Buon Natale, Fratelli E Sorelle!

The Life, The Truth, & The Resurrection Is Born -- But Remember, We Too Must Die

Midnight mass at the Church of the Holy Trinity of Pilgrims

I had not planned to write a Christmas greeting, but the Tom Holland interview with Bari Weiss inspired me. They’re talking about his great book Dominion, which is a historical account of how Christianity made the Western world. If you haven’t read it, oh Lord have mercy, do! If nothing else, it will help you accept how people like Tom, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Niall Ferguson have moved from atheism, or agnosticism, to some kind of Christian faith, however tenuous. Excerpt:

Bari Weiss: Your book opens with the crucifixion. Your argument is that the turning point is not Jesus’s birth, but his death, at 33 years old, at the hands of the Roman authorities. Why is this the pivotal moment?

Tom Holland: It is very difficult to overemphasize how completely mad it was for everybody in the ancient world that someone who suffers crucifixion could in any way be the Messiah, let alone part of the one God. In the opinion of the Romans, crucifixion is the fate that should properly be visited on slaves. Not just because it is protracted and agonizing, but also because it is deeply humiliating.

When you die, you will hang there like a lump of meat. This is a demonstration, in the opinion of the Romans, that essentially their might is right. That if a slave rebels against his master, this is what happens.

I think what is radical about what Christians come to believe is not the fact that a man can become a god. Because for most people in the Mediterranean that is a given. What is radical is that the man Christians believe was divine was someone who had ended up suffering the worst fate imaginable—death by crucifixion—which, in the opinion of the Romans, was the fate visited on a slave.

The reason that Jesus suffers that fate is that he is part of a conquered people. He’s not even from Judea. He’s from Galilee. Galilee is not properly under the rule of the Romans. It’s franchised out to a client king. He is the lowest of the low. Even the Judeans look down on him.

The fact that such a person could conceivably be raised up by citizens of the Roman Empire as someone greater than Caesar himself, greater than Augustus, is a completely shocking maneuver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shocking to them all.

The radical message of the crucifixion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.

As you know, I am in Rome this week. It is easy to relax into the overwhelming historical evidence of this city’s Christianity, but you also can’t forget its imperial heritage. St. Peter’s Basilica, and the square in front of it, is one of the most glorious places on the planet, but it all started out as — pardon the expression — a shithole where the body of a Galilean peasant, Peter, was buried after he got what was coming to him as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. A few decades ago, archaeologists discovered deep below the awe-inspiring Bernini high altar in the basilica the grave of that simple peasant. That’s where all this worldly glory comes from: the resting place of a man who gave his life to testify that Jesus of Nazareth was God in the flesh, come to live and die and rise again to save humanity.

I’m actually writing this on Christmas Eve, with midnight approaching. I’m going to send this on Christmas morning, but soon we’re heading out to join an American friend and his family at midnight mass. Could the Caesars ever have imagined that 2000 years later, they would be nothing but ancient history, but the faith they tried to crush would be alive, and the birth of this Jewish nobody from the outback of their Empire would still be celebrated as a holy day? Of course not!

We don’t think enough about the meaning of the Incarnation, when Mary’s fiat —her agreeing to be the vessel for God condescending to enter time as a mere man — changed everything. This is the great divine affirmation that man is created good, that humanity has intrinsic dignity, that no matter what the world says, no matter what the great Caesar and the Machine of Empire says, we matter.

As Holland’s book makes clear, this fact made all the difference in the world — and still does. The perversion in our own time, he says, is that we in the West have decided that Man Is Great, but that sin, or original sin (the idea that there is something ineradicably fallen in our nature) does not exist. This is turning us into monsters of pride. Nevertheless, the die was cast when the “pale Galilean,” as a modern poet said derisively of Jesus, conquered.

Because we are fallen, even the Christian world has never been free of sin, of cruelty. But Christ not only gave us the means to conquer it (by imitating Him in dying to ourselves), but also the means to judge our corruption. We know right from wrong, though many deny it today. Everything ultimately comes down to the Satanic proclamation of Aleister Crowley: “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.” If God does not exist, then there is no power strong enough to restrain the corrupt will of man. When Martin Heidegger said at the end of his life, in the 1960s, that “only a god can save us,” he was talking about the need for a divine force to keep us from destroying ourselves. He did not believe in the Christian God — though I’ve read that he did return to the Catholicism of his childhood near the end of his life — but the philosophical, indeed the anthropological, point he made is powerful: we cannot be good, ultimately, on our own.

Matt and I just got back from midnight (Catholic) mass at the Church of the Holy Trinity of Pilgrims. (There is no Christmas Eve liturgy for the Orthodox; maybe the Russian church has one, but they are on the Julian calendar.) A friend here invited us to join his family for the mass, and we were happy to accept. This is a parish where they are still allowed to celebrate the Tridentine Rite; the parish belongs to the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter.

It was extraordinarily solemn and beautiful. The entire church, which was constructed from 1587-1616, was illuminated only by candles around the altar. Near the beginning of the liturgy, a priest formally placed the Christ Child in a crib above the tabernacle (look closely at the photo at the top, and you can see him). It occurred to me that Jesus was bound in swaddling clothes after he came into this world, and he left this world bound in a funeral shroud. I have to think that this was the point the figure made.

The altar remained shrouded in clouds of incense, and the sounds of Renaissance polyphony filled the cavernous nave. I prayed intensely throughout, and even asked the Lord to bless all of you, and to answer your intentions. I was pleased to discover that I remembered the basic prayers in Latin, and even prayed one cycle of my Orthodox prayer rope in Latin (“Domine Jesu Christe miserere mei”). During the consecration, on my knees on the hard floor, my head nearly touching the ground, I thought about how this mass, with this music, is truly one of the glories of our civilization in the West. I am not remotely drawn to return to Catholicism, but I thanked the Lord for the beauty and faith He has given to the world through these people and their rites, and I prayed for the unity, in charity, of the Christian peoples. I also realized, listening to the ritual prayers in the ancient tongue of the West, that despite our decadent state, the West is worth fighting for. I asked God to grant us repentance and a resurrection of the spirit of true faith.

We left during Communion, because of course as Orthodox, we couldn’t receive, and it was well past one a.m., and unlike his old pop, Matt had not napped earlier in the day. What a pleasure it was to walk back in the cold night air, on the winding, narrow streets of Rome, to reach the end of a street and notice oh hey, it’s the Pantheon! What a gift this week in Rome has been. And it’s not over yet! After liturgy in the Greek church, we are going to have lunch with a friend tomorrow. He lives in the neighborhood of St. John Lateran and St. Maria Maggiore. Maybe they will be open for a visit.

Earlier on Christmas Eve, as you’ll recall, I visited the Capuchin church here in Rome to pray at the tomb of St. Felice. But I also visited the very strange crypt, which the Capuchins for centuries have held and ornamented as a memento mori — a reminder that death awaits us all. It is macabre, at first, but you must understand their point: that this life is a passing thing, that our real life begins in eternity. We must hold lightly to the things of this world. This is something that we Orthodox Christians agree with entirely. I tell you, though, this is something to see:

The Capuchins who lived at the church used to come down and pray there at night, before bed, to ponder death. There are several rooms filled with skulls and bones. There is even a Chapel of The Pelvises. Look closely:

More:

And:

The final chapel features a painting of Christ raising Lazarus from the dead:

Death, you see, is not the end! Resurrection awaits us, at least we who unite ourselves to Christ. Per Tom Holland, this too is the radical message of Christianity, even more radical than that the first shall be last. But before we rise, we must pass through death. We must have all the things of the body, and all the things of this world, taken from us. Nobody — not one of us — gets out of here alive. All the good and the great who have ever walked this earth, eaten, drank, danced, played games, made love, married, given birth, and all the things — eventually turn to dry bones. Our Christian hope, though, is knowing that death has no lasting sting, and in the confidence that at the end of time, all these bones will live again.

I’m telling you, this was such a great place to visit after the overwhelming beauty and luxury of the Vatican Museums on Monday. It was the starkest possible reminder of the reality of this life. This crypt is not for the faint of heart, nor for Christians who think of the faith as about nothing more than psychological and emotional uplift. One of the skeletons clothed in a Capuchin habit holds a sign reading, "What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be." Wisdom, let us attend!

Keep Christianity weird, say I. Not everybody needs to visit the Capuchin crypt and walk among the bones. But don’t doubt for a second that a Christianity that cannot contemplate what these monks contemplate — the brute fact of death, and the inevitable loss of all things in this world, between our passing and the general resurrection to come — is not a faith that is capable of holding its ground in the face of mortal terrors.

It was, for me, a salutary place to visit on the eve of the celebration of the birth of Jesus. That sweet little baby came into a world condemned already to die, by virtue of being mortal. And yet, by dying and resurrecting, he trampled down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowed life. Even among the thousands of Capuchin monks whose last earthly remains lay arrayed for inspection in the six little rooms underneath the church on the Via Veneto, in Rome, the Eternal City, whose earthly glory passed centuries ago, probably never to return, but which still can reveal the deepest truths of life and of death.

For unto us a Child is born! Unto us a Son is given! Let us enjoy these twelve days of Christmas. Lent will be here before you know it. Remember: you and I too shall die. But let us live while we live. Buon Natale, fratelli e sorelle!