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.