The long season of the church as imago imperi and all the trappings of worship, liturgy, power, canon law... is now over in Europe. What if this return to a pre-Christian time that celebrates the Sol invictus turns out to be the beginning of the desire for a new advent?
by Luigino Bruni
published in Città Nuova on 16/12/2025
The image, which I took in Leuven, where the only open church I came across was a museum, did not speak to me of anticipation but of absence. Together with the Magi who have already arrived in that strange nativity scene, because theirs is not a temporal distance from the Epiphany, but a metaphysical distance that cannot be bridged. They are disoriented Magi, they do not know where to go or who that child is. They no longer bring ‘gifts’ but ‘presents’, with bows and wrapping already prepared by the store, and all the same.
That empty crib, locked behind a gate, those Magi who are absent even though they have already arrived, told me something new: truly, Christianity, Christian culture, no longer exists in Europe. In its place is Christmas (with a lowercase ‘c’), of consumption, gifts, nice feelings, reindeer and goats, discounts. These are understandable things, things that people even love, because we like celebrations.
We have returned to the second or third century, before Christianity, to the festival of light and the winter solstice (Sol invinctus). We have returned to the wars of that empire, to the categories of barbarian and foreigner, to slaves, patricians, and plebeians, to many games and little bread. And why, I asked myself, should the Baby Jesus return amid all this wickedness?
But as I pondered all this, a question came to me: “Are you sure this absence is a bad thing? What if this absence were the new name for waiting? What if it were the beginning of a new desire for a new advent?”
Historically speaking, it is absurd to ask whether the transformation of the early Christian communities into the religion of the Roman Empire and then into the Middle Ages was a good or a bad thing. It simply was. But, of course, the demands of the new religion of the empire (worship, liturgy, power, canon law...) changed something important, and that first charisma transformed into an institution left much material in the cocoon.
What is certain is that the long season of the church as imago imperi is over, at least in the West. What remains is an empty cradle, an icon of the European democratic hell. But from that emptiness, from that now-closed gate, from those bewildered Magi, from these museum-churches, something can be reborn, and perhaps is already being born: the desire for something new, the expectation of a return, everything different and everything similar to that of past centuries. We have stopped waiting for the Messiah, and his place has been taken by the wait for the Amazon package. And that is not enough.
May the empty cradle, the bewildered Magi, that iron gate be the parents of a new desire for that child. Then perhaps there is no better time than ours for a new Christmas.
May this presence-absence give rise to a new desire for infinity, for a Logos that pitches its tent among us.