RESOLUCIÓN Nº 646 MAYEPGC/
RESOLUCIÓN Nº 1.236 MAYEPGC/
I am beginning to suggest that the fall of the angels as utterance served as a prominent
hagiographical motif for Anglo-Saxon poets. While some scholars question its status as a vita,58
Elene affords an opportunity to extend this argument. Cynewulf’s poem recounts the famous
angelic vision granted to the Emperor Constantine and his subsequent victory over the armies of Maxentius (312). The poem then follows Constantine’s triumphant return to Rome and his attempt to discover the meaning behind the ‘token’ (tacen) that led him to victory. Most of the poem, however, focuses on Elene, Constantine’s mother, and the apocryphal story of her ‘discovery’ (inventio) of Christ’s Cross in the Holy Land.
The man whom Elene enlists to help her in her quest to find the Cross is Judas Cyriacus, a Jew whom Cynewulf describes as ‘wise in lore’ (gidda gearosnotor [l. 418a]) and ‘skilled in words’ (wordes cræftige [l. 419a]). When we first meet Judas, he and the other Jews are described as ‘spiritually blind’ (modblinde [l. 306a]). Cynewulf’s poem traces the process of Judas’ coerced conversion to the Christian faith. Throughout the early stages of the poem, Elene aggressively mines the depths of Judas’ knowledge about the history and lore of the Cross. When he refuses to reveal his knowledge regarding the whereabouts of the Cross, Elene places Judas in an earthen pit and starves him. Suffering and hungry, Judas eventually agrees to help Elene. While in search of the buried Cross (the goldhord), Judas is seized upon by the devil. In order to
57 Raymond C. St-Jacques, “The Cosmic Dimensions of Cynewulf’s Juliana,” Neophil 64 (1980): 134-139 (134). 58 Bremmer, “Changing Perspectives,” 205.
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banish the devil, and disassociate himself from his former ‘spiritual blindness,’ Judas effectively utilizes the fall of the angels narrative as an apotropaic weapon; he both identifies the devil and banishes him in a verbalized sacral performance of his new Christian faith.
Elene is a poem about the recovery of knowledge with spiritual value.59 This reclamation process is initiated by Elene, who attempts to extract wisdom from Judas in a manner that
resembles Juliana’s interrogation of the devil. On the issue of the location of the Cross, she goads Judas with, ‘Say, if you can’ (Saga, gif ðu cunne [l. 856b]) and ‘tell me quickly’ (saga ricene me [l. 623b]). According to John Damon, “Elene performs a role of domination and physical
coercion often reserved in hagiography for the persecutors of martyrs.”60 Unlike Juliana, whose aim is the revelation of the devil’s persecutions against mankind, Elene’s ‘wisdom questions’ are aimed at uncovering the hidden knowledge and lore concealed by the Jews in the poem.
Judas actively suppresses his knowledge of the location of the Cross in the presence of Elene. Robert Bjork asserts that Judas “rhetorically and figuratively conceals the Cross.”61
Nathan Breen similarly points out that Judas desires to control “the narration of the history of the Jews” through this act of concealment.62
In the presence of the Jewish council, Judas maintains that the Cross must stay hidden for the security of the Jewish nation:
‘Þæt wæs þrealic geþoht! Nu is þearf mycel þæt we fæstlice ferhð staðelien,
þæt we ðæs morðres meldan ne weorðen hwær þæt halige trio beheled wurde æfter wigþræce, þy læs toworpen sien frod fyrngewritu ond þa fæderlican lare forleten.’ (Elene, ll. 426-432a)
59 On this point, see Nathan Alan Breen, “The Voice of Evil: A Narratological Study of Demonic Characters in Old
English Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003); Breen argues that “the knowledge of Christ, whether partial or complete, creates a significant increase in worldly power” (57).
60 Damon, Soldier Saints and Holy Warriors, 95. 61 Bjork, Old English Verse Saints’ Lives, 80. 62 Breen, “The Voice of Evil,” 61.
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(‘That [the crucifixion] was a bad idea! Now there is great need that we are steadfast in our spirits, that we do not become informants of that murder, or as to where that holy tree was hidden after the violence of war, in case that the old writings be overturned and the laws of our fathers forsaken.’)
As Andrew Scheil observes, Cynewulf works within a tradition which supposes that the Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death. He states that Judas is the “representative of the antagonistic Jew … [who] killed Christ because they did not recognize him as the son of God.”63 Within this context, part of what the Jews suppress is the evidence of their culpability in the death of Christ. Judas insists that the Jews must not become ‘informants, betrayers’ (meldan) of their former crimes; the Cross must remain buried for the maintenance and continuance of the Jewish nation. Becoming a melda would not only mean personal shame, but also a betrayal of the Jewish people and the overturning of Jewish traditions embodied in the ‘old writings’ (frod fyrngewritu) and ‘laws of our fathers’ (fæderlican lare).
We find this manner of melda in Beowulf where the term refers to the ‘informer’ who passes treasure taken from the dragon’s hoard to Beowulf: ‘the precious vessel had come to him through the informer’s hands’ (him to bearme cwom / maðþumfæt mære þurh ðæs meldan hond [ll. 2404b-2405]).64 In both cases, treasure hoarded ‘after the violence of war’ (æfter wigþræce), which passes through a melda, threatens cultural rupture or change. Judas treats his knowledge like treasure but, as Hill notes, it is the kind of treasure we see in Beowulf where a hoard becomes “a symbol of everything wrongly hidden away, possessed in darkness, spell-bound by
63 Andrew P. Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2004), 219.
64
This probably refers to the thief’s lord, who is an “informer in the sense that by giving the cup to Beowulf he reveals the cause of the dragon’s ire” (Klaeber’s Beowulf, n. 2405b). See also E. R. Anderson, “Treasure Trove in
Beowulf: A Legal View of the Dragon’s Hoard,” Mediaevalia 3 (1977): 141-164 who argues that the informer
136 evil thought.”65
Moreover, according to Scheil, “By hiding the location of the cross, the Jews are, in a sense, reenacting the crucifixion, extending their original crime.”66
Cynewulf’s melda in Juliana (the demon) openly claims responsibility for Christ’s crucifixion (ll. 289-306). In evoking the idea of a melda in a slightly different context here, Cynewulf subtly associates the Jews not only with the crime of Christ’s crucifixion, but also with the devil. He reinforces this by characterizing the Jews with phrases and formulae typically reserved for the rebel angels. He says that they have ‘raised up enmity’ (nið ahofun [l. 837a]) and, like the rebels angels, they ‘listened’ (hyrdon) to ‘the author of sins’ (leahtra fruman [l. 838]). Through their deliberate act of concealment, Cynewulf suggests that the Jews aid in the accumulation of the devil’s own “plunder” in the form of un-Christianized souls.
With his imprisonment and starvation in the earthen pit, Judas’ own body becomes an emblem for buried wisdom. Damon notes similarities between this sequence and the temptation of Juliana, stating that the women in both texts keep an “informant held captive until he will reveal the secrets he holds.”67
Judas gives into his hunger on the seventh day when he announces that he is prepared to reveal the secret location of the Cross. Upon his emergence from the pit, Judas says a prayer in Ebrisc (‘Hebrew’). In this prayer, he begins to reveal his trove of spiritual knowledge beginning with a history of angelic creation. He praises God (l. 725), evokes both the
65 J. Hill, The Cultural World of Beowulf, 137. 66
Scheil, The Footsteps of Israel, 226. Scheil adds that, “in his unbelief Judas lacks spiritual nourishment; he chooses to ‘heed the bread’ (i.e. remain a Jew), refuses the hard privation of stone (i.e. the Christian life), thinks too much of his body, makes his belly his god, and thus, like the gluttonous man of Vercelli 7, he sullies his body and spirit and requires purification and conversion in the pit. Like the cannibals and their victims in Andreas, when Judas ‘rejects’ (wiðhyccge, 618) the better thing, he shows us that he is not thinking correctly; his mind lacks the capacity to understand God, until his purging starvation” (Footsteps of Israel, 261).
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good angels (ll. 734b-759) and the fallen angels (ll. 759b-771), and anticipates Christ’s rule on earth through the power of the Cross:68
‘… Þæs ðu, god dryhten,
wealdest widan fyrhð, ond þu womfulle scyldwyrcende sceaðan of radorum awurpe wonhydige. Þa sio werge sceolu under heolstorhofu hreosan sceolde in wita forwyrd, þær hie in wylme nu dreogaþ deaðcwale in dracan fæðme, þeostrum forþylmed. He þinum wiðsoc aldordome. Þæs he in ermðum sceal, ealra fula ful, fah þrowian,
þeowned þolian. Þær he þin ne mæg word aweorpan, is in witum fæst,
ealre synne fruma, susle gebunden.’ (Elene ll. 759b-771)
(‘… This you, Lord God, will rule forever, and you the guilty sinful ones from heaven cast out the foolish ones. Then that cursed troop needed to fall down into hell into manifest punishments, where they now undergo agonies in that flood in the dragon’s embrace, wrapped in darkness. He rebelled against your authority. For that, he must in misery, full of every foulness, suffer guilty, endure bondage. There he may not reject your word, bound fast in torment and punishment, the creator of all sin.’)
Bjork characterizes the structure of Judas’ speech as “linear, chronologically relating the events of salvation history from Creation to Doomsday.”69
In addition to his rhetoric undergoing a shift, this prayer also reveals that Judas’ identity has changed; he is in a sense narrating a release from his own form of rebellion against the ‘authority’ (aldordome) of God.
Judas asks that the goldhord ‘which has long been hidden from men’ (þæt yldum þæs
lange heyded [ll. 791-792a]) be made known to him by ‘a rising smoke’ (rec astigan [l. 794b])
‘from the spot’ (of ðam wangstede [l. 793a]) where the Cross is buried. In associating Christ’s Cross with a goldhord, Cynewulf invokes the idea that buried treasure, like spiritual knowledge, is being placed back into circulation. As Hill notes, “buried treasure elicits a sense of
68 In the Acta, Judas says, “You cast the unbelieving angels into deep Tartarus and they dwell in the bottom of the
abyss” (Sources and Analogues, 65).
138 uselessness.”70
Judas, on the one hand, becomes the melda who will snitch on his fellow Jews, but he also becomes the one who will make the hoard of Christ’s spiritual riches open and available, of use to the Christian nations.
Scholars have detected distinct baptismal imagery in this episode as Judas begins to experience and enact his own conversion. Whereas before, Judas was modblinde, he is now described as overcoming blindness of spirit. Cynewulf may be drawing upon a Gallican baptismal prayer from the Stowe Missal recounting Mark 3:5 and Eph. 4:18, which says catechumens must expel ‘blindness of heart’ as they
loose the bonds of Satan … Take from the devil all occasion of triumph … Be not deceived, Satan: punishment threatens thee, hell threatens thee, the day of
judgment, the day of everlasting punishment … When everlasting destruction is prepared for thee and thine angels.71
Judas is, of course, about to accomplish these things in a literal sense. Following his prayer, ‘steam rose up from the place just like smoke’ (of ðære stowe steam up aras swylce rec [ll. 802- 803a]). This image also connects to the baptismal language and imagery to be found in the Stowe Missal recounting John 4:14: “goeth down therein there may be a well of water springing up unto
eternal life.”72 The rising steam prefigures Judas’s full entrance into the church through baptism and his eventual salvation.
To become fully Christian, Judas must reveal sacred knowledge by opening the goldhord. Once the Cross has been recovered and authenticated through a miraculous sign (ll. 859-897), a devil appears to Judas: ‘a demon leapt up there, hovering in the air’ (on lyft astah lacende feond [l. 899]). The devil tells Judas that his hoard has been unjustly plundered and that he has been
70
J. Hill, The Cultural World of Beowulf, 122.
71 Documents of the Baptismal Liturgy, ed. E. C. Whitaker, (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,
1970), 216.
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robbed of his ‘cut’ (a reference to the “doctrine of the devil’s rights”).73
Referencing Judas Iscariot and possibly Judas Cyriacus simultaneously, the devil describes how a ‘Judas formerly’ (Iudas ær [l. 921b]) brought him hope but now ‘through a Judas’ (þurh Iudas [l. 923b]) he has been ‘deprived of goods’ (goda geasne [l. 923a]). In becoming a melda for Christ, Judas has undone the devil’s monopoly on souls (ll. 902-910) and transferred ownership of the goldhord.
Elene overhears Judas sparring with the ‘originator of sins’ (ealre synne fruma) (ll. 952b- 961a). According to Breen, the devil is a formidable figure because he “possesses a wealth of knowledge as a result of his history as a witness to human activity”74
and even the “time before the birth of Christ.”75
The devil asks Judas who has ‘increased old strife, by plundering my possessions?’ (‘iceð ealdne nið, æhta strudeð’ [l. 904]).76
Judas, however, is becoming a formidable figure in his own right because he is imbued with wisdom from the Holy Spirit.77 In the Acta, Judas says, “May Christ who raised the dead damn you to the abyss of everlasting fire.”78
Yet Cynewulf amplifies this to demonstrate Judas’ knowledge of the fall of the angels: ‘Ne þearft ðu swa swiðe, synna gemyndig,
sar niwigan ond sæce ræran,
morðres manfrea,79 þæt þe se mihtiga cyning in neolnesse nyðer bescufeð,
synwyrcende, in susla grund domes leasne, se ðe deadra feala worde awehte. Wite ðu þe gearwor þæt ðu unsnyttrum anforlete
73 According to the doctrine of the devil’s rights, Satan controlled the destiny of mankind after the fall of Adam and
Eve until Christ’s sacrifice. For a helpful synopsis, see David F. Johnson, “Hagiographical Demon or Liturgical Devil? Demonology and Baptismal Imagery in Cynewulf’s Elene,” in Essays for Joyce Hill on Her Sixtieth
Birthday, ed. Mary Swan, LSE 37 (Leeds: University of Leeds, 2006), 9-29 (12ff). See also Robert Boenig, Saint and Hero: ‘Andreas’ and Medieval Doctrine, (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), who address the
doctrine of the devil’s rights and also the ‘Diabolus-model of Atonement’ in which the “action of Christ on the cross in some way saves man and defeats Satan” (82).
74
Breen, “The Voice of Evil,” 58.
75 Ibid., 80.
76 Bjork argues that “The devil’s discourse closely resembles Judas’ personal style and thus becomes emblematic of
the capacity for evil that Judas had within him before his conversion” (Old English Verse Saints’ Lives, 88).
77 Ibid., 81.
78 Allen and Calder, Sources and Analogues, 66. 79 This phrase also occurs in Andreas (l. 1313).
140 leohte beorhtost ond lufan dryhtnes, þone fægran gefean, ond on fyrbæðe suslum beþrungen syððan wunodest, ade onæled, ond þær awa scealt, wiðerhycgende,80 wergðu dreogan, yrmðu butan ende.’ (Elene, ll. 939-951)
(‘You need not, mindful of sins, so strongly renew sorrow and raise strife, wicked ruler of sin, because the mighty king shoved you down into the abyss, working sin, upon a ground of
torments, lacking of glory, he who by his word raises the dead. Know you more clearly that you through folly forsook the fairest light and the love of the Lord, that beautiful joy, and ever since have dwelled on a fire-bath bound with torments, a burning pyre, and there in your rebel-
mindedness, you shall suffer damnation and misery without end.’)
I would argue that, as with Juliana, Cynewulf is here channeling the perlocutionary and performative potential of the fall of the angels. Here, Judas is able to clearly identify both the devil and his originary status as an angel.81 As Dendle notes a demon must be “crystallized into a single entity before it may be confronted and controlled.”82
As with Juliana, Judas’ utterances are highly ritualized and sacral in that he successfully banishes the devil by echoing the renunciation of Satan found in the baptismal liturgy. Having been recently raised from his own abyss, ‘a ground of torments lacking of glory’ (in susla grund / domes leasne), Judas succinctly separates his identity from that of the devil who dwells below the earth, affirming his sanctity through revealed knowledge and by articulating the same terms of faith spoken by catechumens at baptism.
Numerous scholars have considered how this episode resonates with the baptismal
liturgy. Catherine A. Regan’s study stresses the symbolic level of Judas’s torture and conversion,
80 This formulaic phrase can be found in both Andreas (l. 1072; l. 1172) and Guthlac A (l. 663).
81 For more on gender relations in Elene, see Joyce Tally Lionarons, “Cultural Syncretism and the Construction of
Gender in Cynewulf’s Elene,” Exemplaria 10 (1998): 51-78; Lionarons argues that Judas has relinquished
“(feminized, Jewish) discourse … The change is underscored by his post-conversion flyting with the devil, in which Judas’ newly-minted open and truthful speech is juxtaposed sharply to the closed and deceptive talk of the demon” (63). She reads Judas as undergoing a masculine re-birth with his languishing “in the pit as a kind of spiritual gestation, and his emergence from the pit as the birth of the new man, who will be called Cyriacus” (65).
82 Dendle sees parallels in Elene’s singling out of Judas from 3000, 1000, 500 Jews. Just as Elene could identify the
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proposing that Cynewulf dramatizes the relationship between the church and the soul of a catechumen in preparation for baptism (ll. 1032b-1035a; 1043-1046a).83 Since baptism was seen as a symbolic reenactment of Christ’s temptation, she likens Judas’ fasting in the pit to Christ’s fasting in the wilderness.84 Regan suggests Judas’ utterance serves as a kind of verbal
commitment and that he “is prepared now to enter the Christian community through the sacrament.”85
Building on Regan’s conclusions, Johnson convincingly identifies Judas’ demon as a liturgical devil (in contrast to the ‘subordinate’ demon that appears to Juliana).86
This distinction, Johnson argues, links “the episode to the liturgy of Baptism and [foregrounds] the figurative, symbolic dimension of the narrative’s meaning.”87
Just as the liturgy exists within a temporal borderline, Cynewulf links the original exception of the fall of the angels to the miraculous expulsion Judas performs on the sacred site of Christ’s death, thereby bridging the events of sacred and secular time.
While these critics address the crucial symbolic level of Elene, others such as John P. Hermann rightly caution against readings which privilege the symbolic level of the narrative over the fundamentally violent nature of the torture which brings about Judas’ conversion.
83 Catharine A. Regan, “Evangelicalism as the Informing Principle of Cynewulf’s Elene,” Traditio 29 (1973): 27-52
(33ff).
84 During one of Judas’s first encounters with Elene, he evokes (without knowing it) Christ’s Temptation in the
wilderness: ‘How might someone be in the wasteland, trudge the moors weary and without food, obsessed with hunger, and loaf and stone together come into his sight, one hard one soft, how might it be that he pick up the stone for relief of his hunger?’ (ll. 611-616a); Regan discusses the importance of fasting in “freeing the Catechumen from the bonds of Satan” (“Evangelicalism,” 44). See also Thomas Hill, “Sapiential Structure and Figural Narrative in the Old English Elene,” in Cynewulf: Basic Readings, ed. Robert E. Bjork, Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon England 4 (New York and London: Garland, 1996), 207-228. This article first appeared in Traditio 27 (1971): 159-177 and was revised in 1995.
85 Regan, “Evangelicalism,” 52.
86 Johnson, “Hagiographical Demon,” 9. 87
Ibid., 16. Johnson suggests that Judas’ confession of faith resembles the Gelasian sacramentary (“Hagiographical Demon,” 19), but I would put forward Gallic influence because the Stowe Missal specifically evokes the idea of ‘spiritual blindness’ and the well-spring delivering the ‘mercy of baptism through this sign of the cross, which sign do thou O devil never dare to cross out’ (Baptismal Documents, 214).
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Referring to Judas’ enclosure in the pit as an “inverted passion,”88
Hermann argues that “torture cannot simply be read as emblematic of the relationship between the church and the soul of a catechumen since torture in the name of a Higher Truth is not the same as fasting voluntarily