Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

The Spirit of Chirstmas

The Spirit of Christmas Chesterton’s Christmas essay for  was entitled, in the Collected Works edition (Vol. XXXIV),“The Old Christmas Carols,” while the essay for  was called “The Rituals of Christmas.” In one sense, of course, carols and rituals make Christmas. The essence of Christmas is the Nativity, the Birth of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, into this world.The Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us. Carols and rituals arise from our human attempts to say to ourselves what this Birth means. That is, we acknowledge that whatever else this glory of God on High is, we did not cause it. It is not ours to bring into existence, but it is ours to praise and worship. Chesterton wondered why “old Christmas carols are so good when most modern Christian hymns are so bad?” Remember that this query was written in !When at Christmas I get out some old tapes of Christmas music, I am always struck by the mood and the sentiment that these Christmas songs and hymns stir in my soul. I have often wondered why they have this charm and enchantment. Songs like “White Christmas” or “Blue, Blue Christmas” which are neither Christian nor pious in sentiment nevertheless carry with them much of the ritual and mood that we associate with Christmas. Meanwhile “Silent Night” itself is not two centuries old. Fides quaerens pulchrum. Chesterton began his  essay by noting that medieval Christmas plays dressed King Herod, for example, as a medieval king. To suggest this practice to be anachronistic is beside the point, Chesterton thought.This choice of costume was not root93 ed in ignorance.“It was sometimes rather a profound and philosophical indifference.They [the medieval writers and designers] instinctively insisted on the brotherhood of men across the ages.”1 Herods still exist in our time. The brotherhood of man across the ages reminds me of Chesterton ’s thesis about the democracy of the dead, that we cannot be complete if we forget the actual experience of those who have gone before us.We are, if we are medievals, more likely to understand the sort of king Herod actually was if he is dressed in contemporary garb of the time than if we dress him “in the costume of an Idumean prince under the suzerainty of Caesar Augustus .” The poets, the story-tellers, and the writers of carols can tell us the truth even if they have images and words that are less than historically accurate in accent or garb.The Madonnas with Child painted amidst Roman ruins or medieval villas did not miss the point of what the Nativity was about simply because they were not depicted as Bethlehem in the beginning of our era. Chesterton wondered about the reason for the boisterous shouts and good cheer that are found in medieval Christmas carols . “I should be inclined to suggest,” he wrote,“that some part of it may have been due to men really believing that there was something to shout about.”2 Chesterton was quite sure that “the spirit of Christmas is in these songs more than in any other literature that has been produced.” I like that notion, I must confess, of shouting because there is something worth shouting about. In , Chesterton began his essay with this striking sentence : Christmas, with its Christmas candles and its hundred shapes and patterns of fire, from the old legend of the log to the blue flames of Snapdragon and the sacred oblation of burning brandy [in the true tradition of sacrifice, which is the destruction of the most precious thing for the glory of the divine powers] has rather irrationally thrown my thoughts back to the flames of a torchlight procession which I saw on the last great ceremonial festival in this city.3 94 The Spirit of Christmas This festival was the celebration in London of the Armistice of World War I. What Chesterton was driving at here was the natural symbolism of things, burning things, associated with Christmas. He thought it a bit incongruous to substitute a burning log with an electric one. I saw a candle in a garage window the other day over off Connecticut Avenue. It was of course an electric light and not Christmas-tide. It looked like something permanent.The problem is akin to the sanctuary candle or votive candles.These same candles made of electric lights designed, presumably, for the...