[Previous: Book 4, lines 1025-1047]
Book 5 begins with Pontius Pilate reflecting on everything he had been told about Jesus by Joseph (in Book 2) and John (in Book 3).
Insonti vero Romanus parcere capto------------
toto corde petens, huc mentem dividit, atque huc.
Fama viri, virtusque animo, egregiique recursat
Oris honos , nec iam obscurum genus esse deorum.
Omnia respondent auditis. Denique ad ipsos [5]
conversus Solymos fremitu tectum omne replentes
“Ite,” ait, “et posito mox huc certamine adeste.
Sit qni pro cunctis numero delectus ab omni
fando aliquis doceat, quo tandem is crimine morte
mulctandus, quod tantum obstet scelus, ordine pandat, [10]
insonti.” Simul haec, simul illi abiere frementes
Christo animis certi numquam desistere vivo.
Innocent captive! The Roman truly yearned------------
with all his heart to spare him. His thoughts roamed,
kept returning to the man’s fame and virtue,
his noble face—obviously that of a god.
It all confirmed what he’d heard. Finally [5]
he turned to the citizens yelling in his house
“Go,” he said, “and come back with someone from
your number who can make this clear to me:
explain why this man must be sent to his death
exactly by what crime he has given up [10]
his innocence.” They rushed noisily away,
never desisting in anger while Christ lived.
And so we start Book 5. This will detail Jesus’s crucifixion, with Book 6 giving us the resurrection: some action at last (we might say) after two very lengthy books which contained nothing but 1000-line monologues: Joseph in Book 2, remembering Jesus’s conception and birth and John in Book 3 recalling his adult ministry. On and on they go. The notional context for these two books is that both men are pleading Jesus’s case before Pilate who, as Roman governor, can doom or spare him. But it’s so over-extended it becomes, frankly, ridiculous. In one of his comic essays Michael Frayn proposes ‘The Rime of the Wedding Guest’: ‘my intention,’ he says, ‘is that it should be recited or rather murmured simultaneously with the recitation of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” as a sort of accompanying ostinato’ [The Original Michael Frayn (Methuen 1990), 167]. Its entirety is this kind of thing:
‘I see … uh-huh … yes, yes … uh-huh… and so on, for the same length as Coleridge’s poem. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine put-upon Pilate having a similar parallel poem written for him.
I see … I see … so that’s …? OK
That’s very interesting I’m sure
Mm … mm ... uh-huh … dear me ... I say …
Uh-huh … uh-huh … uh-huh … I see
Yes … yes … How strange … that’s quite …
Er … ah … mm-mm … uh-huh … dear me!
Uh-huh … uh-huh … uh-huh … alright …’
I'm being unfair, I know. I can suspend my disbelief, willingly, just as well as the next geezer. Still, a more substantive matter is the way Vida has painted himself, as it were, into a corner. For whatever reason (presumably to do with a Roman Catholic desire not to demonise the Roman in this scenario, when there are lots of Jews he can throw his animus upon) Vida has characterised Pilate as sensitive and informed, persuaded by Christ's innocence and even by his divinity. Such a figure ought, really, to convert to Christianity. But he doesn't. How and why can Vida return us to the quid est veritas? hand-washing buck-passing coward of the Gospels? Which is to say how can Vida do this without inflicting peculiar violence upon his own characterisation? I don't believe he can, actually.
The image at the head of this post is the so-called ‘Pilate Stone’, unearthed in 1961 during an archaeological dig at Caesarea Maritima, Israel. The inscription reads:
[DIS AUGUSTI]S TIBERIÉUMThis probably relates to a temple built to honour the deified Roman Emperor Augustus in the late 20s or early 30s.
[...PONTI]US PILATUS
[...PRAEF]ECTUS IUDA[EA]E
[...FECIT D]E[DICAVIT]
To the Divine Augusti [this] Tiberieum
...Pontius Pilate
...prefect of Judea
...has dedicated [this]
[Next: lines 13-81]
How about Pilate the man with political responsibilities that can't *necessarily* be read through the prism of personal qualities? For instance, sanctioning the death penalty has, probably always, been a precondition of getting executive power in the US. A side-note: Michael's account, to Adam, of the postlapsarian history for which he is responsible, which takes up more or less the last two books is described by CS Lewis as "a lump of untransmuted futurity," which sticks in my mind.
ReplyDeleteIt's a great phrase, presumably used in deliberate allusion to Ovid's description of Chaos at the beginning of the Metamorphoses as rudis indigestaque moles: "moles" is the word for a clump of stuff without any particular shape or form: "rude untransmuted lump" would be a good translation ... implying, I suppose, that Lewis thinks Milton could have made something of this material if he'd put his mind to it.
DeleteI wonder what Milton made of Vida's portrayal of Pilate in this poem. Perhaps he thought nothing much of it; if he even identified the issues that are bugging me, it's possible his view would have been: of course Vida, as a Roman Catholic, gets tangled in his attempt to salvage Roman Pilate's reputation; a better way is to jettison all the bag-and-baggage by which a Christian's individual moral conscience is mortgaged to the splendor of the Romish church.
Milton ended up attending no church at all, though he's buried in St Giles, Cripplegate, now in the Barbican. The parish was known for a relatively high proportion of religious radicals among its inhabitants.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, unless my brain is malfunctioning, Michael's account of postlapsarian history is remarkable for deeming the Reformation beneath notice.
ReplyDeleteVida does include a dig at the Reformation in Book 1 lines 919-923, when God tells Jesus:
DeleteAnd if, later on, a coarser age loosens
men’s morals, and some distant descendants
degenerate from my way—then hard labour
imposed by me shall recall them to piety:
Strengthened by their woes they’ll rise up to the stars.
Concerning that passage I said it was one "in which God not only predicts the Reformation (which was well underway in 1535) but assures us of the inevitable success of the Counter-Reformation (a prediction posterity has rather stubbornly refused to verify). What’s happening here is that Vida is putting frankly partisan words into God’s mouth, something more than a little demeaning, one might think, for the ultimate divine force of the cosmos as such. Make no mistake: Vida's durus labor [921], the hard or rough work, of dragging these future recusants back to Rome means, amongst other things, torture and execution. Not nice, really."
I think he's verging on having no truck with institutions of any kind. Although he never explicitly criticized Cromwell, after a certain point his silence (absence of praise) seems meaningful and he allows publication of a few texts associated with malcontents.
ReplyDelete