Book 4, lines 565-597

[Previous: lines 532-564]

John is still narrating various miracles performed by Jesus.

Quid memorem, ut mentes hominum, curasque latentes,    [565]
quod fieri certo nequeat sine numine, cernat?
Quippe animis dubios, taciti dum vana timemus,
castigans dictis nos saepe erexit acerbis
mirantes. Quoties ipsis etiam hostibus olim
praedixit quos mente dolos, quae furta pararent                [570]
incassum, dum caeci odiis agitantur iniquis?
Fœmina nec latuit bis senos passa per annos
sanguinis immundi manans de corpore flumen.
Illa quidem ardentis morbi confecta dolore
pone sequebatur, siqua illum tangere posset,                      [575]
hanc unam rata nempe viam restare salutis.
Ergo dum pubes fluit undique, et agmina inundant;
illa subit, leviterque extremum apprendit amictum.
Ad tactum veter effugit de corpore morbus.
iamque abitum, latuisse putans, clam mente parabat.         [580]
Praesensit Deus, et pavidam, seseque tegentem
affatus placidè monitis implevit amicis.
Vidi oculos ante ipse meos mortalia nuper
aut membra exutum, aut perfusum luce supernè
non infra solis speciem dare corpore lumen.                        [585]
His, multisque aliis, ego quae creberrima vidi,
per terras patuit signis Deus : haud tamen unquam
sese hominem oblitus, moribundo corpore cretum,
multa tulit quoque, mortales quae ferre necesse est;
atque id sponte quidem, nobis imitanda relinquens.            [590]
Saepe hilares mensas ideo et convivia adivit;
nec cœtus bonus est hominum aspernatus in urbe.
Saepe etiam insidias inimicae gentis et iras
suffugiens, ut homo, malè tuti limina templi
exiit, objecitque cavam pro corpore nubem;                        [595]
nec se in conspectum latebris dedit abditus atris,
dum fremerent hostes nequicquam, et saxa pararent.

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Should I recall that he read minds, the hidden                      [565]
cares of men—impossible without divine help?
Often, to our surprise, he sensed our souls’ doubts,
castigating our baseless fears with goading
words. How often did know his enemies’
deceits and ploys, predicting the tricks they used—             [570]
in vain—blinded by their hostile hatred?

There was a woman who’d suffered for twelve years
from an impure flux, her body streaming blood.
Agonized by this burning disease she
followed him, wishing only to touch him,                            [575]
believing this the only way to be cured.
So, as crowds of young people surged to see him
she went too, and gently touched his robe’s hem.
At this contact all disease left her body.
She tried to slip away, all unnoticed                                     [580]
but the god sensed her, and as she timidly
covered herself he spoke gentle words to her.

With my own eyes I saw him leave his body—
slough-off his limbs, bathed in a heavenly light
with a radiance no less than the sun’s.                                  [585]
For these things I saw, and many others,
I knew God had come to earth. And that He
submitted himself to a mortal body,
suffering much of what mortals endure—
did so willingly, that we imitate him.                                    [590]
Often he came to joyful feasts and parties;
nor, in his goodness, did he spurn men’s company.
Though the plots of his enemies, their wrath,
made him flee the unsafe Temple threshold
hiding inside a thick concealing cloud                                  [595]
or inside some dark cave, as his enemies
raged, vainly searching, readying their stones.

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Vida is really losing momentum here: his John is simply piling miracles on miracles. We get the point. And we’re only half way through Book 4! Anyway, here are three more: (a) Jesus can read minds (is this telepathy attested in the Gospels? I can’t think where if so); (b) the women cured by touching the hem of Christ’s garment, from Matthew 9:20-22, Mark 5:24-34 and Luke 8: 42-48; and (c) John’s testimony that he had seen Christ leave his body and become a being of pure light—again, not something strictly mentioned in the Gospels.

Of the central miracle, the Gospels seem to present it as a peculiarly female uncleanness.

And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’” But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering. [Mark 5:25–34]

Wikipedia summarises one mainstream theological take:

The woman's condition, which is not clear in terms of a modern medical diagnosis, is translated as an “issue of blood” in the King James Version and a “flux of blood” in the Wycliffe Bible and some other versions. In scholarly language she is often referred to by the original New Testament Greek term as the haemorrhoissa (ἡ αἱμοῤῥοοῦσα, “bleeding woman”). The text describes her as γυνὴ αἱμορροοῦσα δώδεκα ἔτη (gynē haimorroousa dōdeka etē), with haimorroousa being a verb in the active voice present participle (“having had a flow [rhēon], of blood [haima]”). Some scholars view it as menorrhagia; others as haemorrhoids.

Because of the continual bleeding, the woman would have been continually regarded in Jewish law as a niddah or menstruating woman, and so ceremonially unclean. In order to be regarded as clean, the flow of blood would need to stop for at least 7 days. Because of the constant bleeding, this woman lived in a continual state of uncleanness which would have brought upon her social and religious isolation.

I suppose I'd always assumed, with respect to this miracle, that the touching of the hem of Jesus's garment, as opposed to actually touching Jesus's skin, was a way of indicating how strong his miraculous potency was: that is to say, it was so strong it had suffused even his clothing. But thinking about it again, I wonder if we should take it the other way around. This story focuses on a way in which Jesus can be seen curing a woman's menorrhagia without having actually himself to touch the unclean figure that a menstruating woman represented. That's a much less attractive way of conceiving it, though.

I will confess I've never understood why there has been so much cultural and individual (male) phobia attached to menstruation. Which is to say, I can imagine that, once the connection between periods and fertility was established, all sorts of strange taboos might spring up. But just on a personal level I've never experienced the ‘yuk!’ reaction that (manfestly) lots of men have, over the years. It's just blood. It's not, as it might be, pus or feces or suchlike abject matter bodies sometimes produce (where my ‘yuk’ reaction is as automatic as anyone's, I daresay). It honestly doesn't bother me.

Still, Orthodox Jewry considers menstruation unclean, and it's possible Ancient Rome did too. On this latter point, it's hard to be certain. The evidence is scanty. There's a letter Seneca wrote to Aebutius Liberalis that passes on some scurrilous gossip concerning Mamercus Scaurus:

quid? tu, cum Mamercum Scaurum consulem faceres, ignorabas ancillarum illum suarum menstruum ore hiante exceptare? numquid enim ipse dissimulabat? numquid purus videri volebat? [Benef. 4.31.3]

Well? When you were aiding Mamercus Scaurus in his ambition to become consul, didn't you know that he used to swallow the menstrual blood of his slave girls, open-mouthed? He never even tried to hide it, did he? He didn’t even want to seem pure, did he?

Dunstan Lowe, from whom I quote this little passage, doesn't think this speaks to a broader Roman disgust at menstruation as such; it's just one more ‘dirty’ thing this geezer got up to (going down on his slave girls, even when they were on their period ...). Lowe concedes it's hard to contextualise the slur, though, since ‘other Roman references to the menstrual period (menstrua solvere) outside medical and magical contexts are very rare’ [Dunstan Lowe, ‘Menstruation and Mamercus Scaurus’ Phoenix , 67 (2013), 343]. Indeed he cites only three, rather random pieces of data: ‘Sallust's Histories. 4.40: two Gaulish women segregate themselves during menstruation; Lucretius 6.794–796: the smell of castoreum can make a menstruating woman faint; Tacitus Histories 5.6: bitumen can only be cut by fabric soaked in menses’. Er. Alright.

According to Gil Anidjar, ‘blood shapes and defines the channels and motions that carry the family, the class, the race, the nation, and the economy too’ [Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2014), 89]. His larger thesis is that modern politics, shaped by Capitalism, has been configured on the basis of ‘flow as systems of circulation’. The two extremes of this, absolute blockage and (as with this hemorrhaging woman) continuing uncontrollable flow, stand on either side of an, Anidjar thinks, fundamentally Christian organizing principle of three central concepts of modernity: nation, state, and capital: ‘Christianity qua capitalism, capitalism qua Christianity’ [142], with this dyad figuring less as a religion and more a ‘complex and dynamic set of disciplinary mechanisms, technologies of subjectivation, and institutional apparatuses’ [247]. Much of this is (by design, not inadvertance) quite foggy, but Anidjar has interesting things to say about blood and melancholy, and that's a connection that I find illuminating in this New Testament episode.

Melancholia, Freud tells us, behaves “like an open wound, wie eine offene Wunde.” Melancholia acts, it must act, or work, “like a painful wound, wie eine schmerzhafte Wunde wirken” [258/G446]. Melancholia, in other words, marks or draws blood. This is an old story, which is why melancholia can be said to bear, as Ian Chambers suggests, “interrogations that promote a sense of the unhomely, full of memories that . . . draw blood.” Melancholia was always about blood. Which means it was always about religion, if we provisionally understand this term in a specific sense, which will have to be borne out in what follows: history and collective psychology, of course, but economy as well, and a generalized hematology too. [Anidjar, 191]

The Christian connection made here is to Christ as ‘the Man of Sorrows’. Anidjar doesn't discuss the menorrhagic woman at all. But it seems to me a mistake to ignore how forcefully blood is gendered, though, and the implied narrative of this woman: shunned by society for twelve years, lonely, timid, abject and the embodiment of abjection.

At the head of the post is an early Christian mural from the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter.

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