Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan | Page 9

folk unable to rise to
the heights of abstinence and renunciation; one can hardly imagine a
true early Benedictine filled with "joy that a man is born into the
world." The Nativity was an infinitely important event, to be celebrated
with a chastened, unearthly joy, but not, as it became for the later
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a matter upon which human
affection might lavish itself, which imagination might deck with vivid
concrete detail. In the later Christmas |35| the pagan and the Christian
spirit, or delight in earthly things and joy in the invisible, seem to meet
and mingle; to the true monk of the Dark and Early Middle Ages they
were incompatible.
What of the people, the great world outside the monasteries? Can we
imagine that Christmas, on its Christian side, had a deep meaning for

them? For the first ten centuries, to quote Dean Church again,
Christianity "can hardly be said to have leavened society at all.... It
acted upon it doubtless with enormous power; but it was as an
extraneous and foreign agent, which destroys and shapes, but does not
mingle or renew.... Society was a long time unlearning heathenism; it
has not done so yet; but it had hardly begun, at any rate it was only just
beginning, to imagine the possibility of such a thing in the eleventh
century."{6}
"The practical religion of the illiterate," says another ecclesiastical
historian, Dr. W. R. W. Stephens, "was in many respects merely a
survival of the old paganism thinly disguised. There was a prevalent
belief in witchcraft, magic, sortilegy, spells, charms, talismans, which
mixed itself up in strange ways with Christian ideas and Christian
worship.... Fear, the note of superstition, rather than love, which is the
characteristic of a rational faith, was conspicuous in much of the
popular religion. The world was haunted by demons, hobgoblins,
malignant spirits of divers kinds, whose baneful influence must be
averted by charms or offerings."{7}
The writings of ecclesiastics, the decrees of councils and synods, from
the fourth century to the eleventh, abound in condemnations of pagan
practices at the turn of the year. It is in these customs, and in secular
mirth and revelry, not in Christian poetry, that we must seek for the
expression of early lay feeling about Christmas. It was a feast of
material good things, a time for the fulfilment of traditional heathen
usages, rather than a joyous celebration of the Saviour's birth. No doubt
it was observed by due attendance at church, but the services in a
tongue not understanded of the people cannot have been very full of
meaning to them, and we can imagine |36| their Christmas
church-going as rather a duty inspired by fear than an expression of
devout rejoicing. It is noteworthy that the earliest of vernacular
Christmas carols known to us, the early thirteenth-century
Anglo-Norman "Seignors, ore entendez à nus," is a song not of religion
but of revelry. Its last verse is typical:
"Seignors, jo vus di par Noël, E par li sires de cest hostel, Car bevez

ben; E jo primes beverai le men, E pois aprèz chescon le soen, Par mon
conseil; Si jo vus di trestoz, 'Wesseyl!' Dehaiz eit qui ne dirra,
'Drincheyl!'"[12]{8}
Not till the close of the thirteenth century do we meet with any
vernacular Christmas poetry of importance. The verses of the
troubadours and trouvères of twelfth-century France had little to do
with Christianity; their songs were mostly of earthly and illicit love.
The German Minnesingers of the thirteenth century were indeed pious,
but their devout lays were addressed to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven,
the ideal of womanhood, holding in glory the Divine Child in her arms,
rather than to the Babe and His Mother in the great humility of
Bethlehem.
The first real outburst of Christmas joy in a popular tongue is found in
Italy, in the poems of that strange "minstrel of the Lord," the
Franciscan Jacopone da Todi (b. 1228, d. 1306). Franciscan, in that
name we have an indication of the change in religious feeling that came
over the western world, and |37| especially Italy, in the thirteenth
century.{9} For the twenty all-too-short years of St. Francis's
apostolate have passed, and a new attitude towards God and man and
the world has become possible. Not that the change was due solely to
St. Francis; he was rather the supreme embodiment of the ideals and
tendencies of his day than their actual creator; but he was the spark that
kindled a mighty flame. In him we reach so important a turning-point
in the history of Christmas that we must linger awhile at his side.
Early Franciscanism meant above all the democratizing, the
humanizing of Christianity; with it begins that "carol spirit" which is
the most winning part of the