[Previous:
lines 22-72]
Satan and his devils are swarming over night-time Jerusalem. They try to tempt Jesus's disciples but, in every case but one, they fail. Now read on!
Unus non valuit sese his subducere vinclis
Iscarius pesti infandae devotus Iüdas,
lectorum procerum labes et pestis Iüdas. [75]
Hic se olim addiderat socium vestigia Divi
ingressus, patria, atque opibus, carisque relictis,
incerta exilia, incertas quacunque paratus
ire vias, talique necem pro rege pacisci.
At mox cœptorum piguit, durique laboris [80]
paulatim pertaesum : animo tum volvere secum
noctes atque dies tacitus, siqua potis arctis
legibus exolvi, et priscae se reddere vitae,
indignans longum incassùm cecidisse laborem:
hos abitus, iamque hos abitus et furta parabat [85]
impatiens operum, rebus non laetus egenis.
Talibus undantem curis, animoque labantem
iampridem, nigrae reperit dux ipse cohortis;
haud minùs exultans animis, quàm monte sub alto
cùm procul aspexit tendentem in pascua cervum [90]
gaetulus leo, quem siccis exercet hiantem
faucibus ex longo collecta insania edendi.
Ac priùs in faciem Galilaei versus Iorae,
ipsi qui fuerat conjunctus sanguine Iudae,
insomnem aggreditur verbis. “Tu nocte silenti [95]
montibus in solis erras, insane, potesque
ultròs eva pati sub nudo frigora cœlo,
atque tibi alterius sub mutu degitur aetas;
dum sequeris (quis te tantus furor incitat?) istum
elatumque animis, eversoremque sacrorum, [100]
quem tantùm illuvies adeunt teterrima gentis,
fœminei coetus, et semiviri comitatus?
Primi omnes infensi odiis concordibus ardent;
sacrilegoque necem intentant: iamque ille furorem
vesanum expendet, cedet fiducia tanta. [105]
Non illi auxilio magnarum gloria rerum,
quas mentitur, erit: nil contrà obtendere densa
nubila, nil solitas accingi proderit artes:
rumpe moras; eia instanti te surripe cladi.”
Sic ait, ardentemque odiis instigat acerbis: [110]
tum mutata acri percussit pectora thyrso;
et subitò nocti ablatus se immiscuit atrae.
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Only one man was weak enough to succumb
Iscarius:—he, destined ruin, wicked Judas,
that ruinous defect in the high group, Judas. [75]
Once he’d willingly followed the Lord’s footsteps,
giving up a life of wealth and power for
perilous exile, ready for all dangers
on the journey—even death—to serve his king.
But he soon became depressed: so much hard work! [80]
Increasingly wearying. His mind fretted
silently, night and day, how to avoid
the hard laws of living a perfect life, how
to cease that labour and go back to before:
desertion was always on his mind, furtive, [85]
shirking his task, never happy with his lot.
It was in this state of wavering mind that
the leader of the black cohort now found him;
no less heart-exultant than when in mountain
valley pastures, seeing a tempting deer [90]
a Gaetulian lion, mouth parched with hunger
readies its jaws for the frenzy of the hunt.
But first he took a Galileian form: Jora,
one of Judas’s close blood relatives,
addressing the sleepless man: “Your silent night [95]
erring alone among mountains—crazed! That you're
out here under this naked freezing sky! And
wasting your days at the beck and call of another;
following (what insanity) that one—
that arrogant soul, wrecker of what’s sacred, [100]
who surrounds himself with scums and bums, with
effeminate types, emasculated friends?
The city elders are united in hatred
of this sacrilegious man: soon his madness
and his arrogance will bring about his downfall. [105]
He’ll get no help from his famous miracles,
which are all lies: no use hiding in dense
clouds or his other unprofitable arts:
don’t delay! Flee from this coming disaster.”
These words flamed sharplt in that angry man: [110]
having thrashed his heart with this sharp thyrsus
he vanished suddenly into the dark night.
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Line 91's Gaetulian lion is a reference to a portion of Libya inhabited by the war-like Gaetuli, and notorious for its wild lions. Vergil makes reference to such a lion in
Aeneid 5:351.
So: this passage is about Judas, and his
temptation by Satan, the leader of the black cohort of devils. At the beginning of this passage, Judas is twice called
pestis. This is very far, of course, from a term of approbation, although it seems to me there's a question as to how we translate it: the word means ‘a disease, plague a pest’, but it also means ‘destruction, ruin, death’.
James Gardner goes for the first of these definitions, translating lines 73-75 as ‘Judas Iscariot [was] given over to unspeakable vileness … Judas, that pox, that pestilence among the chosen apostles!’ I’ve opted for a less
outré rendering, not least since, as God himself declared at the end of Book 1, Judas is also part of the plan. Without him there would be no atonement and therefore no redemption. Similarly my ‘depressed’ in line 80 is, I concede, a touch tendentious, translation-wise. The word in the original is
piguit, from
pigeō (‘I feel annoyance or reluctance at; I repent of’); except that
piguit is the third person singular impersonal past tense, which means Judas was ‘pained, afflicted, grieved’. (The
L&S usage note me describes the personal conjugation as very rare, and non-classical for this word; ‘in Classical usage, only the impersonal verb
piget/
piguit exists’). Gardner is more straight-down-the line: ‘he soon grew weary of these undertakings.’ But I’d stand by my version.
Tendentious, yes; but the
tendenz I’m owning here is that Judas is, potentially, one of the most intriguing characters in this whole story, and that flattening his motivation to (as, in Gardner’s reading of Vida) a mere vileness, confected out of laziness and cowardice, is to lose that potential. I mean, Gardner is probably right in his reading. But still: depression and disengagement, after an earlier manic period of energetic commitment, seems to me a more compelling version of Judas's story.
It’s a question of character motivation, fundamentally. Why does Judas do it? The gospels give us three takes on this issue: Mark provides no motive for Judas's betrayal (an implicitly motiveless malignancy); Matthew 26:15 says that Judas betrayed his master for material reward—the infamous thirty pieces of silver—which is certainly comprehensible as a motive for crime, if somewhat thin and unsatisfying by itself.. Luke 22:3 and John 13:27 suggest that Judas was possessed by Satan, which, as I’ve been arguing several times on this blog, puts questions of freedom and choice in question. There are two follow-ups in the NT: Matthew 27:1–10 tells of Judas’s remorse, his attempt to return the money and his suicide by hanging. This touches, at least, on something approaching psychological verisimilitude; although Peter, in the Book of Acts [1:18] says that Judas tried to enjoy his ill-gotten silver, bought himself a nice plot of land with the money, but was punished by God before he could settle down there: ‘he [fell] headlong... burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.’ ‘Bad man does bad thing and is punished’ is a pretty one-dimensional kind of story; ‘bad man does bad thing and then
feels bad, bad enough to end his own life’ is a better because more interesting one.
Vida, it seems to me, splits the difference: his Judas is temped by, but
not possessed by, Satan. In the event, Vida says, the prince of devils finds himself pushing at an open door because, through a combination of laziness and resentment, Judas is already receptive to these malign ideas. But we're still entitled to ask why.
There have been a very large number of later interpretations of course; and the main as-it-were ‘new’ strand of ‘reading’ Judas is to see him not as a traitor, but either as a good man doing exactly what he was told to do by Jesus (because, unless he was handed over to the authorities Jesus couldn’t be martyred and humanity saved: this is the argument, for instance, of theologian William Klassen’s
Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus [1996]), or else as a kind of Jewish puritan, whose devotion to the cause never wavered but who came to believe that Jesus himself was betraying that cause: this is how Dorothy L Sayers writes Judas in her
Man Born to be King.
‘Fiction,’
says Frank Kermode, ‘is fiction whether or not the writer feels the need to call it history’, which is true enough.
The rabbinical practice of Midrash can involve a free use of invented narrative, and what we probably have here is what is sometimes called ‘proto-Midrash’. There is plenty of evidence that Judas came belatedly into the Passion narrative; he is placed at the end of lists of disciples, with the tag ‘the betrayer’, as Luke unequivocally calls him, attached. Betrayal was necessary to the narrative, whether divinely planned or not. A character was needed to do the betraying, and the plot agent of betrayal became Judas.
But a mere plot-actant is a vapid addition to a story, and I fall back on my sort-of reading of Vida. Has anyone written a version of Judas in which (as with Edmund Wilson’s famous account of Scrooge) his manic-depression is the motor for his actions? In the manic phase he throws himself wholeheartedly into the mission of Jesus, his master; but anyone shackled to the grinding cyclotropic horrors of this psychopathology knows, after the high comes, with terrible inevitability that utterly overwrites your will and your desire, the low. Say Judas betrayed Jesus because he was, in himself, suicidally depressed, and because, as part of his psychopathology, he had come to identify with his saviour so closely that hurting was hurting himself. Depression, in its more extreme forms, shares with the old medieval demonology a problematic about how far one’s human power to choose good and evil has been corroded. In some cases the pathology is so overwhelming that such corrosion is as close to total as makes no odds (as if one could rouse a sufferer of clinical depression merely by exhorting them,
come on! pull yourself together!). It might make an interesting etude in fictional portrayal.
The image at the head of this blog is the poster for the movie
Judas (dir. Charles Robert Carner, 2004). I have not seen this movie, and cannot pass judgement upon it; although
reviews collated by imdb do not strike an encouraging note:
‘a terrible waste of film whether watched from a Christian or non-Christian viewpoint’; ‘Did Jesus own his own Surf board?’; ‘I can't recall what Gospel they pulled this crap from.’ Striking poster, though. The hotness of Judas is, perhaps, a too-little-studied aspect of the whole story.
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lines 113-132]
