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Throne and Altar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

C.J.F. Williams
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Extract

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This book is astonishing. Its subject matter is not something that the modem educated reader is likely to have encountered before: a longish Latin poem together with a dedicatory epistle and several shorter poems published by what one cannot help describing as a court poet in the court of Pope Urban VIII—a man who was, surprisingly, a priest. The Latin is not easy, and one is grateful for the translation the Newmans have supplied. But the medium is not half so strange to the modem eye and ear as the message. It is adulation of a monarch of a kind which old fashioned Republicans like Tacitus found so unwelcome in the world of the Emperors: bad enough under Augustus; how much worse under a Nero or a Domitian! And it is to Domitian that the editors look as a precedent for the adulation accorded to Pope Urban.

The particular topic is the canopy recently made by Bernini for the central altar in St Peter’s, which the poet, Guiddicioni, refers to as the “Ara Maxima”. This is indeed the title of his poem, and one does not have to be a Protestant to feel uncomfortable with the paganism of the title itself. Worse still, a few lines into the epistle dedicatory, and one finds that the altar has become a throne—not the throne of God and his Christ, a theme which would have respectable Christian and Judaic precedents stretching back to the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant, but a throne for the Pope himself.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 74 , Issue 876 , November 1993 , pp. 497 - 501
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Guidiccioni, Lelio, Latin Poems, Rome 1633 and 1639, Edited with Introduction, Translation and Commentary by Newman, John Kevin and Newman, Frances Stickney, Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1992Google Scholar.

2 I have become nervous about any wholesale contrast between Hebrew thought and literature and those of Greece after reading some of the work of Professor lames Barr, most particularly and most recently his The Garden of Eden and Human Immortality, Fortress Press and S.C.M. Press, 1992.Google Scholar

3 The editors comment: “She is incesta because the divorce with Catherine was not recognised by the Pope, and because her daughter, later Elizabeth I, was conceived before she was nominally married” (p. 233). But I wonder whether incesta has not a more specific reference to incest: Henry VIII claimed to have conscientious scruples about his marriage to Catherine of Aragon on the grounds that she had previously been betrothed to his elder brother Arthur, and marriage to the spouse of a sibling was incestuous, i.e., within the prohibited degrees. However, Anne's elder sister had been a mistress of Henry's before Anne herself, and this in the eyes of canon law would have made his laison with Anne equally incestuous–an irony of the situation which would not have been missed in Counter‐Reformation circles.