Epiphany — an adumbration
The first yet final Christmas story is a zany one: you start with an unspecified bunch of Zoroastrian priests. Said priests are subsequently led by a star to the fleshly birth of the son of a Hebrew God in the backwater part of a backwater town. Is it a pious fiction, designed to emphasise Jesus’ role as the leader of an all-encompassing weltanschauung? Or might it be more deeply rooted in the historical? Though our protagonists were astrologers, modern astronomy has pointed to 0 AD as the possible date for a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus (fertile!), Halley’s Comet, or a supernova. The debate rages on. In truth, these are the wrong questions: limitless evidence could come to light and it will still remain as unfalsifiable as it is unverifiable.
But the thick silence of this night is not enough to dismiss the mystery we all feel when the universe seems to be guiding us in a certain direction. Gifts are given to us inexplicably and explicitly without the expectation of return, they are inalienable. The magi came from an incommensurable paradigm. They enter a story they are not even part of. Much is said of Jesus and Mary the immigrants — but some of his earliest guests are written as xenos also. Theirs was an alien religion which sought to find a commoner god — both in the sense of peasant and mutual.
These figures saw a spiritual reality in an empirical appearance. They saw the transcendent within the immanent, the impossible in the possible. Driven by unrequited dreams, we live in their shadow. They adumbrate every wait for that eureka. “The star stopped” — we also live in that light from time to time. Constantly, we push and strive to turn the potential into the actual. Yet our lives are seldom realised in the manner we wish. Brimming with expectation, we push further into the unexpected, thinking we are an ‘in control’. And what’s it all for? Outside the physicalist paradigm, this inner controller neither knows where it’s really from, nor where it’s really going.
Throughout all this striving and questioning, we can sometimes forget that we are at all. We see ourselves as a conductor tugging the strings, rather than the sum total of experience itself. But the magi saw through this façade. Our life is not ‘ours’ even in the quotidian sense, it is always already given. Social realities are given, ancient wisdom is given, forward thinking — it’s all given to us. This is not to cast the magi as mere moths to a flame, but to understand that we can never be the objective-reference point we so wish to be. Most things, when examined enough, are unknowable givennesses.
Take the symbols in the Epiphany reading: Joseph the dreamer is something we’ve seen before. In a previous story, a certain dream-interpreter was chased by one who lusted. Here the stepfather of God starts to dream of commitment. (I)magi(ne) dreaming of commitment! Here someone is “born king” and earnestly loved — and will die so too, with an ironic Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, sarcastically mocked. The star is commemorated as stopping at a time previously deemed Apollo’s Day. This is not only a time for the celebration of wisdom, but also of gift. Gifts are a curious thing in their inalienability — the logic of the gift is that giving itself becomes a gift.
This double positive implies an endless loop, because the gift that giving is necessarily also becomes a gift. David Graeber has called festivals like Christmas a “pale echo” of what once may have been a seasonally regular and radically political and economic upheaval in social assumption — that a social philosophy of pure transaction can forget the inalienable trust underlying principles of exchange. In Christianity, gifts of the spirit include the ability to interpret, to predict and to heal. (Corinthians 12:8) If they come from the spirit, the fruits are believed to lead to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Galatians 5:22–3) Holidays — holy-days — are a gift to rest. With them, we can integrate what we’ve done, and where we want to go. Harvey Cox in his celebratory Feast of Fools argued that more than homo economicus, the human is fundamentally “homo festivus and homo fantasia. No other creature we know of relives the legends of his forefathers, blows out candles on a birthday cake, or dresses up and pretends he is someone else…[But] [t]he images that fired our hopes for the future have lost their glow. We often see the past as a cage from which we must escape, and the future as a dull elongation of what we now have…If God returns we may have to meet him first in the dance before we can define him in the doctrine.” (pp.11+15+28) Epiphany involves the trickster’s dance — in a radical avoidance of any prisoner’s dilemma the magi are warned in a visionary dream to avoid the one who wants to kill the threat.
Gifts also involve gratitude. In a rather cynical yet revealing piece of research conducted across the main continental human cultures, it was discovered that gratitude makes us more likely to obey. Gratitude! The one affect which may temper greed, reweld swords to ploughshares, convert our busy inner-life-of-no.1 into a realisation that we are not the giants on whose shoulders we stand, or on whose shouldn’ts. Gratitude, especially in the absence of an obvious benefactor — to the universe say, or to the elusive one-word-poem, ‘God’ — had been perhaps the one last refuge we could all nestle into in a metamodern contratext. And yet even our dear friend, the innocent virtue of gratitude, is now also irrevocably linked to the authoritarian dynamic.
“[G]ratitude can encourage obeying instructions to exact physical harm, violating moral principles of care. Grateful participants obeyed both benefactors and nonbenefactors… Induced happiness and admiration did not produce the same effect… The findings suggest that gratitude can make a person more vulnerable to social influence, including obeying commands to perform an ethically questionable act.” (Tong et al 2021)
Cult dynamics have long been observed to obey this simple dynamic. Render members grateful to their leader for their own identity, and slowly but surely, coerciveness becomes the norm, and leaving the cult becomes impossible without the haunting feeling that you’re leaving your entire life behind. Without those for whom and in whom and with whom one is so grateful to exist, one would have to shed one’s entire identity. And yet — with all the controls in place in this experiment — this paper cannot reckon with real world gratitude. Casting gratitude as ‘just another prison’ neglects its normatively polyvocal, nested and fundamentally directed nature. Thanks to this illuminating manuscript, we now have yet another experimental psychological platitude, but one which shows how far humans can critique.
It reminds me of the moment the psychologists ‘disproved’ free will, by inducing the desire to pick up a glass. But what real decision did not really take months… What kind of gratitude has to be induced by a manipulation? What true gratitude is not cultivated by thinking our feelings and feeling our thoughts?
Gratitude properly understood is the enjoyment of a gift. But what about the use of gratitude to manipulate? In this powerful painting by Gossaert — we see the Madonna and Child in a post-apocalyptic Cathedral. This burnt out husk of a church exposes the finitute of institution: the birth of God is instituant, it ushers — it cannot freeze. The profundity of the painting for me lies in the direction of the Magi’s eyes. We expect the recipient to be at the end of their eyes — these gifts are made into a glorification by being received. Instead, their gaze points to the gift itself: expensive, shining, a bloated vanity project. Imagine not looking at the reaction of the person to whom you give the gift, but instead seeing the gift as a status symbol? Here lies gratitude’s potential for manipulation: expectation of gratitude is the worship of the gift itself.
Our gift as Christians at this is not in the gilded gifts we give and receive, but in the waiting and listening to the life of Christ as an exposure to the life of the Goddess of all. Is this not rife with contradiction? How can something become eternal when once finite? How can something male be female? Do we really want to live forever? How can I remain me without my haircut, my piercings, my grimace and smile? The story of the Christ captures the imagination because it claims unreservedly that there is something behind the veil, a truer truth, a deeper depth; that our separation is illusory, and one day, we will all return to the same One, whether at cradle or cross.
References
— Matthew’s Nativity
— Paul’s Letters to the Galatians and the Corinthians
Cox, Harvey (1969), Feast of Fools, Harvard: HUP
Tong, E. M. W., Ng, C.-X., Ho, J. B. H., Yap, I. J. L., Chua, E. X. Y., Ng, J. W. X., Ho, D. Z. Y., & Diener, E. (2021). Gratitude facilitates obedience: New evidence for the social alignment perspective. Emotion, 21(6), 1302–1316. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000928
