Christ is crucified.
Haud secus indefensus, inermis restitit heros.------------
Illum nudum humeros, nudum omne à vertice corpus
directum longo malo applicuere furentes: [705]
nuda dehinc tendunt transverso brachia ligno,
diversaque ambas affigunt cuspide palmas
hinc atque hinc: mucrone pedes terebrantur eodem
confixi largum manat de stipite flumen.
Instant vi multa; ferro ardua robora adacto [710]
dant gemitum: reboat diro stridore supinus
mons circùm ingeminans, ictûsque resultat imago.
Tum supra caput, et nomen, patriamque, necisque
inscripsere notis variis in stipite causam.
Dextra autem, laevaque duos gemina arbore fixos [715]
addiderant socios, quos ob commissa merentes
leges supplicium ad justum pœnamque vocabant.
Verùm ipsum amborum in medio longè altiùs arbos
extulerat, veluti scelerum exhortator et auctor,
aut furtis foret ante alios immanior omnes. [720]
Defenceless and unarmed the hero stood,------------
his shoulders naked, naked his upper body
his frenzied tormentors stretched him out [705]
lengthwise, naked, across the wooden beam:
piercing the palms of his hands with nails, first
one then the other, pinning both feet with a spike.
Transfixed, a great river of blood flows out.
Forcefully they drove the iron into the wood [710]
through the son—the boards groaned with their effort,
and the mountains re-echoed the dreadful sound.
Then, over his head, his name, homeland, and crime
was written onto a panel and displayed.
To his right and left, fixed to their trees, two [715]
other men, whose dreadful crimes had merited
the death penalty by law, and justly so.
But his timber, in the midst, was the tallest,
as if he were the exhorter and author
of crime, and indeed the most monstrous of all. [720]
Line 717 is, perhaps, slightly wrongfooting for a modern reader: as if saying ‘well, obviously crucifixion is ghastly, but it’s fine to use it on real criminals—the problem with Christ is that he was innocent!’ Torture is fine, in other words, provided the tortured person deserves it. Hmm.
This passage as a whole is a strange one, actually: it opens with a stress on Jesus's helplessness: indefensus and inermis (line 703), undefended and unarmed, and mentions his nakedness not once but three time (twice in line 704 and again in line 706). Thrice nude! The description of the iron nails piercing hands and feet is pitiable, but by the end it's as if the really terrible thing about this crucifixion is not its degrading and agonising physical reality, but the sheer social injustice of presenting an innocent man to the world this way. It's part of the larger agenda of the Christiad, and a way of extracting an in effect pro-Roman message from a circumstance in which, one might think, the Romans are bound to emerge badly. Here's Hyam Maccoby:
According to the Gospels, Jesus was the victim of a frame-up. His aims were purely religious, and in pursuing them, he had fallen foul of the Jewish religious establishment, who, in order to get rid of him, concocted a political charge, and managed to hoodwink the Roman governor, Pilate, into believing it. When Pilate still showed reluctance to execute Jesus, they pressed the political charge until he was left with no option: ‘The Jews kept shouting, “If you let this man go, you are no friend to Caesar; any man who claims to be king is defying Caesar” ’ (John 19.7).One more detail: although Gardner translates lines 713 and 718 as ‘Above his head, at the summit of the cross, they wrote ...’ and ‘But his cross, set between theirs, rose far higher ...’ in fact at no point in this passage does Vida use the word crux. It's actually quite striking how rarely he uses that word in this poem; words like trabs (‘timber beam’), lignum (‘wood’, ‘tree’) and arbor (‘tree’) are consistently preferred. It's not that crux is never used (it crops up at 5:407 for instance); but it is notable mostly by its absence, and this passage doesn't use the word even once. I'm not entirely sure why this should be. There's no metrical reason why crux or any of its grammatical forms can't be fitted into hexameter, after all.
Since the 18th century, however, it has been argued that this allegation of a ‘frame-up’ is itself a frame-up – whose victims are the Jews. If Jesus, as many Gospel passages indicate, did indeed claim to be ‘King of the Jews’, is it possible that he meant this in a completely non-political sense? Why should he have chosen such a political designation if he had no political aims? Moreover, the picture of the Jews as more pro-Caesar than the Roman governor hardly rings true, given the Jewish record of resistance to the Roman occupation. The conclusion has been reached that Jesus was in fact a rebel against Rome, that the ‘manifest content’ of the story should be trusted rather than the ‘secondary elaboration’. The ‘manifest content’ is the story of a Jew who died on a Roman cross, with a Jewish rebel crucified on either side of him. The ‘secondary elaboration’, created in order to clear the early Church of the charge of disloyalty to Rome, tells a story of a man-God innocent of anti-Roman activity, whose enemies were not Romans but Jews.
Regarding the triply-stressed nudity of Christ in this passage we might want to turn to Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago 1997), which constitutes, in Frank Kermode's judgment, ‘a remarkable study of genital display in some – indeed in a great many – Renaissance depictions of Christ’:
Steinberg demonstrates that from about 1260, painters departed from the hieratically clothed, unsexed Byzantine tradition, and undressed the infant Jesus. Thereafter, for two centuries, they pictured him naked but without genital emphasis. But by the end of the 15th century they not only painted his penis but represented it as ‘pointed to, garlanded, celebrated’, stared at and venerated. In the following century it was touched and manipulated, and by the 1530s it was sometimes being shown in a state of infantile erection. This theme of erection, though under cover of a loincloth or other garment, was repeated in pictures of the Crucifixion and the dead Christ. There are some extremely fantasticated loincloths in paintings of the Man of Sorrows, as in two ‘deeply shocking’ pictures by Ludwig Krug (c. 1520) and Maerten van Heemskerck (1532), here reproduced. Some renderings of Crucifixion and Pietà are, I think one must agree, clearly intended to suggest large erections, which may have been intended to symbolise Resurrection.Vida doesn't go this far. But he certainly seems au fait with the Franciscan slogan: nudus nudum Christum sequi.
The purpose of these displays, it is conjectured, was to celebrate the Incarnation – though Steinberg prefers the obsolete term ‘humanation’. God became an entire man, and therefore a sexual being; his sex, like his dependence on his mother’s breast, is a pledge of that full humanity the doctrine asserts. And it will not do to offer naturalistic explanations of his infant behaviour; Jesus is entirely unlike other painted babies in his behaviour and the behaviour he elicits from others. There is no need to stress the humanity of ordinary babies or marvel at it.
At the head of this post: a characteristically fleshly and busy canvas by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640): ‘Christ on the Cross between the Two Thieves’, sometimes called ‘Le coup de lance’. It was painted 1619-20 and is presently in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, in Belgium.
[Next: lines 721-42]
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