On the Feast of Christmas

by James Beauregard

Today, the Christmas season stirs many different thoughts and feelings across the world. T.S. Eliot captured the many possibilities when he wrote,

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,

Some of which we may disregard:

The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,

The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),

And of the childish – which is not that of the child

For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel

Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree

Is not only a declaration, but an angel.[1]

Some believe, some experience the joy of the season, some oppose it. In the personalist tradition, it is striking and likely not a matter of coincidence that so many of the 20th (and now 21st) century's personalists were themselves Christian believers. Anglo-American personalism  developed, in part, from Protestant theological tradition and Borden Parker Bowne’s study in Germany, and the names of Christian personalists of the past century abound:  Bowne himself, Austin Farrer, Emmanuel Mounier, Jacques Maritain, Karol Wojtyla, Edith Stein, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John F. Crosby, Roberts Spaemann, Bernard Härring, Romano Guardini, Czeslaw Bartnik, Bogumil Gacka, Randy Auxier, Tom Buford, Rocco Buttiglione, and many others  - the list goes on and on.

Given the season, I would like to take a moment to focus on two personalists who explicitly turn their attention to the feast of Christmas: Edith Stein and Romano Guardini.  Stein was born into a Jewish family in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) the late 19th century and after drifting away from faith in her adolescent years, found her way into the Roman Catholic Church and into the order of Carmelites. She was a member of the Carmelite community in Cologne, Germany, but after Kristallnacht in 1938, left Germany and took up residence at the Carmelite convent in Echt, the Netherlands. She was arrested there in a roundup of Jewish – Christians in the wake of protest against the National Socialism by the Netherlands bishops, and transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers on August 9, 1942. Guardini, born in northeast Italy, and whose family moved to Germany when he was about a year old, was a Roman Catholic priest and theologian whose writings, both philosophical and theological, are still read today.

First, Edith Stein. She spent Christmas of 1931 at Beuron Abbey in Germany, and during her stay there wrote a reflection called Das Weichnachtsgeneimnis: Menschwerdung und Menschheit (The Mystery of Christmas: Incarnation and Humanity).[2]  In this text, she refers to the Mystery Christmas, and by extension of Christianity, as an “undivided whole”: to enter into any part of the mystery is to enter into the whole of it. In the journey of the Christian life, in her words, "The way leads from Bethlehem to Golgotha, from the manger to the cross." To live that life, for her, means to live that life as a person in community, to live in ongoing Association communication with God, to hear the word, to follow it, to pray and to follow the will of God. The German word Umkehr - return -  is typically thought of as a Lenten word, a turning away from sin and a return to the heart of God. It is, at the same time, an advent word, it's time to return to an understanding of what it means to be persons, and persons in relation to God and community. Living deeply out of her own tradition, she wrote, “The way for each of is lies with the Son of God, through suffering and death to the glory of the resurrection.”  The American Scripture scholar Raymond Brown has written that the infancy narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are microcosms of the wider gospel message. Stein perceived this decades before Brown wrote his magisterial commentary on those narratives, The Birth of the Messiah.

The second personalist who wrote explicitly about the Christmas season, Romano Guardini (1885 – 1968), published in 1954 a book called simply, Der Herr (The Lord), an extended series of reflections on the life of Christ.[3] in the first reflection Guardini also touches on the theme of the unity of persons through consideration of the prologue to the gospel of John. He writes, " Everything is concentrated on the ultimate, all – powerful essentials: Lagos, flesh, step into the world; the eternal origin, the tangible earthly reality, the mystery of unity."[4]  an understanding of the meaning of personhood emerges from his reflections, and understanding grounded in the person of Jesus of Nazareth: "he entered fully into everything that humanity stands for – and the names in the ancient genealogies suggest what it means to enter into human history with its burden of fate and sin. Jesus of Nazareth spared himself nothing."

As T.S. Eliot noted, it is quite easy to get caught up in the commercialism of the season, which begins earlier and earlier each year, but the take the time to stop and reflect is to reenter the mystery, and to resume an attitude we knew as children, but so often forget:

the child

For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel

Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree

Is not only a declaration, but an angel.

---

[1] T. S. Eliot. The Cultivation of Christmas Trees. New York: Farrar Straus and Cudhay, 1954.

[2] Edith Stein, “Das Weichnachtsgeneimnis: Menschwerdung und Menschheit,” in Edith Stein Gesamtauggabe, 19, Geistliche Texte I. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2009, 2-14.  Translation from this text are mine and taken from this edition.

[3] Romano Guardini, The Lord. Washington DC: Gateway Editions, 2014.

[4] Romano Guardini, The Lord, 5.