Epiphany

Today we celebrated the feast of Epiphany at Notre Dame de Victoires, our local parish. The church and its Marian shrine are quite famous throughout France, and the local congregation is alive and thriving, as evidenced by the packed church for mass this morning, the beautifully sung liturgy, and the crowds who remained afterward to pray.

Epiphany is one of my favorite of the Church's feasts, because, among other things, it is a celebration of the conviction that motivates much of my work in philosophy. The well known story told in Matthew 2: 1-12 of the wise men who follow a star in search of the newborn king of the Jews, along with Romans 1: 19-21, Acts 14: 15-17, and Acts 17: 26-28, are sources for the Christian conviction that unaided natural reason can attain some knowledge of God, however limited, and that the sciences in general, and philosophy in particular, can open and lead one to accept the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Pope Benedict treats this topic very well in the chapter on the magi from the recently published third volume of Jesus of Narareth on the infancy narratives. The story of the wise men, he says, "implies that the cosmos speaks of Christ, even though its language is not yet fully intelligible to man in his present state. The language of creation provides a great many pointers. It gives man an intuition of the Creator. Moreover, it arouses the expectation, indeed the hope, that this God will one day reveal himself. And at the same time it elicits an awareness that man can and should approach him." That's why I'm writing a dissertation on an argument for God's existence.

After mass E and I continued the celebration with a delicious king cake (which is for Epiphany, by the way, not Mardi Gras). King cakes are a big deal here, and there are lots of different kinds. We got a traditionally southern one, made of brioche and candied fruits, which came with a golden crown. And I got the piece with the gold in it!

After lunch we visited the Sainte Chapelle (!), which St. Louis built in the thirteenth century to house the relics of the passion. We aren't sure why, but there was no line today and admission was free. Thank you France! The building is in the high Gothic style and is just amazing. The walls of the upper chapel are literally almost nothing but stained glass windows depicting more than 1,000 scenes from salvation history. Wow wow wow.

On our way home we took a detour through the Jardin de Tuileries, which is full of trees cut into neat squares that further witness to the French thing for tidy gardens. Tomorrow we're supposed to be getting down to work. We'll see how that goes.