For Christians, the advent of the Son of God has become commonplace. It’s celebrated, sung, preached about, wondered at, but simultaneously domesticated by nativity scenes, cutesy Advent calendars, and cozy Christmas traditions. It’s easy to forget that Advent cracked the world wide open.
Ancient religion operated, as Felix Ó Murchadha puts it in his A Phenomenology of Christian Life, by a “sacred logic.” The world was one—coherent, orderly, hierarchical. The sky was the sky, the earth the earth, and while they brushed up against each other, they couldn’t mix. Olympians were deathless and untouchable, even when they appeared in the guise of a man, a bull, or a shower of golden rain. Humans were mortals destined for Hades. Ritual maintained the cosmic boundaries. Sacrificial smoke rose to connect earth to sky while simultaneously signifying and ensuring their separation. Ritual restored cosmic boundaries when they were breached, undoing desecrations and distilling mixtures.
Ancient philosophy offered a variation of the same cosmos. Ó Murchadha rejects the common notion that Plato believed in a double universe, a world of sense and a distinct world of ideas, and he doesn’t think Plato devalued the material world. The cosmos is one and, as the Timaeus makes clear, as good as it can possibly be. Yet Plato (and Aristotle and other varieties of Platonism) shared the antique belief in the coherence of a world structured by unmixable oppositions. Platonic participation doesn’t, as is often thought, unite two worlds but orders the one world by delicately articulating and balancing oppositions. The wise man conforms to sacred order by striving “to purify the soul of the body and the body of the soul” in a way that “guards as much as possible their mutual exclusion.”
The advent of the eternal Son broke sacred order. The sky-God came to earth, not as an elusive theophany, but in an everlasting hypostatic union. A God from beyond the world entered the world, so that the beyond is also in. He who cannot be seen showed himself in the world of appearances, visible, tangible, audible (1 John 1), though he can only be truly seen by those who respond to a call to faith. Jesus sweeps away the graded ladder of being that connected earth to sky, humans to gods, leaving an infinite abyss between Creator and creature that was bridged when the Creator took up residence in creation as a creature.
In Advent, all that Olympian religion and Greek philosophy strove to keep apart is merged. Divine and human take up a common corporeal location in the world. The God who eternally is enters the world of becoming. Every stunning patristic paradox strikes at the foundations of ancient thought—“the word becomes flesh, the impassible suffers, the God of heaven appears as a slave, the immortal One dies a shameful death.”
By ancient standards, Christianity is a contamination, a desecration, an abominable pollution, a detestable mixture. Christianity rips apart the sacred order. Jesus is the name of that rupture.
Christianity makes the audacious claim that the Incarnation provides the key to all and everything. In place of ancient exhortations to conform to nature, the apostles command us to follow and imitate the human life of Christ who is beyond nature. Instead of acknowledging the inescapable earthiness of human existence, Christianity defines true life as precisely the “mixing of sky and earth.” Instead of meekly accepting the absolute limit of death, the gospel announces Jesus’s triumph over death. We live in finite flesh but, as St. Paul wrote, our life in the flesh is Christ’s indomitable life living itself out within us. Instead of maintaining strict boundaries of the sacred and of the human person, Christians revel in the “porosity of things which is made manifest in the Incarnation,” the fact that things aren’t closed monads but “openings beyond themselves” as “receptacles of a sending and a fundamental effectivity.”
Since the first century, Western philosophy is the story of persistent, sometimes desperate, efforts to reckon with the Incarnation. Some missed the radicalism of Advent. Thinking Jesus merely inverted sacred order, they offer Christianity as a pathway of escape from earth to sky. Others have tried to smooth the sharp edges of Advent, to set things neatly back in their places, to restore sacred order and untangle the contamination of Word by flesh and flesh by Word. No doubt such attempts will continue, but none will succeed. Advent will always resist domestication. Jesus broke philosophy, and there’s no putting it back together again.
Peter J. Leithart is president of Theopolis Institute.
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