Christmas theology and a meditation on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

I studied – among many other things – literature. I studied literature trusting, first, that the professors of literature loved literature; and secondly, that since they had the enormous privilege of earning a living by reading, thinking, and writing about literature, which they loved, they would be able to help me read better in general and read individual works that I loved better in particular. Not every professor of literature I had in class could do this. Some were.

    Today, most literature professors don’t even see this as their task. Indeed, most don’t seem to love literature so much as debunking literature that other people have loved, often for no other reason than it was written by a “white man,” as though that fact somehow pollutes it. How primitive and revealing of a toxic resentment. (To understand the debunkers, read what Nietzsche wrote – ironically – about Christians in A Genealogy of Morals.) But I digress.

    Looking to recover at least the Sehnsucht (i.e. the painful longing for the distant and unrecoverable home for my soul) for the lost joy I have known at Christmas time, my Internet algorithm flashed up a course from Hillsdale College on Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, a book I have truly enjoyed but which I have never considered essential. A cool story. Well, the professor – Dwight Lindley – uncovered layers of meaning that allowed me to see a depth in the story I had been blind to. Which was strange, since the depth he uncovered connected to and expanded my core convictions about life. Dickens seemed to have done even better than Aquinas, Kierkegaard, or Lewis.

    What did he see in the story that I was not fully aware of? Several interrelated disclosures of the meaning of Christmas, that in turn revealed the meaning of Creation.  

 . . . 

Stave One. Hell. Or it would be except for all the people gathered around light in the darkness, singing songs; and all the good food in the shops waiting to be eaten. Scrooge's inner life - or lack thereof - is Hell, but the narrator let's us know it is not real, and so we don't fear it - or Scrooge. Scrooge’s life is that of a damned soul – but the language evokes an atmosphere lighter than Dante’s Inferno because Scrooge is framed by the real – good – world throughout. And there is humor. We are definitely not in the world of Dante's Inferno. The world would be a hell, people all like Scrooge, but for all the light and all the cheer. 

    The first descriptive sentence ends with the word “sinner.” But the whole person embodies in almost every facet the essence of sin, or Hell. Not just the particular form of greed he embodies: I suppose he would be among the hoarders in Dante’s Inferno. But he reveals the very meaning of ‘being damned.’ He is alienated, cut off from other people (his nephew, his clerk, the carolers), from nature, from joy, from his own past (all of Stave Two), from light (“darkness is cheap”) from human sympathy (“decrease the surplus population”), from simply human pleasures like eating and drinking (he eats gruel) – from reality, from Being. From the Creation. From his own essential nature as part of the Creation. Scrooge is loveless. Still, he can’t completely mask his humanity. The pleasure he takes in his use of language – while used for destruction – is a genuine pleasure, one that connects him somehow to the Human albeit it negatively.  These themes are deepened in the following staves.  

   We see from the beginning two worlds – Scrooges’ world, on the one hand, full of the cold and darkness (lovelessness) that such lost souls spread; a world in which everything is measured by quantitative, monetary gain; a world of bare facts and mechanical time; a world where every soul is alienated from other souls, each looking after their own business. And this business is accumulating wealth and thus power over others, a cruel world in which we are all nothing but covetous machines, a Darwinian world where one person’s gain is another’s loss in the end, in spite of temporary alliances based on mutual interest (like Scrooge and Marley). This is how Scrooge sees the world and he has adapted himself perfectly to this environment. (Indeed, it is the world of capitalism, of the stock exchange.)

    On the other hand, there is the real world, the world Scrooge is blind to, the world that capitalism surrounds with cold and darkness but can no more extinguish than darkness can extinguish light. This is the Christian world, though the novel keeps the links to Christ in the background and understated. But the central message of Christmas is, as John puts it (1:5): “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (Roman imperial domination, another form of darkness. Capitalism has no monopoly on that.) And that light is the light of love. Within this real world – in terms of the novel – there is joy, excess, giving, abundance, pleasure (in a good sense), conviviality, festiveness, compassion, and a transcendence of time in time, so to speak. This real world of warmth and light and the darkness and coldness – in Dante’s Inferno Satan is immobilized in ice – of Scrooge’s world, a false world: this is the metaphysical background of the story.

     These two world versions collide in the first scene. Scrooge is in his counting house office. The weather was winter – the appropriate season for Christmas, for light coming into the darkness. Also “the fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without…the houses opposite were mere phantoms – as other people are to Scrooge. He emits cold and fog himself to all around him; he makes Bob Cratchit work in the cold “in a dismal little cell, a sort of tank.” And into this cold, dismal world (and soul) – a reflection of Christ – the nephew enters with a cheerful “Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” Knowing the whole story, that seems like a prayer that was answered.

    We see the different accounting in the false and real worlds. For Scrooge, his nephew has nothing to be merry about since he is rather poor. Everything is weighed by gain. Christmas is pure waste, a gratuitous pouring out of everything valuable in celebration. The novel will hit this theme hard: in this, it is expressing the essence of the Creation itself. Being itself is just such a gratuitous pouring out in love. If God’s nature were as Scrooge’s, there would have been no Creation, which from Scrooge’s own point of view would have been the more rational choice. “Much good has it [Christmas] ever done you!” It’s like saying to the Creator: “Much good as this Creation ever done you!” Fred, Scrooge’s nephew, tries to state in words the logic of Christmas, which is the logic of Creation itself, of the real world with its different sense of good, its different accounting, that Scrooge has cut himself off from:

There are many things from which I might have derived good by which I have not profited, I dare say, Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas-time, when it has come round – apart from the veneration due its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that [it can’t] – as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it.

    The contest between worlds is about opening hearts – not only to other human beings with whom we share a common humanity (and mortality) but to Being itself – as Creation. The whole story is teeming with festive joy and giving, and there is never a doubt that this is the real world. Christmas is a picture of Creation as it would be without the cold and darkness of sin, of shutting up the heart. Scrooge must be brought to open his heart, and then he will know.

   I will comment on Stave Two tomorrow and pick up on some other themes in Stave One.