It is fascinating to imagine Santa Claus approaching the bed of an incurable high-brow and dropping the entire theological library of St. Thomas Aquinas into the Christmas stocking. The forty volumes would crash perilously into the stocking, and old Santa Claus would pad out of the room chuckling to himself at his little joke. There would be laughter in the nurseries of Heaven, and serve the high-brow right, It would hardly be right for St. Thomas Aquinas, who is clean shaven, to pull the beard of old Saint Nicholas as a gesture of affectionate appreciation. But it would be right of Santa Claus to have pulled the high-brow’s leg—toys for children, and theology for high-brows.
It is true that toys satisfy in most cases, and are distant and shadowy “patterns or symbols of truth. By insisting on teeing the wheels go round, the low-brows manage to get down to the truth or thereabouts. But the high-brow, who wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is to be met in some other fashion. The man of mind, who insists fin all the propositions being proved, is to be tackled differently. Thanks to the immense and intimate knowledge of all cases which old Santa has, the high-brow is not to perish of hunger but to be filled with the complete truth, which is theology; which, in the hearty and painstaking manner of an Aquinas, can be finished in forty tomes, all told.
It is possible that the high-brow would proceed to build with the forty volumes of print as a low-brow builds with the forty blocks of the building set. It is hugely to the credit of the high-brow that, where mere low-brows register contact with their simple and easy pleasure in things, the high-brow demands nothing short of the complex and terrible joy in the causes of things. The low-brow has cleared the stocking empty and it sprawling on the drawing-room carpet, busy with the adjustment of things whose existence he has accepted and never found reason to question. In that sense, Old Santa Claus’s normal toys are all the end of a process. But the unusual Christmas present of a theology is a stupendous enterprise in beginning. Before anything was, it is. It is an explanation going before the foremost of things as they are. It was therefore decent of the harassed high-brow not to wish to take things seriously before they explained themselves. It is even possible-that he did not wish to take himself seriously before he could explain himself satisfactorily to himself. The forty volumed present was opportune. There was a question which even a high-brow could put without egoism: Who am I? or Am I anybody in particular ? If low-brows were going about asking for more and better mince-pies, there was nothing to stop a high-brow in the fullness of the festive spirit from asking for more ‘and better metaphysics. If there is cake, there is also the human soul.
After all. The validity of the existence of a stocking came from the existence of a leg. Along this line of thinking, the existence of Christ alone could give validity to the commemoration and even institution of Christmas. There have been harrowing moments in the lives of high-brows when they asked themselves the tremendous question: Is there really a God? If, there is, then there must have been some revelation of His purposes given by Himself to the creature called man. There is a thing (high-brows firmly believe) called the human mind; and there is the Divine Mind. The human mind (high-brows concede) is finite. If so, is there a link, so to say, between that finiteness and this infinity? Between the creature called man and the Creator was there a mediate term bridging the gap and filling the abyss? The prime Christmas present was the knowledge imparted that there was; that Christ supplied the hiatus of the human mind; that He was the answer to the embarrassment of the high-brow; that being God and the only Explanation which squares with the high-brow’s facts, He condescended to humanity and became man, assuming the only guise which is convincing to men. As a fact, it was the greatest of historical facts, rendering all others insignificant by making all else lead to or from it. As an event, it was the greatest of recorded events; all other events have received their date from that crucial one or remain for ever relative thereto. This deathless event goes for all time under the name of Christmas.
St. Thomas Aquinas’s theology avoids the Christmas cake and wine and toys and crackers and family reunions of children and parents and the giving and receiving of presents; but these important accidents derive really from the first and fundamental things in which he is absorbed, because of the high-brows. In the great central classic place of his forty tomes, which is the crown and glory of all theology, he considers the mystery of the God-Man, without whom the Christmas wines rejoice not and the crackers crack in vain. Infinitely more than the marvel of the toy engines, infinitely more also than the marvel of the real earth and the heavens and the vast stellar bodies in the universe, is the marvel of the real Divine Child in the manger. Could He possibly have been Eternal God? How is the Godhead reconcilable with humanity? Should a temporal nativity be attributed to Christ? Is the Blessed Virgin to be called Christ’s Mother in respect of His temporal nativity, or the mother of god? Were there two filiations in Christ? Was Christ born without His Mother suffering? Whether Christ’s birth should have been made known to all or to some? Whether Christ Himself should have made His birth known? Whether Christ’s birth should have been manifested by means of the Angels and the Star and what sort of star was it? And; above all, what was the nature of the union of the Divine and the Human?
These speculations are of the essence of Christmas; and the Christ of the theologian is not any sort of Christ known to the ancient heresiarchs or the moderns, but Him alone of dogma (that difficult word). The definitions (let us say reverently) fix Christ. Without them all is confusion, and a series of errors in the course of time brought confusion into the ranks of those who called His Name. Photinus taught that in Christ there was only a human nature. The Manichees, who had apparently never seen a babe at close quarters, opined that the Divine Babe was a phantasma. Apollinaris denied the rational soul of Christ, and Arius, the consubstantiality of the Son. Origen himself taught a soul of Christ created before the world. A great many other errors crept in and were condemned. They detracted from the divine splendour of the transcendental mystery that was the Incarnation; and the detractors are dead. The living testimony to the Truth cannot but preserve and perpetuate the good news that God was made man and born on Christmas Day. Wherefore the cognition and adoration of the first small group to whom the Glory of God in the Highest was manifested must endure.
The Babe is unlike any other babe; His Nativity unlike any other nativity. The faith in Him was an unparalleled upraising of the human heart towards the Most High who promised peace to men of good will. The first gift to the children of men was the Child Himself and a theology which the angels announced with celestial harpings. Then there were the first recipients, the Child’s Mother and Joseph and the shepherds and the Wise Men; and the witness included the dumb creation, the ox and the sheep and the ass (not to be confused with the high-brow). With the acceptance of the theology there arose the legend of that generous and romantic giver who carried his toys wherever theology had preceded him; so proper was it that those who had faith should also have fun.