Post 2: Hodgepodge

I have a theme song for my post today.



I'm a sucker for apocalyptic literature, so Jacopone making big references to the Book of Revelation (and then *gasp* changing it) caught my attention. In poem 50, The Battle Against the Antichrist, I know that we talked a little about this in class, but the scene in there is SO MUCH LIKE the scene in revelation where the serpent-dragon-Satan thing comes up out of the sky, sweeps a third of them out of the sky and drinks all the water in the river. Except, in the Bible version, Mary gives birth to Jesus just in time (talk about epic battle scene--the angels are trying to fly her away from Satan and the woman is HAVING A BABY), and that power defeats the serpent. Yeah, he takes some sinners down with him, but that's to be expected and the world is saved.

In Jacopone's version, there is no light. At all. Not even from Mary and Jesus's heads. It's completely dark. The moon's not even out. You get the sense that the sun is there, but nothing's happening. It's just there as kind of this still presence, and you know that it's there and you know that it has to be providing some light, but that's not the point. The point is that the sun is just this passive thing, and it's the moon that takes the active role. The sun just sits there. The moon's dressed for a funeral and darkens everything. It almost seems to overpower the sun, which is all kinds of ridiculous, because seriously, when does the moon ever do that? The order is wrong, and by setting up this extremely uncomfortable setting (as well as referring to a battle we're used to winning as a losing one), Jacopone gets our attention. THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG HERE. THE CHURCH IS EXTREMELY WRONG HERE. The focus here isn't on a powerless God; it's on the fact that the Church has taken God pretty much completely out of the equation. He's still there in name, but Jacopone doesn't see God's presence in the Church's actions or intentions. The Church's power is so great that it's sucking God out of other people's lives too, and they're left in a position as helpless as the one that Jacopone describes. The goodness is this great light that can't do anything. We even forget that it shines.

Jacopone goes on to describe three traps people fall into. There's three options and none of them are good. We're used to at least one of them being good--or at least one of them being slightly more desirable than the others--because we're used to the Bible. Or I'm used to the Bible, and Jacopone's audience would have been used to the Bible. Most people, says Jacopone, fall to greed. That's the big problem in the Church, and it really is. The Church has become this political force where people make lots of money--even more so in Jacopone's eyes, since he's totally advocating for a primary Francis of Assisi way of life. Then he mentions what I talked about in my last post, which was the vanity of knowledge. So essentially, if greed doesn't get you, learning things and thinking you're better than everyone else and getting lost in being all "knowledgable" will.

Then Jacopone mentions this third option that I didn't quite understand. It's like...if you get past the first two, then you're lost to this want to perform magic and miracles. I wasn't quite sure how to interpret that. Could it be a want to be Christ? Or a want to extend beyond human bounds? Or maybe it's a fame thing? Either way, I guess it leads back to the first two, where you end up turning away from God to follow these things. God becomes, again, like in his first image, a passive force in your life. He exists, and you do things in his name (sort of), but he becomes a circumstance rather than a focus and a reason. That's what Jacopone critiques here (in a rather fantastic fashion, in my extremely humble opinion).

Jacopone gets nicer at the end, in kind of a vain hope (but a hope, I noticed, nonetheless) that people will be able to defeat the three temptations and end up in a good and functional (and active) relationship with God. This is pretty early on as far as his poems go, so I guess he might not have been very angry yet, but yeah. Even if the hope is sarcastic, it's still present. Jacopone mentions that confiding in our strength is wrong, so I was wondering where strength comes from. Does it come from God? I think that's where Jacopone thinks it comes from, and that's one of the reasons why he's riding everyone so hard about this.

Also, in answer to Jacob's question in class the other day, Christ had to die and it was said that he was going to die, but I don't think people exactly understood the fact that he had to die because of all the bad stuff everyone had done in the past to turn away from God and, essentially, love. That's why you got the blame game instead of people kind of checking their lives.

Post 1: What is Idle Knowledge?

Jacopone is kind of a rock star.

Reading the poems assigned, I had so many things to discuss about all of them, but the thing that stuck out most to me is Jacopone consistently referring to two forms of knowledge: learning vs pious devotion, or true knowledge vs university knowledge.

First, this sticks out to me because, you know, I go to a university. So that got me thinking about what I was learning in class. Was that knowledge true, or was it something that wasn't? Jacopone seems to think that there is learning that falls in line with God and the way he wants us to live and learning that takes away from God. God must be a present figure in your learning and knowledge. This is true. Sometimes, knowledge creates pride. When I was a little girl, "know-it-all" or "Smart Alec" were among the worst of insults you could get (you know, besides "Poopy Head"). Knowledge is supposed to benefit yourself and others. It's not supposed to be something to cut yourself off from others or put yourself above them.

This passage, in 34 (ON THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TRUE AND COUNTERFEIT LOVE, ACQUIRED AND INFUSED KNOWLEDGE), stuck out to me the most:

"Acquired knowledge, however long its meditation,
Cannot engender properly ordered love.
Infused knowledge, as soon as it touches you, fills you
With burning love, makes peace between you and God.
It makes you humble, edifies your neighbor,
And gives you knowledge of the truth."

Well, hey there, Jesuit values. Going to a Jesuit liberal arts school, you kind of get this sense of "learning for the sake of learning," but you also get that learning serves as a tool to help other people (as well as kind of a cool path to self-fulfillment through helping others). Through knowledge, you pursue a higher truth about the world that's not as much of a cut-and-dry means to an end as perhaps knowledge solely for the sake of being rich.

For knowledge to work for Jacopone, it must be selfless, and that wasn't something he was seeing a lot of when he was living. People with knowledge and in higher offices got paid more, and they were being very corrupt. Popes were rich and getting corrupt. Jacopone didn't see the aspect of their offices where they helped other people--at all, it seems. His solution was to get rid of them and to hope in vain that people would eventually turn and follow the path to true knowledge, that people would ultimately turn away from pride and follow God.

The papacy did eventually clear up (and by eventually, I'm talking more like "recently"), but learning even more about how corrupted the papacy was, I can see how hopeless it must have seemed for poor Jacopone. It's hard to stick it to the man when the man runs like...everything.