[Previous: lines 99-120]
Christ's spirit is sent by God to harrow hell.
Iam Deus, ut sacros vates, et sancta piorum------------
concilia educens tenebris inferret Olympo,
corporeis liber vinclis concesserat imos
spiritus ad manes, animarum regna silentum,
per caecos aditus, et praecipites anfractus [125]
solis inaccessos radiis, loca nocte perenni
obsita, terrificam caecae formidinis aulam.
Hic stabulant, vivisque tenent impervia regna
noctivagi fratres, superi quos ira Parentis
cœlo immane nefas animis excussit adortos, [130]
Tartareisque genus miserabile mersit in antris,
quando illos tenuit regnandi tanta cupido.
Nunc miseros pœnis manes miseri magis ipsi
exercent, vinctosque tenent nigrantibus oris.
Interiora habitant barathrum irremeabile clausae [135]
crudeles animae, ad superos dum vita manebat.
Nunc merita expendunt vasta fornace sepultae
supplicia, undantemque ferunt caligine fumum.
Ignis ibi aeternus, semper nova flamma renascens.
Innocuae circùm sedes, secretaque longè [140]
atria circuitu longo: hic incendia nulla,
nulli obsunt penitus flammis ultricibus ignes;
umbrarum sed iners requies, penitusque silentis
mundi temperies: secretae his sedibus aevum
insontes degunt animae, quibus haud sua damno [145]
admissa; at primi scelus exitiale parentis
detinet hïc clausas, nostrae nil lucis egentes,
pœnarum prorsum expertes, nisi luce carerent
iucundâ, qua gens gaudet stellantis Olympi.
Hic patres, sanctum genus, antiquissima proles, [150]
qui vitam vinclo nullo, non legibus ullis
compositam, incultos primi degere per agros
inter oves, patrio tantùm se more tenentes,
iustitiae memores ultro rectumque colentes.
Hic vatesque pii, qui quondam numine pleni [155]
ventura intrepidè magnas cecinere per urbes;
quique dedere orbi leges divina reperta;
quosque datis olim iuvit parere volentes;
matronae, atque viri, vitœque in limine rapti.
Omnibus unus amor, cœlique arrecta cupido. [160]
Et iam promissi memores tum fortè per umbras
secla recensebant tacitis volventia lustris,
ducebantque animis finem adventare malorum.
Now God, so that sacred bards and holy------------
men might leave darkness and enter Olympus,
freed his spirit from its material bonds
and sent it to the realm of silent souls.
He travelled by blank ways and steep cliffs that [125]
never thrilled with the sunlight: a night land
the baleful territory of blank fear.
This was the dwelling place of outsiders,
night-roamers and their kin. In his wrath God above
had hurled them from heaven for attacking Him [130]
sank that miserable race deep in Tartarean caves:
where those that so lusted for power could rule.
Now they’re more miserable than the poor souls
they chain and punish in that black expanse.
Trapped in inner depths from whence none return [135]
were those souls who knew only cruelty when alive.
Now they paid the price, interred in giant fire
and choking on the constant billows of black smoke:
an endless flame, forever being renewed.
Elsewhere the innocent dwell, their hidden halls [140]
circled about. Here there is no burning,
and no punishing flames ignite. Rather
there is deep silence and shadowy stillness
a world without extremes. Here were placed the
souls of innocent people, admitted through [145]
no personal fault, but via our first parents’ sin:
enclosed there, but not deprived of all light
or experiencing punishment, though not lit
by the lovely brilliance of Olympus’ stars.
Here holy patriarchs and ancestors [150]
who lived innocent lives and broke no laws
unrestrained existences in their fields
among sheep, paternal custom guiding them,
justice by nature, and righteous by instinct.
Here too were pious prophets, who, God-inspired, [155]
bravely preached what was coming to the cities
and laid down divine laws and revelations.
Here were many happy to obey such laws
and those, girls and boys, snatched from life’s threshold.
All shared one love and yearning for heaven. [160]
And, remembering what had been promised,
darkling, counting the silent rolling decades
they began to hope the travails’ end was nigh.
This passage begins a 150-or-so line account (lines 121 to 293) of the harrowing of Hell, undertaken by Christ so that virtuous pagans and patriarchs might enter Olympus (line 122), Vida's classicizing way of referring to heaven. This, I think, is another bit of Vida that caught the imagination of his greater successor, Milton. Paradise Lost doesn’t need to describe Limbo, since there’s nobody as yet to go there; but Vida's account of ‘Tartarus’ feeds forward into Miton's epic.
So, yes: welcome, again, to Hell. The ‘worldbuilding’ here involves a familiar problem: rather like Hamlet musing on that undiscovered country from whose borne no traveller return, shortly after his chinwag with the ghost of his Dad, undeniably a traveller returned from the borne of that undiscovered country. Here the issue is God’s punishment. These rebel angels have been banished to deepest Tartarus, a place Vida specifies in line 135 as a place from which none return (irremeabile, ‘from which one can not return; irremeable’). But if that’s so, how come so many devils have fluttered up into our world, taking the forms of birds, or bees? They did so at the beginning of Book 2, real devils flying up to Jerusalem to encourage its citizens to condemn Jesus; and they did so again in Book 5, this time as allegorical personifications (something else Milton reworked):
Presently he called from its lair lurking FearBut what is before handwaved towards as ‘vast tracts’ is here given more specificity. The topography of Milton’s netherworld draws, in part, from this bit of the Christiad—Vida has mentioned Hell before, but not in such as way as to imply its larger geography. Here we have [in Gardner’s rendering] ‘sightless paths and steep cliffs untouched by the sun, realms covered in perpetual night, a baleful dwelling of blind fear.’ Milton’s Satan crosses from Hell to Earth, navigating ‘a dark and drearie Vaile … and many a Region dolorous’, crossing both fiery and frozen mountains and passing, famously, ‘rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death, [PL 2:621]. Then he crosses
—a dark, huge and unavoidable monster.
In all that shadowy place there was no more plague
more terrifying, or envious of mankind.
His companions were: Cold, and downcast Sloth.
He told this torpid creature to ascend to
the upper air, ....
The creature did as ordered, forming dark shapes
distilling itself into a flock of black night-birds.
This obscene thing flew across immense tracts. [Christiad 5:309-324]
a boundless ContinentSatan encounters what Milton, in one of his rare accesses of Carry-on style humour, calls ‘the backside of the World farr off’, a ‘large and broad’ cliff that is, hugely, part of ‘a dark Globe’ (this, we're told, is the ‘Paradise of Fools’).
Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night
Starless expos'd, and ever-threatning storms. [PL 3:343-5]
Prior to that Vida has described his ‘limbo’, here a place without fire or sharp suffering, but also a place of rather claustrophobic silence and darkness: a mundus temperiēs (line 144), ‘a temperate world’, ‘a moderate world’, quite hard to translate actually (I’ve gone, as you can see, with ‘a world without extremes’).
At the head of this post: a fresco of the Harrowing of Hell by Fra Angelico (c. 1430s). Nice to see that Jesus was a supporter of the England national football team.
[Next: lines 164-197]
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