[Previous: lines 300-367]
Interea circumpositis ex urbibus aegrum------------
cernere vulgus erat conventu accedere magno.
Multi ibant oculis clausis, multi auribus orti [370]
indociles, fandi ignari, quique aegra trahebant
membra, ferebantur; quosve exagitabat Erinnys
captos mente, sui immemores, deus ipse iuvabat
auxilio validique omnes laetique redibant.
Now from all the surrounding area’s cities------------
a great and various crowd of the sick approached.
Some were blind in the eye, some deafdumb, some [370]
unreachable, unaware of their surroundings; those
who could not walk were carried; some had Furies
invisibly maddening their minds. The Son of God
helped them all, and they returned home cured and glad.
A brief interlude, this, capping the episode with Mary Magdelene washing the saviour’s feet and buffering the text before the narrative returns us to Jerusalem (the place at which the Christiad opens) for his final days. I suppose we could take it as some kind of gloss on the previous episode that those afflicted in the mind are described as in effect ‘possessed’ (by Furies), where those with purely bodily disabilities are simply presented. It’s a complicated matter nonetheless. It's the mind, not the body, that gets us saved, or damned, after all.
The image at the head of this post is Murillo’s ‘Christ Healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda’, (1667-70); oil on canvas, presently in the National Gallery, London.
[Next: lines 375-435]
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