[Previous: lines 73-104]
Joseph explains his family tree and history to Pilate.
Dixerat: ille igitur missa formidine cœpit: [105]------------
“Dicam equidem; nec, dux, tibi magna arcana silebo.
Sed, quando genus insedit cognoscere nostrum,
id primum; neque te suspensum ambage tenebo.
Quamvis res inopes opera ad fabrilia versum
exercent, tamen est mihi regum a stirpe propago, [110]
admotumque genus superis, clarique parentes.
Principio innumerae pater Abras gentis, et auctor
maximus ille tuas non, ut reor, effugit aures:
qui generi legesque tulit, moremque sacrorum.
Isacon hic dedit: Isacides Jacobus ab illo; [115]
bis senos qui mox proceres genuit, quibus omnis
nostra domos in bis senas gens secta tribusque est.
Hos inter pietate olim quàm major Iudas,
tam sese sobole egregia super extulit omnes;
Iudaeamque suo dixit de nomine terram. [120]
Hinc (licèt in medio series longissima patrum)
Davides ortus, regum pater, unde meorum
per bis septem exit genus actum ab origine reges.
Verùm longe aliud juveni genus: ille parentes
quamvis mortales mortalibus editus oris [125]
dignatur, tamen est Divo cœlestis origo,
estque Deo genitore satus, gaudetque parente,
Cui mare velivolum, cui tellus paret, et aether.
Illum aut em aereas in luminis edidit auras
nunquam mixta viro mulier; fœtaeque remansit [130]
virginitas, olim ut vates cecinere futurum.
Nam pater omnipotens fœcunda desuper aura
afflatam implevit; tuinuit divinitus alvus.
Quôd verô genitor vulgo sum creditus ipse;
haud ita res, mihique alma parens accredita tantùm, [135]
quicum animi posset curas durumque laborem
partiri; mox me, famae niveoque pudori
permetuens, eadcm dignata est nomine veri
coniugis immeritum, nec tali munere dignum.
“Haec erat, ut revocans rem cunctam ab origine pandam, [140]
Iudaeas inter virgo pulcherrima nymphas,
centum optata procis, Mariam dixere, parentum
unica progenies, urbe edita Nazaraea.
Ipsa autem, aeterno prœ virginitatis amore,
oderat et thalamos, et se sacraverat aris. [145]
Anna tamen grandaevaparens, haudnescia vatum,
plenaque venturi, è nata praeviderat olim
egregiam factis sobolem regemque futurum,
qui populos magnos magna ditione teneret:
id cœlo fixum esse, pios id prodere vates. [150]
Saepe illam in somnis monuit vox missa per auras
iungere connubio natam, generosque vocare;
iamque erat apta viro, iam nubilis: hactenus autem
distulerant Superûm monitis parere parentes;
cùm mediâ ecce iterum sublimes luce per auras [155]
vox audita: ‘Viro properate ô iungere natam.
Nec generi longé optandi; de sanguine vestro
quaerantur de more: omnis mora segnis abesto.’
“Continuô parvam vulgatur fama per urbem.
Tum consanguinei pulchrae spe conjugis omnes, [160]
conveniunt iuvenes: complentur virginis aedes.
Ipse etiam patri consanguinitate propinquus
accessi, quamvis aevi maturus, ut ipsi
aequaevo natae ob thalamos gratarer amico.
Stabant innumeri, forma atque aetatibus aequis [165]
florentes, cœlum cui munera tan ta pararet
Incerti; et sortem sibi quisque optabat amicam.”
After these words, he set fear aside and spoke: [105]------------
“I’ll tell you, lord, and reveal secrets to you.
And, since you wish to know my origins,
that first; I won’t keep you in any suspense.
Though poverty compels me to work the land
I am actually descended from a line [110]
of kings, a high race of famous ancestors.
The first of my line was Abraham, my nation’s
father, whose fame cannot have escaped your ears:
who founded my people, laws and sacred rites.
From him came Isaac: from Isaac, Jacob; [115]
from whose twelve sons our entire race descends,
and is divided into its twelve tribes.
The most notable of these was Judas, whose
noble sons lifted his house above the rest;
so it is that this land was called Judea. [120]
Then came (after many generations)
David, the father of kings: from his to mine
fourteen royal generations intervene.
“My son’s ancestry is quite other: though he
dignified us with a mortal birth in the [125]
lands of mortal men, his origin is celestial,
fathered by God, rejoicing in a parent
who rules the ship-thronged seas, and land and sky.
He was brought forth into the light from a
virgin mother; whose maidenhead remained [130]
even after this birth, as the prophets had foreseen.
The omnipotent Father breathed his aura
into her, miraculously filling her womb.
The common folk assume I am the father:
that’s not so. His dear mother was merely, [135]
entrusted to me, to help her hard labour
and care for her soul; afterwards though, concerned
for her honour and modesty, she did
honour unworthy me with the name of husband.
“So that you know everything from the beginning: [140]
She was most beautiful girl in Judea.
A hundred men courted her—Mary—the only
child of parents from the town of Nazareth.
But her true love was for her virginity,
so she despised marriage and loved religion. [145]
Anna, her elderly mother, knew the prophets,
and had herself foreseen that her daughter
would give birth to a man destined to be king
who would hold the great in his greater sway:
this was heaven’s will, as the prophets said. [150]
Often in her dreams she would hear a voice
telling her to call suitors and marry-off
her daughter—who was of marriageable age—
but she delayed obeying the divine command;
until, amazing! in the middle of the day [155]
a voice was heard: ‘give your child in marriage now!
A son-in-law is not far; your own bloodline
will provide him: do not delay this task!’
“At once this news ran through the small town.
All the young men of her lineage came to [160]
the house of this beautiful girl hoping to win her.
I also went there, as her father’s kin
(though I was old) to congratulate him
as an equal, on his daughter’s marriage.
Innumerable men stood about, young and [165]
flourishing, uncertain whom heaven would choose
and each hoping that fortune would smile on him.”
The Bible doesn’t name, or indeed mention, Mary’s mother; but the apocryphal Gospel of James (written perhaps around 150) identifies her as ‘Anna’, known today as ‘Saint Anne’. ‘In the West, the Gospel of James fell under a cloud in the fourth and fifth centuries,’ it seems, ‘when it was accused of “absurdities” by Jerome and condemned as untrustworthy by Pope Damasus I, Pope Innocent I, and Pope Gelasius I.’ But ‘In the Eastern church, the cult of Anne herself may go back as far as c. 550, when Justinian built a church in Constantinople in her honor.’ By the sixteenth-century, when Vida was writing, her place in the pantheon was settled.
One question is whether Anne, in giving birth to Mary, somehow did or did not pass on to her daughter humanity’s ‘original sin’. One theory was that though Anne and her husband conceived their child through sexual intercourse—which is, according to Augustine, how original sin is passed on—God intervened to make this particular conception ‘immaculate’, free from macula (blemish, stain or shame). People sometimes think this Catholic doctrine of ‘immaculate conception’ refers to the birth of sinless Jesus, but it doesn’t: it’s Mary’s birth to which it refers. Wikipedia’s entry on the ‘immaculate conception’ is full of fascinating stuff.
Mary's freedom from personal sin was affirmed in the 4th century, but Augustine's argument that original sin was transmitted through sex raised the question of whether she could also be free of the sin of Adam.[10] The English ecclesiastic and scholar Eadmer (c.1060-c.1126) reasoned that it was possible in view of God's omnipotence and appropriate in view of Mary's role as Mother of God: Potuit, decuit, fecit, “it was possible, it was fitting, therefore it was done;” Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), among others, objected that if Mary were free of original sin at her conception then she would have no need of redemption, making Christ superfluous; they were answered by Duns Scotus (1264-1308), who reasoned that her preservation from original sin was a redemption more perfect than that granted through Christ.‘It’s not sinful if you don’t enjoy it’ seems like a strange position to hold to me, but what do I know. Anyway, the matter was still being discussed during Vida’s lifetime; not dismissed out of hand (it was, it seems, regarded as a ‘pious opinion’ consistent with faith and Scripture) although the Council of Trent didn’t rule on it. It wasn’t until the 19th-century that a Papal Bull made it doctrinal. Vida doesn’t touch on the matter, here.
Nevertheless, it was not theological theory that initiated discussion of Mary's freedom from mankind's curse, but the celebration of her liturgy: in the eleventh century the celebration of her liturgy, for the popular feast of her conception brought forth the objection that as normal human conception is sinful, to celebrate Mary's conception was to celebrate a sinful event. Some held that no sin had occurred, for Anne had conceived Mary not through sex but by kissing her husband Joachim, and that Anne's father and mother had likewise been conceived, but St Bridget of Sweden (c.1303-1373) told how Mary herself had revealed to her in a vision that although Anne and Joachim conceived their daughter through sexual union, the act was sinless because free of sexual desire.
Apart from all that, what this passage says to me is that Vida's epic has a Thersites problem. What do I mean? Well the Iliad is filled with handsome, tall, powerfully-built aristocratic warriors and princes. Such people (and, of course, the gods) are the poem's entire dramatis personae. The one time somebody not noble, not an aristocrat, turns up the poet mocks him roundly:
Now the others sate them down and were stayed in their places, only there still kept chattering on Thersites of measureless speech, whose mind was full of great store of disorderly words, wherewith to utter revilings against the kings, idly, and in no orderly wise, but whatsoever he deemed would raise a laugh among the Argives. Evil-favoured was he beyond all men that came to Ilios: he was bandy-legged and lame in the one foot, and his two shoulders were rounded, stooping together over his chest, and above them his head was warped, and a scant stubble grew thereon. [Iliad 2:212-19; this is Murray's splendidly fruity 1924 Loeb translation]Thersites, addressing this conclave of his betters, sneers at Agamemnon and decries the whole war as stupid. Then nobel and aristocratic Odysseus creeps up and shuts him up: ‘and with his staff [he] smote his back and shoulders; and Thersites cowered down, and a big tear fell from him, and a bloody weal rose up on his back. Then he sate him down, and fear came upon him, and stung by pain with helpless looks he wiped away the tear.’ Take that, commoner!
This, though, just is epic. This is its mode: nobel warriors, princes, kings and gods. Iliad, Aeneid, Paradise Lost: all the same. But Vida has a problem. Thersites and the slaves in Odysseus's household in the Odyssey are the only prototypes of commoners in epic, and obviously he can't model Joseph on either of those. He could, perhaps, have tried to reconfigure his mode to make an epic of ordinary people, the humble carpenters and villagers of the Gospel; but he doesn't. Instead he leans hard on the ‘bloodline of David’ angle, and makes Joseph a nobleman, albeit a nobleman who has fallen on hard times and must now labour with his hands. It's awkward, and makes, I'd argue, a hash of something important about the story told by the New Testament: Jesus is not a patriarch, because he has come not to lead one particular tribe but for everyone. But there we are.
The image at the head of this post: a statue of Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary and Jesus in the Cathedral Museum of the Church of Santiago de Compostela.
[Next: lines 168-188]
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