Book 5, lines 913-939

[Previous: lines 894-912]

Christ has been crucified between two thieves.

At verò inter se adversis decernere dictis
auditi, pœnas qui iuxtà ob furta luebant,
supplicio aequali iuvenes gemina arbore fixi.          [915]
Alter enim furiis, longisque doloribus actus,
ipse etiam verbis morientem heroa superbis
stringebat miser, ac tales dabat ore loquelas:
“I nunc, et templi multa constructa virûm vi
demolire adyta, et post tres rursum erige luces.        [920]
Nunc, tibi si genus è summo traheretur Olympo,
eque Deo Genitore fores, ut te ipse ferebas,
his te, nos pariterque malis prohibere liceret.
Verùm, omnes quando iactâsti vana per urbes,
vobiscum moriere, Dei mentita propago.”                  [925]
Non tulit haec alter, dextra qui in parte propinquus
iam morti pendebat, et haec extrema profatus:
“Infelix, quae tanta animo dementia sedit?
Nos ambo meritò luimus peccata; sed insons
proditur hic odiis : quin nos commissa fatentes           [930]
aequiùs hïc fuerat veniam pacemque precari.”
Sic ait: hinc Divum conversus lumina in ipsum
talibus orabat: “Superi tu certa Parentis
progenies (nam celsa manent te sidera) ab alto
respice me, et dexter morienti protinus adsis.”             [935]
Annuit, et verbis Deus est dignatus amicis:
“Tu partem laudis capies, tu gaudia mecum;
quae me cunque hodie, una eadem te regna beatum
accipient, ait: astra alacri iam concipe mente.”

------------

Now the other two hanging on either side
paying the penalty due for their many thefts,
could be heard disagreeing about him.                           [915]
One driven to frenzy by his long agony
and his impending death, railed at the hero
unleashing a stream of words at the wretched man:
“Go! Now! The temple many men built?—smash it
demolish its shrine, rebuild it in three days!                    [920]
Now, if you truly do come from Olympus
if God really is your father—free yourself,
and whilst you’re at it, free us from this torture.
But since all you preached in the cities proved vain
die with the two of us, false son of God.”                         [925]

Not so the other, on the right, hanging close
to death. These were the last words that he spoke:
“Miserable man! Are you demented?
We are both deservedly punished; but he
has been betrayed by hatred. It would be better                [930]
for us to pray to him for peace and pardon.”
So he spoke, and turning to the divine man
he added: “for truly you are high God’s
offspring (the tall stars await you), look down
upon me and show me kindness as I die.”                         [935]
The god dignified him with these friendly words:
"You shall share the praise and joy with me;
wherever I go, those same happy realms will
accept you,” he said “you will know the stars.”

------------

This famous episode of the two thieves has conflicting Biblical sources.

The impenitent thief is a man described in the New Testament account of the Crucifixion of Jesus. In the Gospel narrative, two criminal bandits are crucified alongside Jesus. In the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, they both join the crowd in mocking him. In the version of the Gospel of Luke, however, one taunts Jesus about not saving himself, and the other (known as the penitent thief) asks for mercy. In apocryphal writings, the impenitent thief is given the name Gestas, which first appears in the Gospel of Nicodemus, while his companion is called Dismas. Christian tradition holds that Gestas was on the cross to the left of Jesus and Dismas was on the cross to the right of Jesus. In Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend, the name of the impenitent thief is given as Gesmas. The impenitent thief is sometimes referred to as the ‘bad thief’ in contrast to the good thief.

The good thief, in other words, only appears in Luke. It's quite a famous interpretive crux, since Matthew and Mark are quite specific that both thieves are damned:

And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left. Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross! ... He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also taunted him. [Mark 15:27–15:32]

Luke tells quite a different story:

Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, “Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation? And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes, but this man has done nothing criminal.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied to him, “Amen I say to you today you will be with me in Paradise.” [Luke 23:39–43]

Beckett, who found this fascinating, makes much of it in Waiting for Godot. As Estragon pulls off his boots to air his toes, Vladimir says:

VLADIMIR: This is getting alarming. (Silence. Vladimir deep in thought, Estragon pulling at his toes.) One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It's a reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo.

ESTRAGON: What?

VLADIMIR: Suppose we repented.

ESTRAGON: Repented what?

VLADIMIR: Oh ... (He reflects.) We wouldn't have to go into the details.

Later he ruminates some more on this matter:

VLADIMIR: And yet ... (pause) ... how is it—this is not boring you I hope—how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved? The four of them were there—or thereabouts—and only one speaks of a thief being saved. (Pause.) Come on, Gogo, return the ball, can't you, once in a way?

ESTRAGON: (with exaggerated enthusiasm). I find this really most extraordinarily interesting.

VLADIMIR: One out of four. Of the other three, two don't mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him.

ESTRAGON: Who?

VLADIMIR: What?

ESTRAGON: What's all this about? Abused who?

VLADIMIR: The Saviour.

ESTRAGON: Why?

VLADIMIR: Because he wouldn't save them.

ESTRAGON: From hell?

VLADIMIR: Imbecile! From death.

ESTRAGON: I thought you said hell.

VLADIMIR: From death, from death.

ESTRAGON: Well what of it?

VLADIMIR: Then the two of them must have been damned.

ESTRAGON: And why not?

VLADIMIR: But one of the four says that one of the two was saved.

ESTRAGON: Well? They don't agree and that's all there is to it.

VLADIMIR: But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?

ESTRAGON: Who believes him?

VLADIMIR: Everybody. It's the only version they know.

ESTRAGON: People are bloody ignorant apes.

Jesus can save us from Hell, but not from death. We all have to die, after all; but not all of us have to go to Hell. I've always taken this passage, and indeed this whole play, to be about the essential arbitrariness of things in general, an existential insight not a million miles away from Coleridge's mariner and the seeming arbitrary disproportion betweem his crime and his punishment (it goes off the point of this post, but ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is a story of an albatross—the purity of alba, whiteness, sacrificed doubly upon the ‘T’ of its [c]ross—murdered by the human mariner with his ‘cross-bow’, harrowing a kind of marine hell and finally being redeemed).

In Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are the two thieves (or two tramps) situated, as their names tell us, on the left and the right sides of the absent centre represented by Godot (Vladimir, with his Russian name, to the east—Estragon, with his French one, to the west: Ouest-ragon—although which of these, west and east, counts as the blessed right-hand and the cursed left-hand depends, rather, on where you happen to be standing). That orientation is also, of course, arbitary, at least so far as moral worth is concerned. You will be saved or damned depending on whether you have done good or bad things, on whether you are a good or bad person: that's common sense. Except that we've all done bad things. There are sins of commission for those who do things, and sins of omission for those who abstain from doing things to try and avoid committing sins of commission.

The thing is, the whole point of the passion narrative is that Christ saves us, or at least offers us salvation, regardless of our worth. The reason why ‘people’, in Estragon's laconic judgment, ‘are bloody ignorant apes’ is because they systematically prefer the story that says: say nice things to God and you go to Paradise, vent angrily at God and, no matter what the provocation or the circumstances, you go to Hell. It's a banal spiritual morality, it seems to me, and more a matter of superstition, of warding-off with the correct forms, than spiritual truth. Imagine a scenario in which the left-hand thief railed at God and the right-hand thief flattered him and Christ told the former that he would join him later in Paradise. How would theologians spin such a variant?

But it's not hard to imagine. I assume they would say something like: ‘the right-hand thief was a thief, and so a bad man; sugared words don't compensate for that, and indeed God looks poorly on flattery. The left hand thief, though also a bad man, was at least honest; and being honest to God is the beginning of all virtue. Christ looked into the suffering of his body and soul that caused him to lash out, and saw the germ of goodness there for he came not to reward sycophants but to save the desperate.’

Actually, I think Beckett's moral is starker than that. When he notes that 50% is a ‘reasonable percentage’ he's gesturing towards a kind of Russian Roulette model of salvation, when factors entirely out of your control, such as where and when you're born, how you're brought-up and whether or not you can even grasp the subtle complexities of faith (‘oh ... we wouldn't have to go into the details’) count for more than good intentions. Denis Devlin, one of Beckett's contemporaries as an Irish Modernist artist, wrote two poems about the thieves. The first, from the right hand, seems almost conventional:

It is not right for me to talk to You,
To wait on You with ministerial bow,
To pray, or if I lived in higher merit
To love even, or to adore, or care.
Why? the reasons? there are many of them;
That You are there and are not there.

The huge and foreign universes round me,
The small dishonours in me coat my heart:
Whether the whim of the ignoble beast
Or the Gothic nobility of the choir,
It makes no difference, both high and low,
Are burned to nothing in Your fire.
My will You will for a fire toward. [Devlin, ‘The Good Thief’ (1930)]

The companion poem, though, takes us into stranger, or less intuitive, spiritual spaces:

Lord, we You've made it in our power
To destroy the World You saved us in
And not only our bodies with Your souls,
Your soul created for Your praise forever
But all that has been made against Your image
Passes, both now and never,

Beasts that eat their young in innocence,
Men that torture knowing what they do?
Innocent things and conscientious things?
We who destroy the flower and the grass,
The thrush whose song's as powerful as the sea
All this and more has come to pass. [Devlin, ‘The Bad Thief’ (1930)]

I especially like the play on words in ‘come to pass’; and tend to think there's a sharper truth in the thrush's song than on the rather grandiose cosmic blather of the other poem. If our salvation is neither merited individually, nor predetermined by some grounded divine judgment but is instead a matter of percentages, a kind of quantum randomness, then the very contradiction of the different gospel accounts of the two thieves becomes significant precisely as a dislocation, or if you prefer a liberation, of consequence from innocent things and conscientious things. Do not despair, one of Schrödinger's cat survived; do not presume, one of Schrödinger's cats expired.

That's bad theology, I know. But badness is the first step on the way to redemption, I suppose.

At the head of this post: ‘Christ on the Cross between two thieves’; an illumination from the Vaux Passional, 16th century. And here, as chaser: a Rembrandt engraving of the same subject:

[Next: lines 940-958]