Theology in Action: St. Nicholas and the Gift of Christmas1
Timothy Kirchoff 2
There is indeed something strangely endearing about St. Nicholas’s spontaneous and zealous
defense of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and it is gratifying to find so deep in Christian history
someone in whom a compassionate concern for the poor and a profound zeal for doctrinal rectitude meet.
If the floods of memes that I’ve observed on social media in the period from his
feast day to Christmas for the last few years are any indication, Catholics in certain
circles of social media have all but entirely replaced the traditional Santa Claus image of
St. Nicholas of Myra with that of the Fist of Orthodoxy: the jolly old elf is now the
bane of Arius’s nose.
As is typical of the medium, though, the memes themselves function more as
entertainment than evangelization: They don’t come close to doing justice to why
Nicholas should be considered a saint or what
about him is worthy of emulation. There is
This zeal manifested
hardly even a hint that the use of violence by a
itself in magnificently
member of the clergy, particularly in the
generous acts of charity
context of a theological debate, is scandalous
in the original sense of the term—it gives the
impression that a sinful act might be acceptable. Nicholas of Myra is a saint despite, not
because of, his violent outburst.
And yet the same irrepressible enthusiasm that put St. Nicholas in trouble at
Nicaea was also what made him noteworthy in the first place. At Nicaea, this zeal
manifested itself in a less than saintly way, but elsewhere in his life, it manifested itself
in magnificently generous acts of charity: He met Arius with a closed fist, but the poor
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Article published in Ethika Politika, December 23rd, 2015.
A native of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Timothy Kirchoff graduated in 2014 from the University of
Notre Dame. He is currently interning at the Lumen Christi Institute and is a contributing editor with
Ethika Politika.
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with open hand and heart.
Nicholas committed his single most notable act of charity in his youth:
He provided dowries anonymously and out of his own inheritance for three young
women who would otherwise have had no way to support themselves over the long
term other than slavery or prostitution. By providing dowries, Nicholas made it
possible for these young women to avoid the worst indignities of desperation. He had
no desire to scold the young women or their father for their circumstances or for the
terrible choices that they were contemplating. He gave them—without question,
condition, or lecture— a way out of their desperate circumstances, and, when he was
caught and confronted, he explained simply that he wanted the credit to be given to
God.
St. Nicholas’s desire for anonymity had nothing whatsoever to do with deceit or
misdirection: In his mind, concealing his own identity was simply a way of illuminating
the identity of the one truly responsible for that gift, namely, God. St. Nicholas,
doubtless, would say with St. Paul that “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives
in me.” God’s love worked in and through him, and so it was God and not Nicholas
who truly deserved the credit. (Whether he
We encounter the
would similarly attribute his interaction with
clearest image of divine
Arius to divine inspiration is less certain).
charity that reached out
With these points in mind, we can begin
to see what charity in the spirit of St. Nicholas
to humanity
looks like: In the State of Utah’s decision to
simply provide housing to homeless people, in
crisis pregnancy centers that offer women the resources they need to bear and raise
their child, in the circles of Catholics who donate money to pay off the student loan
debt of those entering religious life, and most of all in those who respond generously
and unhesitatingly when they see a neighbor in trouble.
We might also see something of Nicholas in the anonymous gifts of toys to poor
children, but the all-too-clichéd parental game of attributing their children’s presents to
a red-suited man at the North Pole seems to miss the point almost entirely. St. Nicholas
did not try to preserve his anonymity just to see how clever he could be, but to elevate
the recipient without drawing attention to himself. Furthermore, he aimed not simply
to provide the recipients of his gifts with a few hours of relaxation or enjoyment of
earthly pleasures, but with a clear and easy path out of the poverty in which they found
themselves.
Here we encounter the clearest image of divine charity— that divine love that
reached out to humanity with an extravagant gift by which God hoped to rescue us at
last from our poverty, sin, and desperation. This gift, contra Arius, was not a created
being that would therefore be naturally subordinate to God, but was God’s very self.
And so we have arrived back where we started: The Incarnation. It is ultimately
fitting, despite all of the distortions in popular culture, that St. Nicholas should be so
closely associated with Christmas, the liturgical season in which we focus on the
mystery of the Incarnation. And yet the fact that St. Nicholas’s magnificent acts of
charity were inspired by the Incarnation points not only toward the Incarnation, but
also toward the deep connection between theology and action: Theology has the
capacity to radically change the way we see and behave in the world—if we allow it to.
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