THE POETRY OF PROVIDENCE
The Poetry of Providence A Conspiratorial Benedictine and a Golden-Mouthed Preacher on the Dating of Christmas
By Dr. James R. A. Merrick
I
lived in Scotland twice for a combined five years. Two of my children were born there, and it is the birthplace of my Catholicism, having been received into the Church with my family in 2017. Surrounded by the remnants and ruins of ancient and medieval civilizations, I couldn’t fight the urge to become part of the grander and nobler trends of history by entering the Church Catholic. Living in Scotland was overall an enriching experience. But there was the occasional “culture shock.” The prevalence of instant coffee in a place so proximate to continental Europe and that understood the importance of maturing spirits was confounding. More shocking, however, was the discovery that until relatively recently the observance of Christmas was discouraged in Scotland, with some of the historic traditions having been outlawed by Scottish Parliament in 1640. It wasn’t until 1958 that Christmas was restored as a public holiday. To this day, “Hogmanay,” or New Year’s Eve, overshadows Christmas. It might surprise you, as it did me, that a Christian country would practically ban Christmas. But seventeenth-century Scotland was shaped by the Protestant Reformation, especially the Calvinist branch. And Protestants generally felt that the Catholic Church needed to be purged of various superstitions and purportedly idolatrous practices that had crept in over the centuries through contact with paganism. Calvinists felt that if something wasn’t explicitly commanded in the Bible then it shouldn’t be enjoined upon people. As John Knox, leader of Scottish Presbyterianism, wrote, the feast of Christmas has “neither commandment nor assurance” in the Bible and therefore was to be “utterly abolished from this Realm” (History of the Reformation in Scotland, vol. 2, p. 281).
2 | December 2023
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Calvinists also believed that sin inclined humans to substitute ritual adherence for sincere faith. Thus, they suspected the observance of Christmas to be full of various rituals and traditions that obscured the real significance of Christ’s birth and obstructed genuine faith. This general skepticism toward Catholic tradition developed in the decades that followed to the point where many leading lights thought most distinctly Catholic practices could be attributed to the influence of paganism. Because paganism was typically held to be superstitious and inferior to Christianity, when Catholic traditions could be traced back to pagan roots the narrative of Catholic corruption of Christianity could be advanced, a narrative as expedient politically as theologically. When it came to the question of the date of Christ’s birth, it became popular to attribute the choice of the date of December 25th to the pagan festival of the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun or Sol Invictus. The Benedictine monk and classicist Jean Hardouin was a noteworthy proponent of this view. But it was his Protestant contemporary Paul Jablonski who took the theory and turned it once more into evidence against the Catholic Church. Hardouin was somewhat of a conspiratorial thinker, though his skepticism of medieval learning was at home in his day. He once claimed that the vast majority of ancient literature and artifacts were forged during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But Hardouin did not invent the theory of the pagan precedent for the date of Christmas. It was noted in the twelfth century by an Orthodox bishop, Dionysius bar Salibi. Dionysius was likely overinterpreting patristic statements about the coincidence of Christ’s nativity with the birthday of Sol Invictus. The famed fourth century
