Poetry Analysis: The Wise Men by G.K. Chesterton

In addition to Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” which I posted here, we also read and discussed G.K. Chesterton’s poem, “The Wise Men” as part of our discussion of Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s book, The Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men.  You can read the four part blog posts on Longenecker’s book: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.   

 

The Wise Men

By G.K. Chesterton (1913)

 

Step softly, under snow or rain,

   To find the place where men can pray;

The way is all so very plain

   That we may lose the way.

 

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore,

   On tortured puzzles from our youth,

We know all labyrinthine lore,

We are the three Wise Men of yore,

   And we know all things but the truth.

 

We have gone round and round the hill,

   And lost the wood among the trees,

And learnt long names for every ill,

And served the made gods, naming still

   The Furies the Eumenides.

 

The gods of violence took the veil

   Of vision and philosophy,

The Serpent that brought all men bale,

He bites his own accursed tail,

   And calls himself Eternity.

 

Go humbly . . . it has hailed and snowed . . .

   With voices low and lanterns lit;

So very simple is the road,

   That we may stray from it.

 

The world grows terrible and white,

   And blinding white the breaking day;

We walk bewildered in the light,

For something is too large for sight,

   And something much too plain to say.

 

The Child that was ere worlds begun ─

(. . . We need but walk a little way . . .

We need but see a latch undone . . .)

The Child that played with moon and sun

   Is playing with a little hay.

 

The house from which the heavens are fed,

   The old strange house that is our own,

Where tricks of words are never said,

And Mercy is as plain as bread,

   And Honour is as hard as stone.

 

Go humbly; humble are the skies,

   And low and large and fierce the Star,

So very near the Manger lies

That we may travel far.

 

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes

   To roar to the resounding plain,

And the whole heaven shouts and shakes

   For God Himself is born again

And we are little children walking

   Through the snow and rain.

 

You can hear “The Wise Men” read on YouTube, here:

 

 I can’t say I understand every line, but I think I got the gist, though it took quite a few readings and listening’s.  This is a poem you have to hear.

So I have to say I was a little confused by the different forms of the stanzas.  There are three forms, a quatrain (four lines), a cinquain (five lines), and a sestet (six lines).  The stanzas are all in iambic meter (unstressed/stressed syllable pattern) and are of eight syllables (referred to as four feet) long.  The quatrains and the sestet end with a shortened line of six syllables.  I should also mention that the quatrain and the sestet also have an alternating ABAB (and a concluding AB for the sestet) rhyme scheme while the cinquain has an ABAAB rhyme scheme.

So the eight syllabic line quatrain, including the shortened fourth line, is a classic ballad form.  There are variations on this, but what Chesterton chose might be most common.  They are typically narrative and the form harkens back to the Middle Ages, though they returned to popularity in the 19^th century. 

The cinquain was not as typical but also made a comeback in the 19^th century.  The 19^th century poets strove for musicality, and Chesterton really comes from that tradition.  The great heyday of the cinquain I would say was in the 17^th century.  “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” by John Donne is a really fine example.  That fifth line gives a cinquain more of a contemplative feel. 

Finally a sestet echoes the last six lines of an Italian sonnet, which among other things gives a closure to a thought. 

In all there are ten stanzas, arranged in what I would consider a pattern: 4-5-5-5-4-5-5-5-4-6, where four stands for a quatrain, five for a cinquain, and six for the sestet.   There’s no such established form that I could find, so I would say it’s Chesterton’s creation.  And like the Victorian poets whose lineage he comes from (think Tennyson, Poe, Rossetti, even Yeats and others) the musical/sound experience is paramount to his construction.  And as I look at each of the stanzas, I would say they function in their classical sense.  Though not perfectly, the quatrains are narrative, the cinquains are contemplative, and the sestet brings it to a conclusion.  That’s pretty innovative and yet traditional at the same time!

Now what’s the narrative about?  Yes, the Magi traveling to Jesus, but what I can’t distinguish is whether it’s an actual Magi speaking or someone in Chesterton’s present time (the narrator?) taking on the persona of a Magi.  It seems to blur.  What do people think on that?  Is it one or the other or both?  I just can’t make up my mind. 

Now what I would do at this point is identify the central idea of each stanza.  Here’s my best guess.

Stanza 1: Journey to a place to pray, which I take is the Magi kneeling before the manger as in a crèche scene.  I’m also struck by the paradox that way is plain but easy to lose one’s way.

Stanza 2: Describes the studious nature of the Magi with another paradox that despite their learning they don’t know the truth.

Stanza 3: Further describes the Magi learning, but this time characterized as caught in a circular trap serving merciless pagan gods.

Stanza 4: He describes these gods as hiding the truth, bringing evil by linking them to the serpent.  What’s fascinating here is he has another reference to circular, the serpent biting his tail is a circle, and he identifies it as a false eternity.

Now take a break here.  I would say that stanzas one through four are the first chunk of thought.  Let’s call this Part 1.  It concerns the Magi’s fruitless existence prior to encountering Christ.

Stanza 5: The journey continues.  Again Chesterton brings up the paradox about getting lost on a simple road.

Stanza 6: A description of the whirlwind of snow about them, being blinded by a light, and paradoxically (again!) not being able to see something that is “too large for sight.”

Stanza 7: A walking into the stable to find the Christ child.  Best lines in the poem: “The Child that played with moon and sun/Is playing with a little hay.”

Stanza 8: I have to admit, I am baffled by this stanza.  Which house?  The Magi’s home?  The stable?  The house of the narrator?  This feels like the philosophic center of the poem but I can’t get it. 

OK, those last four stanzas can be called Part 2.  The reach the Christ child and are overwhelmed.

Stanza 9: I think they walk up to the manger here, and again another paradox: they are near but yet so far still to go.  I take that as they still have a journey to comprehend the significance. 

Stanza 10: So this concludes with a roaring laughter.  Why?  And another paradox, “God Himself is born again.”  “Again”?  When was He born the first time?  But the concluding couplet is very striking: they have suddenly, I assume metaphorically, become children “walking through snow and rain.”

So what I take from that last stanza is that the joy of meeting the Christ child transforms the narrators (he refers to a “we”) into children playing in snow.  The once drudgery of the journey is a sort of child’s play now.  This, and the plain too that the lion roars on, brings the poem back to the first stanza of snow and rain.  It gives the poem a circular feel. 

This leaves me with some unanswered questions.  So why the circular form and how does that relate to the serpent’s evil circular image in Part 1?  What is stanza 8 all about?  Why the laughter as a concluding image—it seems to come from nowhere?  And what about the narrator?  Is it the wise men of yore or present day speaker? 

Still I became very fond of the poem as I understood it!  That was enjoyable.

 

Poetry Analysis: The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot

Given the similarity in themes, this poem, “The Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot and G.K. Chesterton’s poem “The Wise Men” were part of the discussion at the end of Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s book, The Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men.  So this and a coming post on Chesterton’s poem are associated as Magi posts.  You can read the four part blog posts on Longenecker’s book: Part 1,  Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.  

 

Here is Eliot’s poem.

 

The Journey of the Magi

By T.S. Eliot

 

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

  

You can listen to T.S. Eliot reading his own poem here:

 

First we should note the form of the poem.  We have three uneven stanzas, the first of twenty lines, the second of eleven lines, and the third of twelve lines.  It is in free verse of uneven line length with no rhyme scheme.  It’s pretty close to natural speech.  If you could summarize the theme of each stanza, one could say the first is the journey, the second is the arrival, and the third is trying to comprehend the experience.  We see that the first two stanzas, the narrator speaks in the inclusive “we” while in the third he shifts to the personal “I.” 

We see that in the first stanza the journey was difficult: cold, long, dirty, expensive, sleepless, having to sustain uncouth and repulsive workers and hostile cities, all the while dreaming of the “silken girls” of summer back home and hearing the voices in his head saying it was “folly.”  The details are of bodily lusts, and of other sinful and unkind acts, and the scenery of a waste land of winter, dead snow, nothing growing.  The central animal imagery is of camels who are “galled,” that is to say chafed, irate, who are “sorefooted,” that is struggling, and “refractory,” that is to say resistant, stubborn.  In fact, the word “refractory,” an odd word to use in a poem, characterizes the whole first stanza: resistance.

In the second stanza, the narrator comes to a “temperate valley,” echoing perhaps the land of milk and honey.  We have “vegetation,” so we have life.  We have running water and civilization with the wind-mill, and a horse, this stanza’s central animal image, in the meadow.  We have allusions to the sacraments, a running stream for baptism, vegetation with a wind mill suggesting grain milled into flour for bread, and a tavern with vine leaves suggesting wine.  But we have not come to Eden.  Interwoven we have images of the crucifixion: the three trees and hands dicing for silver, and feet kicking “empty wine-skins.”  But the narrator concludes with the word “satisfactory,” the word that I think characterizes this stanza and which by the way rhymes with the word “refractory” from the previous.  On first blush, “satisfactory” sounds anticlimactic until you look at its Latin root of satis, meaning enough, sufficient.  Yes what they found was anticlimactic, after all it was only a baby they found, but the baby was “enough,” “sufficient,” “fulfilling.” 

In the final stanza what is at first striking is the absolute lack of imagery.  There is none.  Everything is an abstraction.  Birth is a summary descriptive; it lacks any specificity.  The same thing with death.  There are no images of birth and death given.  “Kingdoms,” “evidence,” “remember,” “agony,” and “dispensation” are more abstractions.  The closest he comes to an image is with “alien people clutching their gods.”  While the clutching of gods is still an abstraction, it does approximate an image, and what a strange way to end a Christian poem with an image of people holding on to their pagan gods.  “Dispensation” is I think the word that characterizes this stanza, and I think defines the entire poem.  I’ll get to that shortly.

So what are we to make of the entire poem?  Yes, it’s the first person account from one of the Magi, but this poem came shortly after Eliot’s profound religious conversion.  In a sense perhaps this poem is taking us through his biographical journey.  What do we make of the three stanza division?  When you see three you kind of think of the Trinity, but unfortunately there is no way to link any of the Persons of the Trinity to the first and second stanza.  No that doesn’t fit, but perhaps you can think of this as Dante’s journey through the Divine Comedy, with the first stanza being hell, the second being purgatory, and the third being heaven.  That fits rather nicely when you know that Eliot loved Dante. 

Perhaps an even better organizing principle is St. Augustine’s City of God.  There Augustine constructs the polar opposites of the City of Man versus the City of God, but more importantly he divides the City of Man into two parts, the pagan world and the world of Judaism, that is, of the Old Testament.  Could we see the first stanza as sitting in for the pagan world, the second stanza for the world of the Old Testament, and the third stanza for the sublime New Testament’s City of God?  I certainly think so.  The first stanza is filled with pagan idolatry of wine (liquor), women, and song (voices singing in our ears)!  The people around him are completely undisciplined, seeking only satisfying bodily passions.  Even the Magi dreams of girls and sherbet.  There is no self-sacrifice.  Only grumbling of discomforts, hostility, and no turning the other cheek.  Even the “folly” of the voices seems to echo St. Paul’s “Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor 23).  The ‘folly” comes from the perception of gentiles.

In the second stanza I mentioned how we have the rudiments of the sacraments, but unfulfilled, and we even have the lintel of the Passover.  We also have the allusions to the crucifixion, and we have the white horse, which I think is a symbol of earthly power, which becomes harnessed in heaven (there are several white horses in the Book of Revelation) but here runs away.  The most intriguing image is that of the empty wine-skins.  This alludes to Jesus’ parable of the wineskins: “no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined.  Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins” (Lk 5:37-8).  In Jesus’ parable, the old wineskin is Israel of the Old Testament.  It cannot hold the new wine that is Jesus or the new covenant. 

In the final stanza we are met with “Birth” and “Death,” both strikingly capitalized.  What Eliot has done here is merged the two.  Birth and death are one which is merged in the person of Jesus Christ.  Indeed, how many births and deaths can we draw up here?  There is Christ of course.  There is the Magus narrator who is now born to a new life and realizes that this birth is a mortification—a death to the body.  There is the same for the poet Eliot in his personal experience, a new devout Eliot and the old pagan Eliot dead.  But there is the death that Christ’s birth conquered through His resurrection, so that with heaven open we all can be born to eternal life.  His birth ends death through a new birth.  Finally it is no accident I think that the last stanza has twelve lines.  The Feast of the Magi is celebrated on the twelfth day of Christmas, but more importantly the number twelve symbolizes completeness in Biblical numerology, not just completeness but fulfillment.  The Old Testament is fulfilled in the New.  Indeed then one can look back at the other stanzas and link the twenty lines of the first stanza to the undisciplined indulgence of the pagan world, and the eleven lines of the second stanza to the coming short and unfulfilled of the Old Testament world.  I don’t know if Eliot had Augustine’s City of God in mind but the construction and details work very well.

Finally I must mention what I think is the greatest poetic flare of the entire poem.  I’ve read this poem for decades and never saw this, and it has elevated this poem from a good to a great poem for me.  It’s these lines that are so easy to overlook and probably aren’t even comprehensible.  They weren’t for me all these years, and for some reason I never stopped to draw their significance.  But then I never stopped to break the poem down like this.  You miss so much if you don’t analyze a poem in a formal, disciplined way.  These lines: “And I would do it again, but set down/This set down/This: were we led all that way for…”  It actually sounds discombobulated: “but set down/This set down/This.”  Eliot never describes the manger scene, the Christ child, and the holy parents.  He can’t.  You can’t describe the mystery of the incarnation.  It’s beyond words.  The experience has overwhelmed him.  It is a conversion experience.  It is indescribable.  It’s the same with my personal religious experience.  I was essentially a pagan.  I was moved beyond comprehension, and I can’t for the life of me describe it.  Words just fail.  I assume the same thing happened to Eliot on his conversion.  Despite Eliot being the greatest poet in English of the 20^th century he can’t describe it.  It comes down to a babbling incomprehension.  It comes down to “this,” just “this.”  Nothing more. 

And so when the magus returns to his country, to those “alien people,” he is the one alienated.  He has to live in the “old dispensation,” which means in the old order of things.  Look up the definition of “dispensation.”  (1) A general order or arrangement of things.  (2) An exemption from the law or vow or some rule.  (3) An act of dispensing, distributing.  So he is alienated in the world of the old arrangement; but now exempt from the old law of the Old Testament, and has received the dispensed free grace of God to those of faith.  He has been profoundly changed.  He has gone through a birth, which is the death of his old self. And awaits the death of his bodily self into a new birth. 

You may not like this poem, but it is a rich, rich poem by one of the greatest poets to ever have lived.  In just a mere 43 lines, he has taken the reader through a powerful experience.

Also the shift to the personal "I" in the last stanza makes the experience singular. We ultimately go before the Lord as individuals. It is our individual hearts that are changed.

Casey Commented:

Thank you, Manny. This was an excellent articulation of the poem and it does help a great deal.

 

I disagree a bit that one gains most in analyzing a poem formally. A poem ought to convey that which cannot be conveyed ordinarily. That is, a poem, as unit, conveys something complete. I feel this poem fails in that regard.

 

However, after reading that articulation, I wonder if it fails for me because I have not had the kind of conversion experience you describe. Perhaps the unit of meaning is something that I cannot grasp having not experienced it. As one might never grasp the experience of eating persimmon who has never eaten one.

My reply to Casey:

Perhaps a little bit. But I think the poem grew on me as I uncovered more and more of its muted poetic elements, even beside that inarticulate moment in the poem. Poems such as this are not as obvious as poems that have established form such as meter and rhyme. Both types of poems have organizing principles, and while the organizing principle is given in say the Chesterton poem, here you have to deduce it. It so happened that I was reading Augustine's City of God the other day and was fresh on my mind. If it's the musicality of poetry that is pleasing to you, then I can understand why this one doesn't suit your taste. But for me it was the connections and the word play (refractory/satisfactory/vegetation/dispensation), the supporting imagery, all culminating in a life changing experience that made me realize it was a great poem. Was it you that used the word "encoded" to see how the Old Testament is found in the New? Someone used that word recently in that context. Eliot does similar. He "encodes" meaning through words and images and progression to pack what could easily be a novel length story into just 43 lines. The beauty of this poem is to see all that.

Kerstin Commented:

Manny, I get the feeling you like the puzzling out of wordplays, the detective work of looking what is deeper in these types of poems by picking the language apart. To me this looks like a lot of work. I like it a little easier presented, give me the imagery in ready to comprehend pieces. But I think this has to do with what sorts of things we enjoy and where our aptitudes lay. I can spend countless hours learning about traditional/ancestral preserving and cooking methods, trying to perfect making country paté, mayonnaise, or sourdough bread. The hours can fly by and I don't even notice. I can imagine you can spend this kind of time delighting in what you can uncover in a poem.

My Reply to Kerstin:

LOL, well yes. But the puzzling out is not the objective. The objective is to understand the artistry. It's not just poems or novels but paintings and symphonies and such. For some people understanding the artistry takes the wonder out of the work. For others understanding the artistry gives the work its full wonder. I'm in the latter category.

My Comment:

Oh I'm sorry you guys don't like this. It's really a great poem.

 

If you didn't like Eliot reading it himself, you should listen to this great read by Sir john Gielgood:

 

 

Or this reading by this young man, Tim Martin.  I have no idea who he is, but this might be the very best reading:

 

I have to admit, I love T.S. Eliot's poetry.  The name of this blog is taken from Eliot's Four Quartets. 

The Mystery of the Magi By Dwight Longenecker, Post #4

This is the fourth and final post of a series on Dwight Longenecker’s The Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men.  You can read Post #1 here.  

Post #2 here. 

Post #3 here.  

 

Summary

Chapter 10, “The Star of Bethlehem”

Next Fr. Longenecker takes on the legend of the Magi following the star to Jesus.  Fr. Longenecker evaluates various theories: a supernatural phenomenon, a natural astronomical event, or an astrological reading of the night sky.  Each of these generic theories have specific possibilities.  First Longenecker attempts to understand how Matthew understood the star?

 

Matthew, of course, never says that a supernatural star guided the wise men across the desert. He mentions the star twice. First the wise men say to Herod, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him” (Matthew 2:2). A few verses later Matthew continues, “After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was” (Matthew 2:9).  [p. 113]

I’m not going to summarize each of the theories but some of them considered are a comet, a meteor, a supernova, an alignment of planets, celestial divination, the helical rising and falling of Jupiter, and astrological reading of the stars.

Chapter 11, “Wise Men from the East”

Here Longenecker explores the understanding of Matthew’s use of the term “wise men” for the Magi and what Matthew meant by “from the East.”  In so doing Longenecker recapitulates the theory that the Magi were Nabateans star gazers, that the “East” referred to the land of the Nabateans, and how the legends of the Magi developed into what it has become.  Longenecker then goes into some of the very earliest of Christian writings—when the legends had not developed yet—and located passages from the Church fathers substantiating his theory.  Longenecker then proposes how the real knowledge of the Magi was lost as the Church center of gravity moved from the Middle East to the European continent.

###

One theory on the star of Bethlehem that Fr. Longenecker did not consider, though it would fall under the supernatural category, is that of St. John Chrysostom back in the fourth to fifth century was that the star was an angel.  I came across this theory from Aleteia, the Catholic online magazine, the other day.  Chrysostom proposed in his Homily on the Gospel of Matthew.  (Link is provided in the article.)  First he rejects the scientific phenomena theory because he does not believe there are stars that move from east to west.  

 

[W]hether it was a star by nature or a star in appearance only, we shall easily know the other things also. Whence then will these points be manifest? From the very things that are written. Thus, that this star was not of the common sort, or rather not a star at all, as it seems at least to me, but some invisible power transformed into this appearance, is in the first place evident from its very course. For there is not, there is not any star that moves by this way, but whether it be the sun you mention, or the moon, or all the other stars, we see them going from east to west; but this was wafted from north to south, for so is Palestine situated with respect to Persia.

Second he points out that no star could have been visible in the daytime.

 

In the second place, one may see this from the time also. For it appears not in the night, but in mid-day, while the sun is shining; and this is not within the power of a star, nay not of the moon; for the moon that so much surpasses all, when the beams of the sun appear, straightway hides herself, and vanishes away. But this by the excess of its own splendor overcame even the beams of the sun, appearing brighter than they, and in so much light shining out more illustriously.

Third he points out that it would be impossible for a star to come to rest above a single child, and concludes it had to be an angel.

For it did not, remaining on high, point out the place; it not being possible for them so to ascertain it, but it came down and performed this office. For you know that a spot of so small dimensions, being only as much as a shed would occupy, or rather as much as the body of a little infant would take up, could not possibly be marked out by a star…How then, tell me, did the star point out a spot so confined, just the space of a manger and shed, unless it left that height and came down, and stood over the very head of the young child? And at this the evangelist was hinting when he said, Lo, the star went before them, till it came and stood over where the young Child was ... Therefore after He has brought them, leading them by the hand, and has set them by the manger; it is no longer by a star, but by an angel that He now discourses unto them.

I do lean to Fr, Longenecker’s theory of an astrological prediction, but if I had to go with a supernatural theory, I do like Chrysostom’s angel theory.  If angels individually visited Joseph and Mary then why not the Wise Men?  For me none of the natural astronomical event theories make sense.

My Comment:

I subscribe to The St. Paul Center for weekly emails on the Sunday Mass readings. This is Scott Hahn's organization and he usually provides a short explanation of the readings akin to a homily. This coming Sunday (Jan 2) is the Epiphany of the Lord, where we get the readings on the Magi, and you can listen to Scott give his thoughts on these readings here.  

It's apparent Scott has not read Fr. Longenecker's book. He says the Magi "probably came from Persia." Well we now know otherwise! They came from the Nabatean Kingdom. Is n't it something that we know something about Catholicism that the great Scott Hahn doesn't? ;) At least Scott says "probably."

My Comment:

An article today by Fr. Longenecker essentially summarizing his book: "TWELVE REASONS WHY THE MAGIWERE ARABIANS NOT PERSIANS"

I guess it's from his personal blog.

###

Summary

Chapter 12, “What Happened to the Wise Men?”

This chapter divides into two parts.  The first part, Longenecker goes line by line of the Magi passage in Matthew and provides his final response to all he has walked us through in the book.  The second half of the chapter Longenecker speculates what happened to the Magi after the Nativity event and how they may have shaped Christianity afterward.  Could the Magi have settled with the Essenes of the Dead Sea Scroll community?  Could the Magi or their next generation have shaped St. Paul’s theology when St. Paul after his conversion spent three years in the desert meditating on the significance of Christ?  Longenecker provides some evidence that support those claims. 

Conclusion, “Why Does it Matter?”

Here Longenecker justifies why knowing the true history of the Magi should be known.  Because it supports the facts of the life of Jesus Christ, and knowing that the Magi were not mythical weakens the skeptic’s arguments against Christianity.

Epilogue, “What Happens to the Epiphany?”

Longenecker spends a few concluding pages on contemplating what de-mystifying the Magi implies to our understanding of the Feast of the Epiphany.  He feels it doesn’t alter it much.

###

Gerri Commented:

I didn't realize Fr. Longenecker was a priest. I knew he was a convert and thought he was a deacon.

 

In his closing pages, he, too, wants what we discussed earlier - for other scholars to take up the topic and continue the research he started.

 

And I agree with him: de-mystifying the Magi doesn't alter my understanding or appreciation of the Feast of the Epiphany.

My Reply to Gerri:

It didn't alter mine. If anything it enhanced it. What seemed like a made up story made it real for me, and in that reality it deepened my faith. Truth be told, I'm not keen on hagiographic stories, including saints' lives.

###

Before we leave this book, I wanted to discuss the second half of chapter 12, the speculative section on the Magi going to Damascus, joining with the Essenes, and then years later St. Paul spending three years learning from the Essenes and the next generation Magi.  This theory resonated quite strongly with me.  I don’t know if you have known about the three years St. Paul spent in Arabia after his conversion.  It’s in Arabia that Paul seems to discern what Christianity is all about.  Remember before his conversion experience he was a strict Pharisee.  He has his conversation on the road to Damascus where he goes blind, is taken to Christians in Damascus, has his sight returned, gives himself up to Christ, and is baptized.  Fr. Longenecker then quotes Paul.

 

“But when God . . . was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him fifteen days.” (Galatians 1:11–18) [p. 148]

I’ve always been intrigued by those three years.  I always took it as he spent three years “in the desert” contemplating how Jesus fits into Judaism and what Jesus as a crucified, “failed” messiah means.  The messiah to the Pharisees was supposed to be a conquering hero who was going to overthrow the earthly shackles on the Jewish people.  But Jesus didn’t do that.  But Paul clearly had a supernatural experience encountering Christ, and so he could not deny Christ wasn’t who He said He was.  So how did this all fit together?  We see from Paul’s letters he more than any of the apostles derives the theology from the Old Testament and from Christ’s life and teachings.  Was this theology all from Paul’s contemplative three years in Arabia? 

Fr. Longenecker lays out some important questions.

 

[Jean] Daniélou mentions [in Primitive Christian Symbols] an ancient tradition that Paul was converted at Castle Kokhba, the name of which means “Star Tower.” If there is truth to the ancient tradition, then Paul was blinded by a radiant light at Kokhba, which means “star.” Was his sudden illumination seen as a sign of direct divine revelation similar to the star that had led the Magi to Christ?

 

Immediately after his conversion Paul went into Arabia for three years. What prompted him to do that? His sojourn in Arabia has mystified scholars. Some suggest he went there to begin his missionary work, but this seems unlikely so soon after his sudden conversion. Others suggest that he went into Arabia for a meditative retreat, like Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness.

 

The New Testament scholar Margaret Barker observes, “After his conversion, Paul went to Arabia, and his visit may help to identify the magi. He came back better informed about his new faith and able to explain that Christianity was rooted in something older than the law of Moses. Who instructed him?” (p. 149)

I don’t know about that blinding light being connected with the Magi star, but what exactly did Paul do in the Arabia and how did he become so insightful to Christianity?  I think it’s generally acknowledged that Christian thought more directly derives from Essenes’ Judaism and not the Pharisee’s understanding of Judaism. 

One could quote almost all of Longenecker writing from page 148 to 154, but that would be too extensive.  Let me just quote these paragraphs which kind of pulls together his theory:

 

We find in Paul’s theology a synthesis of the same three cultural and religious strains that we find in the Nabateans. The first strain is Abrahamic Judaism. This is the Judaism from before the destruction of Solomon’s temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC. The Arabian tribes claimed descent from Abraham, and Nabatean religion had its roots in the earlier Abrahamic religion. This earlier form of Judaism was also the religion of the Jewish refugees who fled into Arabia in the sixth century BC.

 

The second strain in Paul’s theology is the mystery religions that had grown out of Mesopotamian culture and were the second source of Nabatean culture and religion. Paul warns his followers of the dangers of mystery religions, but he also uses the language and imagery of the mystery religions, correcting them and using them to point to the mystery of redemption in Jesus Christ.

 

Paul also understands Greek philosophy, which he integrates successfully into his theology. The Nabateans had also absorbed and integrated elements of Greek culture, religion, and philosophy.

 

Somewhere and somehow, Paul learned how these three elements could be fused to explain the gospel of Jesus Christ to a non-Jewish audience. Did he develop his theology during his three years in Arabia and Damascus? Who were his teachers? Did Paul learn from a school of Nabatean wise men? Was he taught by the Magi themselves?  (p. 150-1)

Longenecker goes on to expand on each of these strains teasing out the theology Paul formulates from them.  I don’t know if Longencker is perfectly correct on what Paul formulates from these strains but I do think he is on to something as to Paul’s sources.  What cannot be argued against is that Christianity is not Pharisaic Judaism, and Paul’s Christian theology is much more than what comes from the Pharisees.  I’m a supporter of Longenecker’s theory here. 

###

Kerstin Commented:

Fr. Longenecker is definitely on to something. He is connecting the story of the Magi with the larger cosmology. On the last page, p. 164, he writes:

The Magi's whole world view and cosmology were predicated upon a belief that the "heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork."

We in the West have gotten lost in the weeds over the past centuries in materialism, functionalism, legalism, etc., etc. We have looked less and less to the heavens and wondered at the Cosmological Order as a whole. In contrast, Eastern Orthodoxy has retained this sense of wonder and mystery of the Cosmological Order.

 

On page 154 Fr. Longenecker writes:

The foundation of the Jewish religion is the covenant of faith that was established with Abraham and his descendants. Margaret Barker suggests that this Abrahamic religion was considered the original by the refugees from the destruction of Jerusalem and that they considered the legalistic religion that emerged after the exile to be an illicit development

Immediately I thought of the division between the more legalistic Roman Rite and the more mystical Eastern Rite. What a parallel!

 

Here is a 16 minute video from the Christian artist Jonathan Pageau who has a You Tube channel called "The Symbolic World". Jonathan is a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. In this recent video he goes into detail of How Christmas Reorganizes the Gods by the example of an Orthodox hymn called the Nativity Troparion. You will find it has everything to do with what we've read here. It will give a deeper understanding of what Fr. Longenecker is getting at. He didn't pluck any of this out of thin air.

 

Also, Jonathan had an hour-long conversation with Bishop Robert Barron on A Return to Cosmic Christianity. It dovetails nicely here.

 

My Reply to Kerstin:

Do you mean "legalistic" or more based on "reason" for the Roman Rite? There's faith and reason and one needs both. I do see the Eastern Rite as less based on reason and more on mysticism than the Latin Rite. But frankly too far to the mystical turns me off. It feels superstitious or disconnected from basic science. There needs to be a balance of faith and reason. I'm not sure the Latin Rite has it about right but whenever I listen to Eastern Rite speakers it feels like they are disconnected from reason. For me, Pope Benedict XVI has it perfectly.

 

By the way, by reason I don't mean to support Enlightenment rationalism as Fr. Barron denounces in the second video. There is a balance between faith and reason and an imbalance in either direction is disturbing.

Frances Replied to My Comment:

Manny, I am not trying to speak for Kerstin -- she can do that quite beautifully on her own! -- but as I read her post I thought of the word "transcendence." The Roman Rite has lost somewhat a sense of the transcendent; Bishop Robert Barron has referred to this condition at times as a "flattening out." I think the yearning for that sense lies behind the hunger for the Latin Mass. We want "The Other," a sense of the transcendent.

Kerstin Replied:

By "legalistic" I was thinking in the direction of splitting hairs too much, of overcomplicating things, being too rationalistic. Jesus fought the Pharisees on this all the time.

 

We are all products of our own culture, and hence the Roman Rite is what fits me, and I would imagine many of us here. At the same time I find the Eastern Rites fascinating, how they have preserved liturgical rituals and hymnody over the centuries. There is a very pronounced sense of reverence and the holy. I delight in their artistry. What I think is important for us to remember is that the Christian faith emerged in a cultural space that is far more eastern than we are. We may not be used to or comfortable with to move in the mystical space they do, but we have to know about it for better understanding. That's my take.

 

Going back to our book and the mystery of the star, Jonathan Pageau says that for the ancients and the cosmic order they lived in, a star and an angel is the same thing! The stars were the gods, or angels, or beings of the higher order. With this mystical element in mind, that a star/angel showed the Magi where to find Jesus makes perfect sense.

My Reply to Kerstin:

Well said Kerstin. I think we're saying the same thing. I lean toward Thomas Aquinas and Pope Benedict XVI who are just as mystical and transcendence but can support the mystery through reason. I'm not saying the Eastern Orthodox can't support it but I haven't seen it and in a number of places (like in writings of Dostoyevsky) I've seen ridicules of Latin reason. But Dostoyevsky is not a theologian, so I probably shouldn't link Orthodox theologians to him.

Joseph Replied:

Manny, if you haven't read St. Maximus the Confessor, he's a good example of how eastern theologians meld mysticism and reason. Weighing in on Kerstin, Frances, and Madeleine's point, as a priest who celebrates both the Mass of the Ages and the Mass of Paul VI there is a tangible difference in how the two relate to the Divine. My first time attending the Ancient Mass I was just as lost as could be, but as I was exposed to it more I learned how to enter into the prayer and see what goes on. This is not to discount the New Rite, I have also had mystical experiences there, but the Ancient Mass is more in tune with our mystical senses than is the New.

Kerstin Replied:

Manny wrote: " I'm not saying the Eastern Orthodox can't support it but I haven't seen it and in a number of places (like in writings of Dostoyevsky) I've seen ridicules of Latin reason. But Dostoyevsky is not a theologian, so I probably shouldn't link Orthodox theologians to him."

I had to think on this a bit. The divergence goes all the way back to the "filoque" dispute in the Nicean Creed. What exactly is Dostoevsky reacting to? He especially dislikes the Jesuits. I wonder if it had to do with modernism and even secularism seeping into the Latin Rite, and this posed a danger of Orthodoxy being susceptible to the same erosion of Tradition.

My Reply to Kerstin:

I don' think it has anything to do with the filioque. He was xenophobic, like a good number of Russians. Don't get me wrong, he's a great novelist, among the handful of greatest, but he was anti western, and that involved the Catholic Church. I remember a good number of gibes directed toward Poles and Germans. There is a section of his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamzov called The Grand Inquisitor. Read about that here: 

 

He has a Catholic Bishop put Jesus through an inquisition and ultimately condemns Jesus to death. Now there is a lot of psychological and theological stuff going on. It's a great scene. But he didn't have to have a Catholic Bishop be the inquisitor. It didn't have anything to do with Catholicism.

###

When driving home yesterday afternoon from shopping, I had Relevant Radio, a Catholic radio channel around the country, on my radio and on the Drew Moriani show he had Fr. Dwight Longenecker on to discuss his Magi book. It was a twenty-ish minute conversation, and while he didn’t say anything that was not in the book, it was still a blessing to listen to it. Now that all radio shows get turned into podcasts, you can access the show and listen for yourself. So the Relevant Radio podcasts get broken into hour long units. Fr. Longenecker’s portion was the first half of the hour. The second half was a discussion about the guiding star with Fr. Chris Corbally, a priest astronomer. That was interesting and is worth listening to. Here is the link to the “Hour 3 of The Drew Mariani Show 12-22-21.”  

###

Well, tomorrow Jan 6^th is the Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord, the day we readers of this book have been waiting for. I'm almost sure you will have this hymn played at Mass tomorrow. It was my hymn for my Vespers prayer this evening, which would make it the vigil of the feast.

 

We Three Kings

Composer: Rev. John Henry Hopkin (‎1857)

 

We three kings of Orient are

Bearing gifts we traverse afar

Field and fountain, moor and mountain

Following yonder star.

 

O Star of wonder, star of night

Star with royal beauty bright

Westward leading, still proceeding

Guide us to thy Perfect Light.

 

Born a King on Bethlehem's plain

Gold I bring to crown Him again

King forever, ceasing never

Over us all to reign.

 

O Star of wonder, star of night

Star with royal beauty bright

Westward leading, still proceeding

Guide us to thy Perfect Light.

 

Frankincense to offer have I

Incense owns a Deity nigh

Prayer and praising, all men raising

Worship Him, God most high.

 

O Star of wonder, star of night

Star with royal beauty bright

Westward leading, still proceeding

Guide us to thy Perfect Light.

 

Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume

Breathes of life of gathering gloom

Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying

Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

 

O Star of wonder, star of night

Star with royal beauty bright

Westward leading, still proceeding

Guide us to thy Perfect Light.

 

Glorious now behold Him arise

King and God and Sacrifice

Alleluia, Alleluia

Earth to heav'n replies.

 

O Star of wonder, star of night

Star with royal beauty bright

Westward leading, still proceeding

Guide us to thy Perfect Light.

Here is a beautiful version by the opera singer, Mario Lanza. 

###

My Goodreads Review:

More precisely, four and a half stars.  This is a book that locates the historical roots of the story that has become the legend of the three “wise men/kings” who come to the nativity of Christ offering Him gifts.  Mind you, what is in the Bible, more precisely, the Gospel of Matthew, is not the legend.  The legend has been built up from elaborations and folklore, built up so much that hardly anyone believes the legend.  But the Biblical story is there in Matthew, and so what are we to make of it? 

Fr. Dwight Longenecker—the author is a Roman Catholic priest—breaks down the parts of what is actually in the Bible and finds their historical basis, and in so doing saves the story for we believers.  What seemed like a made up story made it real for me, and in that reality it deepened my faith. Truth be told, I'm not keen on hagiographic stories, including saints' lives.  The legend of the Magi went beyond hagiography. 

So Fr. Longenecker goes on to show the Magi were not from Persia or some disparate region of the world.  They were not kings.  And they probably didn’t even ride camels.  So who were these mysterious men who have been linked to the exotic?  Were they exotic?  Yes, but not in ways you expect.  Read the book.  It was methodically argued and quite compelling.

###

This may be the final post on Fr. Longenecker’s book, but there will be two related posts on the Magi, two famous poems, T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” and G.K. Chesterton’s “The Wise Men.”  I will link them after I post them.