“They saw … they came … and worshipped him”
Unlike Caesar who proverbially came, saw and conquered, the Magi-Kings saw, came, and adored. They were conquered by what they saw. They “fell down and worshipped.” They beheld, through the leading of a star, the child-King of Bethlehem. In their adoration, they “opened their treasures and presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh,” ‘sacred gifts of mystic meaning,’ as one of our hymns wonderfully puts it. Such really is the real origin of gift-giving, the giving of gifts in honour of the gift that is given in Christ’s holy Nativity.
Epiphany marks the completion of Christmas. Everything which belongs to sight and sound, to art and music, to prayer and praise is finally gathered together. The imaginary of Bethlehem is now a crowded place of images derived at once from holy scripture and from holy imagination. With “the adoration of the magi”, the pageant of Christmas is now wonderfully complete.
And over. At least, the account of what we have come to call Epiphany marks both the completion of the mystery of Christmas and inaugurates a new and different consideration. The Journey of the Magi impels, in fact, another journey, one that conveys a profound sense of disquiet and unease. “Being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way,” Matthew tells us. “No longer at ease,” T.S. Eliot suggests, because they are profoundly changed by the mystery which they beheld in Bethlehem. Somehow what they worshipped and adored stays with them and has its way within them. Something has changed. There is a questioning wonder about what we have been given to see. As Eliot’s poem, the Journey of the Magi, puts it:
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.
The awareness of our limitations, of which death is the greatest and ultimate limitation, is the birth of philosophy. It is an ancient theme, constantly reworked and replayed in myriad ways. The death of Enkidu gives birth to Gilgamesh’s quest for wisdom in The Epic of Gilgamesh and launches him on a journey through the realms of the deep darkness of death, the home of the sun which in the ancient understanding arises out of the darkness and sets into the darkness. The death of Patroclus occasions a philosophical crisis for Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. And so for Plato, for Augustine, for Dante, for Shakespeare, for Descartes, the list goes on and on, but in one way or another, the awareness of human limitations gives birth to reflection and wisdom.
The adoration of the magi is part of that ancient thinking. The story of our humanity in its deepest truth and dignity is found in our thinking upon the nature of God’s engagement with our humanity, a story which, with the birth of Jesus, is written in the very flesh of our humanity. It is the story, too, of the intense awareness of our limitations. Only so can we be opened out to the presence and the truth of God in his eternity. Epiphany is equally theophany, the manifestation of God as God.
A story, but what kind of story? Matthew does not tell us how many “μαγοι” there were, beyond mentioning three gifts, and, apart from the star which he mentions, neither he nor Luke make any mention of ox and ass, let alone peacocks and greyhounds, kangaroos and beavers, or any other of the menagerie of creation that one might imagine. But the question is who didn’t or doesn’t know this? In other words, how did we become so unwise?
How does anyone knowthat it is just a legend, meaning that it really didn’t happen, anymore than anyone can know absolutely and exactly what happened historically? The point is that we do not and, more importantly, cannot know because we confront certain historical limits to our knowing in that way, whether empirically or rationally. What is the stuff of legend, in the sense of being added to the core story centuries later, are the three magi-kings with names and biographies as in the carol, “We Three Kings of Orient are”. No doubt nowadays they would be supplied with facebook accounts, twitter feeds, instagram selfies and cannabis as a ‘health’ substitute for frankincense!
The Christmas story, simply put, is not and cannot be a linear narrative. The Christmas mystery gathers into that holy scene of Bethlehem so many different things yet not unwisely or unwittingly. It is a deliberate collage of images signifying a profound truth. Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, in their wonderful collaborative painting, the tondo known as The Adoration of the Magi, show a vast pageant of people and creatures all coming to the stable. The painting, rich in symbolic meaning, captures the biblical story in a rich and imaginative way that deepens the understanding and awakens awe and wonder about the divine engagement with our humanity. They knew that the biblical story does not mention peacocks or platypuses any more than they supposed that everyone and everything was literally gathered together at one time in that holy place so long ago and far away.
No. The story of Christmas isa narrative of purpose that arises out of an awareness of human limitation. We are bidden to be wise, to come and adore the mystery of the Word made flesh in the intimacy of the story of God’s engagement with our humanity. We are made aware of the human condition in all of its hopes and aspirations and in all of its despair and disarray, all things to which the Christmas mystery so profoundly speaks. It is really about a kind of wisdom, the counter and the corrective to our limited reasonings, to our computational thinking, to our thinking like a machine, to a kind of idolatry and betrayal of our reason.
“When I am told,” writes Thomas Paine in his 1794 treatise, The Age of Reason, “that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this – for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so – it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.”
This has all the qualities of argument that we associate with the so-called Enlightenment, but is utterly blind to any form of thinking other than its own. Thomas Jefferson, too, removed from the New Testament all the miracle stories of Jesus because such things seemed to contradict natural reason. The young Hegel, too, it is true, did much the same thing. Perhaps this is simply the adolescence of reason. It is as if we cannot think these stories, their meaning and their wisdom. Yet for both Paine and Jefferson, a belief in God and a hope for happiness beyond this life were axiomatic. What then is the problem? For Paine, it is the form of revelation that concerns him and as such he fails to consider the content. For him, “Revelation,” as he says,“when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.” More revealingly, he claims “my own mind is my own church.” And its own wilderness, its own idol.
The philosopher and educator Neil Postman reminds us of the necessity of a transcendent narrative of purpose, without which there is only power and no truth, noting that despite the evident skepticism about the narratives of religion, the enlightenment figures who were the founding fathers of America nonetheless acted as if the narratives were true, as if there is a transcendent authority. Something more is required of us. It is to reclaim the wisdom and the understanding in the Christian story, to come and adore its truth. Such is the counter to our dogmatic refusals and our despair. It means the engagement of our minds with the story of God’s engagement with our humanity.
We see and come to these stories but we have yet to learn to worship. We have yet to learn to be wise apart from our own conceits. “A cold coming we had of it,” as T.S. Eliot imagines, quoting Lancelot Andrewes. It is not the journey to Bethlehem but from Bethlehem that is longer, harder and yet more necessary, a journey in which we are “no longer at ease”. Nor should we be. We are challenged to reason upon what has been mediated to us. Such is the true nature of revelation. It is very much about how we see and think.
We can, it seems to me, distinguish from the deposit of faith the imaginative elaborations upon it without compromise to essential doctrine. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s extended sequence of twenty-seven etchings entitled Picturesque Ideas on the Flight into Egypt, executed between 1750 and 1753 for the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg, provides one such example. Drawing upon second-century apocryphal works such as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, he offers a profound and wonderful commentary on the essential and creedal ideas that belong to the Incarnation. In one of the scenes, the holy family enters into an Egyptian city adorned with idols. As they make their way, the idols fall from their pedestals, one by one; all 365 of them, one for every day of the year! Part of the journey from Bethlehem is the flight into Egypt and thus by way of the ruins of human reason. We can only journey out of Egypt to Jerusalem by way of the redemption of our hearts and minds. It means an awareness of our own follies and limitations. Only so can we, like the Magi-Kings, see and come and worship.
“They saw … they came … and worshipped him”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany, 2019