"As on a second Christmas Day": Keble, the High Church parson at Epiphany
see how carefully it [the adoration of the Magi] is set down in the Book of God, and how much the Church would have us think of it: keeping the memory of it, as one of the greatest days in the year; appointing the Creed of S. Athanasius to be said, as on a second Christmas Day.
To emphasise the significance of the feast of the Epiphany, Keble points to the Prayer Book provision that the Athanasian Creed be sung or said at Mattins (suggesting too, of course, that this sermon was preached at Mattins). This, he states, emphasises the Christological significance of Epiphany, placing it alongside the celebration of Christmas Day and the other principal feasts.
Keble is here repeating a commonplace point in High Church commentary, that the Athanasian Creed is particularly suited to such high festivals and demonstrates the centrality of these saving events to the Catholick Faith. Mant's 1820 Notes quote Sparrow's 17th century commentary:
The Creed, commonly called the Creed of St. Athanasius, is appointed to be said upon the days named in the rubrck, for these reasons: partly, because those days, many of them, are most proper for this confession of the faith, which of all others is the most express concerning the Trinity, because the matter of them much concerns the manifestation of the Trinity, as Christmas, Epiphany, Easter-day, Ascension-day, Whitsunday, Trinity-Sunday.
Keble is here, once again, being the traditional High Church parson, invoking established (and native) High Church teaching, rejoicing in a uniquely Anglican liturgical practice (the congregational use of the Athanasian Creed on major festivals), and seeing in this practice a valuable means of shaping a parish in the Catholick Faith.
As Keble states, this practice particularly emphasises how the Prayer Book recognises the significance of the Epiphany. Within less than a fortnight after Christmas Day, we again recite the Athanasian Creed, to - as Keble puts it in his sermon - "come to Bethlehem (as it were) a second time":
We understand that all this is done in memory of the Wise men coming to Bethlehem, because that visit of their's was the beginning of our Lord's glorious Epiphany, or Manifestation to the Gentiles: those Wise men being the first persons, not of Jewish birth, who were permitted to see Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh.
This is also suggestive of another significance to the saying of the Athanasian Creed on the "great Feast of Epiphany": it both roots the feast's warm and joyful popular piety - "men must needs be glad and rejoice" - in the dogmatic mystery of the Incarnation, and surrounds that dogma, expressed in the Athanasian Creed, with festive, popular joy. In other words, it delivers warm, popular piety from an empty sentimentalism, while also preventing the affirmations of the Athanasian Creed from descending into empty abstraction, removed from a joyous, native piety.
Keble's phrase, "as on a second Christmas Day", captures both aspects of the Epiphany, festivity and dogmatic truth, popular piety and Athanasian Creed. To confess the deep truths of the Athanasian Creed on Epiphany, yet surrounded by the Christmas greenery and carols which Keble references in his seasonal sermons, is indeed to "come to Bethlehem (as it were) a second time", to behold - as Keble states in a sermon for the Sunday after Christmas Day (Sermon XVII) - "the Manhood, as the Creed says ... taken into God".
(All extracts from Keble's sermons are from Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany by the late Rev. John Keble, 1875.)
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