“Behold the Condescension of God”

Quanta dignatio Dei! quanta Virginis excellentia! Currite, matres; currite, filiae; currite, omnes quae post Evam, et ex Eva, et parturimini cum tristitia, et parturitis. Adite virginalem thalamum, ingredimini, si potestis, pudicum sororis vestrae cubiculum.

How great the condescension of God! How great the excellence of the Virgin! Hasten, all ye mothers! And hasten, all ye daughters! Hasten, all ye who after Eve and on account of Eve, are born and give birth in sorrow! Approach the Virgin’s chamber ; enter, if you can, the modest room of your Sister.

—Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) 

The central event of the Christmas season—the incarnation of God as a human infant born in humble circumstances to a peasant woman in an unimportant part of the great Roman Empire—is introduced in the Book of Mormon as the interpretation of a dream about a tree.

The tree, of course, is the Tree of Life—the central symbol of Lehi’s dream in 1 Nephi 8. Lehi’s tree is a sort of inversion of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis. In Genesis, eating the fruit is bad. In Lehi’s dream, eating the fruit is good. It is “desirable above all other fruit” (1 Ne 8:12). It makes one happy (1 Ne 8:10).

When Nephi gets the chance to ask a messenger from God what the tree means, the messenger shows him a vision of the city of Nazareth and a virgin “most beautiful and fair above all other virgins” (1 Ne 11:15). Then he asks Nephi a question that seems odd in the context of a discussion about a tree: “Knowest thou the condescension of God?” (1 Ne 11:16). Nephi admits that he doesn’t, and an angel explains:

And it came to pass that I saw the heavens open; and an angel came down and stood before me; and he saith unto me: Nephi, what beholdest thou? And I said unto him: A virgin most beautiful and fair above all other virgins. And he saith unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God? And I said unto him: I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless I do not know the meaning of all things. And he saith unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of God, after the manner of the flesh.
And it came to pass that I beheld that she was carried away in the spirit; and after that she had been carried away in the spirit for the space of a time, the angel spake unto me, saying: Look! And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms. And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Eternal Father! Knowest thou the meaning of the tree which thy father saw? (1 Ne. 11: 14-21)

Now, I have pulled something of a fast one here. This passage comes from the 1830 version of the Book of Mormon. In the 1837 version, the text was changed to reflect the anti-Trinitarian drift of Joseph Smith’s theology. “The mother of God” was changed to “the mother of the Son of God,” and “the Eternal Father” was changed to “the Son of the Eternal Father.” These changes are unfortunate, as they make the rest of the passage almost impossible to interpret the way that any reader in 1830 would have interpreted it. And the original language connects the Book of Mormon to the Christian tradition of Advent in ways that the later revisions unfortunately, and unnecessarily, reject.

Nephi answers the angel’s question by saying that the tree represents “the love of God, which sheddeth itself abroad in the hearts of the children of men; wherefore it is the most desirable above all things” (1 Ne 11:22). This answer is not wrong, but it completely misses the significance of the vision that Nephi is seeing. In his defense, though, it would be very difficult for any resident of pre-exilic Jerusalem to look at the image of a woman with a child and comprehend that Yahweh—the fearsome God of Armies who, drowned Pharoah’s soldiers and shook the mighty walls of Jericho to the ground—would one day allow himself to be born to an unmarried peasant woman from a little village like Nazareth.

The angel’s response to Nephi, “Yea, and the most joyous to the soul” (1 Ne 11:23) affirms that Nephi was correct to say that the tree in Lehi’s dream represented the love of God. But the angel is also trying to route Nephi’s attention beyond the Sunday School answer. Both the brevity of the response, and the fact that the angel moves on to an even more elaborate vision of Christ, suggest that Nephi still doesn’t grasp the immensity of God’s condescension, the angel tries again:

And after he had said these words, he said unto me: Look! And I looked, and I beheld the Son of God going forth among the children of men; and I saw many fall down at his feet and worship him. And it came to pass that I beheld that the rod of iron, which my father had seen, was the word of God, which led to the fountain of living waters, or to thee tree of life; which waters are a representation of the love of God; and I also beheld that the tree of life was a representation of the love of God. And the angel said unto me again: Look and behold the condescension of God! (1 Ne 11:24-26)

After invoking the phrase “condescension of God” a second time, the angel goes on to show Nephi scenes from Christ’s life and ministry: being baptized, calling the twelve apostles, healing, casting out devils, being crucified for the sins of the world, and being resurrected (11:27-12:6). All of this, the vision says, is what the tree means, because all of it is what the love of God means.

Let’s focus a bit on the phrase “condescension of God.” The phrase is not in common usage today outside of LDS curricular material, but, in 1830, it would have been readily understood as the common Christian understanding of the incarnation of God—the amazing, incredible, wholly miraculous doctrine that the God of everything loved humanity so much that He stepped down from his throne and subjected himself to humanity. Here is a Google N-gram chart showing the distribution of this phrase in printed material–note that it peaks in 1816 and then again in 1830, the year that the Book of Mormon was published.

In the 19th century, the set-phrase “condescension of God” was the standard translation of the Latin term dignatio Dei, which has been used since the days of the Church Fathers to describe the miracle of the incarnation. The Latin word dignatio carries the denotation of “treating somebody with dignity” and the connotation of doing so when the person in question is of a lower social rank. Observe Augustine’s use of the phrase:

For who can worthily appraise the fact that God wished to be born for the sake of men ; that a virgin conceived without man’s co-operation; that she brought forth her Child without corruption; and that she remained a virgin after childbirth? As a matter of fact, our Lord Jesus Christ in His condescension entered the Virgin’s womb (Christus uterum virginis dignatus intravit), without stain impregnated a woman’s members, without corruption made His Mother fertile, and, when formed, came forth from her, preserving intact His Mother’s body so that He might fill with the honor of maternity and with the holiness of virginity her from whom He deigned to be born. [i]

This was how just about everyone used the phrase “condescension of God” in the 1830s. It described the overwhelming miracle of God choosing to become human, experience humanity, walk among humans, and be killed by humans as a manifestation of His absolute and unconditional love of all human beings. Unfortunately, the word “condescend” became infected with irony over the course of the 20th century—it now means pretending to treat someone with dignity as a way of emphasizing their social inferiority—making it hard to use as a description of God’s infinite love. But it is still the best word we have for a difficult concept, so we must try to make it work.

Nephi’s interpretive problem is not that he doesn’t understand the basic story. He gets that: God loves us, Jesus will come and be crucified, there will be some wars, there will be some boats, a great and a marvelous work will happen—and then it will be all over and the good guys will win. What he doesn’t get is the enormity of the consequences that come from God’s incarnation as a human being. He doesn’t understand the urgency of God’s love or the extent to which He will go to enact that love in the world. The vision in 1 Nephi 11-14 becomes a panoramic history of all things, because all things are changed fundamentally by God’s love.

The condescension of God is the miracle that we celebrate at Christmas—not that Christ died, or that He was resurrected, or that He atoned for our sins, but that the omnipotent, omniscient ruler of the universe made a choice to become a weak and vulnerable human being. And He did so because of His perfect love for human beings, which He asks us to replicate in the ways that we treat each other. Nephi keeps thinking that he understands this point, but his interlocutor keeps insisting that he doesn’t and has to see more. Advent is our opportunity to keep remembering how limited our understanding of God’s love actually is and how poorly we keep the two great commandments, both of which are to love as God does.

---

[i] Augustine, Sermons on the Liturgical Seasons, trans., Mary Sarah Muldowney, R.S.M. The Fathers of the Church, vol. 38 (New York Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1959), 144. The Latin text of this sermon (#215) can be found here.