Book 5, lines 815-845

[Previous: lines 758-814]

Mary has come to Golgotha to witness her son being crucified.

Ut verò informi mulctatum funere natum,                       [815]
affixumque trabi media iam in morte teneri
aspexit coram infelix, ut vidit ahena
cuspide traiectas palmas, palmasque, pedesque,
vulnificisque genas fœdataque tempora sertis,
squalentem ut barbam, turpatum ut sanguine crinem,     [820]
deiectosque oculos dura iam in morte natantes,
inque humerum lapsos vultus, morientiaque ora;
Alpino stetit ut cautes in vertice surgens,
quam neque concutiunt venti, neque saeva trisulco
fulmine vis cœli, assiduus neque diluit imber,                   [825]
hispida, cana gelu, longoque immobilis aevo.
Ipsi illam montes, ipsa illam flumina longè
videre ingentem fessae miserata dolorem;
eque sacro aereae lacrymârunt vertice cedri.
Filius at postquam pinu conspexit ab alta                        [830]
dilectam genitricem, animi miseratus in illa,
ut potuit, subitò morientia lumina fixit
semianimis, dulcemque oculis respondit amorem.
Mox sic exanguem visu, victamque dolore
affair extremum curasque avertere dictis:                        [835]
hactenus, ô mulier, stetimus: non te tamen aegram
tantus edat tacitè dolor: haud sine mente Parentis
haec ferimus, solo qui temperat omnia nutu.
Hic tibi pro nato (admotum nam fortè parenti
vidit Ioannem lacrymantem, et multa gementem)            [840]
semper erit.” Iuvenem mox idem affatur amicum:
“Haec tibi erit genitrix; oro, tutare relictam
tu saltem, et matris serva communis amorem.”
His dictis lacrymas, perculsis mentibus, hostes
non ipsi tenuere: ferae ingemuere cohortes.                    [845]

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As soon as she saw the ugly fate of her child,                  [815]
punished with shameful death, nailed to a beam—
saw how unhappy he looked, and the bronze
nails piercing the palms of his hand and his feet,
wounded by his thorn-crown, his torn cheeks
his hair matted with blood and his beard filthy—            [820]
saw his downcast eyes, swooning in cruel death,
his dying head slumped against his shoulders—
she stood, like a crag on an Alpine height,
that neither wind nor fierce lightning with its
triple prongs, nor heavy storm can remove:                     [825]
dulled, ice-white, motionless for a long time.
The very mountains, and the far-off rivers
were moved by this weary woman’s pain.
Tall cedars on their sacred hill wept for her.
And the son, seeing from atop his high timber                [830]
his beloved mother, was moved in his soul:
as best he could, he moved his dying gaze
to reciprocate the sweet love in her eyes.

And then, pallid and in pain, he spoke to her
one last time, hoping to dispel her cares:                         [835]
“So far, woman, I have borne it. But don’t
let this pain grieve you in silence. My Father
permits it to happen, He who guides all.
Here you have a son—” (close by his relative
John watched, weeping and grieving beside her)             [840]
“and always will have.” Then he spoke to his friend:
“She will be your parent; please, when I’m gone
keep her safe as our common mother, in love.”
With such words even his enemies shed tears,
unable to hold back, hardened soldiers groaned.              [845]

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This scene is the mater dolorosa, sometimes referred to as the stabat mater, ‘the mother stood …’ the opening words of a 13th century Latin hymn that became immensely popular through the Catholic world. That Vida stresses Mary standing in line 823, emphatically so after the long rhetorical build-up, suggests that he has this hymn in mind. The particular Biblical prompt here is John 19:26-27 …

When Jesus therefore saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved [ie John] standing by, He said to His mother, “Woman, behold your son!” Then He said to the disciple, “Behold your mother!” And from that hour that disciple took her to his own home.

The hymn, one of the ‘seven great hymns’ of the Catholic church, begins:

Stabat mater dolorósa
iuxta Crucem lacrimósa,
dum pendébat Fílius.

‘The sorrowful mother stands weeping beside the cross on which her son is hanging.’

It goes on for 20 stanzas, and has very often been set to music. Kristeva's ‘Stabat Mater’ essay is very good, I think, on the way this character, defined as she is by a set of radical incommensurables (a virgin who gets pregnant, a wholly unworlded women in the world, the inheritor of Eve's sin who is sinless and so on) comes to figure in art and culture. Kristeva notes that ‘many civilizations have subsumed femininity under the Maternal, but Christianity in its own way developed’:

It seems that the epithet ‘virgin’ applied to Mary was an error of translation: for the Semitic word denoting the social-legal status of an unmarried girl the translator substituted the Greek parthenos, which denotes a physiological and psychological fact, virginity. It is possible to read this as an instance of the Indo-European fascination (analyzed by Georges Dumezil) with the virgin daughter as repository of the father's power. It may also be interpreted as an ambivalent, and highly spiritualized, evocation of the underlying mother goddess and matriarchy, with which Greek culture and Jewish monotheism were locked in combat. Be that as it may, it remains true that Western Christendom orchestrated this ‘error of translation’ by projecting its own fantasies on it, thereby producing one of the most potent imaginary constructs known to any civilisation. [Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, Poetics Today 6:1/2 (1985: ‘The Female Body in Western Culture: Semiotic Perspectives’ (1985), 134]

One thing that Kristeva's (now venerable) semiotic analysis brings out nicely, and which seems to me relevant to the way Vida styles the scene in this portion of the Christiad, is how the archetype configures maternity as an unsaod, unsayable transaction, something that assumes a floating signification within an exchange economy, such that it is easily transferred first from Jesus to John, and then from John to all of us

Striking a shrewd balance between concessions to and constraints upon female paranoia, the representation of virgin motherhood seems to have crowned society's efforts to reconcile survivals of matrilinearity and the unconscious needs of primary narcissism on the one hand with, on the other hand, the imperatives of the nascent exchange economy and, before long, of accelerated production, which required the addition of the superego and relied on the father's symbolic authority. ... The weight of the ‘non-said’ (non-dit) no doubt affects the mother's body first of all: no signifier can cover it completely, for the signifier is always meaning (sens), communication or structure, whereas a mother-woman is rather a strange ‘fold’ (pli) which turns nature into culture, and the ‘speaking subject’ (le parlant) into biology. Although it affects each woman's body, this heterogeneity, which cannot be subsumed by the signifier, literally explodes with pregnancy - the dividing line between nature and culture - and with the arrival of the child - which frees a woman from uniqueness and gives her a chance, albeit not a certainty, of access to the other, to the ethical. These peculiarities of the maternal body make a woman a creature of folds, a catastrophe of being that cannot be subsumed by the dialectic of the trinity or its supplements. [149]

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