4th Day of Christmas: Holy Innocents and St. Anthony of Lerins

 Merry Christmas! The Christmas season is well upon us, and today we see it in all its complexity: we’re still singing carols and chiming bells, while at the same time recoiling from the horror of King Herod’s mass infanticide at Bethlehem, as commemorated in today’s Feast of the Holy Innocents.  Today’s feast reminds us not only of enormities committed against innocent life in our own day, but also that the baby lying in the wooden manger has escaped Herod’s wrath only so that he might die thirty years later on the wooden beams of the cross.

St. Anthony of Lerins

    In past years my 4th Day of Christmas post has been a meditation on the Holy Innocents (here and here, for instance), but this year I’m taking a different approach: as I said in my post on St. Servulus two days before Christmas, lesser observances are often overwhelmed during great celebrations such as Christmas and Easter.  There are, in fact other saints commemorated today, whose memory can be completely buried under the combined weight of the Feast of the Holy Innocents and the ongoing celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord. One of those, St. Anthony of Lerins (also known as St. Anthony the Hermit), will be my main focus today.

   As it happens, St. Anthony would probably be just as happy to be ignored, if his life here on earth is any indication. He born in the year 468 AD at Valeria in the region that the Romans had called Lower Pannonia, but which at this time was controlled by the Huns. He grew up among holy men: he lived for a time with St. Severinus of Noricum after his father died in Anthony’s ninth year; when St. Severinus himself died a few years later, Anthony moved to the household of his uncle Constantius, who was the bishop of Lorsch in what is now Bavaria. When he reached adulthood he became a hermit in the area of Lake Como in northern Italy.  As is often the case with holy hermits, his sanctity attracted a large number of followers. Seeking to recapture a little of the solitude for which he embraced the eremitical life, Anthony moved on from there, eventually settling in Lerins in France, where he spent his final two years on earth . . . and where the would-be recluse became famous throughout the district for sanctity and miracle-working.

    In the story of St. Anthony of Lerins we see a couple of themes that connect him to today’s commemoration of the Holy Innocents, and to the Child in the manger in whose honor we are celebrating this entire liturgical season.  St. Paul tells us in his Second Letter to the Corinthians:

[The Lord] said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. (2 Corinthians 12:9)

"The Adoration of the Shepherds", by Matthias Stomer

We see God’s propensity to work his power through weakness throughout salvation history, most clearly when the infinite Second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Word, manifests himself in this world as a tiny baby lying in a feeding trough in a stable.  We also see it in helplessness of the Holy Innocents slaughtered at Bethlehem, and in the life of a simple man who wanted nothing more than to live a life of holiness with his Lord. Notice on this day when we commemorate the sacrifice of those children, and the sanctity of St. Anthony, that the power of King Herod who brought so much destruction to the little boys of Bethlehem, and of the fearsome Huns under whose rule Anthony was born, has long since disappeared; their names have become little more than bywords for cruelty and violence.

King Herod

    It’s not that the power of the Herods, Huns, and other worldly tyrants has had no lasting effect: it’s just that it doesn’t accomplish what they expect it to.  St. Paul again provides us with the key when he says: “We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28) We see this idea applied in the non-scriptural passage in today’s Office of Readings, a homily by St. Quodvultdeus (his name means “What God wills” in Latin) on the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, in which he addresses King Herod:

Yet your throne is threatened by the source of grace – so small, yet so great – who is lying in the manger. He is using you, all unaware of it, to work out his own purposes freeing souls from captivity to the devil.  He has taken up the sons of the enemy into the ranks of God’s adopted children.

God makes all things work for the good of those who love him, including the evil machinations of wicked men like Herod.  How much more so, then, the good things in the life of a holy man like St. Anthony of Lerins? God gives us his gifts not so much for our own sake, but so that we might use them in the service of others, to help free their souls, as the homilist above puts it, from captivity to the devil. St. Anthony was seeking a quiet life of prayer and contemplation, but God gave him the grace to desire such a life, and the power to perform miracles, so that he might sanctify the people among whom he was living.  Let us all pray for the grace to likewise embrace God’s gifts to us, and to use them for What God Wills.

The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents inspired a number of songs during the Middle Ages, of which only the Coventry Carol is still commonly heard today.  Below is a haunting version of this beautiful song by the Irish vocal group Anúna: