Aristotle believed in God. This is to his credit as a great philosopher. What he did not believe was that God could be concerned about us lowly human beings. It made sense, in a way, since there is, as St. Thomas would state many years later, an infinite distance between God and his creatures. God is eternal; human beings are made out of nothing. For Aristotle, love moved the world, but it was because everything in creation aspired to the condition of godliness. The lower loved the higher because it instinctively wanted to be better; but the higher had no advantage in loving the lower. For Aristotle love was a one-way street in a unidirectional cosmos.
The more important a person is, according to the mores of the secular world, the less likely he is to associate with people far below his station. The executive washrooms belong exclusively to the executives. CEOs have their secretaries involve themselves with the hoi polloi. There is room at the top only for the elite. Success can be measured in terms of the distance by which one has separated himself from the madding crowd.
Other philosophers came along and regarded God not as Aristotle’s “thought thinking a thought”, but as an architect, or an engineer, or a clock-maker, or a mathematician, or a force of infinite potentiality. Then there were the philosophers who saw god as a process, an evolving organism, or as a being that is consubstantial with the world. These gods were large, impressive, majestic, awe inspiring. The one thing they were not, however was loving.
All this “sensible” thinking was dramatically changed when Christ came into the world as a babe. This meant that God was indeed concerned about us human beings; so much so, in fact, that He took on human flesh and presented Himself as a child who would both give and receive love. That God is Love, is a revelation. That God had the humility to become one of us is astonishing. But, love does that kind of thing. There are no boundaries to love’s generosity.
And yet, the message of Christmas does not always break into the hearts of men. We are all familiar with how Ebenezer Scrooge dismissed Christmas as “humbug”. And we all feel squeamish about the Grinch’s plan to steal Christmas. Alexander N. Yakovlev, in his well researched book, Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (Yale University Press, 2002), reveals that Nikolai Lenin ordered his henchmen “to see to it that those who do not show up for work because of ‘Nikola’ {Christmas} are shot.”
The image of the Holy Family is at the heart of the meaning of Christmas, because mothers and fathers, despite their adulthood and years of experience, make their new born child the center of their lives. They find the descending aspect of love, most natural, as well as most gratifying. As Bishop Fulton Sheen once remarked, “Christianity came into the world because a woman was willing to make a child the center of her life.” Motherhood is the epitome of descending love.
It should be noted, however, that descending love is merely a prelude to ascending love. Mothers and fathers must lower themselves, despite risking backaches, before they can raise their child. God descends into the world to pick us up and carry us to heaven. The circle is completed when the hemisphere of love ascending is mated with the hemisphere of love descending. The key that unlocks love is humility. Humility must precede elevation. Pride comes before a fall. The shepherds fell to their knees in worshipping the Christ child. It is easy to believe that when they rose to their feet again, they had a better sense of their personal dignity. We, too, because of Christmas, should feel our hearts expand and our hopes enlivened. Christmas is the day that the babe in the manger told us that He as also the God of the heavens. Thus, the universe became a tidy place in which everyone could love anyone.
Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, CT, and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad and Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart are available through Amazon.com.
Articles by Don:
- In Solitary Witness
- Sweet Land of Liberty. . .Let Freedom Ring
- Fear of Science
- When a Lie is More Than a Lie
- The Republic of Choice In a Culture of Death
