“He sees you when you’re sleeping; He knows when you’re awake.
“He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for Goodness’ sake!”
Bah! Humbug!
I’m sure I’m just a big ol’ Grinch whose heart is two sizes too small.
But I’ve grown increasingly aware of and simultaneously disturbed by our modern and post-modern obsession with Santa Claus. What may be seen on its surface as a harmless little bit of fun has deeper significance to the state of our society.
We don’t do Santa Claus in my house, and I’m not saying you’re a terrible person if you do; but I think there are historical and philosophical implications to the modern conception of Kris Kringle that people should be aware of.
My children are 6, 4, 3, and 0.75. They (with the exception of the 0.75-year old) are all very aware that Santa Claus is not real, but that the cultural icon now in place is derived from the Bishop of Myra—who would have worn a mitre, not a stocking cap. They also know all the reindeer’s names, and sing loudly the words to “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” with great joy and anticipation.
But I think the evolution of Santa Claus mirrors closely the evolution of Western Civilization as a whole—if not the American view of metaphysics and transcendence at the very least.
Yes, St. Nicholas was famous for punching heretics and giving gifts, and his feast, celebrated on December 6, aligns nicely with the liturgical advent season. St. Nicholas became Sinterklass, which became Santa Claus; Christ-mass became Christmas. This much we’re familiar with.
Maybe not-so-familiar is Martin Luther’s idea of the Christkindl (or Christ-child), emphasized as a way to show that the true gifts brought to humanity are not by St. Nicholas as much as they are by the Christ himself. Yet even Christkindl became Chriskindle, then Kris Kringle, which is now as much a part of the Santa lore as any other.
But St. Nicholas, the Roman Catholic Church, and the early Protestant church, would agree that the emphasis was always very much on the grace of God – granting to a sinful species gifts that it did not deserve. Nicholas and Luther were very much cognizant of this and thus emphasized a secrecy in the gift-giving so as not to attract attention toward the human gift giver in their feeble imitations of God’s grace.
Now we have the gifts without the divine grace. The gift-giver is a Jolly Old Elf with absolutely no identification, association, or affiliation with the sovereign God of historic Christianity. And while most adults know that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, most families with small children vehemently insist on his reality.
Since the 19th Century, popular conceptions of Santa Claus have focused less and less on Christian aspects and instead have more and more focused on earthly qualities. This coincides neatly with the West’s acquiescence to Immanuel Kant’s impermeable wall between the phenomenal and noumenal realms, and that we have no business trying to rationalize empirically that which our senses cannot immediately perceive.
Kant’s philosophy – a response to David Hume’s empiricism and critique of causation – spread like wildfire throughout Western Civilization. His impact cannot be underestimated. From Kant came the school of the “higher critics” of Christianity – people like Ferdinand Christian Baur and Freidrich Schleiermacher, influenced by Kantian philosophy, made attempts totally to reorganize Christianity into one that fit in to Kant’s metaphysical postulations.
We can already see the de-Christianization, or even the “de-metaphysicalization”, of St. Nicholas in 1810 – thirty years after Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – in a poem published by the New York Historical Society:
Saint Nicholas [‘Sancte Claus’ in Dutch], good holy man!
Put on the Tabard [a sleeveless jacket], best you can,
Go, clad therewith, to Amsterdam,
From Amsterdam to Hispanje [Spain]
Where apples bright of Oranje [oranges]
And likewise those granate [pomegranates] surnam’d
Roll through the streets, all free unclaim’d.Saint Nicholas, my dear good friend!
To serve you ever was my end,
If you will, now me something give,
I’ll serve you ever while I live.
Of course, perhaps no poem has done more to describe our modern Santa Claus than Clement Clark Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, which introduces the eight reindeer, his manner of dress, his escapades as a sort of human ramoneur, and his flying sleigh. Again, the qualities of St. Nicholas are completely removed from the metaphysical realm. But we are still given an image of a magical elf, from who knows where.
Thomas Nast took care of that several decades later, giving Santa Claus a permanent physical home in the North Pole, removing, finally, any possibility of St. Nicholas’s participation with the physical world from a metaphysical home. Santa Claus was now secularized completely from the noumenal realm, and given a permanent address in the phenomenal realm.
Also coinciding with this evolution of Santa Claus were the very distinctly American philosophies of Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, collectively known as Pragmatism. For the pragmatist, the transcendent or metaphysical was of limited importance – rather, what was important was the results a certain action could bring about. Truth was not a transcendent concept; it was “the cash value of an idea.” In a sense, ultimate Truth, as it had classically been analyzed, was of secondary importance. William James asked, “what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life?”
Influenced in their own way by Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” of knowledge, which asserts that the mind is capable of imputing qualities upon external objects, the pragmatist asserts that ideas can become true; or that truth happens to ideas.
So as the popular concept of Santa Claus grew, society continued to impute truth upon him for Pragmatistic purposes.
By the late 19th century, the interactive nature of a sovereign God was dying. The deists eliminated God’s interaction with the “God as a Watchmaker” assertion; Kant imposed the impossibility of our perceiving divine interaction; Comte and the positivists saw the belief in an interactive god as a juvenile supposition; and Bentham and the Utilitarians believed we could only know God’s will by “observing what is our own pleasure and pronouncing it to be his.”
So, by the time Nietzsche arrived, he could survey Western Civilization and declare that “God is Dead”—forcing him to acknowledge that objective morality could only be described as “A Will to Power.” Universal rules, like those offered by Christianity and Judaism, were manifest immoralities rather than standards of morality, because they deny the Darwinian mankind’s natural will to overpower another.
The pragmatists would not deny the death of God, per se, but did recognize practical utility for society in the belief in transcendent authority. Even Nietzsche recognized the appalling effects a widespread societal recognition that “God is dead” would have, essentially removing all distinction between man and animal.
The pragmatists, on the other hand, saw the “cash value” belief in God could have, recognizing that belief was an integral part of action; ergo, the belief in ultimate Justice, in ultimate Truth, in ultimate Goodness, was an integral part of pursuing societal justice, societal truths, and the social good.
Again, the idea of an omniscient judge was declining – even in the mainline branches of Christianity. A new humanism had emerged that gave the God-believing man the ability to manipulate and obligate God to confer his blessings of salvation, and a way to manipulate other men to comply with the Will of God. The Second Great Awakening had tried to compensate for Kant by emphasizing the emotive proof for God’s interaction rather than any intellectual proof. Preachers used a myriad of tactics to induce emotional responses and emphasized that divine salvation was only possible if the respondent acted first (which is to say, God is dependent first on man’s will in order to exercise His own).
So even for Bible-believing Christians, the gracious gifts of God were more and more dependent on man’s own choice, his own morality, his own Good Works. This reduced the value of Salvation from what was once thought of as a gift-undeserved, into receiving one’s just deserts, or obligating God to respond to and comply with human activity.
So we see in both the Christian and non-Christian worldview, the decline or death of a sovereign God and ultimately no supreme judge of Goodness.
It is no wonder then, that society has continued to impute truth upon Santa Claus that more closely resembles an ultimate arbiter of Goodness and Badness, complete with ministerial agents.
From a Pragmatist’s point of view, there is no Cash Value in moral cacophony. A society that is not morally accountable can have detrimental effects to the value of ideas and ultimately the value of things. Ontological “goodness” has been relegated to antiquated philosophy and existential “goodness”—what is good is what positively affects or fulfills my desires—has taken its place.
This brings us to the moral crisis of the 20th century in which the utility of existential social good was of great emotive and political importance, but stood intellectually and philosophically opposed to the Darwinian standards of natural selection. There is no “arbiter of Goodness or Badness” in a Darwinian worldview – but society still needed an arbiter of morality. For the legal world, legal positivism was the solution to replace Natural Law; for the political world, democratic pluralism was the solution to replace the antiquated notion of an objectively virtuous republic; for the educational world, experience would replaced ideals; for the individual, the primacy of existence overthrew the primacy of essence.
For the child-rearing world, Santa Claus replaced God as the arbiter of Goodness and Badness.
Coots and Gillespie’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” in 1934 introduced both the omniscience of Santa Claus, as well as his moral omnipotence. “He’s making a list, he’s checking it twice; he’s gonna find out who’s naughty and nice.” He alone knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for Goodness’ sake – a “Goodness” that can pragmatically be determined by societal standards and imputed upon children.
Thanks to countless Christmas movies and stories, children from Protestant, Catholic, and non-Christian families alike encourage their children to “believe in Santa” in a way that doesn’t just acknowledge his existence, but that the belief itself is efficacious for receiving his blessings. To believe in Santa Claus is to know objectively how to answer Ezekiel’s question, “How should we then live?” Those who do not believe in Santa do not experience the joy and wonder of his ubiquitous Goodness. Except this man be born again as a child, he cannot see the kingdom of Santa.
Let me be clear – I am not alleging some kind of conspiracy to replace God or Jesus with Santa Claus in the minds of children. What I am suggesting is that if the idea of a sovereign and omniscient arbiter of morality is killed off, civilization will subconsciously build another one in its place, if only for the utility of raising children.
Unlike the Augustinian, Thomistic, and Calvinistic view of this sovereign arbiter, however, the modern arbiter is within the phenomenal realm, is mutable, and can be manipulated and obligated into giving gifts – rather than bestowing gifts upon the undeserved. We should recognize – both theologically and anthropologically – that a “gift” given for Good Works is not a gift at all, but is rather a payment. Grace is diminished, and obligatory, mutually-beneficial contracts are elevated.
In the final analysis, the modern system of Santa Claus resembles modern semi-Pelagian evangelicalism. We do what is good “so that we shall get stuff” – toys, heaven, etc. We do not do what is bad “so that we shall not be punished” – lump of coal, hell, etc. These are both self-indulgent and overtly selfish systems of thought that elevate the personal desire to gain pleasure and prevent pain or loss. And this is the natural state of man – my children need no Jolly Old Elf to teach them how to rationalize their selfishness. They need the grace and mercy of God and of his Christ to know how NOT to be selfish. That is what the Christ-mass is all about.
