Michael Knowles sits down with Bishop Barron to explore the rich and intricate history of Christmas. In 'Michael Knowles Interviews Bishop Barron on the History of Christmas,' delve into the origins of the world's most beloved holiday.
Bishop Barron, a renowned figure in religious scholarship, brings his deep knowledge and insight to this enlightening conversation. Together, they uncover the layers of tradition, theology, and cultural significance that have shaped Christmas into the celebration we know today.
#MichaelKnowles #BishopBarron #HistoryOfChristmas #ReligiousHistory #ChristmasTraditions #TheologicalInsights #CulturalSignificance #HolidayOrigins #ChristianCelebration #FestiveSeason #HistoricalJourney #ChristmasEvolution #DeepDive #EducationalContent #SpiritualDiscussion
I hope you're having a marvelous first day of Christmas.
You know, there are 12 days of Christmas.
People, they want to take down the Christmas tree at five o'clock on Christmas Day itself.
It goes on much, much longer.
There is so much about the Christmas season, Advent, the 12 days of Christmas, the whole even why we celebrate Christmas on December 25th that is Confusing to many modern people.
I consider it all part of the war on Christmas.
I like to consider myself a general in the war on Christmas, but I decided we need to bring in some outside support here because, I don't know, what do I really know about any of this?
So I figured I would bring in an expert on Christmas, and that would be His Excellency Bishop Robert Barron.
Bishop Barron, thank you so much for coming on.
Michael, good to be with you.
Merry Christmas to you.
Merry Christmas.
Wonderful that you could make the time.
I actually want to talk specifically about time and about history and about this claim that one, Christians just invented Christmas and made it this time of year to steal a holiday from the pagans.
That's one claim I often hear.
Two, that there's no good reason that they picked December 25th other than, you know, there were pagan holidays and winter solstice.
And three, that it doesn't really matter when we celebrate Christmas.
It doesn't matter when this stuff happened.
Forget about history altogether.
Let's just, you know, Well, as you suggest, the standard view, and I would have learned it certainly as a student, is that we don't really know for sure when Jesus was born exactly, and December 25th corresponds to, you know, the pagan feast day of the Sol Invictus, right?
The All-Conquering Son, so the return of the light.
And there's a beautiful association there of Christ, the light of the world, etc.
And, you know, that could be the case.
We don't know.
That's a basic fact.
Another angle on it, though, is that some suggest, you know, the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25th, so nine months prior to December 25th, is actually older than the feast assigned for Christmas.
And so, is there some ground, if there was a Some reason to believe that was the case, historically, then wouldn't it make sense that December 25th would be the day of Jesus' birth?
But I think the wider point you're making is the most important one, namely that Christianity is an historical religion.
We are not a mythic system.
So, I love the myths.
I love myths of all the different, you know, cultures, and they're fascinating, and they tell fundamental truth.
That's the great virtue of the myths.
About nature, about the cosmos, about human psychology, etc.
But a mark of the myth is always that little phrase, you know, once upon a time or in that time.
They usually use the Latin in illo tempore.
Or I've often said the contemporary version is in a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
That's a way of signaling I'm dealing with a myth here because I'm not trying to situate it historically.
No one wonders, you know, who was the king of Greece when Hercules was cleaning the Aegean stables?
It's just a category error, because a myth deals with kind of trans-historical truths.
Then there's Christianity, which is a stubbornly historical religion.
It's not just making generic claims about our psychology or about the cosmos or the rhythms of nature.
It's making very specific claims about something that happened.
I think of it, Michael, every single Sunday when we recite the Creed and we say that little line, he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.
We're not talking about the cross as an archetypal symbol.
We're not talking about the mystery of death to life.
No, no, we're talking about this particular first century Jew who was crucified in the Roman manner under this governor whose existence can be verified outside the Bible, named Pontius Pilatus.
That grounds Christianity in a way that mattered immensely from the beginning.
The first Christians knew how vitally important it was that these things happened, you know?
So, there's a constant temptation to reduce Christianity to a mythic system, and it should be vigorously resisted.
Right.
One often hears Christianity referred to as the true myth.
We're not denying that there is this mythic significance, that there's this incredible semiotic significance to the cross and to the mysteries of life and death.
Even when we read in the Gospels, we read in illo tempore, but then what happens right after in illo tempore?
We hear Jesus dixit, you know, Christ said, and now we've lost the realm of mere poetry or high prose, and we're now into the realm of journalism, something that really happened with a real man among other men and women in a real place in real time, and we can trace that historicity all the way back.
I love that you mention the I think it was St.
coincidence of the Annunciation, you know, nine months prior to Christmas.
I think it was Saint Hippolytus of Rome who pointed that out.
And even Pope Benedict XVI observed that while one recognizes these beautiful parallels between the pagan feasts and Christmas, it's very difficult to argue now that the pagan feast, the Sol Invictus, predated Christmas because the earliest the Sol Invictus, predated Christmas because the earliest evidence we have of both in a calendar is from the chronography of 354, I think it is.
And so, it might just as well be the case that the Feast of Sol Invictus went the other way around.
Exactly.
What's beautiful about it to me, I suppose, is that when you have the historicity, you don't have to lose the myth.
And that, I suppose, in a broader view, the nativity and the crucifixion and the resurrection, it is the crux of history, literally.
It's what gives meaning and redeems all of the history, secular and otherwise, that we have around us.
No, quite right.
And you're referring, at least implicitly there, to C.S.
Lewis, who made that observation that those who say Christianity is just another myth haven't read many myths.
And Lewis himself was a great expert in mythic literature.
But it's the same Lewis who makes that remark.
If you want, it's the true myth, you know.
It's not just one more mythic telling among many.
So, you could say, remember, this goes back a few years when I was just ordained, Joseph Campbell came on the scene.
And talked about the myths of the world, and he used the phrase, the monomyth.
He felt that really all the cultures are telling one great story.
And I mean, look, that might be true at some archetypal level, but you can't say Christianity is just one more iteration of the monomyth, because we're up against the stubborn historicity of it.
Elements of truth from the monomyth that are also in the Gospels, sure, but it's the true myth It's the myth that sprang to life.
So, Lewis talks about the good dreams of the human race, that the myths represent the human race dreaming about what will be accomplished in Christ.
And so, they're anticipating Him.
And that's why when Christ is announced, a lot of cultures said, oh, yeah, I recognize that.
I understand that because their imagination had been evangelized through the myths.
So, I think that's a great way of combining the two ideas.
We don't have to just reject the mythic tradition, but we see it as a true myth.
Even, I was just flying back from India, where I flew out for a friend's wedding, and by the way, a big reminder to people, be very careful if you're going to become friends with Indians, because one day they might expect you to fly to India for their wedding.
But it was a lovely wedding, and it was actually in the more Catholic state, in Kerala, where Legend, or maybe history, but at least legend says that St.
Thomas landed.
Pope Benedict also.
Well, I think that's credible.
Well, I hope it's credible because I like to think that I was there where my confirmation landed.
I think it was Pope Benedict suggested he really only made it to northwestern India, Pakistan, say.
But I'd prefer to say that I was walking the ground that St.
Thomas did.
Yeah.
But on my flight back, I was reading some Church Fathers, and I was reading this great book about Dante.
You know, I love Dante, and I figured this will be some indulgent reading, especially in Advent time.
And something that Dante does is he gets into not only religious history, and not only myth also, but secular history.
You know, you see these confounding figures, these old Romans.
You know, Cato, for instance, in Purgatory, plays a really big role.
It's a reminder that the historical aspects of Christianity are not just confined to the faith or to some tiny little sliver of history, but to all of it.
Then I was reminded of this bizarre fact of Christmas, which is that at the time of the nativity, at the time of Christ's birth, you have sitting on the throne in Rome, the man referred to as the son of the divine, the Filius Divi, and then born in Bethlehem. the man referred to as the son of the divine, You have the Phileus Dei, the son of God.
The ascension to the throne of Caesar Augustus, Filius Divi, was heralded by a star, by a comment.
The nativity of our Lord, heralded by another star in Bethlehem.
The Filius Divi on the throne in Rome heralds the Pax Romana, the Roman peace.
The nativity of our Lord heralds the Pax Mundi, you know, the whole peace of the world.
If a Hollywood screenwriter could put that story on paper, you wouldn't believe it.
You'd say, it's too on the nose.
And yet, that really happened.
Yeah, and you mentioned Pope Benedict a couple times.
And, you know, go back to that famously controversial Regensburg address he gave that was misconstrued in a thousand different ways.
His main point there was, it's remarkably significant that Christianity says in Jesus, the Logos became flesh.
Because what that does, it permits a dialogue, literally dialogue, with the sciences, with history, with culture, with law, with all the deepest aspirations of the human heart.
Because what we're longing for, whether we're in a cultural framework, a legal framework, a political framework, we're looking for logos in some way.
We're looking for mind, for reason.
And so Christianity doesn't have to position itself as sequestered over on the side of things.
No, it's at the heart of everything.
Because if the Logos that every scientist is seeking, every artist is seeking, every decent person is seeking, that's the Logos that became flesh in Jesus.
So, it enables this marvelous cultural conversation, which has marked Christianity at its best from the beginning.
The point he was making there in Regensburg is a really vital one in a time of religious and cultural conflict.
And if religion is seen as Dangerous, you know, to our political arrangements and all that.
No, no.
It belongs at the heart of all of it because of the unique claim being made by Christianity.
Logos.
Logos.
The beginning of John's Gospel that matters immensely for our conversation today.
I love that you mentioned the Regensburg Address because the part that got the late Pope in trouble was he pointed out that the Christian conception of God is the God who is the Logos, who is the divine logic of the universe.
Whereas the Muslim conception, and he cited Ibn Hazm, this medieval Islamic scholar, Is that Allah is utterly transcendent such that if Allah were to order a follower to worship an idol He could do that and that would be understandable within the Muslim conception of God that would not be understandable within the Christian conception of God Which is a perfectly fine point that he made and I thought it was silly that he got in trouble for it but but it's extraordinarily significant because if
Our God is the God that is the Logos, then that means it all has to make sense.
You know, that the whole story has to make sense.
And so, you mentioned in the beginning of the Gospel of John, you see Christ identified with the Logos.
In the beginning of the Synoptic Gospels, what do you get?
You get history.
You get a genealogy.
So, how does one make sense of those two origin stories?
Well, I mean, I read them together as the Bible compels us to.
The genealogy accounts are meant to ground us in Israelite history.
I think it's wonderful that the first page you see in the New Testament is this long, complex genealogy, three sets of 14 generations, 14 being the number that corresponds in Hebrew to Dahwid or David.
So, Matthew is saying David, David, David has come.
But you can't avoid Israel if you don't understand Jesus.
See, that grounds him in history.
He's not a mythic archetypal figure.
He's the culmination of this long, roiled and complex and loamy history of Israel.
But it's that same Jesus who is uber-particular, he's an Israelite, came through this long particular tradition, who's also the Logos.
The Logos, the reason behind all things, is made plain to us in this baby who's the culmination of the long history of Israel.
God speaks his word in all things, which every scientist has to assume, right?
There's an intelligibility in everything.
So, God is speaking in all things, but he spoke in varied and fragmentary ways to our ancestors, but now in the fullness of time, he's spoken by means of his Son, by means of his word.
And so, it's the What appears as the culmination of Israel is, in fact, the Logos by which all things are informed.
I think that's the beautiful coming together, if you want, of a more Greek and a more Hebrew view that are right on display in the New Testament.
I love that point you just made, too, which is every scientist, whether he knows it or not, believes this.
You have to.
They have to.
Otherwise, nothing we say would be understandable one to another.
Intelligibility of the world, and that's Ratzinger too, one of the best arguments for God's existence is the radical and universal intelligibility of the world.
How do you explain that without recourse to some sort of creative intelligence which has thought the world into being?
The world is not dumbly there, it's intelligibly there, which is why the inquiring mind goes out to meet it.
Aquinas says that, you know, that there's this wonderful congruence between the seeking And the intelligible world.
Well, how do you explain that without some kind of recourse to Logos?
Now, the genius of Christianity, so any Greek philosopher might have said that.
You know, Pythagoras would have known that.
Plato would have known that.
But who would have guessed that that Logos is most fully revealed in this baby in Bethlehem, wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger?
That the Logos by which the whole universe is governed is something like the self-emptying love of God.
That's the genius and poetry of Christianity, that it brings those two things together.
If you resolve it one-sidedly on the side of history or one-sidedly on the side of philosophy, you're going to miss it.
It's the coming together of those two that's so powerful.
And to think about the symmetry of that in history that one would read only in the very finest myth or see in only the most significant aspects of history.
Namely, you have Adam, from Adam comes Eve, and then we have the fall of man because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve.
And then in the new Adam, our Lord, and in the new Eve, our Lady, you have The new Adam coming from the new Eve.
And you have, just as we have the fall of mankind because of their disobedience to God, of our first parents, so you have the redemption of mankind in Our Lady acquiescing and saying, yes, I'm the Lord's handmaid, be it done according to His will.
And then you have this little baby.
From our oldest first father, you have this little baby as the new Adam.
So beautiful, and it really happened, and even that kind of perspective on it, I fear is somewhat lacking in even the Christian consciousness today, to say nothing of non-Christians who've probably never heard of such a thing.
Well, you've been reading St.
Irenaeus, it sounds like, because that was Irenaeus.
I mean, look, very early on, he's a second-century figure.
Irenaeus dies around the year 200.
He's writing in the 160s, 170s, the time of Marcus Aurelius.
But Irenaeus, I mean, he saw all of this.
And I think one of the real seminal geniuses of our tradition, you know, we say Augustine and Origen, of course, but I think Irenaeus is one of the top three figures among the Church Fathers.
And he saw all those parallels that you were pointing out.
And let me stay with Mary for a second, because you're right, the New Eve, he was very strong on that.
But look at Mary in Luke's Gospel, is presented as the new Ark of the Covenant.
Because she bears within her the presence of God as the ark bore the presence of the Ten Commandments.
And that's echoed all throughout that story, most beautifully, I think, when she goes into the hill country of Judah.
And we'd say, okay, it's a geographical reference.
It is, but it's also a reference to the Old Testament, because when the ark was lost through a long series of events, it ends up in the home of this man in the hill country of Judea.
Same phrase.
Mary goes there.
Well, when David came to get the Ark, he brings it back to Jerusalem and he does this festive dance in front of the Ark, right?
Well, what happens when John the Baptist, in the womb of his mother, hears the greeting of Mary, but he leaps in her womb?
Well, the Fathers saw that as a recapitulation of David's dance.
So, it's a new David dancing in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant.
They didn't miss any of that stuff.
I mean, they saw Israel coming to its fulfillment.
And again, that's the point we have to make over and over again, Michael, I think, is without Israel, you will not understand Jesus.
And when you try, and it happens all the time, you turn Jesus into a sage.
He's a wise speaker of timeless truths.
He's one moral exemplar among many.
Well, who cares?
Who cares?
Yeah.
There's a thousand such figures.
But when you see him through the lens of Israel, and as Paul said, he's the yes to all the promises made to Israel.
Ah, now we get him.
Now we understand him.
That Israelite side of Christmas, I think, needs to be recovered.
It seems to be a peculiar eccentricity of our age that there is a desire to dehistoricize everything.
Yes, and de-Judaize.
I'd be more particular, and I don't want to be too provocative, but go back to the early 20th century when a lot of the historical critical figures, so these are biblical commentators in a more liberal, mostly Protestant tradition, but a lot of them were coming up out of a frankly anti-Semitic viewpoint.
Some, I don't want to overgeneralize, but some were even sympathetic with the Nazis.
And there was, even when I was learning the Bible as a young, you know, seminarian, there was a somewhat anti-Jewish reading of Jesus.
You see it in biblical scholarship to the present day.
When you turn him into a, he's a Stoic philosopher or he's a, you know, he's another mythic commentator.
No, no, he's the yes to all the promises made to Israel.
Only then will you really get him.
Right, right.
That's a great point.
I never made a connection here with the sort of critical historicist school that basically denies all of these concrete historical facts.
Trace it to the beginning of the 19th century.
Someone like Friedrich Schleiermacher, who's the founder of modern liberal Protestantism.
From Schleiermacher all the way through Bultmann and those people, you do find a certain anti-Jewish prejudice.
You know, Bultmann puts it very much in dialogue with the Greek, the Hellenistic world.
One of the marks of the last maybe 30 years of biblical scholarship is the re-Judaizing of Jesus, and I think that's borne tremendous fruit.
And speaking of the Israel of the Old Testament, I've noticed one argument against Modern Christians, we hear, and it's, I guess, a kind of historical argument is, well, we eat shellfish, you know, we cut our hair, and so we're violating the laws of God, and furthermore, how dare you Christians insist upon any kind of moral law because, you know, you've violated some obscure passage of Leviticus.
It seems to me a beautiful thing, though somewhat unknown these days, that the divine law is threefold, perhaps, as we might expect.
Moral, and ceremonial, and civil.
And that, you know, the other day I mentioned something about the natural law.
People looked at me as though I had three heads, you know, that they'd never heard of.
That the moral law might be distinct from a ceremonial law or a judicial law.
You're absolutely right about that, and you hear that argument in different forms all the time today.
People need to read that wonderful section in the second part of the Summa of Aquinas when he makes that distinction between the moral, ceremonial, and what he calls juridical precepts of the law.
Those latter two, he said, are subsumed.
They're kind of seen as symbolic anticipations of what will happen in Jesus, especially on his cross.
So, they're not negated.
They're kind of raised up into a higher expression, whereas the moral law remains intact.
In fact, The Ten Commandments Aquinas construes as basic expressions of the natural law.
Well, that remains the case all the way through.
By the way, I just gave a sermon on this recently.
A lot of the debate in the Reformation around Paul in regard to the law I think can be cleared up if we make these right distinctions.
We're not saved by the works of the law.
I think Paul is referring to Aquinas' juridical and ceremonial precepts, It doesn't mean we abandon the moral precepts.
Because read in Paul to the Romans, where he's so strong on, you know, it's not the law and all that.
But heck, by the end of Romans, he's happily welcoming all these expressions of the moral law.
So they're not repugnant to the work of salvation at all.
Right.
But that distinction is lost in a lot of people, unfortunately.
Yeah, well, and even here we see a distinction between the natural law and other aspects of revelation.
And it reminds me of a line from the first Vatican Council, which says that the existence of God can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason.
The light of natural reason.
Right, yeah.
This today is shocking to so many people who throw their hands up, they say, you know, well man, we can't really ever know if God exists, you know, pass the bong, and it's this real subjectivist sort of hippy-dippy talk, but that was not the view for most of history.
We did believe that we can know the existence of God with certainty, but we can't necessarily know very much about God, or we can't know how to serve God in this world, or we can't know the specifics and the The way in which God enters into history without revelation.
So, it's not just reason without revelation.
It's not revelation without reason, as many modern people would like to characterize religion.
It's both.
Both and.
That's, you know, Thomas Aquinas and all the great figures in our tradition, faith and reason.
And you're right.
Thomas would refer to arguments for God's existence and all that as part of the preambula fidei, right?
The preambles to the faith.
But you might say that conditions for the possibility of taking revelation seriously.
So if, you know, you have some sense from reason of God's existence, God's attributes and all that, well then it makes perfect sense that God would speak, that God would reveal himself to us in a personal way.
So I think, for example, you know, you and I have met a few times and I've come to know you through videos and all that, and so my reason can say a number of things about you.
And I could look you up on Google and Facebook and my mind could construe something true about you, right?
But I'm not going to know you, no way, unless you ultimately deign to speak to me from your heart, right?
Not that I'm expecting you to do that right now, but I mean, only if we became exceptionally good friends and that you decide, I'm going to tell this person something about myself that he would never know otherwise, right?
He would only know it if I revealed it.
That to me is the perfect analogy for the faith reason.
We can know a lot of things about God, I think, through our reason, and God delights in that.
God wants us to come to know him.
And Paul says that, Romans 1.20, I mean, through the visible things of the world, the invisible things of God are known.
Great, great.
And pagans can do that, and modern pagans can do that, so that's terrific.
But the claim of the Church, still startling, is that this God whom we know through reason spoke to us.
Deus Dixit, God has spoken.
And He's revealed certain things about Himself that we would never have known otherwise.
That come from the heart of God, and most fully, in His Son, right?
He spoke in varied and fragmentary ways, but now, in the fullness of time, He's spoken through His Son.
And it's like that baby in Bethlehem, like that poor, destitute figure on the cross, but that's God speaking His deepest heart to us, you know?
That's the, again, paradox in poetry of Christianity.
We don't eschew reason, but we go beyond it, and we listen attentively as God speaks his heart to us.
And it's very difficult for some people.
You know, a very good friend of mine of many years, raised Jewish, read St.
Augustine, decides to convert to Catholicism.
But then I caught up with him maybe a year after he had this revelation, and I said, oh, well, have you done it?
And he said, I haven't.
And I said, well, why is that?
I said, you're no longer persuaded?
He said, no, I'm persuaded.
I am entirely intellectually persuaded.
Not just of Christianity broadly even, but specifically of Catholicism.
I said, I'm totally persuaded.
I can't bring myself to pray to a man.
I just can't get myself to do it.
And I said, but you're persuaded it's all true.
He said, yes.
I said, you're persuaded that you need baptism.
He said, I am.
I said, how do you even cross the street if you think all of that but you haven't done it?
And he said, very carefully.
And then I was reminded that the Incarnation is a stumbling block for people.
No, and in a way, fair enough.
It always has been.
Right.
You know, that God becomes one of us, God takes to himself a human nature to use for his iconic purposes, and that this incarnate God dies and rises to save us from our sins.
That's a weird story.
You know, and that's why Paul knew it, right?
This is folly to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, which for him meant everyone's going to hate this story.
No one's going to get this story.
But of course, that's part of the, weirdly, the convincing power of it, you know?
If it was just a conventional story that we could kind of figure out on our own, what's the likelihood that that's God speaking to us?
But the supremely strange story, the supremely strange world of the Bible that opens up to us, to me that has its own sort of convincing power.
But you know, at the end of the day, and this is every single one of our great figures who say this, at the end of the day, it's the Holy Spirit that has to convict us.
We can't aggressively think our way through it.
We can think about it, and we should, but we can't compel this thing.
It's like any relationship.
You know, I can't compel someone to be my friend.
I can make offers of friendship.
I can even speak my heart, you know, to someone.
But if they don't want to be my friend, I can't compel it.
And the same is true of God.
God wants to be our friend, and so he can't coerce us in that relationship.
That's beautifully put.
And even this point about how odd it all is, you know, a priest friend of mine in New York once said, he said, people want really clear religion.
They want just five bullet points or something.
He said, shallows are clear.
Profound things are a little murky sometimes.
They're a little more obscure, you know.
Go ahead.
But the best analogy there is Chesterton's about the key, you know.
The reason a key works is it's like really complicated.
And if it were simpler, it wouldn't be effective, because anyone could then pick the lock.
It's a very weirdly complex, convoluted thing that will open this equally weird, convoluted lock.
And so, life is very strange and complex, and God gives us a very strange and complex key to open the door.
And the key is, I would say, Israel culminating in the Mashiach, in the Messiah of Israel.
That's the key that he handed to people like Peter and Paul, you know, and who hand that key on to us.
That's the key that opens the door.
So then looking ahead to the rest of the story, we know how the story begins.
We know the pivot of history.
We know the big turn of the story, which we're celebrating now.
And then we know how the story ends.
Though there are some gaps to fill in, I suppose, in the middle.
We've just come out of Advent.
We're now beginning, even though people treat December 1st as, you know, the first day of Christmas and it goes on for 25 days.
Once heard modern religion, that's not my own line, but described as the old religion had first the fast and then the feast.
Now we have first the feast and then the hangover.
But, we're looking ahead now, and even coming out of Advent, people are awaiting the birth of this little baby Jesus, but that's not what we're awaiting.
Now, we're still in a period of awaiting something, and we're still in a period of awaiting Jesus, but we're now awaiting the Second Coming.
And so, traditionally during Advent, one considers the four final things, death, judgment, heaven, and hell.
Which is why it's a penitential period.
People don't really treat it that way anymore.
What do we do as we await now this second Advent, which is going to be more significant perhaps even than the first?
Right.
There's a vigil quality to Christian life.
That's why a season like Advent names something permanent within Christianity.
Our whole life is a vigil.
All of the last 2,000 years have been a vigil.
So, we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior.
Think of the last lines of the Bible, you know?
Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.
We're in like this permanent stance of vigil-keeping.
And that's, I think, a lot of the spiritual life.
I used to teach it under that rubric, is we have to learn to be vigilant.
We keep the candle burning.
That means we're alert and awake even when we don't feel like it, even when we are growing tired, we're growing indifferent.
I've been waiting so long.
Yeah, but stay at your post.
You know, stay at your post.
It hasn't come perfectly yet, and that's obvious to everybody, you know, that the world is not perfect and final justice has not been realized and wicked people prosper and good people suffer and all those things.
Wars and rumors of wars and all of it.
Continue.
So, it hasn't arrived yet, but Christians are vigilant, and we keep the, you know, it's like the five wise virgins, right, that have oil in their lamps, because it's a long wait, and so the foolish virgins fall asleep, and so when the master comes, they're not able to greet him.
That names a permanent quality of the Christian life, is vigilant waiting for the Lord.
And it's a great discipline, you know, Michael, because, again, we want to be in command of the spiritual life like we are anything else.
I want to get in shape, I want to learn how to play the piano, I want to learn how to play golf, and I'm in charge, let me get my book and figure it out.
But it'll never work that way with religion, with the Christian religion.
You have to wait.
Remember in Dante, you mentioned him, there are those in anti-purgatory who waited too long in life.
And so before they even begin purgatory, they just have to wait.
And how long?
I don't know.
I don't know.
And that also names something very important to spiritual life.
Sometimes you just have to wait for grace.
And in a way, that is the whole of your spiritual life, is come, Lord Jesus, come.
I'm waiting for you to act in my life.
So, I think that's okay.
It's a challenge, but it's a very important aspect of the Christian life.
Right, right.
That's beautifully put.
And now I'm reminded even of those early contos of Purgatory, where people wait around a little bit too long.
These people, they've waited in their lives.
And Dante falls into this a little bit too, where he says, you know, I've just been through this arduous journey.
I've gone through the very pit of hell, climbed up through Satan.
And he just wants a little comfort, you know, he just wants a little rest or something.
And he's reminded of one of his own lines of poetry, very famous line, Amor che ne lamenti mi ragiona, because Dante wrote all this famous love poetry, you know, and love which reasons in my mind, you know, and he's going on about his love and he's, but he's forgetting his end.
So he's getting a little bit too complacent and he's not looking forward to he's going to go all the way up Mount Purgatory as well.
So, so we remember that.
No, no, that reminded me of the very beginning of the whole Commedia, when he's wandered off the straight path, and then he sees the hill covered in sunlight, and, oh, that's it, there's my goal, and I'm just going to go.
And then, of course, he's blocked by the three beasts that represent the three modalities of sin.
And that's the person that wants to rush his way through spiritual life.
No, no, you need to do a lot of work.
That's what that's saying to Dante.
You need to do a lot of work before you're ready for this vision of God.
And that's the whole ascetic dimension of the Christian life that we don't like.
That's where we want to feast all the time.
But much of life is this ascetic preparation and this willingness to accept the arduousness of the journey.
And that's Dante.
It's a long trek, as you say, all the way down through hell.
Not part way, all the way down.
And you've got to see Satan at the very center of your own sinful life.
Generating all of the coldness and wickedness of sin.
And then you've got to patiently climb up Mount Purgatory.
So, that's a permanently valuable insight.
But I think today we want to just rush through the spiritual life.
Oh yeah, let me figure this out and just give me the book to follow.
No, no.
You've got to wait, and you've got to go through a journey.
It might be the consequence of people no longer reading Dante, or reading the Church Fathers, or reading the schoolmen, you know, St.
Thomas Aquinas, or reading the Bible, certainly.
But they're all reading self-help books.
And it's ironic, because if all you ever read is self-help, you're never going to help yourself at all.
Right.
Well, just think of, you know, we're coming out of the Advent season, and the great Advent hymn, O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.
Well, that's someone who is Maybe in a distant country, maybe chained in place and completely incapable of saving himself, and all he can do is hope, come, come, can someone come and ransom me?
Well, that's all of us sinners, you know?
We're not able to lift ourselves out of our situation.
That's why God had to come to us and come all the way down.
There's the meaning of the cross, you know?
There's this pulse of Christ becoming sin on the cross.
Not a sinner.
If he's a sinner, then he needs to be saved, too.
But he becomes sin on the cross, goes all the way into our dysfunction, and then lifts us up through his grace.
That's Christianity.
It's not a self-help program.
It's not that.
That's Pelagianism.
That's why Augustine fought that battle.
It was a very important battle because he realized Pelagius was a very charming figure and a very bright man and saw something true.
But if he was basically right, Christianity falls apart.
Because then we're just one more, you know, the classical philosophers had that.
Enough knowledge, enough habituation to virtue, you know, you'll be fine.
Modernity has its own version.
We have our own versions of it.
And then there's Christianity.
That we're not saved by any of that, but we're saved by the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.
Go where he is.
Go where He is.
We're saved by the destitute man on the cross.
Go to Him, you know?
That's a permanently counter-cultural message, especially now.
