Published December 18, 2024
Year in and year out, the weeks of Advent and Christmas are a time for carols. In our home, they begin the day after Thanksgiving. They continue, more or less constantly, through the Baptism of the Lord. We never tire of them. We’re Christmas addicts. Over the past few years though, one particular carol – “God rest ye merry, gentlemen” – has caused an escalating itch in my Santa suit. Kindly note the comma in the carol’s title. Why the comma, and why place it exactly there in the wording? The carol is God rest ye merry, gentlemen. Not God rest ye, merry gentlemen.
Serious questions arise therefrom. Aren’t we “merry” every December already? The retail industry certainly tells us we are, and if not, how to get there. And what does “merry” even mean? After all, this is the carol that claims to offer us “tidings of comfort and joy.” But doesn’t that smack, just a bit, of fraudulent marketing?
Based on empirical data, those two words – comfort and joy – don’t even belong in the same sentence. We live in the most materially advanced culture in history. Even our poor are well-off by half the world’s standards. Compared to other advanced nations, we’re also still (if too often tepidly) a “religious” people. We have a wide range of liberties and opportunities. Our lives are stuffed with emollients, distractions, mood lifters, painkillers, and comforts unimaginable just a century ago.
And yet at the same time, U.S. rates of loneliness, porn usage, sexually transmitted disease, and suicide, along with gender dysphoria among young people, have all increased. More than 20 percent of American adults now seek some form of mental health assistance each year. A presidential candidate claiming – implausibly – to represent “joy” just got jackhammered. Our public life is a civil war of irreconcilable convictions, and joy is clearly not the mood of the country. In fact, given the evidence, “comfort” seems eminently compatible with frustration, anger, and psychic misery.
In his 1950 essay “Three Riders of the Apocalypse” (collected here), the philosopher and political theorist Aurel Kolnai, a Catholic convert from Judaism, described what he saw as the primary modern forms of totalitarianism: Communism, Nazism. . .and “progressive democracy.” While the differences among the three systems are striking, Kolnai wrote, so are certain similarities.
Each tends to destroy or render irrelevant the transcendent dimension of life. And each tends to cocoon the individual, and society at large, in an all-consuming set of materialist ideas or appetites to the exclusion of everything else. He further argued that the “progressive” element in the triad:
really outstrips the totalitarianism not only of the Nazis but even of the Communists, assimilating as it does (under the deceptive verbal cloak of liberalism and tolerance) the thinking, moods, and wills of everybody to a wholesale standard of the “socialized” mind more organically and perhaps more durably [than its rivals]; eliminating all essential opposition to its own pattern by incomparably milder methods, but so much more effectively and irrevocably.
Put simply, for Kolnai, “progressive” democracy in its purest form ends in Huxley’s Brave New World rather than Orwell’s brutish 1984 – a world full of comforts, but absent any higher purpose to life, and thus empty of hope and joy. The result is a crippled soul, because pleasure is not joy. Contentment is not joy. Material abundance is not joy.
When C.S. Lewis described his own Christian conversion as “surprised by joy” he captured the real nature of the word. Joy is numinous, a taste of the merriment of heaven. It’s an experience of unexpected, transforming beauty and unearned, transcendent meaning. And these, in turn, are the qualities that provide the only true and lasting comfort to the human heart.
This is why the German priest Alfred Delp – beaten, manacled in a prison cell six paces across, and eventually sentenced to hang by a Nazi court – could write in a 1944 Advent meditation (collected here), as the Third Reich collapsed in violence around him:
even in these circumstances. . .every now and then my whole being is flooded with pulsating life, and my heart can scarcely contain the delirious joy in it. Suddenly, without any cause I can perceive, without knowing why or by what right, my spirits soar again and there is not a doubt in my mind that all [God’s] promises hold good. . . .Outwardly nothing is changed. The hopelessness of the situation remains only too obvious; yet one can face it undismayed. One is content to leave everything in God’s hands. And that is the whole point. Happiness in this life is inextricably linked with God. . .only in God are we capable of living fully . . .
I am [now] only concerned with. . .the nearness of God and the divine order which alone can heal one’s mortal ills. It is this – and only this – that can both fit us for happiness and give us the means to be happy. To restore divine order and proclaim God’s presence – these have been my vocation, the task to which my life is dedicated.
So yes, God rest ye merry, gentlemen. And here’s why.
We’ve created a culture of noise and relentless commerce; a “holiday” season that barely mentions Christmas; a culture of endless appetites and material anesthetics for deeper, ineradicable yearnings. . .and then we wonder at our own emptiness. Yet beneath it all, running like a fresh spring, the glad tidings remain. The promise of real joy remains. We simply need to turn our hearts to it.
It’s worth remembering that the O Antiphons have been part of the Roman Church’s Advent liturgy since at least the eighth century. The Antiphon for today, December 18, is “O Adonai”: O Leader of the House of Israel, giver of the Law to Moses on Sinai: come to rescue us with your mighty power! Comfort and joy: We’ll find them where they’ve always been; in the Child born at Christmas.
Francis X. Maier is a Senior Fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Maier’s work focuses on the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life, with special attention to lay formation and action.
