Fra Angelico

“THERE is surely something inexpressibly touching in this presence of the inferior animals at the nativity of the Incarnate Creator. In the Incarnation God has been pleased to go to what look like the uttermost limits of His divine condescension. He has assumed a material, although a rational, nature; and, according to our understanding, it would not have been seemly that He should have assumed an irrational nature. Nevertheless He is not unmindful of the inferior creatures. Their instincts are in some sort a communion with Him, often apparently of a more direct character than reason itself, and bordering on what would commonly be called the supernatural.

“At times there is something startling in the seeming proximity of the animal kingdom to God. Moreover all the inferior animals, with their families, shapes, colours, cries, manners, and peculiarities, represent ideas in the divine mind, and are partial disclosures of the beauty of God, like the foliage of trees, the gleaming of metals, the play of light in the clouds, the multifarious odours of wood and field, and the manifold sound of waters. It was then, if we may use such an expression, a propriety of divine art, that the inferior creatures should be represented in the picture of their Maker’s temporal nativity. While the sheep lay on the starlit slopes outside, the ox and the ass stood sentinels, full of patient significance and dumb expression, at His manger. The herds of cattle, which were collected within the walls of Ninive, were one of God’s reasons for sparing the repentant city. The wild beasts in the wilderness were His companions during His mysterious Lent ; and, as all beasts are symbols of something beautiful and wise in God, so has He many times vouchsafed in His revealed word to make them the symbolical language, by which He has conveyed hidden truths to men. They were not without their meaning in the scene of the Nativity. They remind us that the Babo of Bethlehem was the Creator. Their presence is another of His condescensions. He is not only rejected of men, but He trespasses, so to speak, on the hospitality of beasts. He shares their home, and they are well content. They welcome Him with unobtrusive submission, and do what little they can to temper with their warm breath the rigour of the winter night. H they make no show of reception, at least they deny Him not the room He asks on His own earth. They make way for Him, and there was more worship even in that than Bethlehem would give Him.”

— Fr. Frederick Faber, Bethlehem

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