The proclamation of “The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ from the Roman Martyrology” is one of those lovely prayers that can be chanted or recited during the celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours on Christmas Eve; sometimes you hear it before the beginning of Christmas Mass during the Night. It is a lovely paean to the place of Christ in our universe:
When ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world, when God in the beginning created heaven and earth, and formed man in his own likeness;
when century upon century had passed since the Almighty set his bow in the clouds after the Great Flood, as a sign of covenant and peace;
in the twenty-first century since Abraham, our father in faith, came out of Ur of the Chaldees;
in the thirteenth century since the People of Israel were led by Moses in the Exodus from Egypt;
around the thousandth year since David was anointed King;
in the sixty-fifth week of the prophecy of Daniel;
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad;
in the year seven hundred and fifty-two since the foundation of the City of Rome;
in the forty-second year of the reign of Caesar Octavian Augustus,
the whole world being at peace,
JESUS CHRIST, eternal God and Son of the eternal Father, desiring to consecrate the world by his most loving presence, was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and when nine months had passed since his conception,
was born of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem of Judah,
and was made man:
The Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.
Recorded history
One striking feature of this prayer is the specificity of the years invoked. It reminds us that Jesus is not some mythical figure from a barely-imagined past; he was a real person, born in a specific time and place in our known and recorded history. We can correlate who he was and with whom he interacted, with well-documented, independently-confirmed notable personages and events.
But there’s an interesting history behind the version of the prayer we say today, which is a striking example of how the Church works with questions of faith and science.
As it happens, the numbers of years recited here match current historical reckonings. In the past, slightly different numbers were used. The current version, in fact, dates from just the third edition of the Roman Missal (2011). And that’s where we see how science has had its say.
Consider the opening lines of the proclamation, as it was published in America more than a century ago (Vol. XVI, No. 11, December 23, 1916, p. 256):
In the year from the creation of the world, when in the beginning God created heaven and earth, five thousand, one hundred and ninety-nine;
from the flood, two thousand, nine hundred and fifty-seven;
from the birth of Abraham, two thousand and fifteen....
[From here on, the two versions are rather similar.]
Already questioning
This older translation is straight from the Roman Martyrology as published under Pope Gregory XIII in 1583 … just a year after he used the best astronomy of the day to reform the calendar. It’s remarkable for being one of the few places in Catholic writing that adopts the “biblical” counting of years from the moment of creation. Rather than the modern “ages beyond number,” the older version of the prayer presumes to number those years with precision: “five thousand, one hundred, and ninety-nine.”
Yet even back then there was no unanimity in how old the universe was. The years given in the old version didn’t merely conflict with the dominant philosophical (scientific) idea dating back to at least Aristotle, that the universe was eternal with no beginning at all. They actually conflicted with the chronology of the Vulgate Bible. In the late 19th century, Fr. Prosper Guéranger noted in his influential multi-volume book, The Liturgical Year:
“[O]n this one day alone, and on this single occasion, does the Church adopt the Septuagint Chronology, according to which the Birth of our Saviour took place five thousand years after the creation; whereas the Vulgate version, and the Hebrew text, place only four thousand between the two events.”
In other words, even in 1583 they considered these numbers not as an infallible truth, but as something for which different opinions could be held. Apparently, the Church has never been particularly interested in stating an unambiguous age for Creation.
Evolving Church and science
There is nothing new about the Church accommodating the findings of science. Consider how St. Augustine accommodated one of the findings of astronomers of his day, that the Moon is smaller than the stars. This could have been read as contradicting Genesis 1:16, which calls the Moon one of the “two great lights” of the heavens. But Augustine argued that Genesis describes what the average person sees, not what scientists deduce. To the Earth-bound eye, the Moon is indeed greater than the stars … which, after all, is not something anyone would need Scripture to recognize!
But of course, when people today think of science/Scripture conflicts, they never think of Genesis and the Moon. It's always Genesis and origins, Genesis and evolution. So it’s interesting that in one of the few places where science has clearly informed our liturgy, in the proclamation of “The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ,” the science in question is precisely the science of the origin and evolution of the universe.
A century ago, astronomers didn't think that the universe had an origin, or that it evolved. At that time, we were just beginning to understand the existence of other galaxies. Edwin Hubble was using a distance-measuring technique developed by Henrietta Leavitt at Harvard Observatory to show that the great “nebula” visible in the constellation Andromeda was not an object within our galaxy but rather was a galaxy all its own — and that in general, many other such galaxies existed. (They called them “island universes” back then.) But it was still believed that this immense universe of many galaxies was eternal and essentially static, unchanging — no beginning, no end.
Today, astronomers do not believe that. For many good reasons, our understanding of the universe is tied to the idea of a “Big Bang” that occurred about 14 billion years ago. Of course, even in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant had argued that Newtonian physics pointed to an evolving universe. It was only 100 years ago that Fr. Georges Lemaître developed the theory we call the “Big Bang” from the ideas of Albert Einstein. It took another half century of observations and theoretical refinements before Fr. Lemaître's theory became generally accepted. Likewise, our best evidence today leads us to conclude that the Earth itself is over 4 billion years old. With this new understanding comes our present opening to the Nativity proclamation: “When ages beyond number had run their course from the creation of the world ....”
It's important to realize that our accommodation of present-day science doesn't imply some sort of retreat from Scripture. Rather, it can enhance our understanding of Scripture. After all, even at the time of Augustine, knowing that the stars are bigger than the Moon went hand in hand with finding out that the stars are very far away (such that they look small) and therefore that the universe is very big. This put new meaning to scriptural passages such as “what are humans that you are mindful of them” (Psalm 8:5) and “as high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).
Why God made such a big universe
Our evolving universe actually provides a reason for such size. As the physicist R. H. Dicke once quipped, you have to have carbon to make physicists who can calculate the age of the universe … and so the universe has to be billions of years old, and thus billions of light years in extent, for us to exist.
Why? Because only such great scales of space and time give room for stars to form, following the Big Bang; make carbon in their interiors; then explode into carbon-enriched dust, which eventually can make stars and planets like ours. Before we understood an evolving universe, we could merely marvel that God would choose to make the universe so big and yet be mindful of human beings. Now, there's a logic to that size.
Furthermore, in an evolving universe we also have the impetus to look at how life itself may have evolved. Once we thought life simply came from matter as a matter of course, through “spontaneous generation” (another idea dating to Aristotle). Thus, in an eternal universe, life had always existed. Now we see that life also had to have an origin. It had to come about some time after the formation of the universe (which was too hot at the Big Bang for even atoms to exist), through some manner that we can neither see occurring in nature nor observe in a laboratory. So, even if life is not “spontaneously generated” the way we once thought, nonetheless there must have been some sort of development from inert matter to what we recognize as life ... even if we have a hard time defining exactly where or what that development was. We human beings truly are formed from the earth.
As Catholics, we accept that scriptural revelation was complete with the writing of the New Testament. But our understanding of Scripture still grows over time. And our prayers can at best only reflect our understanding of both Creator and Creation.
Indeed, we read in Scripture of a Creator who so loved this Creation that He sent His Son to be a part of it. And His birth, celebrated every Christmas, was something that occurred at a real place and a real time. It occurred in the same Creation, of the same Creator, that gave each one of us existence — and our own birthdays — as well.
