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December
21, 2001 12:45 p.m. |
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our good friend, that Man from Mars, dropped in anywhere this time of
year he would know immediately that something had happened. All he'd wanted
was to take in a movie and find a decent restaurant, but there was electricity
in the air. "That song crept by me on the waters," he remembered
from The Tempest. Now children were singing, song was in the air;
this people gave to children — children! — some of their best
songs to sing. Why did mere children have such prestige, such power, here?
Children are weak. Why were they given the songs? And a gigantic pine
tree, glistening with stars and diamonds, was going up in front of what
appeared to be the major building in the city, while ice skaters twirled
and fell beneath it. The main boulevard of the great city glistened with
beautiful shop windows. Just to walk from midtown north for about a mile
you saw astonishing things in their windows. People were buying things
to give to each other. Something had happened.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem, in Judah, in the days of King Herod. And thereupon certain wise men came out of the east, asking, Where is he that has been born, the king of the Jews? We have seen his star out in the east, and we have come to worship him (Matthew 2:1-3).
That's the beginning of the whole thing. National Review senior editor Willmoore Kendall once remarked that one of the reasons he had become a Christian was the impact that this child had had on history. Much greater than Alexander the Great, than Caesar or Napoleon, George Washington, Hitler. The effect of all their lives put together amounted to very little compared with what happened on the margin of the Roman Empire during that cold midwinter.
And though Jesus, whose name was undoubtedly Joshua, did not write anything so far as we know, he is quoted more often than Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare.
The ancient record of the man that child became has a great deal to recommend it as historical fact. We know much more about him that we do about Virgil or Augustus, or Herod for that matter.
Scientists recently have identified the "star" that the wise men from the "east" saw. Astronomers now can calculate the exact position of heavenly bodies at any time by calculating their positions, course, and speed today, and can read their positions today backwards in time. And at the time claimed for this birth there was indeed an immensely rare configuration in the sky of stars and planets.
Historians tell us that the "wise men" were Babylonian astrologers, and that astrology was a governing mode of knowledge within the Babylonian Empire; in much of the ancient world, for that matter. So the wise men, or Magi, their instruments trained on this new configuration, made their way to Jerusalem and asked King Herod what was going on.
When they reached the place of birth, they brought expensive gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh; and, some speculate, their astrological instruments, which had not predicted the strange configuration that had led them all this way westward to Bethlehem. The rest, to put it mildly, is history. The gifts they brought have become the gifts we give. Our songs echo from the first century on, in all languages. The evergreen tree was assimilated to the story from the dark Teutonic forests as a symbol of immortality. Indeed, the songs themselves will never end, and are being written all the time.
The great modern poet William Butler Yeats was not a Christian. He believed instead things that are almost impossible to believe, a frequent occurrence. Yet he too knew that something astonishing had happened:
I saw a staring virgin stand
Where holy Dionysus died. . .
The Roman Empire stood appalled:
It dropped the reins of peace and war
When that fierce virgin and her Star
Out of the fabulous darkness called.
— "Two Songs from a Play"
"Fabulous darkness" is very good for Babylon and its astrologers; "Star" is a rather adventurous pun, referring to the heavenly body and the world-shaking child.
Some think Yeats was the greatest poet in English of the 20th century; there is little doubt that John Milton was the best of the 17th. When he was but 21 he wrote the magnificent "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." A Christian Humanist (that is, classical scholar), Milton celebrated the birth of Christ and also poignantly mourned the passing of the old gods who retreated into mythology:
This the month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of Heaven's eternal King,
Of wedded maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing. . .
But Milton must bid adieu to the older world and its spirits:
In consecrated earth,
And on the holy hearth,
The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint,
In Urns and Altars round,
A drear and dying sound
Affrights the Flamins at their service quaint;
And the chill Marble seems to sweat,
While each peculiar power foregoes his wonted seat.
This is a very long and beautiful poem celebrating Christmas morning; and not bad for a 21-year-old. All those old divinities did not die, however; 30 years later, he was to write many of them into Paradise Lost.
If many think Yeats greatest in the pantheon among modern poets writing in English, probably an equal number would award the laurel to T.S. Eliot. In 1922 he had published The Waste Land, undoubtedly the most influential poem of the century, written in English and several other languages. Its subject is the struggle of a 20th-century sensibility toward Christian belief. In 1930, Eliot announced that he was in communion with the Church of England, to the dismay of many who had read The Waste Land as a poem of disillusion and despair. In 1930 he published several poems about conversion, including "Journey of the Magi," in which one of the wise men tells his story. The journey was difficult.
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the winter sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melted snow.
Compared with this, things back in Babylon look pretty good:
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
But as they journey, the landscape changes, as their world is about to change:
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness . . .
There is no joy in their discovery, at least for this magus. The poem simply tells us that they found the place. But it changed their lives painfully.
This in its way is the opposite of Milton's poem, told from the point of view of a Babylonian magus:
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people, clutching their gods.
Babylon ain't what it used to be. But the magus knows that something has happened. We understand that for Eliot, London was not quite the same; nor were things altogether comfortable with Bertie Russell, Virginia Woolf, Keynes, Strachey, and the rest of the old gang.
The whole point here is that we could go on and on, and soon it would be Christmas 2003. After all, God did promise Abraham that his descendants would be as the stars in the heavens. So let us bid merry Christmas on a merry and cheerful note with the modern English poet John Bettejman:
No love that in a family dwells,
No caroling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single truth compare —
That God was mine in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.
— "Christmas"
Right now, the man from Mars knows that something has happened.
— Jeffrey Hart is a senior editor of National Review.