Even though I get a new batch of students each year, I know how to freak out each Latin class. It requires nothing more than to direct them to a stanza in a hymn of Bernard of Clairvaux. Here is the offending line, rendered in a rather literal translation: “I have taken honey from your lips/ Drawn from the sweetness of milk/ Beyond all delights.” As I explain to the class, the imagery is that of the hymnist tasting of the half-dried blood of Christ as it drips off of His face and finding it to be nothing short of the milk and honey of the true Promised Land.
They find the imagery gory and bizarre, which is odd. They have seen Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the Thirteenth, Halloween, and all of their sequels. They enjoy seeing car chases (often ending in bloody crashes), exploding buildings, and insatiable sharks. War movies have to be so realistic that the only thing missing from the experience is the acrid smell. When they aren’t watching films (or doing their Latin homework), they are playing video games where corpses pile up several feet deep.
In this respect my students are no different from their peers or society at large. We steep ourselves in violence, but cannot bear the thought of the smallest injury, even a hangnail, in real life. For us violence has become entertainment, no less than it was for the ancient Romans and with equally disastrous consequences. There had been funerary games and gladiatorial contests since the earliest days of Rome. Victories were often celebrated by marching the conquered through Rome and then executing them. Since most of the adult male population had served as soldiers and knew the dangers of war, this bloody event was not mindless entertainment, but a somber celebration of victory after the perils of the battlefield. But a shift occurred in the first century B.C., as warfare was relegated to professional soldiers. The bloodlust didn’t diminish as the percentage of veterans declined among the general population. If anything, the popularity of gladitorial contests, reenactments of major naval battles, and harrowing chariot races increased. In a similar vein Americans have developed an insatiable desire for seeing violence, even though fewer and fewer will actually see real live combat. For us, violence is both entertainment and something that does not evoke a strong emotional response.
Bernard of Clairvaux takes the exact opposite stance. He does not rehearse the violence of our Lord’s death for mere entertainment value, and the crucifixion evokes great tenderness, sorrow, repentance, and love in Bernard. His poem O caput cruentatum (which is the basis via the German hymnist Paul Gerhard for the English hymn, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded”) is one of the first great hymns to meditate on our Lord’s suffering, but it is with the idea that the penitent will find great comfort and healing in our Lord’s wounds. Would that we appreciate our Lord’s suffering more deeply as Bernard did!
© 2010 James A. Kellerman
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