O Come, All Ye Faithful

 This was one of the Christmas carols my high school chamber choir performed in our annual madrigal concert, welcoming the advent of Christ Jesus. The entire concert is a two- or so-hour long venue, featuring plenty of cheers (and wassail). The performance opens with Silent Night as the performers walk in and settle, greeting the guests. Soon after, groups of students perform prepared skits to open every carol sung—some historically informed, others more comical. The larger scene, nonetheless, is one festively honoring the Holy Nativity.

The author (left) in the 2019 madrigal concert celebrating the advent of Jesus Christ.

Yet, the elephant in the room remains. Why is everyone dressed up in these ridiculous outfits, and why are they trying to pull off exaggerated, English accents? Yet, nobody in the audience is gawking or giggling over such sight; instead, they are enamored by the story.

By bringing up my high school memory of performing in this choir, I attempt to make an analogy of how more modern historians view both the medieval visual and performing arts’ depiction of the Holy Nativity (at least, according to our readings). As Rudolf Bultmann asserts, for example, the mystery of the Gospels is now futile—an antiquated view that is “pointless because there is nothing specifically Christian about the mythical world picture,” and “impossible because no one can appropriate a world picture of a time now past that was not yet formed by scientific thinking.” [1].

In this sense, I think of Bultmann as a less extreme version of Thomas Jefferson, who labored to cut off all miracles in his Bible as he found it incompatible with a rationalist view of the world. While Bultmann does not go as far as Jefferson in personally rejecting the notion of the sublime, he thinks it infeasible to imagine the same Heaven and Hell, spirits and demons as our medieval predecessors did. If someone thinking like Bultmann entered our concert, I am sure they would chastise our skits being made up by the contriving minds of bored seventeen-year-olds and that half of our carol selection not actually existing in the medieval period. 

From the outsider point of view, that is true. Perhaps, substantively, the skits are superficial, maybe even arbitrary. Silent Night did not exist before the 19^th century. But is that criticism really getting at the point?

The same criticism can be used against elements of the York Mystery Plays, the Exeter Book, and the French iconography cited by Emile Mâle. In “Joseph’s Trouble about Mary,” the play fixates upon Joseph’s utter disbelief of Mary’s virginal pregnancy:

“God’s sand? Yah, Mary, God help!

But certes that child was never ours two.

But woman-kind if them list help,

Yet would they no man wist their woe.” [2].

The audience stands in Joseph’s place, bewildered and undoubtedly puzzled by such miracle. Matthew’s Gospel, however, tells a much simpler story without emphasis on the mystery: “Whereupon Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing publicly to expose her, was minded to put her away privately.” [3]. Even Advent Lyric VII in the Exeter Book tells much more vivid tale than Matthew ever did, speaking on how Joseph found the “wicked conception. . . the source of [his] shame” and that it “has been nothing but trouble.” [4]. Here, it is the maiden Mary herself that tells Joseph of the mystery. Yet, Matthew 1:20 clearly notes the “angel of the Lord appear[ing] to [Joseph] in his sleep” and informing him of the birth of Christ. [5]. Luke’s Gospel does not even tell of Joseph’s struggle.

I think an implicit suggestion Mâle’s work advances is that the medievals had a better sense of the “bigger picture” of the Gospels, including the Holy Nativity. He asserts that “if the life of Christ be divided into three parts—the childhood, the public life, and the passion—it becomes evident that the first and last alone have been represented with any wealth of detail.” [5]. The iconography did not seem to care too much about Jesus’ daily life. When reading the Advent Lyrics and the York plays with this framework in mind, I think things make more sense. The public life of Jesus Christ mattered much less than more significant, theological events like the Nativity and the Passion. Clearly, it was significant enough such that their liturgical calendar was fundamentally structured off this.

Stained glasswork at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris depicting the Nativity.

The medievals, feeling much less constrained than their Puritan successors, wrote liberally and without a “textualist” restraint. Take the more reflective Advent Lyric VIII, for example, pondering upon the eternal coexistence of the Father and the Son:

“There is no one so wise,

No sage so skilled under earthly skies,

No riddle-unraveler who can solve for us

How heaven’s guardian gathered himself

Into the spirit and flesh of his own Son.” [6].

This bewilderment is not found in Matthew nor Luke. Matthew’s Gospel simply tells the narrative of Joseph obeying angel Gabriel and taking Mary as his wife while birthing Jesus Christ. Luke’s Gospel also does not mention this mystery of a coeternal Father and Son. The medievals, much more than the later Puritans and certainly the modern thinker, willingly immersed themselves into such mystery. They were not afraid to be dazzled by them, nor be handicapped by the pure historicity of every granular detail of the Gospel.

In fact, the medieval Christian fully understood that strict, “textualist” interpretations of the four Gospels risk losing out on the bigger picture. John’s Gospel made this exceedingly clear:

“Many other signs also did Jesus in the sight of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God: and that believing, you may have life in his name.” [7].

John’s verses remind us of our utter subservience under the eyes of God—the one who humbled himself by becoming part of his creation. Bede’s note of the writing of the Bible being guided by the Holy Spirit reminds us further that it is already remarkable that God has chosen to communicate with us through scripture (or, as a previous blog post eloquently pointed out, the biblical “tabernacle”).

“O Come Let Us Adore Him, Christ, the Lord!”

I thus circle back to my high school madrigal concert. What does it have to do with what I discussed immediately above? The point of the concert is, like the iconography, York plays, and Book of Exeter, not to recreate such scenes of medieval Advent worship one-for-one; we are twenty-first-century high schoolers dressed up in funny outfits pulling off ridiculous “English” accents. Instead, the point is to celebrate the advent of Jesus Christ—the coming of the Son of God. The historicity of the performance, though not completely irrelevant, is still ancillary.

Similarly, the medievals recognized that there was nothing heretical about putting theological considerations ahead of historical ones. No one denies that there are elements that may not have completely lined up with the “historical” Gospel. But the importance is, as John said, to immerse the reader into the story of the Gospel and demonstrate that Jesus is the Son of God.

—PJZ

Sources:

1.     Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology (1941),” New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 3.

2.     “Joseph’s Trouble about Mary,” York Mystery Plays, ed. Richard Beadle and Pamela King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 56.

3.     Matthew 1:19 (DRV).

4.     The Exeter Book: Advent Lyric VII, The Complete Old English Poems, trans. Craig Williamson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 313-15.

5.     Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century (1958) (New York: Routledge, 2018), 177.

6.     The Exeter Book: Advent Lyric VIII, 315-17.

7.     John 20:30-31 (DRV).