Carmina [Incertus]

Poems of Doubtful Authority. (From the Pisaurense Collection.) Against Vain Poets. I now promise to enshrine your sacred poems in holy books, and you, O Christ, the name of God, the Anointed One, who will loose the eloquent tongue for the highest Father: only begin to give your heart to divine things, and to raise your senses, directed towards God, from the earth. Soon a new light will arise in the opened heavens for your eyes, and the sacred Spirit will enter through the opened spaces in a silent passage, and will shake your inmost being with a joyful breath. Come now, stretch the lyre, and strike your fruitful breast; let a great power, moving beyond the usual, depart for your songs; a greater order of things is born for you. No longer do you sing of the judgment of Paris, nor the false wars of the giants: that was a childish game in your past age; once, playful things were fitting for a little one. Now, with a mind more serious, as much as you are more advanced in years, you wish to spurn the Muses with a mature heart, and an age already fitting for the heavens, and a venerable example which your countenance demands, take up the subject matter, and conceive divine thoughts.

If you have gained any beauty and name from false things, a great name from empty things, when you sang of fictions in ancient poems, or when you related earthly deeds, praising the glorious triumphs of kings, you are not worthy to take praise from those whom you rather adorned with the gift of rich speech: how much greater glory will grow for you from these undertakings, in which you exercise both your tongue and also instruct your mind in holiness, and you will attain both praise and life at the same time. And while you read wisely and write of the true miracles of the highest God, you will learn to be nearer and dearer to God himself: whom, while believing, you admire, you will begin to love, and by loving you will rightly glide into Christ. Hitherto that trumpet of your voice has resounded for vain uses; now it thunders forth higher deeds. Learn more the causes of things and the beginnings of the world. Do not, wandering, seek the countless worlds of Epicurus' dreams, which the madman, with atoms as parents, produces through the void, vainly roaming in an empty heart. Moses, venerable in name with ancient law, will solve your empty cares, seeking the world composed from the first beginning by God as founder: and reporting man formed from clay and brought to life by sacred breath, he himself will teach by whose gift he is higher than all breathing things on earth. Do not despise yourself as if you were Pyrrha's stones or Prometheus' clay, whom the highest hand, with face and mind sublime, and deigning to fashion in its own image, has made. You will learn there also, not to hand over the judgment of our fate to falsehood, what sentence has bound us to death, and under whose law we lead our life.

If you cast your mind higher than the sky, and beyond the stars you wish to know what is, or what was before time, John teaches things more remote than the world and the ages. "In the beginning was the Word," he says; God rejoiced in the Word as a pledge, and the Word of God was at the same time, and the same God was the Word. This Word, without which nothing, through which all things, all things, and every nature in turn lies prostrate, subject to God. The divine offspring, the power of the begetter, all things adore through the begotten in paternal majesty. We now confess with our tongue the reigning Lord Jesus, by which name our salvation and faith are founded and rest, reaching toward eternal life.

Sustained by this divine gift, we mortals, though fragile, achieve by chaste deeds to overcome nature, to break the rigid bonds of death, and to use non-corporeal laws within the body, following the divine footsteps of Christ, the God, with the mind governing the soul and the body under sacred arms. For the mind, subject to God, seizes the weapons of salvation, and obtains dominion over its own soul and flesh, and each man becomes by right master of himself, who, given over to the one eternal Lord, becomes ruler of his own limbs, unconquered by vices, a hater of iniquity, stronger than adverse virtues, in just order: a true man, because powerful in mind, in which he holds the light of reason, he tempers his senses, servants without any struggle, and guides his breast with gentle reins. You, whose noble mind burns with the fire of supernal seed to ascend with ethereal steps, insert your head into the lap of the Lord: soon Christ, bountiful, will give his udders flowing with sacred milk to you as you gape, and will flood your mind with divine light, so that, with darkness dispelled, you may see the great laws of the awesome God, by which the all-parent wisdom, Christ, remaining in Himself, always renews all things, and, as God wishes to be the arbiter of His own works, He contains and changes species and the times of life, draws in or draws back the sky, the sea, the stars, the winds, ruling by the power with which He made them: the vast outcome of Egypt teaches this, and the tyrant drowned by the receding sea, and He Himself, whom all things tremble at, whom all things serve, first experienced heavy motions through all the elements.

For the land then held the Jews in common with a single time, which alone was the chosen people of God at that time: and yet that grave wrath of God against the proud enemies ran distinct among the mingled peoples. Now I know you will not say that uncertain chance drives the storms, and that chance drives the sea, when you read that the sea was ordered to part, and did part, and that a dry path lay open among the stiffening waves, and again the sea, dissolved at the command of the holy man and the prophet’s rod, flowed back into its liquid folds, in both cases the power of the sea obeyed, so that a path and vengeance were given to the saints. Why did the prophet, a fugitive to Tarsus, whom, cast into the sea by a perilous fate, a beast with a vast maw seized, and vomited forth harmless from its huge belly? Does it not teach that the sea and the stars are moved by the dominion of God? For fleeing God in vain, whom no one flees, since he holds all things, he stirred up the wrath of the sky and the sea at once. For the rebellious nature, recognizing the omnipotent Lord, feared, as if conscious, to carry the safe man through itself, and bound the fugitive with winds and waves. That prophet, chosen by God, after he terrified the sinning peoples with a threatening warning, proclaimed a grave destruction, broke the guilty, and turned aside the wrath of the Godhead, washed away his own crimes with tears, and fled the final day of perverse Nineveh. That king did not have a fate, who, with death near, prayed to the Lord, whom he knew alone could bend his own laws, that he might extend his consumed life-span longer, and he deserved to live three lustra as a survivor beyond his own years, and to live in ages not his own. Now let us marvel at Plato weaving fates for three.

Or the numbers of Aratus, and the painted stars of Manetho. Let them tell, I ask, where then the swift boundaries were placed for the newborn, and which stars went with which signs, when the pious Ezechias, by the power of his faith in prayer, turned back the courses of the stars and disturbed the motions of the sky, the sun’s light driven backward by command? Or when, at the command of the holy leader, the same sun halted, the night prolonged, so that the victory of the sacred people might be accomplished; it stood still, the orbit reversed, balancing so that the increased light might encompass great triumphs. What of the Son, the power and wisdom of God, Christ? Does he not sufficiently remove your vain cares and errors, and teach us alike by warnings and deeds that one God rules all, and that we should think nothing happens without the command of the Creator, saying that not a leaf from a tree, not a bird in the air, falls without his order? And when the Almighty levels the sea with a word, or treads upon it with his foot, and by a word drives away deaths, or presses demons, or sends back returning souls into holy bodies, and commands the long-dead to go forth from opened tombs, and restores the decayed to life with the returning breath of life—does he not sufficiently show his own power, the author who alone governs all nature and life?

I pray to Him, to Him rather I devote my zeal and labor in reading and writing; sing of the Thunderer's great undertakings, write of the first beginnings of things created by the Word, and of the chaos before the day, and the first twilight of light, and what thereafter through all ages in various elements was spoken or done by God—you will learn this through the holy volumes, which Moses taught, inscribed on the legal tablets, or which the new law of the Gospel Testament marks, revealing mysteries previously hidden, Christ. Then I will truly remember you as a divine poet, and I will drink your poems like a draught of sweet water: when they offer me, drawn from the highest nectarous springs, the things that hold Christ the Lord of all, and testify that your mind prevails by God, so that I may gain from you both the riches of speech and of mind. And I will rejoice that he, whom Hector joined to me by a kindred bond, is a kinsman under holy religion: nor, with the mortal bonds of the body to be loosed, will I embrace the holy one with a perpetual pledge * *.

To Jacob, Master of the Horse. By the ashes of Paul, by the threshold of Peter's white hair, do not tear my verses, Duke Jacob, mine; So may Thomas sustain your breast for a shield, and Bartholomew go with you to war as a companion: So by the aid of the saints may no barbarian storm the Alps: So may holy Susanna give you her strength. So may any fierce man who swims across the icy Ister be drowned; like the horses of Pharaoh, birds devour him: So may the Getic rhomphaea, an avenger, strike the Gothic hordes, and the prosperous hands of the Tejans rule Roman affairs; So may a dying guest give you a great triumph, and poured-out casks overcome your thirst; So may your right hand never be stained with enemy blood, do not tear my verses, Duke Jacob, mine. EASTER POEM. Christ, powerful over things, founder of the returning age, Voice and Mind of highest God, whom the Father poured forth from his deep Mind, and gave him shares of so great a kingdom; who subdued the impious crimes of our life by suffering, having deigned to clothe himself in a bodily form, to speak openly to peoples, and to acknowledge himself a man: and whom, enclosed in Mary's womb, soon at the sight of the divine power the virgin's breasts swelled, and the unwedded Mother was amazed that her inmost parts were filled by a secret birth, about to bear her own Author. Mortal hearts: the Artificer of the sky, the discoverer of the world, was a part of the human race; and he who wholly encompasses the whole world under one breast lay hidden; and he who is not contained by the spaces of earth, nor by the wave of the sea, nor by the sky, flowed together into small limbs.

Indeed, you underwent even the name of punishment and the bonds, to snatch us from death, and to put death to flight by your own death. Soon, borne up into the ethereal breezes, you seek again your joyful parent, the earth purified. May you warm a narrow tomb, so that often on festal days the annual fasts of a sincere sacred rite may be celebrated. PRAISE OF CHRIST. True offspring of God, and older than all years. Now born, who always were; the discoverer of light before your own, and parent of your mother: whom the coeternal Father sent from the stars, poured into the seeds of the Word to inhabit a virgin's womb, and to enter the narrow paths of the body, and to dwell in a small abode: whom no place contains: who, at the first light, saw whatever you had created when the world was born. Yourself the maker, yourself your own work, you deigned to feel the unjust changes of age and to endure the unlike modes of this body, and to undergo humanity, so that you might be able to show God, lest slippery error and the long-deceived cleverness of the varied world should allow mortal hearts for so many ages to be ignorant of their Author. Your mother, conscious of the birth, and the terrified beasts felt fears. You, the new stars, scanning with anxious gaze, saw first in heaven, and the Magi, following the light, found you. You loose guilty breasts, you lead back escaped souls into dead bodies, and you command life to return. By the law of the received gift, you penetrate to the shades, and you, immortal, enter the hiding places of death; for to you alone was birth a beginning, and you finish by dying: but with night repelled, you return to heaven and the Father, and again by the eternal order you remove contagion from the purified lands.

You alone, and the Father’s companion: you the innocent Spirit, and so often one, and in a triple name simple. What else, if not for all? Who could believe that you could have died, you who were able to give back life? THE MIRACLES OF CHRIST. An angel addresses Mary, by whose foreknowing word she conceives, preserving her virginity, God. The Chaldean kings give you prophetic gifts: myrrh for the man, gold for the king, accept incense for God. Christ changes waters into flowing wines: by which first deed he proves himself to be God. Five loaves, two fishes, five thousand fill; and God commands that more be left over from the little. Born from the womb, a blind man perceived new lights, and marvels that he has earned the unknown day. Lazarus rises from the tomb, Christ calling out, and the law of hard death perishes, undone. The wave shakes the wavering Peter: to whom Christ, on the deep, both steadies the right hand and faith by his word. A bloodless woman touches Christ’s garment; blood stands in her veins: faith becomes medicine.

The paralytic, after many years, walks when commanded, a wonder, himself the bearer of his own bed.