C. S. Lewis’s “Christmas Sermon for Pagans”

Last updated on: December 23, 2023 at 6:57 pm By Gene Veith

In Monday’s Christmas Miscellany, we discussed an article about how Christmas destroyed paganism. I recalled that there is another take on the relationship between Christianity and paganism, this one by C. S. Lewis.

A few years ago, a piece that Lewis wrote for The Strand Magazine in 1946 was discovered. It’s entitled “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans” and has still not been published in any collection of Lewis’s writings.

Last year about this time, Lewis expert Crystal Kirgiss made it available on her blog. It is getting attention now because Kerry J. Byrne of Fox News wrote an article about it, focusing on how “it addresses, with almost startling prescience, many of the same culture-war issues simmering for years in the United States and exploding across the nation after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks on Israel.”

You need to read it all, but let me tell you a little about Lewis’s argument first. He begins by saying that though he accepted The Strand‘s assignment to write a Christmas sermon for pagans, he worried that there may not be enough pagans left for him to write to.

Lewis, the classically-educated literary scholar, knows that a pagan has more in common with a Christian than either of them have with a “post-Christian” secularist.

Actual pagans like Homer, Aristotle, and Virgil would agree with Christians like Shakespeare, Milton, and Hopkins that there is an objective right and wrong, an objective nature, and living deities to whom we are accountable. Lewis says that the pagans also tended to know that they are in trouble with the gods, that their behavior whether intentional or unintentional will bring about their doom, unless they can somehow placate the gods.

The post-Christians, though, believe in something else entirely:

Now the post-Christian view which is gradually coming into existence—it is complete already in some people and still incomplete in others—is quite different. According to it Nature is not a live thing to be reverenced: it is a kind of machine for us to exploit. There is no objective Right or Wrong: each race or class can invent its own code or “ideology” just as it pleases. And whatever may be amiss with the world, it is certainly not we, not the ordinary people; it is up to God (if, after all, He should happen to exist), or to Government or to Education, to give us what we want. They are the shop, we are the customers: and “the customer is always right.”

Sound familiar? Lewis is just getting started.

Have you not begun to see that Man’s conquest of Nature is really Man’s conquest of Man? That every power wrested from Nature is used by some men over other men? Men are the victims, not the conquerors in this struggle: each new victory “over Nature” yields new means of propaganda to enslave them, new weapons to kill them, new power for the State and new weakness for the citizen, new contraceptives to keep men from being born at all.

Meanwhile, the post-Christians are constructing new secular ideologies that presume to take the place of actual religions, whether Christian or pagan. But those certainly can’t work in a climate of moral relativism:

As for the ideologies, the new invented Wrongs and Rights, does no one see the catch? If there is no real Wrong and Right, nothing good or bad in itself, none of these ideologies can be better or worse than another. For a better moral code can only mean one which comes nearer to some real or absolute code. One map of New York can be better than another only if there is a real New York for it to be truer to. If there is no objective standard, then our choice between one ideology and another becomes a matter of arbitrary taste. Our battle for democratic ideals against Nazi ideals has been a waste of time, because the one is no better than the other. Nor can there ever be any real improvement or deterioration: if there is no real goal you can’t get either nearer to it or farther from it. In fact, there is no real reason for doing anything at all.

Without denying the problems of paganism, Lewis floats the idea that maybe post-Christians need to become pagans before they can become Christians. The world is composed of people who do not know they are sick (the post-Christians); those who know they are sick (the pagans); and “those who have found the cure” (the Christians). A person must realize they are sinners before they can be truly receptive to Christ. (Sounds like Law and Gospel to me.)

For (in a sense) all that Christianity adds to Paganism is the cure. It confirms the old belief that in this universe we are up against Living Power: that there is a real Right and that we have failed to obey it: that existence is beautiful and terrifying. It adds a wonder of which Paganism had not distinctly heard—that the Mighty One has come down to help us, to remove our guilt, to reconcile us.

So read the whole essay linked here: A Christmas Sermon for Pagans,

Dr. Kirgiss first gives us a photocopy of the article in The Strand, but if you scroll past those yellowed pages, you will find an easier-to-read transcript.

Photo: C. S. Lewis via Flickr, Public Domain

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The Newly Discovered “Christmas Sermon for Pagans” by C. S. Lewis

Last updated on: December 19, 2017 at 5:18 pm By Gene Veith

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The scholar Stephanie R. Derrick tells about discovering two previously unknown essays by C. S. Lewis, including “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans.”

In an article for Christianity Today entitled Christmas and Cricket: Rediscovering Two Lost C. S. Lewis Articles After 70 Years, she summarizes the two articles that were published in The Strand in the late 1940s. Because that magazine was not indexed until 1983, which was after the standard Lewis bibliographies had been compiled, they were not included in bibliographies or collections of his works.

Dr. Derrick says of the Christmas essay that the editor of The Strand gave Lewis the topic of preaching about Christmas to modern “pagans.” But Lewis, as he does elsewhere, pointed out the difference between modern day secularists and actual pagans.

Lewis proceeded to use his Christmas “sermon” as an occasion to draw distinctions between the true Pagans or Heathens of old—“the backward people in the remote districts who had not yet been converted, who were still pre-Christian”—and modern people in Britain who have ceased to be Christians, who are sometimes referred to as “pagans.” To confuse these categories, Lewis says, is “like thinking … a street where the houses have been knocked down is the same as a field where no house has yet been built. … Rubble, dust, broken bottles, old bedsteads and stray cats are very different from grass, thyme, clover, buttercups and a lark singing overhead.”

Real Pagans differ from post-Christians, Lewis continued, firstly in that they were actually religious: “To [the Pagan] the earth was holy, the woods and waters were alive.” Secondly, they “believed in what we now call an ‘Objective’ Right or Wrong,” that is, that “the distinction between pious and impious acts was something which existed independently of human opinions.” Finally, Pagans, unlike “post-Christian man,” had “deep sadness” because of their knowledge that they did not obey the moral code perfectly. To compensate for this shortcoming, the Pagan developed a wealth of ceremonies to “take away guilt.”

Lewis goes on to unfavorably compare the enchanted worldview of ancient paganism to today’s “universe of colourless electrons.” Dr. Derrick quotes Lewis’s conclusion:

It looks to me, neighbours, as though we shall have to set about becoming true Pagans if only as a preliminary to becoming Christians. … For (in a sense) all that Christianity adds to Paganism is the cure. It confirms the old belief that in this universe we are up against Living Power: that there is a real Right and that we have failed to obey it: that existence is beautiful and terrifying. It adds a wonder of which Paganism had not distinctly heard—that the Mighty One has come down to help us, to remove our guilt, to reconcile us.

Indeed, a remedy has been provided for the “deep sadness” brought onto the world by sin. The very Pagan thing we do on December 25 of “singing and feasting because a God has been born” just may be, Lewis suggests, our “way back not only to Heaven, but to Earth too.”

This essay, “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans,” which had also been discovered by Christopher Marsh in 2015, will be published in its entirety in VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center in January 2018.

Dr. Derrick also found another essay attributed to Lewis, “Cricketer’s Progress,” on the career of the famous cricket player Maurice W. Tate, turning into a reflection on the prospects for servicemen adjusting to life after the war. This author of this piece was given as “Clive Hamilton,” which was a pseudonym sometimes used by Lewis. But it is about sports, a topic Lewis was notoriously uninterested in! Dr. Derrick raises questions about whether Lewis actually wrote this piece, despite the Strand indexer’s attribution to him, though she decides that Lewis is just playing with the genre of sports-writing.

At any rate, it’s good to have more C. S. Lewis, and we can receive his “Christmas Sermon” as a Christmas present.

Photo, books by C. S. Lewis by Bill Smith via Flickr, Creative Commons License

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Why Christmas Is at the Beginning of Winter

Last updated on: December 19, 2024 at 6:04 pm By Gene Veith

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There is good reason why we celebrate Christmas when we do, near the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, a time of cold and lifelessness.

We don’t know exactly when Jesus was born, though scholars keep trying to work it out. Some say it must have been in March, when shepherds would be outside, watching their flocks by night. New research, based on calculations of the times of Jewish pilgrimages and updated astronomical information about the eclipse that accompanied the death of King Herod, makes the case that Jesus was born in December after all, on December 1, 1 B.C.

Some say that Christmas is just a Christianization of a pagan Roman holiday, such as Sol Invictus (“the invincible sun”), but historians are realizing that it is more likely that the day devoted to the sun god was more likely an imitation of Christmas, rather than vice versa. Nor is Christmas a Christianization of the Roman holiday supposedly for children, Juvenalia, which was actually about growing out of childhood and was never celebrated much.

The birth of Christ was first said to have been on December 25 very early, in 204 A.D. The reason Christmas was placed in the liturgical calendar on December 25, as we blogged about four years ago, is connected to the Annunciation, when the angel appeared to Mary and the Christchild was conceived. The commemoration of that event, which some experts think the early church might have celebrated even before it made a big deal about Christmas, was on March 25. You take that date, which is actually fairly well attested, count nine months, and the Child’s birthday would be on December 25.

I happen to think, as a pious opinion rather than doctrine, that the Holy Spirit would cause the church to get the date right, just as He would cause Christians to imagine Jesus as He really was (long hair, beard, etc.). But the bigger question is what the December date means.

Spencer Klavan reflects on this in his Daily Wire post The Case for Advent Maxxing:

Just as the exuberance of Easter is preceded by the 40 somber days of Lent, the 40 days of Christmas are preceded by days of preparation known as Advent. This is the key to understanding the rhythm of the whole liturgical calendar: it goes through successive periods of grief and joy, silence and music, death and resurrection. It takes the natural ebb and flow of the light throughout the year as raw material in a grand work of art, using the solar system itself to construct a symbolic picture of Jesus’ life. In Genesis, when God sets up the stars as “signs to mark the seasons,” the rhythm of the year becomes a language for conveying the order of creation. The Jewish calendar, pinned to the cycles of the moon, established the pattern. The Christian calendar, founded on the schedule of Jewish feasts that Christ observed, grows out of it.

The winter solstice, when the daylight becomes shortest, makes for a natural beginning to this yearly sequence. Unlike Easter, which took place firmly during the festival of Passover, Christmas isn’t identified with a specific date in the Bible. Many people now think Jesus was born sometime in the Spring. But the winter date was fixed already by the 4th century A.D. St. Augustine of Hippo loved to preach about the symbolic appropriateness of December 25th as an entry point for God into the world, precisely because of the dark and the cold: “He, therefore, who bent low and lifted us up chose the shortest day, yet the one whence light begins to increase.” As the day wanes to its lowest ebb and the year rolls into its most brooding silence, the light of the world slips in and begins to grow.

This is deep and ancient magic. Every people and tribe has long since recognized that the earth wheels through a cycle of death and rebirth. Christians saw in their lord and savior the answer to a promise whispered through the very structure of creation, written in the very bones of the year.

To be sure, pagan religions had their Winter Solstice observances. But Christianity reverses what they meant. The darkest and longest day of the year would have been an odd time to celebrate “The Invincible Sun,” since that date looked more like the time when the Sun was defeated. That may be why the artificial holiday promoted by a few emperors didn’t really catch on. More meaningful was the Yule of the Germanic tribes, a time of huddling around the Yule log in the darkness, making sacrifices to keep away the evil spirits. Christmas upended that, teaching that our darkest hour is exactly when Christ came.

Here is more from Augustine’s Sermon 192:

He was born on the day which is the shortest in our earthly reckoning and from which subsequent days begin to increase in length. He, therefore, who bent low and lifted us up chose the shortest day, yet the one whence light begins to increase. By such a coming, though silent, He urged us, as with the sound of a mighty voice, to learn how to be rich in Him who became poor for us; to accept freedom in Him who took the form of a slave for us; to possess heaven in Him who sprang from earth for us.

I realize this applies to those of us in the Northern hemisphere. In the Southern hemisphere, December 25 is near the beginning of summer, so that countries such as Australia celebrate Christmas by cooking out at the beach. They celebrate the victory of the light over the darkness, so that works symbolically too.

Photo: A field with a bunch of dry grass in the foreground. Grain winter snow via Picryl, public domain.

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A Christmas Miscellany, 2023 A.D.

Last updated on: December 25, 2023 at 7:45 am By Gene Veith

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Merry Christmas to all my readers, every one of whom I appreciate more than I can say! Christmas falls on a Monday this year, which turns our customary Monday Miscellany into a Christmas Miscellany, covering the following topics:

God the Baby; the world Jesus was born into; and Christianity, paganism, and the gospel.

Also, on Friday and next Monday on New Year’s Day, this blog will come out from behind the paywall so all can participate in our annual custom of first reviewing the predictions that readers made for 2023, and then making new predictions for 2024.

God the Baby

Gregory Seltz of the Lutheran Center for Religious Liberty gives a remarkable quotation from the late newscaster Harry Reasoner. Dr. Selz gives as his source a 2020 column from Cal Thomas, who notes that this was an on air commentary for ABC News given on Christmas Eve, 1973, the year of Watergate, economic recession, and war in the Middle East.

Christmas is such a unique idea that most non-Christians accept it, and I think sometimes envy it. If Christmas is the anniversary of the appearance of the Lord of the Universe in the form of a helpless baby, it’s quite a day. It’s a startling idea, and the theologians, who sometimes love logic more than they love God, find it uncomfortable. But if God did do it, He had a tremendous insight.

People are afraid of God and standing in His very bright light. But everyone has seen babies and almost everyone likes them. So, if God wanted to be loved as well as feared, He moved correctly here. And if He wanted to know people, as well as rule them, He moved correctly, because a baby growing up learns all there is to know about people.

If God wanted to be intimately a part of Man, He moved correctly. For the experience of birth and familyhood is our most intimate and precious experience.

So, it comes beyond logic. It’s what a bishop I used to know called a kind of divine insanity. It is either all falsehood or it is the truest thing in the world. It is the story of the great innocence of God the baby. God in the power of Man. And it is such a dramatic shot toward the heart, that if it is not true, for Christians, nothing is true.

So even if you did not get your shopping all done, and you were swamped with the commercialism and frenzy, be at peace. And even if you are the deacon having to arrange the extra seating for all the Christmas Christians that you won’t see until Easter, be at peace. The story stands.

It’s all right that so many Christians are touched only once a year by this incomparable story. Because some final quiet Christmas morning, the touch will take.

Remember Harry Reasoner? Remember when journalists occasionally would say something like this? This is the 50th anniversary of that broadcast, a time when the nation and the world were also in a very dark place. That one phrase will haunt me for Christmases to come: “God the Baby.”

The World Jesus Was Born Into

You think times are bad now? That our government is corrupt? That our country is dysfunctional? That violence in the world is out of control? Wait until you learn what was going on when and where Jesus was born.

Historian Philip Jenkins will enlighten you about this in his post The Year Jesus Was Born. I’ll get you started, then click the link for the rest:

Scholars differ on the exact birth-date of Jesus of Nazareth, though a fair consensus holds that it was not in the year 1. Many favor a date in or around 4 BC, and for the sake of argument, let us take that as accurate. If so, the birth occurred during or near a truly dreadful time in the history of what was already a troubled and turbulent land: arguably, the story has a special new relevance in the horribly violent conditions in that region today. Although these events are familiar to scholars, they are not at all well known by non-specialists. This is unfortunate, because memories of this crisis certainly shaped memories and perceptions for decades afterwards, and conditioned attitudes during Jesus’s lifetime. If we don’t understand those conflicts, we are missing the prehistory of the earliest Jesus Movement. And they do provide a necessary, if unsettling, context for the Christmas story we recount at this time of year. Was this really what that first Christmas was like?

[Keep reading. . .]

Christmas, Paganism, and the Gospel

Anthony Costello has written a fascinating post on the conflict between Christianity and Paganism–how this begins with the ancient Hebrews, how this conflict is a major theme of the Old Testament, and how the coming of Christ at Christmas killed paganism and for all.

Read the whole piece. I’ll quote a few paragraphs–without the connections between them, with some being from the scholars he quotes–to give you a sample. But, having praised it, I then want to say a few words of criticism.

From Anthony Costello, The True Meaning of Christmas: The Death of Paganism, at Theological Apologetics:

Historian Paul Veyne characterized the pagan gods this way:

The pagan gods, by contrast [to the biblical God], live their lives and are not confined to a metaphysical [transcendent] role. They are part of this world, one of three races that populate the earth: animals, which are neither immortal nor gifted with reason; humans, who are mortal but reasonable; and gods, who are immortal and reasonable. So true is it that the divine race is an animal genus that every god is either male or female.

Veyne, A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (208)

Moreover, for the most part, all cultures around the world had this basic understanding of the world: that the world was enchanted with god-like beings or divine, mysterious powers. This was roughly the same for the ancient Greeks, as well as the Algonquins. The philosopher, Charles Taylor, described this ancient, pagan world as “enchanted,” meaning that ancient cultures experienced the natural world as imbued with “spirit agents”– innate, mysterious powers that had their own wills and intentions, moods and attitudes. . . .

In contrast to this pagan view of nature, there were a handful of ancient communities that believed roughly the opposite of this: that there was only one God. Further, this God was separate from and transcendent to the realm of nature, i.e., from the cosmos. Following logically from this, this God, and only this God, was eternal and uncreated and that the world human beings inhabited was not eternal or uncreated, and, likewise, neither were its gods. The most obvious and relevant example of a community like this were the Israelites. . . .

The history of Israel is the history of a persistent spiritual and physical battle between the following: between Yahweh the Creator and others of His creatures who rebelled against Him; between the belief in one, big God and belief in many, little gods; between the one, revealed religion of the Israelites and the many speculative religions of the pagans; between God’s people and not-God’s people; between the transcendent and the immanent; between miracles and magic; between light, love and liberty and darkness, bondage and the power of death.

When Jesus comes, He will cast out devils and defeat all the powers of darkness. And by His death and resurrection, he founds His church, which will convert the world from paganism. I like his explanation of St. Peter’s confession that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” and how Jesus promises that “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:13-19).

The word translated “hell” is actually “Hades,” which is the name both of a place (the realm of the dead) and a god (the god of the dead). “Jesus’ point here is crystal clear: He is going to initiate something new, a new dispensation of God’s grace, the next phase of the battle plan that will destroy the “gates” of Paganism’s main headquarters: hell, the realm of the dead.” And he reminds us that “gates” are for defense, not offense. The figure of speech isn’t that hell is attacking the church. The church is attacking hell! And the walled fortress of Hades will not be able to prevent the church from casting down its gates and sacking the city.

My problem with this reading is that the destruction of paganism is seen as “the true meaning of Christmas.” That would be what St. Paul said: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Timothy 1:15).

Not only did Christ Jesus come, to save sinners, but he came for St. Paul, who thought of himself as the worst of sinners. And by extension, He came “into the world” at Christmas for me and for you.

Luther said that the chief words in the Sacrament are “for you.” Similarly, Christ coming into the world for you makes Christmas the purest Gospel.

I think Christ saves us by delivering us from the power of sin, death, and the devil, so this would include paganism. I am sure that Costello believes this. I just wish he would have foregrounded the Gospel more.

Those in the Reformed tradition seem especially preoccupied with the threat of paganism, including the alleged “idolatry” of accepting anything physical (water, bread, wine) as a means that God uses to manifest Himself. And their doctrine of the Limited Atonement keeps them from an unreserved proclamation to everyone that Christ came into the world “for you.”

But, another definitive Biblical text about the true meaning of Christmas is the first chapter of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . .And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). And the “for you” comes a few verses later, when John the Baptist proclaimed “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).

Illustration: “Adoration Of The Shepherds” [c.1615] by Bernardo Strozzi, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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Why Christmas is on December 25

Last updated on: December 23, 2014 at 6:57 pm By Gene Veith

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Touchstone has reposted its most popular article, the scholarly treatment by historian William J. Tighe from 2003 about why the birth of Jesus is celebrated on December 25. And, as he definitively shows, it has nothing to do with any pagan festival. (more…)

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Christmas was NOT based on the Roman Juvenalia

Last updated on: December 24, 2012 at 5:30 am By Gene Veith

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In his continuing series that we’ve been blogging about exploding the myth that Christmas was based on a pagan holiday, Rev. Joseph Abrahamson takes on the view recently pushed on the History Channel that Christmas, along with customs like singing carols, doing things for children, and gift-giving, grew out of the Roman solstice feast of Juvenalia:

The claim about Juvenalia is usually that it was the Roman solstice or early January holiday where the celebration of the youth, singing carols, and gift giving came from. Claims like this are usually made by people who watched the History Channel’s programs and their views of Juvenalia:

“Also around the time of the winter solstice, Romans observed Juvenalia, a feast honoring the children of Rome.” HC

Juvenalia was actually instituted in A.D. 59 by Emperor Nero to celebrate his first shave at the age of 21.

In other words, he was no longer a child, but an adult. Juvenalia was not a celebration of youth, but of coming out of adolescence to be a real man.

In this article I am listing sources instead of copying the quotes because they are long, but please don’t gloss over what the source says. Go to it and read it. Read each of them.
We can go back to Tacitus (AD 56 – 117), the earliest historian who recorded the invention of Juvenalia. Tacitus was 2 or 3 years old when Nero celebrated his Juvenalia.

Tacitus records Nero’s creation of Juvenalia in his Annales, XIV.15-16 [English/Latin Parallel] XV.33 [English/Latin Parallel] XVI.21 [English/Latin Parallel]

Again, no particular date, nothing about a childhood celebration or gift giving. Nero did command his people to sing or perform lewd songs and acts in the theaters he had constructed for this occasion.

Next is Suetonius (c. AD 69 – c. 122) [roughly contemporary with Tacitus], who wrote in his The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, [English/Latin] but gives only a very brief account, stating nothing about the date of Nero’s beard shaving party, nor about any child’s gathering or gift giving.

Born almost 100 years after the Nero invented Juvenalia, Cassius Dio (AD c. 150 – 235) gives a description that is more detailed than that of Tacitus or Seutonius in his Roman History 62.19-21 [Greek Text][English Text] Found in Vol. VIII of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1925 LXI:19-21, pp. 77-82.

No date for Nero’s Juvenalia is mentioned by Cassius Dio. He does mention that Nero had theaters constructed for the event. He also mentions that Nero forced people from the high end of society in to humiliating and lewd acts in honor of the emperor’s first shave, which they did because they had a not unreasonable fear that Nero would kill them if they displeased him.

Dio also writes that Domitian (AD 51 – 96, emperor from 81-96)gave Juvenalia games but assigns no date.

So, now we are 175 years after Nero instituted Juvenalia, and we have no date of the year, no mention that this festival is for the good of children, and no mention of gift giving. We do have the fact that Nero constructed theaters for this celebration and commanded performances that included a singing competition. And, of course, Nero was declared the best singer of all.

The choice of December 25th and January 6th for the Christmas observance is already established by the end of the 2nd century AD.

via Steadfast Lutherans » Redeeming Holy Days from Pagan Lies — Pagan Solstice Celebrations 2.

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