Christmas and the Divine Creativity
Cur Deus homo?
"Why is God a man?"
So asked St. Anselm of Canterbury, long ago; and so many us are hopefully compelled to ask, for the first or the hundredth or the thousandth time, by the Christmas season. Or perhaps not; perhaps, after a dozen or two or three or five or seven dozen Christmases, perhaps we simply take the angels and the Mother and Child and Wise Men and Shepherds all as givens. Perhaps we have never questioned them at all. Perhaps all our knowledge of Christmas comes from Hallmark Christmas movies. Perhaps we always thought that Christmas was a fictional holiday invented for Jim Carry's How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Why is God a man? Why is God a human being? Why is God a child, an infant, held in the arms of his mother, watched over by a stepfather, surrounded by animals and poor shepherds and exotic magicians? Why is God nursing, why is he crying, why is he sleeping? Why is God the descendant of the founding king of a minor Near Eastern dynasty? Why is God a political subject of Gaius Iulius Caesar Augustus? Why does God need a blanket?
Why is God something?
Of course, to even begin to answer the question posed above, we have to have some understanding of what God is; and also (a much harder question) what man is. Anselm had one very good answer to these questions; and I invite you to consider this answer at your leisure. For now, I will merely suggest some thoughts that came to me recently, and which were for me wrapped together inextricably with the event of Christmas.
Woods and Rain
If God really is a man, then perhaps the first thing to be said, to be gestured at, is that there must, after all, be some connection between God and man, some relationship, some likeness of some sort, that would allow God to be a man, that would make sense of this connection. And perhaps if God is man, we can learn from what man is something of what God is; and also from what God is something of what man is. And perhaps from the above we can learn something about Christmas.
Recently I was walking in the woods, or to be more precise a muddy swamp in the woods, when I was struck by a realization of just what it is that makes life in this world so strange and so difficult to grasp. This vision initially had nothing explicitly to do with Christmas; but I think they are related all the same.
Most of us, particularly in the modern world, imbibe a vision of the world that is, fundamentally, categorical and discrete and individualized. This is to an extent a matter of modernity; it is to an extent simply a necessary feature of all learning that begins with and consists in text and science and formal study. By all of the above, knowledge is experienced as a series of facts, which describe and correspond to things and events, each of which is discrete and at least relatively complete in itself, and which we then learn to relate to other facts through large, vague patterns of knowledge and interpretation and causation. We learn about a tree, about its life-cycle, its characteristics, what it looks like, what it is trying to do; and then we learn about the boring beetle or the vine that devours the tree, and what it looks like, and what it is trying to do. We learn about Josef Stalin, his characteristics, his appearance, ideology and goals and actions; and then we learn about Trotsky. Indeed, increasingly we learn about all these things not even from historical narratives, not even from sketches of growth and reproduction and life-cycle, but merely from images, totally frozen particularized abstractions.
It is this basic structure of our thought, I think, almost more than anything else, that makes contemporary ideas and narratives so conflictual, so based on contradiction and competition and even violence. To a great extent, all our ideas of order, of beauty, even of goodness, are found within individual things, choices, goals, achievements, whether those of a star or those of a mushroom or those of a man; what lies between these things, connecting them to one another, is mere chaos, gaps in knowledge and understanding, and hence inevitably competition, struggle, war, dominance. A star dies; a tree is devoured by moss; a man kills another man.
And yet...when I wandered in the woods, it suddenly occurred to me, unquestioningly, that this was all wrong; that it was in fact the relations between things, temporal and logical and even totally accidental, that were the primary site of order, of beauty, of being as such.
When one wanders in the wood, it is exceedingly difficult to see a single tree; let alone a particular tree species allegedly struggling to reproduce itself to the exclusion and domination of all others. The elm may indeed be trying to do reproduce; and it may indeed be thwarted in so doing by the maple and the boring beetle and the humidity of the air. But that is not really what one sees.
Put simply, one sees places, landscapes; put more accurately, one sees stories, works of art, exercises of creativity.
In a particular spot in the forest there are living trees of different species, their branches intertwined with each other; there are dead trees, their branches still growing leaves and inhabited by insects and mushrooms and flowers; there is swamp grass, spreading around all of the above, linked together in an impossibly dense network, sheltering all below and supporting all beneath; there is mud, rich and thick, and there is water, burbling and flowing above rocks. Most strikingly of all, as I experienced it that day, there are the dead or half-dead tree stumps, from which arise branches that have been sculpted, exquisitely and by no human hand, into fine, rounded shapes like ax-heads or the threads of clothes falling around a body. The tree is dead; and out of its dead flesh arises something utterly beautiful.
Here is the mystery, then; that it would seem that most of what constitutes the being of the world around us, of things in general, is in fact the relations between things. The individual thing, the individual fact, goes and comes and moves across other things; and what arises out of all this motion is not chaos, a mere welter of conflict and contradiction; what arises out of these relations is unmistakeable order and harmony and beauty, something like poetry, like music, like wine, like a painting painted by an artist or a story told by a storyteller.
Based on this, of course, one could well argue, as many physicists have argued, that the substance of individual things is to a large extent merely an illusion; that reality is merely a mathematical equation, simple in itself and without parts, unfolding necessarily through time and space and human person alike; that matter is merely the accidental result of a series of atomic interactions or particle or chemical models; that animal and plant life are merely surface features of a more fundamental ecosystem; that human beings are merely variables in a sociological model. This is certainly true to a degree and in a sense; but taken as a comprehensive explanation of things in general, it is obviously, almost trivially false. It is not the case that we can satisfactorily explain the existence and features of every tree and star and person by their place in a formal, necessary account of relations independent and prior to whatever may be related by them. None of us have ever seen an equation living and dancing in the wild; we have seen trees and stars and planets and people. And as physicists and ecologists and sociologists and yes, historians have all found, these things have a strange life of their own; and at the oddest moments come to life, and kick, and blow their systems all to pieces.
Even more than this, though, the simple reality is that these systems, however comprehensive or explanatory they may be, have never yet succeeded in driving out the arbitrary fact of existence. As modern physicists have discovered, beautiful, necessary symmetries may be found in many fundamental features of the universe; but it is the ugly things, the contingent things, the arbitrary "fine-tuning" of variables and initial features, that are responsible for the existence of most of the really interesting things in the cosmos, galaxies and stars and planets and life and ourselves. At every level, whether of the universe or an ecosystem or a society or a human life, it is relations within limited and arbitrary time and space and contingency, truly accidental relations, arising from no necessary feature or goal of any being or system, that make reality as we experience it most actual and real: how a beam of light falls across a leaf, how a dead tree falls across a stream, how moss grows on a particular branch, how one human life crosses another. It is these things that are in fact most beautiful, most meaningful, most real, even in the sense of most determinative for the shape of our systems and ideas and lives. It is these things that exist, in the fullest sense, connecting us with the universe and each other and God. Today, I saw the doubled orange light of a lamp reflected in a puddle as the rain fell around it in a thousand tiny dancing sparks; and my whole life was altered forever.
In this, our most basic, fundamental experience of the world is always an experience of a creativity: that is to say, of being, of reality, of actuality, of unity, of beauty, even of necessity, expressing itself in and through what is accidental, contingent, multiple, interrelated. Inasmuch as we have tried to be an artist, tried to create something, whether a song or a poem or only a pot of food based on a recipe from Facebook, we have tried to do precisely this, to take disparate things and bring them together into a non-necessary relation that is somehow also harmonious, beautiful, true, that expresses something that could not be expressed otherwise; and inasmuch as we have experienced a work of art by a human being, we have experienced just this sort of thing. It was not the plot mechanics of a film that altered our whole sense of the world; it was, most likely, a particular atmosphere generated by a particular long-dead actor sitting in a particular long-destroyed set playing out a scenario on a page written by a madman in the reproduction of a single moment long past. Likewise, the things that have most altered our own lives indelibly and forever, I am certain, were not systems or schemas or piles of discrete knowledge, but some particular series of moments in time, in place, bringing us together somehow impossibly out of all possibilities with a particular person, and with God.
That the world is most fundamentally a work of creativity is an idea easily grasped by children, and easily dismissed by the facilely educated; but after we have contemplated, considered, reasoned about, trees and flowers and swamps and moss and streams and ecosystems and human history and human personality and time and space and the universe itself, we come back, inevitably, to the same basic insight. In the final balance, our experience of art is not separable from our experience of the world. In the final balance, the world itself can be understood as nothing other than a work of art. And this is, regardless of one's presuppositions or upbringing, why it is quite difficult to avoid believing in God.
This past year, I have written a number of posts about Trinitarian theology and modern theoretical cosmology, in which I suggested that the idea of divine creativity, the idea of creation, is a much more subtle and sophisticated and even radical answer to problems that still bedevil contemporary thinkers, and indeed bedevil contemporary thinkers more than any generation of thinkers before them. To say that God is creative is not merely to say that God is a particularly powerful or willful or skilled designer or engineer of systems and machines. It is, rather, to say that God fundamentally is a thing that by his inmost nature seeks to express the full, necessary transcendent content of himself, and that what we call creation, the universe, this bizarre contingent object in time and space that bedevils physicists and Platonists alike, can be most cogently understood as an attempt to express this necessary, transcendent content in a contingent, particular, limited way. God makes choices neither arbitrarily nor necessarily, but the way an artist makes choices--because what he wishes to express is far beyond the ability of his medium to bear. And hence the puzzling contingent features, nay, the puzzling contingent existence of the universe, is neither the necessary unfolding of a mathematical object, nor the arbitrary decrees of a tyrant, but the creative, generous choices of an artist with a definite subject in mind.
As Aquinas and the great theist philosophers taught, creation is not merely a single event, like winding up a watch or building a machine; it is a constant activity, a constant actuality, of divinity in the midst of things. Divine activity is more intrinsic and internal to the essence of beings than their own activity; it precedes that activity and makes it actual, makes it exist, at every moment and every action and inaction. And hence it is that there is no contradiction between affirming the real existence and activity of a single tree, or a species of trees, and yet also the actuality and beauty and order of a contingent place or moment of time. Each and every arrangement of time and place and thing is a divine work of art; and so is the sum total of those arrangements, that arrangement of all arrangements, which we call the universe.
And hence, too, can be most cogently and fully understood the even more puzzling existence and features of the human being, the human person. The human person is, as the ancients said, a mikros kosmos, a microcosm, a little universe; we are less like an object, a rock or a stone, than like an accidental falling of tree across stream with its branches sculpted by the wind and moss growing on its branches and flowers springing up below. Human beings are composed of flesh and blood and soul and body and face, bound together in a unity that is not so much all of a piece, like a rock or a mountain, as harmonious like a story or poem. We begin as the result of the coming together of two persons; the accidental blending of flesh with flesh, of genes with genes; and as we grow, we coincide with more and more other persons, times, places, landscapes, and in our memories, our minds, our hearts, we grow more and more composed, built out of, all these coming-togethers, these little acts of divine creativity.
A human person is, like a place or a time or a stream in the woods, an exercise of the Divine creativity, bringing together contingent things into harmonious unity, into beauty, into being. And God is the one who from the beginning to the end of time has done precisely this, in every time and place and human life and every little woods by the side of the road.
Christmas and the New Creation
And so, we return to Christmas. Why is God a man?
Put simply, God is a man because God is creative, and because man is a creation.
By one understanding, God and man are simple opposites. God is powerful; man is weak. God is eternal; man is temporal. God is necessary; man is contingent.
All this is true, or true enough; but it does not give the truest understanding of either God or man. In a deeper perspective, God and man are not so much opposed as correlative, with even their oppositions the result of a particular kind of relation, the relation of an artist to his work of art.
Man is a creature; that is, man is a constant exercise, a constant activity, of the divine creativity. When we say that God became man, then, we do not say that the eternal and powerful merely associated itself with the contingent and weak, or merely pretended to be so for a little while, used such creatureliness as a mask or a means or a tool for some higher or more cosmic end. We say that there was, and is, one human person, one microcosm, who expressed what God in all his activity seeks to express--namely, himself--as fully and as intimately as it can be expressed in contingency and creation. God is creating us at each moment of our lives; but for every moment of the life of this person, this Christ, beginning in the manger and ending on the Cross and beginning again beyond death in the Resurrection and ascending to be made eternal forever, that creative activity of God was so intimate and intrinsic and fully and totally determinative of the existence and activity and thoughts and desires and willings and actions and identity and personhood of what was created as to be, in the most important sense, one and the same person. As God had begotten God in eternity, so God created himself in time.
In becoming man, however, God in no way subtracted from the essential creatureliness, the essential contingency, the essential accidentalness of man. Christ lived a life of moments, in a thousand thousand relations, substantial and temporal and local and social and political and personal and entirely accidental, with other people and places and moments and Empires and ecosystems and the universe itself from the beginning of time. And so, necessarily, he drew all things to himself, every moment and time and place and stream and fallen tree and person. The divine imprint of creativity that lies on every thing was not merely affirmed, but increased infinitely, in a totally new dimension corresponding to a totally new calling.
And so, now, when we wander in the woods, we can see not only God creating a tree, causing it to be and to fall or to be grown upon or to be fashioned into a work of human art; we see God hanging from the tree, a creature in accidental relation with a creature. These relations that are the inmost essence of art God has entered into even more intimately than before, entered into not merely as an artist enters into what he creates, but as one work of art enters into and constitutes another. Hence, everything is transformed, and will be, until all of creation corresponds in its relation with God not just with the relation of artist to work of art, but to this new relation, this new creation, of the artist made art, the creator made creation, the God made man. The sky is the sky he looked up at; the water is the water which he drank; the human face is a face like the one he possessed. The very ordinariness, the very mundanity, of the art of Christmas, mother and child and wisemen and donkeys, testifies to this more than anything else could. God is a child in the arms of his mother: what more can anyone say?
I am not sure that anything said above is coherent; I hope very much that nothing said above is unorthodox. Having just finished a book on historical theology and heresy I realize very much how easy it is to err. All I can plead is that I do not, thank God, take what I have written seriously; which would be a terrible fate.
Yet hopefully, in this very clumsy work of art, this discordant arrangement which corresponds only infinitely distantly to the work of divine creativity present at every moment and time and place and person, I have expressed something of what is true, and so helped someone, perhaps, to see Christmas for a moment in a new light.
In any case: Christus natus est. Deus homo est. Alleluia.
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