“For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12-13, NRSV)
This Present Darkness
In the Midwest, Old Man Winter arrived with a vengeance. Although we have had snow off and on since the beginning of November, this was the first snowfall that landed on frozen ground, blown in with a blizzard and powerful winds that burned skin upon contact. This sudden drop in pressure is called a “bomb cyclone,” and heralded fatal temperatures that took much of the country by storm. As I write, thousands of people remain stranded as a result of canceled flights and other fallout from the first winter storm of the season, and many people have died from exposure to extreme cold and winter’s harsh fruits of snow and ice.
This year, we celebrated Christmas with our families in Michigan’s snowbelt, along the western coast of Lake Michigan. Both of our families have partially relocated to the Grand Rapids metro, and as it is the halfway point between Detroit metro and Chicagoland it is a natural landing spot for holiday celebrations. Of course, in winter this now means braving conditions that this year reminded me of the desolate white world described in HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness or Dan Simmons’ The Terror. To paraphrase CS Lewis, a landscape that evokes the eternal sleep we associate with winter, and never Christmas.
Yet, it was Christmas. And it was also my first Christmas celebrated since being received into the Catholic Church last Easter. I had hoped to celebrate it with a traditional Christmas midnight mass, but alas, the weather conspired against those plans. Instead, we gathered around the living room television and listened to Pope Francis’ beautiful Christmas homily, a lesson about the perils of avarice. In the grand tradition of Alexandria, the Holy Father speaks of the symbolic significance of the coming of Jesus Christ in a small manger in Bethlehem: Lessons in proximity or closeness, of poverty and of course the tangibility of the incarnation, a word that is translated as “concreteness.”
The Christmas story is as dramatic and perilous as the Passion, a fact that we sometimes forget as we meditate on the joy and promise of Advent. After all, Jesus Christ was not born as a traditional king, but into the everyday bondage of the Roman-occupied Judean province of the Empire. His lineage is royal, but through the line of David which we can assume many Judeans connected themselves to in the days of the Second Temple. His birthright transcends his humble origins, as his family was at most a status we could describe as middle class and any financial independence he enjoyed was relative to a small, wealthy elite and a much larger impoverished or enslaved class of subservients. Even if we accept the traditional gospel narrative that he was raised to be a carpenter as the son of a carpenter, men who could sell their expertise in the open market, the financial independence of his family in such a case was still precarious. Certainly, if we are to believe the gospel accounts, they were implicitly unable to afford a sacrificial lamb and used doves and pigeons as substitutes. Compare Leviticus 12:8 with Luke 2:22.
Opposition also preceded and accompanied his birth. As the gospels of Matthew and Luke tell it, he was pursued by forces that can only be described as archonic, in the Pauline and gnostic sense of that word. Although the Massacre of the Innocents is not believed to be authentic history, Herod had earned a reputation for a scale of brutality that made it believable in this largely preliterate era. It signaled that Herod was clothed in worldly strength and that he was one of the many violent forces in that era that could be compared to the dread Pharaoh of the Egyptian exodus. He was also a vassal of the distant Emperor and the local front man for the more proximate Roman prefects and governors that ruled over Judea. He was a power among powers.
In the era of the Nativity, humanity was still sojourning much closer to animism; accordingly, every material phenomenon or experience would also have a spiritual or symbolic aspect to give it a deeper range of meaning. When Christianity materialized, it identified its opposition in both material and spiritual terms: Vassal lords like the Herodian dynasty were visible political, social, economic and material realities, but they also had an invisible spiritual substrate. This realm of the unseen was in an important sense autonomous and its own subject, so that these forces of domination of the day had a psychic existence that resembled a living subject. In the cosmology of St Paul, you were either living under the direction of the higher, elevated Spirit of God, or you were enthralled by lesser spirits. Regardless of their station in life, humans were ensconced in a world that was both seen and unseen, and they were either vessels of the Holy Spirit through the Body of Christ, or they were agents of an altogether different order.
The Nativity stories presented in Matthew and Luke might seem like a departure from the demon-haunted world of Mark’s gospel or the contrast of light and darkness of Johannine literature, but I would argue that the these stories present a similar spiritual reality through narrative. Herod is a mad king who possesses Judea as the Egyptian Pharaoh once did, consulting with astrologers to pinpoint the location of the messiah who is promised to overthrow his worldly dominion. Of course, these men are wiser than Herod gives them credit for; after paying homage to Jesus with adoration and gifts fit for a king and god and sacrifice, they leave for home on a different path to prevent Herod from finding the messiah and murdering him along with the other innocents aged two and below who are massacred.
An Epiphany of Light in a Season of Darkness
At the heart of Advent and Christmastide is the manifestation of a God that dwells in and with humanity, and that shows a preference for the outcast and the outsider, the impoverished and the destitute. This is a central component of Christianity’s moral message, and in the Nativity we see many allusions to this theme. In the dramatic events depicted in the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, both Joseph and Mary are forced to evade sinister forces that seek to murder the Christ child. It would be a mistake to view this opposition to Jesus and the Holy Family as solely spiritual, however; after all, Luke connects the radical ministry of John the Baptist with the opposition of Herod, which will lead to his execution. In the narrative recorded by Luke, Jesus and John are cousins and spiritual (and presumably political) allies. John the Baptist is a herald of Jesus the Christ, their messages similar if not wholly identical.
The gospels of John and Mark do not have any infancy narrative, but they do feature the same link between Jesus and John the Baptist. Taken together, all these narratives suggest that Jesus was initiated into John’s ministry, and that John’s ministry was aimed against the ruling authorities of the day: Herod, yes, but also the Sadducees and the Pharisees that he denounces as a brood of vipers. There are also particular grievances suggested, against tax collectors and soldiers first and foremost. In each gospel, there is also the suggestion of an expanded aim of reconciliation for not only sinning Judeans, but also the various nations of the gentiles.
Early in Mark, Jesus is tempted by Satan. The nature of that temptation is not revealed in Mark, but shortly after this long period of desert wandering, Jesus is depicted as having the ability to rebuke and exorcise demonic entities that are capable of possessing humans and causing them serious injury. Significantly, he first demonstrates this power in a synagogue on the Sabbath, and his power is contrasted with the far more limited authority of learned scribes. Mark may not hint at the incarnation, but he does present Jesus Christ as imbued with powers that could only be attributed to divine beings. In choosing a synagogue as the first demonstration of this power, Jesus is also identified as having knowledge and abilities that exceed those of the more traditional, institutional authorities aligned with the Sauducees and Pharisees, the primary groups he will later encounter in Jerusalem. Unlike the scribal authorities, Jesus does not have to rely on the traditions of the torah scholars: His authority to command demons or unclean spirits comes from elsewhere.
The world of Mark is demon-haunted, but so too is the world of Matthew. In fact, it is during his wilderness wanderings described in Matthew that Jesus is offered dominion over all of the nations of the earth, which assumes that Satan has the power to offer them. This assumption similarly appears in the letters of Saint Paul, where “rulers” or archontes are described in both political and spiritual terms, and in the Second Letter to the Corinthians Paul even describes a “god of this aeon” creating a spiritual blindness that inhibits the reception of the good news of Jesus Christ and his atoning sacrifice. The world of early Christianity is haunted by demons and unclean spirits, angels and gods of the lower worlds below the firmament.
Early Christianity was far more diverse than what would become orthodoxy over successive generations. According to the church father Clement of Alexandria, the apostle Paul had a follower named Theudas, who in turn taught the Gnostic Christian Valentinus. Valentinus claimed that Paul transmitted an esoteric teaching related to Christian cosmology, a Gnostic form of Christianity that would later be deemed heretical. Central to this theology, which came to be called Valentinianism by its detractors, was salvation rooted in experiential knowledge called “gnosis” but perhaps better translated as “insight.” There were a number of revelations that followed from this, chief among them that the Yahweh depicted in the Old Testament was in fact a lesser, created being known as the Demiurge, an imperfect god that shaped the world of matter in ignorance. By cultivating gnosis, the followers of Valentinus believed that they were helping to restore a spiritual order to the chaos of matter, uniting the divine sparks within humanity to the Pleorma or the fullness of the Divine.
There were other Gnostic Christians who believed that the Demiurge was wholly evil, but unlike those Christians, who would be labeled Sethians because of a complicated cosmology that elevates the third son of Adam Seth, they did not teach a simple dualism between matter and spirit. Instead, the universe was structured by three primary elements: Spirit or pneuma, soul or psyche, and matter or hyle, which was the province of the body or soma. Every human being is said to consist of three components: a material body, an animating soul, and a spirit.
In the cosmology of Valentinus, the divine feminine Sophia is responsible for the creation of these three separate elements, but the net result is that the Demiurge and his spiritual host wages a kind of perpetual war against the Devil and his archontes, or “rulers.” An allegorical reading of Genesis favored by Valentinus sees the struggle between the archontes and the angels in the story of Cain and Abel, who are the archetypal representatives of the psyche or soul warring against the hyle or carnal matter. Borrowing from the Enochian tradition, the cosmology of Valentinus explains the Flood of Noah as the result of this struggle, but the important point here is that virtually all forms of early Christianity agreed with what Paul wrote in Ephesians: The material world is a battlefield between “the cosmic powers of this present darkness” and the illuminated followers of the Christ.
As we can see from Paul, there was a sense that the world was in the thrall of dark spiritual forces, which helped explain the presence of injustice. The more esoteric gospels of Mark and John eschew any Nativity narrative, but both Luke and Matthew point to the same themes explored in the opening chapters of Mark and John: John the Baptist is a herald and prophet of the coming Light that will outshine the darkness, being Christ. When Christ arrives, he is immediately pursued by these archonic forces of injustice.
These events are now memorialized in the liturgy of Advent and Christmas, and the Christmas homily of Pope Francis continues to point to spiritual and material consequences of this battle: War, poverty and death. In the Northern Hemisphere, the celebration of Christmas at the time of the Winter Solstice reinforces the image of the Christ child as a light of hope against the powers of darkness, temporal and spiritual. And this is the ultimate message of Christmas: A radiant light, growing even in this overwhelming and all too present darkness.
The Empire Never Ended: Powers and Principalities of the Present Aeon
It is a hard time to be hopeful. The Russian war against Ukraine has been raging for nearly a year, and there is no sign of peace on the horizon. Climate change has become an undeniable reality as “once in a generation” droughts and blizzards and temperature shifts are less radical deviations than regular events. A week ago, I was driving in ice and snow and the temperature with windchill was below thirty degrees. Today, the snow and ice have vanished and warm winds have prevailed, and the temperature is forty degrees above zero.
There is a certain resignation to the chaos of the moment. In the last two years, the world has been rocked by a global pandemic, wars and ongoing assaults against democracy and human rights. Yet there’s a layer of surreality that engulfs everything, with our discourse centered on the antics of Elon Musk’s strange tenure as the owner of Twitter in the last few months, the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the political fallout in America’s midterm elections, the seemingly endless assault on democratic norms that just a decade ago everyone at least pretended to honor.
This year has been challenging personally. My family has relocated to Chicago, and immediately after I lost my job, creating a mad scramble to prevent financial ruin. It has been a strain on our relationship and on a once strong friendship. Before Christmas, I attended a Taizé service at the church where I was received last Easter, my partner beside me. I had intended to partake in the sacrament of reconciliation in anticipation of the Eucharist at midnight mass, but neither were possible owing to long lines and winter storms. Still, I prayed to the divine wisdom of God in the form of Sophia, and felt a sense of communion, peace and renewal. Which is something, in these times.
“The empire never ended,” was a phrase that science fiction author Philip K. Dick, himself a late convert to Christian Gnosticism, coined to describe the way that the Roman Empire of the gospels never fell, but only changed form. Its most militant opponents were captured by the same spirit of empire that they had once waged war against, and the changing of the guard was simply memorialized in each epoch. We are now surrounded by the vestiges of what Rome was, in a country that self-styled itself after the Roman Republic, which succumbed to dictatorship and imperial ambition. It is hard to look at our flailing republic and our former president without thinking of the tribulations that accompanied Rome’s transition to an empire. It was, after all, a fake democracy, stylized as a republic that hid its dark forms of subjugation behind tradition, custom and a false honor.
Jesus Christ in Christianity is the savior who was crucified by these dark powers and their representatives in the form of the Roman Empire and its Judean collaborators. The overriding message of hope and love and faith prevailing over the darkness pervades all gospels, canonized or not. And yet it is in America where Christianity has been most perverted into its opposite: A religion of hatred and cruelty and indifference. This is nowhere as symbolically poignant as the cult of personality that has elevated Donald Trump into a false messianic figure, despite his rejection of every core component of the Christian faith, orthodox or not. Herod undertook many colossal building projects, most famously his reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. He courted the Romans and the Judean religious leadership, and his murderous unbounded ambition was politely ignored because he made a show of public piety. The empire never ended, and Herod has successors into the present age, which remains mired in darkness.
In his inaugural speech, President Kennedy referenced our “long, twilight struggle.” He called it “a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” And this is the struggle we endure today, in body and soul, assisted with the Spirit. It is an enduring struggle, one that shows every sign of being a war that continues without end. Jesus Christ promised and end, however, and that is the deepest meaning of the Christmas event. His message of love and hope endured the passion of the Resurrection, and his followers were moved to wage a war against the forces of empire. But it is a spiritual war, and a struggle against forces that are both cosmic and material.
Christmas is the hope that these things too shall pass, in the fullness of time.