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ertain characters in history are notoriously difficult to come
to grips with—William Shakespeare, Billy the Kid, or Sherlock Holmes for
example. Certainly nobody has ever said that Nicholas of Myra was an easy fish
to catch. Nobody who made the effort to get the lowdown on the guy anyway.
Every time you think you’ve got something on him, he wriggles off again into the
darkness of the deeps, nestling among the rocks of myth and legend.
Last year Megyn Kelly, an eminent scholar and linguist—at least
so I suppose from the certainty of her pronouncement—announced that she had
found the elusive saint—and that he was in defiance of the probabilities, a
white man. Presumably a fourth-century Lycian white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
She didn’t explain about the reindeer and living at the North Pole thing, but I
suppose they were in there somewhere. They had to be.
Megyn Kelly unfortunately chose not to reveal the evidence for
her remarkable discovery; I am still awaiting the definitive paper showing that
it is a historical fact that St. Nicholas is a verifiable historical figure.
Presumably it should settle matters once and for all, like the issue of Jesus’s
wife or his brother’s bones. In the meantime we can only fall back on the
cobwebby legends that have actually come down to us, dusty and frayed as they
are.
What is a verifiable historical figure, anyway? Is William
Shakespeare? I’ve talked with at least one person who maintained he was
essentially the invention of seventeenth-century editors who needed an author
for anonymous plays they wanted to foist off on the public. Ignoring this sort
of revisionism, along with the Oxfordian lunacy, there is still the issue of
the rural yokel poacher from an illiterate household who somehow rose from
holding horses in London to become one of the greatest poets and playwrights
the world has ever known. Did he
exist? The actual records are unhelpful, being notices of baptism and burial,
transfers of property and appearances before the court, payments and the other
trivia that anyone leaves behind in the record-books during a life of more than
a few moments. Between the legendary bard of Avon and the actual guy who was
born, married, and died in Stratford there is a nearly impenetrable veil. The
legend fills at least one rather thick book (Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives), but the facts take
up a lot less room.
I suppose we mean was the legend inspired by a real person—did
the legendary character have a historical counterpart? The legend of Billy the
Kid is a rich tapestry of sometimes conflicting stories, but the life of his
historical counterpart—a nineteenth-century bit-player in the Lincoln County
War named Henry McCarty—comes down to a dry collection of legal documents and
newspaper accounts. Is it fair to say that Henry McCarty was Billy the Kid, with no qualifications or caveats? I’m just
asking; I don’t have an answer.
The thing is, even Sherlock Holmes had at least one historical
counterpart, though he didn’t solve crimes or hang out at Baker Street.
Precision is helpful. And in the case of Nicholas of Myra—well, precision reduces
the legendary saint to dust blown away in a hurricane. There’s just no there there.
It seems fitting to conclude this St. Nicholas Day meditation with
the words of another fictional character, one Kyle Broflovski:
Haven’t Luke Skywalker and Santa Claus affected your lives more
than most real people in this room? I mean, whether Jesus is real or not, he—he’s
had a bigger impact on the world than any of us have. And the same can be said
for Bugs Bunny and—and Superman and Harry Potter. They’ve changed my life—changed
the way I act on the earth. Doesn’t that make them kind of real? They might be
imaginary but—but they’re more important than most of us here. And they’re all
gonna be around here long after we’re dead. So, in a way, those things are more
realer than any of us.
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