La superación del sentido traumático de la mors immatura en el centón cristiano De Verbi Incarnatione

Abstract

De Verbi Incarnatione features a speech in which God addresses his Son, urging him to become incarnate in the mortal world (vv. 35-54). The first verses present many references to the prelude of Nisus and Euryalus’ disastrous mission. Thus the Virgilian subtext portrays a pessimistic motif: the death of youth. However, the Christian author counters the Virgilian negativity, adding a fortunate prophetic speech, extracted from a different scene of the Aeneid. The shift from pessimism to optimism conveys a positive meaning to the death of Christ. The same strategy reappears when the author juxtaposes a reference to the suicide of a young Virgilian shepherd with a series of verses extracted from the renowned fourth eclogue and its optimistic prophecy. As a result, the cento combines the memory of a literary and cultural tradition with the need to communicate the precepts of Christianity. The final product is something clearly alter ab illo.