Poets sometimes have as great a capacity to help us with Christmas as the theologians; for Christmas is a time of deep and complex beauty. Part of the complexity is best caught by the paradoxes that we encounter within it, and at times of mystery it is often the poets who interpret paradox best. Both in the ideas behind Christmas and the way we celebrate it, we are confronted by both paradoxes; but the poets can also help us with the practicalities of the way in which we approach the celebration.
Two poets in particular help us: GK Chesterton with the paradoxes, and Charles Williams with the contradictions of our practice. In <em>The Everlasting Man</em> (1925), Chesterton explores the two contrasting realities of supremacy and vulnerability. He describes the beauty of the paradoxes better than most:
“Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God.”
In his picture of reality, Chesterton linked these two seemingly unconnected, even opposing, ideas – God and a child, divinity and infancy, omnipotence and vulnerability, creation and helplessness. “Bethlehem,” he wrote, “is emphatically a place where extremes meet.” It is the birthplace of a child, at once divine and human, at once all-powerful and powerless.
In one of his final poems, “<em>Gloria in Profundis</em>”, he captures the paradox of love as the power of God the Father yields to the powerlessness of the Son as a child in a manger: “Glory to God in the Lowest.”
We respond to the mystery and beauty of Christmas with a rhythm of feasting and fasting. But not all of us can manage the balance between celebration and renunciation as well as we would like. Many of us are better at one than the other.
Another poet, Charles Williams – one of the Oxford Inklings and friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien – wrote about feasting and fasting as being a matter of vocation in which we found ourselves making up for each other’s weaknesses across both space and time. He suggested that even if we as individuals can’t manage the balance as well as we would like to, the Church, on our behalf, can.
His understanding of the interplay between the <em>via positiva</em> and <em>via negativa </em>was that it involved a symbiotic interdependence. These two spiritualities are not contradictions, for they coexist, almost, co-inhere, in the life of the Church: “each being the key to the other”.
Williams suggests that this idea applies to the way in which the <em>via negativa</em> and the <em>via positiva</em> are practised by the whole Church, beyond what we do or don’t manage as individuals. He describes co-inherence and its practical expression as “exchange”: a quest for balanced integration not only in ourselves as individuals, but more helpfully across the life of the Church in both time and space:
“The Rigorous view is vital to sanctity; the Relaxed view is vital to sanity. Their union is not impossible, but it is difficult; for whichever is in power begins after the first five minutes, to maintain itself from bad or unworthy motives. Harshness, pride, resentment encourage the one; indulgence, falsity, detestable good fellowship the other.”
Rather beautifully, he describes this in terms of vocation, as if each of us is called to be stronger in the practice of one rather than the other:
“Some were called to a strictness, and some to a laxity. It naturally happened that strictness, being more difficult, was regarded as superior. So far as difficulty is concerned, it is. So far as vocation is concerned, it is not. Relaxation is no less holy and proper than Rigour, though perhaps it can hardly be preached so. But the lovely refreshments of this world may not be without their part in the lordly rigours of others; the exchanges of Christendom are very deep; if we thrive by the force of the saints they too may feed on our felicities.”
We are encouraged that even if we fail to fast as thoroughly as we should in Advent (and Lent) across the divisions of space and even time, we are in a reciprocal relationship with the saints.
We should shrug off despair and self-criticism, and instead remind ourselves that some of us have a duty to bring as much beauty of art, music and intellect to the fast as we possibly can. They, the saints, have practised a deeper renunciation than we can manage, but we are invited to practise a deeper celebration of feasting in return.
<strong><strong>This article appears in the December 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
