An Anne Rice Christmas

Anne Rice has written about vampires for ten novels now, so readers whose passion for doomed souls remains unrelieved may balk over her recent move to higher things, spiritually speaking. I doubt that their disappointment will last long. Ms. Rice’s latest book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, opens up a new phase in her wildly successful literary career, one into which her large following will be the better for entering.

Christ the Lord is about Jesus of Nazareth at age 7, and most especially about --- can you believe this? --- his inner struggles at that age with a growing awareness that he might be, in the most literal sense possible, God. If the book were merely about religious delusions, there would be no particular reason for praising the chutzpah of its author for writing it. Any literary hack could put together something credible on a theme like this. But on the theme of a really, truly, genuinely divine Christ in the mentation of a child?

Even in the first century, with eye-witnesses there for the asking, only Matthew and Luke took so much as a first pass, and much later at that, at executing a plot-line like this. Paul never gave it a  thought. And it took John only fourteen verses to set up that magnificent eight-word finesse of it altogether: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The second century produced more risk-taking explorations of the God-kid theme than the first century did, most notably in the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas. But all of those ventures quickly crashed and burned, as well they should have. Turning clay sparrows into live ones? Knocking off a disrespectful playmate? Better that Anne Rice had left those screwball vignettes alone and continued to make it all up as she went along.

But it would not be better had Anne Rice avoided the subject of a redemptive, incarnate God altogether. Fiction, of the quality she is more than capable of producing, is just the right venue for airing out a subject like this. It takes narrative imagination far more than it does logic to capture the idea of an identity between the universe’s creator and a man run out of town after his first sermon. God’s advent in Jesus of Nazareth is simply too big an event for either observed data or spun-out dogmas to contain.

Myth is the only way to go here, in Plato’s sense of the word: as stories that are made-up and true at the same time, rendering realities that can only be rendered when we begin thinking and feeling, aspiring and rejoicing “outside the box.” Great myths are not fantasy and falsehood masking as fact. They convey something truer than all three.

First century Christians mythologized their own growing understanding of Jesus by extending the connections they first perceived between Jesus’ resurrection and his divinity to other events in Jesus’ life, from his teachings and wonder-workings backward in time through his baptism to his infancy, birth, and finally to his very conception. The insight underlying all their efforts was that Jesus’ resurrection could attest to his unique status in God’s eyes only if Jesus possessed that very status from the very beginning. As the Gospel writers might have put it, Easter revealed what had been true, but not fully realized to be true, from the time of Jesus’ baptism (Mark), or of the angelic visits to Joseph (Matthew) and Mary (Luke), or from before anything had been created at all. (John)

What first century Christians did not do very well was draw their hearers and readers into the inner struggles of a man whose body and brain could only obscure the divine substance they came to believe had been mixed perfectly with its every cell and molecule, its every neuron and synapse. Jesus’ heroism proved easy enough for them to depict; they had at their disposal a whole literary genre to support their efforts to present him as a hero of all heroes, fearing but facing the kind of opponents that could and did destroy lesser men. But Jesus’ divinity was another kind of story altogether, one they could tell only by finally divesting its bearer of the very humanity that he was divinely chosen to bear. Thus, John eventually began telling of a Jesus who got through life with hardly any struggle at all. Others told of a Jesus who only seemed to suffer at human hands, and who really didn’t.

Happily for us, Anne Rice will have none of this. Happily for her story, her Jesus exhibits a budding identity disorder from a very early age. And happily for him, he had the best Therapist ever to help him with it.