History Is Shaped Like An X
By DONALD DeMARCO
The sentence “History is shaped like an X” belongs to Msgr. Ronald Knox and expresses his estimation of the historical significance of Christmas. Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957) was ordained a Catholic priest in 1918, a year after he resigned his ministry in the Anglican Church.
He distinguished himself as a theologian, an author of detective stories, a regular writer and broadcaster for BBC Radio, and a re-translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible into English. In addition to penning many books, he also served in an Army Intelligence role during World War I.
What did he mean by this cryptic phrase? For one thing, he was not referring to the “X” as it appears in the word “Xmas.” He would not have objected to the use of the letter since he knew that it stood for the Greek letter “Chi” which is short for the Greek Christos, referring to Christ.
What he had in mind was the immense historical significance of Christmas. He viewed this feast day as a “bottleneck” that separated the past, “when things got worse,” from the future when “things are to get better.”
He compared the Nativity with the winter solstice, which is the shortest day of the year (in 2015 it falls on December 22). Christmas, then, is the event that marks the end of the increase of paganism (a diminishing of light) and the beginning of Christianity (the increase of light).
Appropriately, the term “BC” stands for “before Christ,” while “AD” stands for Anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord,” or more precisely, “anno Domini nostri Iesu Christi” (in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ). These terms are used in both the Julian as well as the Gregorian calendars.
Msgr. Knox translates Luke 3:1-6 as follows: “Prepare the way of the Lord, straighten out his paths. Every valley is to be bridged, and every mountain and hill leveled, and the windings are to be cut straight, and the rough paths made into smooth mountain roads, and all mankind is to see the saving power of God.”
Knox applies this passage to Christmas. He sees Advent as “cutting through our self-conceit” and preparing the way for love since “the King’s business must go forward.” Christmas is the event that allows history to break through the bottleneck into the spacious atmosphere of Christianity. Therefore, it is like the letter X where the lower space represents the pagan world and the upper space represents the Christian world, while the intersection refers to the “bottleneck.”
According to Msgr. Knox, “Christmas has the disconcerting directness of childhood.”
Consequently, so that all of us can appreciate Christmas properly, he states: “For once in a year we have to see things with the lucidity of a child’s eyes.” This reference to the spiritual acumen of the child is most interesting. A short poem by the 19th-century poet, Grace Noll Crowell, states the same point beautifully:
Whatever else be lost among the years,
Let us keep Christmas still a shining thing:
Whatever doubts assail us, or what fears,
Let us hold close one day, remembering
Its poignant meaning for the hearts of men,
Let us get back our childlike faith again.
It may be surprising for many to know that no less an intellectual giant than Albert Einstein had great appreciation for the spiritual capacities of children. “The pursuit of truth and beauty,” he wrote, “is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
On another occasion, he remarked: “To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition.”
In his eighth and final volume of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Children of Crisis series, Robert Coles interviewed children from various cultures and religious backgrounds to find out what God meant to them. He discovered that children, mostly around the age of 10, responded with great fervency and depth.
“Our greatest natural resource,” opined Walt Disney, who knew a great deal about the very young, “is the minds of our children.”
In his celebrated ode, Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood, William Wordsworth remembers his youth when “everything was appareled in celestial light.” He laments the fact that as we grow, we lose something of that sharp spiritual acumen that we had when we were young:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy.
One of the many paradoxes of Christmas is that it demands childlike sensitivity to appreciate it properly, and yet it has immense historical significance that requires a different set of eyes. Christmas is where the child and the adult meet in awe, one sensing its light, the other sensing its breadth. Christmas, then, is for everyone and for all time.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
