[Previous: lines 294-312]
Back on Earth, Jesus's disciples are still mourning his death.
Iamque adeô in terris hominum miranda paventes------------
terruerant animos visa: umbris orbe fugatis,
sole recens orto, mœstissima Magdalene [315]
amissi desiderio perfixa magistri,
cum sociis ibant prima sub luce ferentes
in gremiis molles patriae felicis odores,
myrrhamque, et costum, spicaeque unguenta Cilissae,
supremum tumulo munus: varioque serebant [320]
multa inter sese tristes sermone per agros.
“Nos miseras, quas non secum lacrymabilis heros
duxerit ad letum: vigiles quis fallere nobis
custodes dabit? aut quis grandia saxa sepulcro
evolvet clauso, ut saltem fungamur inani [325]
munere, deserto solventes debita busto?”
Talia fundentes tumulum venere sub ipsum,
iactantesque oculos faciles huc plurima et illuc,
milite conspiciunt collem et custode vacare,
claustraque mirantur secum patefacta sepulcri. [330]
Accedunt: at ubi tumulum conspexit inanem,
naribus unde ingens fluctus se evolvit odorum,
hoste putans clam sublatum pulcherrima virgo
flebat, inornatum vellensque à vertice crinem,
et memora, et montes gemitu, sylvasque replebat. [335]
Cui iuvenis subitò effulgens in vestibus albis
aligerum genus, et cœli de gente. “Quid, inquit,
quaeritis, ô matres? longoiam parcite luctu,
atque animis mœstum tandem revocate timorem.
Laetitiam certa iam spe praesumite vestram, [340]
quandoquidem quem vos adeò lugetis ademptum,
funestaeque trabi fixum, ut scelus omne piaret,
vestraque sponte suâ deleret crimina morte,
unus pro cunctis, Erebi iam rege subacto,
manibus ex imis has rursum lucis in oras [345]
victor iit, superaque etiam nunc vescitur aura,
corporis ablutus quaecunque obnoxia morti.”
Haec ait, et nubi volucer se immiscuit atrae.
Meanwhile, on earth, men were still terrified------------
by what their timid souls had seen. As darkness
was banished by the sun, grieving Magdalene [315]
filled with longing for her absent master
went with her companions at dawn, carrying
their country’s sweet incense in their dresses:
myrrh, ginger and fragrant oils of Cilicia
as a final donation to the tomb. They [320]
talked of many things as they crossed the fields.
“How unhappy we are, our mourned-for hero
went to death without us. Can we evade
the guards, or shift his sepulchre’s great stone
seal, so we can at least perform the small [325]
custom, and offer gifts at his neglected tomb?”
So speaking they arrived at the tomb itself,
casting their looks in all directions they saw
the hill was free of soldiers—there were no guards.
More amazing: the doors to the tomb stood open! [330]
They went in, but the sepulchre was empty
and fragrant incense reached the nostrils of
the lovely virgin—she thought some enemy
had stolen the body by stealth, and wept
pulling her hair, her cries filling the woodland. [335]
Suddenly a young man dazzlingly white
was therem one of the winged angelic race. “What
are you looking for, women? Stop your weeping
and banish all sorrow and fear from your souls.
Be happy, and confident in your hope: [340]
he you mourn, whom you believe taken away,
who was nailed to a beam for everyone’s sins
of his free will, to blot out crimes with his death,
one man for all men—has defeated Erebus
returned from the depths again into the light [345]
as victor, and now has passed above, breathing
the airs of heaven, freed from his body’s death.”
He spoke, then hid himself in a sightless cloud.
Line 319 specifies myrrh, ‘costum’ (which Lewis and Short call ‘an Oriental aromatic plant, Costus Arabicus’ without being more specific—Wikipedia suggests this is known popularly as ‘spiral ginger’ though it is, despite its arabicus name, native to South America; so presumably Vida is thinking of something else) as well as unguents from Cilicia, ‘region in southern Turkey, extending inland from the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea.’
This is Vida's version of the first Easter morning, the women discovering the empty tomb. There are discrepancies in the Gospel account of this, climactic moment in the Christian narrative. According to Luke, various women went: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and ‘the others with them’; in John only Mary goes; in Mark both Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James are mentioned, as is Salome. In Matthew, Mary Magdalene is with another Mary, presumably the mother of James. As to why they go to the tomb, Mark and Luke say that the women were intending to continue the Jewish burial rituals; Matthew says they just wanted to look at it, John doesn't say why they came (Wikipedia point out that ‘the apocryphal, heterodox Gospel of Peter claims that Mary Magdalene came to mourn’). The woman or women then see first the stone rolled away and the tomb empty, and then, according to Mark, a mysterious man in white in the tomb. In Matthew this man is identified as an angel and in Luke there are two angel-like men. John's gospel doesn't mention this angel, or man, at all. Wikipedia's Empty Tomb entry has a whole chart on the differences actually. Click to embiggen:
Generations of scholars and theologians have found both these discrepancies and the sheer abruptness of the way this story is framed either problematic, or else eloquent in a particular way. ‘Mark 16:1-8,’ Richard Miller notes, ‘foregrounds not an evincing, postmortem appearance of a risen Jesus but a cenotaph with a missing body. This ending has seemed so strangely unsatisfying and unresolved that many scholars have supposed a missing ending for the narrative, lost early in the process of textual transmission.’ [Miller ‘Mark's Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 129:4 (2010), 761]. But Miller points out how common the trope of the absent body is in Classical culture, and suggests the Gospel narrative be understood in those terms. But there's something, perhaps, more profund in the combination of abruptness and absence, which is to say: in the eloquent paradox of founding a whole faith (of consummation, life and salvation) on these two things. Death, after all, is always abrupt, it always interrupts life; and the deus abscondicus of modern-day belief is potently figured here by this empty tomb.
At the head of the post: Russian artist Mikhail Nesterov's ‘The Empty Tomb’ (1889)
[Next: lines 349-391]
You're probably aware of Frank Kermode's especial interest in the enigmatic Mark in The Genesis of Secrecy?
ReplyDeleteGenesis of Secrecy is one of my favourite of Kermode's books.
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