Christmas and The School of Fools

Why God delayed the Incarnation for centuries

Why did God wait for so many centuries to save mankind through the incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ? And why has He allowed the world to carry on for so long after it? In The Preparation of the Incarnation (1885), Father Henry James Coleridge explains.

The fulness of time

‘When the fulness of the time was come,’ says St. Paul to the Galatians, “God sent His Son.” As Father Coleridge explains, this was ‘the central point of His Providence in the government of the world.’ Everything before the Incarnation prepared for it; everything afterwards is the history of the consequences of it. Its ‘fruitfulness…will never be exhausted.’

The dignity of the coming Deliverer meant that ‘a very long train of heralds and forerunners’ was sent before Him as God waited until ‘the world would be most fit to receive the great mercy of the Incarnation.’ And now, after the Incarnation, ‘the longer the world lasts, the more do we see of the wonders of the Providence of God, of the powers of the grace of our Lord, of the inherent vitality of the Church, of the beauties and the prerogatives of the saints.’

From the beginning of the world

Even before the Incarnation, man was not abandoned. St. John speaks of our Lord, in the Apocalypse, as ‘the Lamb slain from the beginning of the world,’ and Father Coleridge explains that ‘there was from the beginning a provision, far more abundant perhaps than our ordinary thoughts comprehend, for the application to the souls of men of the merits and efficacy of the Precious Blood which was to be shed on the Cross.’

The book of Job shows us how men could live and die in the faith of the future Redemption: ‘We see how they could keep the law of purity, of justice, of mercy, of charity, and keep their hearts ever open to the light of His all-seeing Eye, walking before Him, and so being perfect.’

Learning humility

God also delayed the Incarnation so that man would learn from ‘his humiliation how much need he had of One Who might redeem and deliver him.’ From his experience of ‘unequal conflict with the power of evil,’ man discovered his weakness:

Cruelty, lust, murder, rebellion against parents, unfaithfulness to the conjugal tie, and to the parental and filial duties, theft, deceit, seduction, and unnatural crimes, were placed on the altars of the heathen world…There are many forms of polytheism and heathenism…But there is unity in all this diversity, the unity of the malignant purpose of the evil powers, greater than man, who were concerned in this hideous fabrication of false religions. The unity is the unity of hatred of God, of insane pride and vanity, shown in the desire of getting themselves worshipped in His place, of hatred also to men, of hatred of all that is innocent and good, and virtuous, and gentle, and merciful, of all that can make life noble and happy, of the practice of morality, of the service of God, according to the law of conscience, of the faithful preservation of the original traditions and the original hopes of the race.

In one of the most amazing verses in Scripture, we’re told that it got so bad that God even repented that He had made man on the earth. And yet, Father Coleridge comments, ‘during all those centuries, and since the time of the Incarnation, He has never failed in the daily mercies and bounties of His Providence. Here then is another great and beautiful revelation of the character of God.’

Defeating the devil at his strongest

It’s masculine to defeat your enemy at his strongest. And that’s exactly what God did with the devil. Father Coleridge explains the ‘Our Lord was to find His enemy in possession, as He Himself says, like a strong man armed who keeps his court and castle in peace. He was to overpower him, and take away all his arms in which he trusted, and to distribute his goods.’

Indeed, ‘the more complete the empire which Satan had established, the more overwhelming was his rout and subjugation to be.’ As the Psalmist sings, “Out of the mouth of infants and sucklings thou hast perfected praise, that thou mightest destroy the enemy and the avenger.” Even the weakest, most depraved sinner was able to laugh at the devil due to the power of the Cross.

Benignity vs. majesty

Father Coleridge wisely reminds us that ‘it could have cost God nothing to overthrow His enemies.’ His omnipotence means what Scripture calls a ‘single rough word’ would have sufficed.

So why didn’t God do it that way?

‘It was not by His power alone that the world was to be redeemed, or Satan defeated. God deals with men, as one of the saints has said, rather with the wisdom of His benignity than with the power of His majesty. He never forces the human will, He woos it, and wins it by His grace.’

In a beautiful point, Father Coleridge adds, moreover, that God ‘was not, even in dealing with His enemies, to forget that they were His creatures.’

He allows them the full play and exercise of the powerful and intelligent nature which He had given them, only taking care, as in the typical case of Job, not to let them use all their powers in an unfair conflict with the inferior nature of man, but only just so far as His permission extended in each particular case and no further.

The gathering storm

And this, as the Fathers said, was so ‘that Satan should be defeated by his own weapons turned against himself, that he should be as it were surprised in the heyday of his security, and baffled by his own inconceivable blindness, the inevitable result of his own pride.’

While the Angels in their deep humility could look down on earth and see the gradual advance and growth of the world towards its own redemption, and the gradual maturing of the preparation which God had not only decreed, but promised, and prefigured in a thousand ways, the proud vain conquerors, as they thought themselves, of the despised and hated race of man, were unable to see the gathering storm which was to overthrow their reign.

Of course the demons knew all the prophecies and the promises as well as the angels did. But Father Coleridge says ‘the accomplishment of these predictions stole on them unawares.’ Their pride blinded them to how ‘it consisted in the main in the humiliation of God Himself and in His victory through humiliation.’

The duty of gratitude

The long history of the world before the Incarnation also teaches man the duty of gratitude. According to Father Coleridge, there were three elements in heathensim:

There was a good element which came from God, there was a thoroughly bad element, which came from Satan, and there was a corrupt element, which was a fruit of the workings of unregenerate human nature upon society and upon the objects of sense and intelligence with which man is placed in relation.

The good element, embodied in the achievements of Greece and Rome, ‘might even have been expanded into a perfect system of natural religion and of reasonable virtue, had men been grateful enough to earn larger measures of grace from God.’

But men did not choose to honour God, and ‘on that account it was that they were given up’ due to ingratitude:

‘The simple discharge of this one natural duty would have saved the world from all that misery, and would have of itself gone far to defeat all the malice of Hell.’

Gratitude, at Cicero said, is the parent of all the other virtues.

The pride of life

Instead of gratitude, man chose pride. As Father Coleridge reminds us, paganism is ‘not properly so much a religion, as a system of human life and human society, according to the impulses and unbridled lusts of the natural man.’ And God used history to teach us its results:

In proportion as man became more and more the master of the world, as wealth and power and knowledge and experience increased, as civilization (so to call it) and the means of communication advanced, there grew up that great system of cruelty and immorality, of the godless pursuit of pleasure and worldly ends, which we call paganism.

This ‘old state of human degradation,’ as Father Coleridge describes it, ‘is not far from us at any time.’ And that’s because ‘it is in the soil of human nature, when it is left to itself and has forgotten its God.’

Man can’t escape worship

But man does not escape worship by forgetting God. And the Incarnation was delayed to teach man that the alternative to Christianity is not atheism but idolatry.

Children are taught to think of pagan gods, especially in Greek mythology, as poetic creations, symbols of psychological or natural forces, or the heroes of pre-history. But Father Coleridge says we should never forget that, as St. Paul tells us, the gods of the heathen were the devils:

There was more behind these forms of grace and beauty than the imagination of earthly poets. Unless St. Paul is mistaken, unless thousands of Christian martyrs were mistaken, who treated the heathen idols as the forms under which the apostate Angels were adored, the gods of the heathen were Satan and his associates, permitted by the just judgment of God to draw to themselves the adoration which men had denied to Him, and taking care to deify in themselves every shape of human vice and passion, and to exact from their worshippers impure rites and filthy mysteries, that man, made in the image of God, might learn from them to degrade himself even below the level of the beasts of the field.

The vanity of philosophy

Man’s intellect also had to be humbled. God patiently waited until ‘the human mind had exhausted itself in its efforts’ so that ‘it was trained, by the process, to receive the truth for which it had learned to long.’

We find among the philosophers many fine characters, many noble sentiments, many bold guesses, but one thing we do not find, whether in Pythagoras or in Socrates, in Plato or in Aristotle, in the disciples of the Porch or of the Garden or of the Academy. We do not find any answer to the perpetual questionings of the mind and heart about truth, and virtue, and God, and man, the present and the future.

It’s not that metaphysical proofs of God are philosophically weak. The Catholic Church teaches that God’s existence can be known with certainty by natural reason. But philosophical arguments are often psychologically weak due to partly to the weakness of man’s intellect but mainly his pride. There are no rational arguments for atheism. But there are countless irrational ones.

And of course philosophical arguments, even when understood and accepted, don’t save anyone. ‘Which of you by taking thought, can add to his stature by one cubit?’ (Matthew 6:27)

‘Experience keeps a dear school,’ said Benjamin Franklin, ‘but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.’

The training of humanity

Ancient philosophy, then, offered little ‘direct relief of the mental distress caused by the unsatisfied cravings for truth of the human soul.’ Yet Greece had a Providential part to play:

Greece could not satisfy the questionings of the human intelligence, but it was her office to train that intelligence, to discipline thought, to register the laws of reasoning, to lay the foundations of solid philosophy, to perfect language and style, and to raise the most imperishable monuments of the achievements of the human intelligence in poetry, in history, in art, in all that makes life intellectually beautiful and cultivated and noble.

And although the armies of Rome made the world ‘one united whole in polity and government', thus securing ‘one of the most essential requisites for the spread of the Gospel,’ it was the conquests of Alexander and the Greek Empire founded on them that spread the culture that first unlocked Sacred Scripture across the world and the Pax Romana possible.

As Father Coleridge puts it, ‘Greece prepared men to listen to St. Paul; Rome trained them to live under the rule of St. Peter.’

We know all things but truth

Having read Father Coleridge, we can now appreciate ‘The Wise Men’ by G. K. Chesterton:

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all the labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but truth.

We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And serve the made gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly ... it has hailed and snowed...
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun
(... We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone...)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where trick of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly, humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain.
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.

I am grateful to S. D. Wright for taking the time to distribute Father Coleridge’s work here on Substack. That’s where I first discovered it, and I recommend that you subscribe to the project: