[Previous: lines 791-843]
John continues his narration of Jesus's adult ministry.
“Nec minùs ingentem huc comitum adventare novorum------------
cernere semper erat numerum, matresque virosque, [845]
omnibus idem animus quibus, et mens certa sequendi.
Haud secus ac bellum sicui rex maximus urbi
indixit, iamque arma ciet, iamque agmina cogit,
cladem orae exitiumque ferens, populisque ruinas;
non tantùm iurata manus, lectaeque cohortes [850]
incedunt, sed praeterea, quos dirus habendi
duxit amor varia cupidos ditescere praeda,
agglomerant multi, atque iniussi castra sequuntur.
Non sat erant lataeque viae, campique patentes
tot populis, iret quacunque, sequentibus ultro. [855]
Saepe heros sese ingenti subducere turbae,
et montes petere, et desertos quaerere saltus.
Atque equidem memini, cùm propter stagna profectus
ferret iter, passimque manus praetexeret ingens
littora, et urgeret supra densissima morem; [860]
proripuit sese, ac cymbam, quae forte parata,
insiliit, subitoque iubens praecidere funem
teli intra jactum liquidum processit in aequor.
Constitit hinc, terramque aspectans, plenaque circùm
littora, divinis affari vocibus orsus, [865]
iustitiaeque aperire viam et vestigia recti.
Hic illic stabant arrectis auribus omnes
interclusi undis, inhiabantque agmine longo
attoniti, miraque animos dulcedine capti.
ipse loquebatur, circum sedata silebant [870]
aequora, ubique modò spirantibus incita flabris;
frondiferaeque, domus avium, sine murmure circum
stabant immotae procurvo in littore sylvae.
Sed non interea longaevae parcere matres
vocibus: illum omnes mirari insueta loquentem, [875]
felicemque uteri matrem, felicia matris
ubera clamabant, quae talem enixa tulisset,
et teneris immulsisset plena ubera labris.”
“A huge number of new disciples------------
joined every day, both men and women, [845]
all determined, heart and mind, to follow him.
It was as if a great king had declared war
on a city, marshalling troops and weapons,
bringing disaster and ruin to the people;
not only the cohorts of sworn-in soldiers [850]
but also the many camp-followers
who gather unbidden, attracted by gain
eager to get rich on the spoils of war.
Neither the broad road, nor the wide open plain
could accommodate so many people. [855]
Often the hero withdrew himself from so
huge a crowd, to the mountains and wastelands.
Once, I remember, when he walked the shore
to embark on a journey, a large group
thronged the beach, eager, urging him to speak. [860]
He ran to a boat which happened to be there
jumped in and quickly cut the mooring rope—
sailed clear waters. A spear-cast from the shore
he stopped, looking back at the crowds on the
shore. Then he began to speak divine words, [865]
revealing the correct path to Justice.
On all sides people stood, their ears pricked up,
hemmed in by the waves, hearing the long-hoped-for
words with amazement, hearts caught by sweet surprise.
As he talked his speech quieted the restless [870]
sea, which had previously been driven by winds.
And the leafy groves, home to the birds, fell silent
trees motionless along the curving shore.
But the aged matrons did not hold back their
voices: all marvelled at his wondrous words [875]
and praised his mother’s happy womb, happy
breasts, that had (they sang) nurtured such a child,
offering her full breasts to his tender lips.”
Christ preaching from a boat comes from Luke:
So it was, as the multitude pressed about Him to hear the word of God, that He stood by the Lake of Gennesaret, and saw two boats standing by the lake; but the fishermen had gone from them and were washing their nets. Then He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat. [Luke 5:1-3]… although there are other places in the Gospels where Jesus preaches from a boat. The odd thing here is that what he preaches (as we shall see as the passage continues) is, in essense, the Sermon on the Mount. Why Vida relocates this extremely famous sermon from a mountain to a boat isn't clear. I'll talk about it in tomorrow's post.
The final lines, with their rather lubricious repetitions—two each for happy felix, mater and hubera (breasts)—strikes a strangely erotic note. The last line here almost looks like it might come from one of the many examples of Latin erotic poetry, although, unless my Google-fu has let me down, I don't believe it's an actual quotation. Odd, though. Except that it's not odd, is it? Me finding it odd is actually me registering my distance from a distinctive, medieval-Renaissance and Catholic somatically sensual apprehension of religious bliss. It is, inevitably, to index my own culturally Protestant biases.
Earlier, John compares the gathering ranks of disciples to an army, ready to capture a city. Once again (as in line 774, where John boasts that Jesus’s disciples urged him to give his followers weapons and lead them on an invasion of Syria) this is an extraordinarily impolitic thing to say to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, if one’s aim is to persuade him that the man he has in his custody is not an armed insurrectionist. But Vida isn’t thinking, here, of the notional context in which this immense speech is being delivered.
I say this, really, to try and put my finger on another way in which epicizing the Gospel narratives entails problems. Earlier on this blog I’ve talked about the, we might say, fundamental mismatch of writing a story of humble people in a profoundly unhumble, elevated and aristocratic mode. But something else came into focus for me when, dawdling around online, I chanced upon an old LRB review of Gabriel Josipovici’s 1988 study, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible. Josipovici’s thesis is that critics who treat ‘the Bible as literature’ replicate the mistakes of (some) theologians and indeed believers in trying to explain away the many oddities and inconsistencies of the Bible, fitting them into one or other larger explanatory schema. Josipovici thinks this does violence to the radical gnarliness and resistance of the Bible itself. He follows this up with a discussion of the way so much of the Bible is drive by dialogue.
This theme is continued in the chapter ‘Dialogue and Distance’. Like Auerbach before him, Josipovici notes how much of the ‘action’ in the Hebrew Bible is carried by dialogue; he also notes that this can be a device for concealing, or refusing to supply, the ‘meaning’ of the action. We are told what God said, and what this or that character replied. What lies behind the words is seldom revealed. In this chapter Josipovici begins to deal with a general problem in talking about what ‘the Bible’ says or intends: the difference between the Testaments. For him, the Gospels seem to belong in the Old Testament world. Their narrative conventions, their characteristic mood and flavour, he seems to believe, are really Hebrew, even though they are written in Hellenistic Greek. (This point was a favourite one in the theological world in the Fifties and Sixties.) The divide runs between the Gospels and the letters of St Paul (even though these are earlier than the Gospels, and so nearer in time to the Hebrew Scriptures): Paul really does believe in clear-cut meanings, answers, solutions to mysteries whereas the Gospels share the open-endedness of Hebrew narrative. There is a case to be made here, though it is a fragile one, for, as Josipovici observes, the Gospels are classic examples of narratives with an ending, and to add them to the Hebrew Scriptures is to transform the older, more non-committal collection into a straightforward comedy, and to dissolve the riddles. ‘In the Gospels meaning is spelt out, the author appends his signature to his book. And this exclusivity of meaning will be taken further in the later books of the NT, until the book of Revelation merely adds the final full stop.’ Yet even here, in the Christian Bible whose articulation is so different from that of the Hebrew Scriptures, tradition has (perhaps despite itself) interposed to prevent the Bible from becoming The Guinness Book of Answers: ‘For one thing, there are four Gospels, not one. This already acts as a brake on the centralisation of meaning. For another ... the canonical Gospels, and especially that of Mark, leave us with a strong sense of precisely that distance, that primacy of dialogue, which we saw to be so integral a part of the historical books of the Hebrew scriptures.’ [John Barton, ‘Bible Stories’, LRB 11:4 (16 February 1989)]Vida temporarily losing sight of the fact that John is talking to the Roman governor, pleading for a prisoner’s life, is actually only part of a larger problem: which is that the Christiad is structured not around dialogue but around monologue. Books 3 and 4 make this plainest, of course; but in fact it’s true throughout. It doesn’t have to be like this—epic is hardly hospitable to rapid stichomythia, of course, but Milton (for example) is able to work a fair proportion of actual dialogue into Paradise Lost. Indeed, I wonder if this is one of the key ways that, whisper it, Milton is just a better poet than Vida.
[Next: lines 879-967]
The image at the head of the post is Francisco Boroba's ‘Jesus Preaching From a Boat’. It is for sale at the ArTrue Gallery, Taipei City, Tainan City.
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