The Public and the Private in the Iliad and The Baptism on the Savica

Abstract

When analyzing Prešeren’s romantic poem <em>The Baptism on the Savica</em> (1835), one should not overlook the subject of paganism. In comparison to Christianity, paganism, too, was familiar with the concept of eternity, but associated it with cycles, with the inseparable ties of people to nature, and therefore with the eternal alternation of life and death. Christianity, however, establishes the concept of earthly transience, separates death from life, sees nature as people’s inconsequential surroundings, and introduces a personal God, accessible to people only through words. The mythological cyclic time of paganism is replaced by spatial linearity, which makes Bogomila, the former priestess of the goddess Živa, disregard the vivacity and charms of all being and submit to the new concept of nature as “green coolness”. The article therefore makes a strict distinction between the pagan love of Bogomila and Črtomir on the Island of Bled and their reunion after the defeat of the pagan army, when Bogomila had already become a Christian and attempted to draw Črtomir into the new religion. Bogomila hoped to bestow on their love a dimension of eternity; something, that had a priori belonged to their relationship within paganism; however, Christianity had imposed on her the realization of the finality of everything earthly, including love. This undermines the thesis of romantic love between Črtomir and Bogomila and puts their relationship into a framework that does not require a tragic and resigned ending. To show this, the author compares Črtomir and Bogomila to Homer’s Achilles and Briseis. Bogomila’s Christianity continued to serve love, as once her paganism had; it was only that the eternity of their relationship now no longer existed on earth, but rather in the Messianic and eschatological future of the second coming of Christ, when kindred and loving souls come together again. Bogomila’s conversion was based in her own, feminine realization of the fact that it was Christianity that imposed the knowledge of the transience of love’s bliss on earth. With this, the pagan eternal repetition of life and death split into the this-worldly, condemned to ruin and destruction, and the other-worldly, bound to eternity; in the same way, people are separated into worthless flesh and pure soul. Paganism offered to Črtomir and Bogomila everything they needed for the eternal bliss of love, so they did not indulge in either the yearning or hope that inevitably grow from a desire for infinity that has been lost and therefore turned towards faith in the afterlife. – Since this also implies an issue of the public and the private, the analysis attempts to find a parallel between the heroic and the tragic periods when love shifts from the public sphere to the private one, which is once again demonstrated by the example of Achilles and Briseis. As Črtomir escaped a heroic death and later suicide, he attempted to replace his heroic tasks with the embrace of the woman he loved, although that also meant embracing the new religion. Unlike Bogomila, Črtomir was not able to accept it in the same way as she; he could only accept it in a form closely resembling his paganism. So in the end he no longer followed Bogomila, but rather created a new mystical model for himself that opened a new path for Bogomila and, with that, for all beings. Črtomir’s new-found mysticism is sustained by his vision of light, followed by silence and the re-discovery of a safe home. It is a rainbow-colored light, a mystical silence and the mention of the home in “these woods”. That is, time and space in early Christian mysticism were directly tied to Plotinus’ pagan model of enlightenment. Bogomila could not take this path, because she had experienced Christianity on an explicitly rational level, even in a cunningly feminine way. Therefore, the baptism occurring at the end of the poem is completely irrelevant to Črtomir; what is essential to him is only the mystical experience of nature and Bogomila, for without it he would remain a lonely, humiliated, as well as resigned pagan warrior, who had also lost his love. Following enlightenment, Črtomir is no longer a defeated soldier, nor a lonely convert and resigned lover, but a human being who had to kill all his former hopes to be filled with the new power of love and total commitment to the living. To him, bog (“God”) is no longer beg (“escape”) and nebo (“heaven”) no longer ne-bo (“something that will never come to be”). He is once and for all liberated to be free. Could it be said that this triumph was only true for Črtomir, while the poet remains confined to a space where there is no hope of escaping, and where god remains an escape and where the sky will not be?