www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Christmas = Feast of the Incarnation???

The Annunciation: The Feast of the Incarnation

God the Son, fully and completely God, eternally begotten in the bosom of the Father, became fully and completely man at his conception in the womb of the Virgin Mary. His human life began at fertilization, which in his case was miraculous, because his Virgin Mother was made fruitful, not by male seed, but by the power of the Holy Spirit. That is why it is the Annunciation that is the chief feast of the Incarnation. The Nativity of Our Lord is also a celebration of the Incarnation but in a different sense. The Incarnation was effected in Nazareth and then manifested in Bethlehem. March 25 commemorates the moment of the enfleshing of the Word; December 25 commemorates his birth in the flesh taken nine months earlier. Christmas Day is a feast of "theophany," a celebration, says St. Gregory Nazianzen, of "God manifested to man by birth." He comes forth from his Mother "as a bridegroom out of his chamber or as the sun from his chamber to run his race" (cf. Ps 18:6). In the stable at Bethlehem, Mary can at last hold in her arms and feed at her breast, see with her own eyes, the Child-God who for nine months has been hidden in the hermitage of her womb. In the Byzantine liturgy, the Church sings with the voice of the Theotokos:

"And she, bending over him like a handmaiden, worshipped him and said to him, as he lay in her arms: 'How wast thou sown a seed in me? And how hast thou grown within me, O my Deliverer and my God?'"

On Christmas Day, in the company of Mary and Joseph and the shepherds, the meaning of the Incarnation seizes the mind and heart of the earthly Church: God, the Creator of the universe, has become a tiny baby. As St. Bernard says, the Word was made "infant flesh, young flesh, helpless flesh." But the Church also remembers, especially during the last week of Advent, that, before being a newborn baby, God incarnate was an unborn baby in modern jargon, a fetus, an embryo, a zygote. The first stage of human life that God made his own and thereby divinized was embryonic. The adventure of being human began for the eternal Son at the moment of his conception.

This dogmatic truth is proclaimed in the liturgies of both East and West on March 25. In the Roman Missal of Pope Paul VI, the celebration is a feast of the first rank (a "solemnity") and is described as "the Annunciation of the Lord." During the Creed, at the "Et incarnatus est," the faithful are invited to kneel as a reminder of what the day commemorates. In the Byzantine rite, at Great Compline for "The Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary,"the Church sings these words:

"Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice: for the Son who is coeternal with the Father, having his throne and like him without beginning, in his compassion and merciful love for mankind has submitted himself to emptying (cf. Phil 2:7), according to the good pleasure and the counsel of the Father; and he has gone to dwell in a Virgin's womb that was sanctified beforehand by the Spirit. O marvel! God is come among men; he who cannot be contained is contained in a womb; the Timeless enters time; and strange wonder! His conception is without seed, his emptying is past telling; so great is this mystery! For God empties himself, takes flesh, and is fashioned as a creature, when the angel tells the pure Virgin of her conception: 'Hail, thou who art full of grace; the Lord who has great mercy is with thee.'"

The Schoolmen (following Aristotle) held the view that the rational soul is not infused at the first moment of conception but at a later time, that is, when the embryo has attained a sufficiently advanced state of bodily development.

St. Thomas stood by this theory, not just because it came to him from Aristotle, but because it corresponded to what was observable in nature, and he was convinced that a sound philosophy must be empirically based.