Carmelite QuotesQuote of the day, 17 April: Blessed Baptist Spagnoli
FORTUNATUS: I know not who rules the winds and storms. This I do know. (But though I know this, I know not enough. And yet might I dare speak? What will I say? Will I therefore be punished in my lifetime?) If, as is claimed, divine powers rule the world from above, I reckon that they care not at all for the hard labors of men.
Look with what sweat we gain our meager living, how many evils the shepherd bears (poor wretch!) for his flock, children, and wife. In summer he burns in its harmful heat. He is numbed by the frosts of winter. In the rain we sleep on hard flints or on the ground. A thousand contagions, a thousand sicknesses oppress our sheep, a thousand dangers harass them. The thief threatens the flock with his snares, the wolf too and the soldier, more thievish than any wolf.
When our hands have become calloused, worn by constant use, when our faces have become dirty, our beards stiff, our skin dried out by the heat, then a single hailstorm suddenly snatches up everything with its whirling winds.
The gods above do this, the gods before whose altars we bend in honor and to whom we dedicate our little torches and waxen offerings. I don’t know what kind of affection and mildness could overwhelm with so many calamities shepherds who lack all the necessities of life.
FAUSTUS: Our crimes, Fortunatus, bring all these things on us. The sentence of Heaven’s judge is just.
FORTUNATUS: What crimes? Did we plot against Christ’s life?
FAUSTUS: Our quarrels, thefts, anger, and lust, our lies and brawling.
Blessed Baptist Spagnoli
Adulescentia: The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus (1498)
Eclogue III, The unhappy outcome of mad love (excerpts)
Note: Born in Mantua on 17 April 1447, as a youth, Blessed Baptist Spagnoli joined the Carmelites of the Congregation of Mantua at Ferrara. In his own time, he was a renowned humanist who brought his richly varied poetry into the service of Christ. He used his friendships with scholars to encourage them to live a Christian life. Translator Lee Piepho was a professor of English Literature at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, specializing in the Renaissance. His research on the diffusion of Italian Renaissance Humanism in Great Britain and continental Europe, particularly in Neo-Latin literature (European works written in Latin in the early modern period), included the Eclogues of Baptist Spagnoli, who was also known as Baptista Mantuanus.
Spagnoli, B & Piepho, L 1498, ‘Eclogue I’, in Adulescentia: The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus, 2nd edit., viewed 16 April 2024, https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/mantuanus/trans.html#1_1
Featured image: Two Caucasian shepherds holding the gates guide a freshly shorn flock of sheep into their paddock. Image credit: Ihor Vesna (Adobe Stock)
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