JPII and Virgil

Virgil is often called by some Church fathers, and implied in Dante Alighieri, a forerunner to Christianity. Especially in his Isaiah-like prophecy in Eclogues of a child who would be born to rule the world in peace. The infrequent references I give to Virgil in my previous post "JPII and Dante" hardly do him justice, and Pope John Paul's Jubilee Year association with Virgil at the reopening of the Vatican Museum presents an ideal opportunity to invoke the great Latin poet.

Before Freudian psychoanalysis, the standard of psycho-somatic evaluation for man was virtue. This way of determining someone’s overall health and well-being originated in Greece and Rome and was fully adopted by the medieval Church. The Divine Comedy of Dante is hierarchically structured around virtue, and Dante places Virgil in the state of Virtuous Pagans in his Inferno, to show that the cardinal virtues could be attained apart from sanctifying grace. The theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, however, require the regeneration of Baptism! While Virgil seemed to lack the latter, he certainly embodied the former enough for Dante to employ him as his guide through the Inferno and Purgatorio. With this in mind, the Vatican Museum has “inscribed on the architrave of the entrance to the Courtyard of Statues…Virgil’s verse ‘Procul este prophani’ (Stay away, o profane)”[1], a warning by the Sibyl of Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid barring entrance to the netherworld for any vicious, that is, un-virtuous visitors.

JPII opened this very Vatican Museum entranceway in the Jubilee Year of 2000, with the words, “Significant doors that the Holy See opens to the world”[2]. He too, it seems, met with Virgil and Dante’s standard of virtue. Furthermore, he accomplished a kind of ‘harrowing of Hades’, like Christ and Aeneas, by incorporating such historical figures as Virgil, Homer, Aristotle and others into the Vatican’s permanent collection of statuesque forerunners to Christ.

But aside from my interpretation of such a symbolic gesture, is there any hope for Virgil’s ultimate salvation? Just because he is quoted and plastered in the Vatican Museum does not mean he is a Christian, does it?

Mowbray Allan explores the question of Virgil’s salvation in light of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with his article “Does Dante Hope for Virgil’s Salvation?”. In it, he raises some of the same evidence found in the Vatican Museum as to how Virgil may have been saved by Christ, even though he is coupled by Dante with those who despair:

Conceivably even those who inherited the promise of Abraham were once subject to the law announced on the gate of Hell. This, I think is the most important step in the argument. For Virgil’s despair has been self-validating: under the dark spell, we have failed to see or to credit much evidence calling it into question. But Virgil’s hopeless view of his own status is the very part of his teaching which cannot possess inherent authority. To step outside the hopelessness of Virgil, to perceive it as a fact of psychology and not a final act of theology and as a source of irony and of drama: this way of reading needs only to be defined to assert a claim to be as natural, on the face of it, as the one presently favored, perhaps even more so, given the uneasiness which the idea of Virgil’s damnation cannot but occasion, indeed, seems intended to occasion[3].

While a final judgment is not within my scope of discernment, I would strongly argue that Dante did hope for Virgil’s salvation in Christ. Virgil’s presence in Purgatorio is strong evidence of that as well. If Baptism is participated in by water, blood, or desire at least by the time of a person’s death, is that not sufficient for salvation? Again, I will not be the final judge on Virgil’s soul, but he certainly proved himself to be a worthy forerunner of Christ—to the point of helping to lead Dante to Christ himself!

Furthermore, as Professor Buranelli of Notre Dame writes, “The word ‘museum’ comes down to us from the Greek museion, which means ‘temple or residence of the Muses’”[4]. Virgil is undoubtedly ranked as a ‘muse’ for the likes of Dante and even Pope John Paul II—himself a poet, orator, and actor. As Karol Wojtyla, the Pope translated a version of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex into Polish. Imagine how much more highly he must have thought of Virgil’s Latin than Sophocles’ profane use of Greek! (As a side note, the psychology that accompanied Oedipus Rex in Freud stands as a stark contrast to the evaluation by means of virtue to which I originally referred.)

Virgil’s worldview and writing more closely aligns with that of Karol Wojtyla than Sophocles or Freud. Though Dante may have taken the emphasis on virtue too far at times in his Divine Comedy (Pope Celestine V for example) it is an objective compass for gauging a person’s well-being and relative proximity to Christ-likeness, both in terms of the cardinal and theological virtues.

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[1] Dr. Francesco Buranelli. “Vatican Museums: The Holy See’s Portal to the World”. Nanovic Institute, University of Notre Dame, IN 2007

[2] John Paul II, “Address of the Holy Father John Paull II for the Inauguration of the New Entrance to the Vatican Museums,” February 7, 2000 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/2000/jan-mar/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20000207_vatican-museums_en.html.

[3] Mowbray Allan. “Does Dante Hope for Virgil’s Salvation?”. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 193-205. *My note: Dante's gate of Hell reads, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"

[4] Dr. Francesco Buranelli. “Vatican Museums: The Holy See’s Portal to the World”. Nanovic Institute, University of Notre Dame, IN 2007



Update:
One way of making the character of Aeneas more appealing humanly is to compare him with the great men in sacred and profane history who were charged with high missions, with Abraham and Moses, Washington and Lincoln, or with outstanding men of our own days, like MacArthur or Churchill. ‘And the Lord said to Abram: go forth out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and out of thy father’s house, and come into the land I shall show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation.’ There is a mission like that of Aeneas, full of hazard and heartbreak. What hardships Abraham suffered, what discouragement and depression he knew! But, with Heaven’s help, he accomplished the task. Francis A. Sullivan Vergil Yesterday, Today, and Forever—The Classical Weekly, Vol. 40 (Dec 16, 1946).

Lastly, I refer to EWTN's library for an excellent article on Aeneas by Theodore Haecker, "VIRGIL AND THE ANCIENT WORLD":

It was twenty years before Odysseus at last returned to his
homeland--returned poor, naked and a beggar, it is true, but a conqueror.
He returned and found again there almost everything that home stands for;
he found his island, his earth, the place where as a child he had first
known the light and beauty of the world; his old father was still there,
his wife and his son, his faithful hound--surely the very picture of a
happy home-coming! But what of Aeneas--to what did he come? Does he
really resemble Odysseus at any point? No--there is no greater difference
within the whole compass of ancient literature; and to understand that is
to see how absurd are those critics who would dismiss Virgil
contemptuously as a mere plagiarist and imitator of Homer. There is no
more profound or astonishing originality in all the literature ofantiquity
than Virgil's; and that precisely because it operates within the limits
imposed by the inherited and traditional forms, which it reverently
observes. But to return to Aeneas--does he, like Odysseus, come back to
the land of his childhood? We are told incidentally, it is true, that
Aeneas's ancestors had once dwelt in Italy, but this is mere political
rhetoric, and has nothing to do with the story proper, the personal fate
of Aeneas, where in fact it is entirely forgotten.

Aeneas did not return to the home of his childhood; on the contrary,
he left it, and he left it as a fugitive (fato profugus)--witness the fact
that Turnus, who had always remained at home in Latium, refers to him
contemptuously and reproachfully as desertorem Asiae, deserter of Asia, a
coward forgetful of his duty, flying from the colors. And this of Aeneas,
of the ancestor of Caesar, of the mirror of Augustus! Aeneas was no
victorious Greek, but a defeated Trojan like Hector. In that night of
horror and desolation in the burning city of Troy, his wife, dulcis
conjunx, had perished, and alone he had carried away his aged father and
the penates; beside him, hardly able to keep pace with him, ran his little
son. His father died on the journey--the father of pius Aeneas whose very
life, the inmost spring of whose being was love of his father and his
father's love of him--and he buried him. So far as he alone was
concerned, so far as concerned only his own selfish will, his personal
inclination, his own earth-bound, memory-bound desires, it is true he
would rather have turned back to build old Troy again. Yet he dared not;
for Fate, the will of the all-powerful, had bidden him seek out a new
homeland--Italy. So armed only in the might of virtus, he went forward
against the malignity of Fortune; for Aeneas never had fortune with him in
the way that Odysseus always had.

"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem; fortunam ex aliis."

(Learn virtue from me, child, and true toil; learn fortune from
others.) And with the help of war (though a thing in itself hateful) he
made his way against the opposition of men; he made it despite the
jealousy of the lesser gods, despite the prompting of his own desire,
despite even pity; against his own will, and strong only in the strength
of submission and the supreme might of Fate, he went on to find Italy, his
new home. Italiam non sponte sequor --Not of my own will I seek Italy.

"Me si fata meis paterentur ducere vitam auspiciis, et sponte mea
componere curas; urbem Troianam primum, dulcesque meorum reliquias colerem"

(Did the Fates but suffer me to shape my life after my own pleasure
and order my sorrows at my own will, my first care would be the city of
Troy and the sweet relics of my kin.)

In all pre-Christian literature there are no more Christian lines
than these. Sainte-Beuve hardly penned a truer line -- though a bold one
and one open to misunderstanding -- than when he wrote: La venue même du
Christ n'a rien qui étonne, quand on a lu Virgile. (The coming of Christ
is nothing surprising when one has read Virgil.) Against his will then
Aeneas journeyed to that Italy which he knew not, and which was full of
perils. But even as he listened to the mysterious, unsearchable higher
will, gradually there kindled within him, and burned into the very marrow
of his soul, a longing that was prepared for any sacrifice, for this
second homeland, for Italy, which as yet was his only in the command
ofJupiter, a land of promise from which he was still separated by long,
and ever longer, trackless ways, viae inviae. Thus Virgil breathed into
his hero that love for Italy, not merely for Rome, which was his own; for
Virgil was not merely a Roman, he was an Italian also.


AENEAS AND ABRAHAM

How full of paradox, how dialectical is the inner life of Aeneas!
Does he in this resemble any of Homer's heroes? Though remote in time, of
another race, and of another country, yet in spirit, which knows no
distinctions of time or race or country, is he not akin rather to Abraham,
the father of the faith? Did not Abraham also have to leave the homeland
of his heart, and, for the sake of the faith and in obedience to an
inscrutable will, a fatum, take upon himself the sorrow and bitter smart
of memory, which for star-bound man is the meaning of a change of
homeland. So it was with Aeneas.

The Homeric heroes can state plainly their truths and their
falsehoods, and both are in the nature of self-revelations. But Aeneas
cannot do this. Like all reticent men, he can speak only the truth that is
in him, and that only occasionally and darkly. And again, like all
reticent men, be they so from necessity or of their own free will, he
makes no such brave figure as Achilles or Odysseus; it is easy to
misunderstand him, as it is not the cunning Odysseus, or the transparent
Achilles. Perhaps Virgil is here throwing some light upon the difficult
character of Augustus--was he too, and of necessity, reticent? (which is,
of course, not the same thing as 'sullen'). Aeneas is a grave man, gravis,
a man burdened with one idea--for having many thoughts makes a man light,
but having few and anxious thoughts makes him grave; and the burden of one
thought only will make him grave indeed. It was this that made him a
leader; this that made him the founder of Rome. At all events Virgil is
not here drawing simply upon his imagination; this is no mere poetic
invention. He here makes explicit in truth and in beauty what had for so
long lain implicit in the character of Rome itself. And with one accord,
without a moment of hesitation, Rome accepted and sanctioned this
explanation of herself at the hands of her greatest poet. This is an
historical fact, and a highly significant one; for what a people endorses
and appropriates for ever to itself from the writings of its greatest poet
is always something that is at once both a self-confession and a
self-revelation....


VIRGIL AND PLATO

Rome had no original speculative philosophers, but she did possess
great practical, realistic thinkers, and her greatest was a poet, Virgil.
All the great and simplethings of our reality have been meditated by him.
That ideal of the man of mind, the spiritual man, union of contemplative
sage and creative artist, was realized only twice in the classical
world--first in Greece by Plato who was thinker and poet, after the Greek
fashion; and then in Rome by Virgil who was poet and thinker, after the
Roman fashion. (Among the Jews of pre-Christian times, that is of the Old
Testament, this union was practically never broken; none was there a poet
without being also a sage, and none a sage without being also a poet.)
Virgil has demonstrated that Rome was fully conscious of her own
character, both as to the things she lacked and as to the things she
possessed to overflowing. She acknowledged without envy the superior
gifts of the Greeks in the fine arts and in philosophy, though hardly in
literature; and with unshakable steadfastness and confidence she devoted
herself to her mission--itself also an art--to the mission of governing.
But her mission--and here is a fact often ignored and easily
forgotten--her mission was not primarily based upon force. Where that
alone exists as a foundation, Virgil's condemnation is unequivocal. Not
only is Catiline--that true political criminal, contemptor divum, despiser
of the gods--hateful to him, but for him Sulla and Antony--brutal generals
without any of the magnanimitas of true statesmen--also share the fate of
the political criminals of Dante. He blames even the great Caesar,
because he did not rule more patrum, after the manner of the fathers.
Rome's mission was essentially not founded upon force; it was power
rather, and based upon certain great and simple virtues, chief of which
was pietas, love fulfilling duty, whose political expression is justice.

Hence the paradox of a Rome founded not by a conqueror but by a
defeated man. Let King Pyrrhus or any other petty tyrant preen himself
because Achilles, the unconquered, was his ancestor; Rome was for Hector.
And Aeneas, the fugitive, who after one defeat built a new city, was the
ancestor of Caesar and Augustus. No State that would stand, still less an
empire that would endure, was made of the Greeks, for all their qualities;
neither would Achilles serve, for all his impetuous storming to victory
and, equally impetuously, to a profitless death; nor yet Odysseus--he knew
too much, he was too fickle and he had too large a sense of humor, a thing
which may easily prove an insuperable obstacle to successful statecraft.
The ancestors of Rome were required to be builders and rebuilders, not
destroyers, of cities. The Greeks built cities too, of course; they gave
us the very name and science of politics; they taught us to understand
wherein the essence of it lies....


VIRGIL AND THE PROPHETS

It is truths of this order that lie hidden in the Aeneid;truths
which, though through long periods they may fail to be appreciated, will
again suddenly flash out brilliantly in the light of their own truth,
touched anew into life by some catastrophe of the time. Virgil is the
only pagan who takes rank with the Jewish and Christian prophets; the
Aeneid is the only book, apart from Holy Scriptures, to contain sayings
that are valid beyond the particular hour and circumstance of their day,
prophecies that re-echo from the doors of eternity, whence they first draw
their breath:

His ego nec metas rerum, nec tempora pona: imperium sine fine dedi.

(To these I have set bounds neither in space nor in time; dominion
have I given thee without end.)

--so runs the fatum Jovis. For, whether we like it or not, whether
we know it or not, we are all still members of that Imperium Romanum,
which finally and after terrible errors accepted Christianity sua sponte,
of its own free-will-- a Christianity which it could not abandon now
without abandoning itself and humanism too....


"THE ADVENTIST HUMANITY OF A VIRGIL"

The content of the Aeneid is a hazy, inchoate theology expectant of
the inseminating spirit--the best of which paganism was capable before the
fullness of time was come. Paganism as it existed before Christ is no
more to be revived than is the Jewish world before Christ. The decisive
difference between the submissive adventist humanity of a Virgil and the
pale, decadent humanism of the so-called humanists of the Renaissance lies
in the fact that, whereas the one was a material soil awaiting the
springing seed, the other was a sort of horticulture occupied with growing
cuttings from lovely pot-plants; the one, a womb of longing which cried
aloud for fulfillment; the other a mere precautionary measure which, if
the worst come to the worst, should serve to hide from men's eyes for a
few centuries approaching disaster. The Classicists pretend to see in
Virgil their own image; yet, whereas he has denied nothing of his, not an
iota of the tragedy and shame, they have often in the ultimate things
denied the past of their ancestors....A humanism devoid of theology cannot
stand. Today men are searching desperately for `Man,' but they seek what
does not exist, namely autonomous Man. If they would find the whole man,
they must not mistake the part for the whole, but, what is more important
and more essential, must see that man realizes his wholeness only in the
fact that he is wholly creature and cries out unceasingly for his Creator
when He is not near, even as a child cries for its mother.

from Virgil, Father of the West (1934), Ch. 6.


EDITORIAL NOTE ON VIRGIL AND THE MESSIANIC ECLOGUE

Throughout the Middle Ages, Virgil was regarded as having prophesied
the birth of Christ, because of the following lines in his Fourth Eclogue,
which has been called the Messianic Eclogue:

"The last age, foretold in the Sibyl's verse, is come, and the
great order of the ages begins anew. Now the Virgin returns, the
reign of Saturn recurs; now from the heights of heaven a new
generation descends. Only do thou, pure Lucina [goddess of
childbirth], show thy favor to the child that is to be born, the
child under whom the race of iron shall at last cease and a race
of gold shall arise all over the world....He shall receive
divine life; he shall see heroes mingling with gods and himself
be seen of them; and he shall rule a world that has been given
peace by the virtues of his father....

"Now do thou (for the time is at hand) enter upon thy great
honors, dear offspring of the gods, Jove's own great progeny."

Why in fact is the Fourth Eclogue called a Messianic eclogue?
Because it bears a resemblance to certain passages in the Old Testament
predicting the Messiah. For example, Isaiah 9:6 and Isaiah ll:6.

Isaiah 9:6: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is
given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his
name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the
Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace."


And the second reads as follows:

Isaiah ll:6: "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the
leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young
lion and the fatling together; and alittle child shall lead
them."

Because of the reference to the Virgin in the Eclogue and its
speaking of "A new begetting that now descends from heaven's height," we
should also keep in mind Isaiah 7:14: "Therefore the Lord himself shall
give you a sign: Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shalt
call his name, Immanuel."

For the Christian world, this had found fulfillment by the coming of
the Angel Gabriel to Mary in Nazareth to announce to her that, in the
words of St. Luke's gospel: "And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb,
and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Jesus. He shall be great,
and shall be called the Son the the Highest; and the Lord God shall give
unto him the throne of his father David. And he shall reign over the
house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end..." Lk.
1:31-33.

When Mary asked how this could be, since she knew not man, the Angel
replied: "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the
Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall
be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." Lk. 1:35.

This is why Haecker calls Virgil the poet of adventist paganism. JJM