Continuing with a reflection on Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

It’s bitterly cold out and foggy – outside and in Scrooge’s soul. It’s Christmas and there are scenes of people making merry and singing – light and warmth in the cold, dark time. There are scenes of wonderful food in the shops contrasted with Scrooge’s “melancholy meal” and the “gruel” he wants to eat before bed.

   Marley had died seven years ago. Why seven? Why not six or eight? Perhaps Dickens is smuggling in the idea of abundance: seven is important in Christian symbolism because of the seven days of Creation. Creation, as the novel invites us to believe, is itself an overflowing excess, completely gratuitous, born of love. Light, warmth, water, earth – being arising in the cold void of nothingness. The number seven plays a role in the story of Jesus feeding the multitude as well. Jesus fed a crowd of 4,000 people with seven loaves of bread and a few fish. Jesus blessed the food, distributed it among the people, and afterward, seven baskets full of leftover fragments were collected. The use of the number seven in the baskets of leftovers invites the idea of divine completeness and abundance. I don’t think Dickens expects readers to unravel this chain of significance, but it is there notwithstanding.

   Why does anything at all exist, and not rather nothing? (associated with Leibniz, revived in philosophy by Heidegger) The very idea of God as God signifies perfection and the absence of any need (deficiency). As such, the very idea of God implies that God is self-contained, in need of nothing external to complete his nature.  Aristotle conceived God – against a metaphysical background it is not important to go into now - as "thought thinking itself", emphasizing divine intellect and self-contemplation. God's contemplation is not directed toward the changing world but is self-contained and eternal; it would lessen God to give one thought to humanity or the world. That would be a good model for Scrooge, constantly about “his own business.” Indeed, the first passage describing Scrooge could almost describe God as Aristotle imagined God: “…self-contained and solitary as an oyster.” Notice the repetition of the word “sole” in the early part of the book to describe Scrooge: “Scrooge was his [Marley’s] sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner.” And Scrooge did not mourn inwardly as the narrator makes clear, and so he was no real friend. He and Marley were alone together, allies, not friends. 

     Scrooge is cold and self-contained, pitiless and calculating because he closed his heart to love – to being, reality, nature, as imagined in the novel – under the pressure of childhood fears. This aspiring to the ideal of self-sufficiently following the laws of nature – cruel laws in Scrooge’s capitalist world – separates the Christian image of life from its classical predecessors from Socrates to the Stoics. The main difference between Scrooge and these ancient proponents of self-sufficiency and reason is that Scrooge lives – in his own mind – in a Hobbesian world of a war of all against all, a Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest, a Schopenhauerian world of atoms striving to be by absorbing other atoms. If that were reality, then Scrooge’s response would be rational and the lovers of Christmas would be the sentimental fools that he imagines them to be.

  But in terms of the novel, reality is not like that.  The Christian God overflows into the Creation, and his essence is love, which is just a kind of giving of the self. God gave of himself in creating the world and so loved the world that he gave himself to it to save it from itself. So Dickens pictures God as abundance, as love expressing itself through abundance and giving.  And this wanting to give oneself away radiates throughout Creation – in images of people going out of themselves to love others or simply wish them well. Even the food is depicted as wanting to give itself away. The descriptions of food throughout suggest this, but especially in Stave Three in the encounter with the Spirit of Christmas Present. This theme of the novel presents itself clearly in the following passage:

  For the people who were shoveling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee, callout out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball – better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest – laughing heartily if it went right, and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were peans and apples clustered in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’ benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water gratis as they passed….

This goes on and on. Dickens is implicitly connecting the self-giving that is the essence of Christmas to the very fabric of Being itself, which like its Creator is made to give itself away. This gives a more precise meaning to the old thought that only God’s love keeps the universe in being. The novel – like Dante’s great poem – contains an entire metaphysical-theological picture of the universe, one more sympathetic to me than Dante’s. Part of this comes from the joy I experienced at Christmas during my childhood.