Savio
Saldanha SJ
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18050444
25-12-2025
Growing
up in India, Christmas was never experienced as a festival enclosed within
Christian boundaries. It was a shared cultural and spiritual event—warm,
vibrant, and unmistakably multicultural. Our home became a place of
encounter: neighbours and friends of every faith—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and
Christians—came to admire the Nativity crib and the decorated Christmas tree.
Conversations lingered, sweets were exchanged, and differences were suspended,
if only briefly, in a shared atmosphere of joy.
Long
before I could articulate it theologically, this experience impressed upon me a
simple but profound conviction: Christmas announces a birth meant for all.
Christ is not born into a religious enclave but into a fragile world, for
humanity as such—across caste, creed, status, and belief. Christmas thus
gestures toward a universal human longing for hope, peace, and recognition. A
quote widely attributed to Rabindranath Tagore says
this, “Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of
man.” Indeed the birth of Jesus announces that very hope which is alive in
all Christians and people of goodwill today.
Yet
this intuitive universality also provoked deeper questions. How does this
comforting and inclusive message stand in dialogue with modern philosophical
critiques that challenge faith, morality, and tradition? And how does the
Church today articulate the enduring meaning of Christmas amid skepticism,
crisis, and pluralism?
Philosophical Reflections: Christmas and the Question
of Choice
At
the heart of Christmas lies the mystery of the Incarnation—God freely
choosing vulnerability, finitude, and human history. This theological claim
inevitably raises philosophical questions about freedom, meaning, and
responsibility. Two modern thinkers, standing at opposite poles, illuminate
this tension: Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Sartre’s Paradoxical Affirmation: Christmas as
Existential Choice
It is
one of the great ironies of modern philosophy that Jean-Paul Sartre, an
avowed atheist and architect of existentialism, wrote a play centred on the
Nativity. While imprisoned in a German POW camp in 1940, Sartre composed Bariona,
or the Son of Thunder for his fellow prisoners.
The play’s protagonist, Bariona, is overwhelmed by
despair. Living under Roman oppression, he resolves that his people should
refuse to bring children into a world destined for suffering. Yet his encounter
with the Christ Child disrupts this logic. Bariona ultimately chooses not
despair, but sacrifice—laying down his life so that hope might survive.
For
Sartre, this is not a confession of divine grace but an existential revelation:
human beings are not defined by their situation but by their choices.
Even in a prison camp, even under tyranny, one can choose hope over nihilism.
In this sense, Sartre’s Christmas becomes a drama of freedom and
responsibility.
Strikingly,
this resonates with the Christmas of my childhood. The sharing of joy across
religious lines was not mandated by doctrine; it was a choice — an existential
affirmation that hope could be enacted even amid difference. (But then, it was
a different India that our generation grew up in, where friendship and respect
did not know religious boundaries, where we celebrated all festivals with equal
gusto and reverence. The hatred would be sowed later, slowly and steadily – but
that is a topic for another time.) Sartre’s unexpected Christmas thus affirms,
from outside faith, something Christianity proclaims from within: that meaning
emerges when one freely commits oneself to life and hope.
Nietzsche’s Radical Rejection: Christmas as Moral
Weakness
If
Sartre paradoxically affirms Christmas, Friedrich Nietzsche radically
rejects it. For Nietzsche, Christianity represents a profound distortion of
human flourishing. He famously denounces it as a “slave morality” — a
system that glorifies weakness, humility, and compassion while suppressing
strength, creativity, and vitality. From this perspective, Christmas — the
celebration of a poor, vulnerable child proclaimed as Savior — epitomizes what
Nietzsche sees as life-denying. Rather than affirming the will to power,
Christianity invites reverence for dependence and suffering. The Incarnation
becomes, in Nietzsche’s reading, an obstacle to humanity’s ascent toward the Übermensch,
the self-creating individual beyond conventional morality.
Nietzsche’s
challenge remains unsettling. It forces Christians to ask whether Christmas has
been reduced to sentimental comfort or social convention. Is the celebration an
evasion of responsibility, or does it truly demand transformation? His critique
exposes the risk of celebrating Christmas without conversion — embracing its
warmth while avoiding its cost.
The Catholic Magisterium: The Incarnation as Enduring
Truth
Against
both existential reinterpretation and radical rejection, the Church’s Magisterium
insists that Christmas is not merely symbolic or optional. Its meaning rests on
the historical and salvific reality of the Incarnation.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC
§§457–460) articulates this clearly. The Word became flesh:
·
To
reconcile humanity with God,
restoring communion broken by sin.
·
To
reveal God’s love,
not as abstraction but as embodied self-gift.
·
To
make us partakers of the divine nature, drawing humanity into God’s own life.
Christmas,
therefore, is not simply about moral inspiration or existential courage; it is
about God’s initiative. Salvation begins not with human striving but
with divine descent. Yet this descent does not negate freedom — it summons it.
Recent
papal teaching has consistently drawn out the social and ethical implications
of this mystery. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pope Francis presented
the Christ Child as a “light in the darkness,” insisting that genuine faith
must translate into concrete solidarity. His call for equitable access to
vaccines was not a political aside but a theological claim: if God enters human
vulnerability, then no vulnerability is morally invisible. Across subsequent
Christmas messages, Francis has returned to this theme: the Incarnation grounds
a commitment to peace, care for the poor, and resistance to indifference.
Christmas thus becomes a criterion for judging social arrangements, not merely
a devotional feast.
Pope
Leo XIV in his first Christmas homily (2025) proclaimed that in the birth of
Jesus, the “great light” long sought in the heavens entered human history as a
vulnerable child who revealed God’s saving love and the true dignity of every
person. He insisted that God’s omnipotence appeared in the powerlessness of the
newborn Christ, whose need for care makes every human life—and especially the
poor, children, and strangers—a privileged place of God’s presence. Drawing on
Benedict XVI and Augustine, he contrasted divine humility with human pride and
a distorted economy that treats people as merchandise, arguing that the
Incarnation unmasks such slavery and offers genuine freedom. He thus described
Christmas as a feast of faith (God made man), charity (self-giving love), and
hope (peace announced to the world), sending believers forth, “unafraid of the
night,” to meet the dawn of a new day as messengers of peace.
Hence, I feel that Nietzsche’s thoughts can be strongly
refuted through these Church teachings and Papal addresses which ask Christians
to move against the current tide of consumerism and treating people as ‘commodity’
to treating the vulnerable with respect and dignity. Christianity hence, does
not make people meek but rather inspires countless men and women to love and serve
Jesus in the forgotten sectors of the modern society.
Ignatian Discernment: From Crib to Concrete Decision
Within
the Ignatian tradition, Christmas is not only contemplated; it is
discerned. St. Ignatius invites the faithful, in the Spiritual Exercises,
to imaginatively enter the mystery of the Incarnation — to see, hear, and feel
God’s choice to dwell among the poor and vulnerable. This contemplation is
never an end in itself. It leads to discernment of spirits: learning to
recognize movements that draw one toward faith, hope, and love (consolation),
and those that lead toward self-absorption, fear, or despair (desolation).
When we apply Ignatian discernment to Christmas, it helps us avoid two common
extremes.
The
first is sentimentality. Christmas can easily become only about warm feelings,
decorations, nostalgia and emotion. When this happens, the radical meaning of
the crib is softened. We forget that God chose poverty, vulnerability, rejection
and that the birth of Christ challenges our comfort and calls us to conversion.
The
second temptation is cynicism. From this perspective, the Incarnation is
dismissed as unrealistic, weak, or naïve—a nice story that has little power in
a harsh world. This attitude echoes Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity as
glorifying weakness. Cynicism refuses to believe that humility, mercy, and
self-giving love can truly transform history.
Ignatian
discernment refuses both extremes. Instead of asking only, “How does Christmas
make me feel?” or “Is this story believable?” it asks a deeper question: Where
is God acting now, and how am I being invited to respond? Discernment listens
to the movements of the heart and leads toward concrete choices — greater
compassion, responsibility for the vulnerable, and commitment to justice. In
this way, Christmas becomes not just a memory or a myth, but a living call to
faith in action. In this light, Christmas becomes an existential and spiritual
crossroads. It demands not only belief but decision — how one will live in
response to a God who chooses nearness, poverty and vulnerability.
The Universal Light as Call and Choice
When
viewed through philosophy, theology and discernment, Christmas emerges not as a
comforting myth but as a demanding revelation. Sartre reminds us that
hope must be chosen. Nietzsche warns against hollow celebration without
strength or authenticity. The Church proclaims that God has already chosen
humanity, irrevocably, in the Incarnation.
The
universal joy of my childhood — where neighbours of all faiths gathered at the
crib — now appears not as mere nostalgia, but as a lived intuition of a deeper
truth: the light of Christmas is universal because the vulnerability of God
addresses every human conscience.
This
light does not coerce; it invites. It does not deny freedom; it radicalizes it.
To celebrate Christmas authentically is to allow oneself to be questioned: Will
we choose hope over despair, solidarity over indifference, responsibility over
retreat?
In an age marked by fragmentation and suspicion, the Christmas crib remains a silent but persistent challenge. It asks whether we will allow ourselves to be transformed by a God who enters history without power, without violence, and without exclusion. The universal light of Christmas ultimately confronts us with an existential choice—one that must be renewed each year, not merely remembered.
Conscience at the Crossroads: A Final Synthesis
All
these philosophical and theological threads ultimately converge on the terrain
of conscience, the interior space where freedom, responsibility, and
grace meet. Christmas, when taken seriously, places conscience at a crossroads:
between Sartre’s insistence that meaning is forged through choice, Nietzsche’s
provocation that an immature morality risks becoming evasive comfort, and the
Church’s proclamation that God has already chosen to enter human vulnerability.
The Incarnation does not bypass conscience; it summons it. Faced with the
fragile God of the crib, conscience must decide whether to remain anesthetized
by sentiment, custom, or critique, or to engage in the slow, costly work of
discernment. In an Ignatian key, this crossroads becomes a place of election — where
one freely chooses to align one’s life with the logic of the Incarnation:
solidarity over domination, hope over despair and responsible love over moral
abdication. Christmas thus endures not as a seasonal memory, but as an ongoing
moral summons addressed to every human conscience.
Bibliography
- Catechism of the Catholic Church. §§457–460, 2307–2317.
- Francis. Urbi
et Orbi Christmas Messages (2020, 2024). Vatican City.
- Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises. Especially the
Contemplation on the Incarnation.
- Pope Leo XIV. (2025, December
24). Full text: Pope Leo XIV’s Christmas night homily. Catholic News
Agency. https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/268681/full-text-pope-leo-xiv-s-christmas-night-homily
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. 1887.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883–1885.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul. Bariona, or the Son of Thunder. 1940.
- Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes. Vatican City, 1965.
Merry Christmas Savio... You put a lot of efforts. wonderful
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