Epiphany and the Modern World
Lessons from the Magi—and tracking the new star rising in the east.
No skill is more important today than the ability to read the signs of the times. The biblical Magi were experts at it. It led them not to the simulation, but to the incarnation.
Magi is a strange word. It comes from the Greek magoi in Matthew’s gospel, which the English words magic, magical, and magician are all derived. In English translations of scripture, starting with Tyndale’s ‘New Testament’ in 1526, it is often rendered as “wise men.” Not helpful.
Later tradition took even greater liberties: magi had become “three kings” within a few centuries, drawing on even more ancient scripture passages like Isaiah 60:3 (“Arise, shine, for your light has come…Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…All from Sheba will come, bearing gold and incense…”).
Let’s dwell in the depths of the original Greek (which is polyvalent and polysemous) and not try to reduce it to something more familiar: let’s just refer to them as magi. That is what I will do for the remainder of this essay.
As we’ll see shortly, Magi are the kind of people almost entirely missing from our world today.
Dramatis personae
The story of the Magi is much stranger than we perhaps think. Many of us are overfamiliar with it from the hundreds of nativity scenes that we’ve seen throughout our lives. We have a vague idea of what the story is about. It needs to be defamiliarized, so that its mysteries can be fully appreciated.
There are four major players in the story of the Magi: the magi, the star, King Herod, and the Christ child.
The Magi: The Magi were most likely from a Persian priestly caste within Zoroastrianism, known for their roles as astrologers, interpreters of dreams, and advisors skilled in both esoteric and natural sciences. In some sense, they represented the nexus of reason, religion, and innovation in their day—the intersection of what I have called Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley (the “three city problem” of modern life).
Most importantly, they were gentiles. The Epiphany of the Christ to the magi represents the revelation of the savior to “the whole world”; when they realize they are being manipulated by Herod, they leave Bethlehem and return to their own country “by another way”, carrying the revelation they have witnessed to Persia and beyond. The Magi, in some sense, stand in for all of us.
To what lengths would we go to follow the signs, to encounter the mystery that lies at the end of the pursuit? The mystery that is the pursuit?
It is for good reason that the Magi have captured our imaginations for two thousand years. I’ve seen a depiction of the Magi in the Catacombs of Priscilla outside of Rome, where in the Capella Greca there appears a clear depiction of the Magi that date back to the third century A.D. And in the Italian town of Ravenna, which I’ve also had the opportunity to visit (I am a bit obsessed with the Magi), there is a sixth century mosaic in which the Magi appear with names for the first time—Balthassar, Melchoir, and Gaspar. They are also described as Sanctus, or holy.1
Herod: Herod, known as “Herod the Great”, was appointed King of Judea by the Roman Senate in 37 BCE and rules all the way until his death in 4 BCE. He governed Judea under the authority of the Roman Empire. When he hears the the Magi have come from the east, he summons them secretly to try to ascertain knowledge from them about where this newborn “king of the Jews” that he has heard about might be. But Herod is a treacherous king. He pretends to be interested in finding out from the Magi where the child is by feigning interest in worshipping the new Messiah, asking the Magi to report back to him. His true intention was to eliminate a potential rival. Herod is duplicitous to the core. Herod represents the powers of this world that actively prevent us from following the signs, or which hijack and subvert our pursuit of those signs to their own ends.
The Christ Child: The mystery of the incarnation is the central mystery of the Christian faith, and nowhere does this become more apparent than in the infancy narrative: the mystery of God becomes present in a child with a beating heart, who has chosen to enter human history not in power but in the humility of a child who is reliant on his parents for care and protection. For an in-depth exploration of the infancy narratives, you can do no better than Pope Benedict’s book Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives—I always read at least some of this book every Advent season. While the infant Jesus is obviously central to the story, I am not going to focus on him in this post because I want to highlight some particular dynamics at play with the Magi, since they are the type—themselves a sign—of a new kind of spirit that we should like to cultivate.
The Star: The star is the focal point of the story. Yes, the infant Jesus is the most important person in the story and in world history, but the star is the protagonist of the action. The star is why the Magi leave the comfort of home in the first place. The Magi tell Herod: “We saw his star at its rising and have come to honor him” (Matt 2:2). The star is totally central to the story because it acts as the mediator between the Magi and Christ. It appears as a mystagogical sign—a sign that leads a person deeper into a mystery.
Nearly all the apocryphal gospels (those that didn’t make it into the canon of the bible) which recount the story of the Magi visiting from the East place even far more emphasis on the star than Matthew does in his gospel. In the Protevangelium of James, Herod doesn’t ask when the “star” had appeared in the sky, he asks the Magi what sign (semeion) they had seen to make them go out of their own country and make such a long journey. In the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, “an enormous star shone from evening until morning” (Ps.-Mt. 13.30) and we are told that it took the Magi over two years to follow it from their home to Bethlehem.
In the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, the star is associated with a divine messenger, or an angel—it has a living quality which the Magi can interact with. It stops when they stop, for example. It is certainly not a normal celestial body.
Lastly, in the apocryphal Revelation of the Magi, the star is more important than ever: it narrates the story of the Magi in the first-person, in their own voices, and we get much more detailed information. The star has been a central character in history since the earliest pages of Genesis, we learn: it is a secret sign (this is a gnostic gospel, after all) that those who know should be on the lookout for. “Adam instructed Seth his son about…the light of the star and its glory, because he [saw] it in the Garden of Eden when it descended and came to rest over the Tree of Life” (Rev. Magi 6.2).2 But the star is not merely a ‘sign’ in the Revelation of the Magi; the star, we come to realize, is Christ himself, leading the Magi to the mystery of the incarnation. It guides the Magi to Bethlehem and leads them directly into the “Cave of Treasures” where they find that the star has taken the form of a tiny human.
My sense is that the idea of the star, the idea of signs in general, will only continue to grow in importance as we talk more and more about becoming an interplanetary species.
The Signs of Our Times
Let’s take Matthew’s Gospel at its word and assume that the star was, in fact, a star. (And not a drone flying over the state of New Jersey, or anything else—without getting into the weeds in physics, or astronomy, it was clearly a very special astronomical phenomenon.) To the Magi, the significance of the star was unmistakable: they knew they had to follow it.
The star is a sign that leads to an encounter with the divine. Our modern world is full of so many signs that nobody seems to know what to pay attention to anymore, which also means that our world is devoid of signs. If everything is significant, then nothing is truly significant. Our attention is limited. Knowing what to pay attention to is perhaps the greatest skill that one can develop in our century.
Having just finished writing the introduction to Eric McLuhan’s important book, The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and The Soul: An Odyssey, the thing I can’t stop thinking about is how scrambled our society’s senses are—to the point where signs are no longer legible to us, and we have no idea what or who is pointing to what or who. It’s dog whistled all the way down; sub-group upon sub-group ‘codes’ various messages to reach an intended audience. But where are those transcendent signs, leading out of the shadows? And would we even know how to see them?
We are flooded with signs that prompt us to engage with this and that, signs which are often self-referential and circular. All of the signs are what I call in my book Wanting 'freshmanistan’—they are like the signs that kids in a classroom of freshman use to differentiate themselves, and not to point to something greater than the tiny world their lives are circumscribed in. Signs that signal status within the confines of the group are more important than signs that point away from it.
Questions we should be asking:
Who are the Magi in today’s world?
What are the signs that we should be paying attention to? And how do we train our sensory perception to be able to recognize those signs in the first place? Modern education isn’t training us to be able to ‘see’ like the Magi.
How can we cultivate the reverence of the Magi?
Reverence is the beginning of wisdom in that it helps us to attend to reality honestly, with an openness and humility. It acknowledges things as they really are, independent of one’s subjective desires or preferences. It is the opposite of pride, self-assertion, or possessiveness. It entails a readiness to perceive and respond to the inherent worth of persons, objects, and truths. The Magi displayed tremendous reverence for the star, following it across many hundreds of miles to the birthplace of Christ; and when they got there, they had the disposition of reverence before him, “paying him homage”, and presenting the gifts they had brought.
I can’t help but think of people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk—the latter two, by the way, obsessed by space, by astronomy, like the Magi of old—and how lacking in reverence they appear. If anything, they strike me as highly irreverent. It is extremely hard to imagine them kneeling down before an infant and acknowledging that he is more important, indeed even more powerful, than they are.
I rarely make predictions here, but my long-term macro strategy is that there will continue to be a three-fold movement out of three core existing institutions and to a new (metaphorical, but maybe even physical) place that we have not yet discovered. I think this presents some grave dangers, but also opportunities.
Out of Athens: intellectual life is moving outside of traditional academic institutions, for better or worse, and into an incredibly information-rich world where podcasts and self-published books are abundant and fewer people are willing to pay an extremely high price tag for an old credential that quickly becomes out of date.
Out of Jerusalem: Many are seeking spiritual nourishment outside of the institutional Church, especially those who have never before been religious or open to the idea of religion. This has been the appeal of a figure like Jordan Peterson over the past decade: he is like a safe harbor for the exploration of spiritual things, a bridge between Athens (intellectual life) and Jerusalem (the Church), which has been sorely needed because the Church—with the exception of a few people like Bishop Barron—has watered things down. There needs to be some connective tissue between the Church and the world. There needs to be a vestibule. As the hierarchal Church loses influence, that influence is going to be distributed throughout the world in ways that few people understand and it’s going to be more important than ever that people are equipped to be able to read the ‘signs’, lest they be deceived.
Out of Silicon Valley: The third part of the movement—the one that I think is tremendously positive—is the coming movement of innovation out of Silicon Valley. This movement will be fueled by a more distributed network of power, ambition, and capital, but also by a broadened understanding about what innovation is. It will move beyond traditional tech. I hope this happens at a geographical level (Steve Case has been trying to do this for years with his “Rise of the Rest” movement)—but I hope it happens more fundamentally at the level of culture. To be truly innovative, we need a culture of innovation that is ordered to the highest aspiration of the human heart. That is never going to happen within the confines of 1 Hacker Way (Facebook HQ). But it can happen if the right people are willing to venture out, as the Magi did, to bow down before a mystery which they recognize is greater than their technology.
Where From Here?
The challenge of our age is not a lack of signs—it is the wisdom to discern the real from the fake, and the courage to follow the real signs wherever they may lead: to an encounter with The Real.
But there is one part of the story of the Magi that is nearly always forgotten or excluded: in most lectionaries, the liturgical reading which tells the story ends with the line: “And after being warned by God in a dream not to return to Herod, the magi left for their own country by another way.”
If we keep reading, though, we learn the alarming truth: “Then, when Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he became very enraged, and sent men and killed all the boys who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had determined from the magi.”
The Magi will forever be linked to infanticide. Those three Magi, filled with reverence to the point of traveling thousands of miles to adore an infant child, are the prototype of the kinds of people we need in the world today. Because the New Magi will have to contend with the continuation of that Culture of Death wrought by Herod. They will have to fight the greatest battle of our time, which is euthanasia and every assault on the sacredness and dignity of human life, made in the image and likeness of God, that the Magi beheld.
That will forever be my litmus test for tech, and my litmus test for entrepreneurs. That is the most important sign about where these things are leading.
The Magi: Who They Were, How They’ve Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate, by Eric Vanden Eykel
Thanks again to Vanden Eykel’s book for this
Enjoyed this entire piece, but the vestibule metaphor was especially delightful.
It’s encouraging to see Jerusalem reenter mainstream discourse via new media. But you’re right that it’s fraught with charlatans.
Euthanasia is indeed a good litmus test to reveal those who would assault human dignity. Another test is willingness to forgive, recognizing that even those who assault human dignity still have their own dignity. Everyone is called, including the Herods of today.
The challenge to awaken to the strangeness of the Magi reminds me of a quote from Josef Pieper’s book The End of Time:
"All the same, an already "concluded" revelation, which has been fashioned into the accepted property of tradition by centuries of theological interpretation and has thereby become, so to speak, historically legitimized, seems to be something less scandalous and aggressive something so little aggressive that it becomes positively needful to "render oneself synchronous" to the fact of the revelation again (as Kierkegaard has put it) by an explicit, almost violent act of reflection and so call to mind the scandalous character of the revelation, its incommensurability with the spheres both of nature and of culture."