Sárospataki Füzetek 2. (1998)

1998 / 2. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: Star of the Nativity

aroópa tahi füzeteit

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Eliot emphasizes the shock which the incarnation brings to other religions, dismissing ah other gods as alien. The Magi found that their old culture and faith had become alien. Faith in Christ revises our whole outlook on history, on culture, on the world. This was also very much in the perspective of Pasternak when he wrote about Christ as the root of history, the fountain of freedom and a new ethos. But Pasternak ends his poem very differently, speaking of the Magi present at the manger:

The Magi stood in shadow (the byre seemed in twilight):

They spoke in whispers, groping for words.

Suddenly one, in deeper shadow, touched another To move him aside from the manger, a little to the left.

The other turned: like a guest about to enter,

The Star of the Nativity was gazing upon the Maid.

Whereas Eliot’s pom is typically Reformational Protestant, talking about the cultural renewal of the Christian faith, Pasternak’s is more Eastern Orthodox, talking about the mystery of the presence of the divine in the triunity of: Star, Virgin & Child. Pasternak reminds us that we must all come out of the shadows of sin and death to the Light. So Rembrandt painted a nativity scene in which the light does not come from outside but from the face of the holy child in the manger. Ferenci Karoly painted a wonderful scene of the Magi crossing through the shadows of the woods: are they coming out of the dark to the light, or going back, as Eliot said, to the darkness of another dispensation?

In the novel, there are a number of specific references to the incarnation of Christ. One of them, after talking about Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’ feet with her hair and receiving great mercy for her many sins, says: „What familiarity, what equality between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!” (415).

The last poem of the Pasternak series, and the closing words of the novel, reach a great zenith of religious clarity and ideological choice. Christ is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the prayer as well as the novel ends saying:

I shall descend into my grave. And on the third day rise again.

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