According to Matthew they came from the east, looking for a newly born king. Neither Mark nor John say anything about the birth, whereas Luke, who does, mentions only shepherds and angels. Traditionally they have been called wise men, and sometimes magi, a name which refers specifically to an ancient Persian priestly cast, but which has come to be used more generally to mean someone skilled in Oriental astrology and magic, which everywhere were the earliest forms of catalogued human knowledge. Some think they might have been Zoroastrians.
In the Western Christian tradition they were three in number primarily, it seems, because Matthew said that they brought with them three gifts, and for some reason the early Western church thought that wise Eastern men could manage one and only one present each. In the Eastern Christian tradition they were twelve in number, which seems suspiciously like one wise man for each of the days between the date on which the birth was celebrated (25 December) and the date on which their arrival at the scene of the birth was celebrated (6 January). Around three hundred years after they made their famous journey, the church upgraded them from magi to kings, reflecting no doubt a greater willingness among church leaders to defer to power rather than wisdom. Around five hundred years after that, their names were first recorded in the text known as the Excerpta Latina barbari: Balthasar (from Arabia or Ethiopia), Melchior (from Persia), and Gaspar (from India).
The magi have proved a fertile source for poets and painters. A cold coming we had of it / Just the worst time of the year, says TS Eliot, in his imagined reconstruction of an old magi’s reminiscences: … were we led all that way / For birth or death? While Eliot emphasised the harshness and risks of long distance travel, and the ambiguity of meaning associated with the nativity, visual artists have focussed more on the luxury of the magi’s costumes and the goods they carried with them. Of the many Renaissance representations, I like Botticelli’s version (which includes a self-portrait on the far right hand side) and that by Dürer, which allows the Western gaze to feast on Eastern exoticism. (As Barbera Walker has demonstrated, within this tradition, as with many other Renaissance genre paintings, the Black characters never take centre stage.) For two thousand years now, the magi have offered artists an ideal creative opportunity: these were clever fellows from far away, who came to Palestine following, so they claimed, a star: that’s about all Matthew tells us, so the rest can be made up.
Let us assume, for the sake of a good story, that there was indeed a birth and maybe some shepherds too. (I make no claims here about the likely presence of angels). Let us also assume that some (maybe three, maybe twelve, or maybe some other number) eastern scholars came travelling to what is now the West Bank, looking for something or someone: perhaps they were anthropologists, perhaps treasure seekers, or maybe early tourists. It seems plausible that they might have used the story of an astronomical event – a shooting star, an asteroid storm, or similar – as suitable cover for their travels. It is also possible there was a comet in the night sky, which they and everyone else saw, that provoked their trip of exploration, and it is easy to imagine that an unusual event in the heavens might be taken as a sign or signal of an important event with religious significance. I repeat, it is easy to imagine.
One thousand, six hundred and eighty years later (if, rather charitably, we take the church calendar to be accurate) another comet appeared in the night skies during November and December, and all over Europe people watched and wondered. This comet was first noted by the German astronomer Gottfried Kirch (whose name fits perfectly for my story) and was tracked and measured by John Flamsteed, whose detailed observations persuaded Isaac Newton that there really was only one comet – whose trajectory took it past the earth once and then back again a second time – rather than two different comets, as many others argued at the time. Newton later made use of details of the comet’s orbital path in his description of universal gravitational force, published in the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). However, before Newton’s great work went to press, another author had published a lengthy discussion, with the catchy title, Miscellaneous Reflections, Occasioned by the Comet Which Appeared in December 1680: Chiefly Tending to Explode Popular Superstitions, Written to a Doctor of the Sorbonne. This book was published in French in 1682, although neither author nor publisher were mentioned on the title page. It soon became common knowledge that the work has been written by Pierre Bayle.
Bayle had been brought up a Huguenot (a French Protestant), but converted to Catholicism as a young man. Later, he rejoined the Reformed Church and taught at a theological college at Sedan. When this was closed by order of Louis XIV, as part of his persecution of French Protestants, Bayle moved to Rotterdam, in the United Provinces, and lived there for the rest of his life. He taught philosophy and history at a civic academy, and he wrote a number of works that dealt with controversial contemporary topics in theology and philosophy, including a six-million word encyclopaedia, called the Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697). According to Jonathan Israel, the great modern historian of the Enlightenment, Bayle was probably the single most widely read and influential thinker of the early Enlightenment. … Though banned in France and the rest of Catholic Europe, his works were read everywhere and by everyone who claimed any sort of acquaintance with contemporary European intellectual life. (Radical Enlightenment, p. 331).
Although outwardly he remained part of the Reformed Church, many of his contemporaries were suspicious of his writings, which appeared to undermine the teaching of the church by introducing sceptical arguments that elevated reason above faith. Like Descartes and Spinoza before him, Bayle found the United Provinces the safest place in Europe in which to study, teach, and publish: the local church leaders were mostly hostile to the new scientific thinking, but they were less able to coax the political authorities into silencing (by imprisonment or death) those authors who promoted critical philosophy and questioned the cogency of contemporary theology.
The ostensible subject of Bayle’s Miscellaneous Reflections was not what we could learn about gravity by tracing the elliptical route of the comet’s orbit, but rather what ordinary people thought the comet’s appearance might mean for them. Unlike the magi, who believed that the comet they followed was leading them to a new king, church leaders in seventeenth century Europe claimed that comets were portents of impending divine judgement for the sins and faithlessness of the people. The appearance of the comet in 1680 triggered widespread social anxiety about the very visible presence of an ill omen. Bayle argued that treating the comet as a religious sign rather than a natural phenomenon was pure superstition. His rather clever argument went something like this: since the comet can be seen all over the earth, including places where the Christian faith is not known, and since the response of heathen peoples to the comet will be for them to increase their worship and devotion to their own gods, then if God truly sent the comet as a warning sign, then he himself is responsible for an increase in idolatry in the world, which is a great sin. The only way to avoid the conclusion that God is a promoter of idolatry is to accept that comets do not convey moral or religions messages, but are purely natural phenomena. It is not hard to see why some of his contemporaries doubted the sincerity of Bayle’s professions of loyalty to the church.
Later in the text, Bayle moved on to his main subject, namely other superstitious beliefs that he thought should be rejected, including the argument promoted by leaders of both the Catholic and Reformed churches that only devout Christians could be relied upon to lead moral lives, and that the spread of atheism would lead to a breakdown of the moral and social order, due to the inherent wickedness of unbelievers. Citing examples from the ancient world – Theodorus and Epicurus – and from recent history – Lucilio Vanini and Benedict de Spinoza – Bayle argued that there was no reason to think that atheists could not lead virtuous lives, and therefore that a society of atheists would be no worse, and perhaps somewhat better than a society of devout Christians. Central to his argument was the need to consider all the evidence available rather than merely an unrepresentative sample, and to follow the logic of reason rather than rely on tradition. That something has been believed by many people for many years does not give us a reason to think it is true: on the contrary, we should recognise that we often accept ideas that are passed down by tradition simply to relieve ourselves of the burden of examining the evidence, and the hard work of submitting arguments to the scrutiny of reason.
Three hundred and forty-five years later, there are no comets expected this December, but there will be plenty of traditional festive behaviour as people decorate their homes, prepare extensive meals, and sing seasonal songs. Many long journeys will be made, although few by camel, and many presents will be given and received. I suspect that not many people will spend their holidays reading Pierre Bayle, which is a shame because his attack on superstition and his advocacy of reason are as relevant today as they were when his books were first published.
The best news for us all, however, would be the arrival early in the new year of a some magi. Not that we have need of more gifts – conspicuous consumption is no longer a noteworthy event in the Western world – but we would benefit greatly from some new wisdom, most especially concerning how, in the absence of any credible shared religious beliefs, we might construct a society of virtuous atheists. We do not need a comet to remind us how difficult, but equally how important this task is.
Very interesting.