I'm currently reading Cyrano de Bergerac's satirical utopian novel Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (Les Histoires comique des États et Empires de la Lune et Soleil), the first part of which concerns the protagonist's journey to the moon where he encounters a civilisation of large humans who walk on all fours, and - in the fashion of the topsy-turvy world of utopias - conduct most of their affairs in a very different manner from those of Cyrano's native seventeenth-century France. The novel contains a lot of interesting details, espcecially for its debt to older novels of moon travel and utopian societies and its influence upon later novels. As a medievalist, however, there was one particular detail which caught my attention, and which served as yet another reminder that the stories of the saints as they were told throughout the Middle Ages, continued to be told and to have an influence on writings and story-telling in what we now call the Early Modern Period.
The detail in question comes at the very end of the novel, where the protagonist discusses the existence of God with the master of the house in which he is lodging. This master is a young man, because on the moon the reverence for age is turned upside down and so he is the sharpest wit of the house and treats his father as unpleasantly as a father in Cyrano's France might treat his son. Cyrano used this device of the contrary world to explore matters of theology, statemanship and sexuality in his own time by using the quadruped men of the moon as a mirror to his own society and a mouthpiece for his own ideas. The young moon-man lambasts the novel's protagonist for the latter's belief in God, and delivers an argument against it. After the main point of the lecture is delivered, however, a knock on the door is heard and in enters - in the translation of Richard Aldington - "a large, black, hairy man" who "approached us, seized the blasphemer by the middle and carried him off up the chimney."
The protagonist grabs hold of the moon-man out of pity and attempts to draw him back, but is himself carried off and follows the devil and the damned moon-man back to earth, where the protagonist manages to let go just before the devil enters Hell in the earth's interior. This devil serves both to ward off any potential censorship of the novel and of Cyrano's person, since Cyrano's lunar mouthpiece is sentenced to eternal damnation for his atheism. Yet at the same time, this damnation is only set in motion after the main argument has been delivered and before the protagonist has a chance to rebut it and thus prove God's existence, thus leaving the matter on the side of Cyrano. Moreover, the devil serves as a useful device for sending the protagonist back to Earth in a speedy manner.
Bartholomew inspecting his knife
Beaune - BM - ms. 0039. f.070, psalter, 13th century
(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)
The reason why this detail caught my attention as a medievalist, however, is the description of the devil as a black man, indeed as an "Ethiopian". This description of the devil has its root in early Christian apocryphal literature, and there are in particular two episodes of early Christian hagiography that has helped disseminating this image into the popular imagination of later centuries. The first instance is found in the Life of Antony of Egypt written in the mid-fourth century by Athanasius of Alexandria. Here, Antony encounters a being called the "spirit of fornication", which is described as an ugly black boy. A slightly more elaborate description, however, is found in the legend of Saint Bartholomew (discussed in this previous blogpost), which was a legend popularised through various collections of the stories of the saints, perhaps most importantly Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea. In the legend of Saint Bartholomew, we read how he travelled to India to convert its inhabitants to Christianity, and there encountered a devil who was worshipped as a pagan god. This devil is described as having the guise of an Ethiopian, just as the devil visiting Cyrano's blasphemer on the moon. The appellation of "Ethiopian" echoes a long-standing confusion in ancient and medieval geographical learning in which India and Ethiopia were situated very close to one another and were sometimes talked about as neighbouring countries, or as an interchangeable shorthand for a distant, exotic place.
Cyrano does not mention Saint Bartholomew, and neither does he have to. The imagery of the devil as an Ethiopian is clearly influenced from the apocryphal legend, and its survival well into the seventeenth century is an important testament to the endurance of these stories of the saints, and the impression they exert on the literary imagination.
Ingen kommentarer:
Legg inn en kommentar