The unlikely joy of Christmas

In the Year of the Earth Goat, halfway through the third millennium of the ancient sexagenary cycle, the Han Emperor Ai died and was succeeded by his 8-year-old cousin. Far to the west, Amanishakheto ended her reign as Kandake of Kush; Artaxias II of Iberia perished as the foundations were laid in Eritrea for the great mercantile Kingdom of Aksum. In Teotihuacan a city began to rise out of the jungle that would eventually span eight square miles. In Rome, at the behest of the emperor, the newly unretired Tiberius turned his attention to the quelling of a revolt in Gaul while Ovid began the composition of his immortal Metamorphoses. And in Palestine, an insignificant province of that glorious empire, a teenaged girl gave birth to a child in a cave that doubled as a stall for oxen.

Some of the above-mentioned occurrences are well attested; others are the objects of conjecture, the province of archeologists rather than historians. Whatever the contemporaneous significance of the others, only the last of these events, which was celebrated more than 2,000 years ago by a handful of semi-itinerant non-citizens and three philosophers of Persian or African (or perhaps Chinese) extraction, continues to be the occasion of joy for more than two billion people the world round.

What is the source of that felicity? I have long suspected that it is bound up in one of the most persistent objections to the Christian faith. Assuming that a universe that is now estimated to have come into being 14 billion years ago, in which the indescribable vastness of our own solar system is of almost infinitesimal smallness, has a great Architect is one thing. How about the idea that He might become incarnate as one of millions of extant species on a rather small planet, in an unremarkable setting among rude and unlettered persons, amid the most ignominious of circumstances (born in a stable to a mother who was suspected of adultery)?

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If it all sounds rather quaint now, it is nothing in comparison with how strange this story would have appeared in late antiquity. We may not value the lives of children sufficiently these days, but we have no problem being sentimental about them. The pagans of the first century felt otherwise. Children are weak; babies, especially those of mere imperial subjects, worthless. The idea that a hero-king, much less the incarnate wisdom of the universe, would take the form of a humble infant, and that His birth and eventual judicial murder would be one of the most important occasions in the history of the cosmos, would not only have been considered implausible, it would have been called offensive to both morals and aesthetic tastes. (This was the so-called "slave revolt in morals" that filled Nietzsche with disgust: Unlike so many enemies of the Church before or since, he perfectly understood the significance of Christianity and hated it.)

It is not only righteous pagans who were appalled by the Incarnation. It is well and good to observe, as the authors of the Gospels did, that it was in accordance with the words of the Prophet Isaiah (and perhaps dimly apprehended by Virgil as well). But even, indeed perhaps especially, those who were familiar with the prophets were not prepared for who the Messiah was when he arrived. He had no sword, no armies, no chariots; he did not promise the restoration of an earthly kingdom for His chosen people but the establishment of a supernatural imperium in which all persons might be honorable subjects.

This is why I am not even remotely surprised by the world's incredulity about what happened in that hollowed-out piece of rock in Bethlehem in the middle of the Han Dynasty. It is just as astonishing to those of us who find in it the source of an ineffable joy.