Book 2, lines 113-132

[Previous: lines 73-112]

Satan (the ‘he’ of the opening line, here) has tempted Judas to betray Jesus. Now read on!

Hinc miserum invadens praecordia ad intima sese
ingerit, atque imis dirum implicat ossibus ignem.
Olim, etiam in mentem veniunt, quaecunque sub illo            [115]
iussus dura tulit, quaecunque exhausta pericla:
et piget, atque nefas polluto volvit amore,
immeritumque animo sedet hosti prodere regem.
Ah miser, ah malesane, Deum non pectore sentis?
Non oculis numen praesens, non auribus hauris?                 [120]
Quis te mutavit tantus furor? aspice quo nunc
culmine praecipitas, quanam trahis arce ruinam:
nec qualis sentis tibi menti insederit error.
Quid struis? aut quò te raptat tam dira cupido,
quae nunc te malè habet, mentisque et lucis egentem?          [125]
Quam nunc amittis sortem, irreparabile donum,
optabunt seri post secula mille nepotes.
Atque adeô quae vota foves, quam mente secas spem,
laetitia elatos animos inflatus inani,
omnia discerpent, rapientque per aera venti.                       [130]
Excute, dum licet, infandam de pectore pestem,
quaeque imiste nunc est addita cura medullis.

------------

Now he’d invaded the wretched man’s inmost
heart, filling his very marrow with fire.
From then on he kept thinking about all the                     [115]
harsh discipline and danger he had known:
depression seized him. All his love polluted,
he resolved to betray the innocent king.

Bitter man! you wretch, can’t you feel God moving
in your heart, his presence in your eyes and ears?            [120]
What fury has changed you? Can’t you see the cliff
you’re leaping off, the tower you’re plummeting from?
Can’t you see how error swallowed-up your mind?
What are you doing? Raped by your own dire desire,
slave to bitterness, blind, out of your mind?                    [125]
You’re throwing away an irreplaceable gift
whose loss will last a thousand generations!
Meanwhile, all your broken prayers for favour,
all the soul-joy you yearn for, puffed up with vain
dreaming, will vanish like breath into the wind.               [130]
Drive out, while you can, this plague from your heart,
rid your bones of this anxiety—do it now!

------------

Line 124’s rapta means ‘seized’, ‘abducted’ (Gardner translates ‘ravished’), but it also means ‘raped’, and ‘ravished’ seemed to me a little evasive in this context. Then again, ‘raped’ is probably too strong. I’m not sure. There is, I'd say, an edge-of-hysteria flavour to the many rhetorical questions and pleadings of lines 118-132. Vida’s repeated browbeating here feels egregious; a little protest-too-much—or, indeed, given that Vida is addressing (a) a literary character that he has himself written whom (b) he knows full well won’t listen to these exhortations, it all might just sound rather phoney.

There’s some interesting stuff in this passage, though; and perhaps the pitch to which Vida screws himself, his faux-outrage, by bleeding into something not faux at all actually, ends up revealing something quite telling. In particular the two lines 126-27:

You’re throwing away an irreplaceable gift
whose loss will last a thousand generations!

fold-in some rather peculiar theological implications. If Christ had not been betrayed, and thus crucified, we would never have been redeemed, which would have been a much larger disaster for us than Christ living out his normal life. Saying so is a pretty straight-down-the-line Christian theological position. What on earth can Vida mean when he, as narrator (not, that is, putting the sentiment into the mouth of a character) insists that Christ avoiding crucifixion would have been a thousand-generation boon for humankind?

I should say that my translation, actually, truncates the Latin a touch: Quam nunc amittis sortem, irreparabile donum,/optabunt seri post secula mille nepotes. That optabunt (the third-person-plural future indicative of optō, ‘to select, to wish, to desire’) suggests that the loss will be of something that ‘they’—all of us, I suppose—will want or desire, but which will have been taken away. Gardner’s version is: ‘For a thousand generations to come, men will long to possess that irreplaceable good fortune that you throw away’; but this omits the donum, or gift, of the original. That Christ’s sacrifice was freely given is, again, very important to Christian theology; although surely the gift was not Christ himself so much as Christ’s sacrifice and the atonement it made available to us.

I’m not, I’ll be honest, entirely sure what’s going on here. Perhaps it’s the form of Vida’s retelling overwriting, as it were, the content. What I mean by that is: the story of the Gospels is about the incarnation of God as a man; but the point of that story is something immaterial, non-physical—grace—something that works internally, on the soul and the heart. But epic is allergic to abstraction and handles internalisation poorly; it likes physical manifestations of things, and the action inside character is always represented by characters in action. Vida takes Christ as an epic hero, and it’s that that leads us here.

I don’t know. Maybe not. I’m carrying on with my (slightly, but not I think wholly misleadingly) tendentious translation here, rendering line 117 piget as depression; the previous post includes a discussion of the rationale for my choice. I’d say it’s allowed by the Latin—just—but I’d also have to confess that I’m going with it because the ‘depressive Judas’ angle interests me (you may prefer Gardner’s reading of that word: ‘he felt repugnance’).

It’s also a reading, I’d suggest, that fits with the idea that it is Christ himself—rather than the spiritual possibilities Christ’s sacrifice opens up—that is the valuable thing in this scenario. Adam Phillips starts with the obvious: ‘betrayal is only possible when there is something to betray.’ But he goes on to develop his thought in a less obvious direction.

That something takes time, and is of paramount importance. Sexual jealousy is not just one of the things that happens when you become attached to someone: it is the sign of attachment. If there was no such thing as betrayal in the world how would anything matter to us, or how would we know that it did?

He’s almost (I suppose, not quite) saying that betrayal is an integral part of sexual attachment as such—or perhaps, of any attachment. He goes on:

There have always been two important questions about Judas: what was he doing, and why was he doing it? And in answering these questions – which means interpreting the story and the figure of Judas – we have to bear something simple but significant in mind: that in betraying someone (or something) one is protecting someone (or something) else. And that someone or something else may be – in fact is likely to be – of real value. When E.M. Forster said that he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country rather than his friend he was drawing our attention to the question of value, of what betrayal can protect.

Depression can lead to suicide, which is what happens with Judas. And manic-depression is its own particular form of this larger disease. The implied pattern of Judas’s commitment is a period of intense enthusiasm for Christ’s project, followed by a period of pathologically intense reaction, a loathing and contempt. The depressive’s loathing and contempt is always fundamentally for him/herself, and by folding Christ into that Judas is, in one sense, following-through on the intensity, the force, of the initial identification with his hero. What he is protecting, then, is: everybody else, the world, removing the hated thing (himself, his leader) from it.

‘The betrayer,’ Elaine Pagels writes in Reading Judas, ‘always intrigues us more than the disciples who remain loyal’; she is intimating, perhaps, that we get a certain kind of pleasure from stories about betrayal that we can’t get from stories about loyalty – more pleasure, or a different kind of pleasure. As though disloyalty offers us something that loyalty cannot. As though we are intrigued by the part of ourselves that can betray people, particularly people we love and admire. As though there may be some forbidden vitality in this part of ourselves, something morally equivocal and alluring.

[Next: lines 133-150]