Liberation Poetry
He was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew him not.
It’s fitting that the Greek word for “world” here is kosmos:for everything about our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, was and is and ever shall be cosmic. Do I mean that the existence and the meaning of all the far-flung galaxies, and of every least filament of subatomic attraction, of particles so small that to call them particles is to engage in a flight of fancy, is summed up in Christ? Yes, I do mean that.
And more. When, with the Psalmist, we behold the work of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars he set in place, do we see mere matter, extraterrestrial trash, universal mud, or do we touch upon the mysteries of the Creator’s glory? But if God made the world not as a machine but as the fiery and living expression of his will, then it is no stretch to say —in fact, it follows that we should say —that he visits man, too. And how? As the Psalmist never could have expected: he was made flesh and dwelt among us.
And more even than that. All human history, from the dawn of self-conscious Adam to the cinders of a universe consummated in fire, is the drama of Christ’s redemptive work. The master dramatist has shown us all of time compressed into the few days of the Lord’s passion, his death, his harrowing of hell when even his dearest friends saw and heard and knew nothing and thought that all was lost, and his Resurrection, the universal motus terrae, all the material world shuddering in the throes of fear and love.
That isn’t what you’d call Moral Therapeutic Deism. It is the adventure of adventures, the story of all stories, the strand of a ladder hanging between heaven and hell, not to be climbed by man alone, but made into the royal highway by Christ. So the poets of old, when they thought of Easter, did not think of their feelings first —indeed, they hardly thought of their feelings at all. They thought of the cosmic drama.
How fine and just were the notions of the good townsmen of medieval Wakefield, when in their Corpus Christi pageant they portrayed the Harrowing of Hell as happening by the commanding will of Christ, who cries out three times, “Attolite portas, principes, vestras, et elevamini portœ æternales, et introibit rex gloriæ! —Lift up your gates, ye princes, and be upraised, eternal gates, and the King of Glory shall enter in!” And the ghoulish and stupid “ribalds” and the devils try to keep that from happening, but at the third call, your neighbor Jenkyn trips a hidden lever and, to the great delight of the audience and the astonishment of little children, the gates spring open, and Adam and Eve and all the expectant souls come rushing forth in liberty.
Victor & Liberator
The author of our Easter hymn below, Aurora lucis rutilat (possibly by St. Ambrose, d. 397; the version and translation below come from The English Hymnal), wishes to place us at that time, both upon the earth and, as it were, beneath the earth, in what they called the lower regions, the realm of captivity. For Christ came, as St. Paul says, to lead captivity captive, and the gates of hell, bolted fast from the inside and guarded round with demons, as the tomb outside of Jerusalem was beset with Roman sentinels without, but more jealously held by death within, could not prevail against him. The first stanza sets the stage of the conflict:
The day draws on with golden light,
Glad songs go echoing through the height,
The broad earth lifts an answering cheer,
The deep makes moan with wailing fear.
The deep had damned well better make moan:
For lo, he comes, the mighty King,
To take from death his power and sting,
To trample down his gloomy reign
And break the weary prisoner’s chain.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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