With the Christmas season having come to an end—the period between the Baptism of the Lord and the Presentation (Candlemas) on 2 February serving as an “afterglow” of Christmastide—I think it important to reflect upon what has just happened, what the whole of Christmas means not simply for faithful Christians of any culture around the world but for all of us who live in this increasingly global civilization called “western.” For I would like to argue that Christmas stands in the very center of the “great western tradition,” thought of also as “European,” even though its cultural origins are not in Europe but in the ancient Near East.
Christmas and the Modern Secular Self
The Christmas season is increasingly an anachronism in contemporary modernity and its continued existence must be justified to the modern person on new grounds. The project of secularism has emancipated western society from its self-conscious beholden-ness to tradition, except that “tradition” be the tradition of having no tradition. The modern person is convinced that tradition is against autonomy and autonomy is the only definition of freedom that the modern person possesses. We have created a world in which the individual is “sovereign” and “free,” which means we are under no obligation to understand ourselves through any defining narrative except, in the words of Stanley Hauerwas, “the story we chose when we had no story.”
Tradition and Identity: the alienation of the secular self
As good as this situation may feel to the monied cosmopolitan professional of the global west, he feels also the thinness of the “enlightened” self whenever he encounters the thickness of a human community which has retained a genuine tie to or even an immersion in its elder, “traditional culture.” We sense that there is an “authenticity,” for example, to a group of orthodox Jewish men, wearing beards and tasselsand prayer shawls, chanting the ancient prayers in an ancient language which they themselves have otherwise long forgotten how to speak except in prayer; we feel the cultural thickness in the virtual air when we watch a video of “indigenous” peoples of the Amazon or some other such “Third World” place enacting rituals that certainly appear to us as having their origin in an epoch so primordial as to be beyond the reach of history, such that they seem to speak from the very dawn of time itself, with roots driven down as it were to the very center of the earth. We call such people “indigenous” because we know we’ve been uprooted, especially as North Americans of European descent. Hence the explosion of DNA ancestry services whom we pay to tell us where we come from and therefore who we are.
Modernity cannot supply this identity for us, and though we refuse to be anything but modern we are uneasy and anxious about our modernity. We worry that we can access tradition only in the form of cultural tourism and exploitive “appropriation.” The multiplication of identity groups and their correlated “intersectionalities” is a cultural product stemming from the sense of rootlessness felt by the modern cosmopolitan person who is at least as alienated by the multicultural society as he is embraced by it.
And so when we are reminded again each year of the story of Christmas—the Shepherds and the Wise Men gathered round the Holy Family at the manger—we feel in touch again, if only for a fleeting moment, with an ancient tradition, and our hearts can be warmed with a sense of belonging, a connection to identity and community with an ancient and therefore authentic history. Christmas is our tradition. The “thickness” of the scene, to the extent it isn’t trivialized by a shallow, commercial sentimentality or eviscerated by deconstructive “interpretation,” can seasonally alter the consciousness of what Charles Taylor has called the “buffered self” and put us in touch with a reality that has survived the transition to modernity but could never have been authored by it. Would I be permitted to argue that in this moment of being “determined by tradition”—that awful, freedom-destroying authority from which the modern self recoils—we sense that we are being offered a restored identity, that an offer of freedom, love even, has been extended to us by (dare we whisper it?) God himself?
The Characters of the Nativity Scene: Servants of Holy Wisdom
What kind of sense can we make of this thing which perhaps can be described no better than as a spiritual phenomenon? What happened there, so many long years ago, that still retains this beneficent power over us? We should begin with a brief compendium of the characters present at the sacred cave of the Nativity.
The Holy Family
A man and woman whom we might call “orthodox Jews,” Mary and Joseph represent the elite of Israelite ethnic lineage, both in terms of “blood and soil” Israel and of “theological” Judaism. With respect to the blood-and-soil they are both Sabra, that is, born not in the diaspora of the pagan empire but in the ancient land of Israel itself. They each walked the ground trod by their forefathers. The lineage of Jesus is identified through his father Joseph, as the tradition dictates. In Matthew’s gospel (1:1-16), Jesus is shown to be born into the royal Davidic line, but in Luke’s gospel (3:23-28) the genealogy of Jesus is extended all the way to “the beginning,” to Adam himself. Both gospel lineages synthesize the theological element with the blood-and-soil element: Jesus is of royal blood, yet David the Son of Jesse is also the one chosen (christos) of God, destined to be the personal, human symbol of Israel’s divine kingship; and in Luke the “blood” of Jesus is traced beyond human origin to its divine origin, “the son of Enoch, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.”
As Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) notes, even the temporal origin of the “tribe” of Israel in Abraham has divine initiative at its back, since Abraham was a native Chaldean, not a Canaanite, and thus a “wayfarer, not only from the land of his birth to the promised land, but also on the journey from the present into the future.” The message of the Abrahamic lineage is no mere tribal, blood-and-soil affirmation of Israel’s special prerogative, but a transformation of blood-and-soil consciousness into universal consciousness, since “the whole history, beginning with Abraham and leading to Jesus, is open toward universality—through Abraham, blessing comes to all” (Jesus of Nazareth: the Infancy Narratives, p5).
Finally, the issue of Mary the mother of Jesus is included directly in the genealogy of St. Matthew as an irruption of the irregular into the patriarchal tradition: the pattern “who was the father of…who was the father of….” is interrupted at the very end with the introduction of Mary, and Joseph’s identity—in a startling reversal of tradition!—is defined through a woman, for Joseph is merely “the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ” (Mt 1:16). “Mary is a new beginning. Her child does not originate from any man, but is a new creation…” (Ratzinger, Infancy Narratives, p7).
The Shepherds
The figure of the shepherd in the ancient Greco-Roman world is bound up with the idea of the contemplative person, for a shepherd has a task at once menial and leisurely, with short periods of intense work punctuating days otherwise filled with freedom. The sheep graze and the shepherds muse and compose songs and poems. Apollo, the Greek god of poetry and song, is often portrayed in pagan tradition as a shepherd, and this pre-Christian image was taken up by early Christianity into its iconography of Christ. The Mediterranean tradition of the poet-shepherd is given us in a special way through Judaism in the figure of David, the shepherd boy anointed king, whose songs (“psalms”) established an eventually universalized tradition of divine praise and supplication. Thus the Shepherds already in themselves represent the contemplative waiting upon revelation, a trait affirmed and intensified in the story of the Nativity by the appearance of the Angel who announces to them the “good news of great joy which shall be for all people” (Luke 2:10).
The Wise Men
“Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying,‘Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him’” (Mt 2:1-2).
As it has filtered down to us through near eastern scholarship, the “Magi” are known in the popular educated imagination as Zoroastrian astrologers from Persia. Matthew’s gospel only says “from the east” but Persia may well have been the cultural origin of those who were said to have traveled to see the child at Bethlehem, and so the possibility that Persian philosophers appeared at the manger scene means that we must take a closer look at their character.
The mystical-philosophical wisdom religion of Zoroastrianism, or Mazdayasna, which first appears in the historical record in the 5th c. B.C. (curiously about the time of the Greek philosophical enlightenment that gave us Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), centers around the supreme and uncreated deity Ahura Mazda (“Wise Lord”) and the oracles of his prophet, Zoroaster, also called Zarathustra. The religion of Zoroastrianism at least hints at an ultimately monotheistic interpretation of the divinity and also contains messianic prophecies and an eschatology of judgment, reward, and punishment.
Thus the figure of the Magi can be sketched: men who were educated in the high curriculum of their region and culture, who studied the natural world for signs of its divine origin, and who were open to the best wisdom of neighboring traditions in the attempt at rational synthesis not merely for intellectual knowledge and understanding but also to make themselves witnesses of the mighty works of God in the world. They travel to Bethlehem as servants of Universal Wisdom. Informed as they are by fragments of Hebrew prophecy testifying to the birth of Messiah in Judea, they seek this singular personage who is deserving of special and particular gifts—“gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (Isa 60:5-7; Ps 72:10-11; Mt 2:1-12). The Magi are men of science who know that authentic reception of divine revelation is the ultimate goal of human knowledge, and they desire to be at the vanguard of those who go to meet the divine ambassador of good will.
The Tyranny of Modernity’s Untruthfulness
One might well say that if reason and wisdom mean anything at all they mean truthfulness, and what could be more untruthful than a tradition which refuses to acknowledge the seeds of its birth and rather imagines that it is self-created, that it owes nothing to anyone, that by its own Promethean effort it has transcended tradition, that it has no story, that it stands alone in human history atop the mountain of vanquished philosophies and theories and socio-political arrangements, victorious at last over every father and mother, every ancestral taboo, every philosopher and poet and artist and mystic and theologian, every prior determination of nature or human community or individual (even its own prior determinations!), that it is so radically free as to be answerable to no one and nothing?
Such a standpoint would be indeed untruthful. It would also be fantastic, and ludicrous if it weren’t so frightening, since any body of people who combined this outlook with great physical and political power would be the tyrannical force in the world most to be feared. Is it any wonder, then, that everywhere one looks in our society there is massive rebellion against the tradition of Modernity itself? We know that the world we have made for ourselves is untruthful and therefore oppressive, and from all sides of the political spectrum there are voices demanding the deconstruction of our western liberal order. This “thinness” of our present culture which we at least implicitly complain of when we cast about for non-western “wisdom traditions” is a testimony to the deep spiritual dissatisfaction with what we have made of our European heritage. At the very moment of our cultural victory over Christendom we find that we cannot revel as conquering heroes but rather rage in self-immolation at the spiritual wasteland we have created, at the desecration of the holy, and we chafe under the new tyranny of untruthfulness that makes up the substance of our supposedly emancipated institutions.
A Recovery of Authentic “Western” Tradition?
The long journey to a contemporary yet authentic western self-consciousness and identity will be the road, not merely “to Rome,” but to Bethlehem. The spirit of romanitas through which the European cultural identity was formed is not the spirit of mere blood-and-soil tribalism, nor an artificial internationalism, and neither is it a spirit of individualistic self-creation. Rather it is the commitment to looking backward (to its history and tradition) and inward (in spiritual self-awareness) and outward (to universal wisdom) even as it looks forward. The true European ethos is what French philosopher Rémi Brague calls “eccentric culture”: a culture that revolves and evolves from a center outside itself, looking to other sources of cultural wealth not in an egocentric spirit of “cultural appropriation” but rather in humble openness, honesty, and creative synthesis.
Looking to the sacred cave of Bethlehem, what have we seen? Not a disparate collection of mere “seekers,” but rather a human ecclesia, a unity-in-diversity, a community formed in joy, peace, and hope, and all at the intersection of human wisdom and divine revelation. What we see at the sacred cave is, among other things, a seed of western civilization. And that, I propose, is a crucial aspect of the meaning of Christmas for our time. Let us each in this new year make ourselves part of the vanguard, and travel once again from Bethlehem to the world, and from the world to Bethlehem—in our daily work, our neighborhoods and city, our friendships, our families, our parishes, singing with our lives and not merely our lips the song angels sang to men so long ago, “Glory to God in the highest; and on earth peace to men of good will.” Fr. Byron S. Hagan is the Parochial Vicar of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Northeast Minneapolis. He is a frequent contributor to MSPCatholic.