Although it is a matter of some dispute why Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25, it surely has something to do with the pagan celebration of the Unconquerable Sun—a festival started by the emperor Aurelian in 274 to honor the Syrian sun god. We know that by the early fourth century there was in Rome a holy day to honor the True Sun of Justice. In the cultural background of Christmas is the winter solstice, the day when darkness begins to give way to light. That the old pagan reverence for the returning sun still lingered in the Roman imagination is clear from an exhortation St. Augustine of Hippo made in one of his Christmas sermons: “So, brothers and sisters, let us keep this day as a festival—not, like the unbelievers, because of the sun up there in the sky, but because of the One who made that sun.”

The customs of Christmas in the West have developed over many centuries. The Christmas crib, an idea generally attributed to Francis of Assisi, dates back to the thirteenth century. The singing of carols goes back at least as far as the fourteenth. The festive use of evergreens and Christmas trees became common in English-speaking countries after Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, brought the custom from his native Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Saint Augustine, who was familiar with none of these later traditions, celebrated Christmas with his community in fifth-century Algeria, presiding over a midnight liturgy in his cathedral. We still possess a number of the sermons he preached on those occasions. He delivered the sermons sitting down while the congregation stood. A scribe, known as a notarius, would take down his words with a stylus, marking a wax tablet in a kind of shorthand. Later transcribed and corrected by the bishop himself, the sermons became part of his personal archive. Copies were made and distributed whenever needed.

A few fundamental themes recur in Augustine’s Christmas sermons. First, he hardly ever failed to note the radical paradox involved in the Incarnation. In a powerful passage at the end of one sermon, he encapsulates this paradox:

Born of his mother, he commended this day to the ages, while born of the Father he created all ages. That birth could have no mother, while this one required no man as father. To sum up: Christ was born both of a Father and of a mother; of a Father as God, of a mother as man; without a mother as God, without a father as man.

In another sermon he sets out this paradox even more succinctly: “The maker of Mary, born of Mary…the maker of the earth, made on earth, the creator of heaven, created under heaven.” Perhaps Augustine’s favorite incarnational paradox was this: Jesus, born a speechless infant, was the Word made flesh.

These Christmas sermons were all redolent of the language and imagery of sacred Scripture. At the end of one, Augustine alludes to the words of the prophet Isaiah about the donkey knowing its manger. “Don’t be ashamed of being the Lord’s donkey,” he tells his listeners. “You will be carrying Christ. You won’t go astray walking along the way; the Way is sitting on you.” He makes a slightly different use of the same conceit in another sermon: “Let us approach the manger, eat the fodder, carry the Lord who directs us so that under his guidance we may come to the heavenly Jerusalem.” Augustine loved animal imagery. In one of his sermons on the Psalms, he says that a camel is a symbol of Christ because the camel kneels down to accept a rider, then arises to carry the rider along, just as Christ humbled himself, becoming human, in order to lift us up in grace.

Augustine never fails to underscore the joy of Christmas, a joy available to everyone. As he says at the end of one sermon, the just can rejoice at the birth of the Justifier, the sick and weak at the birth of the Healer, while captives can rejoice at the arrival of the one who liberates and redeems. Augustine concludes: “Rejoice, all Christians; it is the birthday of the Lord.”

The feast of Christmas must have struck Augustine especially deeply because of his own past. Having fallen prey to Manichaeism, he struggled to overcome a suspicion of the flesh—a suspicion, that is, of incarnation. He had to learn that the God revealed in Christ was not some distant First Cause but the God of revelation, a person both transcendent and closer to us than we are to ourselves. Just as important, this bishop was the father to a son, and there no doubt lingered in his imagination the wonder of a child’s birth.

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