[Previous: lines 871-891]
Joseph narrates. He, Mary and Jesus have been living in Egypt to evade Herod's fury; but now Herod is dead.
“Ipse iterum in somnis divina voce coactus------------
linquere monstriferi septemflua flumina Nili,
in patriam redeo, atque memor vestigia retro
observata legens pignus cum matre reduco. [895]
Forsitan et puero fuerit quæ cura requiris,
quæ mens, an virtus illi maturior ævo;
ecquid non puerile annis puerilibus ausus.
Si tibi nunc, quæcunque olim admiranda notavi,
primævo dum flore virens adolesceret ætas, [900]
enumerare vacet; me vox priùs ipsa relinquat
defessum, atque diem clauso nox condat Olympo.
Nam quoties dictis tener haud mortalibus ambos
terruit? aut quoties sanctos expavimus ignes,
flammarumque globos, et terrificos fulgores, [905]
sæpe quibus visus puer est ardere nitentem
cæsariem, cæli dum splendet luce corusca?
Nec referam quoties Genitorem audivimus illum
affari solum, arcanasque expromere voces.
Alma parens, tenues arguto pectine telas [910]
percurrens, sæpe humana sub imagine coetus
coelituum tectum intrantes exterrita vidit
blandiri puero, et pictis colludere plumis,
aut violis tegere, et nimbo vestire rosarum.
Nos tamen interea custodes ille vereri [915]
summissus, caræ et mandata facessere matris,
nostraque; et implebat veri Genitoris amorem,
dum membris habilis vigor, et vis firma veniret.”
“Once more a divine voice visited my dreams------------
telling me to leave the seven-sourced wondrous Nile
for my homeland, back up the remembered path,
still watchful, returning with my wife and son. [895]
Perhaps you wish to ask me about the youth:
what was on his mind, as he grew up, or how
he managed the tender years of childhood.
If I told you all the amazing things he did
during the first flower of his adolescence— [900]
to list them all—I would wear out my voice
in speaking, and dark night would hide Olympus!
How often he astonished us with words wise
beyond his years! How often sacred flames,
globes of fire and terrifying flashes [905]
would blaze brightly about the child before us
his hair brightening with heaven’s shining light!
I won’t say how often we overheard him
speak to his Father in their secret language.
Often his mother, weaving at her loom, [910]
saw great groups of angels in human form—
terrifying!—flocking into the house to
amuse child with their painted wings, or pour
down on him a cloud of violets and roses.
Us, his guardians, he treated with respect [915]
and humility, obeyed his dear mother,
(and me!) manifesting his Father’s love,
in the way his limbs took on a more mature strength.
Vida the storyteller has a problem at this point in his narrative. Of the time between Jesus as a baby and Jesus as a man of about 30 years of age engaged on his ministry, the NT tells us nothing substantive. Luke 2:40 says that ‘the Child grew and became strong in spirit, filled with wisdom; and the grace of God was upon Him’, and a little later repeats the sentiment (‘Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men’ Luke 2:52) but that’s not much to go on. What else?
Christians have generally taken the statement in Mark 6:3 referring to Jesus as ‘Is not this the carpenter...?’ as an indication that before the age of 30 Jesus had been working as a carpenter. The tone of the passage leading to the question ‘Is not this the carpenter?’ suggests familiarity with Jesus in the area, reinforcing that he had been generally seen as a carpenter in the gospel account before the start of his ministry. Matthew 13:55 poses the question as "Is not this the carpenter's son?" suggesting that the profession tektōn had been a family business and Jesus was engaged in it before starting his preaching and ministry in the gospel accounts.Millais’ wonderful ‘Christ in the House of His Parents’ (1849–50), sometimes known as ‘The Carpenter’s Shop’, is one way of apprehending this implied narrative: typologically looking forward to the passion but resolutely grounded in a sense of mimetic verisimilitude—this latter was so shocking to the painting’s initial audience that it caused a great scandal. It’s now in the Tate, and there it is at the head of this post. Another way of filling the gap would be to go back to one of the apocryphal ‘infancy gospels’, written (we have to presume) precisely to flesh out the NT’s narrative void. These are full of extravagant and often bizarre miracles. Take, for instance, the 2nd-century ‘Infancy Gospel of Thomas’:
The text describes the life of the child Jesus, with fanciful, and sometimes malevolent, supernatural events, comparable to the trickster nature of the god-child in many Greek myths. One of the episodes involves Jesus making clay birds, which he then proceeds to bring to life, an act also attributed to Jesus in Quran 5:110 … In another episode, a child disperses water that Jesus has collected. Jesus kills this first child, when at age one he curses a boy, which causes the child's body to wither into a corpse. Later, Jesus kills another child when Jesus curses him when he apparently accidentally bumps into Jesus, throws a stone at Jesus, or punches Jesus (depending on the translation). When Joseph and Mary's neighbours complain, they are miraculously struck blind by Jesus. Jesus then starts receiving lessons, but arrogantly tries to teach the teacher instead, upsetting the teacher who suspects supernatural origins. Jesus is amused by this suspicion, which he confirms, and revokes all his earlier apparent cruelty. Subsequently, he resurrects a friend who is killed when he falls from a roof and heals another who cuts his foot with an axe. After various other demonstrations of supernatural ability, new teachers try to teach Jesus, but he proceeds to explain the law to them, instead. Another set of miracles is mentioned in which Jesus heals his brother, who is bitten by a snake, and two others, who have died from different causes. Finally, the text recounts the episode in Luke in which Jesus, aged 12, teaches in the temple.Most odd. ‘The miracles,’ Wikipedia notes, ‘seem quite randomly inserted into the text.’
Vida doesn’t go down this path. Book 3 ends with the Lukean episode mentioned at the end of that quotation and the miracle at Cana. But this bridging passage tells us only three things: one that young Jesus could be distinguished because holy fire blazed out of his head; two that he was wise beyond his years and spoke to God in a secret language; and three that flights of angels crowded into his house to amuse him. The one I want to dwell on, if only for a moment, is the fiery-head stuff.
The word ‘halo’ comes via the Latin halōs from Ancient Greek ἅλως (hálōs, “disk of the sun or moon; ring of light around the sun or moon; threshing floor with its surrounding threshold; disk of a shield”). Since we do not observe human heads literally shining with light, we can take this as metaphor for spiritual illumination, or hallucination, or as something else. Once humans start thinking of the heavens as the domain of the gods, it's a logical step to import what most characterises the celestial realm (the fact that sun, moon and stars all shine) down into our mortal one.
They go back a long way in human culture, these haloes. Sumerian religious literature frequently speaks of melam a ‘brilliant, visible glamour which is exuded by gods, heroes, sometimes by kings, and also by temples of great holiness and by gods' symbols and emblems.’[J. Black and A. Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotmia (Austin, 1992), 130]. The heads of gods and heroes radiate light in Homer. The Colossus of Rhodes, a statue of the sun-god Helios, wore a radiate crown (this celebrated statue, now lost, was the basis for the design of the Statue of Liberty as it happens). And it's certainly familiar enough, of course, from Christian-religious art: not only Christ and his family but all the saints are distinguished in ten thousands paintings by their haloes. That there are a great many haloes in Vida, and none at all in Milton (I think I'm right in saying Milton never once even uses the word, let along describes the phenomenon) speaks to one important fault-line here, the Catholic-Protestant one.
But even within Catholic art there is a divide between those who big-up the halo and those who play it down. Because there is (isn't there?) something ever so slightly silly about them? The cleavage between their metaphorical articulation of spiritual light and their material circularity and metallic seeming-solidity is one liable to trip us into mere bathos. American poet Albert Goldbath says something along these lines in his poem ‘Halos’:
Saints' halos. By late Renaissance they'reThat's nicely put. Vida's description here certainly doesn't carry that holiness-is-health vibe, I think. And yet neither is it the manhole-cover of gold that Goldbath gently mocks. There's something else going on.
delicate rings, the smallest o of glory over
a head, or simple givings out of light,
into form; an inch of shimmer. Leonardo's
figures glow as if holiness were health.
But
at the start they were these heavy golden gongs
behind a face in profile, clumsily done: aboutfacing
into perspective, worshippers smash against emblems
of spirit as solid as sewer covers.
There's a particular intertext relevant here, I think, and it's Vergil. There's a lot of Vergil packed into this short passage, actually. Take Vida's lines 899-902
Si tibi nunc, quæcunque olim admiranda notavi,‘If there were time and I told you all the astonishing things I remember him doing while still in the first flower of youth, I would soon lose my voice from weariness and darkness would cover the sky [that is, Olympus].’ This is based on Aeneas addressing his mother, the goddess Venus near the beginning of the Aeneid.
primævo dum flore virens adolesceret ætas,
enumerare vacet; me vox priùs ipsa relinquat
defessum, atque diem clauso nox condat Olympo.
O dea, si prima repetens ab origine pergam,‘O goddess, should I, tracing back from the first beginning, go on to tell, and you have leisure to hear the story of our woes, sooner would heaven [Olympus] close and evening lay the day to rest.’ And Vida's line 896, Forsitan et puero fuerit quæ cura requiris (‘Perhaps you are wondering what engaged the boy’) is a riff upon Aeneid 2:506, Forsitan et Priami fuerint quae fata requiras (‘perhaps you are wondering what had happened to Priam’). But the Aeneid intertext that interests me here is Lavinia's halo: in Book 7 of the Aeneid, lines 69–83: during a sacrifice at the altars of the gods, Lavinia's hair lights up, an omen promising a glorious marriage for her and glory days to come for all Latins:
et vacet annalis nostrorum audire laborum,
ante diem clauso componat Vesper Olympo. [Aeneid 1: 372-74]
et iuxta genitorem adstat Lavinia virgo,‘Standing beside her father at the altar was the virgin Lavinia, and she was seen (horrors!) to catch fire in her long hair and burn with a crackling flame across her head—her queenly hair blazing, ablaze her jewelled coronal, wreathed in smoke and yellow fire she filled the palace with fire.’
visa (nefas) longis comprendere crinibus ignem,
atque omnem ornatum flamma crepitante cremari
regalisque accensa comas, accensa coronam
insignem gemmis, tum fumida lumine fulvo
involvi ac totis Volcanum spargere tectis. [Aeneid 7:72-77]
This is clearly much more dynamic than those inert plates of gold balanced behind saints' heads in pictures. Dynamism has an energising, but also a destructive, valence, though. That account of Lavinia's burning head evokes less a shining omen and more an actual fire, terrifying and agonising immolation. Vida's account of Christ's burning hair is also terrifying, terrificos [905].
It is sometimes argued by Vergil scholars that the fire associated with Lavinia, and the fact that she is the proximate cause for the war that ravages Italy, as Aeneas and Turnus compete to possess her, links her with Allecto, Vergil's fiery fury unleashed during the war. But this brings me, via what is perhaps something of a conceptual knight's move, to virginity. In this I am picking up on Robin Mitchell's fascinating essay ‘The Violence of Virginity in the Aeneid’ [Arethusa, 24:2 (1991), 219-238]. Mitchell, noting ‘the prevalance of virgins in Books 7-12’ of the Aeneid ‘where the text either directly or indirectly refers to the following diverse group as virgins: Lavinia, Camilla, Juturna, Turnus, Pallas, Allecto, Minerva and Diana. In Book 11 alone there are 21 instances of virgo and its cognates.’ He adds:
The virgins either cause or suffer destruction; much of the war consists of virgins killing virgins. Vergil thus links their sexuality with their violence as the former finds expression sterility and destruction which begins in the opening lines of Book 7 and ends in the close of Book 12. Seen in this light the tragic deaths of Camilla, Pallas and Turnus, along with Juturna's equally tragic immortality, become inseparable with their violence.I like this reading a great deal; not least on account of its startling characterisation of the last six books of the poem as a ‘war of virgins killing virgins’. The whole essay is fascinating, actually. But it brings me back to Vida, and this passage describing a virgin family—virgin father, virgin mother and virgin son—living together—not as a placid or puritan mode of existence, but on the contrary as terrifying. The whole of this little cameo bristles and crackles with virginity as violent energy, flaming in the enclosed space, human beings sealed away in their weaving, or their private conversations with God in a secret language, and yet all connected and domestically compressed. Those angels crowding it to deluge him with flowers: an image as dislocating and strange as it is pious. In filling the narrative gap left by the Gospels Vida has, inadvertently presumably, created a sense of Jesus as a profoundly odd, uncanny child.
The certainty of this that makes it so odd; the way doubt is so comprehensively purged from this retelling. Vida, even if only glancingly, is here describing a child without doubt—and that’s simply not a child, or not a human child. Christ as Midwich Cuckoo: it’s … unnerving, somehow. Vida’s treatment is at the other extreme from (and I appreciate that all I’m really doing here is marking my personal preference for) the retelling embodied by, say, Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ (1955), where Christ is continually plagued by doubt, is in effect made by his uncertainty, his inner sense of weakness and self-interrogation. I don’t think the point in that novel is to render Christ more ‘human’ by delving into his inner psychology (although I suppose it's often read that way), because inner psychology is as opaque to us whether one is dealing with a mortal as a god.
And Vida has already given us Christ’s moment of doubt in the garden, his praying that the cup might pass: the muss es sein? Es muss sein? drama of Gethsemene. In other words, the Gospels are hospitable to the notion of Jesus as a doubter (let’s not forget him crying out on the cross that God had forsaken him—Chesterton somewhere points out that this moment is, in effect, God becoming an atheist; a profound mystery indeed). But that’s not Vida’s vibe. The infant Jesus, with angels for playmates instead of other human children, having secret conversations with God Himself in a language nobody else can understand … he a confection rather of hammered gold and gold enamelling to, as the poet put it, keep a drowsy Emperor awake.
There is, quite apart from anything else, the matter of timing. Kazantzakis writes a Jesus who struggles for a long time with some sense that he is special (his parents, we can imagine, tell him that he is special—the angel who appeared to Mary! The star!—but parents often do that kind of thing. Over the course of adolescence, and into adulthood (working as a carpenter, making, as Kazantzakis shows a conflicted Jesus doing, crosses on which people are tortured to death!) and only eventually understanding what his purpose was, what he was on earth for … now that’s a compelling story.
It also explains why Jesus waits so long before starting his ministry. Vida’s version begs the question: what’s the hold-up? Why the delay? This Jesus is good to go at 13—good to go, indeed, at half that age. He commands troops of literal angels, manifests signs and wonders. We might object that the disciples would not follow a child—that only an adult man would have the gravitas to command their loyalty—but this seems to me both the misunderstand the nature of the child concerned, but also the culture of the times (Alexander the Great was a kid, after all, and he had no problem getting people to follow him). That Jesus waits is confirmed in the gospels: when he tells his mother, in John 2:4 “Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come” it implies that he is waiting for the proper time, and perhaps that he has been waiting for a long period. But why?
[Next: lines 919-968]
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