A magical time of year
The gold of wisdom, the incense of prayer, the myrrh of death to self: Epiphany gifts that can re-enchant, unite and perfect the world.
Magi came from the East, following a star. St Matthew has told us this so often, year after year, that perhaps we don’t quite notice what we are hearing. They’re from the East, probably Persia, so they are not Jewish. So, not only Jews, but gentiles are also called to Christ, fulfilling the prophecies of Isaiah.
Well, that is the respectable angle, happily susceptible to demythologisation, so that we don’t have to worry about the more troubling magical details. Amen, end of sermon.
Or is it? Because actually, even that statement is not quite so polite as it seems. You may know that comparative theology and inter-faith dialogue are part of my academic and ministerial CV. This leaves me alert to a certain danger we in the trade call supersessionism: that is, the idea that Christianity supersedes Judaism, because now that the Jewish prophecies have been all fulfilled in Christ, there’s really no need for the old religion any more, which can be, and has been, extended to the idea that if Judaism is no longer needed, nor are Jews. We know the results of that. But as if that wasn’t enough, here the danger is doubled, because whatever religious beliefs those Eastern Magi espoused, those are also brought to fulfilment in Christ. If the Magi stand for all non-Jewish religions, does this mean that Christians have to maintain a supersessionist stance towards every world religion? Are Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and all the rest expendable?
But this, like the first bit of lettuce thrown in a food fight, is only the tip of the iceberg. There are crunchier problems which still need addressing (drum roll, please). The second problem is the Magi themselves. The clue to the problem is in their name. They are mages, magic-users: astrologers, in fact, who follow the stars to find the newborn King. Yet someone even casually acquainted with Christianity might wonder whether the Bible is really that well-disposed towards magic, given certain events in later Church history (as an aside, contrary to prejudices encouraged by Hollywood flicks, the witch-hunts were not mediaeval, but an early modern innovation). And were said sceptic to search the Scriptures, he would indeed find condemnations of magic and divination by the stars. So how come Our Lord and Saviour draws this band of soothsayers, proto-Russell Grants, to Bethlehem?
Then there is a third problem, and that is the meaning of the gifts the Magi bear. You may already know them as literary devices, each foreshadowing some aspect of Christ’s ministry. The gold proclaims Him King of Kings, the frankincense is offered to Him as incense is offered to God in the Temple, the myrrh is for anointing Him in his death, and its sweet scent rises as He does in His Resurrection and glorious Ascension. And again, content with our demythologisation, we could quite leave the story there: marked, learned, inwardly digested, with no need for further thought.
But I won’t leave it there, because there is too much left unresolved. First, the relationship between Christianity and the world’s religions; second, the relationship between Christianity and magic; and third, the relationship between the Magi’s historic gifts and the spiritual gifts we can offer in the present. Yet I see all three of these as interlocked, and like the ring or sword of a fairytale, it is the objects that the Magi bring which prove the key that will unlock them. So let’s work backwards, starting with the gifts, and see what they have to bear on the questions of magic and religions.
We start with the gold. In the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament and Apocrypha, Wisdom compares herself to this precious metal. In the New, Our Lord draws on these motifs to speak of hidden treasure and golden coins, to gain which you must sell everything. So, St Gregory of Nyssa would later propose we take gold as the wisdom of God to which we can apply ourselves, not least by applying ourselves to the study of the Scriptures. Let the precepts of the Lord be our widow’s mite.
Frankincense stands for prayer. As light and incense were offered with the singing of psalms at dawn and nightfall in the Temple in Jerusalem, so from ancient times the Church has continued to offer the same in our daily offices of Mattins and Evensong. In the Anglican tradition, this ancient office was opened to all the laity through the publication in English of the Book of Common Prayer. Prayer, including the daily office, is the incense we can all continue to offer Christ, and through which He will form our souls into the shape of His.
Lastly, myrrh stands for death, that death to self which alone gives us lasting freedom, and which was realised for us by Our Lord on the Cross. The Way of the Cross is the Way of death to self and utter openness to God, the source of Life. This is the shape, perhaps one might better say the formless form, into which He moulds us through prayer and the pursuit of wisdom.
So far then, the gifts teach us this spiritual way: first, be purified by abandoning everything for the precious gold of wisdom; second, let wisdom lead you to prayer, in the life and light of the Church; and so be guided to the perfection of wisdom in the Way of the Cross.
What, then, does this bring to bear on the question of religions? Essentially, the import that grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. The Magi show that truth can be found through the pursuit of wisdom even outside God’s self-revelation to His chosen people. It can be found through the movements of the stars which God created, that is through the study of the natural realm, and through the those elements of truth in the spiritual and philosophical traditions of the world. This is not, however, to make the absurd claim that religions are all “paths up the same mountain.” For a start, none of us have the objective view of that mountain, as though hovering in a helicopter from afar, to make such a claim. Then, can we really say that, for instance, the Moonies or Aum Shinrikyo are “climbing the same mountain” as Christians or Buddhists? I think it is something from which we might really want to distance ourselves. But what we can say, with confidence, is that non-Abrahamic religious and philosophical traditions influenced both the Old and New Testaments and the later life of the Church. We can say that the love of wisdom, which after all is the proper meaning of philosophy, like the shining star leads her lovers towards Christ.
I would go further and say that certain insights from non-Christian traditions can help us to understand aspects of our own tradition which are unclear or forgotten: I think, for instance, of how the Kyoto School philosopher Nishitani Keiji drew on the Mahāyāna doctrine of śūnyatā, or emptiness, to re-interpret Nietzsche’s nihilism through an augmented Christian doctrine of kenōsis, that is, the Incarnation and Cross as witness to God’s essentially self-emptying nature (as per Philippians 2:5-12). From Nishitani’s Buddhist perspective, this Christian doctrine acts as handmaid to the fullness of Zen thought, and so be it; but from the Christian perspective, this can serve as an example of wisdom which is ostensibly “outside” Christian tradition helping to articulate our teaching more comprehensively, and deepen our spiritual lives. In this view, there is theologically speaking no such thing as “other” religions (whilst acknowledging their sociological reality in this world!), or perhaps even as “religions” per se, for all that is true tends towards the truth of Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life: the one who reveals the true Good and guides us to it via the wood of the Cross, that foolish perfection of wisdom, whose arms span the height and depth of philosophy.
On magic, I could say rather more, but think I will leave most of it to a forthcoming post on theurgy. For now, suffice it to say that I do not share what I consider a broadly Protestant antithesis to magic as a whole. The Reformers famously despised the “hocus pocus” (hoc est corpus) of the mass because it looked so much like magic: a chosen person wears special clothes and makes certain set gestures and incantations over certain ritual objects to effect a change in a substance or circumstance. Well, perhaps it looks so much like a kind of magic, because that is what it is. But like religion, not all magic is equal. There is the magic which seeks to manipulate the spiritual and physical realms, versus that which seeks to bring the physical to its spiritual fulfilment; that which seeks control over spirits, versus that which seeks only to be a vessel of God’s grace. And the latter is surely the kind of magic that Jesus effected whenever He healed and restored, or turned water to wine, or bread and wine into His Body and Blood: though we may prefer the more respectable term of “miracles,” or better still demythologise them entirely, Our Lord worked in this world as a vessel of grace which never manipulates or destroys, but again, brings all things to their perfection. This, then, is the magical role of the Church: the re-enchantment of the cosmos, with nothing excluded, to bring it to the perfection of unity with God. Such, indeed, is the magic of the Mass, in which the fruits of the cosmos and of heaven, the work of God and of human hands, and the hands and hearts of humans ourselves, are offered back to Him from whom they came for their perfection and the perfection of all things. This universe is part of one great, eternal liturgy, resting on the true deep magic of God’s grace. Yet it is a magic in which we can participate only by the pursuit of golden wisdom, the offering of fragrant prayer, and the anointed death of self, that God may be all in all.