OF THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTMAS AND THE PLACE OF A SPARROW

I love this reflection, by an Anglo-Saxon scholar, challenging the prevailing belief that the church stole the idea of Christmas from the pagans. It’s thoughtful, wise and very informed. Worth reading all of it! By Eleanor Parker https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2020/11/

In Britain, as elsewhere in northern Europe, Christmas is a midwinter festival. (This is where people start shouting ‘because it was stolen from the pagans!’ so I’m now going to talk about that; but please proceed with an open mind, and don’t just shout at me…) By the time early medieval missionaries came to convert the various peoples of Britain to Christianity, Christmas, like Easter, was already a well-established festival in the church. It’s a common mistake in modern discussions of this question to massively overstate the influence of English-speaking culture within the medieval Christian church; I talked about that in relation to Easter here. So it’s important to say first that the association between Christ’s birth and the winter solstice, between the Son of God and the sun as a potent symbol of light and life, predates this country’s conversion to Christianity by several centuries. The story of its establishment is more complex than is popularly believed, and long before the festival reached this country it was already linked up with a network of other liturgical dates, including Easter and the Feast of the Annunciation, which were thought to trace their origins back to the Gospel narratives of Christ’s life and death.

But such ideas, communicated and shared throughout the international church, also manifested themselves in distinctive ways in different Christian cultures – and latitudes and climates. When Christmas reached this part of the world, it met some kind of pre-existing midwinter festival(s) with which it subsequently became entwined. As always, we know much less about these festivals than we would like to know, and much less than is often confidently stated in the media. But in the Anglo-Saxon regions of Britain, that midwinter festival was probably Geola (Yule), and what resulted from that meeting was a new expression of Christianity which went on to develop its shape and meaning within a particular cultural context. As a parallel, we might compare what happened when the very widespread tradition of Biblical and early medieval Christian ‘sun’ imagery for the ‘Son of God’ entered the English language, where the words for sun and son were very close – to a medieval way of thinking, a meaningful conjunction rather than a linguistic accident. Anglo-Saxon Christians knew perfectly well that their ancestors had celebrated a midwinter festival too, and they didn’t pretend otherwise; but the new religion had given new meaning to it, and in their eyes, a meaning more true and powerful.

Religious conversion is a profound cultural shift, which involves rebuilding the social architecture of an entire society. That works itself out in different ways in different places, with an almost infinite amount of diversity and variety. In England, when it came to the festival year, it involved harmonising a new religion which had its roots in the Middle East and the Mediterranean world with the climate and agricultural calendar of a country on the edge of northern Europe. That was a complex process of synthesis and negotiation – not a matter of simply laying one calendar on top of another, or just celebrating old festivals under new names, but of reinterpreting and rethinking the intersections between the divine and the human, between religious observance and the rituals of daily life. One reason I find it frustrating when people ignore this complexity to rant about ‘stealing pagan festivals’ is that it denies the agency and intelligence of the converted peoples, as well as of those doing the converting. This was a process which required serious thought on both sides, and its result was an English festival calendar which had a remarkable longevity, lasting – not by any means unchanged, but very stable – from the seventh or eighth century up to just a few decades ago. Comparable, but distinct, processes took place in other parts of Britain and in Ireland, where new festival calendars were formed within these different contexts – no more or less Christian, but the product of differing cultural forces and forms of negotiation. Those variations are regularly glossed over in modern discussions of these subjects (see: Lammas, Halloween), as if all parts of what’s now Britain and all forms of non-Christian religion were basically the same; but of course they weren’t, and the differences are important to note.

I’m increasingly troubled by the discourse of cultural purity which surrounds the ‘stolen festivals’ myth, since it’s not only historically inaccurate but also would imply, if taken to its logical conclusion, that no cultures are ever allowed to change or influence each other. I do wonder if the people who aggressively assert, more than a thousand years after Britain converted to Christianity, that Christian festivals are still a foreign imposition, unjustly supplanting some kind of native pagan religion, are really prepared to accept the implications of that argument. Are they truly suggesting that mutual influence between different cultures and religions can only ever be seen as illegitimate and corrupting? That there is one form of religion indigenous to the British Isles (paganism), and every religion introduced later has no rightful place here? That immigrants to a country should never be allowed to integrate or combine their religious traditions with those of their new home, and that even centuries after their arrival the traditions they’ve introduced – even if they have been widely and enthusiastically adopted – must always be stigmatised as inauthentic, not really British? I can’t imagine how stultifying it must be to think of culture in such prescriptive terms, nor what it suggests about their attitude to religious diversity in general.

The medieval attitude to the development of religious festivals and seasons was considerably more flexible than such a rigid modern perspective would allow. In the early medieval period, liturgical calendars were organic in their growth, and very localised. Over time things became more standardised, but the story of the development of the Christian calendar in the first millennium is often one of feasts beginning in a particular place, where they’re found to be meaningful and valuable, and then spreading elsewhere if that meaning could be translated to a new context. Some remained local, as many saints’ feasts did; others started local but caught on, like All Saints’ Day, or the Advent fast, and became more widely celebrated throughout the church.

In general, there’s a balance between diversity and universality in early medieval practice which many people in post-Christian Britain struggle to understand. If they’ve only encountered one variety of Christianity – most likely a form of Anglo-American Protestantism, which they often know better from TV than from personal experience – they assume that its beliefs and practices must be universal, rather than culturally conditioned. If that’s Christianity, they think, everything which varies from it must be deviant, and the easiest thing is to label those deviations ‘pagan’. Some Christians are prone to this too, of course. This applies to many things, such as attitudes towards scriptural authority or interactions with the dead, but anything to do with the natural world – cycles of the earth or the sun and moon – is especially liable to fall into this category, even though it’s self-evidently absurd to think that nature is somehow inherently pagan. (People who think lunar calendars are ‘pagan’ might want to take a look at some other major religions sometime.) How can the experience of living through the seasons, which is the most universal experience imaginable, belong to one religion more than another? What can it possibly mean to say that the feeling of living through midwinter, for instance, somehow intrinsically belongs more to paganism than it does to any other religion, such that it can be ‘stolen’? The experience is the same: when it’s cold and it gets dark early, people want light and warmth and the hope that this won’t last forever. They may link those wants and hopes with their religious beliefs, or they may not; but surely no way of acknowledging those feelings and marking the season can be more or less right or wrong, pure or impure, native or stolen. It’s just human beings, living through time.

There are many troubling assumptions underlying this binary approach to religion, as well as a long history of what we now know to be faulty scholarship – in particular, that of 19th-century scholars who sought to identity pagan roots for Christian practices because they preferred that to acknowledging these practices’ Jewish or Catholic history. One reason it would be good for the British media to take religion more seriously, and for journalists to attempt to educate themselves about a much greater diversity of religious practices, is that it would help to get away from these binary ways of thinking – basically, to understand that the world contains many more religious options than ‘Anglo-American Protestant’ and ‘pagan’. They could, for instance, learn to recognise the kinds of symbolic language in which many religions speak about the divine, rather than insisting on taking everything with such a tired literalism (‘but would it really snow in Bethlehem?’). Or they could try to understand the role of tradition and the interpretation of sacred texts in different religions, with all their complicated history and nuance (rather than thinking they’re being clever by saying ‘Jesus’ birthday isn’t mentioned in the Bible, so the date must be arbitrary!’). It would be nice to think that as we engage in another profound cultural shift, from Christian to post-Christian Britain, we could discuss these questions in more open and less intolerant ways.

‘Christ was born…’ (BL Cotton MS Tiberius B I)

 

To return to midwinter. Anglo-Saxon writers often use ‘midwinter’ as another name for Christmas, even in the most explicitly Christian contexts. ‘Crist wæs acennyd… on midne winter’ (‘Christ was born at midwinter’), begins the most unambiguously liturgical Old English poem. Even in the eleventh century, when England had been soaked in Christian culture for many generations, Christmas could be called ‘Midwinter’s mass-day’, as a completely unremarkable alternative name for the feast. That’s certainly not because these writers were consciously or unconsciously still a bit pagan; it’s because, like the early medieval church more widely, they were part of a culture fascinated by the intersection of liturgical time and natural time. As they saw it, God created time, like everything in the natural world; and so time and the seasons, like everything else, was pregnant with potential meaning. That meaning they understood by the light of their own environment and their Christian faith. It’s no coincidence that Bede (who had thought very seriously about the transition from pagan belief to Christianity within his particular cultural context), chose a winter scene to illustrate something about that transition, giving voice to the thoughts of a pagan Northumbrian discussing whether or not to accept the new faith:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad. The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

The point of this story is that not that Christianity, unlike paganism, protects you from the storms of winter. It’s more bleak than that, more honest. The lighted hall, full of people and warmth and feasting (so different from Thomas Traherne’s empty magnificence) is human society on this earth – all that we build to shield us from the cold and darkness. Pagan or Christian, an individual life coming into that society is still like the brief flight of a sparrow, fragile, vulnerable, transient. But the point is that if this new religion meant anything at all, it meant a glimpse of something outside the hall: of a different kind of time to that which is known to us. It meant the hope of a presence out there in the emptiness, a light in the midwinter darkness.