FullReads

In this corrected version of Papias, we certainly gain an intelligible account of what otherwise is far from intelligible, viz., the falling headlong. But all the rest is a dismal heap of irrationalities; and the single ray of light which is obtained, viz., the suggestion of the fig-tree as an elevation, which explains the possibility of a headlong fall, is of itself an argument that some great disturbance must have happened to the text at this point, else how could so material a circumstance have silently dropped out of the narrative? There are passages in every separate book of the canon, into which accident, or the somnolence of copyists, has introduced errors seriously disturbing the sense and the coherence. Many of these have been rectified in the happiest manner by ingenious suggestions; and a considerable proportion of these suggestions has been since verified and approved by the discovery of new manuscripts, or the more accurate collation of old ones. In the present case, a much slighter change than might be supposed will suffice to elicit a new and perfect sense from the general outline of that text which still survives. First, as to the phrase ‘fell headlong,’ I do not understand it of any fall from a fig-tree, or from any tree whatever. This fig-tree I regard as a purely fanciful resource; and evidently an innovation to this extent ranks amongst those conjectural audacities which shock the discreet reader, as most unsatisfactory and licentious, because purely gratuitous, when they rest upon no traces that can be indicated as still lurking in the present text. Fell headlong may stand as at present: it needs no change, for it discloses a very good and sufficient sense, if we understand it figuratively as meaning that he came to utter and unmitigated ruin, that his wreck was total, for that, instead of dedicating himself to a life of penitential sorrow, such as would assuredly have conciliated the divine forgiveness, the unhappy criminal had rushed out of life by suicide. So far, at least, all is sound and coherent, and under no further obligations to change small or great, beyond the reading that, in a metaphorical sense, which, if read (as hitherto) in a literal sense, would require the very serious interpolation of an imaginary fig-tree.

What remains is equally simple: the change required involves as little violence, and the result from this change will appear equally natural. But a brief preliminary explanation is requisite, in order to place It advantageously before the reader. The ancients use the term bowels with a latitude unknown generally to modern literature, but especially to English literature. In the midst of the far profounder passion which distinguishes the English from all literatures on the modern European continent, it is singular that a fastidious decorum never sleeps for a moment. It might be imagined that this fastidiousness would be in the inverse ratio of the passion: but it is not so. In particular the French, certainly the literature which ranges at the lowest elevation upon the scale of passion, nevertheless is often homely, and even gross, in its recurrences to frank elementary nature. For a lady to describe herself as laughing a gorge deployee, a grossness which with us, equally on the stage or in real life, would be regarded with horror, amongst the French attracts no particular attention. Again, amidst the supposed refinements of French tragedy, and not observe the coarser tragedy of Corneille, but amidst the more feminine and polished tragedy of Racine, there is no recoil at all from saying of such or such a sentiment, ‘Il me perce les entrailles’–it penetrates my bowels. The Greeks and Romans still more extensively use the several varieties of expression for the intestines, as a symbolic phraseology for the domestic and social affections. We English even, fastidious as we are, employ the term bowels as a natural symbolization for the affections of pity, mercy, or parental and brotherly affection. At least we do so in recurring to the simplicities of the scriptural style. But, amongst the Romans, the word viscera is so naturally representative of the household affections, that at length it becomes necessary to recall an English reader to the true meaning of this word. Through some physiological prejudice, it is true that the bowels have always been regarded as the seat of the more tender and sorrowing sympathies. But the viscera comprehended all the intestines, or (as the French term them) les entrailles. The heart even is a viscus; perhaps in a very large acceptation the brain might be regarded as a co-viscus with the heart. There is very slight ground for holding the brain to be the organ of thinking, or the heart of moral sensibilities, more than the stomach, or the bowels, or the intestines generally. But waive all this: the Romans designated the seat of the larger and nobler (i.e., the moral) sensibilities indifferently by these three terms: the pectus, the pr�“cordia, and the viscera; as to the cor, it seems to me that it denoted the heart in its grosser and more animal capacities: ‘Molle meum levibus cor est violabile relis;’ it was the seat of sexual passion; but nobler and more reflective sensibilities inhabited the pectus or pr�“cordia; and naturally out of these physiologic preconceptions arose corresponding expressions for wounded or ruined sensibilities. We English, for instance, insist on the disease of broken heart, which Sterne, in a well-known passage, postulates as a malady not at all less definite than phthisis, or podagra, though (as he says) not formally recognised in the bills of mortality. But it is evident that a theory which should represent the viscera as occupied by those functions of the moral sensibilities which we place in the central viscus of the heart, must, in following out that hypothesis, figure the case of these sensibilities when utterly ruined under corresponding images. Our ‘broken heart’ will therefore to them become ruptured viscera, or pr�“cordia that have burst. To burst in the middle, is simply to be shattered and ruined in the central organ of our sensibilities, which is the heart; and in saying that the viscera of Iscariot, or his middle, had burst and gushed out, the original reporter meant simply that his heart had broke. That was precisely his case. Out of pure anguish that the scheme which he meant for the sudden glorification of his Master, had recoiled (according to all worldly interpretation) in his utter ruin; that the sudden revolution, through a democratic movement, which was to raise himself and his brother apostles into Hebrew princes, had scattered them like sheep without a shepherd; and that superadded to this common burden of ruin he personally had to bear a separate load of conscious disobedience to God and insupportable responsibility; naturally enough out of all this he fell into fierce despair; his heart broke; and under that storm of affliction he hanged himself. Here, again, all clears itself up by the simple substitution of a figurative interpretation for one grossly physical. All contradiction disappears; not three deaths assault him, viz., suicide, and also a rupture of the intestines, and also an unintelligible effusion of the viscera; but simply suicide, and suicide as the result of that despondency which was figured under the natural idea of a broken heart. The incoherences are gone; the contradictions have vanished; and the gross physical absurdities, which under mistranslation had perplexed the reverential student, no longer disfigure the Scriptures.