Book 6, lines 560-591

[Previous: lines 536-559]

Thomas, having doubted, recovers his belief in Jesus's resurrection.

Talia narrabat Cleophas : quae credita cunctis               [560]
vera negat Thomas, et cœptis perstat in îsdem.
“Haec mihi (dicam iterum) nemo persuaserit unquam,
illum ipsum his oculis clarâ nisi luce videndum
hausero, et his manibus nisi vulnera contrectâro.”
Sic fatur: simul ecce Deus cum lumine largo                   [565]
improvisus adest iterum, sociosque revisit:
et clausae mansere fores, mansere fenestrae.
Non aliter vitri, quod tectis summovet auras,
lumine sol penetrat splendentes aureus orbes,
insertim radios iaciens in opaca domorum;                      [570]
nec tamen ulla viae apparent vestigia adactâ
luce, sed illaeso saepe itque, reditque metallo.
Sternunt sese omnes terrae, genibusque salutant.
Ut verò Didymus manifesto in lumine vidit
vulnera monstrantem, et se nomine compellantem,          [575]
horruit, et prono confestim corruit ore,
multaque se incusans animo, sic denique fatur:
“Vera mihi facies, verus Deus, omnia novi.
Haud equidem, fateor, vivum te credere quibam,
post obitus, cœli hoc iterum spirabile lumen,                    [580]
has auras haurire: animo tua dicta labanti
exciderant penitus, modò quae suprema dedisti.
Demens, qui te obita non posse huc morte reverti
crediderim, cùm quartâ alios iam luce sepultos
ad superas cœli nuper revocaveris oras,                            [585]
et memini, atque aderam: sed me mens laeva tenebat.
Forsan at haec tamen haud vestro sine numine tanta
(credo equidem) venit dementia: forsitan olim
proderit hïc seris haesisse nepotibus unum,
et manibus voluisse priùs contingere corpus;                     [590]
ne facies, aut vana oculos eluderet umbra.”

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So Cleophas spoke, and all believed him.                          [560]
Only Thomas denied the truth, unswayed.
“I myself,” (he said) “won’t be persuaded
til I see him by the light of my own eyes,
and touch his wound with my own hands.”
It’s what he said. Then—look!—the light of God             [565]
shone huge as the hero again revisits
though the door and windows remained closed!
As when glass, that keeps the winds from a house
lets golden sunlight through its circular panes
rays that cast darkness out of the houses;                          [570]
light leaves no mark of its passage through
to and fro without harming the metal frame.
They all greeted him and knelt before him.
When the Twin saw him truly manifest—
showing his wounds, addressing him by name—             [575]
he trembled, and immediately fell to the floor,
full of self-reproach, speaking the following:
“You are the true form of God—I know it now.
I admit I could hardly believe you lived
after your death—breathing the same air as us,               [580]
touched by the same breezes. Your words faded
from my mind, all you gave us from above.
Madman I, even your promise to others
that four days after death they’d see light again
reviving renewed on the shores of heaven—                  [585]
I was wayward, though I remembered your words.
Perhaps it did not come without your power
(indeed I believe it)—this madness. One day
perhaps it will benefit our descendants
to know one doubted, until he’d touch your body          [590]
with his hands, lest his eyes were deluded.”

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The emphasis, several times repeated in this portion of the poem—and, to be fair, taken directly from the gospel account—of Jesus not only appearing alive again after dying (a genuinely impressive achievement) but of Jesus somehow sneaking in to rooms despite locked doors and closed windows (more in the territory of a conjurer of cheap tricks) puzzles me, rather. Why focus on that, after all? Aren’t there more impressive things going on in this story? Here, though, Vida offers something somewhere between a gloss, by way of epic simile, and an explanation: Jesus moves through the pane of glass like golden sunlight. It’s beautiful, although the risk it runs is of characterising Jesus as insubstantial, a kind of hologram of photons rather than a real, physical body.

The ‘circular panes’ of glass is a striking little detail: the Latin is orbis, line 569—Gardner translates, a touch oddly, as ‘the golden sun passes through the shining orbs of glass that keep the wind from the house’—though the Latin is actually a 2D, not a 3D, signifier: ‘circle, ring, a rotation, a disc or disc-shaped object.’ I mean, I’m not sure late 15th- or early 16th-century windows were disc-shaped, by and large, but whatever.

The Gospel account, in John, has inspired centuries of representations like the one at the head of this post, ‘The Incredulity of Saint Thomas’ by Caravaggio (1602) of course:

And after eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace to you!” Then He said to Thomas, “Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing.”

And Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus said to him, “Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” [John 20:26-29]

There's a grisly physicality to this (though Glenn Most thinks ‘that the Johannine text strongly implies that Thomas never touched Jesus’s wounds despite the apostle’s earlier claim that he would not believe in the resurrection without tactile proof’ [Most, Doubting Thomas (Harvard Univ Press 2005)].

The unsettling nature of this, well because uncomfortably captured by Caravaggio up top, has to do with the bizarre intimacy it construes. After all, who is it that penetrates Christ's body? Only his enemies (crucifying him) and those of his disciples who doubt him. Doesn't this imply some kind of equivalence? And yet his followers today devour him whole—he penetrates them, not the other way around. There's something unnerving about thinking the reverse (the penetratable Christ). Which in turn perhaps leads to a flip-about interpretation of Caravaggio's image; Thomas passsive, not active; Christ's torso, active, not passive. In Caravaggio's canvas, the strange angle of Christ's head on his body disconnects it, visually speaking, from the rest of the composition. And then we're looking at one of those Bosch-y devils without heads, but with faces embedded in their chests: Christ's nipples for eyes, his wound now a hungry mouth, gobbling and devouring Thomas's hand. Thomas becomes the eucharist; Christ internalises him.

This is me being fanciful, I know. Still, if nobody has written a critical account of the poetry of R S Thomas and not yet called it Doubting Thomas I'd be amazed:

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind's song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof. [R S Thomas, ‘Song At The Year's Turning’ (1955)]

[Next: lines 592-628]