Scientific Nonsense – Weekend
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The mysterious ancient text, known under the title “Cyprian’s Feast” (or “Cyprian’s Supper” – “Coena Cypriani”), unexpectedly received a brilliant popular science fate in the 20th century. At first he was glorified as an example of carnivalism by Mikhail Bakhtin. Then Umberto Eco, following Bakhtin’s ideas, wove it into his “Name of the Rose” – and thus conveyed it to the widest readership. All this, however, did not bring us too close to understanding this absolutely amazing literary work – either the last absurdity of Antiquity, or the first absurdity of the Middle Ages. But in any case, the absurdities of the program and conscious.
More than a hundred manuscripts of Cyprian’s Feast have come down to us in various versions – this is decent. But to explain the incredible popularity of this text, say, by narrative fascination, it will not work: the plot itself in “Feast” is simple and somehow rickety. A certain king named Joel holds a marriage feast “in the eastern country, in Cana of Galilee.” There are many guests. Guests sit down, eat, change clothes, eat and drink again, have fun. In the end, however, it turns out that something was stolen from the king in the course of the festival; a trial follows, the culprit is found, unexpectedly punished with death and buried. All.
The colorfulness here is not in the plot, but on a visit: they turn out to be dozens and dozens of characters from the Sacred History. Old Testament, New Testament – everything is demonstratively mixed up, and even Jesus is among them, as they say, on a general basis, without any special register. There is no “motivational part” explaining all this mess, the guests simply appear – and immediately begin to behave in such a way that the reader can guess in this behavior a reference to the corresponding place of the sacred primary source. There are a lot of references of these, as well as the characters themselves, and the situations themselves depicted are blatantly far from any sacredness.
Here, for example, the guests could not find a place at the banquet table and they had to sit down in all directions. At the same time, Adam sat down “in full view of everyone, and Eve on the leaves, / And Cain on the coulter, and Abel on the pail, / Noah on the ark, Japheth on all sides, / Abraham under the tree, Isaac on the altar, / Jacob on the stone, Lot in front of the gate.” And so on.
“And Paul endured, but Esau murmured, / And Job groaned, for he sat on the dung.”
“Pharaoh served the bread, Joseph divided it, / Herodias came with a dish, and Rebekah with food, / Jacob brought it, and Noah distributed it.”
Gradually, you get used to this outlandish logic and you are no longer surprised that Aaron (who was the “tongue and mouth” of his tongue-tied brother Moses) takes the tongue of the fried animal, Samson’s jaw (who beat the Philistines with a donkey’s jaw), Peter’s ear (cut off in the Garden of Gethsemane ear to the slave Malchus), eyes – Leah (“weak-eyed” wife of the forefather Jacob), neck – beheaded Holofernes.
In other words, all this could look like a visual catalog of biblical characters, along with their attributes, with which, for example, the sculptors of Gothic cathedrals depicted them. Only, firstly, in a puzzlingly playful way. Secondly, the unknown author of The Cyprian Feast (hiding behind the name of Cyprian of Carthage, the famous bishop and theologian of the 3rd century) takes not only popular heroes, those that were in demand, including in medieval art, but also quite exotic figures. For example, as a robber at the close of the holiday, he exposes Achan, the son of Kharmias, a passing character in the book of Joshua 7, 16–26, whom even in post-Gutenberg times, not every reader will remember, to say nothing of the early Middle Ages. Thirdly, we cannot say exactly when Cyprian’s Feast was written, but in any case, very long before the Gothic. Absolutely no later than the beginning of the 9th century – and, obviously, not earlier than the end of the 4th.
And one more thing: the catalog should look ordered, but here the Scriptures seem to have been passed through a meat grinder. Instead of the usual, in our opinion, for medieval culture understanding of biblical history as a coherent and orderly narrative, in which there are old prototypes, a passing shadow, but there are shining events of the New Testament, “The Feast” offers a total confusion that leads nowhere. Well, they buried the unfortunate intruder (with another series of persistent allusions) – “and then Zechariah rejoiced, Elizabeth was embarrassed, / Mary began to think, and Sarah laughed. / After the completion of which they all dispersed to their homes. This, imagine, everything ends. The reader does not find any history of human salvation, in general, any landmarks that help to understand this game.
“The whole of Holy Scripture is here whirling in some sort of buffoonish round dance,” Bakhtin exclaimed about this. He (and then Eco) really wanted to see in the “Cyprian Feast” a prototype of the novel by Rabelais, the first signs of the “grotesque tradition of the symposium.” In these views, he rested on the “material and bodily nature of the banquet images” (it is unlikely that it is always infallible – where is the material and bodily in the fact that Elizabeth was embarrassed, and Mary began to think?). He also addressed the Easter sermon of St. Zeno of Verona (IV century), which could become one of the starting points for the “Cyprian Feast”: “Apparently, he set himself the goal of somewhat ennobling those violent and not entirely Christian feasts that his flock indulged in on Easter holidays. For this purpose, Zeno made a selection from the Bible and from the Gospel of all those places that speak of the eating and drinking of the persons of Sacred History, that is, in other words, he made a selection from the Holy Scriptures of all banquet images. It turned out to be a kind of renewal of the sacred in the material and bodily plane. In this sermon there is an element of “risus paschalis”, that is, that laughter and free jokes that, according to ancient tradition, were allowed at Easter in church sermons.
This very sermon indeed, by all accounts, influenced the “Cyprian Feast”. But if we look at its original, we will find that it is addressed not at all to a violent flock (here Bakhtin’s ideas were clearly generalized and naive), but to “neophytes”, newly baptized. It was to them that the Bishop of Verona, as a beautiful – and desperately bookish – rhetorical device, promised “a heavenly meal, honorable, pure, wholesome and eternal.” And then a little bit (no “all those places that talk about the food and drink of the persons of Holy history”) developed this idea: three youths bring vegetables for this meal, Moses – a lamb, Abraham – a well-fed calf, Jacob – motley sheep, Peter – fish, etc. In addition, no matter how tempting it would be to trace the theme of ritual jokes from the mysteries of Eleusis to the Christian Easter, but “risus paschalis”, “Easter laughter” is not an “ancient tradition”, but a local phenomenon, recorded in early modern Germany. There, the Easter preachers really made the audience laugh and then interpreted the jokes in a moralistic sense. Zeno has flowery rhetoric, moralizing, but no joke. In The Cyprian Feast there is what seems to be a joke (the salt of which, however, eludes us), but there is neither rhetoric nor morality.
Perhaps those who see the Cyprian Feast as a mnemonic device are right after all – a manual that helps to remember the notorious attributes and, in general, much of the biblical plot and imagery, something that, if not a simpleton, then a learned clergyman needed. Deliberately absurd form in such cases really helps, everyone knows this for themselves. Personally, my school was very bad with chemistry, but now wake me up in the middle of the night with a question about what is the valency of potassium – I will answer. And how not to answer, if the wild words really stuck in my memory: “Potassium, sodium, silver are monovalent good.” Well, or remember the old card trick, for the correct device of which you need to memorize a meaningless phrase: “Science can do a lot of geeks.”
In any case, the absurdism of the “Feast” is not folklore, not common folk, but learned, erudite-virtuoso almost to the same extent as stuffy epigrams and centones of some Ausonius. Only this learning is new, and a lot of things will come out of it later. For example, the same Gothic cathedral portals, densely populated by prophets, kings and apostles. But that’s later – but for now this thin text appears, pretending to be strange, incoherent and irreverent: “Lot got drunk, Holofernes began to snore, / Noah got drunk, Jonah fell down, / And Peter did not sleep until the roosters.”
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