Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels. Vol. 2: The Passion Narratives (review)

With the publication of The Passion Narratives, Frederick A. Homann and Walter S. Melion have completed their three-volume, multiyear labor of love: Jerome Nadal’s magnum opus. They include forty-seven of the book’s original 153 chapters in translation. Although Homann and Melion refer to these as the “key sections,” their criteria for inclusion or exclusion could have been explained more fully. Still, given Nadal’s dense language, interpretative complexity, and devotional methods, it is wonderful to have this sampler. The Infancy Narratives (volume 1) appeared in 2003, and The Resurrection Narratives (volume 3) followed two years later. I reviewed the latter in The Catholic Historical Review (92, [July 2006], 318–19). The middle section on the Passion, as the longest, presented translation challenges, and so Homann and Joseph F. Chorpenning, editorial director of Saint Joseph’s University Press, opted to publish volume 2 as the final volume.

In addition to his editorial remarks about the translation, Homann offers (pp. xiii–xvi) a short discussion of the devotional texts that influenced St. Ignatius of Loyola and Nadal. He remarks that Nadal’s affective style of meditation strongly recalls that of Ludolph of Saxony, Bonaventure, Pseudo-Bonaventure, and Thomas à Kempis: “Like Ignatius, Nadal speaks primarily to persons of faith, to lead them to a deeper faith, to contrition and penance through heartfelt compassion and reflection on the Word made flesh” (p. xv). Homann observes (pp. 285–86) that Nadal stresses the sufferings of Christ as well as the Virgin Mary. In the remarkable section “Advice for the Meditations on Christ’s Passion” (pp. 83–87), appended to chapter 80, Nadal admonishes his reader to focus on “what the sacrosanct Virgin Mother suffers, whether she is present or absent at the mysteries we contemplate.” Homann draws our attention to Nadal’s harsh treatment of those he perceives as enemies of the true faith, including the Jews. In the first meeting of Christ and Pilate, Nadal includes a meditation on Judas in hell lamenting his actions (p. 147). He writes, “You served Satan, now you’re his forever. You’re cursed by God ....” Did Nadal have a sense of humor or just a taste for retribution? It is easy to imagine him smiling slightly when he first decided to populate hell with Martin Luther incessantly shouting “Faith alone justifies!” and John Calvin crying “Christ’s Body is not truly present in the Eucharist!”

Melion follows his superb discussion of Nadal, his book, and his meditative methods in volume 1 (pp. 1–96) with highly focused examinations of just a few chapters in the next two volumes. Here he analyzes Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (pls. 108–10) and Christ with Pilate (pls. 118, 120, 123, 124). He notes that Hieronymus Wierix’s four scenes of the Ecce Homo display the same stage or setting. Although the positions of Christ, Pilate, and other protagonists change, the viewer occupies the same “seat” watching the action unfold. Wierix and Nadal thus implicate the viewer as a member of the crowd calling for Christ’s death. This follows Nadal’s counsel that in order to “meditate on Christ’s Passion, we must first observe the mysteries that took place at Gethsemane as if we were ourselves present” (pp. 2–3). Throughout his learned analysis that focuses more on texts than images, Melion explicates Nadal’s fundamental stress on seeing. Homann and Melion are to be congratulated for bring Nadal’s masterpiece to a broader audience.