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| "Light of the World" by William Holman Hunt, Keble College, Oxford |
How often do we pay attention to what
words could mean? Most of us go for the most obvious or first definition that
comes to our minds. The English language has such linguistic richness to it,
yet sometimes we miss that richness. I've been digging into George Herbert's
poem "Christmas," and, in reading it for the hundredth time, I
suddenly thought about one of the words: "contracted." I'll quote the
stanza, the closing sestet (6 lines) of the sonnet that forms part one of
"Christmas":
O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted
light,
Wrapt in night's
mantle, stole into a manger ;
Since my dark
soul and brutish is thy right,
To Man of all beasts be not
thou a stranger :
Furnish and deck
my soul, that thou mayst have
A better
lodging, than a rack, or grave.*
I've always read the word
“contracted” (first line above) in its meaning of "condensed": God's
great glory shrunken to fit into human form in the Incarnation. His
"glorious ... "light" drawn into the flesh, blood, & mind of
a smaller, lesser being.
But in what other potential ways
could the light of God be "contracted"? Why had I never seen the
word "contract" contained within "contracted"? So obvious! Time
to turn to the Oxford English Dictionary.
For those not familiar with it, the OED is extremely helpful in that it not
only gives definitions the word has had over time, but it supplies examples of
historical usage of the word. This way I can check to see what meanings the
word would have had during Herbert's time of the late sixteenth & early
seventeenth centuries, but also examples of how it was used.
So, the word "contracted"
in Herbert's time indeed had the meaning of "agreed upon by
contract." Now this opens up a new meaning to Herbert's sestet about the
Incarnation. Contract: or how about a more familiar word for us: covenant. The
New Covenant is an unconditional covenant between God and man that Christ came
to fulfill and that he instituted at the Last Supper.
Let me go even further with the
now-obsolete definition of "contracted": "agreed upon."
What about the Triune God having agreed amongst the 3 persons to establish this
new contract to replace the old? (See Herbert's poem "Redemption"
for his metaphor of this replacement of old with new.) What about Jesus Christ
having agreed to fulfill the New Covenant, not just before the foundation of the
world (1 Peter 1:20), but in the Garden of Gethsemene on the eve before: "not
my will, but Thine be done" (Matt. 26:39)? I love how Milton's Paradise Lost pictures the Son's
agreement in the salvation plan. In Book 3, the Son of God stands up before all
Heaven and offers himself as the substitute for mankind: “Me for him, life for
life / I offer. On Me let thine anger fall” (3.236-7).
So we have “contracted” as
“condensed” (also “shrunken” or “narrowed”) and as “agreed upon by contract,” but
we're not done with definitions. Another definition of the adjective
"contracted" used in Herbert's time is "betrothed," a
theologically rich idea. Christ the Bridegroom is betrothed to his Bride, the
Church. The Incarnation of the Son of God anticipated, set into motion by
instituting the Church, the ultimate happily-ever-after wedding between the
Lamb and his righteous Bride (Revelation 19:7-8). Reflecting on the holiness of
Christ and his great sacrifice in both putting aside his divine glory to take
on human flesh and bearing the weight of our sins upon the cross, the speaker
in “Christmas” feels keenly his own unworthiness: his “dark” and “brutish” soul
(line 3 above). Therefore, he asks that his soul be redecorated by the Lord to
be a fit place of habitation for God’s glorious light.
* You can find Herbert’s poem
“Christmas” on Luminarium’s Herbert page: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herbert/christmas.htm
Lovely observations, Jennifer.
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