Article
Belief
Christmas culture
Creed
Wisdom
5 min read

How to have a philosophically happy Christmas

Raise a glass to the invasion of history by the author of history.

Professor Charles Foster is a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a member of the Oxford Law Faculty.

A fish eye lens view of a person standing silhouetted, looking up to a colourful night sky with the Milky Way across it
Greg Rakozy on Unsplash.

A few years ago, I had dinner with a well-known philosopher. Knowing that he is no friend of religion, and curious how he’d respond, I set about mocking the credulity of Christians and parroting the lines I’d so often heard: superstition degrades and obfuscates; let’s act and think like grown-ups, not craven children; we’re free to write our own rules, and we can write better rules than barbarous Levantine goat-herders; we’re brave enough to say that when we die we rot. And so on. The standard fare.  

He looked at me over the top of his glass. ‘Have you never been taught’, he said acidly, ‘that if you destroy the premises of an argument, the argument collapses? The same is true of history.’ 

I’ve slowly learned that he was right.  

‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’, asked John Cleese, as the leader of the People’s Front of Judea. He’s famously answered by his troops. The modern version of the question, which is just as embarrassing, is ‘What have the Christians ever done for us?’  The historian Tom Holland, not (as far as we know) himself a professed Christian, has made a good living by providing a long and meticulously documented list. I’m not going to review it here.  My own personal list would include Chartres Cathedral, Paul’s tectonic notion that there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’ (and hence universal human dignity and suffrage), and Christmas

The Christians say that Christmas is the commemoration of a historical fact: an invasion of history by the author of history; of creation by the creator.  

This is too much for many to swallow.  If that’s true for you, is it dishonest to celebrate Christmas? 

A mathematician friend works on imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by the ‘imaginary unit’, i. i2 = -1, and so i = √-1. Think about it. It’s an impossibility. It’s absurd. Descartes talked about ‘imaginary numbers’ only to laugh at the idea. But they are enormously useful in real life. You are reading this on a phone or computer screen courtesy of imaginary numbers. Sometimes it’s worth suppressing, or at least muting, a contemptuous laugh. Tom Holland’s list, and mine, depend on theological and historical numbers that might (or might not) be imaginary. You don’t have to stop dubbing the numbers ‘imaginary’ – don’t stop having to call them ludicrous – to carry on reading your screen.  

Christmas, for me, is a celebration not only of family, gluttony and intoxication, but of four facts (if the Christians are historically correct) and four principles which are generated by those facts - whether the facts are real or imaginary. The principles work, just as my computer screen does. 

First: human agency is cosmically colossal. The invasion I mentioned above was invited (so preventing it from being rape) by a Palestinian Jewish girl. She could have said ‘No’, and so scuppered the whole project.  

Second: Christmas drafts a completely new account of power. In the Christian story of Easter, all the powers of darkness are disarmed by one broken man dying on a piece of wood between dying criminals. It was a continuation of the story that began at Christmas: the birth, in a shitty stable, to a teenage mother accused of fornication, of a child soon to be a refugee, driven to another country to escape the murderous authorities. It’s all about the subversion of political and military power by the irresistible power of the powerless.  

Third: the universe is surprising. Nobody predicted the invasion. Yes, I know the Christians say, with the confidence given by the retrospectocope, that there were hints in the Hebrew scriptures, but they weren’t seen at the time, and the most learned Jews today, even with the retrospectoscope, still don’t see them. Yes, I know that the ancient world was awash with tales of the impregnation of mortals by gods, and with virgin births (think of Dionysos, Attis, Romulus and Remus and many others). But they didn’t look remotely like this. Those tales were told to prop up conventional claims to power, not explode them. Bethlehem burst onto the blind side of history, injecting unforeseen possibility. The virgin conception smashed pre-conceptions. A new way of being had gestated. If that was possible, what wasn’t?   

Fourth: The most revolutionary thing about Christmas, perhaps, is that it shows that mythos is real – part of the web and weave of reality.  

After dinner at Magdalen College, Oxford, on 20 September 1931, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson walked together along Addison’s Walk, part of Magdalen’s grounds. They were discussing the resurrection of Jesus. Lewis knew all about the ubiquitous tales of dying and rising gods. The Christian resurrection stories were no different, he said. They were poetically resonant, no doubt, but essentially ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.’ 

‘No’, said Tolkien. ‘They are not lies,’ There was a sudden rush of wind in the still night. In Lewis’s rooms the conversation continued into the early hours. The stories were indeed myths, Tolkien contended, but true myths.  

This conversation propelled Lewis finally into Christianity.   

The Christmas story suggests that Tolkien was right (and those notoriously mystical quantum physicists – some of the most adept handlers of imaginary numbers, by the way - are right): there is no robust boundary between history and legend, between physics and metaphysics, between matter and spirit. This, in fact, is our working assumption, whether we’re explicitly religious or not. However icy our reductionism, we think that we matter, that there is more than matter, and that whatever that ‘more’ is, it is heavier and more enduring than matter, and matters more than matter. We love our children far more than reciprocal altruism or kin selection suggests we should. However sturdy our atheism we dab our eyes at the St Matthew Passion and put flowers on our parents’ graves.  

It is reassuring to have a festival which enjoins us to lift our glasses and toast the way we live when we’re being the kind of people we urge our children, our friends and our politicians to be. It commands us to admit mystery to the dining table, and to celebrate being as mysterious as we know we are.  

Christmas, authentically celebrated, is part of the foundation on which rest Chartres cathedral, freedom, suffrage, dignity and many things we innocently and dangerously take for granted. Like it or not, that foundation, as the austere philosopher observed, is the premise of the argument for the civilization that until recently succoured us before we replaced it with – well, with what?  

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Review
Art
Character
Creed
Easter
Suffering
5 min read

Why sculpt the face of Christ?

In Nic Fiddian Green’s work we feel pain, strength, fear and wisdom.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A man looks up a shaft of light that illuminates him and a crucifix higher up a wall.
I Accepted, 2025.
Richard Foster.

The seeds of faith were sown in the life of Nic Fiddian Green by his father. As he has explained recently, he “was shown a way and a faith, and an understanding around the faith of Christianity, in the way my father lived”. 

Later, his wife-to-be, Henrietta Hutley, asked him to help create Stations of the Cross for the Wintershall Estate in Surrey where, today, The Nativity and the Life of Christ are regularly performed. Henrietta’s father, Peter, wrote and brought The Passion of Jesus to Trafalgar Square, while her mother, Anne, had the vision for the Stations of the Cross project after a life-changing visit to Medjugorje. 

Fiddian Green says that “The Face of Christ has been with me for over 40 years” and that he has “searched for His face through my art as part of my spiritual journey, and also in the work of many others – especially Renaissance artists like Giotto, Piero della Francesca and Michelangelo”. 

Fiddian Green, who is internationally celebrated for his monumental equine sculptures, has created a deeply personal and spiritually resonant exhibition entitled The Face of Christ. The exhibition features 20 new sculptures including works in bronze, copper, lead, marble, plaster, and silver, together with a series of drawings. The exhibition ranges from the Nativity to the Resurrection but focuses primarily on the crucifixion.  

The exhibition is deeply personal for Fiddian Green because it is informed by the harrowing encounters he had with an array of life-threatening illnesses a few years ago. These caused an obvious and honest creative re-assessment and it is from these experiences that a stronger, deeper and more contemplative vision has emerged. One that permeates the new work via modes of stillness and reflection.  

The Face of Christ offers a profoundly meditative engagement with the image of Christ, capturing a sense of serenity, resilience, and transcendence in bronze and stone. In these works, he shows us how his spirit and his faith help him triumph over the physical as he explores the enduring power of faith, suffering and redemption. In the eyes of his work, we feel pain, strength, fear, wisdom and more as he asks questions of the viewer that leave a powerful and spiritual resonance. 

Fiddian Green says: “These works are a reflection of my journey of faith. I have come to find that His power to elevate us underpins everything I strive to do and The Face of Christ is an attempt for me to convey in my work all that He conveys in my heart. Christ gives me the key, but will I open the door…?” 

While the exhibition focuses on the crucifixion and the face of the crucified Christ, the expression on Christ’s face is generally one of peace, rather than pain. In part, this is because many of the heads of Christ included are images of Christ resting in death prior to the resurrection. The brokenness that the crucifixion brought is shown in these images through damage to the body of Christ, as opposed to the expressions on his face. This is most powerfully the case with ‘Broken for You’, a bronze crucifixion sculpture where Christ’s torso, as well as being scarred by a long spear-like fissure, has also been fractured with the two parts fused together using brace brackets. Similar fissures appear on other of the crucifixion sculptures but ‘Broken for You’ goes furthest in graphically showing the pain Christ endured on our behalf. 

It seems to me that Fiddian Green could go further in revealing the horrors that Christ endured and that his love of Renaissance art with its focus on beauty and balance might hold him back in this regard. Another artist to have regularly depicted the Crucifixion in images shown in mainstream galleries in recent years is Peter Howson, whose images of the crucifixion are much more expressionist graphically capturing the depth of pain that Christ endured. Fiddian Green’s drawings, more than his sculptures, tap into the sense of pain endured, particularly ‘This Storm will Pass’, a partial image of the face of the crucified Christ which in its frenetic pencil-marks and incomplete state speaks particularly powerfully. 

Fiddian Green, by contrast, primarily gives us a sense of the peace that he receives from Christ on the face of Christ. ‘I Forgive’, a bronze head of the crucified Christ depicts the love with which Christ looks on us as he endures the cross. ‘Christ is Laid to Rest’ is a huge head encircled by a crown of massive spikey thorns with green verdigris overtones suggesting the sweat and blood of anguish which has led to the completion of purpose that Christ finds in death. ‘Peace’, a plaster sculpture of Christ’s head, is also redolent of the supreme achievement of the cross; ‘It is finished’, meaning that all his work is complete and done, enabling him to rest and enabling us to enter rest.  

In these images, Fiddian Green is reading back into the events of the crucifixion the outcomes that it gains for us and showing, in his Christ figures, the peace that he personally finds in the love and forgiveness which overflows from the crucified Christ to each and every human being throughout time and history.  

Fiddian Green writes of having “been given materials to use by the God of heaven and earth” – those materials of the earth that he uses in his sculptures – and says that “it is my hope that some of these pieces may rest and resonate with those who see it; that they may find a deep connection by gazing on the works which takes the eye, the heart and the soul to the One who helped me create them”.  

While Lent, Holy Week and Easter are often times when art is offered to enable us to walk in the footsteps of Christ it is not common for commercial galleries to specifically invite meditation on these events, so don’t miss the opportunity for contemplation that the Sladmore Gallery is providing through this exhibition. 

 

The Face of Christ, 10th April – 2nd May 2025, Sladmore Gallery, London.