The other day, a TV priest identified a positive sign, as they say, in today’s society. It seems the churches are increasingly packed for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, “something not seen a few years ago”. I have a hunch the sign does not mean quite what that friar thinks.
Churches are packed on Christmas Eve all over Europe. Is it a sign some attachment to organised Christianity is still twitching among the masses? Possibly. But it is just as likely the liturgy has become secularised. An agnostic Swedish friend, so beautiful each word of hers sounds to me like philosophy, described it as “cosy”. The service could be part of the tranquillising entertainment of the season, with its place alongside productions of the Nutcracker, pantomimes and A Christmas Carol.
The rising Maltese numbers of Midnight Mass attendance, on this view, would be a sign of growing secularisation. The ritual serves to modernise paganism for recent urbane generations overwhelmed by counsellors and therapists, all urging them to get in touch with their feelings, nurse their inner child, enjoy what makes their society unique and let their children archive some warm, enchanted memories for the colder, disenchanted years to come.
So which is it? Paganism or Christianity?
Must we choose? Some tests suggest themselves but the very idea of trying to insulate Christianity from paganism is misguided.
It seeks to discover a purity of essence that is alien to what the gospel writers, not to mention the early and mediaeval Church, introduced into the feast of Christmas.
In the gospel, the Nativity does not take place in an enchanted world. The story is one of deep darkness – imperial census, homelessness and rejection, mass slaughter on the basis of a horoscope – which slowly becomes permeated with light.
Many scholars doubt the Roman census, which requires Joseph and Mary to be on the move, actually took place; the idea that people would need, en masse, to return to their native towns sounds like a most un-Roman-like recipe for social confusion and political instability. If it is an artistic fiction, however, it would only underline just how much the writers wanted to portray a world in the winter of its discontent, needing a turn of the sun.
Scholars also point to the resemblance between the account of the birth of Jesus and the mythological accounts of the births of certain pagan gods. But if the gospel writers drew on such accounts, as they may have, it was to argue with them: by coming up with a story similar enough so that its divergences become striking and surprising.
The virgin births of the gods were based on the idea of a divide between the sacred and the profane. It offered a magical view of the world, with a special place for gods and religion. Often, it had an esoteric message meant for the select few, like a stock market insider-tip from a trusted friend.
In contrast, the Nativity tells a story turning on a paradox. It would make no sense without the idea of the sacred; yet, it seeks to abolish the divine from the profane. It urges the disenchantment of a counter-culture to the glitter and glamour of power and the idols but argues that to view the world with disenchantment is not to profane everything, like the cynics, but rather to see it all as sacred. What’s more, its message was for everyone. It was news, to be sifted and compared like the tidings of an economic recovery or the report of a neighbourhood sighting of Natalie Portman.
It is not a simple idea to convey, within the confines of either a story or religious teaching, but Christians have tried. In the gospel, what is extraordinary about the deity’s birth is the absence of religious paraphernalia while the distinction between pagan magic and Christian truth is dissolved when the three wise men, their intimations resting haphazardly on astrology, find the manger.
In later Church teaching, ingenious ways were found to incorporate European midwinter celebrations into the Christian festivals of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. The Christmas tree is a pagan evergreen; the 12 days of Christmas are derived from the Roman revelries; the candles are drawn from Roman and other traditions that ward off darkness.
The fact that almost everything to do with Christmas tradition is of pagan origin is sometimes described as the fruit of Christian theological spin. Even this jaundiced view, however, should make us notice a theology keen to house the foreign and dissolve the boundaries between who’s in and who’s out. It stands in such stark contrast to the fundamentalism rife in our times, so keen to use coercive means to weed out anything and anyone deemed foreign.
The teachers, however, did not think of themselves as spin doctors trying to draw in the undecided. They did not seek to enchant but to disenchant. Holly was used as festive decoration but also regarded as a harbinger of blood and the crown of thorns. At the historical roots of the child’s sermon at Midnight Mass lies a tradition of celebrating the infants killed in the hunt for the baby Jesus: in the 12 days after Christmas, ecclesiastical responsibility was delegated to children, with a choirboy elected bishop, having miniature vestments.
Recounting such history makes Christmas seem a strange feast. But it is. It divinises pagans and kills their gods.
ranierfsadni@europe.com