Why are Christmas carols so weird?

Why, my sharp-minded colleague Tom Utley once asked after a Telegraph Christmas Carol service, should anyone think God would abhor the Virgin’s womb? He was talking about the line in “O come, all ye faithful” that goes: “Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.” Wasn’t it a bit weird?

At last I found the answer in a book, Redeemer in the Womb, by the theologian John Saward, which brilliantly explores the unusual subject of what writers in the early Church thought about the months spent by Jesus in the Virgin Mary’s womb. A pagan presumption in the ancient world was that women’s insides were nasty and shameful.

Behind ‘O come, all ye faithful’ lies theological gynecology

To this prejudice, a strand of heterodox thinkers (Gnostic, Manichaean, Docetist or otherwise flesh-hating) added repulsion at the idea of God becoming incarnate in the messy entrails of any human being. Porphyry of Tyre, a third-century Neoplatonist, was disgusted by the idea that “the Divine entered the womb of the Virgin Mary, became a fetus, was born and wrapped in swaddling clothes, full of blood of the membrane, bile and other things.”

By contrast, the good St. Hilary (315-67), after whom the university Hilary term is named, while recognizing popular distaste for things intestinal, is full of praise that God the Son, “the invisible Image of God, did not scorn the shame that marks the beginnings of human life.” Aha! Hence the phrase taken up by the unknown author of “O come, all ye faithful.” (I suspect the author was an eighteenth century layman called John Wade, who literally wrote the Latin original, “Adeste fideles.” In an astonishingly regular and beautiful script, he produced manuscript service books for Catholics in London, used, for example, in embassy chapels where the law left them free to worship.)

Anyway, there is another ancient source for the non-abhorring. The great hymn of praise, the Te Deum, as translated in the Book of Common Prayer, sings:

'Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man,
thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb'

(‘Non horruisti Virginis uterum’ in the fourth century original.)

The point was picked up by that engaging seventeenth century prose writer Lancelot Andrewes, who in a sermon before King James, for Christmas 1614, quoted Hilary’s words on the Virgin’s womb in Latin and English for the bookish king. Christ as “embryo,” says Andrewes, “nostrae contumelias transcurrit, the very contumelies of our nature — transcurrit is too quick a word, He ‘ran’ through them; nay He stayed in them, in this first nine months.” You can hear him saying the words, which read as if taken down in shorthand.

So behind this Christmas supermarket anthem lies theological gynecology. Another carol, usually sung before Christmas (when most carol concerts now take place), looks forward to the second coming of Christ: “Lo! He comes with clouds descending.” It too sounds weird, its weirdness compacted by the catchy tune known as Helmsley, which was said to have been heard by a friend of Charles Wesley, whistled in the street.

“Those who set at naught and sold him,/ Pierced and nailed him to the tree,/ Deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,/ Shall their true Messiah see,” says the carol. The repeated phrase “deeply wailing” makes an impression. This sacred song was popularized by Revd Martin Madan, chaplain from about 1760 of the Lock Hospital at Hyde Park Corner, which combined treatment of venereal disease with the care of reformed prostitutes. In 1780 he published a book in favor of polygamy. Even that jolly carol, “We three kings,” written in New York in 1857, enters a chill world of death in the stanza explaining the magus’s gift
of myrrh:

‘Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom; —
Sorrowing, sighing,
Bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb’

It sounds like Edgar Allan Poe’s version of Christmas morning.

I suppose our mistake is to think carols are a set thing, always as we know them now. “Carols are songs with a religious impulse that are simple, hilarious, popular and modern,” begins the preface to the Oxford Book of Carols, published in 1928. Can the authors really have thought that?

They were Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Dearmer and Martin Shaw. Vaughan Williams valued folk songs; Dearmer had been inventing a Catholic liturgy for the Church of England and Shaw had worked with them both as a composer since their success with The English Hymnal (1906). They were right, though, to point out that when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, in 1843, the carol was on the verge of extinction. Their chosen task was to make the remnants of folk carols fit for singing and to expunge Victorian compositions with “poor tunes and words pitifully jejune.” They never expected “Frosty the Snowman” (1950) or “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” (1952).

But among the Oxford trio’s successes is “The Holly and the Ivy,” which combines secular images of the “rising of the sun and the running of the deer” with metaphors of the sufferings of Christ: “a berry as bright as any blood,” “prickle as sharp as any thorn,” “bark as bitter as any gall.”

For Vaughan Williams and company, carols were not just for Christmas. Classier carol services currently like to include “My Dancing Day,” with its refrain: “Sing O my love, O my love, my love, my love/ This have I done for my true love.” One stanza goes:

‘Then on the cross hanged I was,
Where a spear to my heart did glance;
There issued forth both water and blood,
To call my true love to my dance’

The words echo the ancient Reproaches of Good Friday and must have been present in the mind of Sydney Carter in 1963 when he wrote the hymn “Lord of the Dance.”

Less often sung is a folk carol on Dives the rich man and Lazarus the beggar. When Dives dies he is told: “There is a place provided in hell/ To sit upon a serpent’s knee.” Very Christmassy.