Carols are much weirder than we think

00:00 08:56

Christopher Howse has narrated this article for you to listen to.

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.

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 foetus, 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 recognising 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 18th-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.