[Previous:
lines 282-299]
Pilate's wife has just told him of her strange dream. Now read on!
Talibus auditis Solymos animo acrior urget [300]
Romulides, certus vesano obstare furori.
Iamque minis agit, et dictis haud amplius arcet
mollibus insanos, et non toleranda frementes.
Iamque videbatur demptis dimittere vinclis
velle virum, et tantis se tandem solvere curis. [305]
Sensit atrox Erebo umbrarum regnator in imo
aeternam servans memori sub pectore curam.
Ingemuit, vincique animo indignatus amaro est.
Protinus horriferum latebrosa ab sede Timorem
evocat atrum, ingens et ineluctabile monstrum. [310]
Tristior haud ulla est umbrosis pestis in oris
scilicet, atque hominum egregiis magis aemula coeptis.
Frigus ei comes, et deiecto Ignavia vultu.
Extemplo hanc superas torpentem ascendere ad auras
imperat, intonsi qua molli vertice surgunt [315]
Phoenicum montes, Solymorumque alta subire
moenia, ut Ausonii flectat ducis aspera corda
deiiciens, subigatque metu desistere coepto.
Iussa facit. sibi nigrantes accommodat alas
nocturnarum avium, inque atros se colligit artus. [320]
Iamque emensa viae tractus obscoena volucris
purpurei crebra ante oculos se praesidis ecce
fertque, refertque Volans circum Importuna, sonansque
nunc pectus, nunc ora nigris everberat alis,
immisitque gelu, et praecordia frigore vinxit. [325]
Diriguit visu subito, atque exalbuit ille,
surrectaeque comae steterunt, gelidusque per ossa
horror iit. Genua aegra labant. Vox faucibus haesit.
Quem simul ac cives sensere insueta timentem,
pallentemque genas, et toto corpore versum, [330]
his subito arrepto clamantes tempore dictis
aggressi: iste ausus vulgo se fingere regem.
Aspirat sceptris, regisque affectat honores.
Quem si forte neci mavis subducere , nec te
crimina tanta movent, Judaeas protinus urbes [335]
seditione potens Romanis legibus, omnemque
artibus avertet Syriam ditione Quiritum.
Res igitur tibi si curae Romana, decusque
Caesaris, hanc superis pestem citus aufer ab oris
hauriat ut meritas haud uno crimine poenas [340]
ne gentem repant contagia dira per omnem.”
Talia perstabant uno omnes ore frementes.
Dux vero expertus genus intractabile, regis
palluit ad nomen (praecordia ad intima saevit
subdita pestis enim) nec iam superantibus obstat [345]
amplius, et se se victus, cedensque remittit,
haud ultra potis insano pugnare furori.
Cen cum rostratae sese opposuere triremi
protinus adversi mediis in fluctibus Euri,
luctatur primum celsa de puppe magister, [350]
hortaturque viros validis insurgere tonsis;
demum ubi se niti contra intolerabile caelum
incassum videt, ac veiitos superare furentes,
vertit iter, quocumque vocat fortuna pcr aequor
multivium, atque auris parens subremigat aeger. [355]
Haud tamen abstinuit verbis, vocive pepercit.
“Verum, Vincor,” ait, “nec habet vestra ira regressum.
ln me nulla mora est; moriatur crimine falso
damiiatus. Vos triste inanet, speroque propinquum
supplicium. Vos sacrilego, serique nepotes, [360]
o miseri, meritas pendetis sauguine poenas.”
Sic effatus, aquam plena iubet ocius urna
afferri, abstergensque manus haec addidit ore:
“Ut nunc his manibus maculae absunt, sic mihi nullum
hac iu caede nefas, meque omni crimiue solvo.” [365]
Dixit, et exurgens solio intra tecta recessit.
Illi autem: “Deus haec nobis, gnatisque reservet,
Instauretque graves poenas , quascumque meremur.”
------------
Hearing this the Roman resolved again [300]
to persuade the citizens to quell their mad ire.
Now he issued threats, no longer warding off
these intolerant madmen with soft words.
He seemed ready to remove the chains and free
this man—and so free himself from these cares. [305]
Down in Hell, the dread lord of the shadows,
always nursing bitterness in his breast,
groaned, soul-angry at the thought of defeat.
Presently he called from its lair lurking Fear
—a dark, huge and unavoidable monster. [310]
In all that shadowy place there was no plague
more terrifying or envious of mankind.
His companions were: Cold, and downcast Sloth.
He told this torpid creature to ascend to
the upper air, to where the tree-shaggy [315]
Phoenician hillside overlooks Jerusalem,
go past those walls and twist the Roman leader’s
heart with terror, making him give up his cause.
The creature did as ordered, forming dark shapes
distilling itself into a flock of black night-birds. [320]
This obscene thing flew across immense tracts
swirling before the purple-clad ruler’s eyes
roiling back and forth, striking at his face
and chest with many black flapping wings,
filling him with fear and chilling his heart. [325]
At this vision he stiffened and blanched white,
his hair stood straight up and cold made his bones
shudder. His knees seized, words stuck in his throat.
As soon as the citizens saw his fear,
his pallid face, wild eyes, his trembling body, [330]
they immediately assailed him with
these words: “This man claimed to be a king!
Grasped for a sceptre! Craved all royal honours!
If you don’t put him to death for such sedition
his crimes will move all the Jewish cities [335]
to rise against the authority of Rome,
and no arts will stop Syrian spears from joining.
If you have any care for the glory of Rome
and Caesar, clear these shores of this pestilence.
Give him what his many crimes have deserved [340]
and stop this contagion creeping through the land.”
All this they cried out as if with one voice.
The governor, knowing how stubborn they were,
grew anxious at the word king (his heart raging
with hidden posion), no longer opposed [345]
them. He knew he was vanquished, and yielded
no longer able to fight their mad frenzy.
As when a beaked trireme, wind-thwarted,
struggles against waves blown by burly Eurus
and at first the steersman struggles on the deck, [350]
urging his men to row against the blast;
but when he sees it’s hopeless to struggle
against the furious assault of high winds,
he turns his course wherever chance takes him
wearily rowing the many sea-ways. [355]
He did not now remain silent or hold his tongue.
“You have won,” he said, “your wrath won’t be contained.
No more delay: let these lies condemn him
to death. As for you: a dreary punishment
will soon come. You and all your descendants, [360]
—wretched!—will pay with your sacrilegious blood.”
Having spoken, he called for an urn full of water
and, washing his hands, he added these words:
“As the dirt is now cleansed from my hands, so no
guilt of this crime is mine; I absolve myself.” [365]
He spoke, rose from his seat and went inside.
They answered: “Let God reserve this to us,
And punish us exactly as we deserve.”
------------
‘Eurus’ (in line 349) is the south-east wind: “Eurus (Εὖρος) according to some was the southeast wind, but according to others the East wind … Generally in the Latin poets the name Eurus is used for the east or southeast wind, as in Greek. Eurus is a wind of storm, described as a turbulent wind during storms and tossing ships on the sea.”
This list of Latin poetic uses of Eurus suggests that Vida isn’t copying anyone in particular. Vida's lines 359-61
Vos triste inanet, speroque propinquum
supplicium. Vos sacrilego, serique nepotes,
o miseri, meritas pendetis sauguine poenas.
[
Gardner translates this as ‘as for you, a dreary punishment awaits you and I hope it comes soon. You and your descendents, wretched men, will pay for this with your sacrilegious blood’] ... owes much to that bit in the
Aeneid where Latinus, king of the Latins, tries and fails to hold back the war-lust of his people, egged-on by Turnus, against the incoming Trojans, and finally gives up on them with this warning:
Ipsi has sacrilego pendetis sanguine poenas,
o miseri. Te, Turne, nefas, te triste manebit
supplicium, votisque deos venerabere seris. [Aeneid, 7:595-597]
‘You yourself, my wretched children, with your impious blood shall pay the price of this! The guilt and its bitter punishment shall await you, Turnus, and too late with vows will your supplicate the gods.’
Otherwise this is the last we see in the poem of Pontius Pilate (whose name it occurs to me actually means ‘hairy bridge’). Vida follows the apocryphal
Gospel of Nicodemus (also called the
Acts of Pilate), if not directly then more generally drawing on the tradition of church history that itself drew on this work—in which Pilate is portrayed as a man forced to execute Jesus by the Jews and as distraught at having done so. There's no
Ecce Homo in this account, which strikes me as a strange omission, really. Otherwise Vida caps the episode with a reiteration of the blood libel by which the Jews inprovidently agree to millennia of genocidal anti-Semitism, at least according to Matthew.
When Pilate saw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a tumult was rising, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this just Person. You see to it.”
And all the people answered and said, “His blood be on us and on our children.” [Matthew 27: 24-25]
But what really interests me about this passage is not its rote (though grievous and on-brand) anti-Semitism, but rather its use of allegory.
Many times, during the last several months of this blog, I have reverted less to analysis of Vida and more to the, I think, under-researched question of the influence Vida had on John Milton. This is because, good though the
Christiad can sometimes be, it's manifestly no
Paradise Lost. As I say
in this post, I have poked around ‘in a more or less desultory manner’, for some big monograph that lays out Milton's indebtedness to Vida and discovered that ‘there isn’t one. It’s not that it’s been entirely ignored (in 1645's ‘The Passion’ Milton specifically praises Vida, says his poetry “trumps” everyone else’s, so his indebtedness isn’t something he tried to hide). Some scholars have nibbled at the edge of this topic, especially where Milton’s Latin poetry is concerned, but I found myself thinking: what’s needed is a big, proper study that explores all the ways Paradise Lost is an Englishing of the Christiad. I could write one, I suppose. The thing is I am no Miltonist, so writing such a thing would entail ratcheting myself up into an approximation of one, which means reading librariesful of books and articles about Milton, and that’s a wearying prospect to contemplate, really.’
Long stretches of the
Christiad, especially in Books 3 and 4, have little feed-through to Milton, I'd say. But important passages in the first two books strike me as important prior intertexts for
Paradise Lost, and now ... well, here's this. At no previous point in the
Christiad does Vida invoke allegorical personifications, but now: here we are.
Presently he called from its lair lurking Fear
—a dark, huge and unavoidable monster.
In all that shadowy place there was no more plague
more terrifying, or envious of mankind.
His companions were: Cold, and downcast Sloth.
He told this torpid creature to ascend to
the upper air, ....
The creature did as ordered, forming dark shapes
distilling itself into a flock of black night-birds.
This obscene thing flew across immense tracts
swirling before the purple-clad ruler’s eyes
roiling back and forth, striking at his face
and chest with many black flapping wings,
filling him with fear and chilling his heart. [Christiad 5:309-324]
This is quite a striking piece of writing. At the same time it does, surely, exactly what Samuel Johnson objected to in Milton's introduction of Sin and Death into the end of Book 2.
Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death is undoubtedly faulty. Sin is indeed
the mother of Death, and may be allowed to be the portress of hell; but when they stop the journey of Satan, a journey described as real, and when Death offers him battle, the allegory is broken. That Sin and Death
should have shown the way to hell might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the passage by building a bridge because the difficulty of Satan’s passage is described as real and sensible, and the bridge ought to be
only figurative. ... This unskilful allegory appears to me one of the greatest faults of the
poem; and to this there was no temptation but the author’s opinion of its
beauty. [Peter Martin (eds) Samuel Johnson: Selected Writings (Harvard University Press 2009), 434-5]
Vanity with respect to the ‘beauty’ of the conception may be one reason why Milton includes this episode; but another reason, surely, is simply his commitment to following epic precedent. Which is to say, following Vida, here.
I mean, I say so; although nobody seems to have noticed it. [Robert B White notes that ‘the allegory of Sin and Death, which
appears toward the end of Book 2 of
Paradise
Lost ... which
eighteenth-century critics considered an aesthetic flaw, has become for the modern critic
mainly a hunting ground for sources’; but he himself doesn't mention Vida, limiting himself to James 1:15, Gower's
Mirour de l'omme and the
Adamo Caduto of Serafino della Salandra, before circling back to Augustine and the Bible.
Robert B. White, Jr., ‘Milton's Allegory of Sin and Death: A Comment on Backgrounds’ Modern Philology 70 (1973), 337-341].
I suppose Vida's part in this larger tradition of mixing together epic and allegory has been overlooked because his allegorical personifications are of Fear, Cold and Sloth (
Timor,
Frigus and
Ignavia) rather than Death and Sin. But (although death
is both fearful and cold, and sloth
is a sin). But surely the point is less in the specific details here than in the fact that Vida switched modes, if only for a dozen lines or so. Is there any reason why Vida's Satan could not have sent actual devils, in the shapes of birds, to harry and affright Pilate? After all, that's exactly what he does
at the beginning of Book 2, when myriad bird-like devils flock in night-time Jerusalem, filling sleeping Jewish elders' dreams with horror and generally whipping-up anti-Jesus feeling. Why the shift from the worldbuilding consistency of more devils, to the dislocation of modes entailed by allegorical figures, also as birds?
Stephen Fallon distinguishes “personification allegory” from “the allegory of
topical allusion, in which
poets write of contemporaries under the veil of invented names”. Clearly we're dealing with the former, here:
Coleridge defines personification allegory as the use of “one set of agents and images”
to represent “moral qualities or conceptions of the mind that are not in
themselves objects of the senses.” By the late seventeenth century this
important literary mode had, after a late flowering in the work of
Spenser and his literary heirs, ceased to answer to the ontological
assumptions of the educated audience, and had retreated into the strictly
circumscribed refuge of Bunyanesque Baptist literature. The reasons for
allegory's decline are twofold and interrelated. First, by its nature
personification allegory involves characters of a different order of reality
from those of mimetic narrative. Second, by the light of the seventeenth
century's new, and increasingly empirical, standards of truth, which
depend on the gradual displacement of realism by nominalism, the
different reality of abstractions is demoted to a lesser reality and in some
minds to non-reality. [Stephen Fallon, ‘Milton's Sin and Death: The Ontology of Allegory in Paradise Lost’, English Literary Renaissance 17:3 (1987), 332]
By ‘the gradual displacement of realism by nominalism’ Fallon means that for many medieval people abstractions such as Fear, Cold and Sloth possessed a Platonic or neoPlatonic and therefore actual, in-the-world existence, for instance as kinds of minor-demons or spirits (as Vergil has both gods like Venus moving about the world, but also talks of how Strife rushes around the battlefield).
Allegory's vitality owed much to the realist belief in the actual
existence of universals outlined above. But the Middle Ages witnessed a
progressive moderation of extreme Platonist realism, precipitated by the
criticism of the nominalist minority, who denied the existence of universais. The universais, from their privileged status in Plato's realm of Ideas
(universals exist as separate entities), moved under the influence of
Aristotle into things (universals exist, but only within things), and finally
retreated into mind (universals exist as modes of thought). One can chart
the course of medieval realism by contrasting its early exponent, Augustine, its greatest poet, Dante, and its Renaissance heir, René Descartes.
While Augustine places the universals in the mind of the biblical God, he
otherwise remains entirely consistent with Plato in granting them ontological priority over the concrete subjects in which they manifest themselves. The position given to the universais by Dante is less exalted, as we
see in a passage from the Vita Nuova (xxv): “It may be
that someone worthy of having every doubt cleared up could be puzzled
at my speaking of Love as if it were a thing in itself, as if it were not only
an intellectual substance, but also a bodily substance. This is patently
false, for Love does not exist in itself as a substance, but is an accident in a
substance.” The extreme realists Plato and Augustine would have said
that accidents are universals that exist in themselves as well as in particular subjects, and moreover that this former existence is more real than the existence of the subjects .... Descartes goes
further in reducing the ontological pretensions of the universals:
“Undoubtedly, the ideas which represent substances to me amount to
something more and, so to speak, contain within themselves more
objective reality (i.e. participate by representation in a higher degree of
being or perfection) than the ideas which merely represent modes or
accidents” .... For Augustine, the extreme realist, universais have a
greater reality than things, for Dante at least a different reality, and for
Descartes a lesser reality. [Fallon, 336]
Fallon's point is that ‘the implications for allegory of this philosophical trend are ominous.
If the universals or accidents lose ontological weight, then so do the
allegorical agents who represent them. Paraphrasing Descartes, we may
say that
characters representing substantial beings (i.e., mimetic characters) contain more reality than those representing accidents in substances.’
Vida and Milton, writing within a century and a half of one another, articulate precisely this tension as regards the ontological viability of allegory. There was a lot of it about, as poets and artists wrestled with this big shift in allegory's viability and indeed fundamental meaning. Here, coming between the two epicists, is ‘
Hercules Triumphant over Discord’ (1633; Christoffel Jegher, after Peter Paul Rubens):
Do we take this Vida passage as implying that Fear is, in some sense, the progenitor of Cold and Sloth? In the sense that Fear can give us chilly trembles, and rob our will of the ability to act? Vida talks of the latter two as Fear's
comitēs (line 313), a word that means both ‘companions, comrades, partners’ but also ‘attendants, servants’.
There are certainly verbal echoes of Vida in the Death-and-Sin allegory section of Milton: Vida's
horriferum Timorem ‘horrid Terror’ (where
horridus means “rough, bristly, savage, shaggy, rude”, from
horrere “to bristle”) gets picked up by Milton's Gate of Hell and its ‘horrid Roof’ [
PL 2:644], Death approaching Satan ‘with horrid strides’ [
PL 2:676], Death's wielding a Dart one stroke of which causes ‘strange horror’ to seize its victims, and ‘pangs unfelt before’ [
PL 2:703]. Death himself is ‘the grieslie terror’ [
PL 2:704], and when he strikes his deal with his father Satan he ‘grinnd horrible a gastly smile’ [
PL 2:845]. Sin recalls how being pregnant with Death caused ‘fear and pain’ to ‘[tear] through my entrails’ [
PL 2:783]. Vida's embodiment of these allegorical qualities as birds has its parallel in Milton too, where Satan promises to summon Sin and Death to the upper air where they ‘Shall dwell at ease, and up and down unseen/Wing silently the buxom Air’ [
PL 2:841-2], or when Milton compares Death ‘black as Night’ to ‘the Night-Hag... riding through the Air’ [
PL 2:662]. Compare Vida's Timor in line 324-25,
nunc ora nigris everberat alis,/immisitque gelu, et praecordia frigore vinxi, ‘it struck now his face, now his chest with its black wings, filling him with a dread chill.’ And later, in Book 10, when Sin and Death leave the gate of hell and fly up to Earth they are compared both to a flock of terrible birds
and to a terrible coldness:
As when a flock
Of ravenous Fowl, though many a League remote,
Against the day of Battel, to a Field,
Where Armies lie encampt, come flying, lur'd
With sent of living Carcasses design'd
For death, the following day, in bloodie fight.
So sented the grim Feature, and upturn'd
His Nostril wide into the murkie Air,
Sagacious of his Quarry from so farr.
Then Both from out Hell Gates into the waste
Wide Anarchie of Chaos damp and dark
Flew divers, and with Power (thir Power was great)
Hovering upon the Waters; what they met
Solid or slimie, as in raging Sea
Tost up and down, together crowded drove
From each side shoaling towards the mouth of Hell.
As when two Polar Winds blowing adverse
Upon the Cronian Sea, together drive
Mountains of Ice. [PL 10:273-291]
Hard not to conclude there's a lot of Vida's in all this.
What does it mean? It might, perhaps, tempt us into a De Manian ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’-style prioritisation of deracinated allegory over the notionally ‘transcendent’ unity of meaning of the spiritual, especially the symbol under the logic of Christian notions of incarnation. Certainly Vida's Fear is a powerfully-written passage, more so than the often drearily pious passages from earlier in the epic. But Paul de Man may be less relevant here than his antecedent in this matter, Walter Benjamin, a writer who also sees allegory as fragile and de-numinized, but who rather laments than celebrates that fact. ‘In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune. Its beauty as a
symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it’ [
Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (trans. John Osborne (London: Verso 1998), 176]. What De Man and Benjamin have in common is an insistence on the differentiation of allegory and symbol in
temporal terms.
Both de Man and Benjamin stress instead the connection between allegory and
temporality, in opposition to the instantaneity of symbol. Time leads allegorical signs
to fragmentariness, arbitrariness, and discontinuity and demystifies the instantaneous
fullness, naturalness, immobility, and organicity of symbol. If symbol is supposed to
be a natural union of sign and meaning, allegory shows the distinctness of sign and
meaning and their conventional relationship. [Andrea Mirabile, ‘Allegory, Pathos, and Irony: The Resistance to Benjamin in Paul de Man’ German Studies Review 35:2 (2012), 321]
What, we could say, is the larger context of these two allegorical irruptions into these two epic poems? In Vida's case the allegorical personifications of Fear, Cold and Sloth appear at the end of what we have seen is a very lengthy, cumulative textual strategy by which Vida seeks to minimize the responsibility of Pilate for Christ's death, and instead throw all the guilt onto the Jews. To that end he has Pilate listen sympathetically to both Joseph and John, then has him attempt to persuade the Sanhedrin (unsuccessfully) to show mercy, to shuffle responsibility for Jesus's fate onto Herod, and finally to try the angry crowd with both soft words and threats. What finally pushes him over the edge are these three allegorical figures. In other words, allegory in this case is deployed to explain why this ‘good’ Roman allows an innocent man to be put to death:—not that he is influenced by devils, like the Jewish elders in Book 2, but that he succumbs to embodiments of those more general
human failings: he gives way to fear etc. Allegory here is, in effect, a way of letting Pilate off the hook.
Contrast this with Milton. Why, structurally, does Milton introduce Sin and Death into his poem at the end of Book 2? Because Satan is trapped in Hell and needs to get out in order for the poem's story to move forward. Clearly God cannot just open the door for him; and if Satan or the other devils could just mosey out of Hell then it would hardly be the infernal prison it was designed to be. Milton's solution is to say: it is sin—Satan's sin, but also our collective sinfulness, synchronically understood—that lets Satan loose into the wider world, and with her comes Death (because, as Romans 6:23 reminds us, the wages of sin is death). In other words, Milton's business is not explaining away the failing of
one individual, like Pilate; it is explaining why the universe as a whole is so full of misery and suffering, why God permits it. And his explanation is that this is not God's fault. What has let this monstrosity into our world is
Sin, not God.
But this is a problem, on the level of allegory, and not in the Johnstonian sense noted above. Because at this stage in the story mankind has
not sinned, not yet. The Adamic disobedience is not only in the future, but depends, timeloop-wise, upon Eve being tempted to sin by a Satan who is only able to tempt her to sin because (her and our) sin has allowed Satan to leave Hell in the first place. (Sin, in this scena,
must be ours as well as Satan's, since otherwise Milton's allegory is saying: that same wickedness that locks criminals in gaol is also the key that permits them to walk free, and that's just incoherent and nonsensical. It's
our sin that opens us to Satanic influence, after all). This knot, this temporal impossibility, is what Milton reaches for with his abrupt shift of mode from epic representation to allegorical meta-representation. It's how his poem notates this problematic.
This, if you like, is the difference between Vida's abrupt introduction of allegorical personifications and Milton's. Vida's is more organic, more a symbolic piece of special pleading. Milton's foregrounds the temporal paradox of sin, something we are born into and yet something we also assume. Benjamin's formulation from
Origin of German Tragic Drama ‘allegory establishes itself most permanently where transitoriness and eternity confronted each other most closely’ [
Benjamin, 224] is remarkably apposite: Milton's epic marks the point where Edenic eternity turns over into the grievous transitoriness of fallen life, and does so in order to set-up that redemptive moment when transitoriness becomes eternity again.
At the head of this post: ‘Pilate Washing His Hands’ by Fernando Gallego (1480s): a rather fine oil on panel currently in the collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson.
[Next:
lines 369-400]
