Essay

Christmas culture

Creed

1 December 2023

6 min read

The poem became flesh and dwelt among us

Ponder the poetic depths of Frank Skinner’s thoughts on the Incarnation.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Against a night blue sky an angel cradles a baby and is followed by an angel train of cherubims

E.R Hughes, 1912.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

This summer I got to interview Frank Skinner; comedy-legend-come-football-anthem-maestro. The whole interview was a lot of fun, but the final six minutes were my favourite. They’re the reason this article exists.

Frank, who is the host of Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast and carries a pocket-sized book of poetry with him wherever he goes, spoke about the "super-poetry" of Jesus.

If you haven’t listened to it yet, do. Frank is incredibly worth an hour of your time.

But, for now, allow me to summarise his thoughts:

"Christianity is like living the poem… it’s like the Old Testament was a collection of poetry, I’m not saying that there’s no factual stuff within it, but clearly it’s written in a poetic style, with great truths and insights into human nature. And then, with that whole phrase, “The Word became flesh”, it’s like now the poetry gets real, there’s going to be a poem that lives, and it’s all going to make sense… this is super-poetry, this is poetry that’s actually physical, it actually exists."

Frank goes on to suggest that we’ve lost sight of this, that humanity have forgotten, or perhaps never fully grasped, that we exist because of this super-poetry, that we exist within it, that ‘there’s a line waiting just for us’. And then he turned to me and Justin (my co-host) and said,

"Here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it, go and sort that out."

So, here I am. Sorting that out… Kind of. That’s a lot of pressure, Frank.

The Word became flesh

The ‘phrase’ to which Frank is referring, the one which turns poetry into super-poetry, can be found in the Prologue of John’s Gospel. And it is a theological juggernaut of a chapter – mind-bendingly complex and eye-wateringly dense – it is arguably one of the most influential chunks of the entire bible. So, a nice and easy place to start.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

That’s the incarnation summed up in ten words. It’s ironic that it would take ten-million words to fully unpack the depth of them, isn’t it? Gosh. John’s such a genius.

The Word - that’s Jesus – who, as the Prologue goes on to state, is the Son of God, the very source of life itself, and the light of the world. He was present since the beginning, preceding and partaking in the creation of the universe. He, the Word – Jesus - became flesh, and moved into the neighbourhood. And in so doing, he bound together centuries worth of prophecies, predictions, expectations and hopes. The maker squeezed himself into the confines of the made; it is, without a doubt, one of the most outrageous claims that Christianity makes.

The Word has an accent.

The Word gets tired.

The Word burns the roof of his mouth on his food.

And yet, still God. Always God. The Word of God, with a name and a birthday and a bedtime. Wherever you fall on the whole ‘believing it’ scale, you have to admit, it’s pretty astonishing. It is a cosmic-sized plot-twist.

But what if one were to assume that this really happened? If one were to believe that a God who transcends time, space and matter actually made a physical appearance in human history, as Frank Skinner does, then it changes everything. Such a belief leaves nothing untouched, it is utterly un-containable.

The poem became flesh

And that’s why I think that Frank’s poetry analogy is so genius. Let’s follow his train of thought for a moment, shall we?

Poetry has a tendency to dodge and disobey definitions at any given opportunity. It is, in its very essence, defiant. In fact, poetry’s unwillingness to sit contentedly in any given definition might be the only way in which it can be defined. And yet, despite very few of us feeling confident in our own abilities to define or explain the inner workings of poetry (perhaps we can leave such a task to Frank and his podcast), we all know it when we see it.

It would, I suppose, be rather poetic of me to suggest that there’s something innate going on there. To wonder whether there’s a capacity woven into us, a capacity to feel poetry to a degree that we could never understand it. I think this to be true even if our only exposure to it is through the snippets that have leaked through the cracks, the phrases that have escaped their literary confines and snuck their way into popular culture. And perhaps therein lies its power; we are able to spot poetry and somehow know that it is wanting access to parts of us that move through, but ultimately beyond, the cognitive. And then I suppose we decide whether we shall let it.

Poetry, at least the good kind, describes the indescribable, explains the unexplainable and identifies the unidentifiable. We can feel that it is making profound sense of us, even if we haven’t made sense of it. I haven’t worked out how it does that; if I had, I’d be putting such knowledge to good (and profitable) use. But there are incredibly deep insights beneath each word chosen in poetry, there are ‘ah-ha’ moments waiting to be stumbled upon, there are echoes of our own feelings – our fears, our longings, our hopes and our struggles – encapsulated in each stanza. Our choice is whether we’ll give it the time to shows us such. And if/when it does, will we trust it? Will we pay attention to our strangely warmed heart? (to borrow a phrase – many thanks John Wesley)

The truth that poetry is seeking to tell cannot be wholly proved by whether or not we can expound it with words or measure it with reason. The whole point is that it cannot be contained in such a manner. The truth of it can be more aptly identified in the odd resonance that we can no more deny than we can explain, it is in the familiarity that we find in brand new sentiments, it is in the ache that binds us to the words. It is in those places that the truth of poetry is most keenly felt.

And that is the case with the Christian faith, the epic story of the made and their Maker, the ultimate poem of the cosmos. And so, the story of Christmas, the enchantment of the Incarnation, and the beauty of Jesus is that the poet became the poem.

The Poem with an accent.

The Poem who gets tired.

The Poem who burns the roof of his mouth on his food.

Jesus is the super-poetry that I live and breathe, he is the poem to which I can belong. I can’t make sense of the incarnation, but I know that it makes sense of me. The intricacies of that poem can be debated, they can be observed, they can be weighed up – I’m not opposed to putting the Incarnation under the microscope – I’m just opposed to that being the only means by which we assess its truth. Rather, I would suggest that its truth can be more keenly felt in the places that poetry is designed to be felt – the deepest ones. Just as we have an oddly innate capacity for poetry, I believe us to have an innate capacity for Jesus.

The Poem became flesh, and he dwells among us. You know what, that is pretty insightful. Bravo, Frank.

Article

Belief

Christmas culture

Creed

Wisdom

16 December 2024

5 min read

How to have a philosophically happy Christmas

Raise a glass to the invasion of history by the author of history.

Charles Foster

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A fish eye lens view of a person standing silhouetted, looking up to a colourful night sky with the Milky Way across it

Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

A few years ago, I had dinner with a well-known philosopher. Knowing that he is no friend of religion, and curious how he’d respond, I set about mocking the credulity of Christians and parroting the lines I’d so often heard: superstition degrades and obfuscates; let’s act and think like grown-ups, not craven children; we’re free to write our own rules, and we can write better rules than barbarous Levantine goat-herders; we’re brave enough to say that when we die we rot. And so on. The standard fare.

He looked at me over the top of his glass. ‘Have you never been taught’, he said acidly, ‘that if you destroy the premises of an argument, the argument collapses? The same is true of history.’

I’ve slowly learned that he was right.

‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’, asked John Cleese, as the leader of the People’s Front of Judea. He’s famously answered by his troops. The modern version of the question, which is just as embarrassing, is ‘What have the Christians ever done for us?’ The historian Tom Holland, not (as far as we know) himself a professed Christian, has made a good living by providing a long and meticulously documented list. I’m not going to review it here. My own personal list would include Chartres Cathedral, Paul’s tectonic notion that there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’ (and hence universal human dignity and suffrage), and Christmas.

The Christians say that Christmas is the commemoration of a historical fact: an invasion of history by the author of history; of creation by the creator.

This is too much for many to swallow. If that’s true for you, is it dishonest to celebrate Christmas?

A mathematician friend works on imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by the ‘imaginary unit’, i. i2 = -1, and so i = √-1. Think about it. It’s an impossibility. It’s absurd. Descartes talked about ‘imaginary numbers’ only to laugh at the idea. But they are enormously useful in real life. You are reading this on a phone or computer screen courtesy of imaginary numbers. Sometimes it’s worth suppressing, or at least muting, a contemptuous laugh. Tom Holland’s list, and mine, depend on theological and historical numbers that might (or might not) be imaginary. You don’t have to stop dubbing the numbers ‘imaginary’ – don’t stop having to call them ludicrous – to carry on reading your screen.

Christmas, for me, is a celebration not only of family, gluttony and intoxication, but of four facts (if the Christians are historically correct) and four principles which are generated by those facts - whether the facts are real or imaginary. The principles work, just as my computer screen does.

First: human agency is cosmically colossal. The invasion I mentioned above was invited (so preventing it from being rape) by a Palestinian Jewish girl. She could have said ‘No’, and so scuppered the whole project.

Second: Christmas drafts a completely new account of power. In the Christian story of Easter, all the powers of darkness are disarmed by one broken man dying on a piece of wood between dying criminals. It was a continuation of the story that began at Christmas: the birth, in a shitty stable, to a teenage mother accused of fornication, of a child soon to be a refugee, driven to another country to escape the murderous authorities. It’s all about the subversion of political and military power by the irresistible power of the powerless.

Third: the universe is surprising. Nobody predicted the invasion. Yes, I know the Christians say, with the confidence given by the retrospectocope, that there were hints in the Hebrew scriptures, but they weren’t seen at the time, and the most learned Jews today, even with the retrospectoscope, still don’t see them. Yes, I know that the ancient world was awash with tales of the impregnation of mortals by gods, and with virgin births (think of Dionysos, Attis, Romulus and Remus and many others). But they didn’t look remotely like this. Those tales were told to prop up conventional claims to power, not explode them. Bethlehem burst onto the blind side of history, injecting unforeseen possibility. The virgin conception smashed pre-conceptions. A new way of being had gestated. If that was possible, what wasn’t?

Fourth: The most revolutionary thing about Christmas, perhaps, is that it shows that mythos is real – part of the web and weave of reality.

After dinner at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 20 September 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson walked together along Addison’s Walk, part of Magdalen’s grounds. They were discussing the resurrection of Jesus. Lewis knew all about the ubiquitous tales of dying and rising gods. The Christian resurrection stories were no different, he said. They were poetically resonant, no doubt, but essentially ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.’

‘No’, said Tolkien. ‘They are not lies,’ There was a sudden rush of wind in the still night. In Lewis’s rooms the conversation continued into the early hours. The stories were indeed myths, Tolkien contended, but true myths.

This conversation propelled Lewis finally into Christianity.

The Christmas story suggests that Tolkien was right (and those notoriously mystical quantum physicists – some of the most adept handlers of imaginary numbers, by the way - are right): there is no robust boundary between history and legend, between physics and metaphysics, between matter and spirit. This, in fact, is our working assumption, whether we’re explicitly religious or not. However icy our reductionism, we think that we matter, that there is more than matter, and that whatever that ‘more’ is, it is heavier and more enduring than matter, and matters more than matter. We love our children far more than reciprocal altruism or kin selection suggests we should. However sturdy our atheism we dab our eyes at the St Matthew Passion and put flowers on our parents’ graves.

It is reassuring to have a festival which enjoins us to lift our glasses and toast the way we live when we’re being the kind of people we urge our children, our friends and our politicians to be. It commands us to admit mystery to the dining table, and to celebrate being as mysterious as we know we are.

Christmas, authentically celebrated, is part of the foundation on which rest Chartres cathedral, freedom, suffrage, dignity and many things we innocently and dangerously take for granted. Like it or not, that foundation, as the austere philosopher observed, is the premise of the argument for the civilization that until recently succoured us before we replaced it with – well, with what?