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Jesus has come to harrow Hell.
Ecce autem foribus succedens maximus ultor------------
haud cunctatus, adest divina luce coruscus.
Porta ingens adversa manet centum aerea vastis [200]
vectibus, aeterni postes: hanc nulla neque igni
vincere vis valeat, neque duri robore ferri.
Constitit hïc Deus, ac dextrâ stridentia claustra
impulit: intremuit quo latè exterrita tellus
impulsu, vaga contremuerunt sidera mundi, [205]
regiaque umbrosis immugiit atra cavernis.
Ad sonitum horrifico adventu de vallibus imis
lucifugi raptim trepido adsunt agmine fratres,
humana facie crurum tenus, inde dracones.
Tum rudere insuetùm, dirumque è faucibus ignem [210]
efflare, atque domum piceo omnem involvere fumo.
Continuô patuere fores: procul, ecce, repentè
sponte sua absiliunt convulsi à cardine postes.
Apparet confusa intus domus, altaque circùm
atria, rarescunt tenebrae, et nox caeca recessit. [215]
Nam Deus haud secus obscuris conspectus in antris
perstringens oculos divina luce refulget,
quàm cùm gemma ignes splendore imitata corusco
in noctem thalamis lucet regalibus, atrasque
exuperat tenebras, largo et loca lumine vestit, [220]
purpurea circùm perfundens omnia luce.
Here he is: the supreme avenger approaches------------
no delay, glittering with divine brilliance.
In his way was a huge brass-forged gate, hundred- [200]
barred, strong as eternity. Not fire, nor
the hardness of iron could overcome it.
God’s son took his stand: his hand pushed the shrieking
doors—and the ground in every direction
trembled, the wandering stars above shivered, [205]
and groans crossed the shadowy underland.
At the sound of his coming, the depths disgorged
light-fleeing monsters, terrified, rushing out,
human-faced, but dragons from the waist down.
They groaned strangely, shot flames from their jaws and [210]
breathed out black smoke, filling the entire space.
But the doors shifted, suddenly breaking,
crashing down, torn forcefully from their hinges!
The gigantic interior was dimly revealed,
the nether darkness receding, night banished. [215]
For the god was conspicuous in those dark caves
his divine light gleaming and dazzling their eyes,
like the flashing light that fires from a gemstone
shining in a king’s shadowy chambers
banishing all darkness, illumination [220]
flooding everything with bright purple light.
That Jesus can so easily break-down the door to Hell is, perhaps, less immediately impressive than we might assume. The door, after all, was set there by God (presumably we are not to assume that the devils fashioned this door, like Milton’s crew building Pandemonium, to keep themselves in). It oughtn’t to surprise us that God can undo what God has done. These lower bronze gates parallel the gates to heaven described in Book 5, on which scenes from the war have been
carved by craftsman, and skilfully inlaid with gold.No such decoration down below; these gates really only exist in order for Jesus to burst through them and rescue all the virtuous pagans and Jewish patriarchs. And so he does.
Here could be seen, hanging in the liquid air,
battles left and battles right, fighting
now here, now there, advances and retreats,
the very heights of heaven darkening
with missiles, soldiers fighting one-on-one and
skirmishing. Those who lacked spears grabbed
their enemy’s long locks in their hands and
whirled them round in a circle by their hair.
By increments one side yielded, attacked from above,
urgent fighting; til wheeling through the air,
the enemy scattered and fled, all at once:
like storm-clouds rolled before fierce South wind.
The Father, a thunderbolt in his right hand
expelled them, pursuing them with fire from
heaven: Erebus’ dark house received them. [Christiad, 5:599-615]
Upon entering these shadowy spaces Jesus shines with a light that Vida calls ‘purpureus’ (line 221), a word that means ‘purple, including reddish, violet, and brownish’. That's an odd kind of light to cast, one might think; like something out of one of the moodier 1980s pop videos, or a Michael Mann flick. Since purple is the imperial colour, it might be that what Vida means here is something more conventionally royal: which, I presume, is why Gardner translates Christ's appearance as ‘deck[ing] everything with its golden glow.’ I'm not sure, though: gold is aureus after all, and that's not the word Vida goes with.
Lewis and Short, after listing all the places where purple means, simply, purple, list a few things described as purple in Latin literature that you or I might not immediately think of as purple, things like blood, dawn, eyes (a hero in Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica [3:179] has ‘purple eyes’) and ‘love’. The obvious go-to for Vida, of course, is Vergil; and in the first book of the Aeneid Aeneas is described as having purpurei laeti oculi—bright and joyful eyes, say the translators (the Loeb Aeneid has ‘his eyes a joyous lustre’), although strictly the phrase means joyful purple eyes [Aeneid, 1:591].
It's a puzzle, generally speaking, trying to recover what precise hues the ancients thought colour-terms referenced. It's tempting, in this instance, to assume that the eyes thing can be assimilated into our modern preference for bright blue eyes, since for us purple is a dark blue-y kind of colour. But the other things to which the ancients used purpureus, like blood and wine and sunset, suggests that they saw it as a much redder shade than we do. Even so late as the end of the sixteenth century we see the word being used in this more classical sense, as when Shakespeare opens his narrative poem of Venus and Adonis with Adonis rising early with the dawn to go hunting:
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd faceWell at any rate, I decided I quite liked the weird lighting effect of this Princean purple blaze, so I've gone with a literal translation here.
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase. [Venus and Adonis (1593), 1-3]
I'm sure you recognise the image at the head of the post: Rodin's large-scale sculpture ‘La Porte de l'Enfer’, ‘The Gates of Hell’. Several copies of this exist; up top is the Philadelphia one; Rodin worked on it for decades, beginning in the 1880s and ending only with his death in 1917. You can undertake a virtual tour of this monumental piece of art here.
[Next: lines 221-235]
Over on Twitter my friend Jon Walker (@NewishPuritan) explains: "The purple light is from the source account in the Gospel of Nicodemus, where it is helpfully expanded in the standard translation of the latin version as a 'purple and royal light', i.e. clearly chosen for its imperial associations."
ReplyDeleteI was going to refer to "Royal Purple," and was redirected on Wikipedia to "Tyrean Purple," which had a reddish aspect, was very dear, and in Rome became the object of a sumptuary law which gave an exclusive right to the emperor to wear it. I excerpt the beginning of the entry, but the rest may well be of interest: Tyrian purple (Ancient Greek: πορφύρα porphúra; Latin: purpura), also known as Phoenician red, Phoenician purple, royal purple, imperial purple, or imperial dye, is a reddish-purple natural dye; the name Tyrian refers to Tyre, Lebanon. It is a secretion produced by several species of predatory sea snails in the family Muricidae, rock snails originally known by the name 'Murex'. In ancient times, extracting this dye involved tens of thousands of snails and substantial labor, and as a result, the dye was highly valued.
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