Welcome to the podcast “An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul. Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli. Today we will talk about the very last poem of this collection called “The Good Tidings”. It is a poem about the advent of Christianity which seals the end of Antiquity and ushers in a new world. After taking us on a journey through the Greek and Roman world, Pascoli ends his poetic collection by narrating the birth of Christ, a momentous event which goes unnoticed when it happened, as you'll hear in the poem. But even as a non-believer, Pascoli could not fail to remark how this event is a milestone in the history of the Western world. He created a stunning two part poem which we're going to discuss today.
I am here with Professor Joan Taylor. Joan is an expert on early Christianity and Second Temple Judaism. She teaches at King's College London and has published extensively on the origins of Christianity, the archaeology and history of the of the Christian holy places and Greco Roman religion, among many other things. So we will dig a bit into the sources of this poem and a bit into the history of early Christianity. The poem you hear is part of the translation James and I published in 2022 for Italica Press. The poem is read by David Carter. The music is by Giovanni Tardini, played at the Celtic Harp by Arianna Mornico.
ELENA
So welcome Joan and thank you for being here today.
JOAN
Thank you for having me. That's great to be here today.
ELENA
Fantastic. So this poem, “The Good Tidings”, is dividing into, divided in two parts, one called “In the East” and one called “In the West”, each of them narrating the advent of Christianity in two different contexts. “In the East” describes the birth of Christ as we know it from the tradition of the nativity scene. Well, in Bethlehem, in a stable, Jesus as a baby in a manger surrounded by shepherds. While “In the West” narrates the advent of Christianity in Rome. So let us start with the first poem “In the East”, and let us listen to it. That's my favourite part of the poem.
ELENA
So those who follow this podcast series know that the author of these poems, Giovanni Pascoli, very rarely creates this material from scratch. He always draws on or elaborates upon historical or literary sources. And I must mention that when he pose the songs of the shepherd that you have just heard, he was echoing another great poem by Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi called “Night Song of a wandering shepherd in Asia”. Well, that poem puts into play the notion that humans are inherently sad as a species, because unlike other forms of life on earth. They know that they are bound to die. And Pascoli writes his own version of this theme, sort of repeating the ancient Greek concept that man, man is a brotos in Greek, a mortal. So here we see the same ethos informing many of the other poems of this collection, such as Solon or “The Old Men of Kea”. But then Pascoli switches to incorporating sources about the birth of Christ. So I'd like to ask Joan to tell us about what we know of the birth of Christ and what the sources of the nativity scene are, which we can see in this poem.
JOAN
Yes, so it's very interesting how the poet weaves together actually aspects of the two nativity stories that we have in the Gospels. One is in the Gospel of Matthew and the other is in the Gospel of Luke. And it’s more reliant on the Gospel of Luke than the Gospel of Matthew because it's in the Gospel of Luke that we have shepherds watching their flocks by night, and angels, a host of heavenly angels give the announcement of the birth of, of the Messiah in Bethlehem. And they go and find the Christ child laid in a manger in what is described in the Gospel of Luke as a kind of guest room rather than perhaps an attachment to a proper inn or somewhere they would ordinarily have stayed. It might be a stable, it might be a cave, but it's a place where there is a manger, where animals would eat food from. And so Jesus is laid in this manger. And this is the sign to them that they would find this child laid in a manger. And it's a beautiful story. It's. It's of course, told so often in terms of Christmas stories. It's depicted on greeting cards or Christmas cards. So people know the story of the shepherds who have this announcement from the angels in the hills of Judea. And it begins. I love how the poem begins. They kept vigil on the hills of Judea. A few shepherds around dying bonfires. This really bringing to life that moment of the shepherds being there out and on, on the hills around Bethlehem, outside the town, and bringing in also others were by silent tombs or garrulous springs. The, as you said, the implication of death, that the tombs appear at the beginning of the poem and the end of the poem. And that's actually the theme, that's the motif that links the beginning and the end together. So that's not in the Gospel of Luke. There's no mention of tombs, but what there is is this mention of, of salvation, that, that the Christ child being born is going to bring peace, is going to bring something wonderful to the world.
ELENA
Excellent. So thank you very much, Joan, for this. So the poem, as you said, started with a strong reminder of human mortality as sung by the shepherds. And then the angel comes and he awes the shepherds, announcing the coming of God on earth. The tombs turn to cradles and thundering springs, and the shepherds set out to find the immortal God. But what they find is a frail baby whose life hangs on a breath. And the universe, however, confirms that that delicate child is really God on earth. And in the text there are also allusions to the death of Christ as the angel's arms are spread like someone's arms when they are in fact nailed to a cross. And Joan, Christianity was born in a messianic context and the Jews awaited a Messiah as it was promised in the Bible. What were the expectations surrounding the Messiah?
JOAN
Actually, it's interesting because we now know that there were many different kinds of expectations about what the Messiah would be. And since the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls from 1947, 1948, we can see that there were different types of Messiah that could be expected. And one was a more heavenly figure, the Son of Man, this incredible heavenly figure that would come to earth as imagined in the prophet Daniel's work, in chapter seven of the prophet Daniel. But then there was also a more royal Messiah, the so called Son of David, from the line of David, who would be a rather military leader of the, of the land and would liberate Judea from any kind of foreign interference. For example, the Romans, they were supposed to be seen off by this particular type of Messiah. But there were other messiahs as well. Messiah means “anointed”, which should refer to a kingly ruler, because a kingly ruler was anointed as part of his ceremony of appointment as the king. But prophets could also be anointed metaphorically as being somehow gifted with the power of God, the Holy Spirit. And therefore they were anointed somehow with, to do a certain job for God with the Spirit leading them. And in a way, what we see in the Christian story is a bit of a blend of different concepts of the Messiah. So Jesus is the descendant of David, but he's not a royal ruler in this military sense. He is actually someone who suffers and dies and, and looks like a failure in terms of a military or kingly ruler, but then is victorious over death, so proves himself as more powerful than death. He's also a prophet. He's remembered as a prophet. He does things prophets do, like miraculous healings and other wonderful works. And he's also presented as the Son of Man in terms of some kind of heavenly figure that has come to earth. So we've got this, this blend of different Messianic concepts and in one, in terms of Christian understanding of Jesus. And I think you can almost see Christians talking, you know, like, what kind of Messiah is Jesus? And one text might emphasise one aspect of his identity and another, what might emphasise another aspect, you know, Son of God, Son of Man, Son of David, great prophet. Or even a concept like the suffering servant of, of the prophet Isaiah, who does describe a figure who is suffering. But it's unclear in a way how much that is related to Messianic ideas proper. Or is it something that Christians have particularly woven into the Messiah concept because of Jesus? Or did he himself do that? Did he weave it into what his destiny would be? So we have a lot of questions about what the Messiah was and how Christians imagined the Messiah.
ELENA
Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Joan. This is super interesting. And now we go to Rome, the other part of this poem. And Rome is nowadays considered the centre of Christianity, at least of Catholicism. But Christianity came to Rome from Judea and it didn't originate there. However, Rome being the capital of a vast empire and at the time a multicultural and densely populated city, it soon became one of the main centres of proselytism for the first Christians, who soon established a thriving community there. So this time, before we listen to the poem, I'd like to ask Joan one more question and to tell us a bit about how Christianity came to Rome actually, and who the first Christians actually were.
JOAN
Well, Christianity traditionally came to Rome through the arrival of the Apostle Peter. So Peter is remembered as the founder of the Church of Rome. Interestingly, that's not described anywhere in our Bibles, but it's remembered in terms of Christian tradition. And then the other co founder of the Church of Rome is considered to be the Apostle Paul, who came somewhat later. And both Peter and Paul in terms of Christian memory were executed in 64 after the fire of Rome. The Emperor Nero persecuted Christians at that time, blamed them for being a problem with the Roman gods. And the Roman gods then caused this fire and therefore Christians were persecuted. So Peter and Paul are martyrs, but also considered the founders. In fact, it was probably a more ad hoc thing that Christians first developed different house churches where they were gathering as disciples of Jesus in communities and remembering Jesus life and telling stories about Jesus. It was probably more organic than Christian tradition makes it, as Christian tradition developed that they'd like to give status to certain important men in terms of the beginnings of different churches. And I myself rather like to think of women talking and this women disciples of Jesus being very important also in establishing early Christian communities. So at the end of the, of Paul's letter to the Roman Church before he arrives there, there's a lot of women who are mentioned as being very important in the Roman Church. And oddly, he doesn't mention Peter. So despite the fact that Peter is remembered as the founder, he's strikingly absent from Paul's Letter to the Romans before he arrives there. But Rome became an important centre for early Christianity because Rome was the capital of the empire and all roads lead to Rome. A lot of Christians from all over the Mediterranean went to Rome and the church there gained its authority really not only from Peter and Paul, but because it was the capital, it was the big city of the, of the Roman Empire. And it was a patchy time for the Church in Rome for a long time, until early in the 4th century, the Roman emperor Constantine became a Christian. And then Rome took over Christianity as the imperial Roman religion. And it sort of ironic, there's a lot of irony in all of this, in that Jesus was executed as an agitator against Rome. He was given a Roman execution, one of the worst and most torturous forms of Roman execution in being crucified, condemned by Roman governor Pontius Pilate to this awful fate. And the Romans initially persecuted Christianity in patches, but, you know, clearly they did, and then Christianity takes over Rome. So there's curious paradox.
ELENA
Let us listen to the second part of the poem
So “In the West”, this part of the poem is still engaging with the notion of human mortality, in my opinion. So again, we have an angel there, and the angel doesn't come for the eagles praying abroad, for the senators or for the ladies, and not even for the priestesses of Vesta, but he appears to a slave already agonising in a pit full of corpses. And once again the angel doesn't deliver immortality, he doesn’t even promise it, but he promises peace and comfort, as it is said in the last line, which means taking comfort from our sorrows. And it's interesting that Pascoli inserts the advent of Christianity at the very end of a book of poems devoted to mythological and historical figures from Greek and Roman antiquity. So Christianity actually puts an end to the ancient world. It ushers in a new era. And Pascoli intentionally creates a ring composition between this poem and the first one, “Solon”, which is also in this podcast. “Solon” takes place just after the Anthesteria had finished. Those were the feast of, it was the feast of flowers. So the poem was set in spring and “The Good Tidings” takes place after the Saturnalia so in winter. And “Solon” introduces the concept of turning sorrow into joy thanks to music and poetry and then as they can soothe us even when we are in pain. And here the poem ends with the Greek sentence “taking comfort from our sorrows”. So even if Christianity and the sort of the ancient Greek ethics, to simplify, they are radically different, they both rest on the fundamental notion that humans suffer, pain being the quintessential trait of human nature, as well as mortality. So as such, humans crave for comfort, they crave for hope, and religions bring that comfort. Pascal himself was an atheist, but he longed for that comfort. He wished he could believe. So both poetry is a balm from the human soul as a way to immortalise human deeds. And religions such as Christianity, they soothe pain by offering comfort. Or else we can say Christianity actually sanctifies human sorrows as Jesus goes through pain and death himself. And the big change here is that sorrow is not only accepted, but it's also holy. So Christianity is the wound, not the bandage. This is a sentence I've just come across in a book by writer Esther de Waal called Celtic Christianity, which I recommend because it's seasonal. But going back to Pascoli, his is a very modern take on Christianity, a very agnostic view of it, which is probably very different from the views held by the first Christians.
JOAN
Well, I don't know. I think that appreciation of sorrow and actually acceptance of hardship in life is quite strong in Jesus’ own teaching. In a way, Jesus was quite pessimistic about what would happen to people who were disciples, as he was about his own life on earth, that life on earth is hard, that certainly there are powers in this world that, that are pretty grim. And he said to his disciples, if you look at Mark 13, how they would suffer, they would be persecuted. And that of course is written after the time that they were persecuted by Nero, after the fire of Rome. But Jesus doesn't present a scenario in which if you have faith, everything is going to be fine for you and, you know, a providential attitude that you're, you know, all you need to do is trust in God and everything will be great. And that isn't, it's, it's a, it's something that is struggled with in terms of religion, in terms of Christian faith, that you believe in a good God, you believe that God is taking care of you and, and, and loves you, and, and you put your trust in God and yet God has somehow allowed the world to be hard and the world will go its own way and somehow, ultimately, everything is in the hands of God. But, but things can go in ways that you don't expect and, and you can be in terrible, terrible dire straits. And so with Jesus, there's a, an incredible amount of compassion. And he indicates that God is really with people who are in distress, compassionate and loving and wanting, healing and wanting the goodness of what he calls the Kingdom of God that hopefully is, is around the corner. But the present world is a world in which there is all sorts of darkness. You know, the symbolism of Satan really, that illness and death and hardship can come upon you. So there is this pull towards God, towards the light, towards love in a world that is needing redemption.
ELENA
Yes. The brokenness of the world. Yes. And on this note, I want to thank Joan for this very interesting exploration of early Christianity. And thank you very much for being our guest today.
JOAN
Thank you for having me. Thank you.