Book 1, lines 674-692

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Nec procul hinc ideo videas latè infera circùm
regna, subobscuras sedes, lucemque malignam              [675]
solis, ubi casti manes, animaeque piorum,
sedibus exclusae quondam debentis Olympi,
unius ob scelus, expectabant ordine longo.
Stabant hic cani proceres, vittataque vatum
agmina tendebantque manus ad sidera passas;              [680]
quos omnes humeris pater altè extantibus Abras
amplificam pandens chlamydem, protentaque latè
brachia subnixus, dextra laevaque tegebat.
Orantes illos credas, superûmque parentem
supplicibus dictis affari, parceret irae,                           [685]
parceret unius noxa omnes perdere gentes.
Substitit hïc imo suspirans pectore divus,
atque ait: “En nostrum deposcunt ista laborem:
in me nulla mora est; ego tantae debitus irae
morte mea eripiam hos tenebris, et claustra refringam. [690]
Quin ea, quae subitò paucis deprensa sequuntur
sublegite infandum mihi portendentia letum.”

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Nearby could be seen a circle of infernal
realms, halfshadowed regions lit by a feeble                  [675]
sun, where chaste ghosts, souls of the pious—
excluded from their seats in high Olympus
by one man’s sin—all waited, a long array.
Standing here were white-haired elders, prophets
with laurels on their brow and hands upraised;               [680]
Father Abraham, broad-shouldered, holding wide
his cloak, and reaching out with his raised arms
holding his hands over them all on both sides.
You'll suppose they're praying to the Father
supplicating his anger and begging him,                         [685]
not to destroy everyone for one man’s crime.
And here the divine man sighed a deep sigh
and said: “see how these things compel my work.
Nor will I shirk it! I’ll settle this debt:
my death will rescue them from darkness, will break     [690]
their gaol: though few can see what’s coming; you must
un-mystery the portents of my shocking death.”

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I’m not entirely sure what the last two lines here mean: Quin ea, quae subitò paucis deprensa sequuntur/sublegite infandum mihi portendentia letum. Christ is addressing his disciples; deprensus means ‘caught; discovered, recognized; revealed’; sublegite is the second-person-plural imperative of sublegō, which means ‘I gather or pick up or from below, gather or search for underneath. I take away secretly or by stealth; listen to secretly. I choose or elect in the place of another, appoint, substitute’; and infandum letum means shocking or abominable death or ruin. Gardner translates: ‘indeed, unravel the scenes that follow, understood by few, that presage my unspeakable death’, which I’m not sure is any clearer than the Latin—‘unravel’ for the imperative sublegite doesn’t quite catch the collective command, the ‘you-all must do this’, or its secret element, its sub-legibility. Mind you, I can’t put my hand on my heart and say my version is better.

At any rate: this, stop three on the tour of temple bas reliefs, in this part of the poem’s lengthy ekphrasis, gives us Limbo. Here the virtuous and pious patriarchs wait, under Abraham’s as-it-were wing, for Christ to release them. They’re not in the Hell we saw earlier in lines 121-235, and are not being tormented by that passage's lively set of grotesque devils, since the people here have done nothing specifically wrong. But neither are they in Heaven (‘Olympus’, in this poem’s classicising idiom) since they are not baptised in Christ and so not redeemed.

Vida doesn’t call this place Limbo, mind you, and this short passage doesn’t get into the long-standing and complicated debates about what happened to virtuous pagans and unbaptised newborn infants after death. Broadly, Pelagsius, who didn’t buy-into the whole Original Sin idea, but who did nonetheless believe that baptism was necessary for heaven, posited a ‘third’ place for the virtuous-but-unbaptised: neither hell nor heaven but a kind of sub-heaven, eternal happiness but not the intensity or perfection of bliss available to those redeemed by Christ. Augustine wasn’t having any of that:

This is an absolutely new fable, never before heard in the church, that one could have an Eternal Life which is not the kingdom of heaven, and that one could obtain salvation outside of the kingdom of God without doubt will go to damnation. [Augustine, Sermo 294, 3.3]

But although Augustine railed at length against Pelagsius, and repeatedly insisted that there was no ‘third place’ (‘it does not do to believe that it is possible to have a middle life [vita media] between vice and virtue, nor, on the part of the judge, that he can have a middle decision [sententia media] between chastisement and recompense’; De Libero arbitrio 3:66)—nonetheless he ended up endorsing a kind of Limbo anyway: a damned place, but without the absolute severity of pain endured by those who have compounded their original sin with wicked actions. A no-place, as a kind of antechamber to Hell. Dante, illustrated above, took the idea from him.

Vida’s mention of Abraham, in this passage, glances at the mention, in Luke 16:22, of ‘Abraham’s bosom’ (the place the beggar Lazarus goes to live in bliss as Dives is sent down into Hell). What does Christ mean when he says this? How can Abraham, unbaptised, be in heaven to offer his welcoming bosom to Lazarus until after Christ has harrowed hell, something that, by Luke 16, he had not yet done? It was a passage that troubled Augustine, and the saint’s account of it is, I think, behind Vida’s passage here. Take for example this, from a letter written late in Augustine's life:

But I would find it hard to say whether the bosom of Abraham where the wicked rich man, from the torments of hell in which he was, saw the poor man reposing, is to be considered under the term paradise or considered as belonging to hell. [Augustine, Epistola 187, 2:6].

In the words of Christopher Beiting [‘The Third Place: Augustine, Pelagius and the Theological Roots of the Idea of Limbo’, Augustiniana, 48 (1998), 28], Augustine here reverses his earlier position on the plain duality of heaven and hell ‘by presenting a new view of the geography of hell.’ In Augustine’s own words:

Besides, if we are to believe there are two regions in hell, one of the suffering and one of the souls at rest, that is, both a place where the rich man was tormented and one where the poor man was comforted, who would dare to say that the Lord Jesus came to the penal parts of hell instead of only among those who rest in Abraham's bosom?

This, I think, is what Vida is portraying here: a separate section of Hell, where Abraham shelters many under his ‘cloak’—his ‘in Abraham’s bosom’ is, in the Vulgate ‘in sinum Abrahae’, and sinus is a word with several meanings, amongst them a hollow or cavity; a bosom but also ‘a fold of the toga over the breast, pocket’ [L&S]. So that's what's going on here, I think.

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