Book 2, lines 196-215

[Previous: lines 151-195]

Nicodemus has defended Jesus in the Temple, outraging the elders. Now read on!

Talia perstabat repetens: violentia cunctis
gliscit, et accensus semper per viscera sensus
conflatur magis, et saevos furor aggerat aestus;
paulatimque animi turgescunt tristibus iris.
Exarsere omnes: pestis latet intus, et omnem             [200]
eripuit miseris lucem; victisque veneno
pestifero nebulas offudit mentibus atras.
Tum demum erumpit, quae cunctos ira coquebat:
infremuere omnes contrà, gemitumque dedere.
Qualiter aere cavo, dum sulfura pascitur atra,           [205]
inclusus, magis atque magis furit acrior, ignis;
moliturque fugam, nec se capit intus anhelans:
nulla sed angustis foribus via, nec potis extrà
rumpere, materiam donec comprenderit omnem:
tum piceo disclusa volat glans ferrea fumo:                 [210]
fit crepitus: credas rupto ruere aethere cœlum:
iamque illa, et turres procul ecce stravit, et arces:
corpora, et arma iacent; latè et via facta per hostes.
Haud illi secus accensi meliora monentem
excludunt adytis, atque extra mœnia trudunt.               [215]

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So he spoke, standing his ground: but violence
blazed-up to meet him, a crescendo of
savage fury sparking the crowd to madness,
swelling their souls with dreadful resentment.
How they all raged! a deep-down sickness that                 [200]
blinded them to the light, drugging their minds
cloaking them in noxious, vaporous shadow.
Out it burst, all the ire that was boiling
inside them, groaning and roaring against him.
As when, in a bronze barrel, black sulphur burns             [205]
and the enclosed space magnifies the force of
fire, keen to escape, hissing, trapped, with only
the narrow bore’s channel to free itself
exploding all its consumable matter:—
the iron bullet flies in a flash of smoke                             [210]
crashing out, loud enough to crack the sky:
and then: distant towers knocked flat! citadels,
bodies, weapons scattered; straight through the enemy!
Just so did the flaming rage turn against him
to banish him from the temple and the city.                      [215]

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This short passage links Nicodemus’s speech in defence of Jesus [lines 163-195] with Caiaphas’s speech condemning him [lines 218-252]. The most interesting thing here, I think, is the splendid little epic simile comparing the rage of the angry mob to gunpowder igniting inside the barrel of a cannon. It’s a striking and vivid piece of writing, this; and two things in particular strike me about it.

One is its anachronism. There have been a lot of epic similes in the poem at this point, but this is only the second to compare something in 1st-century AD to something from much later in history (clearly there were no bronze cannons firing in AD33). The other, from right at the beginning of the poem, is when Vida compares Jesus’s growing band of followers to the river Po. On that occasion this is what I said:

All this raises the question, I suppose, of anachronism: … a large question, actually, more usually discussed in the visual arts (Renaissance paintings of Christ and his saints are packed with anachronisms and contemporaneous touches, of course) than poetry, but relevant here too. One group of critics, following Aby Warburg, thinks the point of painting antique figures in Renaissance style was to emphasis the aliveness of the subject matter, its vitality: clothing the ancient in the habilments of the now-living to stress the nowness and the livingness of the gospel message.

For Warburg, the figures of the past appeared “not as plaster casts but in person, as figures full of life and color,... the embodiment of antiquity as the early Renaissance saw it.” He offered as a prime example Baccio Baldini's engraving of Bacchus and Ariadne, in which the deities appear just as Florentines had actually witnessed them being enacted in the carnival festivities of 1490, for which Lorenzo de' Medici himself composed the immortal canto di carro. [Charles Dempsey, ‘“Historia” and Anachronism in Renaissance Art’, The Art Bulletin 87 (2005) 416; Dempsey is quoting Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Getty 1999), 89]

But another school argues something the opposite, that the function of these anachronistic touches is precisely to orchestrate what Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood call ‘a clash of temporalities’. Rather than bring the ancient story up-to-date, what such anachronism does is to pull up-to-dateness back into the past, to revert contemporaneity into the holy aura of the epoch of Christ and his saints.

To perceive an artifact in substitutional terms was to understand it as belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously. The artifact was connected to its unknowable point of origin by an unreconstructible chain of replicas. That chain could not be perceived; its links did not diminish in stature as they receded into the depths of time. Rather, the chain created an instant and ideally effective link to an authoritative source and an instant identity for the artifact. [Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, ‘Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism’, Art Bulletin, 87 (2005), 407]

This argument intrigues me. I wonder if it's right, and more to the point I wonder how we might apply it to Vida. Nagel and Wood hang their dicussion on a 1503 painting by Vittore Carpaccio picturing Saint Augustine seated at a table in a very sixteenth-century-looking study ‘pausing, his pen raised from the paper’. But saints are one thing; Christ is another. We might want to argue that the anachronism here figures the way Christ in a sense, broke history, and remade it: it registers, in other words, a shift from chronos to kairos, from a blank succession of hopeless years into a calendar structured by grace. But there's an added wrinkle. Because Vida is not simply reaching back to first-century AD Judea, he's also reaching back to first-century BC Rome, and Vergil. So the anachronism splits, as it were, three ways: pagan, Christian and modern.

I am particularly intrigued by the way Milton imports Vida’s anachronistic image, anachronistically, into Paradise Lost. In Milton’s sixth book Raphael, recounting the war in heaven between angels and devils, fought long before humanity was even created, describes the devils inventing gunpowder and cannons. The battle is going against them, so first:

         Sulphurous and Nitrous Foame
They found, they mingl'd, and with suttle Art,
Concocted and adusted they reduc'd
To blackest grain, and into store convey'd:
Part hidd'n veins diggd up (nor hath this Earth
Entrails unlike) of Mineral and Stone,
Whereof to found thir Engins and thir Balls
Of missive ruin; [Paradise Lost, 6:512-19]

These are then deployed on the battlefield: cannons of ‘brass’ and ‘iron’ whose ‘mouthes/With hideous orifice gap't on us wide’ until the fallen angels step forward with their lighted reeds to discharge the weapons,

         for sudden all at once thir Reeds
Put forth, and to a narrow vent appli'd
With nicest touch. Immediate in a flame,
But soon obscur'd with smoak, all Heav'n appeerd,
From those deep throated Engins belcht, whose roar
Emboweld with outragious noise the Air,
And all her entrails tore, disgorging foule
Thir devilish glut, chaind Thunderbolts and Hail
Of Iron Globes, which on the Victor Host
Level'd, with such impetuous furie smote,
That whom they hit, none on thir feet might stand,
Though standing else as Rocks, but down they fell
By thousands, Angel on Arch-Angel rowl'd; [Paradise Lost, 6:582-94]

This is clearly expanded from Vida:

As when, in a bronze barrel, black sulphur burns
and the enclosed space magnifies the force of
fire, keen to escape, hissing, trapped, with only
the narrow bore’s channel to free itself
exploding all its consumable matter:—
the iron bullet flies in a flash of smoke
crashing out, loud enough to crack the sky:
and then: distant towers knocked flat! citadels,
bodies, weapons scattered; straight through the enemy! [Christiad, 2:205-13]

The brass cannons, the devilish gunpowder—itself a kind of distillation of diabolical rage and evil—the roar of the charge ‘wounding’ or ‘emboweling’ the sky, and finally the distant enemy skittled over: it’s the same order of events; all Milton does is expand upon it. This doesn’t seem often discussed in Milton studies, but it hasn’t been entirely ignored. Estelle Haan notes the comparison, and also with the epic simile Milton uses in PL 4:813f: ‘up he starts/Discoverd and surpriz'd. As when a spark/Lights on a heap of nitrous Powder, laid/Fit for the Tun som Magazin to store/Against a rumord Warr, the Smuttie graine/With sudden blaze diffus'd, inflames the Aire:/So started up in his own shape the Fiend.’ Haan is interested in the many neo-Latin poems published after the British Gunpowder Plot which troped anger (especially Catholic anger) as diabolical and gunpowder-explosive. [Phineas Fletcher, Locustae [1627] (ed Estelle Haan; Leuven 1996), xxxii]

[Next: lines 216-252]