Book 1, lines 100-120

[Previous: lines 90-99]

Hic subito, non læta ferens, gravis impulit aures         [100]
nuntius, atque animum rumore momordit amaro.
Lazarus haud procul hinc Bethanes regna tenebat,
dives opum, clarus genus alto a sanguine regum.
Nam pater ingentes Syriæ frenaverat oras,
vique sibi captas quondam subiecerat urbis.             [105]
Nemo illo hospitibus facilis magis: omnibus illa
noctes atque dies domus ultro oblata patebat.
Huc etiam persæpe ipsum succedere Christum
haud piguit creberque domus indulsit amicae
hospitio, atque deum posita se nube retexit.             [110]
Hunc igitur postquam morientem accepit, et acri
vix morbo correptum, auras haurire supremas
et quasi jam leti portas luctarier ante,
demisit lacrymas, sociisque hæc edidit ore:
“Cedamus. Leto actutum revocandus amicus             [115]
in lucem, modo me summus pater audiat ipse,
atque suas velit hic, ut sæpe, ostendere vires.”
Hæc ait, et gressum Bethanae tendit ad urbem.
Prosequitur comitum manus ingens atque videndi
innumeri studio socios se protinus addunt.               [120]

Then suddenly all happiness was hushed: a grave         [100]
messenger came, hurting their hearts with sharp news.
It was Lazarus, ruler of nearby Bethany:
a very wealthy man, and of royal bloodline
(his father had quelled rebellion on Syria’s coast
and conquered many cities there by force).                [105]
No one was more hospitable to guests: all
were welcome to his house, both night and day,
and Christ himself was often a visitor
relaxing in that friendly home, able there
to set-aside the cloud that hid his godhood.              [110]
So when he heard that this man was dying, cruel
disease wasting him—that he was breathing his last
and struggling at the very gates of death—
he shed tears, and spoke to his disciples:
“we have to go. Our friend must be recalled              [115]
into the light, if the supreme Father will hear my words,
and once more use such a man to show his strength.”
He spoke, and then went straight to Bethany.
A crowd followed him, eager to see the man live
and many more joined with them on the way.                   [120]

Just as Vida cut abruptly from Jerusalem to Zacchaeus, so he cuts, again abruptly, from Zacchaeus to Lazarus on his deathbed. This is the lead-in to a much longer episode in Book 1: Vida shifts the scene to Hell (lines 121-235, a passage that strongly influenced Milton) where devils bicker in horrid counsel over how to destroy their enemy, Christ. Then, at line 236, we come back up to Earth, Jesus actually arrives at Bethany and we're shown Lazarus being raised from the dead. That takes us up to about line 300. Since Book 1 as a whole is a touch under 1000-lines long that means the first third of it is given over to preliminaries + Lazarus.

This Lazarus is from John 11 (there's another Lazarus mentioned in Luke, but that's a different person) and the emphasis Vida gives it at the beginning of his epic is explained, in part, by that impeccable theological resource, Wikipedia: ‘the miracle of the raising of Lazarus, the longest coherent narrative in John aside from the Passion, is the culmination of John's “signs”. It explains the crowds seeking Jesus on Palm Sunday, and leads directly to the decision of Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin to kill Jesus.’

One striking thing about Vida's version is the emphasis on Lazarus's wealth and public eminence: he ‘rules’ (regnat) Bethany and is not just dīves, a rich man, but dīves opum, a rich rich man. Where does this version of Lazarus come from? It's not in the gospels, and I can't locate anyone else who styles the figure this way, so perhaps this is Vida's invention. Of course, it might simply be my culturally-Protestant prejudice that leads me to think that asserting great wealth and high office are no bar to holiness is a particularly Catholic thing to do.

There are several early Church traditions associated with Lazarus: that he fled later persecutions of Christians and became the first Bishop of Kition (present-day Larnaka) where he lived for thirty more years, dying of old age; or that he fled further afield and became the first Bishop of Marseilles, where he was martyred by decapitation. There's also a tradition that, Buster-Keaton-like, Lazarus never smiled during his post-resurrection life (he was too grieved, they say, by the unredeemed souls he had seen during his four-day sojourn in Hell). But nothing about his father subduing a rebellion in Libya. I've no idea where that datum originates. It implies, I suppose, that his father was a Roman holding high military office, and therefore that Lazarus's ‘rule’ of Bethany might have been some imperial office. Vida would, as a Roman Catholic, of course have wanted to stress the continuities between Christ's ministry and Rome's papal episcopate, although this one is a little hard to swallow (Lazarus is the Greek version of the Hebrew-Aramaic name Eleazar, not a Roman name at all). Still perhaps we can intuit Lazarus's wealth from the fact that he had a big house and many friends, and perhaps Vida is thinking in poetic-contrasting mode, so as to distinguish this Lazarus from the other Lazarus, who of course was a penniless beggar.

More striking is line 110. What do you think Vida means when he says that, in Lazarus's house (and by implication not elsewhere) Christ ‘set aside’ the ‘cloud’ (nūbēs) that hid his godhood? To me it suggests that Christ generally went around disguising that he was divine, something that would otherwise have been unmissably obvious to everyone and which he was obliged actively to occlude. But isn't that the very opposite of what the gospels imply? Aren't Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all about Jesus travelling far and wide to spread the good news of his divinity?

My reading of this line, for what it's worth: this, as the old deconstructivist jargon has it, is the problematic of Vida's poem. Christ in the gospels is a simple man, a carpenter's son. He spends his time with ordinary people, not with kings and princes. The authorities think him merely a rabble rouser and criminal; unable to see that he is divine they execute him as a low criminal. The message he brings is not for an elite, but for everyone; it is, in both senses of the word, common. It is one of the creative paradoxes of the gospels that this low-born ordinary man is also the king of kings, literally God come to earth.

I think that the Christiad simply finds it hard to believe that God could walk among us and nobody notice. Surely it must have been obvious! And yet, the NT makes manifest, not only wasn't it obvious to most people, even some of Christ's closest followers doubted it. Perhaps, Vida intimates—and he doesn't go much beyond hinting at this, in his poem—that was because, on most occasions, Christ deliberately hid his divinity from mortal eyes. Why? Well the ways of God are ineffable, so who knows. I mean, it seems to me a radically point-missing piece of post-hoc rationalisation, and rather demeaning than anything else (as if Christ is Cyclops from the X-Men, veiling his uncontrollable eye-beams behind a specially constructed visor). But what do I know?

[Next: lines 121-235]