Book 6, lines 349-391

[Previous: lines 313-348]

Mary Magdelene has come to Jesus's empty tomb where an angel appeared to her, instructing her not to weep. Now read on.

Ipsa etiam res, ecce, oculis oblata repentè
firmavit dubiumque animum, tenebrasque resolvit.           [350]
Namque morae impatiens, atque acri saucia amore
dum virgo sedet, ac miratur inane sepulcrum,
artificumque manus; videt ipso in marmore fictum
littus arenosum, porrectum in littore piscem,
fluctivomum, ingentem, nant aequore qualia in alto         [355]
mole novâ ignaros nautas terrentia cete,
monstrum turpe, atrum, spatiosi bellua ponti,
cuius ab undivomo vates imperditus ore
redditus aereas rursum veniebat ad auras.
Tum secum: “Superi nunc ô nunc visa secundent              [360]
praesentes: veterum agnosco non vana futuri
signa, inquit: nempe ut monstri deformis in atro
tres vates latuit luces, tres gutture noctes
ingluviem passus, vastaeque voraginis antrum;
sic heros multùm ad superos defletus amicis,                     [365]
inclususque cavo saxo, terraque sepultus
delituit, saepe ut (memini) praedixerat ipse,
ad cœlum rediit, saxumque reliquit inane.”
Talia versanti subitô sub imagine falsa
ignoti agricolae sese Deus obtulit ipse,                              [370]
et tumulum iuxta astabat: mox farier orsum
virgo amens animi agnovit, conversaque luce
respicit, ecce, novâ illustrem, radiisque coruscum.
corruit, ac genua amplexans satis ora tueri
clara nequit, corpusque oculis obit omne volutis,               [375]
et mœstum aspectu dulci saturavit amorem.
Continuô tristi penitus de pectore mœror
omnis abit, rediitque decor suus ilicet ori
marmoreo: sed adhuc turgentibus humida gemmis
lumina, inornatique fluunt per colla capilli.                          [380]
Sic ubi rore madens pluvio rosa languida honestum
demisit caput, atque comam largo imbre gravatam;
tum si purpureo sol lumine vestiat arva,
et redeat madido facies innubila cœlo,
protinus attolens sese rursum illa resurgat,                           [385]
puniceique sinûs divinum pandat honorem.
Talis erat posito virgo pulcherrima luctu.
Ardet amans ipsum affari regemque Deumque,
et coram solitas haurire ac promere voces.
Dum trepidat, quae prima haerens exordia sumat,                 [390]
mortales visus, adopertus nube, reliquit.

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That she saw this sudden manifestation
brightened the faltering faith of her soul.                             [350]
Indeed, transfixed by love and impatient of delay,
the young girl sat in the empty tomb, amazed
by the well-crafted space. Carved in the marble
was a sandy beach. A fish stretched on the shore
vomiting water—it was as huge as any                                  [355]
great whale that threatens mariners on high seas,
an oceanic monster, ugly and black—
but from its mouth, the prophet emerged alive
returning again to breathe the upper air!
Then she said: “now angels, oh, now confirm                       [360]
what I’ve seen—the old prophet’s predictions
were not,” she says, “in vain: inside that monster’s
belly, alive for three days and three nights
enduring the whirlpool in the cave of its throat!
So did Jesus, mourned by Heaven and his friends                [365]
lie inside the hollow rock, tomb-buried
hidden, yet often (I remember!) he foretold
his return to heaven, leaving an empty grave!”

Such were her thoughts when suddenly appeared
the god himself, disguised as a farmer                                 [370]
standing beside the tomb. But as soon as he spoke
the girl recognizing him, turning to his light
and beholding his rays of flashing brilliance.
She went to him and clasped his knees, never
tiring of gazing on his bright and lovely face,                      [375]
filling her sad vision with his sweet regard.
At once all fear departed from her deep heart.
Native beauty returned to a face that seemed
sculpted in marble—her eyes were still wet
with gemlike tears and her hair spilled out unkempt.           [380]
Like a dew-dotted rose watered by rain
that hangs down its head after bountiful showers;
if, now, the sun’s purple light lights the fields,
the rose returns to life, lifting its soaked face
to heaven, immediately restored to itself and                       [385]
disclosing a divine beauty of red petals.
Such was the lovely girl when she stop grieving.
She longed to speak to the king, the god himself
to exchange familiar words face to face.
But as she hesitated, thinking how to begin,                         [390]
he left, hiding himself in a cloud of unseeing.

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The prophet mentioned in line 358 is, of course, Jonah; and the conceit that Jesus’s tomb included a marble wall on which was a bas relief of his escape from the fish (classical ekphrasis, like Homer's description of Achilles' shield, or Vergil's of the painted walls of Dido's palace) here has obvoius typological significance. Christianity has adumbrated a large number of typological parallels between the Old and New Testaments over the years, where things that are described in the former are explained as symbolically prefiguring, or mystically pre-embodying, the events of the latter. Some of these are more fanciful than others, but the notion that Jonah’s three days and nights inside his personal Moby-fish typologically anticipates Christ’s death and resurrection is, unusually, one that Jesus himself specified:

But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and indeed a greater than Jonah is here. [Matthew 12:39-41]

There seems little point in Jesus disguising himself as a farmer in line 370 if his face is shining with divine light. Something of a giveaway, one might think. Still there is something moving, here, in the frank joy of Mary Magdelene at seeing the man she loved and believed dead alive again.

On the subject of Jesus’s ‘disguise’, John is the only evangel to mention this, and his version of events is rather different to Vida’s:

But Mary stood outside by the tomb weeping, and as she wept she stooped down and looked into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. Then they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”

She said to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid Him.”

Now when she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?”

She, supposing Him to be the gardener, said to Him, “Sir, if You have carried Him away, tell me where You have laid Him, and I will take Him away.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary!”

She turned and said to Him, “Rabboni!” (which is to say, Teacher).

Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.’ ”

Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that He had spoken these things to her. [John 20:11-18]

Two angels rather than Vida’s one, and a gardener (hortulanus in the Vulgate) rather than Vida’s agricola, which definitely does mean farmer. More importantly, in the Bible Mary does not recognise Jesus until he specifically draws attention to his identity, where in Vida she sees straight through his ‘disguise’. Still, this encounter between Mary and ‘the gardener’ was a common theme for religious art in the medieval and early Renaissance. At the head of this post, for instance, is Juan de Flandes’s painting of the scene (from c.1500). You can see that Jesus is even holding a spade.

As to why John includes this episode and none of the other gospels do, your guess is as good as mine. The standard (I suppose) reading is that John is styling Jesus as the new, that is renewed, Adam: ‘Adam was put in the garden of Eden to maintain it and care for it (Gn 2:15). He failed to do so, but Jesus is the second Adam, the true human being ... As the gardener he opened the way to the tree of life (Rev 2:7; 22:14,19)’ [John Suggit ‘Jesus the gardener: the atonement in the Fourth Gospel as re-creation’, Neotestimentica 33:1 (1999), 167]. That's fair enough, though rather more fanciful than Jesus as the new Jonah.

Jean-Luc Nancy, on the other hand, is less interested in the notional ‘clarity’ of such typological manifestation and more in the way it is grounded in a more fundamental unrecognition, a failure to see what is obvious.

Another aspect of the intrigue of vision involves the mistake Mary Magdalene initially makes when she thinks she is seeing the gardener. For this mistake to be possible, Jesus must not be recognizable, or at least not immediately so. Mary Magdalene has known him for long enough; it is unlikely that she would not be able to recognize him. The reasons for her mistake must remain undecided: either in her certainty of no longer seeing him alive, she does not even have at her disposal this ‘pre-vision’ or this schema that is prior to the image and that would permit or impose the identification; or else Jesus himself is not recognizable at first, while nonetheless indeed being himself. [Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body (Fordham University Press 2008), 27]

Nancy notes that this failure-to-recognise is the first of several that attend the reappearance of Christ.

The difficulties involved in recognizing Christ have a twofold significance. On the one hand, it is as if his resemblance to himself were a suspended and floating moment. He is the same without being the same, altered within himself. Is it not thus that the dead appear? Is it not this alteration, at once imperceptible and striking—the appearing of that which or of he who can no longer properly appear, the appearing of an appeared and disappeared [un apparu et disparu]—that most properly and violently bears the imprint of death? The same is no longer the same; the aspect is dissociated from the appearance; the visage is made absent right in the face; the body is sinking into the body, sliding under it. The departing [la partance] is inscribed onto presence, presence is presenting its vacating. He has already left; he is no longer where he is; he is no longer as he is. He is dead, which is to say that he is not what or who he, at the same time, is or presents. He is his own alteration and his own absence: He is properly only his impropriety.

On the other hand, the difficult and uncertain recognition bears the stakes of faith. It does not consist in recognizing the known but in entrusting oneself to the unknown (certainly not in taking it as a substitute for the known, for that would be belief and not faith).

The second of these two points, that faith itself is (as the NT defines it) ‘the evidence of things not seen’, and this encounter therefore tropes the way faith is a non-re-cognition, is a good one, I think; but even more compelling is the first point, that death is an inscription of departure onto the fabric of what can be cognized in the first place. I like Nancy boy's reading rather more than the standard typological one.

One last note to today's blogpost, a rather pettifogging one that has to do with translation. So: the simile of the rose, sodden with rainfall but lifting its beautiful head again, invokes ‘purple’ sunlight. That looks odd, I know, but it's what the Latin says. I’ve already talked about this particular colour-term, in a previous entry on this blog.

Then again, I may have boobed here. Gardner seems to think line 383’s ‘purpureo’—the ablative singular of purpureus, purple,—modifies ‘sinus’ in line 386, the ‘breast’ of the rose, though that’s in the nominative and is several clauses away. But that can't be right; can it? (Doesn’t it go with the ablative singular ‘lumine’ in the same line?) I’m tentative here because I may be being stupidly wrong, and perhaps Gardner’s translation is the right one , that translation being: ‘if perchance the sun favours the fields with its lovely light … [the rose] unfolds the divine beauty of its empurpled bosom.’ But I don't think I'm wrong. Ho hum.

(One extra note: it’s certainly logical for Gardner to translate sinus as bosom, since that’s one of the things the word means. I've gone a different way, taking the word’s whole semantic field into account—‘sinus: a hollow, cavity—curve—fold—bay—bosom—fold of the toga—Medieval Latin fjord’ and have preferred ‘petal’.)

[Next: lines 392-404]