[Previous: lines 830-871]
Christ has climbed Mount Tabor, accompanied only by Peter, James and John, and addressed his father. Now God replies:
Filius haec: Genitor contrà cui talia reddit.------------
“Nate, Patris virtus, nostrique simillima imago,
nulla tuis fraus, (solve metum) nullaeve nocebunt
insidiae, quas nunc regni molitur operti [875]
arbiter; incœpti frustra irritus omnia tentat.
Induat in facies centum, centum ille figuras;
ipse adero, retegamque dolos, fœcundaque fraudis
agmina disiiciam, et magna virtute resistam.
Unus erit tantùm, cui mentem insania vertet: [880]
infelix, iam nunc devoto pectore versat
infandum scelus ; atque tui iam pœnitet aegrum,
secum indignantem, tua quòd praecepta sequutus
exuerit blandum vitae mortalis amorem,
malueritque graves sub te tolerare labores: [885]
omnia quae mecum mundi ante exordia nôsti.
Hunc tamen indignum numero cœtuque piorum
addidimus, memores vatum, qui talia quondam
praedixere, tuis exemplum insigne futurum.
Evadent alii insidias meliora sequuti. [890]
Omnes, te propter contempto lucis amore,
haud mortem horrescent, pergentque in funera laeti;
innumeramque suo parient tibi sanguine gentem,
proiectu vitae, et mortis amore, superbi.
Efficiam cœlo dignos post aspera tandem [895]
funera, deserti magnum aetheris incrementum.
Quos tu olim aspicies hac relligione nepotes
surgere, Nate, tibi! quàm pectora certa videbis!
Tu modò tu perge, et cœptum decurre laborem.
Hi, quos cernis enim vix nunc tua iussa sequutos [900]
indociles, fandi ignaros, (mora non erit) altos
pectore concipient sensus, doctoque verendas
ore canent leges afflati numine nostro,
et vastum in melius referent hortatibus orbem.
Succedent aliis alii, sacrique nepotes— [905]
victores tua signa ferent trans ultima claustra
oceani latas undis cohibentia terras;
clarescetque tuum passim per secula nomen.
Sponte sua invicti reges tibi sceptra, tibi arma
subiicient sua per terras, arasque sacrabunt. [910]
atque adeô gravida imperiis Roma illa superba,
appenninivagi quae propter Tybridis undam
ingentes populos frenat, pulcherrima rerum,
summittet fasces, et, quas regit, orbis habenas.
Illic relligio, centum illic maxima templa, [915]
centum arae tibi fumantes, centumque ministri;
quique viris latè, atque ipsis det iura, sacerdos
regibus, et summo te in terris reddat honore.
Siqua tamen, paulatim annis labentibus, aetas
decolor inficiet mores, versisque nepotes [920]
degeneres surgent studiis; per dura laboresque
exercens lapsam revocabo in pristina gentem:
illa malis semper melior se tollet ad astra.
Saepe solo velut eversam, excisamque videbis,
quam modò praedixi, populorum incursibus, urbem: [925]
verùm quò magis illa malis exercita, semper
altiùs hoc surgens celsum caput inseret astris,
mœniaque in melius semper recidiva reponet;
nec nisi subiecto passim sibi desinet orbe.
Sic placitum : nostri sedes ea numinis esto.” [930]
Haec ait; et Natum dextra complexus inhaesit.
ecce, autem subitò rubra vibratus ab aethra
cum sonitu fulgor micat, et polus intonat ingens.
Nam Pater omnipotens manifestus ab aethere nubem
ostendit radiis illustrem lucis, et igni. [935]
Omnia collucent latè loca: turbine Christus
corripitur rapido, mediaque in nube refulsit,
verus et aspectu patuit Deus; atque per auras
divinum toto spiravit vertice odorem
luminis aetherei specimen, Genitoris imago. [940]
Nec secus emicuit roseo pulcherrimus ore
insolita circum perfundens omnia luce,
quàm cùm manè recens, lucis fons aureus, ingens,
lumine sol cœlum exoriens rigat omne profuso;
oceani in speculo longè resplendet imago, [945]
et croceae effulgent aurata cacumina sylvae.
Talem se sociis mirantibus obtulit heros,
amborum in medio vatum: quorum alter adivit
flammifero quondam invectus cœli ardua curru,
et tranavit, equis insultans, aeris auras; [950]
Isacidûm Phariis genus alter duxit ab oris
dux profugum, legesque dedit, moremque sacrorum.
Nec non cœlicolûm propiùs tum maxima pandi
visa domus, cœlique ingens apparuit aula.
Tum Genitor, nubis fulgens candentis amictu, [955]
oscula libavit Nato, et vox lapsa per auras:
“Hic mea progenies: hic est mea magna voluptas;
uni huic mortales omnes parete volentes.”
Nec plura his: toto assonuit chorus omnis Olympo
cœlestûm cantu vario, plausumque dedere. [960]
Tum demum in faciem consuetam redditus heros
attonitos socios monstrisque, metuque sepultos
excitat, atque hominis mortali apparuit ore.
So spoke the Son, and his Father replied:------------
“Son, you are your father’s virtue and image,
your friends (fear not!) will suffer no harm by
treachery, or evil orchestrated by the [875]
infernal lord:—all his schemes are null and void.
Though he wear a hundred masks, take a hundred
forms, he'll reveal himself, betray his schemes and
frauds: I shall repel them with great potency.
There's only one, whose mind is driven mad: [880]
unhappy, planning now, against his own will,
infamous sin:—a sick man, who now regrets
following you and all your teachings, since
he is still, at heart, in love with mortal life,
and can’t endure such grave and bitter hardships: [885]
though this was known from the world’s beginning.
And yet this low man was one your godly
number, since we are mindful of the prophets,
who predicted it, as an example.
The others, choosing a better path, prosper. – [890]
all, scorning mere love of life for your sake, will
meet their fate, the horrors of death, with joy;
and their blood will bring forth new followers
for you, proud to die, disregarding life.
After such sharp deaths they will be worthy [895]
of heaven, and greatly add to its numbers.
How many will you see, generations unborn
rising up, following—you, Son!—with stout hearts!
You will see this if you complete your work.
Even those harder to reach will follow you [900]
ignorant now (it will take time) they’ll change
their hearts will grow wise, awe will instruct them:
my numinous spirit will lead them to the law,
and so remake the world into a better place.
Generations will come and come, sacred sons [905]
to carry your victorious standard beyond
the very Ocean that engirds the world;
through the ages they will magnify your name.
Unvanquished kings will lay their sceptres before you,
and raise your holy altars throughout their lands. [910]
Even proud Rome, gravid with empire, beside
the flowing Tiber’s Apennine-born waves,
ruling huge populations—finest of cities—
will submit its fasces and the reins of the world.
Its religion, and its hundred temples, [915]
its hundred smoking altars, its hundred priests
will become one priest, ruling widely over
men and kings, and you will be honoured worldwide.
And if, later on, a coarser age loosens
men’s morals, and some distant descendants [920]
degenerate from my way—then hard labour
imposed by me shall recall them to piety:
Strengthened by their woes they’ll rise up to the stars.
Often you will see this city overthrown,
deleted by barbarian invaders; [925]
but, truly, the more the city is punished,
the more its head will rise up again starry;
the further its walls fall the higher they rise up
not resting until they encircle the whole world.
It’s my will: let this be the seat of our divine soul.” [930]
He spoke, and drew his Son in with his right arm.
Then, suddenly: ruby light shook through the air
with clamorous thunder and flashing lightning.
From high, the Great Father manifested himself
in a cloud of laser-lustrous light and fire. [935]
All around glittered: a whirlwind caught Christ
in its rapid midst, shining through that cloud,
manifestly a true god; and through aerial
vertices breathed a divine fragrance
vision of aethereal light, his Father’s image. [940]
Just as when dawn’s beautiful roseate glow
perfuses the whole horizon with its light
and the morning grows huge with golden brilliance,
bathing the entire sky in sun’s illumination
reflecting from Ocean’s resplendent mirror, [945]
and the saffron-golden woodlands brightly blaze.
In this form his disciples saw the hero,
flanked by two prophets: one who formerly
climbed to heaven in a horse-drawn fiery
chariot, traversing the aerial world; [950]
the other who saved Isaac’s sons from Pharaoh
leading those wanderers, giving laws and religion.
All heaven’s inhabitants came into view,
that bright palace and its many halls.
Then the Creator, mantled in gleaming cloud, [955]
kissed his Son’s lips, his voice out of the sky:
“This is my progeny: this my greatest joy;
let all men as one willingly obey him.”
Nothing more: all Olympus choired in assent
the heavens singing songs and all applauding. [960]
When the hero turned his face he was again himself;
his followers, stunned and scared by what they
had seen, met him in the form of a mortal man.
In God’s reply to Christ, here, the poem becomes really very Catholic. I don’t say this as a snark, because of course the Christiad is a Catholic poem—proudly and deliberately a Catholic poem. But here there are references not just to Rome as the coming centre of Christ’s worship, but more particular digs at Protestantism, as at lines 919-23:
And if, later on, a coarser age loosens—in which God not only predicts the Reformation (which was well underway in 1535) but assures us of the inevitable success of the Counter-Reformation (a prediction posterity has rather stubbornly refused to verify). What’s happening here is that Vida is putting frankly partisan words into God’s mouth, something more than a little demeaning, one might think, for the ultimate divine force of the cosmos as such. Make no mistake: Vida's durus labor [921], the hard or rough work, of dragging these future recusants back to Rome means, amongst other things, torture and execution. Not nice, really.
men’s morals, and some distant descendants
degenerate from my way—then hard labour
imposed by me shall recall them to piety:
Strengthened by their woes they’ll rise up to the stars.
My problem, to be clear, is not the doctrinal content of this speech by God. I don’t think it’s, you know, right; but that’s hardly the point. Vida is using his poem to ventriloquise God uttering the official line of his church, and one would hardly expect him, as an officer of that church, writing to please his Pope, to do otherwise. The problem is one of tone (of, that is, of poetry). Indeed, the disconnect between this speech and its doctrinal specificities is illuminated, I think, by the way Milton, whose Christian doctrine was very different to Vida’s, runs into similar tonal problems with his God monologues in Paradise Lost. The issues with Milton’s God are famously to do with the inertness of his voice, the aridity and monologic monotony of it, but they're something else too. We don’t have to go the full William Empson here—although much of what he says, in Milton’s God of the supreme being as a sadistic megalomaniac, a ‘God whose only pleasure is gloating over torture’, could very easily be, retrospectively, applied to Vida. But I'm taking Milton’s God to be not so much an exercise ya-booery aimed at the God as such (though there’s certainly a quantity of that proto-new-atheist stuff in Empson’s book) as an essay interested in a more specific problematic: how Milton, who belonged to the party that overthrew a tyrant, can reconcile his vision of God with his political morals, given that his God is so very much Vida’s God of the Old Catholic Hierarchy. I’m not sure he can, and Empson’s digs at a God ‘astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin’ and so on, pertain to that.
The underlying point, which still seems to me, after all these years, unrefuted, is that Milton in Paradise Lost, as Vida here in the Christiad, make God a character in their poems. It is a radical contradiction, a kind of self-annulling paradox, to make the author of all things (including Milton, Vida and therefore their poems) a mere character inside Milton and Vida’s poems, and the paradox has a particular acidity in this case, because the whole topic of Vida’s poem is the rich complexity of that unique overlap of eternal divinity and mortal humanity we call ‘Christ’. An ineffable God is one thing; but (this is what I take Empson to be saying) once such a being is styled as, in effect, another kind of Christ—only a much less forgiving and gentle one—a character in the world of the poem, such a character, boasting of how He will torture Protestants back into Catholicism can hardly avoid coming over as, well, repellent. A key mistake Dawkins and his ilk make is, precisely, in treating God as if he were just another actor in the cosmos, rather than being the ground upon which the cosmos as such is construed: C S Lewis gently rebuking those who accused him of believing in fairies at the bottom of his garden with the reply that, for a Christian, it was quite the other way about, that the garden was, as it were, in the fairy. But isn't that exactly the fault into which Vida here, and Milton later, slips?
Anyway: the first book of Vida’s epic ends here, with the Transfiguration of Christ, an episode taken from Matthew 17:1–8, Mark 9:2–8 and Luke 9:28–36. Here’s Matthew’s version:
Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves; and He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him. Then Peter answered and said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if You wish, let us make here three tabernacles: one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!” And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their faces and were greatly afraid. But Jesus came and touched them and said, “Arise, and do not be afraid.” When they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only. Now as they came down from the mountain, Jesus commanded them, saying, “Tell the vision to no one until the Son of Man is risen from the dead.”It seems to me worth noting, following on from what I say in the previous paragraph, this NT God is an obscurity, a voice and a power; and that these things do not add up to Him being a character in Matthew’s story, I think.
A few notes on the Latin. With respect to line 934-5’s ‘the Great Father manifested himself/in a cloud of laser-lustrous light’—well, I put up my hand. The Latin is nam Pater omnipotens manifestus nubem/ostendit radiis illustrem lucis, where radii luci are rays of light, radiant light; but I figured, since it was happening in amongst a ruby-lit cloud (nubis) that my translation was passable. You may disagree.
Otherwise the thing that is most notable about Vida’s transfiguration (apart from the ornately kitsch, one-might-say High Church Catholic, trappings and vibe of it) is how insistently the poem reiterates images of light, repeating the word and its variants over and over:
ostendit radiis illustrem lucis, et igni.These many iterations of light, and the attendant references to skies and fires and brightnesses, become almost egregrious. I haven't, for instance, translated each of these several luces with the same word, or it would get monotonous. Milton certainly picks up on this from Vida; indeed, to such a degree that light becomes one of the poem’s inspirational muses:
Omnia collucent latè loca: turbine Christus
…
luminis aetherei specimen, Genitoris imago.
Nec secus emicuit roseo pulcherrimus ore
insolita circum perfundens omnia luce,
quàm cùm manè recens, lucis fons aureus, ingens,
lumine sol cœlum exoriens rigat omne profuso [935-44]
Hail holy light, offspring of Heav'n first-born,Looking back from Vida, we can see that he has shaped his version of the transfiguration out of a string of echoes of the passage in the first book of the Aeneid where Aeneas’s mother, Venus, appears to him first of all as a mortal woman, only afterwards revealing herself as a goddess:
Or of the eternal co-eternal beam
May I express thee unblamed. [Paradise Lost 3:1-3]
Dixit, et avertens rosea cervice refulsit,Venus then shrouds her son in a cloud and whisks him off to Carthage. Gardner points out that God kissing his son’s lips in line 956, oscula libavit Nato—not a detail mentioned in the gospels—comes from earlier in Aeneid, where Venus begs her father Jupiter to spare Aeneas, and he agrees: ‘oscula libavit Natae’, ‘he kissed his daughter’s lips’ [Aeneid, 1:256]
ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem
spiravere, pedes vestis defluxit ad imos,
et vera incessu patuit dea. [Aeneid 1:402-5]
‘She spoke, and as she turned away her roseate neck shone brightly. A divine fragrance breathed from her ambrosial hair, her clothes fell to her feet and she was revealed as a goddess.’
[Next: Book Two!]
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