Dear friend,
First: I’m absolutely delighted to share that Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life won Christianity Today’s Book of the Year in the Spiritual Formation category!!!! I was thrilled and totally surprised. It is so rare to receive public recognition for writing in this category and what a little boost it was! My publisher is running a sale in honor of this honor (ha) and selling the book for 40% off. Check it out. Now onto my Advent musings.
If you are a long time reader, you may already know that I have a complicated relationship with John Milton, author of Paradise Lost. Yes, he is objectively one of the greatest poets in the English language. Paradise Lost is objectively one of the greatest poems penned in the English language. Areopagitica is great. He also drives me bonkers. His polemical theological texts annoy me deeply.
However, I do genuinely love his wonderful poem, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. Milton was 21 when he wrote this poem (!!), and if you don’t think he’s a genius after reading it, you might need to read some more poetry. I first encountered the poem in my undergraduate degree. It’s too long to reproduce here in full, but here are a few choice stanzas:
This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heav’n’s eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heav’n’s high council-table,
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside, and here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.
Say Heav’nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God?
Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome him to this his new abode,
Now while the heav’n, by the Sun’s team untrod,
Hath took no print of the approaching light,
And all the spangled host keep watch in squadrons bright?
See how from far upon the eastern road
The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet:
O run, prevent them with thy humble ode,
And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;
Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice unto the angel quire,
From out his secret altar touch’d with hallow’d fire.
Magnificent. But what I remember most within this poem is that it was the first time I had encountered the apocryphal tale of the idols toppling at the advent of Christ. The poem takes an almost alarming, but powerful turn:
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And then at last our bliss
Full and perfect is,
But now begins; for from this happy day
Th’old Dragon under ground,
In straiter limits bound,
Not half so far casts his usurped sway,
And, wrath to see his kingdom fail,
Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-ey’d priest from the prophetic cell.
The lonely mountains o’er,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament;
From haunted spring, and dale
Edg’d with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent;
With flow’r-inwoven tresses torn
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
In consecrated earth,
And on the holy hearth,
The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint;
In urns and altars round,
A drear and dying sound
Affrights the flamens at their service quaint;
And the chill marble seems to sweat,
While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat.
Peor and Ba{:a}lim
Forsake their temples dim,
With that twice-batter’d god of Palestine;
And mooned Ashtaroth,
Heav’n’s queen and mother both,
Now sits not girt with tapers’ holy shine;
The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn;
In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn.
And sullen Moloch, fled,
Hath left in shadows dread
His burning idol all of blackest hue:
In vain with cymbals’ ring
They call the grisly king,
In dismal dance about the furnace blue.
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Orus, and the dog Anubis, haste.
Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian grove or green,
Trampling the unshower’d grass with lowings loud;
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest,
Naught but profoundest Hell can be his shroud:
In vain with timbrel’d anthems dark
The sable-stoled sorcerers bear his worshipp’d ark.
He feels from Juda’s land
The dreaded Infant’s hand,
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide,
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:
Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew. The origins of this imagery come out of what is now called Pseudo-Matthew, an apocryphal account of the infancy and childhood of Jesus composed sometime in the seventh century and based off the apocryphal Gospel of James. It influenced medieval thinkers and artists, because it was included in the immensely popular Golden Legend. In this story, when Mary and the young Jesus come to Heliopolis in Egypt, hundreds of idols topple and prostrate themselves on the ground at their arrival.
This is an illustration of the scene from the Bedford Master, a fifteenth-century Parisian illuminator. The miniature is within the Bedford Hours, now at the British Library. I love the flailing hands of the little idol.
Milton, of course, takes this story in a more general direction. It is not when the Holy Family enters the temple, but when Christ appears in the flesh in the manger for the first time, that all demons and demigods and idols are rendered impotent at last. The helpless baby, wrapped in “swaddling bands,” strips away the glamor and illusion to reveal that they are even more helpless. Sullen Moloch is fled.
Milton and the Bedford Master both provoke me to ask myself, and you: what idols and petty demi-gods in my own life need to be toppled with the Advent of the Christ child in this season? Can I learn to welcome the toppling, though it necessarily involves falling and crashing and shattered pieces of things I have worshipped? Can I prostrate myself on the floor of the stable or in the temples to myself that I have constructed? I hope so. I want that.
I wrote a review of Nadya Williams lovely book, Christians Reading Classics, over at Christianity Today.
Working on a new little baby project. Who knows if it will ever see the light of day? Also remodeling our basement, with the hopes that we will indeed see more of the light of day, and am slowly being driven mad.
Old Books with Grace kind of fizzled the last month—normally I do an Advent series, but this year we are in the midst of a massive house project (see above) and my brain just did not have the space (my office is in said basement). Ack! I’m going to put the podcast on a little hiatus for a few months, because it’s been hard to keep up with in this season of life. But do check out this week’s episode, featuring the wonderful Paul J. Pastor on William Blake, wherever you get your podcasts.
A nice long break from speaking and interviews—but upcoming speaking in the spring includes Michigan, Florida, Colorado Springs, and Houston, so if you’re in one of those locations, keep your eyes peeled for more details.
Nonfiction: Fleming Rutledge, Advent. Highly recommend.
Fiction: Finally reading Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries for the first time. Really enjoying.
Medieval/Medieval-adjacent: The Moral Treatise on the Eye by Peter of Limoges… love a good treatise on optics and ethics 😂
Article: This piece on becoming a nation of subscribers & the proposed fifty-year mortgage from Matthew Burdette over at Compact is thought-provoking and good.
A poem-prayer for endings from the great Christina Rossetti, Victorian poet, sister to pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and lover of beauty (1830-1894).
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Before the beginning Thou hast foreknown the end, Before the birthday the death-bed was seen of thee: Cleanse what I cannot cleanse, mend what I cannot mend, O Lord All-Merciful, be merciful to me. While the end is drawing near I know not mine end; Birth I recall not, my death I cannot foresee: O God, wise to defend, wise to befriend, O Lord All-Merciful, be merciful to me.
Amen.
Peace for your December,
Grace
P.S. Medievalish is free, and I’d be delighted if you shared it with a friend!
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