologers from Persia. Astrology was central to the culture of Persia at that time. Among the gifts they brought were probably their astrological instruments, in recognition of the fact that the religion of Persia had been superceded. In Eliot's poem, they understand that something really new has happened, but do not understand what.
The magi knows that something incommunicable has happened. I myself think that an earlier poem by Eliot reflects an understanding of what that is. The 1925 "Hollow Men," following upon the l922 "Waste Land," strikes me as — only thematically speaking — something like the Yeats lyric quoted above. It is generally thought to reflect total emptiness and despair. Yet the voice in the poem tries to pray. And the famous ending is subject to interpretation:
What "world" is that? Possibly it is the vitality of secular humanism as a 1925 spiritual option for Eliot. The Roman Empire ended religiously with that Infant's cry on Christmas night in Bethlehem. We might think that the "world" of Eliot's "waste land" was, for him, ending. His next poem was "Ash Wednesday" (1930), which scandalized the secular intelligentsia. The young John Milton was both a passionate Christian and a passionate classicist, that is, he was a powerful Christian Humanist. In his "Morning of Christ's Nativity" he wrote with very mixed emotions of the displacement by Christmas of the great classical world:
There is no other holiday like Christmas. It is celebrated in every corner of the earth. It is not — yet — universal, but it is global. It shapes the calendar we use into BC and AD, and that calendar, though not universal, is very widely used. Even Chinese and Israeli airlines use it. There have of course been great men known to history, men who, in their time, were world-shakers. Alexander the Great conquered more territory than any other warrior, and spread Greek civilization through the Middle East and all the way to the border of India. Only scholars remember when he was born. We have had Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Bismarck — tremendous figures. But they gave rise to nothing like Christmas. The late Wilmore Kendall, a senior editor of National Review, and a profound political and historical philosopher, posed what seemed to me an original for the idea of the divinity of Jesus. He argued that no other figure in history has produced anything like the effect Jesus did. Thus Kendall argued from vast and unique effect to vast and unique cause. If you drop a pebble into a pond, it makes ripples. If you drop a large rock, it makes much bigger ones. But what makes a tidal wave in the pond? Although I know that that argument is not airtight, I still think it suggestive. "And the star that they had seen at its rising went before them, until it came and stood over the place where the child was. They greatly rejoiced when they saw that the star stood still. Entering the house and finding the child with Mary His mother, they knelt down and worshipped Him. And opening their treasures they offered Him gifts, of gold, frankincense and myrrh." (Matthew 2:9-11) This must be why we put gifts for the children beneath the evergreen tree, which represents immortality. It has always struck me as important that Christianity likes to give its best songs to children's choirs to sing, because, I think, of that tremendous Child. He has summoned more divisions than the secular titans like Caesar and Napoeon. But the poets also have sung long and well. We began here with examples, and you can gauge the power of Christmas by going down the centuries of poems about Christmas. An excellent selection of these may be found in O Holy Night: Masterworks of Christmas Poetry, edited by Johann M. Moser. We hear the Roman Christian Prudentius (348-415): "Born of the Father's heart/ Before the creation of the world, / Alpha and Omega named. / Beginning and end of all that is." And down through the great list. To even begin to cite all the texts would wear out your microchips. But consider:
This great song is the most powerful of all songs, the most powerful ever sung. And it will still be sung by poets 2,000 years from now, less than a microsecond from the perspective of eternity. — Jeffrey Hart is author, most recently, of Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education |
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he
great poet William Butler Yeats was not a Christian, or for that matter
even a believer in God, but he knew that something inconceivably important
had happened in the Bethlehem suburb of Jerusalem about 2,000 years ago.
Mary and Joseph had journeyed there, as required by law, to report to
the Roman census. They were not poor and "homeless," but related
to King David, and so required to register in Jerusalem rather than Nazareth.
Yeats wrote of this hinge of history: 
Lord."