The Adoration of the Magi

We are defined by, more than anything else, our desires: both the fulfilled ones and the thwarted ones, I think. Once a man has it in his head that he wants something, this desire begins to shape him. Ambition, or lust, or greed, eventually become engraved on a man's face, as do the more admirable, less common, desires. One need only to consider the sorts of things people want nowadays to begin to understand why the world is an imperfect place (and getting worse, one will note).

This is all just a roundabout way of coming to the point I was going to make when I started writing. When I was in Prague, I visited — as all tourists to that city must — Prague Castle. The most impressive part of that very large complex is probably St. Vitus's Cathedral, which is as fine an example of Gothic architecture as you'll find anywhere in Mitteleuropa. My favorite memory of the castle, however, comes from the considerably smaller Basilica of St. George, which is basically Romanesque (albeit with some Gothic and, regrettably, Baroque elements. I cannot understand why anyone would deface the simple purity of a Romanesque interior with the gaudy showiness of a Baroque façade). In one of the side aisles (to the south of the nave, if my memory serves), there is a medieval carved (wooden?) relief depicting the adoration of the Magi: I say without hesitation that this was my favorite work of art that I saw in Prague. I did not take a picture of it — I find tourists taking pictures in church to be irritating enough that I did not dare do so myself — but here is the best picture of it that I could find on the internet:


Of the six figures, three are unexceptional: the two wise-men in the background, and St. Joseph (who always seems to get a rather raw deal in such depictions. Here he looks rather disinterested. It's not his son, anyway, after all). But the three central figures are remarkable. The Theotokos sits with the Christ-child on her lap, looking rather guarded: who is this foreigner come to gawk at her son? Most striking is the third wise-man, who has taken off his crown. (Why are the Magi supposed to've been kings? Oh well; no matter.) His expression — which you can't see so well in this particular photograph — is of undisguised wonder: here, here, offering his hands in a childlike gesture of blessing, is the desire of the man's heart. The carving has captured a moment of transcendence: the union of the soul with the soul's creator. What else is there to say about the Christian life, save that we ought to seek Christ with such fervor? Would that all sacred art served as such good catechesis...