The festival of Christmas

Whether you believe or not, you can’t repudiate the power of Christianity without forsaking so much that has made us what we are.

Detail from The Adoration of the Magi by Botticelli.

It’s odd to think that Christmas, like death, according to Jesus, comes like a thief in the night. But, God knows, not when we’re least expecting it but when the world, especially the innocent childhood world, is full of expectation. Remember all that excitement at the thought of lumbering Father Christmas suddenly descending chimneys, his reindeer waiting, to fill those Christmas stockings or pillowslips full of all the heart had desired and yearned for?

Does it matter that Santa Claus, as we also know him, was a rejigging of the figure of St Nicholas by a gilded age America and our visual sense of him is probably shaped by Norman Rockwell, all that white-bearded jolly old fat man stuff, all those wide-eyed pretty kid ragamuffins? No, of course not, because that vision of Christmas was always implicit in the whole shebang. Christmas is the great festival when we celebrate the coming of the Christ child whose innocence will save the world and it’s appropriate that we pay homage to the image of the loved child through our feeling for the children we treasure. And the night before Christmas (with nothing stirring, not even a mouse, as the old rhyming yarn has it) is appropriate because Christmas is an apparitional time. Some people, High Anglicans and Catholics, go to midnight mass as if to acknow­ledge that it’s through darkness that the first glimmer of light is known and highlighted.

And all the legend of Christmas is there in those carols we sing or listen to by candlelight, just as the Europeans have their feast the night before Christmas. “Silent night, holy night. All is calm, all is bright.” “Stille nacht, heilige nacht.” These carols seem as old as human memory — whenever they happen to have been written — because they register so early in our memories. “Away in a manger, no crib for a bed / The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head.”

Out of the mouth of babes, the scripture says, and the language of Christmas and something of its warmth but also its uncanniness, its magic, is there in these songs of the folk that somehow soothe the soul. White magic, of course. The grace that somehow, like clockwork, comes into the world again with the Christmas moment. Bing Crosby sang with irresistible sweetness, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” — betokening the picture-perfect snow that might adorn all those Christmas cards he wrote. Even though in our upside-down antipodean world we have had to partly reinvent Christmas, at least climatically. There are a couple of films of Bush Christmas, the last with a very young Nicole Kidman in 1983.

But Crosby didn’t only sing Irving Berlin’s White Christmas; he also sang Adeste Fideles — O Come All Ye Faithful — booming out in his crooning way: “O come ye, o come ye to Bethlehem. Come and behold Him born the King of Angels!” At some level the civilisation we inherit has had to be faithful to that vision because it is written into our deepest traditions. After all, you can’t repudiate the power of the Christian story (whether you believe a word of it or not) without forsaking so much that has made us what we are, from Crosby and Father Christmas and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer all the way up.

Up to what? Well, think of the great Madonnas and nativities of Western art. Born the King of Angels. Think of the extraordinary figures of casual beauty who attend on Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks and of how she stares down with one hand lifted almost in apprehension — well, at any rate in anticipation — stares everything down while the gorgeous chubby Christ child is there with a cross slung under his arm and the angel, looking like a god, does seem to understand the mystery of the universe. Beckoning from an aperture there is a glimpse of rocks and waves. And when we look at a painting such as this — which seems with such subtlety and almost offhand grace to contain, beyond paraphrase, a feeling of all we know on earth and all we need to know — it’s hard to dismiss all this nativity stuff.

Christmas and whatever Christ­mas signifies is central to the figure of the Madonna in all her artistic realisations and beyond them. What is the Marian moment of the divine praises said at vespers or benediction? “Blessed be the great mother of God, Mary most holy.” Think of the lyricism of Fra Filippo Lippi’s The Annunciation: the angel Gabriel so intent in his grave courtesy, the Virgin with eyes downcast as if dazed by his prophecy that the power of the Most High will come upon her.

This is the moment just before she comes out with the Magnificat, which the greatest music in the world has tried to pay homage to. It is sung, some would say matchlessly, in the Catholic plainchant or its Anglican variation, but we also have it in versions by Monteverdi and Pales­trina as well as the supreme genius of German Protestantism and the Lutheran tradition — not to mention, arguably, the whole of Western civilisation, as it is cherished in music — by Johann Sebastian Bach.

The Magnificat is crucial because the moment of the Annunciation is what sets everything else in motion. This is where Mary goes along with it all, when she says, “Be it done unto me according to thy word.” When she says yes to the incarnation and becoming the mother of God, of bearing the Christ child. The title of the canticle of the Virgin Mary comes from the opening lines of the Latin, Magnificat anima mea dominum. And here is that line translated together with the rest of this moment of transcendent poetry which is thought of as one of the greatest expressions of Hebraic exaltation in the New Testament.

If you think Mary doesn’t say much in the gospels, listen to this. It’s from St Luke who, according to legend, was the confidant of the woman her cousin Elizabeth hailed as blessed among women. “My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done great things to me; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.”

Wagner described Bach as a stupendous miracle in music but in the case of the Magnificat he was transposing great music of a verbal kind to another medium. But the mystery of Christianity and the power of Christmas in particular haunted Bach all his days. In 1734 he wrote his Christmas Oratorio which is sometimes illustrated with that astonishing and uncompromising painting by those northern masters the van Eycks.

It’s also fascinating that we’re contemplating the majesty of Mary’s sense of her mission and the way it issues into the grandest Jewish variety of rhetoric — and of a poetry that transcends rhetoric — to think of the prophetic nature of the great Christmas oratorio in our own Anglo-Saxon tradition, Handel’s Messiah. Handel was an adoptive Englishman and in this immensely grand and stirring work — at which everyone according to tradition stands at the Hallelujah chorus because that’s what the king did in the 18th century — the texts are things like Isaiah’s “He was despised and rejected” — though Handel presents them with maximum dynamism as prefigurations, hence prophetic anticipations of the New Testament.

We tend now to believe that Messiah should be listened to with original instruments — in versions such as those by Christopher Hogwood or John Eliot Gardiner — which are sensitive to what would have been considered contemporary rhythms and speeds. But what a thing of grandeur it is when it is performed with maximum panoramic magnitude in something like the Eugene Goossens edition of it. There is a version of that conducted by that majestic old extrovert Sir Thomas Beecham, from the 1950s, with the great Canadian tenor Jon Vickers.

The story of Christmas is all about people who saw the Christ child come or at any rate wanted to see him. It’s a lovely, homely story. The fact there is no room at the inn. That the child is born in the straw and dreck of a manger with animals and minders of animals as those who honour his coming. It’s a story of the folk and it touches some part of our civilisation that Christ will come to emphasise. “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”

Is it far-fetched to say this influenced democracy? “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” The belief that every soul is equal before the Most High who overshadows all Solomons leads to St Francis and his belief in holy poverty. “Sell what thou hast and give it to the poor,” the all-but-impossible advice Jesus gives to the rich young man, is simply the advice to someone who wants to be a saint. And we all know what we think of that for a game of soldiers.

There is the other side of the homage paid to the baby Jesus represented by the Magi, the three kings of the Orient who sought him out: Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar. The Christmas cycle, its 12 days or two weeks, ends with the feast of the epiphany of January 6 which celebrates the three wise men who come to worship Jesus and bring him their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

And Botticelli’s The Adoration of the Magi (1485-86) shows the homage of the wise men almost in a stage set that is a little bit like a ruin of a classical temple. It’s all a bit like the poet Swinburne’s paraphrase of the deathbed cry of the Emperor Julian, Vicisti, Galilaee (“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean”). Then again Socrates has a bit in common with Jesus: they both died for the Good. And you can see why they imagined that the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil, the great Roman epic poet of the Aeneid, seemed to envision the coming of the Messiah. “Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new generation descends from heaven on high … smile on the birth of the child.”

Christmas is a time when we emphasise the comfort and joy of this Christian story and act out of our sense of the blessedness of giving and the sanctity of those we love, especially children. But there’s a dark side to all this even in its moment of first articulation. Remember how Herod pricks up his ears at the mention of how a new king is to be born and how he orders the slaughter of the innocents because the baby Jesus must be killed at all costs?

Dorothy L. Sayers represents it with brilliance and subtlety in her radio play The Man Born to Be King, which was first broadcast during World War II and had in the role of Jesus Robert Speaight, the actor who created the role of Thomas a Becket in TS Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and who also played Thomas More in the original Australian production of A Man for All Seasons in 1962. He was, together with Sir Alec Guinness, the most celebrated reader of Eliot’s poetry.

And it’s difficult if you know it not to think of Eliot’s pensive, nearly bitter poem, Journey of the Magi. Guinness recorded it with wonder and that famous gentleness in his voice but also with disquiet under the urbanity. “Were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly / We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, / But had thought they were different; this Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death. / We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I should be glad of another death.”

The cheeriness of Christmas and its deep comfort is a myth and one we believe (whether we think we believe a word of it or not). Often, indeed, as Christmas is coming at us like a runaway train we have to fall back on the words of the doubting St Thomas, “Lord, I believe: help Thou my unbelief.”

Quite apart from any question of faith it can just seem like a nightmare because it’s some part of a calendar we have to handle. Why? Because it comes in the name of family. Of those who are dear to us and whom we can’t escape. There’s also the potential strain in Christmas meals, so overtly festive, so susceptible to the horrors of love, not coming out the right way. The loved one we would kill for who no longer speaks to us. The loved one who not only speaks but shrieks at us because this is also, a fortiori, a time of potential tension when the desire to honour innocence and giving, whether literal or not, can turn into its opposite.

Everyone understands the “Bah! Humbug!” of Charles Dickens’s Scrooge just as everyone is likely to be moved by his surrender to goodness and generosity and the plight of Tiny Tim. A Christmas Carol is fascinating because it’s one of the great stories of an age that was still an age of belief, an age when both John Wesley in one direction and John Henry Newman in the other had done much to renew Christianity in Britain.

But Dickens’s myth of Christmas had to be expressed agnostically — it couldn’t be presented too much as a Jesus story because whatever else had happened in 19th-century Britain there had been the shadow of Charles Darwin and also the abuses of capitalism. So although Dickens had his “God bless us everyone”, he was never a religious writer in the way his great Russian contemporaries Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were.

And what about the great modernists? James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a beautifully buoyant, deliciously lit representation of a ruined Christmas dinner. And in the greatest of the stories in Dubliners, the last one, The Dead, he uses a Christmas party simply as the occasion for rehearsal of lost loves and fierce regrets and a very lyrically phrased pessimism.

It’s all a far cry from Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity or from that supreme sense of the transfiguration of the figure of a love that is holy in a world where nothing else is, which we get in those extraordinary Madonnas with child of the Renaissance master Raphael, who created the idiom of the Christmas card caper with such vigour and such a sense of normality and strength that it might almost be a cliche.