Book 6, lines 973-986

[Previous: lines 898-972]

This is the last portion of The Christiad. The Holy Spirit has descended pentecostally upon the disciples. Now they set-off on their various missions around the world.

Ergo abeunt varias longè lateque per oras
diversi, laudesque canunt, atque inclyta vulgo
facta ducis: iamque, utvates cecinere futurum              [975]
antiqui, illorum vox fines exit in omnes.
Audiit et siquem medio ardens aethere iniquo
sidere desertis plaga dividit invia terris;
quique orbem extremo circumsonat aequore pontus.
Continuò ponunt leges, moremque sacrorum               [980]
urbibus: infectum genti lustralibus undis
eluitur scelus, et veteris contagia culpae;
relligioque novas nova passim exsuscitat aras.
Protinus hine populos Christi de nomine dicunt
Christiadas: toto surgit gens aurea mundo,                   [985]
Seclorumque oritur longe pulcherrimus ordo.

SI QUID FACTUM DICTUMVE CONTRA SANCTORUM PATRUM SCITA, INFECTUM INDICTUMVE ESTO. QUISQUIS ES, AUCTOR TE ADMONITUM VULT SE, NON LAUDIS ERGO, OPUS ADEO PERICULOSUM CUPIDÈ AGGRESSUM. VERUM EI, HONESTIS PROPOSITIS PRÆMIIS, A DUOBUS SUMMIS PONTIFICIBUS DEMANDATUM SCITO, LEONE X. PRIUS, MOX CLEMENTE VII, AMBOBUS EX ETRUSCORUM MEDYCUM CLARISSIMA FAMILIA, CUIUS LIBERALITATI ATQUE INDUSTRIAE HÆC ÆTAS LITTERAS AC BONAS ARTES, QUÆ PLANE EXSTINCTE ERANT, EXCITATAS ATQUE REVIVISCENTES DEBET. ID VOLEBAM NESCIUS NE ESSES. CAUTUM EST, UT IN ALIIS, NE QUIS HOC POEMA AUTORE INSCIO INVITOVE DE CAETERO IMPRIMERE NEVE VENALE HABERE IMPUNE USPIAM AUDEAT.

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And so they departed to various
distant lands, singing hymns for all the people
good news about their leader (as the prophets              [975]
had foretold) a voice to all the nations.
They were heard even in the sky-burnt, ill-
starred deserts, dryness cut off from the earth—
heard at the world’s end, at loud ocean’s rim.
Soon they laid down laws, set up rituals                        [980]
in the cities. People infected with sin
were washed with baptism, the old taint cleansed.
A new religion called forth new altars.
and now people were named for following Christ:—
Christians. A golden people filled the world,        [985]
and the finest age of all was just beginning.

IF AUGHT HERE IS DONE CONTRARY TO THE TEACHINGS OF THE HOLY FATHERS, LET IT BE UNDONE AND UNSAID. YOU COULD BE ANYONE—BUT THE AUTHOR HOPES YOU UNDERSTAND THAT HE DID NOT UNDERTAKE SO PERILOUS A WORK OUT OF A DESIRE FOR MERE PRAISE. RATHER, BE AWARE THAT IT WAS COMMISSIONED WITH HONOUR AND THE PROMISE OF REWARD FROM TWO POPES—LEO X FIRST, AND AFTEWARDS, CLEMENT VII, BOTH FROM THE ILLUSTRIOUS TUSCAN FAMILY OF THE MEDICI, TO WHOSE LIBERALITY AND ENERGY OUR ERA OWES THE RENAISSANCE OF (PREVIOUSLY DYING) LITERATURE AND THE HUMANITIES. MOREOVER I WISH YOU TO BE AWARE, WHOEVER YOU MAY BE, THAT NOBODY SHOULD EVER DARE OR THINK THEY CAN WITH IMPUNITY PRINT OR SELL THIS POEM, UNLESS IT BE WITH THE AUTHOR’S KNOWLEDGE AND PERMISSION.

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This is the end, beau-oo-ti-ful friend. The end. Vida concludes his six book epic with a straight-up copyright notice. Splendidly jarring finishing touch, I think.

Well, I suppose we could say that he actually concludes his epic with one last Vergilianism: the new golden age, just beginning, a reference to Vergil’s fourth ‘messianic’ Eclogue. There’s another nod to the Roman poet in the previous lines. When Vida says that these new followers of Christ were called Christians (984-85) he is alluding to Aeneid 1: 276-77: Romulus excipiet gentem, Romanosque suo de nomine dicet: Romulus will initiate a new people and to them shall give his own name, “Romans”. The Christiad has been soaked in Vergil all the way through—my blog posts (have I really been at this, daily, for five months?) have picked out many of these specific examples, and have sometimes dilated upon the problematic of the larger project—taking a story written in plain ‘koine’ Greek prose about ordinary folk, fishermen and carpenters and beggars and restating it in elaborately ornate Latin verse, inhabiting a mode characterised by its elevation of idiom and the nobility of its protagonists.

Nor, I think, does Vida really find a way of bringing these two immiscibles into a harmonious solution. Craig Kallendorf [‘From Virgil to Vida: The Poeta Theologus in Italian Renaissance Com mentary,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 41-62] makes the contrary case: he argues the epic successfully embodies the assumptions of theologia poetica—the notion that ‘pagan poetry contained elements of Christian truth that required interpretation to uncover hidden meanings’—proving that this discourse was ‘alive and well in Italian Renaissance interpretations of Vergil’. Jeffrey Glodzik agrees. He discusses ‘the centrality of Vergilianism in the neo-Latin literature of High Renaissance Rome’, noting that many poets and intellectuals ‘appropriated the themes, language, and episodes of Vergil's texts to articulate a vision for papal Rome in the early sixteenth century … the pervasiveness of Vergilianism illustrates that the Roman humanists were attempting to employ the past as a basis for a transformation of the present that is not as unrealistic as it may first appear.’ On this specific passage, the final one, in Vida’s epic, Glodzik says:

The final lines of the Christiad emphasize the golden age, its appearance, and the Vergilian influence. … By spreading the word of God the disciples will reshape the world and Christianity will flourish everywhere. Notable also is the reference to nations divided by the seas—presumably a reference to the New World—that will be converted. Again, the golden age rises when the entire world accepts the truths of Christianity. [Jeffrey Glodzik, ‘Vergilianism in Early Cinquecento Rome: Egidio Gallo and the Vision of Roman Destiny’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 45:1 (2014), 88]

The success of Vida’s project in these terms is, it seems, taken as axiomatic by most critics:

Compared with the quasi-Vergilian poems which span the fifteen centuries since Vergil . . . Vida's Christiad is virtually the only attempt at Christian epic that succeeded .... Vida was a giant among the pygmies in his understanding of Vergil's structure and thematic design, in his architectonics, in his transformation of many of the canonical elements, in his sensitive employment of evocative allusion, functional similes, interwoven patterns of imagery, and other devices to embody theme, and in his vast conception nobly executed. The Christiad is a fundamentally Christian epic which manages to remain profoundly true to its classical model. [Mario Di Cesare, Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic (Columbia University Press, 1964), 282]

James Gardner, on whose excellent prose translation this blog has greatly relied, agrees. To contemporaries, and to the centuries after his death when Vida was widely read, his name routinely linked in a triad with Homer and Vergil, the Christiad’s powerful appeal was manifest: ‘‘it is almost as if Vida were rewriting Scripture itself, translating it out of what was felt to be the crude and demotic idiom of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate into the more “elevated” language of Vergilian Latin’’ [Gardner, x]. Reworking Jerome’s Vulgate into comparatively older Vergilian Latin, Garnder notes, would have seemed to Vida’s humanistically trained contemporaries—paradoxically—as a ‘modernization’: the reworking of ‘an ancient [i.e., early medieval] and thus somewhat alien expression of Christ’s passion’ into something ‘strikingly, thrillingly contemporary’ [Gardner, x-xi]. I have my doubts about this I must say, but I concede that I’m swimming against the current.

Well: I'm done. Or at least, I'm done with this portion of the process, working daily through little gobbets of Latin and turning them into a pattern of hendecasyllabic and decasyllabic lines. The question is: what do I do now? It'll feel strange, I'm sure, not having my little morning routine (I can of course easily find something else to do). The real question is whether I want to write more about, rather than just translating bits of, Vida's enormous poem.  It was, as Gardner says, ‘by far the most popular Christian epic of the Renaissance, appearing in almost forty editions before 1600. It was translated into many languages, including Croatian and Armenian, and was widely imitated by vernacular poets such as Abraham Cowley and John Milton.’ It might be interesting to explore that a little more, whilst it's still fresh in my mind. We'll see, I suppose.

At the head of this, final post: a painting of Saint Paul writing his Epistles, ascribed to Valentin de Boulogne (17th century). It's not very well chosen for this epic (which ends before Paul's conversion) except that: there he is, scribbling away, like Vida himself. A icon for writers. A good image on which to end.