‘Journey of the Magi’ as a passage to spiritual maturity

By Lynn Ockersz

Easily one of the greatest poems in the English language, renowned modern poet T. S. Eliot’s, ‘Journey of the Magi’, defies easy interpretation. On the face of it, the poem focuses on the arduous journey ‘The Three Wise Men’ of the East, or the Three Kings of Christian legend, made to a stable in Bethlehem on camel-back, on the night of the birth of Jesus Christ, to revere the latter.

Viewed from this perspective, the first stanza of the poem provides interesting reading since it outlines in considerable, graphic detail, the journey of the Kings to the birth place of Christ. In fact, this first stanza reads like a very brief adventure story. For example, the Kings narrate to us thus:

‘The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.’

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow…

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women…

However, on closely scrutinizing even this first stanza one finds that there is very much more to this poem than an engrossing adventure story. For instance, the Kings tell us that in the midst of their travails to meet Jesus Christ that they missed sorely:

‘The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.’

The above lines are an allusion to sensual and carnal desires that, in Eliot’s imaginative recasting of our legend, tended to distract the Kings from their aim of meeting Jesus, who becomes symbolic of fully developed spirituality in the human. The hint is already here in the first stanza that the journey undertaken by the Magi is one of an essentially spiritual nature and transcends the character of a purely physical expedition, although on a casual reading the latter interpretation seems to be correct.

The hazardous, agonizing journey is evocative of the grosser sensuality and demands of the flesh that recurringly assail those humans who aim to develop into complete spiritual maturity through a channeling of their instinctual drives in the direction of a high spiritual purpose. Accordingly, Eliot’s poem becomes a metaphor for man’s constant endeavour to overcome what may be described as his creaturely, material self for a higher state of existence, where spirit triumphs over matter. With the insight of genius, Eliot creatively invests the legend with profound spiritual depth.

However, it is in the second and penultimate stanza of the poem that the first hints of the poem’s relevance to Good Friday are dropped. We are told that the Magi travelled all night and by dawn arrived at ‘a temperate valley’, the climate of which is relatively wholesome and salubrious. Describing this new geographical setting the poet tells us that, among other features, there are;

‘…three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.’

The ‘three trees’ here are evocative of Christ’s crucifixion, since he was nailed to a cross between two convicts who were also impaled on crosses. In Christian terminology, a cross is also referred to as a ‘tree’. The ‘galloping white horse’ is suggestive of St. Paul’s conversion to Christianity.

It is said that Paul, who was initially a persecutor of Christians, and was active decades after Christ’s crucifixion and death in today’s Middle East, was on a mission of hunting down Christians on a horse, when he heard Jesus’ gently admonishing and pained voice from the skies, asking him: ‘Paul, Paul why are you persecuting me?’ Paul was stunned and thrown off his horse. It is said that from the moment of this encounter Paul became one of Christ’s most devout followers and defenders.

We are left to infer from the poem’s second stanza that the acceptance of Jesus into one’s life does not preclude the possibility of one being inflicted with suffering right through one’s duration on earth. Our Magi were on a journey to encounter Christ, but acceptance of Christ, they were made to realize, also involved accepting His Cross, the symbol of suffering.

However, it is the poem’s third and last stanza, that is most complex in meaning. Having recognized and accepted Christ into their lives our Three Kings return to their kingdoms and old dispensations but they are no longer at ease in them. The acceptance of Christ involves dying to their old selves and ways of life. Unless and until this ‘death’ occurs in their lives they cannot claim that they have encountered Christ.

But this dying to one’s old self is no easy task. It involves ‘hard and bitter agony’ because it is not at all easy for mortal man to withdraw from his old set ways. That is, carrying the Cross of suffering is not at all easy for limited humans. However, the price of having Christ is the rejection of the world and considering that the human often slips back to his accustomed worldly life this task of dying to one’s old self is for the spiritually mature a continuing process.

It is for the above reasons that the Magi reflect in the final stanza in the following terms after witnessing Christ’s birth:

‘…. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.’

Many Christians tend to mechanically go through the process of commemorating Good Friday through the adherence to an array of religious observances, but they little realize that the holy day symbolizes a Birth and a Death. The Cross, it needs to be realized, is a reminder that the recognition and acceptance of Christ, symbolized by the Magi’s presence at Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, involves profound suffering at two levels. It means accepting the hardships and agonies of earthly life on the one hand and dying to our old selves and the world, on the other hand. Thanks to ‘Journey of the Magi’ this profound paradox at the heart of Christianity is rendered intelligible to a remarkable degree.