Eros of the Beloved

Sunday, I wrote a post meditating on the verse from Matthew 17 where God speaks to Peter, James, and John while they're stand on the mountain, witnessing Jesus' transfiguration.  This verse reads "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased..."  I'd like to return to this notion of the Beloved as it appears in this passage from Matthew.  We know that a cloud descends over the place where Jesus stands with those three apostles and from that cloud the voice of God speak. 

Although we read the Gospel's in translation from their original, there are still features of the English translation that we can pay attention to.  I'd like to focus on what's happening with the language metrically.  When I read scripture, I encounter it as a very long, elaborate, and intricate piece of verse.  We see it more concretely in the Psalms, which are themselves, verse; and not just poems of devotion, but poems charged with the language of Eros, with a deep longing to reconnect with the divine.  Anne Carson, a Canadian poet who has published numerous collections of poetry (including Glass, Irony, and God; Decreation; and Nox) and translations of Sappho's work, says that we begin to live the minute Eros enters us.  Carson, a highly trained classics scholar, wrote her doctoral research on Greek lyric poetry, wherein she unearths and then develops a fundamental concept about Eros that we, as readers of any text (especially religious ones) can dwell on to aid in our interpretations of these stories.  What she discovers of the Greek language is that desire (Eros) moves; that it functions like a verb.

The Saviour's Transfiguration, Theophanes the Greek, ca. early 15th C

Returning to our passage from Matthew 17:1-9, we can interpret Jesus' and his apostle's ascent to the mountain as an intentional act of devotion.  Building on the metaphor of the mountain as a place of spiritual awakening, what we see in this passage is just that, a spiritual awakening.  This awakening, manifest in the transfiguration, presents itself in the language's rhythm - its meter.  What little knowledge I have of the Greek language is that their poetry was organized according to a quantitative meter, that we refer to as hendecasyllabics, also known as the Sapphic.  Unlike English verse, which most naturally falls into a pentameter line (accentual-syllabic), measuring lines by feet whose primary unit is the iamb, the Sapphic line typically consists of eleven syllables, which aren't grouped into feet per se, but the choriamb which provides a framework for scansion.  This structure organizes verse according to length of vowel, rather than the English accentual-syllabic system which concerns itself with the accentual stress of a given syllable.  You'll notice that there are thirteen syllables in this line: "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased...", so we're already breaking out of both the pentameter and Sapphic lines; yet the meter of this line still illuminates what's happening at this moment when God speaks to Peter, James, and John.  It's certainly difficult to force the line into an iambic scansion, but is possible.  Doing so would establish the pattern " x /  x /  x /  x /  x /;" and in order to appreciate the linguistic characteristics of this line, we would have to .  Without it, we wouldn't catch two of the most important phenomena that occur here: the revisionary disclosure and what Hopkins refers to as "sprung rhythm."  Let's begin with Hopkin's idea. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered this feature metered verse, which he describes as the most natural way to imitate everyday speech in poetry.  He characterizes it as (assuming we're operating on an accentual-syllabic metrical system) as beginning a foot with a stressed, as opposed to unstressed, syllable from which the line may deviate by any number of variable stressed-unstressed patterns.  In our line, we find that it's possible to read it by placing the stress on the first syllable (This), thereby creating two possible measurements for the foot:  a trochee or a spondee, trochee meaning stressed/unstressed and spondee stressed/stressed.  If we read the first foot using a trochaic measurement, then we place the emphasis on "this," thus diminishing the importance of the verb "is," as if to say that God wants to affirm that Jesus, the person occupying the space in which we imagine Jesus to reside, is in fact Jesus - not Peter, James, or John; and after the initial foot, the rest of the line falls into a fairly regular iambic patter.  However, if we scan the first foot as a spondee (stressed/stressed), then we place the emphasis on both "this" and "is," therefore allowing for an entirely different reading where we incorporate the trochaic reading and complicate matters by raising the significance of the verb "is", or "to-be" to a level where both Jesus and the space he inhabits become a sort of metaphorical Christ figure.  Of course, if we just imposed a strictly iambic scansion onto this line, the effect would also amplify the significance of "is," in much the same way that a spondaic scansion would; but the benefit of scanning in opposition to the regular pentameter allows our reading to create a space wherein the transfiguration actually happens.  And this space is then the place where Eros enters, transforming Jesus into the Christ figure.  We feel Eros's movement in the meter of the line, in the organic rise and fall of accents.  Furthermore, the verse that follows the transfiguration compliments the presence of Eros amongst Jesus and the apostles: "When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear." (Matthew 17:6). 

Returning to Anne Carson's idea that we begin to live the moment Eros enters us, we witness both Christ and the apostles being birthed into a new understanding of their world.  Again, we find ourselves confronted with a situation wherein we undergo a death and are reborn, ultimately assimilating into the environment that was previously foreign to us.  There's a tension between a self and an other, a pull and tug.  Models for this relationship may assume many forms, from the self and other being the same to the other donning the guise of the divine, another mortal, etc.  But what matters is the moment when Eros enters into the binary.