Book 3, lines 505-540

[Previous: lines 465-504]

Joseph narrates. He has come to terms with his wife's perpetual virginity and divine pregnancy.

“Ex illo quanta immensum portenta per orbem           [505]
terruerint hominum mentes, praesagaque signa,
limina dum vitae omnipotens attingeret infans,
longa renarrare est mora. Iam tunc Caspia regna
responsis vatum horrebant: iam Nilus et omnis
Aegyptus trepidare, omnes orientis et urbes.               [510]
Vestri etiam audierant (si vera est fama) per oras
Ausonias, iamiam venturum lucis ad auras
invictum regem, cui passim cederet orbis
regnandus, qui se patria virtute potentem,
seque suumque genus sublimi inferret Olympo.             [515]

“His tandem certus signis ego, numinis instar
plenam utero supplex sponsam venerabar, et ultrò
parebam. Victum gravidae et divina ferebat
pocula de cœlo volucer puer: illum ego saepe
intrantem thalamum manifesto in lumine vidi.             [520]
Iamque optanti animo divini tempora partûs
expectabam ardens; sed spem mora iniqua trahebat;
et saepe haec cupido repetebam pectore mecum:
si modõ, si mihi cœlestis se ostendere coram
non fugiat puer ante obitus, quando omnia de se         [525]
rettulit ipsa mihi virgo pulcherrima vera.
Purpureos flores metite, et candentia plenâ
lilia ferte manu; venienti ad limina lucis
dona parate Deo, puerumque invisite regem.
O mihi si quoque tam longè suprema senectae             [530]
pars maneat, quantum valeam tua cernere facta,
sancte puer, cùm sublata formidine mundum
pacabis, patrioque Deus regnabis Olympo!
Tum pax alma colet terras, pietasque, fidesque,
quaeque labat nunc relligio; atque resurgere ubique    [535]
iustitiam in melius versus mirabitur orbis.
Tum ferus in falces curvas conflabitur ensis;
aureaque incipient mundo succedere secla.
Sic ego saepe moras mecum lenire solebam;
et magis usque animo mihi spes accensa vigebat.”       [540]

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“I could not list, here, all the many portents                  [505]
that alarmed men’s minds then, presaging signs
as the mighty infant approached birth’s threshold—
they were widely reported. Caspian realms
trembled at their oracles: the Nile and all
Egypt likewise, and all the cities of the east.                  [510]
I have even heard (if report is true) that
your Ausonian land would be lifted skyward
by an invincible king, born to rule the world
to whose mighty reign all mankind would yield;
With his father’s strength he’d raise us to heaven.           [515]

“These signs won me over at last, numinous
cues for me to venerate my pregnant wife, and so
I obeyed. The labouring maiden was supplied
with food brought by an angel: often he came
into her room in broad daylight—I saw.                           [520]
And now I looked forward to the divine birth
with eager expectation; impatience chafing hope,
reasoning thus with my excited heart:
‘I only hope that this heavenly child reveals
himself to me before I die, since it all                             [525]
was true—everything the lovely virgin said.
Pluck purple flowers, and fill your hands with
pure white lilies; gifts for when the boy-king
comes to the threshold of light. Oh! may I
only live long enough to see your great deeds,                [530]
old though I am now, as you bring peace and joy,
sacred child, nourishing the whole hungry world
and reign as a god with your Olympian father!
may you nurture the world’s peace, duty and faith,
restore faltering religion; the resurgence                           [535]
of justice will improve and amaze the world.
Then swords will be beaten into curved pruning-hooks;
and down the ages the earth will again be golden.’
So it was I found solace during the delay;
and in my heart my hope grew ever greater.”                   [540]

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‘Your Ausonian land’ in line 512 is Italy (‘yours’ because, as we may have forgotten, Joseph is addressing the whole of this enormous speech to Pilate, a Roman). Line 537’s tum ferus in falces curvas conflabitur ensis is based on the line from the end of Vergil’s Georgics [1:508] et curvae rigidum falces conflantur in ensem, ‘then swords will be forged into curved pruning-hooks’. The main referent here, of course, is Isaiah 2:4: ‘And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks’; Jerome’s Latin version of this draws, manifestly, on Vergil: et conflabunt gladios suos in vomeres et lanceas suas in falces. There are also several allusions here to Vergil’s fourth ‘messianic’ eclogue. It’s a bridging passage, really: the first half of Book 3 is concerned with the Annunciation, the second with the actual birth of Christ.

And so this portion of the Christiad draws to a close: from hereon the story moves to the Nativity. The rest of Book 3 is the birth of Christ, the massacre of the innocents and the flight into Egypt (Book 4 is the ministry of Jesus). So this might be the moment for me to pause and have a bit of a retrospective think about where I’ve gotten to, Vida-wise. Take a breather.

So: I enjoyed working through the first two Christiad books very much; but I have to say I’ve been enjoying Book 3 (or the half of it I’ve done so far) much less. There have been a some fun moments of kitsch intensity, to do with the glomming of Catholic spiritual ecstasy, rendered in a somatic explosion of gold and roses, onto the bare bones of the story. But overall the process has become (whisper it) rather dull. Why should I find it so?

I’m going to see if I can’t sidle up to an answer by invoking a straw-wo/man. To that end I posit a believer who, unambiguously and without any internal dissent, believes in the literal truth of the Bible. So far as this person is concerned there really was a man called Jesus, who lived in Judea in the early first century, and who really was born of a virgin, cured the sick and brought the dead back to life, was crucified and came back to life again. History, being true, is here yoked to religious faith, also considered true, although the two kinds of truth invoked are not, actually, the same thing. The one is a matter of externalities, data concerning which representations can be justified or falsified. The other is a matter of spiritual verity, which may not, and indeed (this is a matter of common observation) in fact often does not coincide with the former. I know I'm stating the obvious here: bear with me.

The point is that Vida is composing an epic, not holy writ. It’s art, and art can also be true (just as it can be false). The question is whether the way art can be ‘true’ is the same as, or related to—or perhaps quite distinct from—the way religion can be ‘true’. Napoleon Bonaparte was, as a matter of historical record, 5’2”. During the Napoleonic Wars British newspapers mocked his height and reputation for losing his temper, nicknaming ‘Little Boney in a strong fit’. Let’s imagine an epic poem celebrating his military victories. In this poem he is described as possessing the physique of Achilles.

Making war in a field in Brussels
He was six-foot-four and full of muscles.

It would not be quite right to describe this notional representation as a lie. The poet could, with some justification, argue that s/he is expressing the inner truth of Napoleon’s military prowess and genius, and merely projecting it onto the outward logic of the poem. This is one of the ways in which art makes its truth, after all. The historical truth of Arthur—who he was, whether he even existed—is a fascinating topic, but it’s a mode of truth that is separate from, and that therefore does not contradict, the artistic truth of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

Vida’s business is with the Christian story. Even the hardest-core of atheist is going to find it tricky to deny, given the (for its period) unusual richness of testimony and record, that a person who called himself Joshua bar Joseph, and who came to be called by others Jesus, historically existed. Nor can it reasonably be denied that he had a distinct and important influence on the people among whom he lived. If we press further, as to whether this Jesus ‘actually’ did all the things ascribed to him in the Bible—his miracles—the straightforward believer will say: ‘yes, these things actually happened’; and the atheist will say, ‘no, these things are impossible, and were most likely confected by his followers to bolster their claims that he wasn’t merely a political or cult leader but was actually the Son of God.’ It violates common sense to believe a man can magically generate food from nothing, walk on water or return from the dead, and it betrays an erroneous grasp of the mechanisms of mental illness to believe that schizophrenic people are possessed by literal devils.

OK: but actually, it seems to me that there is a lot of territory between these two positions, and that a good many believers (and, though it may seem counter-intuitive to say this, many unbelievers too) occupy it. So we might find ourselves admitting both a underlying basis of historicity to the Gospel stories whilst still considering Jesus’s birth from a virgin, his many miraculous acts and his ultimate return from death to be true according to a different criterion than historicity. To try and pin-down this lived experience of veracity—this Newmanesque ‘assent’—with specific terminology is liable to seem to belittle it, or else simply to miss its point. So we might say that Jesus’s miracles are true metaphorically rather than literally, or are true in the way that art is true. But I’m not sure either way of putting it is quite right, or quite captures the sense in which many people experience it.

I don’t mean to be vague, but I am trying to put my finger on something that may be important. Return to my straw-wo/man straightforward believer. I ask him/her: do you believe things actually happened the way Vida says they did, in his Christiad? The answer, presumably, will be: well, no, not exactly, or ‘yes and no’, for two reasons. One is that Vida, clearly, is using artistic licence in re-presenting these events; so although the kernel is ‘true’ the specifics are often unambiguously figments of Vida’s imagination. This is neither arbitrary (Vida, we can assume, thought long and hard about which details to include) nor disingenuous, although the second reason why the ‘truthfulness’ of Christiad might be considered dubitable is that Vida cannot help, any more than you could or I could, giving his telling a spin. We could call this latter sectarian, or ideological, or simply point to that our own framing of a story is inescapably ours. But nonetheless the Christiad is a Catholic epic by a man proud to be a Catholic, and that might impact its theological veracity if you happen not to be a Catholic yourself, or are a Catholic of a different stripe to him.

Another way of putting this would be to front-load ‘story’. The truth is always a story; or the human truth always is (mathematical truths and proofs and the like may differ). A lie is also a story of course, but in both cases a story is a way of saying something. A myth is a story. Here Patrick Parrinder summarises Robert Graves' unfashionable (I suppose) but I think still interesting view:

Mythology was once defined by Robert Graves as the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student’s experience that he cannot believe them to be true. Mythical stories are disturbing and invite disbelief; but our own myths are so taken for granted as to be largely invisible. Conventional encyclopedias of mythology exclude Biblical narratives.

One thing I like about this is the way it foregrounds familiarity. Once a myth becomes common enough currency, familiar enough to enough people, then it will slide, Jedi-like, over the dividing line between fiction and lived-experience. And we can turn it around and say: ‘my religious faith is belief in a myth I happen to consider true’, without needing to get tangled up with all the kerfuffle about the precise valence of truth invoked. But isn't this actually a kind of inattentiveness? And shouldn't attentiveness be a core part of faith? So it is that Pilate’s notorious quid est veritas? comes back to haunt us.

This, clearly insufficient and ineloquent though I’m being here, might be a way of framing my dissatisfaction with Vida’s mythmaking in this book of his epic. It’s personal to me, of course but might be worth notating nonetheless.

Vida is making a story of Christ’s life. Indeed, he is, quite specifically, make an epic story of that life, recasting a range of episodes from the childhood and adult mission of Jesus into Vergilian Latin hexameters and epic poses. Now it might be that we find a radical mismatch right here, between prose gospels written in a deliberately simple koine Greek narrating the lives of humble people on the one hand, and this elevated, dignified and noble (indeed: aristocratic and royal) idiom of epic on the other. But this objection, whilst not negligible, has the disadvantage of ruling the Christiad out of bounds from the get-go, so I’m going to park that for a moment with the observation that one need not be a believing Christian to find elevation, dignity and nobility at the heart of the gospels. [This is a bit of a cheat, though; because what Homer and Vergil considered ‘nobility’ was, very specifically, that which was overturned by Jesus’s ministry: the last were placed first, and the world of epic grandeur was turned upside down. But anyway].

My problem, I think, is otherwise. Let me put it like this. I, an atheist, look at the story of Jesus’s life and see a probable historical narrative and an improbable miraculous narrative braided together. The former speaks to the socio-cultural situation of first-century Judea, a place often in political foment, thronged with men claiming to be Jewish messiahs or revolutionary leaders. All the aspects of the purely material story of Jesus rings true in terms of its likeliness of fit to this historical context. What of the latter?

Here’s what I think. The miraculous narrative of Jesus, the one braided into the socio-realistic narrative, riffs on three main iterations of ‘the miracle’. One has to do with Jesus’s miraculous birth. Now, if what’s miraculous here is that a virgin has conceived and given birth without in any way compromising her virginity, then I’m not sure what this myth is saying—or perhaps, I can see what it’s saying (‘virginity is supremely good, and by extension sexual intercourse is bad’), but I can’t see that this is veracious. Virginity may or may not be a valuable thing for individual people (that is and should be up to them) but virginity per se is not supremely good and consensual sexual intercourse is not bad, actually. But come at it another way: if what this part of the story is saying is ‘pregnancy is wonderful in a way that it’s hard to put into words’, then I think I begin to understand why this story frames it via the miraculous. It is amazing, after all: the decaying genetic material of two old humans uniting via sperm and egg somehow, in ways geneticists don’t wholly understand, to produce brand new fresh genetic material—agedness on the path to decrepitude and death pulling, like a conjurer, this brilliant newness of life from its metaphorical hat. To be clear: geneticists of course understand a great deal about conception nowadays; but I'm not sure they are able to say how old, decaying genetic material somehow becomes fresh new genetic material. But there it is. It’s how we avoid death, it’s how the species survives, and it's miraculous in more than just a rhetorical sense. It is something divine, in the sense of undying, touching the mortal flesh of humanity. And that’s something it makes sense, I’d suggest, to think about under the logic of the miraculous.

The second set of iterations on ‘miraculousness’ in the Gospel story comes from adult Jesus’s ministry, and are mostly concerned with health and community: healing people physically and mentally afflicted (even to the point, like Asclepius, of ‘curing’ death) and providing people with sustenance as they gather together, at a marriage feast or in the open air. These, I think, are two related versions of the same thing. This story, this myth, is saying that individual and collective health can be made out of individual and collective disease. The miraculous aspect here is its anti-entropic force, the way it contradicts that sense we all have that, actually, Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again, that’s just not the way the universe rolls. Again: this story seems to me powerful and resonant and can be rightfully—veraciously, we could say—considered under the rubric of ‘the miracle.’ Because, after all community is capable of amazing things, and healing is possible, and love turns out to be all you need to trump entropy.

The third kind of miracle in this story, of course, is Christ’s resurrection. This is saying something that is, really, the most remarkable out of all the three, although this is also where I, personally, strain to find the level at which the myth is veracious. This story, this myth, is saying ‘you don’t have to die’ and, I’m sorry to say, I think that’s untrue. Lots of people disagree with me on this, of course. So it goes.

Anyway this is where I get to my long-delayed point. Because this (personal, I confess) reading of the three push-points where the miraculous narrative of the gospel acquires real purchase on the being-in-the-world of human beings is different in emphasis to the way Vida ‘reads’ miracles, I think. It’s more than just the fact that he, presumably, considered Jesus’s miracles historically true as well as true in the mythic sense I’ve been trying to sketch here. It’s also that they seem to have meant different things to him than me. The radical, beautiful ordinariness of Christ’s ministry, its quasi-novelistic moments of mimetic realness where you get this sense of the travels and actions and interactions of an ordinary (but actually extraordinary) man—this mode of saying that we all, in our ways, are ordinary-but-actually-extraordinary … all that gets deemphasised, stifled, in Vida’s account, by the way he portrays his Jesus as, in effect, a seven-foot-tall Napoleon. Everybody remarks on his more-than-human good looks and bearing, the inherent nobility of his gaze and voice and so on. When Pilate meets him the Roman falls instantly under the power of his divine spell.

I can see why Vida goes this way, especially give the idiom in which he is working, but it seems to me to miss the point of the Gospels, even to mendacity. So, in Book 3, the account of the miraculous birth is disproportionately given over to these questions of virginity and conception as spiritual bliss. This has become a politicised question nowadays, I suppose: and pegged now not just to particularities of Catholic doctrine, but to me the idea that life begins at conception is both a wrong one and, actually, a cruel one. Since we got together, my wife has been pregnant three times and given birth to two beautiful, clever, sensitive children. In between she miscarried a pregnancy, and had to spend a couple of nights in hospital. It was very upsetting, for both of us but of course more so for her. Women miscarry a lot; more fertilised eggs fail to implant than successfully do, and especially in the case of a woman who really wants a child, or for whom this happens repeatedly, it can be devastating, which is where weighing-in would become cruel. Then again, it can also be little more than a heavy period, in which case insisting the woman concerned should go into mourning seems to me cruel in a different way. It seems to me, I suppose, that insisting on conception as the really important thing makes the mistake of conflating orgasm (very pleasant, don’t get me wrong) with importance. Literally everything that happens after conception is more important than conception, the whole joyful or perhaps fraught or debilitating experience of pregnancy itself, which then steps up hugely in importance and wonder (and worry) when the baby is actually born. My wife’s two pregnancies and the births of our kids, are easily the most profound experiences of my life. It’s a cliché to say this I know, but that doesn’t stop it being true. And if I apply the word miraculous to it I don’t mean it as shopworn hyperbole, or mere rhetoric, even if I also don’t mean that I believe a supernatural spiritual entity with volition and emotion and cosmic powers put forth a tentacle of numinousness into our lives. But, see, I don’t think the reality of things is either/or on this: neither ‘a merely mundane unzipping and rezipping of DNA strands’ on the one hand, nor a ‘literally divine magic!’ on the other. Somewhere between. And more to the point, my experience has been that the wonder grew as the baby grew, until birth, which was the most wonderful part of the whole thing so far. I’m not sure Vida’s idea of what the miracle is maps that way; instead he frontloads the start of the process. But that's the wrong way round. Rachel’s miscarriage was about halfway through the pregnancy in which it occurred, and it was grievous; but it would be ridiculous and, actually, insulting to suggest that it upset us in anything like the way the death (I literally shudder to even write these words) of one of our kids would. Because: of course not.

So I suppose what I’m saying, at, I know, excessive length is that there seems to me to be something … off, I suppose, about Vida’s larger pattern. He is putting the emphasis on the parts of the miraculous that are least important and ignoring the parts that speak most eloquently to our actual being-in-the-world, at least as I have found it to be. Your mileage, it goes without saying, may vary.

I have gone on long enough I know, but I’ll wrap-up with one more personal (perhaps too personal) anecdote. So: I read Endo’s great 1966 novel Silence a while back, and admired it without being particularly moved by it. When I heard that Scorsese had made a movie out of it, I was intrigued, although not so intrigued that I actively sought the movie out. I blogged some thoughts about the novel, here, actually.

Eventually, though, the movie came on TV and I watched it. Through most of it I found myself, again, admiring rather than being moved by, or even particularly liking, the film. It is long, probably too long, and in places gets rather clogged by its own slowness and by the slightly self-consciously ‘actingly’ acting of the principals ... not Aslan, maybe; but Spiderman and Kylo Ren press a little too heavily on the brooding-handsome pedal, I think. I know they both went terribly method for these roles, fasting and undergoing months of Jesuit training and so on, but sometimes less is more. Plus, of course, me not being a Catholic means that the central theological dilemma in the movie acquires, however cannily Scorsese adds vividness and heft to his dramatization, something of the patina of an abstracted Trolley Problem. But I stayed with the movie and watched it to the end. Neeson and Garfield's characters renounce their faith and become Japanese: speaking the language, wearing the clothes, worshipping according to the Japanese style and married to Japanese women. They spend their time helping the emperor root-out Christianity from Japan, a kind of reverse-Saint-Paul. Garfield's character grows old and dies and then, right at the end, I found myself crying. 

Nobody was more surprised than I was at this development, believe me. Understand this: I almost never cry. I’m an Englishman, and pretty emotionally remote even for one of my kind. Honestly, I can count on the fingers of one hand (thumb not included) the number of times I’ve cried this century. But there I was. I was fine right up until the moment Garfield’s character’s body was put in its wooden tub and cremated, and the camera moved inside and panned down to his hand such that we could see that he was clutching in his fist the shonky little wooden crucifix he’d been given when he first arrived in Japan. He must have kept this, despite all the dangers of so doing, and his Japanese wife must have placed it in his hand prior to cremation. It’s not clear to me why this moved me so suddenly and so sharply, but it did (and, credit to Scorsese, I don’t think it would have worked, as a cinematic reveal, if the film itself hadn’t been so long and so often gruelling to watch). It caught me by surprise, certainly (as I say; I'd read the novel on which the movie is based, but this final moment is one Scorsese added; it's not in the novel). At any rate, there I was: tears streaming down my face. Why?

There’s a myth here, and it’s an individual one: that, like all of us—although to a more extreme degree than most—this person suffered vicissitudes and reverses, and was forced into public humiliations and compromises that ended up, as these things will, remaking him from the outside in. But, to the last, he kept some part of himself clear of all that, literally clutched in his hand—it seemed to me genuinely moving. It’s about faith, but not necessarily about Catholic faith, Christian faith or even religious faith more broadly, I think. But it’s a powerful myth because it touches something true. Or it did for me. The thing is: I don't find this in Vida's epic. His Jesus is effortlessly divine, instantly recognisable as a god, superhuman. Vida is better placed to talk about this than I, an infidel, but I have to say: that seems to me to miss something absolutely central to the story, the myth, the New Testament is telling, something that Endo (also a believer) understands in a profound way.

This has taken me a long way round the houses, I know; and into rather more personal territories than I’m entirely comfortable divulging if I’m honest. I’m buffered, I suppose, by the knowledge that nobody reads this blog, and that those few who might check it out would be unlikely to scroll through so many unleavened blocks of prose. Enough. Or too much!

The image at the head of this post is The Pregnant Virgin from Németújvár (painter unknown, c.1410; currently in the Hungarian National Gallery).

[Next: lines 541-594]