Unto us a Child is Born

During the past thirty years, a scholarly revolution has radically shifted mainstream perspectives on the first thousand years of Christianity. It is no longer defensible to see it as an exclusively European religion. Instead, scholars have turned to Africa and Asia to discover ancient variants of Christianity whose vast, largely forgotten presence once dwarfed the fragile beginnings of the Catholic Church in Europe (Brown 2021).

This revolution has not yet touched many Christians in the West. To understand it, it may help to take a look at the artworks of the Orthodox Church in Ethiopia, the oldest ‘Christian nation’ after Armenia. Its icons, murals, illustrated books, and processional crosses show an independent African Christianity that has produced a rich cultural tradition.

Its treatments of the Nativity are much older than the images of Christmas that became the norm in Europe during the early seventeenth century.

The church that houses this painting looks inconspicuous from the outside: a modest round building with a thatched roof. But inside, it is painted with fantastic murals. One section shows the birth of Christ. Mary and Joseph are sitting on the floor. She has folded her hands in prayer; her espoused seems to be a little more relaxed and joyful. The newborn lies on the floor between them. He looks like a small adult. His arms are stretched out towards his mother. Below them—for the one-point perspective that came to fruition in Renaissance Europe does not exist here—oxen, donkeys, and shepherds can be seen. On the left is Mary’s kinswoman Elizabeth with her son John the Baptist on her back.

This seemingly simple iconography raises a challenging theological question. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has not accepted the dogma of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) that Jesus Christ has two natures, one divine and one human. Instead, it teaches that Christ could only have one nature, in which the human was merged with the divine: ‘To assert that human and divine were inextricably joined in Christ was to bring God in His full strength down to earth, where He was needed’ (Brown 2021).

Can we find such a belief expressed in this image of Christmas? That is not easy to answer. But the peacefulness and dignity of the newborn, as well as the adoration he receives from his parents, indicate that he is far more than an ordinary human child.

References

Brown, Peter. 2021. ‘The Glories of Aksum’, The New York Review of Books 68.15, available here: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/10/07/the-glories-of-aksum/ [accessed 01/07/2024]

Throughout Christian history, artists have situated the stories of the Bible in their own cultural contexts: landscapes, buildings, clothing, bodies, gestures, and faces were drawn from the world around them. In this way, they brought the sacred story close to home.

It should, therefore, come as no surprise to Europeans when artists from other cultures do the same. But it may unsettle them.

This work was created by Kim Ki-chang, a leading Korean artist of the twentieth century who grew up in a Protestant family. At the age of eight, he contracted typhoid fever and lost his hearing. Thereafter, faith became an indispensable support for him. When civil war broke out between North and South Korea in 1950, after the Japanese occupation, Kim Ki-chang and his wife had to flee to the South. In 1952, amidst extreme hardship and religious tension (he had visions and converted to the Catholic Church), he created a 30-part cycle of drawings on silk depicting the life of Jesus.

Kim Ki-chang did not set the story of Jesus in his immediate present, but in the Chosŏn period (1392–1910), when Korea was an independent kingdom. In doing so, he recalled a time without foreign rule and with a rich cultural tradition.

The Christmas scene is set in a large stable. There is no landscape to be seen. Instead, viewers have the impression of standing in the stable themselves. At the centre lies the newborn child. But, surprisingly, his face is turned away to regard his mother and the star that hangs above her, under the roof.

Luke’s Gospel indicates that Mary is only betrothed (mnēsteuō) to be married. The artist, however, has chosen to depart from that account here, and to encourage us to imagine Mary differently, for she is wearing a mantle-veil—the traditional outfit of married women. To her right, leaning against a post, stands Joseph with folded hands. He is wearing the clothes of a scholar: light blue robe, hat, white socks, and leather shoes.

Seven women (not shepherds or kings) enter from the left, bringing food for the mother—a widespread custom in Korea. In the foreground, a rooster pecks for grain—not a reference to Peter’s later betrayal, for in Korea this bird symbolizes hope and a good beginning. There is, here, no trace of suffering. Rather, this work expresses the longing for a home in a time of terrible homelessness.

References

Ziesak, Anne-Katrin, et al. (eds). 2017. Der Luther Effekt: 500 Jahre Protestantismus in der Welt. 2017, Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin (Berlin: Hirmer)

Certain ideas are so obvious that nobody thinks of them. It then takes an extraordinary person to do what should have been done centuries ago. Paula Rego dared to do what nobody before her (to my knowledge) had tried, that is to show Mary giving birth. Isn’t this what the Holy Night is all about? A young woman giving birth to a child (and God truly taking on flesh in him).

All the pious and beautiful Christian images that preceded this one showed the moments after the birth, when the child is freshly swaddled in the manger or being given his first bath. There are—influenced by some ancient theological traditions—usually no traces of the labour pains, fear, blood, or sweat of God’s carnal coming into the world.

This unique painting is situated in the palace of the Portuguese president in Belém, just outside Lisbon. In 2002, Paula Rego was commissioned by the then President, Jorge Sampaio, to paint a cycle on the life of Mary for the chapel in his residence. In just three months, Rego created eight pastel paintings. She was 67 years old at the time and her oeuvre had finally found the recognition that it had been denied during the Salazar dictatorship.

Something of the force of female pain and self-assertion is also evident in her other paintings of the Virgin Mary. They are not intended to be provocative, but rather confidently assert a female perspective on the sacred story.

Her Christmas painting shows Mary giving birth: her eyes closed, her outstretched hands holding her bulging belly, her bare legs spread wide and firmly on the ground, her dress pulled far up, she is in the last throes of labour. Two oxen watch her calmly. In this crucial moment, she is held by her androgynous guardian angel. This looks like a Pietà. But here it is Mary who experiences succour—not in death, but in childbirth.

References

Claussen, Johann Hinrich. 2024. Gottes Bilder: Eine Geschichte der christlichen Kunst (C.H. Beck: Munich)