This Advent, it is safe to assume that millions of Americans will hear the familiar, jubilant strains of the millennia-old Latin prayer transplanted into pop culture: Gloria in Excelsis Deo! Any first year Latin student would be eager to translate: glory, in the highest, to God.
St. Anselm of Canterbury is credited with describing God as the necessary, noncontingent summit of man’s conception, the ultimate height of both understanding and external reality. St. Thomas Aquinas, critiquing Anselm’s argument, reaffirmed the lofty status of God’s nature: God is too divinely colossal for human minds to fully perceive, and much less to conceive of in His entirety. A thousand hymns, especially around Advent and Christtide, repeatedly declare the wondrous heights of God and the glory of His love for man. What is man, that God has given him Christmas?
Enter G.K. Chesterton. To Chesterton, the glory of Christmas was in the gritty nature of the Incarnation, the moment when the transcendent God emerged into His own creation as both Author and Character. This was the ultimate sign of the greatness of God. Any pagan god could manifest in nature, as it is made of natural things; Zeus existed in his cosmos in the same way that his father and children did. Any author could write his opinion in a fictional narrative or give an ink puppet of himself lines that he would say in such a situation. But the Almighty God is beyond nature, and author not of a fiction, but reality. In the Incarnation, He too was natural; He too was a personal character in His story. In essence, the true power of the highest and almighty God was His ability to be low, small, and humble, lacking form or comeliness to make Himself known and lying in the gritty messiness of a feeding trough. Chesterton has a hundred descriptions for it; the world turned upside-down, the world turned inside-out, the world being made all over again.
For Chesterton and, indeed, for all Christians, the Incarnation represents the greatest moment in human history since the seventh day of Creation. It is the moment that history began again with the fulfillment of God’s promises and the world’s desires. The humility of our God to take on more than transcendent otherness and become, as Isaiah prophesied and Handel scored, a “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief,” is the ultimate show of God’s power in His creation, one celebrated as one of the greatest holy days of the Church (along with the Crucifixion and Resurrection, remembered not just at Easter, but every Sunday).
In the humility of God, Christians find their exaltation. That God has seen fit to become man tells of the wild worth placed in humanity, the bearers of His image. That God has seen fit to incarnate not immediately as a man but as a baby, born in squalor among the animals, speaks further to His glory; the Almighty taking on the weakness of a child. Seeking to illustrate this in the original lyrics of another ubiquitous Christian hymn, Adeste Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful), hymnist John Wade chose not to repeat the high Nicene language of the creed, but a tone reflecting the almost blasphemous degradation of the divine. Rather than genitum non factum…descendit de caelis. Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine.… (begotten, not made…descended from heaven. And was incarnate of the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary), the Latin student may wince at the coarse lyrics of the second verse: gestant puellae viscera, or “carried in the girl’s viscera/guts” (not the refined incarnate, virgin, or womb). So Chesterton saw Christmas: the memory of the highest and most glorious taking on a role as the lowliest, and, in doing so, paradoxically affirming His greatness and raising up all men. In conjunction with the mighty Gloria in Excelsis Deo, Chesterton offers Gloria in Profundis Deo: “Glory to God in the Lowest / The spout of the stars in spate / Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest / And the lightning fears to be late: / As men dive for sunken gem / Pursuing, we hunt and hound it, / The fallen star has found it / In the cavern of Bethlehem.”
