Christ's body comes back to life.
Atque ea dum longè vastum per inane geruntur,------------
iam lux Eois properabat tertia ab oris, [295]
et Pater omnipotens Nato immortalia membra
illustrans penitus divinum afflavit honorem;
quodque fuit mortale modò, et violabile corpus,
immortale dedit. Non tanta luce sereno
sidera clara polo, non aureus ipse nitet sol. [300]
Ceu qui per noctem imposito cinere obrutus ignis
delitet, et nusquam tecto se lumine prodit,
siquis eum flabris exsuscitet arida circùm
nutrimenta serens, subitis ad tecta favillis
emicet, et totas lustret splendoribus aedes. [305]
Talis, ubi turpe irrepsit senium, unicus ales,
congessitque sibi ramis felicibus altum
summo in colle rogum, posuitque in morte senectam,
continuô novus exoritur, nitidusque iuventa
effulget cristis, et versicoloribus alis: [310]
innumerae circùm volucres mirantur euntem:
ille suos adit AEthiopas, Indosque revisit.
Whilst this was happening in the wide air------------
the third day was hastening out of the east [295]
and the mighty Father, clarifying his Son’s
deathless body, filled him with divine breath.
Now what had been a mortal, fragile body
was made immortal. Not the serene light of
starbright skies, not the sun itself, shone so fine! [300]
He was like a fire, ramped-down in ash at night
not betraying its existence with flames, but
if someone should blow on it, and feed it dry
fuel, the embers flare up fiery to the roof
and its brightness fills the entire house. [305]
He was like that fallible but unique bird
who builds a nest in a high tree’s branches
on a hilltop: immolating its old age, it
rises again new, shining with youthfulness
crested and adorned with coloured wings; [310]
all the other birds gaze in wonder as he
flies to Ethiopia, or revisits the Indus.
What God ‘does’, as it were, to the body of his son to retrieve him from death is, I suppose, the central mystery of Christianity, and not liquidable into banal phrasing or facile explanation. A writer, though, has to at least have a go. Here Vida says God ‘illustrates’ or ‘makes illustrious’ the corpse: illustrans (line 297), meaning ‘illuminating, brightening, elucidating, explaining, making clear, making famous, rendering illustrious.’ A tricky one to render, since an Englishing needs to convey both the illumination aspect of this and the enfamous-ing (Gardner renders: ‘glorying the immortal body of his Son’). In the end I went a different way, and picked out the word’s relationship to clarity. This maybe be misleading of me, although some part of me quickens (another relevant term!) at the idea that life is a clarification of death, that it explains as well as illuminates non-life. Fanciful, probably. Vida also includes the more conventional notion that God inspires ‘divine breath’ into his son’s body (also line 297).
On the phoenix simile, at the end, here's Gardner:
The use of the Pheonix as a symbol for Christ is very ancient, going back as far as Clement (2nd century CE) in his first Epistle to the Corinthians, 25-6 and Tertullian (3rd century)in his On the Resurrection 13. The symbolism was also influential in medieval and Renaissance devotional art.The earliest record of the Phoenix myth we have is Herodotean:
Another bird also is sacred; it is called the phoenix. I myself have never seen it, but only pictures of it; for the bird comes but seldom into Egypt, once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and bigness. The Egyptians tell a tale of this bird's devices which I do not believe. He comes, they say, from Arabia bringing his father to the Sun's temple enclosed in myrrh, and there buries him. His manner of bringing is this: first he moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, and when he has proved its weight by lifting it, he then hollows out the egg and puts his father in it, covering over with more myrrh the hollow in which the body lies; so the egg being with his father in it of the same weight as before, the phoenix, after enclosing him, carries him to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. Such is the tale of what is done by this bird. [Herodotus, 2.73]This bird was known to the Jews as well as to the early Christians. ‘Regarding the phoenix,’ says M. R. Niehoff
the church fathers interpreted the pagan myth as a symbol of the dogma of Jesus' resurrection, while the rabbis accepted the Hellenistic stories in their literal sense and numbered the phoenix among other primordial monsters. The rabbis, moreover, enhanced the ontological status of the myth by refusing to confine the phoenix to Urzeit and eschaton and insisting that he is rather a part of their own life experience. [Niehoff, ‘The Phoenix in Rabbinic Literature’, The Harvard Theological Review 89:3 (1996), 246]Indeed, as Niehoff shows, not only did the Jews believe in the literal existence of the phoenix, they regarded it as edibly kosher: ‘Rabbi Johanan expounded: “a recompense for what I have forbidden you [says God], I have allowed something for you. As a recompense for the prohibition of certain fish you will eat the leviathan, a clean fish; as a recompense for the prohibition of certain fowls you shall eat the phoenix, which is a clean fowl.”’ [Niehoff, 263] I wonder what it tastes like?
At the head of this post: French sculptor Germain Pilon's Resurrection of Jesus Christ (c1570).
[Next: lines 313-348]
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