Timeless appeal of Christmas mysteries within mysteries

Botticicelli Madonna and Child 1470

Nothing is more fundamental to the idea of Christmas than the fact it is celebrated in honour of the baby Jesus and it has as its primary focus children who are, by neces­sity, more innocent than the adults they become, the adults who love and cherish them and do their best to make them shriek with pleasure at the presents they give them.

In Leonardo’s great The Virgin and Child with St Anne in the ­Louvre, it is as if we get the two faces of motherhood, the one playful and full of expectation, the other sophisticated with the knowledge of every satisfaction and sorrow life can offer.

The candles of Christmas, like the carols, go back a long way. Some people, a lot of them not regular churchgoers, love the darkness followed by the light of the midnight mass — though some candles always stay lit, it’s not the extinguishing darkness of Easter.

The idea of a candle is as simple as childhood. The idea of “in the beginning was the Word”, of the glittering Logos of the beginning of St John’s Gospel, is the beginning of a reshaping of Christianity that would not have been possible if those Jewish apostles and disciples, those simple fishermen and women of the streets like Mary Magdalene, who Jesus said he would turn into fishers of men, had not been to school with the Greeks of Athens, in particular to Plato.

The Athenians had their temple to the Unknown God, and the Greeks were often monotheists in practice, for all their plethora of gods, who were as endless as the saints of Christendom and the deities of Hinduism.

We should be grateful to St Nicholas and his gradual transformations into Santa Claus and Father Christmas, and the deeply moving, mysterious figure of Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street.

There’s no murmuring against these things because they’re part of the furniture of our minds and all the hopes and fears they contain, just as we can’t baulk at Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol. Anyone who thinks the story of Scrooge is just a great dollop of sentiment should go back to the original and revisit how much darkness and dread, how much spectral and harrowing purgatory precedes the softening of Scrooge’s heart. Besides, we should beware the old injunction of Umberto Eco, the author of The Name of the Rose as well as a theorist of literature, when he says you can ignore the high art of an age but not the popular art.

A Christmas Carol is Dickens’s great parable, and as a parable it’s sublime because it shows the world of Victorian capitalism haunted by the ghosts of an older reverence, a religion that said it was good to love your neighbour as yourself and that this was a version of loving the good with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind.

All of which is, in practice, impossible unless you’re a saint, and everyone knows saintliness is a mug’s game.

For the believer, the ultimate implication of the Christian story, preached at its most comforting at Christmas, is that they should become Christ. The figure of the baby who receives the reverence of the shepherds, the celebration of angels and the gifts of kings is an easier prospect than the “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” desolation of dying on a cross.

Literature, which is in the habit of telling the truth one way or another, has its examples of Christmas nightmare and desolation, however. The greatest English-language master of modernism, James Joyce, has a couple of Christmas stories.

One is overtly a short story, one of the most famous in modern literature, and it concludes Joyce’s volume of short stories, written in the manner of the great Gustave Flaubert in France, which he called Dubliners, and which Joyce said he wanted to carry the aroma of the staleness of life he had experienced.

His most famous story, which concludes the volume, is The Dead. It’s set in a scene of manipulated jollity with references to people being given another spoonful of goose fat and it begins with a ­famous example of how language can fail (and still work, a doctrine Joyce got from his religious education): “Lily the caretaker’s daughter was literally run off her feet.”

In this story a woman, intelligent and compassionate, looks back regretfully on her past in conversation with a refined chap who was the prototype of the sort of educated but parochial Irishman Joyce might have ended up as.

She talks about a young boy and declares she thinks he died for her. She is — at some level beyond our judgment — some sort of sentimentalist, and so is her interlocutor. The story, ideal for Christmas, ends in a magnificent flourish of purple and plangency like this:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

In his next book, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the most pure and brilliant, the most schematic and sterile of all point-of-view novels, and as great a work of art as a masterpiece in the minor mode can be, he painted a devastating picture of the Christmas dinner from hell.

Mr and Mrs Dedalus, Stephen’s parents (elaborately modelled on Joyce’s own, as Stephen is on him), are having their Christmas lunch with Mr Casey, who had been a supporter of Charles Parnell, the great home rule leader, and with Mrs Riordan, nicknamed Dante, the lady who looks after Stephen. Dante is a supporter of the priests who condemned Parnell because of his affair with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea.

She declares the clergy are the apple of God’s eye. Mr Casey says they are the murderers of his dead king.

She, the pious Catholic, speaks with impassioned vehemence and lack of charity and he exclaims, “No God for Ireland!” and is accordingly denounced as a fiend and blasphemer.

At some point, someone declares, “We’re all sinners and black sinners.” We, as readers, all say yes, we all say no. It’s an absolutely credible account with a depth of compassion inseparable from a technique with the precision of poetry, of how ritual jollity in the name of comfort and joy can turn into nightmare without anyone seeming remotely evil.

It is in its very Catholic way a portrait of a world riven with conflict, beset with a capacity for monstrous unkindnesses, which is nevertheless an absolutely recognisable world to all of us.

It is a world we have experienced a thousand times, its dramas and jokes, its bearable ghastliness.

And the way the governing point of view is that of the little boy who is innocent of the implication of everything that is shrieked and sobbed all around him, gives the story an absolute cleanliness of effect, as well as making it completely convincing.

This, among other things, is the familiar nightmare of Christmas, and the fact Stephen is the innocent — the blank Joycean sheet on whom all this squalor and scandal is written for later recollection — only makes the episode more classical, more pure in its musicality and its movement.

Anyone wanting to contemplate the imperfection of the world in the face of the effort, the sincere effort to celebrate childlike innocence and the festive season should have a look, or another look, at this.

Better still, download it from iTunes — or wherever — and listen to great Irish actor Cyril Cusack incarnate the voices with the majesty of a great musician and a great magician.

There are mysteries within mysteries about Christmas, so much light, so much dark. It’s all ushered in by a silent night, a holy night, the whole thing is older than the earth on which we sit.

It’s pagan, it’s Christian, we disbelieve it utterly, and we believe in it more than we know.