Probably the most popular and best-loved Christmas carol in the world is Silent Night. Christmas would now hardly be complete without it. Quite a few years ago, for a reason I don’t quite recall at this stage, I got interested in finding out where this famous carol had come from, and how old it was.
I’d already gathered that its original language was German, from its well-known opening line, “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht”, but apart from that I was none the wiser about it. Thanks to Wikipedia mainly, I discovered that the carol came from Austria, that the words had been written by a young Austrian priest, called Fr Joseph Mohr (1792-1848), and the music composed by a schoolmaster and church organist in the village of Arnsdorf, Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863), with whom Fr Mohr was acquainted.
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The original words of the carol were written by Fr Mohr as a short poem in 1816. In the following year he was sent to the village of Oberndorf, near Salzburg, as an assistant priest, and the year after that, on Christmas Eve 1818, the carol was apparently first sung in the village church, with the words supplied by Fr Mohr and the melody composed by Franz Gruber, but played on a guitar by Fr Mohr.
The two sang the verses alternately. Seemingly, the more usual way of accompanying carols on the organ wasn’t possible because the church had recently suffered flood damage and the organ was unplayable.
Those discoveries were in themselves quite interesting, but what really caught my attention was the date when the words of the carol were written: 1816.
The reason I found the year 1816 so significant was that it was, of course, the year just after the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), which had ravaged and devastated Europe for a good 12 years, before Napoleon was finally defeated and a peace settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna.
In those wars in the early part of the 19th century, untold suffering was inflicted on the peoples of Europe. And it is estimated that somewhere between three and six million people were killed in the conflicts, between military and civilian casualties.
Considering that in 1800 the population of Europe was, it is estimated, only about a quarter of what it is today – and while duly acknowledging that the significance of human deaths cannot be determined quantitively – these figures are still fairly staggering.
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And yet it was in the wake of this terrible slaughter that the young priest, Fr Joseph Mohr, wrote his poem Silent Night, which was to become a world-famous carol. Out of the darkness of those grim years came a testimony to the ultimate triumph of light and peace.
Fr Mohr was born in 1792 and can’t have been unaware of the bleakness and gloom of the Europe he grew up in. But in response to the senseless killing and mayhem unleased by human ambition and self-assertion in the previous 12 years, he didn’t throw up his hands in despair and become nihilistic. He didn’t react with dejection and hopelessness to the sufferings of his times.
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Rather, with a profoundly faith-based proclamation of the goodness, truth and beauty of the Christian message, he invited his parishioners to keep faith with God and, in his remarkably simple and memorable carol, to worship Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Prince of Peace, born for the salvation of the world on the first Christmas.
Reports from the time state that the villagers reacted with delight to the first performance of Silent Night, and it has continued to evoke the same reaction from countless millions of believers, and even non-believers, ever since.
It’s important to note the religious depth embodied in Silent Night. The carol is not an invitation to escape into sentimentality and wishful thinking in the face of the constantly repeated horrors of human history. Nor is it at heart a desperate act of defiance in the face of life’s relentless cruelty, admirable undoubtedly and understandable though that would be.
Reports from the time state that the villagers reacted with delight to the first performance of Silent Night, and it has continued to evoke the same reaction from countless millions of believers, and even non-believers, ever since
Rather, to borrow an idea of Gerd Theissen’s, it expresses a kind of human “creation out of nothing” (a creatio ex nihilo) — an echo on the human level of God’s own unfathomable act of creation. Despite all the risks involved, God allows the world to exist, Christianity teaches, because creation is always embedded in redemption.
Silent Night is a response of faith to the divine light in Christ the Redeemer, which no amount of darkness and distress can ever extinguish. And it continues to be an affirmation of hope in the final triumph of God’s goodness over the evil that seeks constantly to thwart the divine will for the world.
Martin Henry, former lecturer in theology at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, is a priest of the diocese of Down and Connor
