The Theophany

On Theophany, I am put in mind of a passage about this loveliest of feasts from Evelyn Waugh's wonderfully funny and deeply moving historical novel, Helena, which he regarded as his greatest work, and was, according to his finest biographer Douglas Lane Patey, the only of his books he cared to have read aloud: 

Yet you came, and were not turned away. You too find room before the manger. Your gifts were not needed, but they were accepted and put carefully by, for they were brought with love. In that new order of charity that had just come to life, there was room for you, too. You were no lower in the eyes of the Holy Family than the ox or the ass.... For His sake who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the Throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.

Thus spoke the richest and most powerful woman in the ancient world, the Dowager Empress Helena, about the Magi and their wealthy if superfluous gifts (in a passage, Patey tells us, which Waugh wrote in the 1950s to offend socialist sentiment in Britain under what he alternately called the "Atlee terror" and the "grey lice" of the Labour government, an "occupying power").

On another note connected to today's feast, I have it on good authority that we will not have to wait too much longer for Nicholas Denysenko's dissertation to appear as a book. For those of you who cannot wait to read it--an understandable feeling and impulse given the superlative quality of his scholarship, as readers of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies surely know--Amazon offers access to UMI's dissertation version: The Blessing of Waters on the Feast of Theophany in the Byzantine Rite: Historical Formation and Theological Implications.


In the meantime, content yourselves with this sublime singing: