A Christmastide Contemplation on the Incarnation

A Christmas meditation on the Incarnation

Amici,

A Blessed and one hopes Merry Christmas 2019 to everyone.

In lieu of an online card, I offer a Christmas-tide reflection on the Incarnation, if wanted. FWIW. I know people don't seem too keen or either philosophy or theology today, certainly you're unlikely to hear any such from a pulpit. (And remember, "back in the day" Presbyterians were supposed to preach at least 45 minutes, all theology! Those were the days!) But human beings are thinkers  – or should be. Aristotle's "rational animals." So here's a little of both philosophy and theology, just because it is Christmas.

Premise: The Incarnation is the fulcrum, the centerpiece, the raison d'être of Christianity.

"...For through the Mystery of the Word made flesh, new radiance from Thy glory hath so shone on the eye of the soul that the recognition of our God made visible draweth us to love what is invisible." From the preface of the Nativity, Proper Prefaces

That's a wonderful, holy insight into the profound power of the Incarnation, but alas, not much understood today. For some would say it is the Crucifixion and Resurrection that is the heart of the Faith, what the Faith is about. Perhaps most would say so. It is curious that while you hear in popular Christianity that "Jesus died for you," you don't hear too much on the Incarnation, not as a subject in itself and what it entails, and can mean, to "the eye of the soul".

One hears a lot about "Jesus, meek and mild," Who died for our sins. But the Incarnation? St. Matthew in 1:22-23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 about a virgin conceiving a son: Matt 22: All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” – which means “God with us”. God with us. Great name. But what does it mean?

(You haven't lived till you've read modern Jewish commentary on how "virgin" there in 7:14 isn't the word for "virgin" but just a "young woman" and the child so born was just another king of Judah, and so on; it is glaring aspect of the massive change in Judaism post the three great 1st/2nd century Jewish Revolts, the first of which destroyed Jerusalem and killed about a million Jews, and the third killed almost another million and saw the expulsion of the Jews from the ancient Land of Israel altogether. After all that Messianic-fever inspired slaughter, the survivors – those who hadn't converted to Christianity along the way – decided Judaism had had enough of Messiahism, and they downplayed passages formerly seen as heralding the Messiah, such as Isaiah 7:14, which Jewish scholars in Alexandria themselves had translated as "parthenos" in the century or so before the advent of Christ.)

But at Christmas one does sometimes hear it commented upon ironically that Easter, which is a superior feast to Christmas, gets less attention than Christmas. Our Lord died on Good Friday and Rose Again on Easter Sunday, after all. Right? Usually, it is chalked up to the commercialization of Christmas as opposed to Easter, which is mostly about bunnies and brightly colored bunny eggs (who knew bunnies laid eggs?).

However, Christmas – as one of the Feasts of the Incarnation – is on par with Easter, for without the Incarnation, we wouldn't have the Resurrection. They are two sides of Christianity's single Incarnational coin. To split that coin is to engage in counterfeit.

Christmas is one of the major Incarnational Feasts, the others being: The Solemnity (these are all Solemnities and require the Solemn High Mass) of the Annunciation, traditionally "Lady Day" in old Catholic England, is celebrated on March 25. It's also known as the Feast of the Incarnation (or Festum Incarnationis). Then there's the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated on December 8 (her birth is celebrated on September 8.) The Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity became a human being through his Mother's freely willed participation in his Incarnation; hence, her importance to His Incarnation. It would not have happened at all had Mary declined God's offer.

One can say Easter is an Incarnational feast as well, for the Incarnated God is bodily offered up as food for eternal life, mirroring the Pascal Lamb's far more humble, and temporary, sacrifice. (Protestantism was one of those attempts to simplify the Faith, and it deleted the Eucharistic feast as the Real Presence of God in the Flesh, thus leaving its adherents a sort of spiritual junk food, à la carte.)

Christianity is all about the Incarnation, actually, if you consider it a moment. The point of it is to transform us, actually. Hence its necessity. But even as a basic notion, the Incarnation is a radical one, and many reject it. That God became a human being in order to save those of the human race whom He called, and who would choose to turn to Him – that's a Mysterium Fidei, but also a theological puzzle. Why would such an Act be a necessity?

First, consider, this God of ours is not a Supreme Being God (Zeus, Indra, The Dagda) but the Absolute Being God, Being as such, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Moses, who told Moses that His name is "I AM" and thus identifies as the Absolute Being God, the God the great philosophers of later times would define (Aristotle, Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, and various others over the centuries, down to today, such as Edward Feser).

Although the great philosophers of the past were able to deduce the existence of Absolute Being, and many of His attributes, only Revelation could reveal that that God (the only God worth the title "God"), became a human being. Obviously, this teaching separates Christianity from both Judaism and Islam, which cannot accept of the Most Holy Trinity. The Most Holy Trinity is a revelation which, if nothing else, introduces the highest love: charity, charitas / agapé, into the very Essence and Being of the Creator. (Absolute Being as absolutely singular, such as described by the Muslim teaching "Tawhid" about Allah, could not have such an interior dynamic within Itself. And Allah doesn't. He's a paroxysm of will, and never described as a lover, but a "willer".)

Yet why the necessity of the Incarnation? There's a question worth pondering, for how you answer it will define how you understand Christianity and how thus you comprehend and interact with God. Why the necessity of becoming a human being and suffering and dying? God is Absolute; if God says something, that something exists. Period. He doesn't need therefore to do anything but to choose of His own will, to accept the prayers of those who turn to Him, surely (sort of like Allah does, according to Muslim teaching, when he's in the mood to be merciful). God sustains all being in being, in existence. If He stops doing that, it all stops – or whatever particular part of it He wants stopped. (Curiously, Islam teaches Allah destroys everything and recreates it all every split second, almost always the way it was before – yet Allah keeps everything going not out of love – which is not exactly an attribute of Allah's to begin with, but rather habit; the Arabic theological term for Allah's habit of keeping things as they are is 'ada).

In contrast, Christianity's God made a Covenant with all Creation, that it was good and real, and blessed in itself (see Genesis 2, the first few verses). Christianity's god is a God of love, as in self-sacrificing love, but also boundless, giving love. Even contractual love, such as in a marriage, for God has made Seven Covenants from the beginning, the last being the Holy Eucharist by which we are transformed in Christ.

Yet one has to respond to that love by transforming one's life, and doing so through participation in God, via entering into the ancient Covenants through Baptism and then the Holy Eucharist. It is in that Sacramental life that we "enter in" to Salvation, our natures changed, ourselves uplifted. In short, orthodox, full-Catholic Christianity is a complex religion. That's a problem for us orthodox Christians, perhaps the biggest. It takes a lot of study, reflection, and prayerful contemplation to understand even initial aspects of the Faith, and because of all that there's been an endless attempt to simplify it, to "boil it down to the basics". Protestantism, on a basic level, was one such attempt; Vatican II another. But one can't "boil it down". Too much is always and ever left out, and the Baby Jesus gets tossed out with the manger hay. Why should it be simple? The Faith is itself a Mysterium Fidei that we'll spend Eternity in contemplation of, after all – we'll never exhaust its beauty; or, if we're in Hell, we'll spend Eternity in repudiation of it.

But the urge to simplify is ever-present. The current pope himself is notorious for how he "doesn't get it", as he clearly gives basically a Lutheran understanding of salvation, with heavy doses of German-originated moral-relativistic "Modernism" as a side dish, and a very sulfuric horderves of Socialism, a political theory which purports to be motivated by Christian charity but in reality is based on and conjures endless envy, the nastiest of the Seven Deadly Sins. However, any reading of the Gospels, especially but not necessarily in conjunction with the rest of the New Testament, clearly shows Our Lord Christ requires superhuman efforts at true, profound moral perfection. "Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect." Matthew 5:48 (This idea appears in Deuteronomy 18:13 and Leviticus 19:2, or in St. Paul 2 Corinthians 7:1, and a host of other verses – Philippians 3:15 has an interesting way of putting it.)

Protestants as a whole don't get it, either. They are descendants – of a sort – of St. Augustine, the "Doctor of Grace" and they focus on Christ dying for our sins, as Augustine did. (Augustine is why Western Orthodoxy – Catholicism – has the Crucifix as the most ubiquitous symbol of our Lord, unlike the Christos Pantokrator in the Eastern iconography.) But God is greater than any sin, and could overturn the Fall of Adam and Eve in a second – since it happened in time, and Adam and Eve didn't have a full understanding of what they were getting themselves into. When the Angels fell, on the other hand, being outside of time as we understand it – existing in Eternity, in short – their Fall was made in full knowledge of what they were doing, and it was permanent (being in Eternity, how could it be anything else?).

Yet Historical Christianity teaches that God became Man, while fully remaining God, 100 percent of both, and not inheriting the Fallen Nature of human beings (thus his Mother had to be conceived immaculately, obviously, since He received His human nature fully and solely from His Mother.) And He wants us to be like Him, as the verses quoted above indicate. We obviously can't do that, unless we're fundamentally changed. Now we're on the trail of why the Incarnation was a necessity.

St. Augustine, a dour, reformed hedonist, stressed that Fallen Nature because he had wallowed in it for much of his life, a lot like Martin Luther wallowed in it 1100 years later; yet Saint A felt the full impact of the infusion of grace from God that transformed the moral pagan lout Augustine's nature. So, Saint Augustine stressed ever this so-relevant-to-him personal insight, how it was an unmerited grace that saved him. (Grace ultimately derives from the Greek χᾰ́ρῐς, (kháris), meaning "gift." Also prevalent was the idea of Atonement: that Our Lord Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, suffered the Passion and Crucifixion as a vicarious punishment for our sins and a redemption from them.

Yet Augustine was a Catholic, believing in the Real Presence and the infusion of grace necessary to change our nature, and the necessity of a changed nature, which along with the rest of the Sacraments all involving an ordained priesthood and hierarchy – himself being a bishop; Protestantism differs from Augustine in many ways, but an important one is that it sees no transformation of the sinner, no infused grace, but rather an imputed grace that, in Luther's famous image, is like snow covering a manure pile. For the Catholics and Orthodox, that idea never passed the smell test.

But prior to and encompassing the whole Passion and Crucifixion and Resurrection is the Incarnation, the latter the necessary foundation of the former – but again, why? Why were all these needed? Incarnation, Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection?

At Christmas we should perhaps ponder the core of the Christian Faith isn't quite only that "God died for your sins" but rather that we are transformed in Christ via His Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection. The Easterners (whether in Communion with Rome or not) have always stressed this transformation, and they call it Theosis. It is why the main iconography of Our Lord in the East is Christos Pantokrator, Christ the Ruler of All. In short, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity had to become a human being in order to take on human nature in order to change it, to uplift it, to make us New Creations in Christ.

Simply: God Incarnated into the human race in order to Incarnate the human race into God. The Incarnation was necessary not only for God "to empty himself" (Philippians 2:7) but for God to give us "participation in Himself" (2 Peter 1:4). This is the significance of Christmas; it is the reason for the Incarnation. It is what Salvation is.

This Christmas, therefore, I myself want to contemplate the following, and pass it on to you, for what it is worth:

•    The Incarnation: Absolutely necessary and central to salvation, wherein God becomes a human person, Jesus / Yeshu'a (Yehoshu'a: "Yahweh is salvation").
•    God’s Incarnation didn’t lower God so much as elevate human nature, in Christ, enabling…

•    "Theosis" (Divinization) which by grace χᾰ́ρῐς / kháris); a word originally meaning just "gift") – not by nature – is our incorporation into Christ, raising us up to participate in His Divinity (as St. Peter teaches in 2 Peter 1.4). Usually described in the Western Church as an Infusion of Grace, it means our natures are changed. (Compare to Protestantism's Imputation of Grace: God assigns grace to us but doesn’t actually divinize or change our nature; i.e. Luther's manure pile.)

•    St. Athanasius the Great (296-373): "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God" (i.e., participate in the inner life of the Trinity). (De inc. 54, 3: PG 25, 192B) and [CCC 460]

•    St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274): "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods." (Opusc. 57, 1-4) [CCC 460]
•    This teaching is stated in many ways throughout the New Testament, and is heavy in St. John:

•    John 1:12 “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (Obviously, a new creation.) Reread the first three chapters of St. John's Gospel, and then chapter 6, for a powerful meditation on what the Incarnation means.

•    This teaching is also central to St. Paul: 2 Cor 5:17, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (Again, a new creation) 2 Peter 1:4 might well put it best; see also St. Paul in Romans, 6:4, 7:6, 12:2; Galatians 3:27; Ephesians 4:22-24; Colossians 3:8-12. (Protestants, the Biblical literalists, somehow see all these passages, especially the extended Eucharistic discussion in John 6, as being merely metaphorical; literary devices, basically.)

•    And note how Theosis makes sense of Our Lord's teachings. In general, Our Lord Jesus seems to demand the impossible of “ordinary” humans. In Matthew 5, during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives the Beatitudes, then says we are “salt of the earth” and “light of the world”, discusses how He has come not to do away with the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them – and the point of both Law and Prophets was to perfect us. Our Lord discusses elevated behavior regarding anger, adultery, divorce, making oaths and not retaliating (“turn the other cheek”) and love our enemies. He ends with "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:48) That is something manifestly impossible for “normal” human beings to do.

There it is, a mere suggestion of the complexity and profundity of Historical Christianity, of the East and West. John Paul II used to like to say he wanted the Church to "breathe with both lungs", which of course the 14 separate,  Autocephalous Orthodox Churches not in Communion with Rome just laughed off. But the first thousand years of Eastern theology was just as Catholic as Saint Augustine's theology was, and it is worth dwelling a bit on it.

A Blessed Christmas and Excellent New Year to all.

An Préachán