21-24)

In the first two lines Jesus claims to have already successfully divided time into two parts having absolved the Past and freed the future. Why then is the future (which is not dignified by a capital letter as is the Past) characterized in the final line as an unfinished task? If there is a real semantic distinction between "freeing" the future and "washing it clean," it must be this: thanks to the Crucifixion manking will be redeemed from original sin, it will be given a fresh start, but will remain vulnerable. Christ anticipates the future, unabsolved sins still to come. Thus he seems to have doubts about the total efficacy of his Crucifixion. It's value seems to be solely retroactive. The Sacrifice seems premature. Despite the tactful tone, this amounts to nothing less than a lack of confidence in divine judgment: the Father has poorly timed the Crucifixion.

An even bolder passage follows:

Mal et Doute! En un mot je puis les mettre en poudre,
Vous les aviez prévus, laissez-moi vous absoudre
De les avoir permis.—C'est l'accusation
Qui pèse de partout sur la Création!—(ii, 53-56)

Here Jesus sees his role not as Redeemer of mankind but as God's advocate. He suggests that God himself is on trial and is asked to give an accounting to mankind, an explanation of the many enigmas of his Creation. This reversal of God's role from judge to accused is expressed even more boldly in an outline of a projected poem that Vigny planned to call "Jugement dernier": "Ce sera ce jour-là que Dieu viendra se justifier devant toutes les âmes et tout ce qui est vie. Il paraîtra et parlera, il dira clairement pourquoi la création et pourquoi la souffrance et la mort de l'innocence, etc. En ce moment; ce sera le genre humain ressuscité qui sera le juge, et l'Eternel, le Créateur, sera jugé par les générations rendues à la vie." (PL, II, p. 1001). Here we see the full implications of "Jésus … devint homme" and "pensée humaine." In this tacit quarrel between God and Man Jesus is siding with the latter. If God will not speak in his own defense, let Jesus speak for Him, or let others, like Lazarus, who have seen the secrets of the other world.

The aggressiveness of the plea is startling in its boldness, but it is not inconsistent with the section that precedes nor the one that follows. Christ's yielding to his Father's will is presented in section three. The formal division itself suffices to indicate that the rebellious mood is over. The transition is further signalled by a change of epithet: "humaine," which closed the first section and introduced the second, now yields to "divin":

Ainsi le divin Fils parlait au divin Père(iii, 1)

The resumption of the Father-Son relationship is underscored by the repetition of the epithet. However, Jesus' submission does not diminish his anguish, it "redoubles" it. Vigny nicely manages to effect the transition in accordance with the Biblical account without a drastic change in characterization. While submitting to his Father's will, Jesus does not relinquish his anguished quest for light:

Il se prosterne encore, il attend, il espère …
Mais il renonce et dit: "Que votre volonté
Soit faite et non la mienne, et pour l'Eternité!"
Une terreur profonde, une angoisse infinie
Redoublent sa torture et sa lente agonie.
Il regarde longtemps, longtemps cherche sans voir.
Comme un marbre de deuil tout le ciel était noir.(iii, 2-8)

The basic problem, underlined by the final antithetical rhyme, remains unresolved. Looking at the poem in terms of its overall structure, one must allow that the poet has handled his transitions with care and subtlety.

The alleged disunity of the poem will disappear at once when one reads it as the description of a moment of crisis, a brief moment of dissent. The poem's essential structure is solid enough: an exposition in which Jesus suddenly empathizes with mankind's grievances, a central section in which he both articulates and symbolizes them, the resolution of the revolt (but not the anguish), and of course the defiant post-script on Silence uttered not by Christ but by the poet himself anxious to point up the moral.⁴

The exposition makes it clear that we are dealing with Jesus not as omniscient God-Man but as a purely human figure, in fact an archetypal Romantic Hero in revolt against the rules (in this case, silence) imposed upon him. In addition to the rebelliousness implicit at the end of section one and explicit in section two, Vigny's Jesus exhibits nearly all the other traits one associates with the Romantic Hero. He endures, for example, the solitude of the superior individual: "Jésus marchait seul" (i, 1). As in "Moïse," the poet is careful to put symbolic distance between the hero and his followers. And Moses' lament:

Sitôt que votre souffle a rempli le berger
Les hommes se sont dit: "il nous est étranger."(PL, I, p. 9)

is paralleled by that of Jesus:

"Ne pouviez-vous prier et veiller avec moi?"
Mais un sommeil de mort accable les apôtres.
Pierre à la voix du maître est sourd comme les autres.(i, 18-20)

Jesus also possesses the brooding melancholy of the beauténébreux: "Triste jusqu'à la mort, l'œil sombre et ténébreux" (i, 6). He is tracked down by Hernani's "destin insensé" thanks to the poem's first simile foeshadowing the Crucifixion: "Vêtu de blanc ainsi qu'un mort de son linceul" (i, 2). An even bolder simile shows Jesus with bowed head "croisant les deux bras sur sa robe / Comme un voleur de nuit cachant ce qu'il dérobe; / Connaissant les rochers mieux qu'un sentier uni" (i, 7-9). Here we see the Romantic Hero as paria and outlaw. More often than not, the Romantic Hero is not just an outcast but an orphan, a bastard son, disowned or dispossessed. Typical examples are Hugo's Didier in Marion Delorme: "J'ai pour tout nom Didier. Je n'ai jamais connu / Mon père ni ma mère. On me déposa nu, / Tout enfant, sur le seuil d'une église…." and Dumas' Antony: "Les autres hommes, du moins, lorsqu'un événement brise leurs espérances, ils ont un frère, un père, une mère! …des bras qui s'ouvrent pour qu'ils viennent y gémir. Moi! Moi! je n'ai pas même la pierre d'un tombeau où je puisse lire un nom et pleurer." (Happily absent from Vigny's moving figure of Christ is one of the less attractive traits of the Romantic Hero: self-pity.) The parallel here is poignant: Jesus' fitful cries to his Father fall on deaf ears: "Le vent seul répondit à sa voix" (i, 20).

In his Journal Vigny has expressed his admiration for those heroes who dare defy the gods: "Quand un contempteur des dieux paraît, comme Ajax, fils d'Oïlée, le monde l'adopte et l'aime; tel est Satan; tels sont Oreste et Don Juan. Tous ceux qui luttèrent contre le ciel injuste ont eu l'admiration et l'amour secret des hommes" (PL, II, 1001). The poet was furnished with more recent Romantic models in Byron's Manfred and Cain.⁵ As Castex has indicated, this "caïnisme" or "prométhéisme" was an important Romantic theme on both sides of the Channel.

The weakest part of McGoldric's article is his criticism that Vigny "by a ruthless selection of material illustrative of a romantic obsession with the horrific" (p. 512) has "created a subject totally removed from both the letter and the spirit of the Gospels" (p. 510). Jesus' anticipation of his Crucifixion, for example, is criticized because certain details are not specifically found in the Gospel accounts ("Les verges qui viendront") or because they are mentioned "only" once (the cup of gall) or twice (the crown of thorns)! And surely McGoldric is over-straining to make a point when he speaks of Jesus' "morbid, pagan preoccupation with what Lazarus experienced in the nether world after dying" (p. 512).

McGoldric's main complaint seems to be the poem's lack of optimism and the fact that Jesus' monologue is not a theodicy but, rather, what Sartre has called, in L'Idiot de la Famille, "théologie négative." Vigny's Jesus incarnates a certain ambivalence or tension between two polar attitudes, theism and atheism, the dialectic of the central section yielding a synthesis that would best be termed anguished agnosticism. There is an acceptance of the existence of God as a working hypothesis, a vague "ground of being" but at the same time a harsh critique of that existence. Christ offers his complaint as constructive criticism, but the tone is one of tactful irony. There is an unspoken, but almost bitter question being formulated: "If You are really a loving Father, why do you behave like an absentee landlord?"

The poem's ambivalence reflects, on the one hand, the growing doubts of Vigny's mature years, and, on the other, his lingering need to believe. The death of his mother in 1837 provided the chief example of the cruelty of Creation, but at the same time stirred a need to believe in a final, transcendent Justice. Several entries made toward the end of 1837 in the Journal d'un poète reflect Vigny's effort to believe:

Mon Dieu! mon Dieu! avez-vous daigné connaître mon coeur et ma vie? mon Dieu! m'avez-vous éprouvé à dessein? Aviez-vous réservé la fin de ma pauvre mère commme spectacle pour me render à vous plus entièrement?

(PL, II, 1088)

Donnez-moi, ô mon Dieu! la certitude qu'elle m'entend et qu'elle sait ma douleur; qu'elle est dans le repos bien-heureux des anges et que, par vous, à sa prière, je puis être pardonné de mes fautes.

(PL, II, 1091)

Vigny's plea for certainty went unanswered, and his doubts were fueled by Strauss' Vie de Jésus anticipating Renan's more famous presentation of a de-deified Christ. Vigny had read the book by February of 1839, and the original manuscript of "Le Mont des Oliviers" is dated November 12 of the same year. The rendering of Jesus not only as purely human but as symbolic of mankind's religious doubts was inspired by Jean-Paul Richter's "Dream." Madame de Staël's translation of the key passage in which an anguished Christ speaks to the dreamer will give some idea of the stylistic as will as thematic similarity of the two pieces:

"J'ai parcouru les mondes, je me suis élevé au-dessus des soleils, et là aussi il η'est point de Dieu; je suis descendu jusqu'aux dernières limites de l'univers, j'ai regardé dans l'abîme … Relevant ensuite mes regards vers la voûte des cieux je n'y ai trouvé qu'un orbite vide, noir et sans fond."⁶

Vigny's wavering religious stance was representative of a certain cross-current of belief-disbelief among many Christian intellectuals of the Romantic period that helps explain why "negative theology" surfaced so frequently during the nineteenth century. As Sartre says, in L'Idiot de la famille: "L'inspiration, originellement, relevait de Dieu; en France, après la déchristianisation de la bourgeoisie jacobine, la question se complique: Hugo, poète vates, preétend encore écrire sous la dictée d'en haut, mais beaucoup de romantiques—en particulier Musset—incertains, victimes d'un agnosticisme auquel ils ne se résignent pas, remplacent l'.tre suprême, à la source de leurs poèmes, par la douleur de l'avoir perdu…."⁷ The conflicting demands of faith and reason, perhaps best exemplified in Kierkegaard's brave but intellectually anguished "leap" of faith, are already adumbrated in the religious anguish of many a Romantic Hero. Whether he leans toward theism or atheism, the Romantic Hero's feelings at least tend to be ambivalent. When he believes, he asks, like Vigny's Christ, who will help his unbelief. When he doubts, he asks, like Musset's Rolla, who will give him faith:

Jésus, ce que lu fis, qui jamais le fera?Nous, vieillards nés d'hier, qui nous rajeunira?

And when Rolla laments:

Je ne crois pas, ô Christ, à ta parole sainte.

the epithet is not sarcastic but nostalgic. Sarcasm, in fact, is reserved, just as earnestly as Blake's "Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau," for the philosophes of the Enlightenment:

Dors-tu content, Voltaire, et ton hideux sourireVoltige-t-il encore sur tes os décharnés?Ton siècle était, dit-on, trop jeune pour te lire;Le nôtre doit te plaire, et tes hommes sont nés.Il est tombé sur nous, cet édifice immenseQue de tes larges mains tu sapais nuit et jour.

Voltaire's men had indeed been born, but the loss of faith left a vacuum, which, being abhorrent to nature, triggered a wistful nostalgic reaction and provided the Romantics with a new lyrical theme—metaphysical anguish—which has come to dominate the literature of the twentieth century with the successive failures of Science, Marxism, and Eastern Philosophy to fill the void or provide a rejuvenating faith. Latter-day Romantics—"hippies," "yippies," "Jesus-freaks," and what have you—continue the tradition not only by shocking the bourgeois but by ressurecting a purely human and anguished Jesus as "Superstar," an ambivalent term wavering between sarcastic and nostalgic irony, i.e., suggesting both adulation and deflation. Jesus' descent from God to Hero to Superstar (surely a stylistic notch below Hero) must be taken as one of the parameters of faith in the western world.

Sartre's characterization of Flaubert as an "agnostiquemalgré-lui" (L'Idiot, p. 2077) would fit many a Romantic Hero before and since, and Flaubert's determination to "souffrir en présence du Dieu absent" (ibid., p. 2073; Sartre's italics) has an exact analogue in "Le Mont des Oliviers" the main poetic device of which is an ironic apostrophe to a God whose main attribute seems to be absenteeism. It is this ironic tension, as much as anything else, that holds the poem together.

Vigny's poetic right to make of his Christ a Romantic Hero, heir to the doubts of the Enlightenment and witness to the new critical exegesis of the Bible, should go without saying. But even judging the poem on its historicity, one need not see in it a violent departure from either the letter or the spirit of the Gospels. The poem deals not with an entire career but with one of the darkest moments in it. The sombemess, although not developed at length, is already present in the Gospel accounts.⁸ And Mark's Gospel tells us that Christ will have an even more somber, bitter moment on the Cross when he cries out at the ninth hour: "Eli, Eli, lama sabacthane."

Notes

¹ J. M. McGoldric, "Vigny's Unorthodox Christ," Modern Language Notes, 85 (1970), 510-514.

² Alfred de Vigny, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), I, p. 153. Hereafter cited as PL for Pléiade edition.

³ Pierre-Georges Castex, "Les Destinées" d'Alfred de Vigny (Paris: Société d'Édition d'Enseignement Supérieur, 1964), p. 113.

⁴ The section on Silence is dated April 2, 1862, eighteen years after the first publication of "Le Mont des Oliviers" and one year before the poet's death.

⁵ See Georges Bonnefoy, La Pensée religieuse et morale d'Alfred de Vigny (Paris: Hachette, 1944), p. 30.

⁶ Quoted by Claude Pichois, L'Image de Jean-Paul Richter dans les lettres françaises (Paris: Corti, 1963), p. 257. Se also pp. 275-276 for specific stylistic similarities, which Pichois does not think considerable. What is significant, of course, is the characterization of Christ and the general atmosphere of despair.

⁷ Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), II, 1960.

⁸ "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death" (Mark 14:34 and Matthew 26:38). "And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood upon the ground." (Luke 22:44)