Delicate He lays His glory by,
Born that man no extra could die,
Born to boost the sons of earth,
Born to offer them second delivery.—“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” by Charles Wesley
I’ve sung these strains, and others like them, each Christmas since I can keep in mind. However recently I’ve come to understand them in a means I by no means had earlier than. It was a few of my summer season studying, of all issues, that made me see afresh this explicit reality about Christmas.
In Might of this 12 months, I started studying my very first epic poem, Metamorphoses by Ovid. I took up the problem on impulse once I heard {that a} Substack referred to as Ovid Daily was about to start out sending out every day installments of the poem to subscribers. Studying an epic sounded daunting, however merely studying a brief e-mail every single day from Might by August—that sounded doable. And since “Magnificence and the Beast” is my favourite fairy story, an epic filled with transformation tales sounded intriguing.
Studying these myths gave me the beginnings of a brand new understanding of simply how radically Christianity broke with Western tradition.
However I had no thought how intriguing. Within the area of a few weeks, I went from idly observing the emails hitting my inbox and considering, “Oh, I actually ought to meet up with these,” to ripping by each after which frantically looking the Web for extra of the poem, in order that I may preserve going with out having to attend one other entire day. Armed solely with Translate.com and a smattering of highschool Latin, I picked my means by Ovid’s authentic phrases, included with every day’s publish. I searched out commentaries and alternate translations and well-known work impressed by the poem; I even learn Metamorphoses fanfiction (a few of it relatively good). In a phrase, I used to be hooked.
It was the pathos that obtained me. The tragic sample repeats itself many times all through the epic: people are pitted in opposition to the gods, and the gods, nearly with out fail, ship them to their doom. There are numerous variations on the theme. Typically a human provokes a god intentionally, as when Arachne bests Minerva in a weaving contest and refuses to indicate regret for it. Typically the human is merely careless or forgetful—as an example, Hippomenes neglects to thank Venus for serving to him win Atalanta’s hand in marriage. Fairly often a human is solely minding her personal enterprise, when a god comes after her with rape on his thoughts. As translator Stephanie McCarter has pointed out, lots of the encounters which have been sanitized or romanticized by centuries of retellings are, in Ovid’s model, simply plain rapes.
However in the end, in these tales, it hardly ever issues whether or not a human is defiant or submissive or responsible or a very harmless bystander. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s the human or the god who commits the inciting offense. “In case you search the reality, you can see the reason for this in fortune’s fault and never in any crime of his. For what crime had mere mischance?” asks Ovid plaintively in a single case, as if moving into the story himself to beg for mercy. But it surely’s no use. Nothing can save the human from getting was a spider or a lion or a cow or a tree or a deer. The overarching theme is that when the divine powers cross paths with humanity, people are degraded, discarded, typically actually dehumanized.
The wonder and energy of Ovid’s storytelling, alongside together with his refined sympathy for the victims of the gods, make these tales nearly unbearably poignant, whilst they compel you to maintain studying them. In a number of daring strokes, he can sketch a personality so colourful, or so interesting, or simply so recognizably human, that you just ache over that character’s eventual lack of humanity. There are only a few “Magnificence and the Beast”-style completely happy endings right here, both. More often than not, at any time when any of those persons are unfortunate sufficient to draw a god’s consideration, life as they know it can quickly be over. As an oracle warns Atalanta earlier than Hippomenes drags her down with him, “Although dwelling, you’ll lose your self.”
What little I knew of the Greek and Roman gods earlier than this was picked up in snatches from storybooks and historical past or literature lessons. I knew the fundamental outlines of some of those tales. However I wasn’t conscious of the monstrous vindictiveness, selfishness, jealousy, and cruelty that the pagans ascribed to their gods. On this view of issues, apparently, with nice energy got here nice freedom to do no matter you needed, weaker beings be damned. (Actually.)
And that’s the place these Christmas carols are available in. Whereas doing a little background studying on Ovid throughout my summer season mythology spree, I used to be out of the blue struck by the dates when he lived and wrote. Born in 43 BC, Ovid is assumed to have accomplished Metamorphoses round 8 AD.
It hit me proper between the eyes that Ovid was writing in regards to the gods coming to earth and interacting with humanity at the exact same time that God was doing simply that, a pair thousand miles away.
Keep in mind as I write this that I’m an utter novice on this discipline of historical mythology, and I’m not a lot of a historian, both. It could be that students have already written reams on this fascinating overlap, and I’m simply not conscious of it. I’m coming to it solely as a reader marveling at what should be one of many biggest coincidences—or divine jokes?—of all time.
In her essay “A Vote of Because of Cyrus,” Dorothy L. Sayers writes of a second in her childhood when, studying a textbook during which she acknowledged a biblical determine, she realized that “historical past was all of a bit, and the Bible was a part of it.” This realization of mine felt one thing like that.
And it threw a light-weight on simply how totally different Christianity was. The Greek and Roman myths that the poet was gathering and weaving collectively exemplified the spiritual considered a few of the most subtle cultures the world had ever identified. And that is what they got here up with: gods and goddesses who acted just like the very worst of humanity. I ponder what Ovid would have fabricated from a god who not solely created people in his personal picture, but in addition refused to take that picture from them, regardless of how badly they behaved. Who was born to a Jewish peasant lady in a barn (or one thing like a barn), spent most of his life working as a carpenter, taught folks to like their enemies and pray for his or her persecutors, and died a bloody, shameful loss of life on a Roman cross—intentionally and willingly giving his life for the sins of people.
No matter Ovid would have considered this, the concept wasn’t something he or his predecessors got here up with on their very own. Sacrificial love from a god was past even their good imaginations. It’s true that myths of dying and resurrected gods seem all through historical past, however gods who intentionally give themselves over to loss of life with a purpose to save people? These are very onerous to search out. (In Metamorphoses, Jupiter often “lays his glory by” simply lengthy sufficient to deceive and rape a girl.)
So studying these myths gave me the beginnings of a brand new understanding of simply how radically Christianity broke with Western tradition. We obtained a number of good issues from the Greeks and the Romans (I’m an enormous fan of unpolluted ingesting water), however not the idea of God as a loving, struggling servant. That got here from Jesus Christ, and that divine love turned the world the other way up.
Born to boost the little children of earth, to not damage or humiliate or throw them away. Born to raise and dignify them, to make them little children of God. That could be a God whose presence amongst us is value celebrating.
The quotations from Metamorphoses are from the Frank J. Miller translation.
