Book 2, lines 918-963

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As Jesus is being tried by the Sanhedrin, Peter lurks outside. Now read on!

Interea casu Petrus perculsus iniquo
prosequitur moerens, longeque observat Amicum.
Iamque sub ingentis devenerat atria templi,                        [920]
tecta sacerdotis magni , solusque sedebat,
tristis , inops animi ante fores nocturnur apertas.
Olli serva, domus cui curae janua herilis,
id quod erat rata, “Tune etiam fugis,” inquit, “et isti
iunctus eras scelerum consors, ideoque per umbras            [925]
explorator ades, quando omnia nocte quiescunt?”
Diriguit Petrus ad vocem formidine turpi.
Oblitusque sut est, (quae vitae tanta cupido?)
Nec iam scit subita turbatus imagine rerum
quid faciat, quo se vertat, quas advocet artes.                    [930]
Qualis ubi dulci virgo decepta sopore
parvula, quam mater campis ignara reliquit
in solis, abeunte die sub tecta revertens,
confestim rupto circumtulit humida somno
lumina, nec comites, nec matrem conspicit usquam,            [935]
sed loca sola metu videt exanimata, viarumque
immemor, atque horrere nigra circum omnia nocte.

Talis erat miser ille animo confusus, et haerens.
At cari nomen tandem abiuravit amici,
pro quo sponte neci modo se devoverat ardens.                   [940]
Quinetiam, quo se tegeret, succedere tecto
hostili tulit, et famulis se immiscuit amens.
Nec latuit tamen: illum omnes inimica tueri
suspectum, et latebras verbis urgere foventem:
terque adeô obiectum nomen patriamque magistri               [945]
audierat; ficto ter dissimulaverat ore;
cùm matutino mediae iam noctis abactae
edebant cantu cristatae signa volucres,
auroram in tectis solitae acri voce vocare.
Tum monitus verborum, heros quae extrema canebat,          [950]
ingemuit, rupitque imo suspiria corde;
et penitus duris tristi dolor ossibus arsit.
Tum sese miser incusans turpemque timorem,
erepsit furtim foribus, solusque per urbem
totam illam ingemuit, somni sine munere, noctem,               [955]
menti caniciem demissam in pectora vellens.
Quin illum hanc perhibent mox semper flèsse sub horam
admissi memorem, dum vixit: eum aethera pandens
saepe oriens solis saepe ater vesper in antris
invenit luctu indulgentem, eademque querentem,                 [960]
dum nulla admittit mœsto solatia ampri.
Deserti subeunt monita usque novissima regis,
ac se perculsum muliebri voce recursat.

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

Meanwhile Peter, appalled at such wickedness,
weeping, stood watching his friend from a distance.
He waited by the entrance to the great temple                    [920]
where the high-priest dwelt, sitting alone in his
sorrow, spending a hopeless, desperate night.
A servant girl guarding her masters house
knew what he was: “You’re on the run?” she said.
“Fleeing the punishments of your partner-in-crime?          [925]
Lurking in the shadows while the world sleeps!”
At her voice, Peter went rigid with fear,
terrified (why was he so greedy of life?)
thrown into confusion, without knowing
what to do, where to go, what trick to play.                        [930]
He was like a sleepy little girl, left
in the fields by mistake when her mother
goes home at the end of her working day,
waking-up suddenly and looking around
panicked, seeing neither friends nor her mother,                [935]
but only the deserted fields, the unknown
roads, and all the horrors of encroaching night.

That's how scared he was, his mind wavering.
And soon enough he abandoned his friend’s name
for whom only hours before he’d vowed to die.                [940]
He even tried to hide in his enemy’s house
foolishly mixing with the servants: but
he could not hide. All eyes were on him, everyone
glowered angrily as he passed, spoke harshly:
three times he heard his leader’s name and country          [945]
flung at him; three times he dissimulated;
until half the night was gone and morning coming
as signalled by the songs of the crested birds
calling lustily for the dawn from the rooftops.
Then, remembering the hero’s last words,                         [950]
he groaned, and deep sigh escaped his breast.
He was so saddened his very bones ached.
This miserable man rebuked himself for
his cowardice, left the house and crept out
alone, unsleeping in that night-time city,                           [955]
weeping and wrenching at his long grey beard.
Indeed, it’s said ever after, at that hour
he’d cry in memory of what he’d done:
often dawn, or darkening vespers, found him
indulging his grief, lamenting his actions,                         [960]
and allowing himself no consolation.
He remembered he had deserted his king,
and that he had been laid low by a woman’s voice.

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Peter’s cowardice is an interesting business, isn’t it? The gospels here display—once again—the effectively novelistic touch that Frank Kermode is so good on. There's the psychological verisimilitude of it for one thing: that the man quickest with his sword, the man full of bluster and bravado, is the one whose courage crumbles first. Vida’s treatment adds to the specific details of the Gospel account first a rather contrived epic simile, in which beardy old Peter is likened to a tiny girl abandoned in a field; and then an elaborate coda stressing his remorse. We can certainly intuit his remorse from the Biblical account, and both Matthew 26:75 and Luke 22:62 conclude their account of the episode with the same verse: ‘And he went outside and wept bitterly.’ But better, in an Auerbachian sense, is John's version of this incident:

Then saith the damsel that kept the door unto Peter, Art not thou also one of this man's disciples? He saith, I am not.

And the servants and officers stood there, who had made a fire of coals; for it was cold: and they warmed themselves: and Peter stood with them, and warmed himself … And Simon Peter stood and warmed himself. They said therefore unto him, Art not thou also one of his disciples? He denied it, and said, I am not.

One of the servants of the high priest, being his kinsman whose ear Peter cut off, saith, Did not I see thee in the garden with him? Peter then denied again: and immediately the cock crew. [John 18: 17-27]

That leaves us, very effectively, in an ambiguous place with respect to Peter's state of mind at this moment. By referring to Peter’s denial without actually quoting his words, Vida misses the Vulgate’s nicely-judged, repeated non sum: at once ‘I am not the man’ and the theologically performative ‘I negate my being, I un-am myself’. To deny Christ is to choose to cut yourself off from God, which is a kind of radical de-humanising of self. That nothing-ing of a person is captured better by the blank abruptness of John's telling than Matthew or Luke's deictic final line.

Otherwise this very famous episode in the passion narrative crystallises something crucial but, perhaps, not often unpacked, about Christian revelation. Think how much cowardice is woven into these narratives. This is true to a curious degree, really: you might think the early Christians would edit these kinds of episode out, since they don’t portray their founders and holy men in a very good light. Peter, here, is a coward; Thomas doubts; Judas is too much of a coward to live with what he has done; even Christ has his moment in the garden, begging his father to let the cup pass. Then there’s Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of the whole affair: cowardliness wearing its official face. The whole narrative could be taken as variations on the theme of cowardice.

In Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita—I mean, in the Yeshua-Pilate 1st-century Judea portion of the novel, not the modern-day Moscow portion—Arthanius reports back to Pilate on the crucifixion. It is, in many ways, the moral core of the novel. The only words Arthanius reports are Yeshua's insistence that he ‘regarded cowardice as one of the worst human sins’.

Bulgakov understood that, just as individual cowardice corrodes the soul, so a regime like Stalinism could only be erected on the collective cowardice of a people. But then again, isn’t cowardice the most human of reactions? The trembling lamb rather than the lion. It’s what humanises the pet dog, and differentiates him from the fighting mastiff. It is no coincidence that the political ideology that most ostentatiously valorises the courage of the warrior of the ethical foundation of life—fascism—is also the most inhumane, the most murderous and cruel. As against that standard reading of Master and Margarita as a simple condemnation of cowardice, Craig Raine proposes a more nuanced approach:

While the central subject of the novel is indeed cowardice, Bulgakov’s treatment of this theme is more complicated than this summary condemnation might imply. Indubitably, Bulgakov had sympathy for Pilate, whatever his shortcomings. This shines through the narrative … [He] is a man to understand and empathise with the imperfect Procurator of Judea—as well as with the imperfect, flinching, yet finally brave Yeshua, whose remark about cowardice was meant to apply to himself as he underwent the ordeal of crucifixion. In the egotism of his guilt, Pilate annexes it as a reference to himself. [Raine, In Defence of T S Eliot (2000), 199]

In 1934 Bulgakov was so terrified of arrest he was unable to leave his house alone. He stood up to tyranny, not least in writing this novel, and there are plenty of instances of moral and actual courage in his lifestory; but ‘in the end he was drive to write a play Batum, which eulogized the early life of Stalin. Pure cowardice? Hardly.’ Raine’s point is that Bulgakov had to earn a living, but there’s a larger logic that ‘pure cowardice’ is almost a contradiction in terms. In Bulgakov’s novel, Raine notes, ‘references to the Devil, Faust and Mephistopheles abound. Why? Because Bulgakov’s life was one long terrorized pact with the Devil.’

In Russia, in the thirties, it could not have been otherwise, and there is real moral courage in recognizing the true facts of life—just as there is courage in making one’s own cowardice the subject and centre of a novel which, if it survived, Bulgakov must have known, would keep his name alive for ever and also the personal shame encoded there.

We revert, I suppose, to the platitude that real courage is grounded in cowardice. Bravery is not a matter of never being scared—that’s bravado, or indeed psychosis. Bravery is being scared and going ahead anyway. Of the various theological paradoxes in the NT, productive of so much earnest debate and discussion, this of erecting a new religion on a foundation of cowardice seems to me one of the most interesting.

The image at the head of this post is The Denial of St Peter by Gerard van Honthorst (1622-1624)

[Next: lines 964-1001]