"The Dreaded Infant's Hand"

The title of this post probably doesn’t strike you as the typical title for a Christmas post written by a devout believer. It is a line from John Milton’s poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Milton wrote the poem in the advent season of 1629, when he was just 21 years old. Perhaps more than any text than the Bible it captures for me the essence of what happened on that hallowed night in the hill country of Judea 2,000 years ago.

It is a phenomenally weird poem, as befitting a phenomenally weird event. Milton begins by invoking the “Heav’nly Muse” to offer a verse to the newly born Messiah, imagining the writing of the poem as co-temporal with the physical birth. He then offers a hymn in which he expresses many of the traditional Christmasy themes-- “No War, or Battle’s sound/ Was heard the world around” (53-54); “But peaceful was the night/ Wherein the Prince of light/ His reign of peace upon the earth began” (61-63); the shepherds in the fields are greeted with “such music sweet/ Their hearts and ears did greet/ As never was by mortal finger struck” (93-95). Christ’s eventual death is even prefigured: “The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy/ That on the bitter cross/ Must redeem our loss/ So both himself and us to glorify” (151-154). The world is hushed and calm, the silence only broken by an angelic chorus making such gratifying noise that it almost has the power to make time “run back” (135). Milton presents a beautiful description of the night.

However, the poem takes an odd turn in the nineteenth stanza, a move hinted at in the preceding two stanzas. Through the end of the poem (excluding the final stanza) Milton imagines the mythological gods of history as real and banishes them by the birth of the Son. Apollo is no longer able to “divine” from his “shrine”, Baal  and Dagon are booted from their respective temples, Adonis is wounded, Moloch flees, Osiris has likewise gone missing, the tree nymphs mourn in their “tangled thickets”, even the pagan household gods moan in agony. In other words, while the night is silent in the world of men, the world of the gods is being usurped, “naught but profoundest Hell” to be their abode from now on (218). They feel from “Judah’s Land/ The dreaded Infant’s hand” (221-222). And, finally, “Our babe to show his Godhead true/ Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew” (227-228).  

Needless to say, this is an interesting place for a Christmas poem to end up. Milton would use this convention again in his famous epic, Paradise Lost. In the newly created hell alongside Satan, we find Moloch and other pagan gods. I don’t know that Milton is acknowledging their actual existence or merely using the familiar names for purposes of argumentation, though I recall with unease imagining in my first reading through the Old Testament that Moloch and Baal actually existed-- impotent, of course, compared to God, but nevertheless real. But that is neither here nor there. But he is illustrating a larger point here, a point that I think makes this Nativity ode so powerful: it is not merely in Christ’s death and resurrection that the forces of sin and death were defeated, but the amazing fact of the Incarnation accounts for this victory as well. Without Incarnation there is no salvation. Without God taking our place on the eventual cross, there is no reason to think we can be freed finally from sin and death. Everything wrought on the cross was precipitated and, in a sense, guaranteed by the birth of the Messiah. The birth of the Son was the down payment on the impending overthrow of Satan’s reign on earth. Of course there was more required than the Incarnation, but in that moment an intense battle was being fought (and won). The tiny babe, meek and mild in the swaddling bands, lying in a manger, with tiny pink fingers was a dreaded hand to the powers of darkness in the heavenly realms. They were conquered in that moment, banished. And the reign of God began with an invasion.