[Previous: lines 812-851]
Jesus has been arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and dragged away. His disciples scatter. Now read on!
Hœc, pater omnipotens superûm regnator Olympo------------
tam lentus cernis, nec cœlo tartara misces?
Ecquando horrificum dextra iaculabere fulmen,
si nunc immoto facies innubila mundo est? [855]
Fœdere iam rupto, rerum confusa laborent
atque repente elementa ruant, ruat arduus aether.
Cur tua dextra vacat? cur non face terra trisulca
iam fumat? quos flamma vorax servatur in usus?
Non genus humanum, non tanti regia cœli [860]
alitibus supplenda choris, non aurea gens, quae
mox hinc se tollet pietate insignis ad astra.
Ne nostri tanto te cura incendat amore,
iactari ut tali patiaris turbine natum
unigenam, desertum, inopem, atque extrema ferentem. [865]
Diffugere metu comites, sylvisque teguntur;
spumiferi ut suis adventu saevique leonis
semianimes: passim insequitur ferus hostis euntes.
Aspiceres hune iam captum, iam veste relicta
elapsum manibus rapido petere ardua cursu; [870]
illum speluncas, et, sicubi, operta subire
per sylvam loca, saxorumque in fornice condi.
Nec mora, nec requies: cursu nemora avia fervent,
et vasto intonsi colles clamore resultant.
Great Father, ruler of Olympus’ angels—how------------
can you see this, and not crash heaven into hell?
How stop your right hand from hurling thunderbolts?
How leave the cloudless world so unshaken? [855]
Let the order of things collapse in on itself
and all the elements swirl wild together!
What stays your hand? Why is the earth not scorched
with forked lightning? Why stop your devouring flames?
Spare not the human race, nor heaven’s realm [860]
its high choirs, nor the golden race, though its
famed piety will raise it henceforth to the stars!
Though you care for us, it cannot be such warmth
as could permit such storms of suffering for
your only begotten—alone, in pain, near death! [865]
In fear the disciples scattered to the woods
as if chased by boar or savage lion, half-
dead with fear. Their enemies pursued them.
You could see one of them, cornered, throw off his
clothes and slip away, hurrying to the wilds. [870]
Another hid in caves. Others took refuge
in nearby forests or under rock arches.
No rest, no respite: activity filled the thickets
and the leafy hills re-echoed with clamour.
Line 873’s nec mora, nec requies is Vergil: ‘neither delay nor rest’ [Aeneid 12:553], and line 866, diffugere metu comites, sylvisque teguntur (‘the comrades scattered and hid themselves in the woods’) riffs on Aeneid 4:123: diffugient comites et nocte teguntur opaca, ‘the comrades will scatter and hide themselves in the gloom of night’.
Of the one disciple stripping-off to avoid capture Gardner says ‘this detail is based on a curious anecdote in Mark 14:51-52.’ And so it is:
And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.It's only in Mark, this detail; the other evangelists don't mention it. The word the King James committee translate as ‘linen cloth’ is σινδών. According to William E Flippin jr ‘a sindon was a linen cloth used for clothing or burial. The word is used exactly four times in the Christian Testament: in the three synoptic gospels to describe the cloth in which Jesus’ dead body was wrapped for burial—and here.’ To Flippin this suggests that ‘Mark’s intention as a Gospel writer’ was that ‘this man dressed in a white robe had a secret message — a prevalent theme in Mark of the rebirth of humanity that was naked in sin.’ I’m not sure whether Vida would have had this sense of the significance of this moment; in the poem it works—as many details in the Gospels do—to add a sense of quasi-novelistic verisimilitude. It works particularly well, I think, sandwiched between the formulaic lines 873-74, confected out of scraps of Vergil, and the earlier rather grandstanding performative outrage of all those rhetorical questions in lines 852-865.
So far as those earlier questions go ... I’ve been trying to think why I find Vida’s rhetoric here so hard to swallow. It’s not that it’s all so over the top (although, you know: it clearly is over the top). And it’s not, I think, that there’s something unappetisingly masochistic about it: ‘how can you let human beings, like me, do this to your son! You should punish humanity, myself included! Throw the book at us!’ and so on. Take both those things as read; there’s something else, something rather stranger, going on here, I'd say.
One way in might be to consider Adam Phillips’s essay ‘On Getting Away With It’ (in his collection Missing Out: in Praise of the Unlived Life, 2012). Phillips is good in this on the combination of elation and guilt that accompanies that phrase. It’s not that the person who ‘gets away with it’ (let’s say, a crime) is an amoralist, since the structures of morality and authority are needful for his sense of release. In an intriguing passage Phillips discusses the applicability of the phrase to divine power.
The reason that believers don’t think of God as “getting away with it” is that the phrase itself implies the existence of a higher authority. If it means breaking the rules with impunity—eluding the expected consequences, the usual constraints—it also acknowledges that there are rules. It pays tribute to the fact that we are under surveillance, that somebody is keeping their eye on us, that we are not masters in our own houses; that we are, in that ambiguous phrase, “being looked after”. Which is why, as we shall seem getting away with it is among our most confounding experiences. [Phillips, 86-7]This passage shone a strange light on this episode in Vida’s epic for me, and indeed on the passion story more generally. The normal case of somebody “getting away with it” would be: you commit a crime, but manage to get through undetected and unpunished. But not only does the phrase not apply to God (as Phillips says), the whole passion story is a kind of alarming inversion of God, in his figuration as justice. A summary of the passion might be: Christ doesn’t commit a crime, but nonetheless cannot get through undetected and unpunished. Indeed we’re the criminals, here: we’re the ones who commit this crime. And yet not only do we ‘get away with it’, we are prodigiously rewarded for it—by crucifying Christ we obtain divine grace, escape Hell and achieve at least the possibility of heaven. When you think of it like that, there’s a monstrous aspect to it, a catastrophic imbalance of crime and punishment. Vida’s outrage is, I think, a reflection of that. He invokes the wrath of God—more than invokes it, yearns for it, begs for it to be directed upon him and his—in order to reassure himself that there still is a moral universe. As Phillips goes on to say:
When you get away with it—let’s call the “it”, for the sake of argument, a crime, even though “getting away with it” can change its status—something about the higher authority has been exposed; its weakness, its fallibility, its capacity for oversight, certainly its omnipotence; and so something about your relationship to this authority has changed—you have, for example, gone from taking it for granted to testing its reach. What has been recovered, or discovered, is not in actuality your freedom, but your release. [Phillips, 88]The content of Vida’s raft of rhetorical questions is in a way straightforward enough, and in one sense the tone of this passage relates to this content. But the extremity of tone here points at something less conscious, an unacknowledged fear that humanity ‘getting away with’ killing God—and indeed being rewarded for killing God—releases us from the security of God’s authority so fully as to, in effect, negate it. Anything, even the annihilation of humankind by divine thunderbolts, would be better than that! And there he goes, in the illustration at the top of this post: streaking off, naked, getting away without it (the grave linen symbolising our mortality) and very much getting away with it too.
[Next: lines 875-917]
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