The next elections are already scheduled for April this year. Reportedly, both the Gospel of Luke, detailing Christ’s childhood most elaborately, and the Gospel of Matthew, also focusing on this period, are at times far from the truth. From a religious standpoint, this sounds bad: a gospel far from the truth. It only sounds so when we bear in our minds the exceptionally popularized 20th-century notion of truth as something that reflects in some record (e.g., mathematical) the arrangement of things, their interactions, the state of affairs, or the “laws of nature.” There’s no need even to refer to the specificity of a religious perspective; it suffices to notice that in such a world view, we ourselves, our status in the world, the functioning of our mind, consciousness (soul?) can be just another category of facts. Are we able to think about ourselves so consistently?
Since the Enlightenment, the history of culture readily enumerates currents and trends emphasizing a given model of reality. This largely shaped the West and its indisputable cultural success. The troubles that remained (post-Wittgenstein era) with the recognition of the identity of “facts” and “occurring states of affairs” were not resolved by operationalism, structuralism, the flashy Marxist-influenced materialism, nor by clinging to the correspondence theory of truth.
Alongside such worldviews, there coexist entirely different ones, not always explicitly dogmatized (like the religious worldview). Different, in that, besides the facts and between them, there emerges, acts, reveals something that isn’t necessarily a fact. In religious worldviews, this might be a supernatural force, Fate, superstitious fatum; in non-religious worldviews, abstract laws of nature, whose revelation requires an evolutionarily complex construct, such as the human brain.
The Three Kings, three Magi, Wise Men described by Matthew (Mt 2,1-12) are arguably rooted in a very old (dating back to the second millennium BC) tradition from Psalm 72, 10-11, describing the acknowledgment of a new world hierarchy. This so-called Psalm of Solomon describes the kingdom of the Messiah. From today’s perspective, it’s a short, geographically detailed outline of geopolitics conducted by one, absolutely dominant causal force.
Today, we still cannot express in words whether the political, what builds a large-scale order of reality, can be entirely reduced to facts (Realpolitik) or not. Politicians, euphorically declaring values, may seem slightly comical, yet a world without such politicians does not promise to be comical. Do we know values so universal that they can serve as the invariant of any, every human operation? Politics is a sum of more or less efficient operations; they shape the scopes of meanings, concepts we use to describe the world. But what leads, what directs those aspiring to define these operations, to guide them, to encourage participation?
In the oldest reliefs of the Three Magi, or the Adoration of the Magi, as Christian iconography calls this scene, from sarcophagi of the late 3rd and early 4th centuries AD, it’s important to show that the powerful and wise, coming from afar, orient themselves, operate, act according to an overt, absolute, and unattainable order: the order of celestial bodies.
Perhaps asking candidates, politicians, what is, what will be their “Star of Bethlehem” is not so foolish, even in local elections?
In the illustration: on the right, the Adoration of the Magi on the Dogmatic sarcophagus; on the left, on the sarcophagus of Crispina and her sister, both from the first half of the 4th century, Museo Pio Cristiano – Vatican Museums.
