In The Incredulity of Father Brown, his third volume of tales about the eponymous detective-priest, GK Chesterton tells of cases where the non-Christian characters are convinced of mysterious and occult forces at work: a curse which follows an ancient chalice, the prophetic foresight of a dog, a vampiric flying murderer who can only be slain with a silver bullet. And in each case it is the clear rationality of the Christian detective which sees through the nonsense to a true explanation of the case. For Chesterton wants us to see that it is not those who embrace Christianity who are prone to a credulous belief in the supernatural — but those who reject it.
Christmas asks us to believe a miracle like no other. God the Son, through whom all things were made, was united to a human body by the work of the Holy Spirit in the womb of a virgin. How a human embryo could be created without a father is beyond any ability of ours to explain, but even the mechanics of the virgin birth are a minor mystery compared to that of the incarnation: the union of God and man in the person of Jesus. Here was the creator entering into and becoming part of the world he had created. The one held in his mothers’ arms was at the same time holding the whole universe in existence. The one who fled helpless from Herod was the one who wielded all power over all things. The one contained in the manger was the one not contained by all the unimaginable expanses of the heavens. What the angels announced was the arrival of a person who defies every human category and concept, before whose mystery we are called to bow in submission, awe and mental surrender.
And yet, as the Christian message spread across the world in the years that followed, it did not take the form of a call to start, but to stop, believing the ridiculous. Confronted with the might and grandeur of Athens’ pagan temples and religious cults, Paul dismissed the entire edifice as the product of “times of ignorance”, the mere “art and imagination of man”. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo mocked the myriad deities of Rome and their associated ceremonies as nonsensical gibberish with horrible human consequences. Early Christian hymns sang of the darkness fleeing away as the light of Christ flooded into the world. Where Christianity went, superstition and ignorance waned, and literacy, learning, reason, and intellectual thought flourished.
Why was this? It is easy for us to forget that the world into which Christianity came was one in which multiple absurdities of belief went simply unexamined because it had never occurred to those who believed them to join up their thinking in a logical way. Christians, however, had a radical new way of thinking. For the man who was born in the stable was, as the Apostle John said, the Logos of God. This Greek word is usually rightly translated Word, but it also embraces meaning, purpose, rationality. The Christian claim is that there is a single, coherent, integrated unity to the purpose and meaning of all things. Logic — derived from logos — exists in this universe, and all things are subject to it, because it existed beforehand in the mind of God who created them. And this integrated unity of meaning in the mind of God, this Word of God, is not a thing but a person. An eternal person, the eternal Son, the perfect expression of God’s coherent understanding of all things.
And that is who entered the world in the stable at Bethlehem. The child in the manger brought into the world an approach to meaning, logic, words, which its inhabitants had never before known. Those who followed the Word of God in human flesh had a new understanding of what true reason was, a new training in how to use it, and a new expectation that all the world should and would submit to it. For all things were created by the one who is reason itself.
The absurdities of paganism (and its associated horrors) shrivelled in this new light. “The darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining,” wrote the Apostle John, and that is exactly what happened in the centuries that followed. Ludicrous accounts of the lives of the gods, unquestioned (by most) for centuries, were abandoned. Absurd beliefs in divining the future by the ravings of drugged priestesses, or by sacrificial entrails and the flights of birds, were seen for what they are. The worldview which saw nature as a battleground of occult forces inherent in trees, rocks, water, stars and planets was swept away. And as the centuries went on the fact that the Word had been made flesh unfolded in a desire for reasoned thought in all areas of life which ultimately banished paganism from Europe, led to the foundation of universities, and saw the emergence of science. It is not saying too much to say that had Christmas never happened, we would not know what reason and logic really are.
Without Christ, the Word made flesh, we lose the only possible grounds for thinking about things logically at all
Over a millennium after this Christian revolution, the philosophers of the Enlightenment imagined that by dispensing with Christianity we could enter an era of perfect rationality. But the effect has been the opposite: for without Christ, the Word made flesh, we lose the only possible grounds for thinking about things logically at all. And so a post-Christian world is a world in which we are regressing to the absurdities of paganism. Without the logos, we are once again willing to believe nonsense.
For example, many who reject Christianity cannot bring themselves to abandon belief in reason, justice, truth. But then they have to believe in them despite believing that they are grounded on nothing, or at least, nothing higher than human consensus. That is an absurdity; values we invented ourselves can hardly bind us to obey them. Either they exist above us, or they have no claim on us at all.
Or again, the loss of a belief in there being an ultimate meaning behind all things has led to an elevation of mere sentiment: feelings have become, for many, the ultimate reality, as seen in the bizarre doctrines of identity theory. If nothing above me has determined what I am, then my feelings are the only thing that is left. They have become a mystical force with the power to define me, even to change a man into a woman. Transgenderism is merely the most obvious outworking of this profound new irrationality; the destructive force of this insane elevation of the ‘self’ is working its way through the whole of our society, destroying relationships and social structures we depend upon with frightening speed.
Or again, without the Word made flesh, we regress to believing in any sort of nonsense to explain the realities of human experience. Britain today has plenty of empty churches, and a mass of superstition, mysticism, paganism and new-age mumbo-jumbo has rushed in to take their place. These things speak of a general credulousness, a willingness to believe in absurdity, which stalks post-Christian society. We have made ourselves gods, made ourselves into a deity, and discovered that reason and logic have fled from us. It could not be any other way. Abandon the Logos, and you abandon the source of reason itself.
“It’s the first effect of not believing in God,” says Father Brown, “That you lose your common sense and can’t see things the way they are.” A non-Christian society is, he says, “reeling back into the bestial gods of the beginning… and all because you are frightened of four words: ‘He was made man’.”
This Christmas, we are called again to believe that the Word was made flesh in the womb of the virgin Mary. It is a vast and profound mystery, which none of us will ever understand; but it is a mystery which alone has the power to make the whole of the rest of the world make sense. Of course, you don’t have to accept it. But if you don’t, you will in the end have to reconcile yourself to believing credulous nonsense about everything else.
