spdf

CONCEPTIONS OF THE SELF IN AUGUSTINE, KING ALFRED,

AND ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

by

RONALD J. GANZE

A DISSERTATION

Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2004

R eproduced with perm ission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without perm ission.

UMI Number: 3153785

Copyright 2004 by

Ganze, Ronald J.

All rights reserved.

INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy

submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and

photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper

alignment can adversely affect reproduction.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript

and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized

copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

®

UMIUMI Microform 3153785

Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.

All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against

unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road

P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346


“Conceptions of the Self in Augustine, King Alfred, and Anglo-Saxon England,” a

dissertation prepared by Ronald J. Ganze in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English. This dissertation has been

approved and accepted by:

Dr. James W. Earl^Chair of the Examining Committee

Date

Committee in Charge: Dr. James W. Earl, ChairDr. Warren Ginsberg Dr. Steven Shankman Dr. Stephen Shoemaker

Accepted by:

Dean of the Graduate School


An Abstract of the Dissertation of

Ronald J. Ganze for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of English to be taken December 2004

Title: CONCEPTIONS OF THE SELF IN AUGUSTINE, KING ALFRED, AND

ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

My dissertation examines conceptions of the self from late antiquity to the Anglo-Saxon

period, with a particular focus on the influence of the Augustinian conception of self. I

begin by examining conceptions of the self from ethical philosophy and cognitive

neuroscience, championing these approaches over those that emphasize the postmodern

concept of subjectivity. I also demonstrate their efficacy in refuting arguments against a

medieval sense of self, and expose the constructed nature of the “gap” between the

medieval and early modem periods.

Chapter two is chiefly concerned with how the evolution of Augustine’s

theological position regarding free will and predestination affects his conception of the

self, and how his position on the divided will and the two Cities serve to inform

individual identity. Additionally, I examine his narrative construction of self in

Approved:i James W. Earl


Confessions, which bears a striking resemblance to narrative models of self in cognitive

neuroscience.

Chapter three examines the alterations made by King Alfred in his translation of

Augustine’s Soliloquia. The Alfredian self differs from the Augustinian in that it is

enmeshed in a web of social ties and social obligations that necessitates its active

involvement in the City of Man; these ties and obligations serve to add layers of social

identity to the “core” self described in Augustine’s texts. The Alfredian self also emerges

as existential, demonstrating an anxiety about the transience of human existence not

found in his original source, partly derived from his translation of Boethius.

Chapter four examines select Anglo-Saxon poems, with an emphasis on The

Wanderer and The Seafarer. I argue here that the elegies mark a movement back to the

Augustinian conception of the self, a spiritual alternative to the material selves that are

initially the poems’ foci. Despite their Augustinian nature, however, the selves in the

elegies share the existential focus of the Alfredian self, and I draw specific parallels with

Kierkegaard to demonstrate this affinity. The differences between the selves found in

these works, however, leads to the conclusion that an overarching theory of the medieval

self could only be developed at the cost of the very selves the works seek to

communicate.


CURRICULUM VITAE

NAME OF AUTHOR: Ronald J. Ganze

PLACE OF BIRTH: Los Angeles, California

DATE OF BIRTH: June 15, 1969

GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:

University of OregonCalifornia State University, Long Beach

DEGREES AWARDED:

Doctor of Philosophy, 2004, University of OregonMaster of Arts, 1996, California State University, Long BeachBachelor of Arts, 1992, California State University, Long Beach

AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:

Old and Middle English Literature, Early Christianity

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Adjunct Professor, Valparaiso University, August 2004 - Present

Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, September 1999 - June 2004

Lecturer, Chapman University, August 1997 - May 1999

Lecturer, California State University at Long Beach, August 1996 — August 1999

Lecturer, Long Beach City College, August 1996 - December 1998

Instructor, Don Bosco Technical Institute, August 1993 - June 1996

T.A., California State University, Long Beach, August 1992 - May 1993


vii

PUBLICATIONS:

“From anhaga to snottor on mode'. The Wanderer’s Kierkegaardian Epiphany,” Neophilologus, forthcoming.

“The Myth of the Medieval Mono-Mind.” In Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, edited by Stephen J. Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby. London: Routledge, forthcoming.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Professors James Earl and Warren Ginsberg for their multiple

readings of this manuscript, Professor Steven Shankman, for helping me to understand

the latent organizational principle in the prospectus from which this dissertation emerged,

and Professor Stephen Shoemaker, for coming on board this project at the last minute as

well as for providing needed guidance in theological matters. I would also like to thank

Professor Steven Pinker for answering the many cognitive neuroscience questions that

emerged as I wrestled with the problems of integrating one field of study with another.

I dedicate this dissertation to my wife, Alison, and both of our families, without

whose unwavering support it would never have been written, and to the late Professor

A.R.L. Bell, without whom I would never have embarked on a career as a medievalist.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I. SELVES, SUBJECTS & AGENTS............................................................................... 1

The Question of the Self in the Humanities .............................................1Challenging the Myth of the Medieval Mono-Mind and Its

Radical Critique.................................................... 18

II. THE AUGUSTINIAN SELF: EMBODIED SOULS IN THE CITY OF M A N 30

Reading Augustine.................................................................................................30The Philosophical Self in the Soliloquia and Other Early Writings....................40The Pauline Shift from De libero arbitrio to Ad simplicianum de diversis

quaestionibus.............................................................................................55Autobiographical Agency in the Confessions............... 63

The Predestined Soul and Its Body .................................................................67The Self as Autobiographical Agent ............................................................... 88

III. A TALE OF TWO CITIES: FROM DEI CIVITATE DEI TO ALFRED’SKINGDOM OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS ........................................................ 95

From Augustine to A lfred..................................................................................... 95Alcuin’s De ratione animae............................................................................101Fate Versus Free Will and the Concept of Wyrd .......................................... 104

Transforming Augustinian Interiority in Alfred’s Soliloquies ......................... 111

IV. THE EXISTENTIAL NATURE OF THE SELF IN OLD ENGLISHLITERATURE ..................................................................................................142

Selves and Minds ................................................................................................ 142The Wanderer...................................................................................................... 151The Wanderer and Kierkegaard........................................................................... 160The Seafarer..........................................................................................................168The Anglo-Saxon S e lf ........................................................................................ 182

V. CONCLUSION: TOWARDS CONSILIENCE .................................................... 186

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................... 192


1

C h a p t e r O n e

Se l v e s . Su b je c t s , a n d A g en ts

I. T h e Q u e s t io n o f t h e S e l f in t h e H u m a n it ie s

What does it mean to be human? This question is likely as old as human consciousness

itself, and it was, at one time, the central question in the field of study we call the

humanities. Answers were predicated on the assumption that there was some basic

human nature which all who took up the question shared and could locate in the authors

they studied. Literature, for example, was considered valuable in part because it served

to communicate eternal truths about the human condition.

We have, for the most part, jettisoned notions such as “universal,” “eternal,”

“truth,” and even “human nature,” for a myriad of reasons that I shall investigate below.

I find this move curious in light of recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and

neurology which question our decision to let these concepts go and suggest that we

reinstate them as governing principles in the humanities and social sciences. Jettisoning

them creates many hardships for medievalists; we study works written by authors who

did believe in universality, eternity, Truth, and human nature, albeit in a religious, rather

than a scientific way. Approaching these authors in the spirit of cultural relativity does

little to help us understand what it is they were attempting to communicate to their

readers. At its worst, it does little more than help the critic express his or her own

politico-philosophical stance; at its best, it can serve to point out affinities between the

past and the present, but in offering modem explanations for medieval phenomena, it

often obscures historically valid explanations with anachronisms.

Such approaches and the assumptions governing them do little to help the reader

locate the selves who write texts or the selves who populate them, be they fictional or

real. We should rather make an attempt to understand these texts on their own terms, and


2

to share some of their own assumptions—or at least understand those assumptions—if we

want to understand the medieval conception of self. This is not to say that there are not

some modem schools of thought that can assist us in understanding the medieval mind;

after all, if we admit the existence of human universals, we begin to find certain threads

that run through all thought, medieval and modem. The critic must take care, however,

to choose from amongst the wide array of philosophical and psychological approaches

those which are not so historically determined as to have broken their threads to the past.

But before I can continue such an argument, I need to step back and look at the

debate surrounding the concept of selfhood. The scope of this debate is so great that it is

necessary to place limits on what is to be said here. I am going to set limits by organizing

this discussion around what I call the “terminology of selfhood.” These terms are self,

identity, individual, agent, agency, subject, and subjectivity. Each of these words is highly

contested, not only in the humanities but in the social and natural sciences as well; what it

means to be a person remains undetermined—or perhaps more accurately, over

determined—in each of these disciplines.

A recent introduction to the concept of subjectivity states that the word “subject”

is “most often used in cultural theories about the self,” and explains that “the word ‘self

does not capture the sense of social and cultural entanglement that is implicit in the word

‘subject’: the way our immediate daily life is always already caught up in complex

political, social and philosophical—that is, shared—concerns.”1 In discussions of

subjectivity the self is always subject to something, generally the ideology of Western

capitalism and imperialism in the study of modem subjects, often the ideology of

Christianity and feudalism in the study of pre-modem subjects. Most of these theories

are informed by Marxism, and in recent decades the writings of Louis Althusser underlie

most definitions of subjectivity.

Althusser’s notion of the subject is that it is “always-already” a subject of

ideology (a term which Mansfield also utilizes, revealing his indebtedness to Althusser).

1 Nick Mansfield, Subjectivity: Theories o f the Selffrom Freud to Harraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 2-3.


3

Within the system of ideology posited by Althusser and the state apparatuses he argues

assure the continuation of an ideological formation, individuals are seen as the creations

of a pre-existing ideological system or set of competing systems, which offer the

individual a position within them. In order to be a functioning member of society,

Althusser contends, the individual must take up one of the subject-positions that is on

offer. As Althusser describes it, answer the “hail” of ideology as it “calls our name” and

provides for us an identity within the preexisting system. For Althusser, this

“interpellation” by ideology is inevitable and inescapable: “you and I are always already

subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which

guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally)

irreplaceable subjects.”2 Furthermore, Althusser argues that this inescapable ideology is

also always historical: “Ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects,

which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by

ideology and subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are

always-already subjects.”3

Althusser, like Marx before him, asserts that human beings are nothing more than

the sum total of their material existence; by the time Marxism evolves into its postmodern

formulation, the individual becomes the nexus of competing ideological systems, which

allows theorists like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to declare “the death of the

author,” who is, after all, merely an instantiation of material and social conditions.

The “death of the author” and the view of human nature from which it springs are

particular problems for the study of medieval literature in the chapters to follow, as I am

proceeding on the assumption that the texts in question—even those whose authors’

names have not been passed down to us—are written by distinct, individual human

voices, despite their use of convention, despite their use of artifice, and even despite the

2 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, edited and translated by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 172-173.

3 Althusser, 175-176.


4

sometimes “collaborative” nature of their writing. I do not deny that each author is at the

same time also a product of the social and historical situations—one of the motivating

factors behind Augustine’s De civitate dei, for example, is certainly the sack of Rome and

its possible fall—but Augustine, Alfred, and even the prolific Anonymous are not merely

points of convergence for ideological formations.

The major problem with these theories of subjectivity—both for me personally

and in using them to “read” medieval literature—is that they remove interiority from the

human equation, partly, I would argue, because in seeking to supplant religion, Marxist

ideology dispenses with the notion of the soul or any other a priori essence. When

Marxism chose to exclude the metaphysical, interiority was dispensed with along with it.

Committed to materialism, the Marxist is forbidden to look outside the material world.4

Put another way, what these extreme theories of subjectivity deny the individual

self is agency, another critical term that needs definition. In the realm of theory, the

human agent has been defined as “the place from which resistance to the ideological is

produced or played out, and thus not equivalent to either the ‘subject’ or the ‘individual,’

a definition which proceeds from the assumption that the individual is “simply the

illusion of whole and coherent organization, or as the misleading description of the

imaginary ground on which different subject-positions are colligated.”5 I will not be

using “agency” in quite the same manner as it is used in theory (and obviously my

conception of “individual” will be different). For my purposes, agency will be

considered akin to free will, and, as such agency would be considered a priori by a

medieval author. Further, I will argue that agency—or free will—is hard-wired into the

human genome. (I will return to this argument when I have finished defining my list of

critical terms.) While agency may be a site of resistance to ideology, the way in which it

is defined by Theory assumes the primacy of ideology—resistance is, after all, something

4 Though Liberation Theology constitutes an exception to this statement, it has little to do with the types of literary and sociological criticism I am referring to here.

5 Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xxxv.


5

that comes ontologically after that which is resisted. Instead of agency—or free will, if

you prefer—subjectivity gives us what Steven Pinker, in a recent work on the biological

determinants of identity, calls the doctrine of the “blank slate.” The doctrine, its name

coined by Locke and its roots tracing back to Aristotle, holds that we are each bom a

tabula rasa; once bom into a social system, the prevailing ideological formation

immediately begins its work on the blank slate, inscribing onto it an identity that the

individual, possessing no innate mechanisms with which to fight the inscription, accepts

both willingly and unknowingly. The doctrine of the blank slate is particularly useful to

those ideologies which promise to deliver a utopic society; the establishment of a utopic

society depends upon the ability of that society to circumvent human nature (which no

longer exists under the doctrine of the blank slate), that messy biological heritage that so

often interferes with the imposition of the utopic ideology, as is so vividly displayed in

O’Brien’s attempts to “reprogram” Winston Smith in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-

Four. Such a blank slate is required if the Marxist revolution is to produce human beings

who are subjects of Marxism rather than capitalism or some other alternative, a blank

state on which Marxism can inscribe its own ideology, unhindered by any individual

agency—or innate biological imperative—that might object. Indeed, if the Marxist

revolution is to succeed, human beings must be blank slates upon which to work; human

nature, in a biological sense, must be rejected as reality if the individual is to cede his or

her will to the State. The Marxist utopia cannot exist if things like greed, desire, and

selfishness are part of the human genome. The utopia can only be achieved if these are

socially learned behaviors that can be weeded out of society.

Pinker’s analysis of the statements above and the ramifications of their

application in Marxist states is particularly chilling:

If the mind is structureless at birth and shaped by its experience, a society that wants the right kind of minds must control the experience (“It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written” [Mao Zedong]). Twentieth-century Marxist states were not just dictatorships but totalitarian dictatorships. They tried to control every aspect of life: childrearing, education, clothing, entertainment, architecture, the arts, even food and sex. Authors in the Soviet Union were enjoined to become


6

“engineers of human souls.” In China and Cambodia, mandatory communal dining halls, same-sex dormitories, and the separation of children from parents were recurring (and detested) experiments.6

What are we to conclude then, from the fact that many of these nations have faced

successful counter-revolutions, or are in the process of moving away from communism as

younger generations—who should be, according to Marxist-inspired theories of

subjectivity, interpellated by Marxist ideology—gain political power? Such activities

and the need for these totalitarian states to clamp down so hard on them suggest that there

is something amiss with the Marxist-Althusserian theory of subjectivity, and, as such,

with theories of subjectivity that rely upon the original Marxist formulation. Put simply,

there is something in the human individual which this theory does not account for,

something which allows for the rejection of ideology, though it is supposedly

inescapable. Recognizing and integrating that something into the humanities will allow

for an understanding of medieval selfhood far beyond the limited Marxist understanding

currently employed by the race, class, and gender theorists.

Yet society and ideology obviously have an effect on the self; to deny this would

be to disregard the evidence of living in the world. Identity formation is, at least in part,

the act of defining one’s good and then establishing a relationship to that good.

Obviously an individual’s definition of the good is affected by the goods made available

by society, but it is the individual who chooses which goods are to be hers or his and who

exercises his or her own will in establishing a positive or negative relationship to those

goods; family and society may attempt to define those goods for us, and they may find a

certain measure of success in so doing, but in the end we must actively choose them

ourselves, or they aren’t really our goods but empty things to which we pay lip-service.

What I am denying here, then, is the totality which society and ideology are granted in

Marxist-derived theories of subjectivity. I question the validity of these theories in light

of their origins in a specific, historically situated attempt to “alter men on a mass scale.”

6 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial o f Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002), 158.


7

And I question their validity when they are self-contradictory: the Marxist critique of

capitalism is supposed to free us from ideology, but it doesn’t. It simply trades one

ideology for another, and a more oppressive one at that, one that reveals its ideological

nature by going to such lengths to impress itself upon the very people it claims to

liberate.

If we use this particular theory of subjectivity—and the Marxist trappings that

come with it—to “read” medieval literature, and if we approach the authors of the period

and the characters they created as subjects, we run the risk of reducing the people of the

Middle Ages to no more than the products of their ideological systems, Christianity and

feudalism (in whatever form they happened to be taking); we might also add nationalism

to the mix, particularly as we move into the later Middle Ages. Interiority in these texts

is mere delusion, either on our part, the part of the author, or both, our “interior” selves

simply being filled by some outside force; in the Middle Ages, the most likely culprit was

the Church, which, as part of its attempt to control the population, gave them something

to believe in, including the false concept of their own free wills.

Now, to return to the terminology of selfhood. The terms “self,” “individual,”

and “identity” are harder to define than “subject” and “subjectivity.” What constitutes a

“self’ is the core question of human existence, and as such is implicated in most of the

questions asked in the human sciences, and many of the questions asked in the natural

sciences as well. The theory of subjectivity in the Marxist sense is, by comparison, easily

explained, being merely one theory among many of what it means to be a self, albeit the

most utilized in contemporary debates.

I am not going to provide a history o f what these terms have meant over the

millennia. That would be a dissertation in itself. What was meant by these terms during

the early medieval period will, obviously, be a large part of the chapters to follow. But it

is important that I explain what I mean when I use these terms. To begin, I often use two

of these three terms synonymously, though I realize that for many—including medievals

such as Aquinas—they mean distinctly different things. To me, “self’ and “individual”


8

are both used to refer to “who and what I am”; I am my self and I am an individual.

Selves are also individuated—we are separated from one another and from the world

around us by the boundaries of our bodies. Our minds cannot “touch” one another—a

fact that was of great disturbance to both Augustine and Alfred; we are each an individual

consciousness. I cannot say, however, “I am an identity,” but rather I must say, “I have

an identity.” In this sense, I will generally be using the word “identity” to describe what

for me amounts to a severely curtailed version of subjectivity, eschewing the term

“subject” for one that is less theoretically charged. I will use the term “identity” to refer

exclusively to the combination of inner essence and outer forces which the individual

uses to craft what we might also call the “social self’; I used the term “identity” in just

this sense, more or less unconsciously, when speaking of Anglo-Saxon identity in the

first paragraph of this chapter. As for the term essence, I import no particular

philosophical meaning to this term, but am rather using it for its inherent imprecision. By

it, I mean that ineffable quality of being human, which has not yet been explained away

by the human sciences or by the natural sciences, at least not to my satisfaction. I am,

perhaps, reversing the famous existential dictum here, arguing that “essence precedes

existence,” or that, at the very least, existence and essence are simultaneous, if we can

redefine essence to mean what is biologically inherent in an individual.

So the question I posed at the beginning of this chapter, “What does it mean to

human?” is recast as the question, “What does it mean to be a self?” The fields of

cognitive science and anthropology have already provided the types of answers I am

looking for: universal answers, the kind that will facilitate a discussion with writers who

have been dead for over a millennium. These answers have profound implications for

reading medieval literature. While the cultural differences between someone like

71 do not mean by this remark to deny the veracity of certain strands of existentialism, particularly as I will argue below that existentialism—in certain formulations— is a particularly relevant philosophy in coming to understand Old English literature and even Augustine and Boethius, to a certain extent. I do believe that there are ways in which a philosophy such as existentialism (and some of its phenomenological forebears) and the findings of cognitive psychology and neurology might be made to complement one another, each providing its own unique piece of the human puzzle. That task, however, is far beyond the scope of this study.


9

Augustine and myself are vast, they needn’t be insurmountable. Augustine and I are,

after all, members of the same species. Despite our cultural differences, despite whatever

ideologies we subscribe to (notice the active verb), each of us is—or was, in Augustine’s

case—a human being; there is not as much difference between us as cultural relativists

like to believe. The most basic human behaviors, including sexuality, our propensity for

violence, the drive to socialize, even the ability to moralize, have been found to be part of

our genetic code, behaviors that have been, for better or for worse, genetically selected

because they have served to insure the survival of the species.

Perhaps most importantly in the study of literature, the understanding of self

through the use of narrative—“the impulse to narrative,” as some neurologists have

dubbed it—has also been shown to be hard-wired into the human brain:

Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience suggest that the creation of narrative in the human central nervous system is mediated by a regionally distributed neural network. Fundamental components of this network include 1) the amygdalo-hippocampal system, where episodic and autobiographic memories are initially arranged; 2) the left peri-Sylvian region where language is formulated; and 3) the frontal cortices and their subcortical connections, where individual entities and events are organized into real and fictional (imagined) temporal narrative frames.8

According to some scientists, then, the human self is a narrative, created through

biological processes in the human brain in the self s search for self-understanding and

self-integration. The self is understood through the stories it can tell about itself.9 Roger

Schank, whose work on artificial intelligence has led him to seek a working definition of

intelligence itself, has argued that “storytelling and understanding are functionally the

8 Kay Young and Jeffrey L. Saver, “The Neurology of Narrative,” SubStance 94/95 (2001): 75.

9 It is important to note here, particularly given the propensity of those in the humanities to accuse the sciences o f adhering to an extreme form of biological determinism, that this theory does nothing of the sort. While the “impulse to narrative” may be biologically determined, the contents o f the narrative which is produced are not. The findings of cognitive psychology and neurology acknowledge both the biological and the sociological determinants of behavior and identity, and both the “straw man” of Skinnerian behaviorism and the specter of Nazi genetics programs raised by the social constructionists serve only to reveal their inability to face the findings of science in an honest and ethical manner.


10

same thing,” and that “intelligence is bound up with our ability to tell the right story at

the right time.”10 Furthermore, he argues that it is the telling of stories that allows the

human mind to create memories: “We need to tell someone else a story that describes our

experience because the process of creating the story also creates the memory structure

that will contain the gist of the story for the rest of our lives.”11

This is, quite simply, the way the human mind works, and this narrative self can

be found in philosophical as well as neurological conceptions of the self, particularly in

hermeneutical models of the self. According to the hermeneutical model,

When confronted with the question, “Who am I?” we will tell a certain story, emphasizing certain aspects that we deem to be of special significance, to be that which constitutes the leitmotif of our life, that which defines who we are, that which we present to others for recognition and approval (Ricoeur, 1985, pp.442-443). I attain an insight into my character traits by situating them in a life story that traces their origin and development: a life story that tells where one is coming from, and where one is heading.12

It is possible for the mind to integrate ideology into this narrative—or to read its

own narrative through the lens of ideology—but ideology cannot be the sole determinant

of the narrative self (save, of course, in fictional representations of self which seek to

create just such an ideologically determined individual). The search for the origins of the

self in ideology puts the cart before the horse: neuroscience makes it impossible to argue

that the “desire” to envision one’s individual life or the life of one’s culture as an

organized narrative is the result of being bom into a particular ideological formation.

Barring trauma to those areas of the brain responsible for the creation of a coherent

narrative of self, the impulse towards narration is universal. Simply put, narrative is an

10 Roger Schank, Tell Me a Story (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990), 24, 21. Qtd. in Young and Saver, above.

11 Schank, 115.

12 Dan Zahavi, “Phenomenology of Self,” in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tito Kircher and Anthony David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 58. reference to Paul Ricoeur, Temps et Recit III: Le Temps Raconte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1985).


11

intrinsic impulse of the human brain itself. Beyond lies only those forms of dysnarrativia

associated with extreme neurological trauma, and the concurrent obliteration of self. As

Young and Saver have concluded from their investigation into the effects of neurological

trauma upon the areas of the brain responsible for the construction of narrative,

“Individuals who have lost the ability to construct narrative, however, have lost their

selves.”13

This narrative self is perhaps the best answer modem science can provide for

those in the humanities seeking to define the self. Neurologists and cognitive

psychologists have already done the necessary field work to establish the means by which

the human brain accomplishes the construction of narrative; it only remains for those of

us in the humanities to integrate their findings into our own more philosophically derived

models.14 This would necessitate, of course, a complete rethinking of the conception of

“the subject” that has been forwarded in the humanities in the last several decades,

because the integration of this concept of self would require the acknowledgment of the

validity of the other findings of the cognitive sciences, such as the fact that gender is a

product of biology to a far greater extent than gender-theorists such as Judith Butler care

to admit. The narrative self of cognitive science is not simply a product of social forces

and ideologies at work on the psyche; we cannot simply expropriate those aspects of it

that happen to coincide with postmodern philosophy and jettison the rest if we want to

remain methodologically credible.

13 Young and Saver, 78.

14 Those working in the neurosciences have begun such a project, and the anthology quoted from above, The S e lf in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, takes an interdisciplinary approach to the question of the self not indicated in the book’s title. Some of the essays in this volume seek analogies between philosophy and neuroscience, and the one quoted above makes a compelling argument for reading the neurological concept of the core self through phenomenology, and the narrative self through hermeneutics. Other essays avoid combining disciplines, but rather advocate a complementary approach to the question of the self, arguing that the points-of-view represented by philosophy (a first person point-of-view), psychiatry (a second person point-of-view), and neuroscience (a third person point-of-view) each come at the question from different but equally important perspectives, and each contributes a valuable piece to the puzzle.


12

In the study to follow, particularly in the section on Saint Augustine, this

neurological understanding of self is very important; the Confessions is an illustration of

the method by which the brain creates and re-creates its own self-narrative. Young and

Saver explain,

the narrative framing and recall of experience is a dynamic, variable and vulnerable process. Even single individual memories are re-synthesized from widely distributed components. Picturing one’s first encounter with a cat, for example, requires activating visual fragments of feline form stored in the occipital cortex, tactile representations residing in the somatosensory cortices, audible contours of cat sounds in the auditory cortex, motoric programs for petting and carrying in the motor cortex, and often also retrieving emotional associations, metaphoric connections, literary representations. Each of the stored components is vulnerable to change over the intervening years, colored by new experience. Each act of re-synthesis emphasizes different features, depending on the individual’s emotional, cognitive, and social frame at the time of recall. Modem neuroscience has demonstrated that retrieving memories is not the simple act of accessing a storehouse of ready-made photos in a stable neural album, preserved with complete fidelity to the moment of their formation.Rather, each act of recall is a re-creation, drawing upon multiple, dynamically changing modular fragments to shape a new mosaic.Numerous consequences follow for literary interpretation, of which we will mention just one. All memories are suspect, at the neural level. Fidelity-stable recall and self-interpretation of the past is not a property of the human brain and mind. The varied subjectivity of literary autobiographic productions has its roots in the inescapable subjectivity of the brain’s narrative and memory system. This variability of memory, however, does not detract from the primacy of narrative recall in organizing human experience.15

Is the Confessions a product of the reading and re-interpreting of life events through the

lens of orthodox Christianity and through the narrative of Creation which is the Bible, as

I will argue in part in Part II? It seems obvious that this is partly what is at work as

Augustine traces the events of his life leading to his conversion, but this perhaps overly-

literary way of reading the text has allowed a number of critics to accuse Augustine of

being less than honest with his readers. The insights of neuroscience would seem to

15 Young and Saver, 79.


13

disprove these charges of dishonesty on the grounds that this is simply the way that

human memory works—memories, and the individual narrative which they comprise, are

constantly revised. The door is opened to the possibility that Augustine is being

completely honest in the Confessions, because this is the way he remembers the events in

question.16

This is the biological half of the understanding of the self that will govern much

of the study to follow. The philosophical half is derived from two sources. The first is

Charles Taylor’s influential Sources o f the Self which provides one of the best definitions

of identity—perhaps a more accurate term for what Taylor is speaking of than “self’—

than modem philosophy offers. Certainly, it provides for a universality that more

politically motivated theories cannot. A brief passage from the beginning of Sources o f

the Self should serve to more fully present Taylor’s argument:

People may see their identity as defined partly by some moral or spiritual commitment, say as a Catholic, or an anarchist. Or they may define it in part by the nation or tradition they belong to, as an Armenian, say, or a Quebecois. What they are saying by this is not just that they are strongly attached to this spiritual view or background; rather it is that this provides the frame within which they can determine where they stand on questions of what is good, or worthwhile, or admirable, or of value.. . . What this brings to light is the essential link between identity and a kind of orientation. To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance to you and what is trivial

i n

and secondary.

Taylor sees notions of the good as frameworks within which we place ourselves, and

which provide us with the necessary orientation, not just to the good, but to society as

16 The use of rhetorical devices and the presentation of some events in non-chronological order does not negate this conclusion. Certainly Augustine exercises a measure of artistry over the re-telling of his life, and he presents events in a way which emphasizes the overall themes he hopes to impart upon the reader, but this does not serve to change the fact that the essential narrative, stripped of rhetoric and reorganized to reflect the actual chronology, is as he remembers the events in question.

17 Charles Taylor, Sources o f the Self (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), 27-28.


14

well. Knowing what another person considers to be good and to be bad is a large part of

knowing another person’s identity.

The second source for a philosophical understanding of the self comes from

existentialism, which is frequently forwarded as an example of a philosophy which

transcends the historical and cultural traditions which are commonly—and it has been

argued, erroneously—believed to have produced it, and addresses basic, human

experiences and ways of understanding the world that have applicability in all historical

periods. The reason why arguments have been made for the universal nature of

existentialism is that the philosophy finds its core impetus in a “feeling” which cannot be

anything but universal, timeless, and essentially human: anxiety about the transient nature

of human existence—a transience which is itself universal, timeless, and inescapable—

and the sense of alienation which humanity feels, and alienation which is, according to

Hegel, a necessary result of our own self-consciousness. Though the term “seems to have

been coined towards the end of World War II by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel

as a label for the currently emerging ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and his close friend 18Simone de Beauvoir,” philosophers were soon

raking . . . through the remoter past in search of thinkers deserving of the label, the prime candidates being the two enfant terribles of the nineteenth century, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom were known to have influenced Heidegger, Jaspers, and Sartre. This intellectual archaeology was soon to have no bounds, with Pascal, Montaigne, even St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine, newly excavated as heralds of existentialism.19

Such raking through the past can, of course, do a disservice to the philosophers in

question; Augustine and Aquinas, for example, are most decidedly not existentialists.

Yet existentialism is larger than the narrow definitions that are often provided—

definitions which are generally too grounded in the writings of one or two

18 David E. Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 1.

19 Cooper, 2.


15

existentialists—and its major tenets are so rooted in the universal human experience that

they find their way into all but the most de-humanizing of philosophical schools:

To describe existentialism as an expression of an age, moreover, is to suggest that its claims could be only temporally and locally valid. But if the accounts of the distinctiveness of human existence, of the interdependence of mind and world, out of existential freedom, and so on, are true at all, they are true of human beings at all times and in all places.These accounts, furthermore, stem from reflections on the perennial condition of human beings, and not the particular situation obtaining in post-war Europe.20

In addition to the judicious use of existentialism, we can also understand the

motivations and rationale of those who have come before us, through our common

biology and in part through determining their notions of the good, two different but

complementary windows into the minds of other selves. We can understand some of

their motivations and rationale intuitively; and those that are culturally conditioned—not

determined—we can understand by coming to understand the culture in which they lived.

It might be argued that the only way I can come to understand a culture not my own is to

deny that culture its Otherness; I think this does not tally with human experience, or at

least human experience that remains unconditioned by an ideology that defines all human

relationships as relationships of power between self and Other.

There are, in fact, numerous points of intersection between any and all cultures,

and it is to these that we should look in determining our methodology in the humanities.

The anthropologist Donald E. Brown has developed a list of human universals, which

have been described as “‘surface’ universals of behavior and overt language noted by

ethnographers,” and which do not include “deeper universals of mental structure that are

revealed by theory and experiments.”21 On this list can be found over three hundred

items which both field study of contemporary cultures and textual and archaeological

studies of past cultures have shown to be present in all cultures. To be certain, these

20 Cooper, 13.

21 Pinker, 435.


16

universals do not always manifest themselves in the same way, and Brown has taken

great care to insure that the items in his list are general enough to allow for differences in

manifestation. For example, all cultures have been found to practice body adornment;

obviously, a Maori tribesman and a New York businessman practice this human universal

differently, but each does practice it. Items on the list which are most important to this

study include

concept of a person private inner life self as subject and object self-controlself as neither wholly passive nor wholly autonomousawareness of self-imagemanipulation of self-imageself is responsibleintentionself distinguished from otherbelief in religion and the supernaturalbeliefs about deathabstraction in speech and thoughtlanguage not being a simple reflection of realitynarrativesymbolismsymbolic speechfear of deathsocial structuresocializationimagerypast/present/future interpreting behavior lawsanctions include removal from the social unitdistinguishing right and wrongthe cyclicity of timegovernmentritualslogical notions world viewbiases in favor of the in-group true and false distinguished materialism


17

normal states distinguished from abnormaltriangular awareness (assessing relationships among the self & two other

people)22

The items at the beginning of this list will inevitably enter my argument when we

examine those positions which would deny the medieval period a sense of self;

obviously, Brown would argue that such a sense existed in the period, as he includes it in

his list of human universals. It may manifest itself in a different manner than it does in

twenty-first century America (though it differs far less than one might expect), but the

basic sense of self has remained constant since humans moved up the evolutionary ladder

and developed self-awareness. Textual evidence from the period certainly supports this

assertion, as I hope to demonstrate.

By proceeding on the assumption that there are human universals, and by

acknowledging that these are manifested in ways that differ according to culture, a reader

can make greater connections with the texts under examination and gain greater access to

what a text means. Such knowledge must necessarily reign in many of the “misreadings”

that have resulted through the application of theory to determine a text’s “hidden”

meanings. If my project is not only to elucidate the medieval conception of self but to

locate the representation of those selves in the texts I am examining, part of this task is

coming to know the self behind the text, particularly in the cases of Augustine and

Alfred, who will be providing the philosophical material from which I will be working.

What Augustine, Alfred, and the anonymous poets in the Anglo-Saxon poetic record

intended their works to mean is of paramount importance; their intentions are not

unknowable, and cannot be set aside in an attempt to “provoke a text into unpremeditated

articulation, into the utterance of what it somehow contains or knows but neither intends

nor is able to say.” Such “provocations” only obscure the voice that this reader, at least,

is trying intently to listen to.

22Adapted from Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991).

23 Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xiii.


18

II. C h a l l e n g in g t h e M y t h o f t h e M e d ie v a l M o n o -M in d a n d I t s “R a d ic a l ”

C r it iq u e

Much of the debate surrounding medieval selfhood stems from a misunderstanding of

what it means to the medieval Christian to be a self; regardless of textual evidence to the

contrary, the definition of medieval “man” forwarded by Jacob Burckhardt in the middle

of the nineteenth century still largely dictates the way contemporary scholars view the

medieval period:

In the Middle Ages, both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as well as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious o f himself only as a member o f a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. 4

Following the biased notions of Renaissance authors anxious to separate themselves from

the era which had come before them, Burckhardt establishes group identity as the only

identity that the medieval mind is capable of understanding.

William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden perpetuate Burckhardt’s argument in their

influential The Idea o f the Renaissance (1989), but it is Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance

Self-Fashioning—more than two decades old at this writing and widely debated by

scholars of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages—that is considered by many to have

provided the definitive argument that consciousness of self and awareness of the social

nature of identity began with Thomas More.

24 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization o f the Renaissance in Italy, translated by S.G.C. Middlemore (New York: Penguin, 1990), 98. (emphasis mine)


19

Greenblatt begins his argument by stating that “in sixteenth-century England there

were both selves and a key sense that they could be fashioned.”25 He clarifies this

somewhat odd statement by admitting that there have always been selves, but goes on to

argue that

there is in the early modem period a change in the intellectual, social, psychological, and aesthetic structures that govern the generations of identities. This change is difficult to characterize in our usual ways because it is not only complex but resolutely dialectical. If we say that there is a new stress on the executive power of the will, we must say that there is the most sustained and relentless assault upon the will; if we say that there is a new social mobility, we must say that there is a new assertion of power by both family and state to determine all movement within society; if we say that there is a heightened awareness of the existence of alternative modes of social, theological, and psychological organization, we must say that there is a new dedication to the imposition of control upon those modes and ultimately to the destruction of alternatives.26

Refuting Greenblatt’s argument is much more complicated than merely refuting

Burckhardt. We are no longer dealing with a notion of selfhood in a common-sense

manner, as we are with Burckhardt; Greenblatt’s criteria for selfhood have brought both

Marx and Foucault into the argument. The self Greenblatt is concerned with is

“dialectical”; it is a self subject to the “assertion of power by both family and state”; it is

a self who has been introduced to new ways of thinking and being, only to encounter the

oppression of the state should these new ways actually be adopted. Not only is it

necessary to show that there were “complex” selves in the Middle Ages, then, but

Greenblatt makes it necessary to argue against the notion that a tacit espousing of Marxist

and Foucauldian formulations of society and subjectivity is somehow natural and

inevitable.

25 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980),

26 Greenblatt, 1-2.


20

To this portion of Greenblatt’s argument, I can only answer that of course he is

not going to find the sorts of subjects postulated by Marx, Althusser, and Foucault in the

Middle Ages. These conceptions of subjectivity, as I have already pointed out, are

historically and culturally determined, and many of the assumptions behind them have

been disproved by both science and history. But I cannot simply write off Greenblatt’s

Theoretical subject so quickly: many medievalists have accepted the parameters of the

debate as set by Greenblatt and the New Historicists, and have begun trying to find

subjects—in the Marxist-Althusserian-Foucauldian sense of the word—in medieval

literature. Therefore, I will finish the argument against the imposition of modem

conceptions of the self onto medieval texts before returning to explain what is wrong with

Greenblatt’s argument from a common-sense point of view.

This acceptance of the Theoretical subject is a response to Greenblatt and to the

New Historicism; the New Historicists have denied individuality to the medieval period,

and medievalists have answered the call. But embracing the notion of subjectivity is also

a response to the criticism of D.W. Robertson. In “A Whisper in the Ear of Early

Modernists,” a seminal essay in the medievalist response to Greenblatt, David Aers

begins with a paragraph-long questioning of New Historicist Early Modernists, but

almost immediately moves to position himself against Robertson:

My present reflections were prompted by observing a convergence between the story being told by current radical criticism and a familiar story that had once been told in a school of medieval studies which prided itself on its conservatism. The convergence between radical criticism and the extremely influential current of medievalism which called itself ‘historical criticism’, flourishing through the 1950s into the early 1970s, and still not quite extinct, seemed puzzling. After all, that phase of literary criticism had proved extremely inhospitable to the study of social power and its relations to medieval institutions and texts, both sacred and secular.It rejected attempts to explore the relevance of concepts of empirical material drawn from the study of economic history, politics, ideology- formation, psychoanalysis and studies in the cultural construction of gender and gender’s relation to forms of power/knowledge. Characteristic of its position is the now classic formulation in D.W. Robertson’s Preface to Chaucer.


21

The medieval world was innocent of our profound concern for tension.. . . We project the dynamic polarities on history as class struggles, balances of power, or as conflicts between economic realities and traditional ideals.. . . But the medieval world with its

77quiet hierarchies knew nothing of these things.

Aers continues with a critique of the monolithic Middle Ages that Robertsonianism

helped to craft, a critique I agree with, up to a point. Robertson’s methodology is not

much better suited to the discovery of medieval selfhood than the Theoretical positions I

have already critiqued. Like Theory, it assumes that a single lens will suffice in the

interpretation of all post-patristic medieval literature and its authors. Alvin Lee has

pointed out that

One of the charges most frequently laid against the modem allegorical readings of mediaeval texts is that they seem to be based not only on a disregard for the obvious descriptive meaning of the text in question (they sometimes even appear to be diametrically opposed to it), but they also show contempt for the poetic vehicle itself. They slight the real aesthetic achievement of the poem as a thing in itself, on the grounds that things are never really important in themselves but only in relation to a spiritual doctrine.28

Though Lee is best known as an archetypal critic, his objection here to exegetical

criticism appears almost New Critical in content; his concern is with the individual

achievement of the poem, and the ignoring of aesthetic, literary concerns in favor of

exegesis. Aers’s objection is less rooted in literature than it is in culture:

Centuries of Christian traditions, an extraordinarily diversified, complex and profoundly adaptive culture of discourses and practices, was thus turned into a homogeneous, static and uncomplicated monolith. The key to this monolith and its literatures was the Glossa ordinaria and the texts gathered into Migne’s Patrologia latina.29

27 David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ears of the Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject’,” in Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writings, ed. D. Aers (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 177-202

28 Alvin Lee, “Old English Poetry, Mediaeval Exegesis, and Modem Criticism,” in Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh Keenan (New York: AMS Press, 1992), 47-48.

29 Aers, 178.


22

Human existence is far more complex than Robertson’s theory—or at least Aers’s

somewhat reductive version of Robertson’s theory—can account for. And while I

recognize that Aers’s version of Robertson is a simplification, I cannot help but agree that

Robertsonianism contains the possibility of misreading individual medieval authors by

imputing to patristic texts too much power and influence over them. But, by the same

token, it is reasonable to assume that medieval writers were deeply influenced by the

theological and philosophical thought of the day. Just as novelists over the last several

decades have woven postmodern themes and philosophy into their novels, so did the

Pearl-poet, for example, weave a fourteenth-century understanding of Augustinian

theology into his poem. Artists have always been influenced by their philosophical

milieux and vice-versa.

But the real problem is that Aers replaces Robertson’s so-called “conservative

ideology” with his own “radical” one. For all the problems with Robertson’s monolithic

world-view, it at least has the advantage of being grounded in texts written during the

Middle Ages, even if in the end it seems to rely on a view of human nature all too similar

to Althusser’s, with the individual constructed by Church doctrine. Robertson tries to

understand medieval literature through a greater understanding of medieval culture.

However, he makes the critical mistake of assuming that medieval culture is uniform and

that its power over its “subjects” is more or less absolute. If a work can be read through

patristic literature, then that work must be the meaning its author intended.

From his critique of Robertson, Aers moves more or less directly into the realm of

New Historicism, and seems particularly interested in constructing a viable Marxist

reading of the medieval period, explaining to the reader that “It seems important that

literary scholars take note of the pre-capitalist market economy and explore what

consequences it may have for their version of both the medieval period and the early-

modern or, as many still say, ‘Renaissance’.”30 Taken as it is from an essay that purports

30 Aers, 180.


23

to argue for a medieval sense of self, I can only ask why this is important for literary

scholars to do. What possible connection can be made between the pre-capitalist market

economy and the medieval sense of self? Apparently, there is a connection between what

is obviously a Marxist approach (Aers is heavily relying in this section on the Marxist

history of Rodney Hilton) and the location of medieval subjectivity, or at least the

location of a particular type of subjectivity in the medieval period. Aers tells us that

There is no reason to think that languages and experiences of inwardness, of interiority, of divided selves, of splits between outer realities and inner forms of being, were unknown before the seventeenth century, before capitalism, before the ‘bourgeoisie’, before Descartes, before the disciplinary regimes addressed in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.31

Of course there is no reason to think this. But neither is there reason to think that it is

necessary to invoke the vocabulary of Marxism or the politically oppressed subject of

Foucault in order to argue for a medieval sense of self, complex or otherwise. On the one

hand, Aers is able to argue that “the ‘history of the subject’ produced by cultural

materialists and New Historicists seems committed to reproducing aspects of the

ideology which gave us the term ‘Renaissance,’”32 but on the other hand Aers himself

seems committed to the very same political agenda he is accusing his opponents of

following, which is in essence a Marxist analysis of the medieval period. Like

Greenblatt, Aers is caught up in a political battle situated in the twentieth century, not the

fifth through the fifteenth, concerned with ideological formations, market economies, and

split-subjects. Yet Aers’ essay, along with Lee Patterson’s 1990 Speculum article “On

the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” has largely

determined the course of the medievalist response to the Early Modernists. Only the

results of the Early Modernists have been seriously questioned; the concept of self they

espouse has been left intact.

31 Aers, 186.

32 Aers, 185.


24

Thus we wind up with a conception of medieval selfhood predicated on the

assumption that Marxism is “True,” elevating one man’s largely unsubstantiated view of

human nature and the course of history above empirical data. The only way for the

Marxist critic to actually know what was in the minds and hearts of medieval people is to

subject them to a Marxist reading and reveal what lies hidden beneath the surface of the

text, meanings unintended by the medieval authors, obtainable only through the “depth

perception” of modem Theory.

Such readings, derived from this notion of unintended meanings, only exemplify

the second obstacle to locating medieval selves, and that is the tendency of literary

criticism to silence the voice of the text in favor of the voice of the critic. David Aers has

already shown how Robertsonian criticism can be guilty of this, but there are still a few

things to be said about how modem theory silences the text, before moving on to Saint

Augustine.

Chapter one ended with a quotation from Paul Strohm’s Theory and the

Premodern Text. Strohm argues that our job as literary critics is to “provoke a text into

unpremeditated articulation, into the utterance of what it somehow contains or knows but

neither intends or is able to say.”33 The problem is the amount of authority that Strohm

invests in Theory and in the critic.

Strohm’s book begins with a critique of I.A. Richards, William Empson, and the

New Criticism, not because the New Criticism advocated a return to the text, but because

he sees their methodologies as being too “unperturbing” to the text. Strohm believes that

the text must be “provoked” in order to articulate its hidden and unintended meanings,

advocating what he calls a “strategic disrespect.” He explains that

This form of disrespect is abetted by literary theory. It is theory, as elaborated by Barthes and others, which has so powerfully reminded us of texts’ irreducibility to paraphrase, their inability to close or finish themselves or to reveal their secrets. One may even suggest that the “text”

33 Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), xiii.


25

as an object of study, with all that this designation implies about indeterminacy and inconclusion, is a creation of theory.34

The text, as it is presented in a vast majority of theoretical readings, is a creation of

theory. There is a great deal of disrespect paid the literary text in readings which often

ignore the text itself in favor of the dicta of theory. But, in Strohm’s opinion, this is

precisely what the literary critic is supposed to do:

Refuting an easy assimilation to the text’s self-representations, theory justifies itself, and even some of the difficulties it presents, by offering a standpoint of appraisal grounded somewhere outside that range ofpossibilities afforded by the text’s internal or authorized commentary-----I am interested in theory to the extent that it underwrites the claim to know more about a text than it knows about itself.35

The key word in this passage is the word “authorized.” The critic using theory is

involved in an act of resistance—the “authorized” meaning of the text, the traditional

repository of authority, is to be demoted to merely one possible meaning in the text.

Authority is effectively removed to some place outside the text, to a repository of

knowledge supposed far greater than that of the text itself; it is relocated to the theorist

and the critic.

Arguments about race, class and gender may well be important to the culture in

which we live, but they cannot do justice to the texts they are imposed upon. Critics

using these tools come to literary texts with their arguments already formed; using the

literary text to help make that argument can hardly be said to constitute listening to the

text. At times, it consists of intense focus on a few selected passages that can be made to

support the argument, and it almost invariably involves ignoring those portions of the text

which might undercut it. As a result, turning to theory or to the modem critic to help us

locate selves from the past or selves within a text all too often results in finding the selves

of the Theorist and the critic. Carolyn Dinshaw, in Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, provides

34 Strohm, xiii.

35 Strohm, xiii.


26

an example of a reading that blatantly imposes the self of the critic—including a narrative

of Dinshaw’s professional life—onto the text, obscuring the portrait of the self Chaucer

seeks to present.

In her reading of Troilus and Criseyde, Dinshaw begins by explaining what it

means to “read like a man,” citing the patristic exegesis of Robertson and the New

Criticism of Donaldson as examples of two critics whose critical moves serve to “define

the disruptive Other in, and of, the text as feminine and limits it, turns away from it, in

order to provide a single, univalent textual meaning fixed in a hierarchical structure.”36

In their readings of Troilus and Criseyde, Dinshaw asserts, “Donaldson, Robertson, the

narrator [of Troilus and Criseyde], Pandarus, Troilus all read like men: they invoke

structures of authority in order to order the disorder, to stop the restless desire represented

in and enacted by their texts, to find rest.” Offered as an alternative to “reading like a

man” is “reading like a woman,” going “beyond licit or proper awareness; it is potentially

disruptive of orderly, logical, linear narratives that have well-delimited boundaries; and it1 0

is therefore curtailed, kept in check.” In other words, the types of readings Dinshaw

wants to do have been shut down by readers like Robertson and Donaldson. Dinshaw

wants to “read like a woman,” and feels that such readings have been curtailed by male

scholars. We are presented, in essence, with a mini-autobiography of Dinshaw’s career

as a literary critic.

What we learn of Dinshaw’s scholarly self directly affects her reading of Troilus

and Criseyde, or at least the character of Criseyde, whose self and situation emerge as

strikingly similar to Dinshaw’s own. Dinshaw wants to argue that Criseyde sees the

possibility for many other options in understanding the story of Thebes she is reading

36 Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 1989; pages 28-64 reprinted as “Reading Like a Man: The Critics, the Narrator, Troilus, and Pandarus,” in Troilus and Criseyde: “Subgit to alle Poesye, ” Essays in Criticism, ed. R. A. Shoaf (Binghamton, N.Y.: State University ofNew York Press, 1992), 48 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

37 Dinshaw, 67.

38 Dinshaw, 68.


27

when Pandarus interrupts her reading to give her Troilus’s letter. In cutting off her

reading, Dinshaw argues, Pandarus keeps her from reading too far into the story, a move

that would give her too much knowledge of the way her own story will turn out:

Pandarus interrupts Criseyde’s reading (alluding to the twelve books already written on this matter) before she can ascertain her romance’s origins and begins to work on his “text”—a romance of his own creation, which he will soon sit back and “read.” It is as if, in this inaugural moment in the affair of Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde threatens to know too much, to get ahead of the narrative, to read things impossible for her to read, things that must remain hidden from her. Cassandra (the other major female reader in the poem, as I’ve just mentioned) not only threatens to but does indeed know too much. Troilus explicitly scorns her reading of his dream. We might suggest that, in this text, feminine reading seems to male readers to be excessive: it goes beyond licit or proper awareness; it is potentially disruptive of orderly, logical, linear narratives that have well-delimited boundaries; and it is therefore curtailed, kept in check.39

In Dinshaw’s reading, Criseyde is Dinshaw. She has overlaid her own academic career

onto the text to such a degree that Troilus and Criseyde becomes about her desire to

construct transgressive readings of texts, about her desire to disrupt linear, logical

narratives, though it must be remarked that in overlaying her own narrative upon

Criseyde’s, Dinshaw simply replaces one linear narrative with another, one that has

greater subjective meaning for Dinshaw. She also misreads Chaucer’s text. It is true that

Pandarus constructs a romance for Criseyde, but given the outcome of their story, to

argue that Pandarus keeps Criseyde in check is somewhat absurd. The text in Criseyde’s

hands when Pandarus comes to visit is already written; Pandarus’s act in preventing

Criseyde from reading further is to prevent the paradox of reading her own future before

it happens. Unlike Cassandra, Criseyde has not been given the gift of foreknowledge by

Apollo. Dinshaw ignores this obvious reading of the text in order to make it

representative of her own feminist struggles. It is no wonder, then, that we have such

trouble locating the medieval self.

Dinshaw constructs her reading through the use of pre-formed arguments (her

own critical arguments against “patriarchal” criticism) and a selective reading of the text,

39 Dinshaw, 68.


28

a methodology that brings me back to the common-sense arguments against Greenblatt I

spoke of before. Greenblatt appears to have begun Renaissance Self-Fashioning already

having come to the conclusion that the medieval period lacks the “new” expression of

selfhood he describes. But his actual study of the medieval period is so brief and

inadequate that it proves nothing, by any definition of self and self-awareness, modem,

postmodern, medieval or otherwise. Greenblatt’s argument against a medieval, Christian

self-consciousness is, at least in Renaissance Self-Fashioning, supported by a single

quotation from a single sermon of Augustine’s, in which the Bishop of Hippo tells his

congregation, “Hands off yourself. Try to build yourself up, and you build a ruin.”

Greenblatt appears not to have consulted any other Augustinian texts to determine

whether or not this isolated quotation is indicative of Augustine’s thinking as a whole on

both the self and the value of fashioning a social identity. Furthermore, he does not even

quote from the sermon itself; instead, he takes the quoted passage from Peter Brown’s

Religion and Society in the Age o f Saint Augustine, where it is part of a discussion that

deals more with Augustine’s political beliefs than the issue of selfhood. Furthermore, the

difference between sermons, written in a didactic register for a general audience, and

Augustine’s more speculative, philosophical texts is not taken into account. Also, the

fact that the remainder of Sermon 169 exhorts one to be dissatisfied with one’s self and to

always be walking on the pilgrimage of life—which for Augustine is a pilgrimage to the

self—is unmentioned. Obviously, a thorough, close reading of the Augustinian corpus is

needed to demonstrate that Greenblatt’s arguments are based on an inadequate reading of

Augustine.

The studies of Augustine, King Alfred, and the Old English elegies that follow

rest upon the assumptions I have tried to lay bare in Part I. I do not mean the first part of

this dissertation to act as a theoretical framework for the literary analysis to follow,

however. The readings of the works in Parts II—IV will be governed by the works

themselves, not by a desire to embark upon a cognitive psychological, existential, or even

an Augustinian reading of these works. When any of these philosophies or disciplines


29

appear useful to understanding the work at hand—to making a cross-temporal connection

with that work—then I will make use of them to facilitate that understanding, but not

necessarily to advocate the wholesale adoption of that philosophy or discipline.

Undoubtedly, the use of the cognitive and neurological sciences in conjunction with

philosophy to come to a greater understanding of these medieval works and the selves

who wrote them and the selves portrayed in them will lead to tensions that cannot be

resolved in this dissertation without completely departing from the task at hand, which is

a study of medieval literature.

Connections between the authors—Augustine, Alfred, and the anonymous authors

of The Wanderer and The Seafarer—will be made as warranted, but I do not intend to

come to a theory of medieval selfhood or subjectivity in this study, nor do I think it

possible to construct a “running narrative” of the medieval self without ignoring the

differences between the way these individuals conceived of themselves as selves. While

I will accentuate those aspects of human existence in each work which emerge as

universals—proceeding upon the still controversial assumption that there are

universals—and though I will document the attempts of each medieval author to define

and explain what he felt to be universal human nature, those elements of the self which

are culturally determined will continuously surface and prevent me from going too far

towards leveling cultural, chronological, and individual differences in perspective.


30

C h a p t e r T w o

T h e A u g u stin ia n Se l f : E m bo d ied So u ls in th e C it y o f M a n

I. R e a d in g A u g u s t in e

Though much has been written on the subject of the Augustinian conception of self, a

definitive statement remains elusive. Many critical lenses that have been brought to bear

upon Augustine, particularly in the last century. Modernist readers of Augustine argue

for a “a continuity between Plotinus, Augustine, and Descartes,”1 and find in Augustine’s

writings a proto-cogito, citing his statement “Si enim fallor, sum [For if I am mistaken, I

exist]” as a precursor to Descartes’s “Cogito, ergo sum.” Postmodern readings of

Augustine, on the other hand, “begins from a Heideggerian ‘end of metaphysics’ and

goes at least some distance with Jacques Derrida’s development of its consequences.”4

Postmodern readings are fundamentally opposed to the modernist attempt to link

1 Wayne J. Hankey, “Self-Knowledge and God as Other in Augustine: Problems for a Postmodern Retrieval,” Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch fu r Antike und Mittelater 4 (1999), 123.

2 De civitate dei 11.26.18, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vols. 47 & 48, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb (Tumhout: Brepols, 1955). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from The City o f God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) unless otherwise indicated.

3 Modernist readings of Augustine include Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Gareth B. Matthews, Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Charles Taylor, Sources o f the Self: The Making o f Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989); Edward Booth, Saint Augustine and the Western Tradition o f Self-Knowing (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1989); Brian Stock, Augustine The Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics o f Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996).

4 Hankey, 123.


31

Augustine with Descartes, and instead seek to “defend Augustine against the accusation

that he is a collaborator in ‘the fundamental illusion of modernity, the notion that the

private self is the arbiter and source of value in the world.’”5 In making such a defense,

and in constructing a rift between Augustine and Descartes, they have been accused of

“assimilat[ing] Augustine to Plotinus,” 6 whose divine triad lends itself to postmodern

readings far more than Augustine’s concept of the Trinity.7

In the realm of theology, Catholic readers seek to place Augustine firmly within

orthodox Catholic belief, while Protestant readers point out many instances where

orthodox belief took paths different from those laid out by Augustine. Freudian (and

Lacanian) psychoanalysis has also been brought to bear on Augustine, and a “fractured”

and “scattered” self found as a result, similar to the fractured self posited by

psychoanalysis, but unlike it in that Augustine’s fractured self can find its possible unity

in God.

As a result, there are almost as many models of Augustinian selfhood as there are

critics (or at least critical schools). Each has something relevant to add to the still-

emerging picture, but each emerges as problematic in its desire to “contain” Augustine

within a system of thought exterior to him, often in an attempt to claim Augustine as one

of their own. I will be borrowing freely from a number of these readings, but as I do not

5 Hankey, 86, quoting Rowan Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De Trinitate,” Augustiniana 40 (1990), 317.

6 Hankey, 123.

7 Postmodern readings of Augustine include Jacques Derrida, “Cirumfession: Fifty Nine Periods and Periphrases Written in a Sort o f Internal Margin, between Geoffrey Bennington’s Book and Work in Preparation (January 1989-April 1990)” in Jacques Derrida, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); John Milbank, ‘“ Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A Short Summa in Forty Two Responses to Unasked Questions,” Modern Theology 7 (1991): 225-237; John Milbank, “Sacred Triads: Augustine and the Indo-European Soul,” Modern Theology 13 (1997): 451-474; Rowan Williams, “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in De Trinitate,” in Collectanea Augustiniana: Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, ed. J.T. Lienhard (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993), 121-124; Rowan Williams, “Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De Trinitate,” Augustiniana 40 (1990): 317; Susan Mennel, “Augustine’s ‘I’: The ‘Knowing Subject’ and the Self,” Journal o f Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 291-324; Jean-Luc Marion, “The Essential Incoherence of Descartes’ Definition of Divinity,” in Essays on Descartes' Meditations, ed. A.O. Rorty (Berkeley:


32

consider myself an adherent to any of these schools of thought, I am not faithful to the

entirety of their arguments. In the debate between the modernists and the postmodernists,

my sympathies lie firmly on the side of the modernists, whose reading I find more

attentive to the actual content of Augustine’s writing. I will not, however, be reading

Augustine through any particular lens, only making use of the understanding of the

modernists where they appear faithful to Augustine’s own works.

A synthesis of the criticism is not the only synthesis I hope to come to in this

chapter, however. The attempt to determine to what extent we may speak of an

Augustinian “self’ is a particularly difficult task, as Augustine never addresses the issue

directly or as the modem reader may wish he had. Confessions comes the closest of all

his writings to making the self its subject, and even in this text what Augustine is actually

saying about the self is so intimately intertwined with theological statements that it is

often difficult to discern where—if anywhere—we can locate the dividing line between

self and Creation. The reader trying to formulate a statement of Augustine’s point of

view must delve through the bulk of his writing, looking for passages here and there

which address the subject of the self. These passages are everywhere; while Augustine

may not directly address the self, in a way the self is all Augustine ever talks about—

when looked at from a certain perspective, all of Augustine’s writing addresses selfhood:

what it means to be an embodied soul in the city of man. The search for knowledge of

God and the search for knowledge of self are inextricably intertwined in Augustine’s

writings, and most of what Augustine wrote is part of this ongoing search.

Increasing the difficulty of this task is the fact that Augustine’s Latin does not

offer a word that we might translate into English as “self’:

There is no one-to-one Latin equivalent of out English word “self,” with its connotations of the individual as the object of his or her own reflection and introspection. The Latin ego, for example, was only used as a term of emphasis to indicate contrast or distinction between individuals. In Augustine, the two words animus and, especially, mens probably give the closest equivalents. These words are usually translated as soul and mind

Univeristy of California Press, 1986), 297-337; Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-texte, trans. T.A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).


33

respectively, but may equally be used to refer to what we would call the “self.” Nonetheless, Augustine’s language nuances what is taken to be the self in a particular way.8

Innes concludes that Augustine’s “self’ should be equated with the “rational self’; he

explains that

Augustine does use animus to refer to the emotional and volitional aspects of the human being, but only insofar as these are viewed from a rational perspective. The alternative, mens, is a somewhat narrower term than animus, referring to the mind in its specifically inward and upward orientations of rational judgement about things given by sense-perception (scientia) and contemplation of eternal truth {sapientia)?

On some levels, this observation is true, particularly for Augustine’s earlier works, which

rely more heavily on Platonic philosophy than his later, more theologically orientated

works. It remains to be seen, for example, what the role of mens is in the transcendental

experience Augustine and his mother, Monica, share in Confessions IX.

This brings me to the final difficulty—or at least the last difficulty I will discuss

at length—in tackling the subject of the self, or indeed any subject, in Augustine. The

works of Augustine, taken as a whole, demonstrate a considerable lack of self-

consistency. There are profound differences between his earliest surviving works—

written while on a “philosophical retreat” in Cassiciacum just after his conversion to

Christianity in 386—and his latest, written while Bishop of Hippo. His early writings are

more heavily inflected with a Platonism that has yet to be fully interrogated by

Christianity—the writings of Plotinus (or at least those writings of Plotinus which were

available to him, as well as Porphyry’s biography) among his chief influences—and thus

less inflected with what we might consider “orthodox” Christianity. It is only in the years

following his baptism, particularly after his elevation to the priesthood, that Augustine

becomes learned enough in Church doctrine to allow for the sophisticated blending of

8 Robert Innes, “Integrating the Self through the Desire of God,” Augustinian Studies 28:1 (1997):69-70.

9 Innes, 70.


34

Christianity and Platonic philosophy that so marks his later work. As he tellingly

remarks in De trinitate, “Egoque ipse multa quae nesciebam scribendo me didicisse

confitear. [I must also acknowledge, incidentally, that by writing I have myself learned

much that I did not know.]”10 That we are essentially brought along on Augustine’s

educational journey has serious consequences for an examination of his conception of

self. In these early dialogues, the individuated soul is conceptualized, in part, in Plotinian

terms, and appears in some respects to be part of the Good or the one (in the Soliloquia,

Truth is located in soul, and the soul participates in it). Later, the individual soul

becomes a more highly individuated being, which appears to retain much of its

individuality even after the resurrection, as we see in Augustine’s discussion of the

resurrection of the body in De civitate dei, written between 413 and 425, when he had

become far more sophisticated a thinker both in terms of Christian theology and Platonic

philosophy.

This is only one explanation for the evolution of Augustine’s theology, however.

There is a second explanation which I think of equal importance, but one which often

gets ignored in the debates over his Platonism. It is crucial to understanding Augustine

that he begins his career attempting to refute the Manichees and ends his career refuting

the Pelagians. In a certain sense, Augustine’s career as a theologian is a career based on

his responses to heretical movements within Christianity, and many points of Augustinian

theology are developed in an attempt to combat what he sees as the extreme position of

those against whom he is writing. The dialogic nature of his theological writings

becomes particularly important in the debate over free will and the necessity of God’s

grace. In an effort to combat what Augustine sees as the dangerous conclusion of

Manichean doctrine, which is to place the blame for evil outside of the self and onto the

“dark forces” engaged in struggle with the forces of light, Augustine champions human

free will and places great stress on personal responsibility for sin. Later, in an effort to

10 De trinitate 3.Pro. 19-20, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vols. 50 & 50A, ed. W.J. Mountain (Tumhout: Brepols, 1968). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from The Trinity, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991) unless otherwise indicated.


35

combat the extreme position of Pelagianism—which, in its denial of original sin, grants

human beings an uncorrupted will able to perform acts of goodness through its own

nature, rather than needing that nature to be “elevated” through the gift of God’s grace—

Augustine forwards a far more limited version of human free will and stresses the

necessity of the gift of God’s grace prior to the human willing of a good action.

It is not only the poles of Manicheism and Pelagianism to which Augustine reacts,

either. Confessions is written during a time when Donatism is the most popular brand of

Christianity in Northern Africa; De civitate dei is overtly written in reaction to the

upsurge in paganism that comes as a result of the barbarian threat to the Roman Empire;

De trinitate is, in part, a response to Arianism, and, it has been argued, to paganism as

well.11 The “reactionary” nature of Augustine’s writing cannot be stressed enough; it is

difficult to construct a reading of someone whose work is so often predicated on

responding to the position of others.

Yet throughout Augustine’s evolving theology, one fact remains: what we call the

self is always conceptualized as an embodied soul. This is not to say that Augustine

stresses a strict dichotomy between soul and body, though he has certainly been read as

doing so. While a body can be a source of evil, it is not the source of evil. Certainly the

bodily senses—or perhaps what it sensed with them—are seen as imperfect, and can

prevent us from using the true senses of the soul. As St. Paul explains, “videmus nunc

per speculum in enigmate tunc autem facie ad faciem nunc cognosco ex parte tunc autem

cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum [We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then

face to face. Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known]” (1 Cor.1013:12). Yet it would be a mistake to argue that the Augustinian version of the self

11 Edmund Hill makes this argument in his brief introduction to Book IV of De trinitate, in The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), 150.

12 Biblical quotations are taken from Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Bonifatio Fischer OSB, et. al. (Stuttgart: Wtirttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969). Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Douay Rheims translation (Rockford, 111.: Tan Books, 1989). Though Augustine would not have used the Vulgate in his own studies, I have chosen to use it here because of the difficulties inherent in determining exactly what Biblical text Augustine was using. The biblical passages contained within Augustine’s quotations remain his own.


36

corresponds to the concept of the “ghost in the machine,” a concept we can trace back to

Descartes and which was given a name three centuries later by the philosopher Gilbert

Ryle.13 The body, as De civitate dei XXII makes clear, is an integral part of who we are,

and cannot be dismissed as separate from our true selves.

In certain respects, the conception of the individual as soul and body is quite

modem; a very loose analogy can be drawn between Augustine’s position and the

position of cognitive psychology, which sees the human being as both biologically and

sociologically determined. Yet Augustine’s conception of self also differs enormously

from most modem conceptions of self, which, being secular, completely rule out the

existence—or at least the inclusion—of the concept of the soul, and with it, any notion of

some form of a transcendentally determined self and an a priori essence. The modem

self is viewed by many as completely determined by material factors. This places certain

impediments in the way of the modem reader seeking to “understand” Augustine, unless

that reader comes to terms with Augustine’s theological assumptions. Certainly,

Augustine would dismiss the whole socially constructed self provided by one branch of

postmodernism, because while the soul may be led astray by society, society cannot be

said to “construct” the transcendent soul, and that soul must exercise its own will in

choosing to follow the example of society. And while there are some affinities between

Augustine and poststructualist practicers of “the linguistic turn,” if human beings are

constructed by language in Augustinian thought, it is by The Word, the transcendent

word of God completely dismissed by Derrida. Curiously enough, the theory of self

forwarded by cognitive and evolutionary psychology may have some place in a

discussion of Augustine. It does have the ability to make Augustine—and Christian

doctrine in general—accessible to the modem, scientific mind, particularly through the

understanding of the doctrine of Original Sin through the concept of genetic

predisposition. But, while this is an effective way to help us to relate to Augustine,

13 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial o f Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002), 8-9.


37

Augustine would hardly be predisposed to accept a biochemical conception of Original

Sin. For Augustine, it is, after all, the fallen will that must choose to succumb to the

urges of the body, and that fallen will is located securely in the soul.

This leaves the theory of the self forwarded by Charles Taylor: the self is

something which we each define in relation to a greater good or goods—the self is

situated in the realm of the ethical (though not necessarily the religious): “To know who

you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is

good or bad, what is worth doing and what is not, what has meaning and importance to

you and what is trivial and secondary.”14 Here, I think, can be found one point of

convergence between Augustine’s self and a modem conception. Taylor’s self is open-

ended enough to allow it to be universal; even the postmodern notions of self fit into

Taylor’s conception, as they are predicated on the notion that particular ideologies are, in

fact, a good by which one can define oneself. Neither does it impinge upon the findings

of cognitive psychology; it remains strictly in the realm of the philosophical, and

provides a complement to what science has discovered in its own exploration in the

“sources of the self.”

Because Taylor’s philosophy is in part inspired by his own reading of Augustine,

Augustine needn’t be placed upon the Procrustean bed of modem theory in order to make

Taylor’s observations mesh with a reading of him. As Taylor explains,

For Augustine as for Plato, the vision of cosmic order is the vision of reason, and for both the good for humans involves their seeing and loving this order. And similarly, for both what stands in the way is the human absorption with the sensible, with the mere external manifestations of the higher reality. The soul must be swivelled around; it has to change the direction of its attention/desire. For the whole moral condition of the soul depends ultimately on what it attends to and loves.15

However, for Augustine, as opposed to Plato, “It is love and not attention which is the

ultimately deciding factor. And that is why the Augustinian doctrine of the two

14 Charles Taylor, Sources o f the S e lf (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 27-28.

15 Taylor, 128.


38

directions is usually expressed in terms of the two loves, which can ultimately be

identified as charity and concupiscence.”16 The quest for self-knowledge, as I will

demonstrate further below, is all about one’s relationship to the Good, or more accurately

in Augustine’s case, to God.

So, despite objections that Taylor’s understanding of the “conception of the

relation between reason and will in Augustine’s thought” is flawed, this very basic

observation about the self s relationship to the Good is the “glue” I will use to hold

together Augustine’s somewhat scattered observations, and the means by which I tie

together Augustine’s notion of self and the somewhat different notion of self that will

emerge in my reading of King Alfred’s translation of the Soliloquia and the subsequent

examination of Anglo-Saxon poetry and culture.17 Unlike Augustine, Alfred

acknowledges the need for the embodied soul to take up its proper place in earthly

society. For Alfred—somewhat at odds with Augustine in De civitate dei—the kingdom

of this world is important and is a good through which the self can define itself.

For Augustine, of course, there is only one good the individual should orient him

or herself in relation to, and that is God. In certain respects, this demand limits the

amount of individuality an individual should properly enjoy; if we are all to orient

ourselves in relation to the same eternal good, and if the self is defined in relation to that

good, then we become somewhat homologous. This is particularly true after the

resurrection, when those who have been redeemed will all have properly aligned their

will to God’s. But such an alignment, whether achieved for all eternity in the next life or

imperfectly and impermanently in this life, can only be attained through an act of the

individual’s own will, and while that will may need the gift of God’s grace in order to

16 Taylor, 128.

17 Two very different critiques of Taylor’s reading of Augustine can be found in David Peddle, “Re-Sourcing Charles Taylor’s Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 32:2 (2001): 207-217, and Wayne Hankey, “Between and Beyond Augustine and Descartes: More than a Source of the Self,” Augustinian Studies 32:1 (2001): 65-88. The quote regarding Taylor’s reading o f the will and reason comes Peddle, 208.


39

find the strength to act—voluntas, for Augustine—neither God nor anyone else can

exercise the individual’s will for him.

Also, in Taylor’s view, since we are all in a fallen state, and our ability to align

our will to God’s is flawed, in this world, at least, we are given the free will to orient

ourselves to the true good which is God, or to other “false” goods our fallen will may

desire. Given our fallen nature and the multiplicity of things which we might identify as

a “good,” Augustine’s conception of self and Taylor’s overlap further. And, since the

self in this world is all that either we or our authors may actually know, it is to the self in

this world—the embodied soul of my title—that I will limit the major portion of my

discussion.

The most efficient way to proceed through Augustine, as well as the way best

suited to a close reading of the Augustinian canon, is to proceed chronologically through

a selection of his works. Because of the fundamental shift in his thinking in regards to

the question of free will versus predestination in the work De diversis quaestionibus ad

simplicianum, I have chosen this work to mark an “evolutionary leap” between the early

“Platonist” Augustine and the later “Pauline” Augustine.

I have chosen to loosely organize my exploration of these texts around four key

questions that, when answered, provide some answers to the larger question of his

conception of self:

• The foremost question we must ask in this discussion is what degree of

individuality does Augustine grant human beings? If we are to align our will

perfectly to God’s, do we thereby lose our individual wills in the process? And

what effect does the alignment of the individual will to God’s will have on human

freedom?

• This leads to a second fundamental question: to what degree does Augustine

believe we are predestined, and to what degree does he believe us to exercise free

will? Are our identities completely determined from the beginning of time? Do

we freely choose our actions? Do we possess the agency necessary to craft our


40

own identities (both in the general sense and in the sense of self-fashioning

proposed by Greenblatt)? In some ways, this is the most difficult question to

answer, as Augustine begins his career refuting the extreme “predestination”

position of the Manichees, and ends it refuting the extreme “free will” position of

the Pelagians.

• What is Augustine’s position on the soul/body dichotomy he has inherited from

Plotinus and the Platonists (and which he eventually comes to read through Paul)?

What does it mean for Augustine to conceptualize human beings as “embodied

souls”? From which does our identity come, the soul or the body?

• Finally, two strictly modem questions: What role does society play in the

formation of the Augustinian self—in theoretical terms, to what extent is the

Augustinian self a social construct? And to what extent can we craft a dialogue

between modem, biological and cognitive understandings of self and Augustine’s

theological/philosophical understanding? In other words, to what extent do

Augustine’s philosophical observations find validation in the discoveries of the

cognitive sciences?

Each of these questions relates, in some way, to the larger question of selfhood, and they

are questions Augustine asks over and over again. A close examination of his answers to

them, and of the common threads that run through these answers, should allow us to

discover what concepts o f self and identity Augustine bequeaths to the Middle Ages—

and us—and from there we can determine what effects his conceptions have on

subsequent thinking about the self during the medieval period.

II. T h e P h i l o s o p h i c a l S e l f in t h e S o l il o o u ia a n d O t h e r E a r l y W r i t i n g s

Augustine’s Soliloquia were written between the autumn of 386 and February of 387 at

Cassiciacum, near Lake Como in Italy, where he had retired with his mother, Monica, his

son, Adeodatus, his brother, Navigius, and a few friends shortly after his conversion in


41

Milan, recounted in Confessions, Book 8.18 Because the Soliloquia are such an early

work, they appear at times to be more directly influenced by the writings of the Platonists

than his later works do, and the conception of self they forward is necessarily more

Platonic than it will become in later works. Their debt to Platonism is further revealed in

their very form, two dialogues between Augustine and Reason. It is reasonable to assume

that at this early point in his life as a Catholic Christian, Augustine is not yet

knowledgeable enough in Christian theology to rely as heavily upon it in the Soliloquia

as he will come to do as priest and later bishop.

It is important to note that Augustine is ill while writing the Soliloquia-, not only

does he continue to suffer from the “pain in the chest” which forced (or allowed, as the

case may be) him to leave his post as a rhetor, but he mentions specifically in the

Soliloquia that he suffers from a severe toothache. This is important in part because

Augustine sees his own bodily woes as an impediment to the achievement of wisdom. As

he explains to Reason,

Quamquam enim acerrimo his diebus dentium dolore torquerer, non quidem sinebar animo volvere nisi ea, quae iam forte didiceram; a discendo autem penitus impediebar, ad quod mihi tota intentione animi opus erat. Tamen mihi videbatur, si se ille mentibus meis veritatis fulgor aperiret, aut non me sensurum fuisse ilium dolorem aut certe pro nihilo toleraturum.

[For the past few days I have been tormented by a most piercing toothache, such that I contemplated in my mind nothing except what I had already learned; I was completely prevented from learning anything, because that requires total concentration of the mind. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that if the light of truth had been revealed to my mind, I either would not have felt that pain, or would have endured it as if it were nothing.]19

18 Augustine provides an accounting of his companions at Cassiciacum in De beata vita 1.6.

19 Soliloquia 1.12.(21), in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vol. LXXXIX ed. Wolfgangus Hormann (Wien: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1986). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from Soliloquies: Augustine's Inner Dialogue, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., trans. Kim Paffenroth (Brooklyn: New City Press, 2000) unless otherwise indicated.


42

Augustine’s “malfunctioning” body and the sensory perceptions of pain that go along

with it have become a hindrance to his soul’s progress towards truth. There is, in this

passage, a somewhat different emphasis on the soul/body dichotomy than we find in the

later Augustine; this is perhaps the most crucial difference in the conception of self

between the early work and a later work like De civitate dei, in which the emphasis on

the resurrection of the body has reconceptualized the dichotomy considerably. Here, the

body works against Augustine’s will in a way that almost contradicts later writings, in

which it has become clear that only the individual will can be corrupt and can lead the

individual to stray.

I also stress Augustine’s illness here because it is relevant to the discussion of

King Alfred’s translation of the Soliloquia that follows. Alfred, as his biographer Asser

points out, suffered from two chronic illnesses. It is not unreasonable to forward the

hypothesis that Alfred’s illnesses were part of his attraction to a text whose choice by the

king to translate has puzzled Anglo-Saxon scholars, particularly given the presence of

other, more “famous” works of Augustine which existed in several manuscripts in Anglo-

Saxon England.

But, despite the impact of “historical situatedness” on the Soliloquia—both in

terms of its early place in the Augustinian chronology and Augustine’s health while

writing it—it remains an important statement of Augustine’s belief, particularly on

matters of the self. Peter Brown, commenting on Augustine’s own critique of the

Soliloquia in the Retractationes, explains that

Augustine valued and remembered this work more than any other of the time. It betrays tensions between the two elements of his thought that will remain unresolved for very many years. His God is the god of the philosophers: He is the founder of the harmonies of the universe; and His relation to men is as absolute and necessary as the form of a geometrical theorem.20

20 Peter Brown, Augustine o f Hippo: A Biography, second edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 116.


43

Brown stresses, quite correctly, that these early, more Platonic writings contain the seeds

of the later Augustine, seeds that will grow to fruition as they are watered and fed with

Christian theology. The result, as so many readers of Augustine have pointed out, is a

Christianity that is highly Platonic in many ways, a Christianity that has metamorphosed

almost as much in its encounter with Augustine as Augustine has in his encounter with it.

The portrait of Augustine’s thought which emerges in Brown’s biography—and which

seems generally accepted by most Augustine scholars—is that of a slow evolution

towards a mature, orthodox position. However, while the positions forwarded in the

Soliloquia contain the seeds of the later Augustine, they are also positions arrived at

before Augustine fully came to terms with the writings of St. Paul and his doctrine of

grace. This means that we cannot rely too heavily on the Soliloquia in coming to

understand the Augustinian self.

Understanding the self is Augustine’s purpose in writing the Soliloquia, a purpose

stated quite clearly in the text itself, directly after the opening prayer. When Reason asks

Augustine, “Quid ergo scire vis? [What then do you want to know?],” Augustine replies,0 1“Deum et animam scire cupio [I want to know God and the soul].” Augustine seeks

this knowledge through a dialogue with a personification of his own Reason—it is

through the human capacity of reason, and not merely belief, that Augustine wishes to

know God and the soul. The capacity of reason is also an internal capacity—while we

may be granted reason by God, the reason which Augustine speaks of in the Soliloquia is

an aspect of the individual mind, and it is the individual will which must choose to turn to

reason and begin the process of attaining wisdom. Augustine’s turn to reason also

reveals that he believes God to be intelligible, a belief that places him more in Plato’s

camp than Plotinus’s, and one that places him at odds with slightly later orthodox

conceptions of God, which place Him above the level of the intelligible. This belief in an

intelligible God will become increasingly important in Augustine’s later works,

particularly De Trinitate.

21 Soliloquia, 1.2.(7).


44

In addition to attaining knowledge of God and the soul, Augustine also intends in

the Soliloquia to demonstrate, again using reason, the immortality of the soul. This,

purpose, as he comments in the Retractationes, is never fulfilled, and he abandons the

Soliloquia incomplete:

In primo libro quaereretur et utcumque appareret, qualis esse debeat qui uult percipere sapientiam, quae utique non sensu corporis sed mente percipitur, et quadam ratiocinatione in libri fine colligitur, ea quae uere sunt esse immortalia; in secundo autem de immortalitate animae diu res agitur et non peragitur.

[In the first book, the question is raised, and in one way or another made clear, what kind of man he ought to be who wishes to comprehend wisdom, for assuredly, it is comprehended, not by corporeal sense, but by the mind. At the end of the book, by a process of reasoning, the conclusion is reached that those things which truly exist are immortal. In the second book, moreover, there is a long discussion on the immortality of the soul, but it is not completed.]22

In seeking knowledge of the soul’s immortality, Augustine is engaged in what Frederick

Van Fleteren considers his life’s project: “to understand by reason what he clearly

believes . . . to attain a rational understanding of the truths of faith.” Van Fleteren sees

this project as a debate between authority and reason, explaining that “reason’s function

is to reach an understanding of the Christian mysteries previously held by authority.”24

While Van Fleteren is correct in calling this Augustine’s “life project,” this firm

belief in the power of reason to bring the individual to understanding of the sacred

mysteries is more characteristic of the young Augustine than the older Bishop of Hippo.

As early as 390, when he writes De moribus ecclesiae catholicae, the power of reason

22 Retractationes 1.2.6-11, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. 57 ed. Almut Mutzenbecher (Tumhout: Brepols, 1984). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from The Retractations, trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1968) unless otherwise indicated.

23 Frederick Van Fleteren, “Authority and Reason, Faith and Understanding in the Thought of St. Augustine,” Augustinian Studies 4 (1973): 45-46.

24 Van Fleteren, 57.


45

appears to have been lessened: “At ubi divina perventum est, avertit sese; intueri non

potest, palpitat, aestuat, inhiat amore, reverberatur luce veritatis, et ad familiaritatem

tenebrarum suarum, non electione, sed fatigatione convertitur. [But when we come to

divine matters, reason turns itself away: It cannot gaze, it trembles, it is inflamed, it gazes

with desire, it is repelled by the light of truth and turns back to the familiarity of its own

darkness, not by choice, but from exhaustion.]” It is, perhaps, Augustine’s failure to

adequately understand the soul’s immortality that leads him to reconsider the possibilities

of human reason.

But, returning to 386, Cassiciacum, and the quest for knowledge of God and the

soul, it is important to keep in mind that Augustine’s retreat to Cassiciacum was a

philosophical retreat, a place where the ex-rhetor was able to lead the life o f the mind for

a short time before his baptism in 387. It is, in many ways, a retreat to the self, as

Augustine struggles to define his relationship to the good, shaking off his earlier

Manicheanism and, particularly in Contra academicos, Skepticism. Having accepted the

authority of Scripture and the interpretation of that Scripture by the Catholic Church,

Augustine hopes to find a way to reconcile this newly accepted authority with the process

of reason he embraced at the age of seventeen, when he first encountered Cicero’s

Hortensius. As he states in Contra academicos, written only a month or so before the

Soliloquia, “Quod autem subtilissima ratione persequendum est—ita enim iam sum

affectus, ut quid sit uerum non credendo solum sed etiam intelligendo apprehendere

impatienter desiderem—apud Platonicos me interim, quod sacris nostris non repugnet,

reperturum esse confido. [As to that which is sought out by the most subtle reasoning—

for my character is such that I’m impatient in my desire to apprehend what the truth is not

only by belief but also by understanding—I’m still confident that I’m going to find it

with the Platonists, and that it won’t be opposed to our Holy Writ.]”

25 De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 1.7.(11). English translation is taken from Van Fleteren, 59.

26 Contra academicos 3.20,43. 19-24, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. XXIX ed. W.M. Green (Tumhout: Brepols, 1970). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English


46

In addition to a synthesis between Christianity and Platonism, Augustine also

begins at Cassiciacum another process he will continue for the rest of his life:

synthesizing the events of his own life. De beata vita is Augustine’s first attempt to

synthesize and understand the events of his life up to that point through the telos of his

conversion. This type of synthesis is a major drive in Augustine’s life, as both

Confessiones and the Retractationes show him continuing this process of trying to re-

synthesize his life from whatever perspective he currently holds. Augustine is keen not

only to define himself, but to find continuity—or perhaps more accurately, unity—in that

self.

When Augustine tells Reason that he wishes to know God and the soul, he is also

expressing a desire to know himself, though this is not immediately clear. By Book II,

however, his opening prayer has changed to reflect this desire: “Deus semper idem,

noverim me, noverim te. Oratum est. [O God who is always the same, may I come to

know me and come to know You. That is my prayer.]”27 The soul Augustine speaks of

at the beginning of Book I comes to be understood as Augustine’s own soul, rather than

general, metaphysical knowledge. In particular, he wishes to know whether or not his

soul is immortal. As Reason asks him at the beginning of Book II, “Horum omnium,

quae te nescire dixisti, quid scire prius mavis?” [Now of all the things you say you don’t

know, which would you prefer to know first?]” to which Augustine replies, “Utrum

immortalis sim. [Whether I am immortal.]”

The self Augustine seeks knowledge of is not the material, mutable self. To

begin, Augustine seeks knowledge of his soul’s immortality, which reflects a desire not

only for immortality itself, but the immutability that accompanies immortality in both the

Platonic and the Christian conceptions. What Augustine seeks is knowledge of his

translations are taken from Against the Academicians and The Teacher, trans. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995) unless otherwise indicated.




47

unified self, and indeed, in seeking the knowledge, he seeks the unity itself, a quest he

will return to in the Confessions.

The type of knowledge Augustine is seeking, and the changes in self which must

be undertaken in order that this knowledge can be attained, are the subject matter of much

of Book I. Reason asks Augustine if he would be satisfied to know God as well as he

knows his friend Alypius, to which Augustine replies that his knowledge of Alypius is

insufficient, as it has been attained through the senses only: “Sensu quidem quod in eo

novi, si tamen sensu aliquid noscitur, et vile est et satis est. Illam vero partem, qua mihi

amicus est, id est ipsum animum, intellectu adsequi cupio. [What I know of him by sense,

if indeed anything can be known by sense, is worthless, and I have had enough of it. But

that part of him that makes him my friend, I want to grasp by the intellect.]”29 On these

grounds, Augustine argues that in truth, he really does not know Alypius. This causes

Reason some pause, but Augustine continues by pointing out that he does not really know

himself, either, and that Alypius also lacks self-knowledge, at least according to

Augustine’s definition. He asks Reason, “Itaque cum memetipsum ignorem, qua potest a

me adfici contumelia, quem mihi esse dixero ignotum, cum praesertim, ut credo, ne ipse

quidem se noverit? [since I do not know myself, how can it be held against me if I say

that someone is unknown to me, especially when, as I believe, he does not know

himself?]”30

Here the dichotomy between body and soul—perhaps better expressed as a

dichotomy between the material and the spiritual “senses”—emerges quite strongly, and

it remains strong throughout the entirety of the Soliloquia. Sensory knowledge has been

deemed inadequate in the attainment of real knowledge; it is neither a way to know God

nor a way to know other human beings. Instead, the road to self-knowledge is presented

in highly Plotinian terms. The soul must turn inward, toward itself and thus toward God.

29 Soliloquia, 1.3 .(8).



48

It must focus the entirety of its attention—and its desire—upon God, eschewing all that is

material.

The self as it is conceptualized by Augustine in the Soliloquia appears to be

completely interior; it is not a socially constructed self, although a poststructuralist might

describe the Augustinian self as textually constructed, put together using a combination

of Platonic and Christian texts. For Augustine, however, the socially constructed self is

something to be transcended, just as his conversion has allowed him to transcend the

“self’ that Roman society offered him, the false role of rhetor and possible politician he

could no longer play. This is not to say that Augustine is not himself affected by the

social forces of the late Roman Empire, but rather than such effects are extraneous to the

core self Augustine spends his life trying to access.

Augustine’s prayer at the beginning of Book I of the Soliloquia tells us all we

need to know on this score. Augustine tells God, “Nihil aliud habeo quam voluntatem,

nihil aliud scio nisi fluxa et caduca spemenda esse, certa et aetema requirenda. [I have

nothing except my will, I know nothing else except that the unstable and perishable

should be shunned, while the sure and the eternal should be pursued.]”31 He then asks

God, “Si autem est in me superflui alicuius adpetitio, tu ipse me munda et fac ideoneum

ad vivendum te. [If there is in me a desire for anything that would weigh me down, rid

me of it yourself, and make me fit to see you.]”32 The social world, the “city of man” as

Augustine will call it in De civitate dei, is the unstable and perishable, and should not

determine the soul, which is stable and eternal, although the soul possesses the free will

to choose the unstable and the perishable, should it so wish. The essential interiority of

the self cannot be made clearer.

But despite the self s interiority, there is also an indication that the self is not

completely free to throw off the things of this world on its own; it is not completely self-

sufficient. Augustine asks God to “rid me of it yourself,” making it quite clear that God’s




49

assistance is necessary for the self to rid itself of material concerns and find its true nature

and the knowledge of God it seeks. However, it would be a mistake to read Augustine’s

later understanding of the necessity of God’s grace backwards onto the Soliloquia. As

central as this position will become in the theology of the mature Augustine—and an

Augustine who is addressing Pelegianism—this is the sole passage in the Soliloquia that

suggests that such a reliance on God is necessary for the soul to make what has been

called Augustine’s “inward turn.” This should come as no surprise, as Augustine’s

earliest works are, in part, an effort to both combat and divest himself of Manichaeism.

The emphasis on the soul’s free will, as opposed to the dualism of Manichaeism—which

allowed adherents to place responsibility for sin on a “kingdom of darkness” equal to the

“kingdom of light”—is doubtless partially a reaction to Augustine’s recent abandoning of

that doctrine.

So, despite the call for God’s help in the opening prayer, the Soliloquia presents a

self that appears to have the power to make the decision—on its own—to make the

inward turn, using Reason as its guide. Reason explains to Augustine that “Aspectus

animae ratio est. Sed quia non sequitur ut omnis qui aspicit videat, aspectus rectus atque

perfectus, id est, quern visio sequitur, virtus vocatur; est enim virtus vel recta vel perfecta

ratio. [The soul’s vision is reason. But since it does not follow that looking always

results in seeing, the right and perfect looking which results in seeing is called virtue; for

virtue is right and perfect reason.]”33 Augustine is not entirely clear here how the soul is

to achieve this “right and perfect looking,” but it would appear to be an inborn capacity

and involve the process of using one’s reason, which is precisely what the Soliloquia

presents.

Augustine expresses a definite preference for the process of using reason. In De

quantitate animae, written in 388, Augustine comments that “Auctoritati credere

magnum compendium est, et nullus labor: quod si te delectat, poteris multa legere. [To

believe in authority is a considerable short-cut, with no work involved. If you are



50

attracted by this method, you can read many things concerning these matters.]”34 But

while belief in authority is acceptable, and is certainly enough for salavation, it is not

enough for Augustine. He continues:

Si autem cupiditatem istam refrenare non potes qua tibi persuasisti ratione pervenire ad veritatem, multi et longi circuitus tibi tolerandi sunt, ut non ratio te adducat, nisi ea quae sola ratio dicenda est, id est vera ratio; et non solum vera, sed ita certa, et ab omni similitudine falsitatis aliena, si tamen ullo modo haec ab homine inveniri potest, ut nullae disputationes falsae ut verisimiles ab ea te possint traducere.

However, if you cannot restrain that desire by which you have persuaded yourself to arrive at truth by reason, you must endure many long circuitous routes so that only that which ought to be called reason, that is true reason—and not only true, but so certain and free from every semblance of falsehood, if man can still in any way find such, that no false arguments or ones like to the truth can take you from it—may lead you.35

There is, perhaps, to the modem ear—though there certainly would not have been

to either Augustine or his contemporary readers—a hint of elitism in this passage, an

indication that the path of Reason is not one that all are equipped to follow, but one

which adds something quite valuable to an individual’s faith. A passage from De ordine,

while perhaps not completely dissuasive of charges of elitism, certainly serves to temper

the implication. Augustine makes it clear in this passage that the capacity to achieve

knowledge of the divine through Reason is common to all, though the individual is

required to first accept the authority of Scripture:

Itaque quamquam bonorum auctoritas imperitiae multitudine uideatur esse salubrior, ratio uero aptior eruditis, tamen, quia nullus hominum nisi ex imperito peritus fit, nullus autem imperitus nouit, qualem se debeat praebere docentibus et quali uita esse docilis possit, euenit, ut omnibus bona magna et occulta discere cupientibus non aperiat nisi auctoritas ianuam.

34 De quantitate animae, 7.(12), in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vol. 89, ed. Wolfgang Hermann (Wien: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1986). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translation is taken from Van Fleteren, 60-61.

35 De quantitate animae, 7.(12).


51

[Therefore, although the authority of good men seems to be more beneficial to the uninstructed multitude and reason more suitable for the learned, yet, since no man becomes learned unless from a state of ignorance and moreover since no unlearned man knows what sort of a man he ought to be to give himself to his teachers and by what sort of a life he can become teachable, it happens that, for all who desire to learn great and hidden goods, only authority opens the door.]36

That the unlearned can learn the Truths of Scripture and, having gained authoritative

knowledge, are then ready to move to the project of using reason to understand the

knowledge gained. According to Augustine, “the role of authority is to give man the

moral precepts by which he can become teachable. In this sense, authority has a temporal

priority since man needs a certain moral purity as a preparation for his intellectual

training.”37

These passages suggest, as does a third passage from the Soliloquia, that there are

many ways to God, many ways to attain wisdom. In the Soliloquia, it is made clear that

the process of using one’s reason to understand the Divine Truth is what leads the soul to

wisdom, and Reason makes it clear to Augustine that there are several paths to wisdom.

He tells Augustine, “Sed non ad earn una via pervenitur. Quippe pro sua quisque sanitate

ac firmitate comprehendit illud singulare ac verissimum bonum. [But there is not just one

way to her. Indeed, each one seizes that unique and truest good, according to his or her

own strength.]” It is not entirely clear what Augustine means by this statement, however.

He appears to be arguing, both here and in the passages which lead up to this remark, that

there is one wisdom, one unique and truest good, but that there are different paths leading

to it. Each “comprehendit [seizes]” that singular good, but according to his individual

“sanitate ac firmitate [health and strength.]”

36 De ordine, 2.9.(26).6-12, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. 29, ed. W.M. Green (Tumhout: Brepols, 1970). All Latin quotations are taken from this volume. English translation is taken from Van Fleteren, 50.



52

These two words are a source of perplexity. They could be read as meaning that

each of us will attain that level of wisdom our strength allows, but that cannot be what

Augustine is trying to say in this passage. If there is one wisdom—and on that point

Augustine is completely clear—it cannot be divided into levels, because to so divide it

would be to deny it its essential oneness. So he cannot mean some sort of stratification

by “strength and health,” as it would serve to divide wisdom as well as to deny all seekers

equal participation in that wisdom. While there are problematic passages in later

Augustinian works that deal with the issue of inequality of works in this life and rewards

in the life to come, this does not appear to be at issue in the Soliloquia.

Carol Harrison offers a comparison to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as an

explanation for this passage. She explains that

Wisdom is like the intellectual light of minds—Reason draws on Plato’s allegory of the Cave {Republic 7.514) and the analogy of light: some can look at the sun directly, others are blinded by it and seek out the shade, needing to be gradually accustomed to its brilliance by first looking at objects upon which the light shines, then, as the light intensifies, upon shiny objects like gold and silver, fire, the stars, the moon, the dawn, and then perhaps finally, the sun.38

This explanation is reasonable, given the nearness in time of the Soliloquia to

Augustine’s Platonic roots, as is that of Frederick Van Fleteren, who argues that “The

remark in the Soliloquies refers to the different degrees of mental purification needed by

individuals to attain the vision of God.”39 Yet the need of Harrison and Van Fleteren—as

well as other critics—to ensure that Augustine is not claiming multiple paths to

wisdom—and hence to God—is in direct opposition to Augustine’s own comments upon

this passage in the Retractationes.

38 Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5. While Augustine most likely did not have access to Plato’s Republic, Harrison points out that Cicero uses the same image in De Finibus 3.14.38.



53

Forty-one years after this passage was written, Augustine reads it quite differently

than Harrison or Van Fleteren do. Though generally approving of what he had written in

the Soliloquia, Augustine does take issue with this statement.

Item quod dixi ad sapientiae coniunctionem non una uia perveniri non bene sonat; quasi alia via praeter Christum quo dixit: “ego sum uia.”Vitanda ergo erat haec offensio aurium religiosarum quamuis alia sit ilia universalis via, aliae autem uiae, de quibus et in Psalmo canimus: “uias tuas, Domine, notas fac mihi et semitas tuas doce me.”

[Likewise, this statement of mine does not sound well: “There is more than one way of attaining union with wisdom,” as if there were another way besides Christ who said: “I am the way.” I should, therefore, have avoided this offense to pious ears; even though there is that one universal way, yet there are other ways about which also we sing in the Psalm: “O Lord, make known to me Thy ways and teach me Thy paths.”]40

In contradiction to readings provided by Augustine scholars, Augustine believes that

what he meant in the Soliloquia, was that there are multiple paths to God. He later

considers this remark improper, as his theological growth has brought him to the belief

that Christ is the only way to God, the mediator granted to humanity through God’s

grace.

I am not certain why modem readers of Augustine distrust Augustine’s ability to

read his own work. Van Fleteren, for example, says that “In view of the meaning of the

original text in the Soliloquia and Augustine’s comment that it does not ‘sound correct,’

we should be hesitant in affirming that this text means that Augustine held to any

salvation outside of Christ, i.e. by reason alone.” While I would agree with Van Fleteren

that Augustine is not saying that there is salvation in reason alone—the above passages

from De ordine and De quantitate animae make this perfectly clear—Augustine himself

is of the opinion that he was advocating multiple paths to wisdom, and I see no reason

why we should call that judgment into question. I suspect that this distrust of the later

Augustine’s ability to read the earlier Augustine accurately stems from the same thinking

that has made so many readers of the Confessions distrustful of Augustine’s account of

40 Retractationes 1.4.31-36.


54

his early, pre-Catholic life. The later Augustine is often read as severely biased, and

seemingly unable to report the truth of his early life and early writings because his mature

Christianity blinds him to the reality of his past by making him hostile towards it.

I accept Augustine’s reading of his own work, in all but one case, which I will

come to in the next chapter. Advocating multiple paths to a single truth seems consistent

with the rest of Augustine’s early work—indeed, these passages indicate at least two, the

path through authority and the path through authority and reason. King Alfred has also

decided that this passage indicates multiple paths to wisdom, as his emendations indicate.

By the end of the Soliloquia, and up through at least AD 391, a concept of the self

emerges that (1) is individual in nature, particularly given its ability to choose its own

path to a single Truth; (2) exercises an appreciable amount of free will and agency; (3) is

definitely interior, with the soul taking precedence over the body as the true “seat” of the

self; (4) exists a priori, and thus before social existence—and as such cannot be said to

be socially constructed in the sense that modem theory understands social construction,

with society working upon a blank slate and the self becoming a self a posteriori. For

Augustine, there remains an “essence” which retains the possibility of transcending

society’s attempts at construction, though it is not always successful in mounting its

campaign of resistance.

For the most part, these aspects of the self remain constant in Augustine’s writing,

though the ways in which they are understood change as he grows as a theologian. Only

the second aspect is appreciably changed as we move from the early Augustine to the

later. Though the concept of free will expressed in De libero arbitrio, most likely written

between 387 and 391 (possibly being finished as late as 395) maintains the concept of

free will found in the early works, in De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum—letters

written in 396 in answer to questions posed by Simplicianus, soon to succeed Ambrose as

Bishop of Milan—Augustine’s concept of free will has been radically altered through a

doctrine of God’s grace that certainly serves to change his conception of self, particularly

the question of agency.


55

III. T h e P a u l in e S h i f t f r o m D e L ib e r o A r b it r io t o A d S i m p l i c i a n u m d e d i v e r s i s

Q u a e s t i o n i b u s

De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum are two books written in response to biblical

questions sent to Augustine by Simplicianus, who succeeded Ambrose as Bishop of

Milan and who told Augustine the story of the conversion of Victorinus, one of the

stories o f conversion which precipitated Augustine’s own.41 The answers provided to

Simplicianus’s questions in Ad Simplicianum are considered by many Augustine scholars

to mark a turning point in his theology. Of this work, Augustine himself says in the

Retractationes,

In cuius quaestionis solutione laboratum est quidem pro libero arbitrio uoluntatis humanae, sed uicit dei gratia; nec nisi ad illud potuit perueniri, ut liquidissima ueritate dixisse intellegatur apostulus: Quis enim te discemit? Quid autem habes quod non accepisti? Si autem accepisti, quid gloriaris quasi non acceperis?

[I, indeed, labored in defense of the free choice of the human will; but the grace of God conquered, and finally I was able to understand, with full clarity, the meaning of the Apostle: “For who singles thee out? Or what hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received it, why dost thou boast as if thou hadst not received it?]”42

This emphasis on the grace of God greatly contrasts with De libero arbitrio, begun in 387

but likely finished between 391 and 395, putting at least its second and third books quite

close to Ad Simplicianum chronologically. What has changed in between these two

works is the ability of the individual will to do good, or at least the ability of the will to

do good without having first received the gift of God’s grace which “enables” it to do

good.

We already have some indication o f the amount o f agency Augustine grants the

individual in the early dialogues; I do not think this has been much reduced by the time of

41 Augustine recounts the story of Victorinus is in Confessions 8.2.



56

De libero arbitrio. In Book Three, addressing his interlocutor Evodius, Augustine states,

“nihil tarn in nostra potestate quam ipsa uoluntas est. Ea enim prorsus nullo interuallo

mox ut uolumus praesto est. . . . Quam ob rem, quamuis praesciat deus nostras uoluntates

futuras, non ex eo tamen conficitur, ut non uoluntate aliquid uelimus. [nothing is so much

within our power as the will itself, for it is near at hand the very moment that we will . . . .

Therefore, although God foreknows what we are going to will in the future, it does not

follow that we do not will by the will.]”43 This would appear to have the effect of placing

the power to do good in the individual will, a power which Augustine will grant to the

grace of God alone when he answers Simplicianus. Augustine also argues that “si neque

sua neque aliena natura peccare quis cogitur, restat ut propria uoluntate peccetur. [if no

one is compelled to sin, whether by his own nature or by someone else’s, the only

remaining possibility is that we sin by our own will.]”44

This is not the position of the mature Augustine, and Augustine appears to

recognize this in his entry on De libero arbitrio in the Retractationes. In an unusually

long entry, Augustine takes great pains to rescue this early work from the hands of the

Pelagians, who see in its championing of free will a position similar to their own. Not

wanting to be associated with those he has now spent more than a decade arguing against,

Augustine uses this lengthy chapter to re-interpret his earlier work, stressing those few

passages which mention grace. By the time he has finished, he has refashioned De libero

arbitrio into a prescient attack on Pelagianism. This is only done, however, through the

introduction of parts of Romans 7:7-25, one of the passages Augustine responds to in Ad

Simplicianum.

quod enim operor non intellego non enim quod volo hoc ago sed quod odi illud facio consentio legi quoniam bona nunc autem iam non ego operor illud sed quod habitat in me peccatum scio enim quia non habitat in me hoc est in came mea

43 De libero arbitrio 3.3.63-65, 69-71, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. XXIX ed. W.M. Green (Tumhout: Brepols, 1970). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from On Free Choice o f the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993) unless otherwise indicated.

44 De libero arbitrio 3.16.32-34.


57

bonum non inventio non enim quod volo bonum hoc facio sed quod nolo manum hoc ago.

[For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do. If then I do that which I will not,I consent to the law, that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in my flesh, that which is good. For to will, is present with me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do.]

In De libero arbitrio, Augustine uses this passage to illustrate that “Et tamen etiam per

ignorantiam facta quaedam inprobantur et corrigenda iudicantur, sicut in diuinus

auctoritatibus legimius. [Nevertheless, even things done by necessity are to be

condemned, as when someone wants to act rightly but cannot.]”45 This is the extent of

his exegesis.

In Retractationes, however, Augustine’s reading of this passage reflects what he

says of it in Ad Simplicianum, as we will see in a moment. In Retractationes, Augustine

asserts that this passage is a commentary on humanity’s fallen will, and argues that it is in

our nature to be unable to become better on our own:

Si enim non receditur ab eo modo quo naturaliter factus est, ita ut melius esse non possit, ea quae debet facit, cum haec facit. Si autem bonus homo esset, aliter esset. Nunc autem quia ita est, non est bonus nee habet in potestate ut bonus sit, siue non uidendo qualis esse debeat, siue uidendo et non ualendo esse qualem debere esse se uidet.

[In truth, if there is no departure from that state in which man was so made by nature that he cannot become better, he does what he ought when he does these things. If, however, man were good, he would be otherwise; but because he is as he is now, he is not good and he does not have the power to be good, either because he does not see what kind of man he ought to be, or he sees and does not have the strength to be what he sees he ought to be.]46

45 De Libero Arbitrio 3.18.12-14.



58

While I am generally reluctant to disbelieve Augustine’s interpretations of his own

writing, I think that the desire to dissuade readers from thinking he had once taken a

position similar to Pelagius caused him to assert that he was taking a position in De libero

arbitrio that he did not actually take until Ad Simplicianum. De libero arbitrio does not

argue that the human will, fallen and imperfect, is incapable of willing its own good,

though Ad Simplicianum does.

In a newly written introduction to his 1964 biography of Augustine, Gerald

Bonner recognizes the importance of this passage from the Retractationes, and seeks to

place Ad Simplicianum on a much higher level of importance than he had in his original

work:

Decisively, Augustine here broke with the reservations which he had expressed in his first commentary on the epistles of St Paul, composed when he was still a presbyter in 394, in which he had spoken of God’s gift of mercy being given to the preceding merit of faith. Everything was of God. Man could do nothing.47

In his own biography of Augustine, Peter Brown’s assessment of the importance of this

text agrees with Bonner’s: “For the first time, Augustine came to see man as utterly

dependent on God, even for his first initiative of believing in Him.”48

Like Bonner and Brown, I do not think the importance of this shift in Augustine’s

thinking can be stressed enough. He has made a move in the Ad Simplicianum which

severely curtails the amount of agency the self enjoys. If we cannot even turn to God by

our own will, but must first receive God’s grace in order to have the strength of will

necessary to make the turn, a great deal of our agency has been removed. It is no longer

within the power of the individual to make the choice to turn to God; instead, God must

first empower that individual to do so. As Augustine explains, “peccatum sine gratia dei

uinci non posset, ipsa reatus sollicitudine ad percipiendam gratiam conuerteretur. [Sin

cannot be overcome without the grace of God, so the law was given to convert the soul

47 Gerald Bonner, St Augustine o f Hippo (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1964/2002), 3.

48 Brown, 148.


59

by anxiety about its guilt, so that it might be ready to receive grace.]”49 There is a bit of

circumlocution here, but essentially, this passage states that God gave us the law—the

Old Testament—in order to make us aware of our sinful nature. We know sin through

the law; because of its proscriptions, we understand what sin is. But knowing the law and

attempting to follow it are not enough to make the turn to God, and not enough for

salvation. Knowing the law is only sufficient to make us eligible for the gift of God’s

grace, which may or may not be granted an individual. This, of course, brings up the

question of predestination, which is addressed briefly in the answer to Simplicianus’s

first question, but is taken up at length in the answer to the second, which is an exegesis

of Romans 9:10-29, wherein Paul engages in an exegesis of the story of Jacob and Esau.

Augustine argues in the first answer that neither he nor Paul is abridging

humanity’s free will. He explains that Romans 7:18-19, in which Paul states “Velle

enim, adiacet mihi, perficere autem bonum non [To will is present with me, but to do that

which is good I find not],” might “his uerbis uidetur non recte intellegentibus uelut

auferre liberum arbitrium [to those who do not rightly understand these words . . . seem

by them to take away free will],” but argues that “Certe enim ipsum uelle in potestate est,

quoniam adiacet nobis; sed quod perficere bonum non est in potestate, ad meritum

pertinet originalis peccati. [If that is so, actual willing is certainly within our power; that

it is not in our power to do that which is good is part of the deserts of original sin.]”50

Humanity, bom into original sin, is by nature unable to do that which is good by an act of

unaided will. Only the gift of God’s grace is sufficient to provide that power.

The second response, the exegesis of Romans 9:10-29, attempts to answer the

question of who is granted the gift of God’s grace. While Augustine claims to have trod

a fine line between free will and predestination in crafting this exegesis, he appears to

49 De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum l.l.(2).34-36, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. XLIV ed. Almut Mutzenbecher (Tumhout: Brepols, 1970). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from To Simplician—On Various Questions, Book I, in Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. John H.S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press,1953), 370-406, unless otherwise indicated.

50 De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum 1.1.(11). 188-189, 191-193.


60

have had a great deal of difficulty reconciling his new understanding of Paul’s Letter to

the Romans with his earlier conception of free will.

The question confronting Paul—and thus Augustine—is God’s “election” of

Jacob and His condemnation of Esau in Genesis 27. The question for both theologians is

on what grounds God makes this decision, and what distinction exists between Jacob and

Esau to allow such a choice to be made in the first place. I am not going to focus my

attention on either Paul’s or Augustine’s exegesis of the passage from Genesis; I merely

want to examine some of the conclusions Augustine draws from his exegesis. Augustine

begins by telling Simplicianus that “non se quisque arbitretur ideo percepisse gratiam,

quia bene operatus est [No man is to think that he has received grace because he has done

good works].”51 Our actions in this world, therefore, are not the determining factor in our

salvation. Instead, it appears to be the other way around: “Vocantis est ergo gratia,

percipientis uero gratiam consequenter sunt opera bona, non quae gratiam pariant, sed

quae gratia pariantur. [Grace is therefore of him who calls, and the consequent works are

of him who receives grace. Good works do not produce grace, but are produced by

grace.]”52 This appears to severely limit the individual’s participation in his or her own

salvation; it also appears that God’s decision to grant individual grace plays some part in

determining whether or not a person is able to choose good over evil.

Augustine attempts to diffuse this rather disquieting implication through a passage

which seems to grant grace to the person who chooses to believe: “Incipit autem homo

percipere gratiam, ex quo incipit deo credere uel interna uel extema admonitione motus

ad fidem. [A man begins to receive grace from the moment when he begins to believe in

God, being moved to faith by some internal or external admonition].” This would seem

to place some agency back in the hands of the individual, who must choose whether or

51 De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, 1.2.(2)25-26.

52 De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, 1.2.(3).84-86.

53 De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, 1,2.(2).27-29.


61

not to believe. Yet a few chapters later, Augustine states that “Nisi ergo uocando

praecedat misericordia dei, nec credere quisquam potest, ut ex hoc incipiat iustificari et

accipere facultatem bene operandi [Unless, therefore, the mercy of God in calling

precedes, no one can even believe, and so begin to be justified and to receive power to do

good works].”54 The decision to believe itself, then, appears also to be predicated on

God’s grace; God’s grace temporally precedes an individual’s belief in revelation.

Again, this emerging doctrine finds its impetus in a particular view of human

nature. Towards the end of this second answer, Augustine explains why human nature

has made the gift of grace necessary:

Sed quis potest credere, nisi aliqua uocatione, hoc est aliqua rerum testificatione, tangatur? Quis habet in potestate tali uiso attingi mentem suam, quo eius uoluntas moueatur ad fidem? Quis autem animo amplectitur aliquid quod eum non delectat? Aut quis habet in potestate, ut uel occurrat quod eum delectare possit, uel delectet cum occurrerit?

But who can believe unless he is reached by some calling, by some testimony borne to the truth? Who has it in his power to have such a motive present to his mind that his will shall be influenced to believe?Who can welcome in his mind something which does not give him delight? But who has it in his power to ensure that something that will delight him will turn up, or that he will take delight in what turns up?55

What we take delight in, our nature “uncorrected” by God’s grace, is sin. Only through

God’s grace can human nature learn to take delight in what is good and charitable.

Furthermore, not every individual is granted God’s grace, or even has the possibility of

receiving it, which is the point of the exegesis on the story of Jacob and Esau, the first

granted the grace of God and the second having it withheld from him, for reasons which

must remain a mystery to us, but which are, Augustine assures Simplicianus, just.

Augustine attempts to shy away from predestination, but in the end it is a doctrine

of predestination that emerges from Ad Simplicianum. As he comes to the conclusion of




62

his answer to the second question, Augustine divides humanity into two groups: those

whom God has chosen to save and those whom he has chosen to damn. Those whom he

has chosen to damn are on earth for the edification of those whom he has chosen to save:

“Sed tamen ut uasa eos perditionis faciat ad usum correctionis aliorum [In making them

vessels of perdition, he makes them for the correction of others].”56 More than any other,

this rather harsh statement reveals the extent to which Augustine’s theology has shifted;

some people are created already damned by God merely to act as lessons for those who

have been saved. Free will and agency have been severely curtailed, and the emphasis on

the use of reason, so central to the Soliloquia and other early works, is removed.

Augustine quotes from Paul’s Letter to the Phillipians: “Work out your own salvation

with fear and trembling; for it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his

good pleasure.”57

This shift is of tremendous importance to our understanding of the Confessions', it

provides the most rational explanation for the differences in the way Augustine depicts

his conversion in Confessions as opposed to earlier accounts. While I don’t see Ad

Simplicianum as a barrier between an earlier and a later Augustine, I do think that this

letter and its working out of the implications of Paul’s Letter to the Romans do represent

a watershed in Augustine’s thought. If Augustine’s thought can be said to follow an

evolutionary path, the Ad Simplicianum represents a definite mutation.

But, before proceeding to the Confessions, one last point must be considered, and

that is the implications of certain passages of Ad Simplicianum for the question of

individuality. The call each of us must receive from God if we are to be saved is

explained as individualized, at least to the degree that each individual is called in the

manner most suited to him. Augustine tells Simplicianus that “quia si uellet etiam

ipsorum misereri, posset ita uocare, quomodo illis aptum esset, ut et mouerentur et

intellegerent et sequerentur [If God wills to have mercy on men, he can call them in a

56 De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum 1.2.(18).576-577.

57 Phil. 2:12-13.


63r o

way that is suited to them, so that they will be moved to understand and to follow].”

The emphasis on the individual nature of the call is reminiscent of the multiple paths to

God which Augustine speaks of in the Soliloquia. He goes on to say,

Cum ergo alius sic alius autem sic molueatur ad fidem, eademque res saepe alio modo dicta moueat alio modo dicta non moueat, aliumque moueat alium non moueat, quis audeat dicere defuisse deo modum uocandi, quo etiam Esau ad earn fidem mentem adplicaret uoluntatemque coniungeret, in qua Iacob iustificatus est.

[Since, then, people are brought to faith in such different ways, and the same thing spoken in one way has the power to move and has no such power when spoken in another way, or may move one man and not another, who would dare to affirm that God has no method of calling whereby even Esau might have applied his mind and yoked his will to the faith in which Jacob was justified?]59

What are left with, then, in Ad Simplicianum, is the doctrine that in order to be saved, one

must be called from God—granted the gift of God’s mercy/grace—and that those who

are called by God are called in a way appropriate to each individual person. This shift in

doctrine is crucial to an understanding of the Confessions, written just one year after Ad

Simplicianum.

IV . A u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l A g e n c y in t h e C o n f e s s i o n s

Confessions was written during the years a d 397-401, approximately one year after

Augustine had succeeded to the episcopacy of Hippo, and approximately one year after

writing De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum. Augustine was motivated to write

the Confessions in part by a need to answer the allegations of his critics, who questioned

the lack o f continuity between the profligate and Manichean Augustine they had known

in Thagaste before he left for Rome and Milan and the pious Augustine who had


59 De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, 1.2.(14).400-405.


64

returned. Augustine needed to repudiate his former Manichean beliefs and his earlier

decision to pursue a secular career as a teacher of rhetoric—a lofty position, but one

which was amoral at best. As he himself points out in Book 8, his detractors were

particularly interested in the reasons behind his “delay” in leaving his teaching position

after his conversion; Augustine’s conversion came some twenty days before the end of

the school term, so he elected to delay handing in his resignation until then. For some,

however, this delay cast doubts upon the validity of the conversion itself; presumably,

what was wanted by his detractors was an immediate renunciation of the material life he

had led up until that point.

These doubts about the validity of Augustine’s conversion to Catholic Christianity

are understood by most scholars of the period to stem from the pervasiveness of the

Donatist heresy in North Africa at the time of his assumption of the bishopric. The

events of Augustine’s early life were enough, as Confessions makes painfully clear, to

invite Donatist charges of his unworthiness to administer the sacraments. Though

Augustine himself dismissed Donatism as heretical, the fact remains that the majority of

Christians practicing in the Numidian province and in the City of Hippo in particular

were Donatists. Wisdom would dictate that Augustine do his best to demonstrate his

worthiness, if for no other reason than to gain validity in the eyes of the Donatists and

perhaps use that validity to reintegrate them into orthodoxy.

This practical reason for writing the Confessions may appear unconnected to the

trajectory of Augustine’s writing that I began building in the previous chapter, but it is

not. One of the ways in which Augustine validates his past life—not just for his audience

but for himself, as well—is to come to an understanding of it as part of a divine plan.

Reprehensible as his past actions were, they did serve to lead him, albeit slowly, to a life

in the Church. If our lives are predestined by God, and if He has already chosen whom

he will call in the timelessness of eternity, then Augustine was always being called, and

the fact of his answering that call was predestined by God. His life has a telos\ now that

he has reached its seeming endpoint, becoming the bishop of Hippo, it is possible to look

back upon that life and see each event for what it was: a step—or a misstep in the right


65

direction—on the path to the present. As a result, Augustine is able to not only justify his

past to his critics, but he is able to use his own life as an exemplum of the doctrine of

predestination that his new reading of Paul has led him to develop.

If, however, it was Augustine’s intention to interpret his life in this way, he was

not completely successful. The doctrine of predestination Augustine established in the

Ad Simplicianum completely removes the ability to do good from the individual who acts

under his or her own volition. The ability to do good can only come with the gift of

God’s grace, and as a result human beings cease to become agents of their own salvation,

or at least they are divested of the ability to make the initial turn toward God that was a

crucial part of the early Augustine’s Platonist influenced understanding of salvation. The

problem that results when writing an autobiography from this perspective is that such a

severe version of predestination runs counter to lived experience. At the very least, we

appear to ourselves as agents as we go about our day-to-day existence.

Barring neurological trauma, it is biologically impossible for us to conceive of

ourselves otherwise. Despite Augustine’s belief in God’s predestination, the biological

fact remains that human beings conceive of themselves as agents— indeed, they conceive

of themselves as the protagonists of their own personal narrative. Neurologist Antonio

Damasio explains:

You know that you are conscious, you feel that you are in the act of knowing, because the subtle imaged account that is now flowing in the stream of your organism’s thoughts exhibits the knowledge that your proto-self has been changed by an object that has just become salient in the mind. You know you exist because the narrative exhibits you as protagonist in the act of knowing. You rise above the sea level of knowing, transiently but incessantly, as a fe lt core self, renewed again and again, thanks to anything that comes from outside the brain into its sensory machinery or anything that comes from the brain’s memory stores toward sensory, motor, or autonomic recall. You know it is you seeing because the story depicts a character—you—doing the seeing. The first basis for the conscious you is a feeling which arises in the rerepresentation of the nonconscious proto-self in the process o f being modified within an account which establishes the cause of the


66

modification. The first trick behind consciousness is the creation of this account, and its first feeling is the feeling of knowing.60

It is clear from Damasio’s account that the perception of one’s self as an autobiographical

agent is hardwired into the human brain; the reflexivity of the core self knowing itself

takes the form of a narrative with each individual the agent at that narrative’s center. So,

despite Augustine’s personal belief in the predestination of human souls, the fact of his

human existence causes him to conceive of himself as an agent, at least in those moments

when the idea of predestination is not present in his immediate consciousness.

Because of this inescapable aspect of human nature, as Augustine recounted the

story of his early life and eventual conversion in Confessions, it appears that he could not

help but use the language of agency and as a result present an agent who often appears

responsible for taking action—for doing good. This agency is in turn undercut by

passages of commentary which serve to return ultimate agency to God. The result is a

text that is pulled in two different directions, and this is likely a primary cause for the

multiplicity of readings of the Confessions that have been forwarded in the sixteen

centuries since it was written.

Synthesizing these various readings is an impossible task. The most reasonable

course of action—for the Confessions and Augustine in general—is to simply accept this

tension in the text, and realize that Augustine is explaining the relation of agency to

necessity. This is particularly so for the medievalist reader of Augustine, because these

tensions are largely responsible for the wide spectrum of readings of Augustine produced

during the medieval period. When we further consider that medieval readers of

Augustine were generally not able to sit down with the entire Augustinian canon (and

often sat down with works that were wrongly attributed to Augustine), we can understand

60 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling o f What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making o f Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999), 171-172. Emphasis his.


67

why Alfred’s translation of the Soliloquia, which uses not only this early text for its

source material, but the later De videndo deo as well, is not entirely Augustinian.61

I wish to consider two seemingly opposed readings of the Confessions here: the

first reading discovers an Augustinian self who is a predestined soul, with an individual

life being read teleologically. The second discovers an autobiographical agent at the

heart of the Confessions, an agent who exercises control over his own narrative. The life

that emerges in such a reading is also teleological, but in more extreme versions of this

reading, it is the author himself who exercises teleological control over his life, choosing

his own endpoint from which to order the events being recounted. Both readings must be

understood, however, in light of the larger context of Augustine’s Christian theology

circa AD 401.62

L The Predestined Soul and Its Body

At the heart of the Confessions is Augustine’s conversion to Catholicism; few readers

would disagree with this statement. In recent years, however, the nature of that

conversion and its grounding in an emerging theology of predestination and grace have

been largely ignored by all by all but the most rigorous theological readings of the text.

Instead, the text has been read more and more frequently as if it were a literary text, with

various philosophies and theories being brought to bear upon it, and the theological

aspects being dealt with peripherally, if at all.63 Part of the problem with these readings

is the divorcing of the text from its author’s intentions; what Augustine meant to do in the

611 do not mean to suggest that the Confessions had any impact on Alfred’s Soliloquies. There is no indication that Alfred would have known the Confessions', there is also no indication that he did not.

621 have chosen to forego a separate discussion of the Platonism of the Confessions, largely because such discussions are numerous and there is little that can be added. It should be understood however, that the Platonic elements of the Confessions must also be understood in light o f Augustine’s Christian theology circa AD 401, as my brief discussion of the “Platonic ascent” in Book VII attempts to do.

63 For a brief overview of recent criticism of the Confessions, see Hubertus R. Drobner, “Studying Augustine: A Brief Overview of Recent Research,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour o f Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 18-34. Pages 20-21 deal with the Confessions.


68

Confessions should be the primary consideration in any reading seeking historical

understanding of the work itself.64

This is not to say that these literary readings are without merit; when their

methodology is combined with a thorough understanding of the theological milieu in

which the Confessions was written, they can actually serve to illuminate the text for the

modem reader in ways which theological readings alone are often incapable of. Brian

Stock’s reading of Augustine, which focuses a great deal of attention upon the

Confessions, examines “Augustine’s concern with the self as a reader, that is, with the

personal understanding that can be created through a mental ‘rereading’ of the narrative

of previous events lodged in memory.”65 Such a conception of Augustine is obviously

pertinent to the reading of Augustine as autobiographical agent, but it also provides a

methodology by which to read the new understanding Augustine has gained of himself

through his rereading of Paul. In Stock’s terms, Augustine’s rereading of Paul has caused

him to reread his own life’s narrative.

Stock’s analysis of Augustine is concerned with the process by which this

rereading takes place, and while his reading of Augustine can sometimes reduce reality to

the textual, his description of the process is useful in examining the content that

Augustine is rereading and rewriting. Like many studies of Augustine, Stock does not

include Ad Simplicianum, and this omission prevents him from fully analyzing the

ramifications of Augustine’s process of rereading his life in the Confessions, something I

hope the following reading will serve to rectify.

What the Confessions reveal is that the quest for self-understanding and self

integration that mark the Soliloquia has reached a degree of theological maturity and

64 In a literary study such as this one, this comment necessarily raises the specter of the intentional fallacy. However, I am not attempting to write literary criticism o f Confessions in this chapter, but instead come to a deeper historical understanding of the text. Because of this, Augustine’s intentions are relevant, and given the enormous body of work he produced in his lifetime, his intentions are hardly opaque to the modem reader.

65 Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics o f Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1.


69

sophistication that Augustine was incapable of in AD 386-387. While the Platonic

elements of the self that characterize the earlier writings remain in the Confessions, the

events of his life, as Stock and most readers of Augustine point out, have been

reinterpreted between a d 386 and AD 401. He has found, through the practice of reading

his life teleologically and typologically—one of the purposes of Books 11-13—a way in

which to integrate not only the events of his individual life into a unified whole, but also

a way in which to integrate that individual life into the unified whole of Creation itself.

But what many readings seeking to explain this integration fail to acknowledge is

the price that is paid for this integration: the severe curtailing of human agency that

accompanies Augustine’s new understanding of Paul and, subsequently, his own life. We

alone cannot be responsible for our own choosing of the good; the responsibility for our

ability to choose the good is God’s alone. The expression of this theology is perhaps

clearest in the scene of Augustine’s conversion in the garden at Milan. Augustine cannot

turn to God of his own accord; even the desire to make the turn comes as a result of

God’s grace. What is made absolutely clear in Book 8 is that Augustine cannot take the

final, necessary step to renouncing his past life of his own accord. He must first be called

to take up and read. The children playing outside the garden, as Augustine points out, are

speaking through God’s agency. Gone is the intellectual depiction of conversion seen in

Augustine’s earlier writing, and the Platonic attempt at ascent portrayed in Book 7 is

revealed as useful but ultimately insufficient. The approach to God through the use of

human reason has been replaced by a journey to God that must be initiated by God, not

by the individual. The momentarily successful approach to the Godhead in Book 7 was

successful only because Augustine had always already been called in the mind of the

eternal God.66

Reading Confessions in this way means that while Stock’s claim that Augustine is

rereading and rewriting his life remains valid, we must call into question the level of

agency that Augustine asserts in so doing. We may see Augustine as claiming agency for

66 This does not cause Augustine to abandon the use of reason to know God altogether, however; the knowledge of God gained in De trinitate, for example, is obtained partly through the use of reason.


70

himself in rewriting the events of his life, but Augustine would certainly not have seen it

that way. In Augustinian theology, those events and Augustine’s rewriting of them have

already been preordained by God’s decree. We see this in Book 4, which Augustine

begins with a brief prayer to God that God will grant him the ability to remember the

events he wishes to recount: “sine me, obsecro, et da mihi circuire praesenti memoria

praeteritos circuitus erroris mei et immolare tibi hostiam iubilationis. quid enim sum ego

mihi sine te nisi dux in praeceps? [Allow me, I pray you, grant me leave to run through

my memory, as it is in the present, of the past twistings of my mistaken life and to

sacrifice to you ‘a victim of jubilation’ (Ps. 26:6). Without you, what am I but a guide to

my own self-destruction?]” Augustine cannot “create” himself in the text of the

Confessions-, only God can create. This emphasis on predestination that comes as a result

of Augustine’s new understanding of Paul constitutes the “unsavoury part of Augustine’s

doctrine,” and is, in the words of James Wetzel, “theological dynamite . . . every bit as. • ASunpalatable as his judicious critics could have imagined.” Because human beings are

incapable of doing good of their own volition, Augustine’s conversion and subsequent

understanding of himself can only come from God’s gift of grace. Though Augustine

may will himself to make the turn to God and a new understanding of his own life, his

will is capable of doing so only because it has been strengthened by God’s grace; by its

own nature, the human will is necessary, but insufficient.

This view of human nature must inform our understanding of the Augustinian

self, and it must weigh heavily on our readings of any Augustinian work written after AD

396. Wetzel’s reading of the Confessions anticipates my first reading in this respect:

It is not implausible to suppose that, in a d 397, Augustine wrote hisConfessions out of the impetus of his new reading of Paul and that the

67 Confessions 4.1.(1), in Confessions, Vol. 1, ed. J.J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) unless otherwise indicated.

68 James Wetzel, “Snares of Truth: Augustine on Free Will and Predestination,” in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour o f Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 124, 126.


71

conversion he describes so memorably in Book 8 owes as much to exegetical insight as it does to his recollection of an experience more than ten years old. I do not mean to suggest by this that his account is unfaithful to his experience, but more that the meaning of his experience had to wait upon his revision of Paul.69

Far from being implausible, it would be surprising if this major change in Augustine’s

theology did not have an effect on Confessions. A fundamental aspect of human

existence has changed for Augustine with vfe? Simplicianum, telling the story of his own

existence must change as well.

Furthermore, Wetzel’s reading has the advantage of being “charitable.” By this I

mean that he is not seeing in Augustine’s re-working of the story of his conversion any

deliberate dishonesty, but rather the attempt to tell the story of his past using the newly

gained understanding of his present. Gerald Bonner has said of such uncharitable

readings that “one may question the inherent probability of anyone holding the

theological opinions of Augustine when he came to write the Confessions deliberately

incorporating material which he knew to be untrue.”70 Bonner and Wetzel both

acknowledge the obvious truth that the meaning of an event often reveals itself long after

the event itself has occurred; Wetzel applies this facet of human understanding to the

scene of Augustine’s conversion in the Confessions. Stock’s “textual” reading of

Augustine exhibits much the same understanding; Augustine’s acts of rereading are, at

their core, really no different from the retroactive understanding described by Bonner and

Wetzel. But, while Stock provides a thorough reading of the Confessions, he does not

always address key theological issues; and while Wetzel addresses key theological issues,

his is not a thorough reading of the Confessions. What is called for, then, is a thorough

reading of Confessions that addresses these key theological issues.

69 Wetzel, “Snares of Truth,” 128.

70 Gerald Bonner, St Augustine o f Hippo: Life and Controversies, 3rd ed. (Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2002), 44.


72

The emphasis on predestination and God’s agency permeates the Confessions.

Even in infancy, Augustine describes his behavior as dictated by God: “Tu etiam mihi

dabas nolle amplius quam dabas, et nutrientibus me dare mihi velle quod eis dabas. [You

granted me not to wish for more than you were willing, and to my nurses the desire to71 • « •give me what you gave them.]” Augustine’s infant desire for food is moderated by

God’s granting that moderation to him. This is made clearer a few sentences later when,

commenting on this moderation, Augustine explains that “ex te quippe bona omnia, deus,

et ex deo meo salus mihi universa. [all good things come from you, O God, and ‘from my77God is all my salvation (2 Sam. 23:5).]” Because moderation is a “good thing,” it can

only come from God. Were such moderation not granted by God, Augustine seems to

suggest, the animal instinct to eat until gorged—an instinct presumably awakened by

Original Sin—might take over.

But though the infant Augustine was granted the gift of moderation in eating, the

adult Augustine finds his infant self capable of sin through other immoderate desires, and

Books I and II of Confessions are composed primarily of the recounting o f the sins of

Augustine’s youth. But at the same time that Augustine uses the Confessions to confess

his sins, he is also confessing in a different sense—he is confessing his faith. It has been

pointed out by many scholars that the Greek word opoXoyetv, the word in the Septuagint

from which “confession” is derived, can mean both confessio peccati and confessio

laudis. Furthermore,

Whether the confession is simply christological or binitarian or trinitarian, it involves at least an implicit condemnation of one’s own sinfulness and public witness to the lordship of Christ, to his sonship, or to the eternal presence of Father and Son in the Holy Spirit, couched in the forensic rhetoric of eschatological judgement.73

71 Confessions, 1.6.(7).


73 Jamie Scott, “From Literal Self-Sacrifice to Literary Self-Sacrifice: Augustine’s Confessions and the Rhetoric of Testimony” in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian


73

The mature Augustine is able to understand the necessity for his dissolute youth, and is

able, through the gift of God’s grace, to confess it as part of the divine plan for his life.

His education and subsequent employment in the field of rhetoric, the part of his life of

such interest to his detractors, is now understood as a necessary phase, one which

prepared him to be a far more effective public speaker for God: “tu vero, cui numerati

sunt capilli nostri, errore omnium qui mihi instabant ut discerem utebaris ad utilitatem

meam. [But you, by whom ‘the hairs of my head are numbered’ (Matt. 10:30), used the

error of all who pressed me to learn to turn out to my advantage.]”74 Having discovered

the path that God laid out for him, Augustine is now able to understand the significance

of even those events which might seem antithetical to his present self.

Seen in this light, even the purposeless theft of the pears comes to take on greater

purpose, in that it provides Augustine with his understanding of the nature of sin, another

step forward on the road to redemption, and, for the younger Augustine, an understanding

which helps him to throw off the errors of Manicheism. Augustine tells the reader, “dicat

tibi nunc, ecce cor meum, quid ibi quaerebat, ut essem gratis malus et malitiae meae

causa nulla esset nisi malitia. foeda erat, et amavi earn. [I had no motive for my

wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall,

not the object for which I have fallen but my fall itself.]”75 Wetzel comments that

When recollected as sin, the motive behind a theft takes on a more than mundane order of complexity. Augustine concedes that sin is committed for the sake of what may be called “the most limited of goods” (extrema bona), that is, whatever is here today but gone tomorrow, but he adds that sinful desire for goods of this sort is always immoderate; what is transient is coveted as if it were eternal.76

From the theft of the pears comes the first part of Augustine’s definition of sin, a

definition that informs his doctrine of use and enjoyment in De doctrina Christiana. Sin



76 Wetzel, “Snares of Truth,” 132.


74

is the immoderate desire for transient goods: “propter universa haec atque huius modi

peccatum admittitur, dum immoderata in ista inclinatione, cum extrema bona sint,

meliora et summa deseruntur, tu, domine deus noster, et veritas tua, et lex tua. [Sin is

committed for the sake of all these [temporal] things and others of this kind when, in

consequence of an immoderate urge towards those things which are at the bottom end of

the scale of good, we abandon the higher and supreme goods, that is you, Lord God, and

your truth and your law (Ps. 118:142).]77

Such an understanding of sin is of paramount importance in understanding the

Augustinian self, particularly if we recall Charles Taylor’s observation that the self is

defined primarily in what it chooses as its “good.” For Augustine, such a choice leads

inevitably to the distinction between being a citizen of the City of God versus a citizen of

the City of Man. One either chooses the eternal world as one’s good or one chooses• • 78 • • •some thing or things in the temporal world. This is not precisely how Augustine would

describe it, of course. For Augustine, one’s citizenship in either city is preordained, and

to become a true citizen in the City of God, one must be called to grace by God. This is

the theory. In practice, as I have said, it appears impossible to live—or to describe—

one’s life completely as if one’s choice of good—or of evil—is completely

predetermined. John Cassian made this argument out of a need to rescue human hope, a

hope which springs from the sense of having personal agency; I would add to this the

findings of neuroscience that the sense of having personal agency is an essential part of

lived, human experience, and the complete negation of it runs contrary to that experience.

Because of this, Augustine does, at times, fall into speaking of himself as an

agent. For example, in Book 4 of the Confessions, the turn towards or away from God is

described as an act of human volition: “Nam quoquoversum se verterit anima hominis, ad

dolores figitur alibi praeterquam in te, tametsi figitur in pulchris extra te et extra se. Quae


78 The eternal world obviously has the advantage o f being a singular good in which to invest one’s desire. I will take up this line of reasoning in the section on Platonism in the Confessions.


75

tamen nulla essent, nisi essent abs te. [For wherever the human soul turns itself, other

than to you, it is fixed in sorrows, even if it is fixed upon beautiful things external to you

and external to itself, which would nonetheless be nothing if they did not have their being

from you.]”79 It would not be an implausible reading of this passage to say that

Augustine recognizes the implications of the beginning of this sentence as he comes to its

conclusion. He is careful to end the sentence by locating the source of all being in God,

but he begins the sentence with an active verb and a reflexive object. Se verterit anima

hominis: the soul o f man turns itself. Agency is seemingly placed back into human

hands, and we are the ones responsible for our own turning.

Book 4 also begins with the petitioning prayer to God that, as I have mentioned,

gives God sovereignty over individual memory. But the other implication of this prayer

is that God can be petitioned. This seems more in line with the semi-Pelagian position of

Cassian than with what Augustine has set forth in Ad Simplicianum. Augustine prays,

“sine me, obsecro, et da mihi circuire praesenti memoria praeteritos circuitus erroris mei

et immolare tibi hostiam iubilationis. quid enim sum ego mihi sine te nisi dux in

praeceps? [Allow me, I pray you, grant me leave to run through my memory, as it is in

the present, of the past twistings of my mistaken life and to sacrifice to you ‘a victim of

jubilation’ (Ps. 26:6). Without you, what am I but a guide to my own self-

destruction?]”80 If we adhere strictly to the theory of predestination, God has already

foreordained whether or not Augustine will be successful in combing through his

memory. Yet he forwards the petition regardless. Again, I think this speaks to the

impossibility of avoiding disjunction between a theoretical understanding of Divine Truth

and the reality of our temporal existence; Augustine cannot help but fall into describing

life as we experience it: in time, where the future remains uncertain. In making his

petition to God, he also describes God’s actions as if they take place in time, though he




76

obviously does not believe God to exist in time, and believes that God’s “tempus videsn i

quod fit in tempore, [vision of occurrences in time is not temporally conditioned.]”

The above passages should make it clear that the method by which Augustine

presents the reader with a predestined self is a blending of narrative and meta-narrative.

Events are narrated in time, following the experience of the human agent as he navigates

his way through the temporally-designed world. The Augustine who speaks from the

“future,” with all the knowledge that the future has provided, is able to situate these

events in the larger context of a life lived—to see, as it were, the predestination in action.

This is one sense in which the meta-narrative provides the predestined aspect of text. The

second sense is provided by the openly theological comments provided by Augustine the

writer. In Book 5, Augustine narrates the events that led to his departure from Carthage

to Rome. A clear case o f temporal cause and effect is presented to the reader. But, once

the events are narrated, he comments, “verum autem tu, spes mea et portio mea in terra

viventium, ad mutandum terrarum locum pro salute animae meae, et Carthagini stimulos

quibus inde avellerer admovebas, et Romae inlecebras quibus attraherer proponebas mihi

per homines qui diligunt vitam mortuam, hinc insana facientes, inde vana pollicentes, et

ad corrigendos fressus meos utebaris occulte et illorum et mea perversitate. [But it was

you, ‘my hope and my portion in the land of the living’ (Ps. 141:6) who wished me to

change my earthly home for ‘the salvation of my soul’ (Ps. 34:3). You applied the pricks

which made me tear myself away from Carthage, and you put before me the attractions of

Rome to draw me there, using people who love a life of death, committing insane actions

in this world, promising vain rewards in the next.]”82 Similarly, Augustine narrates the

events of Alypius’s close call with the law in the marketplace, where he is wrongly

suspected of having broken into stalls and stolen materials. Augustine comments not

only on the incident as predestined, but is able, in hindsight, to explain the wisdom of

God in allowing it to happen: “You allowed him to be arrested by the officers of the




77

market as a thief.. . . The future dispenser of your word and examiner of many

arbitrations in your Church went away with increased experience and wisdom.”

Alypius, a future lawyer and then arbitrator in his position as bishop of Thagaste, is being

prepared by God for those future positions by this “learning experience.”

The “Platonic ascent” in Book 7 is handled in similar manner. When Augustine

narrates the ascent, he tells us

Et intendebam ut cemerem quod audiebam, liberum voluntatis arbitrium causam esse ut male faceremus et rectum iudicium tuum ut pateremur, et earn liquidam cemere non valebam. itaque aciem mentis de profundo educere conatus mergebar iterum, et saepe conatus mergebar iterum atque iterum. sublevabat enim me in lucem tuam quod tarn sciebam me habere voluntatem quam me vivere. itaque cum aliquid vellum aut nollem, non alium quam me velle ac nolle certissimus eram.

[I directed my mind to understand what I was being told, namely that the free choice of the will is the reason why we do wrong and suffer your just judgement; but I could not get a clear grasp of it. I made an effort to lift my mind’s eye out of the abyss, but again plunged back. I tried several times, but again and again sank back. I was brought up into your light by the fact that I knew myself both to have a will and to be alive. Therefore, when I willed or did not will something, I was utterly certain that none other than myself was willing or not willing.]84

Augustine, acting as individual agent, is able to will this ascent. It is, in fact, the

knowledge that he can will, and that when he wills no one is willing for him, that allows

him to make a successful, albeit temporary, ascent to the Godhead. However, this

passage is followed by a discussion of the divided will, which calls the whole issue of

agency back into question. Only a sentence after the above passage, Augustine

comments, “quod autem invitus facerem, pati me potius quam facere videbam, et id non

culpam sed poenam esse iudicabam. [I saw that when I acted against my wishes, I was

passive rather than active; and this condition I judged to be not guilt but a

83 Confessions, 6.9.(14), 6.9.(15).



78

punishment.]”85 From the Platonic will in the description of the ascent, we move to an

understanding of the nature of the fallen will, divided between the will to do good and itso /

own sinful nature. The individual can will, but may will not to will. Willing not to

will, presumably, is the passivity Augustine condemns, and, paradoxically, constitutes a

lack of freedom for Augustine rather than an exercise of it.

Augustine does not address the issue of God’s grace explicitly in commenting on

this passage, but moving ahead in Book 7 to his description of his final renunciation of

astrology, Augustine comments,

tu enim, tu omnino (nam quis alius a morte omnis erroris revocat nos nisi vita quae mori nescit, et sapientia mentes indigentes inluminans, nullo indigens lumine, qua mundus administrator usque ad arborum volatica folia).

[It was you, entirely you, who brought this about. For no other could recall us from all deadly error than the life which knows no death, and the wisdom which itself needs no light, illuminating needy minds, the wisdom which governs the world down to the leaves that tremble on the trees.]

We are reminded in this passage that only God can make it possible for the human will to

overcome its sinful nature and choose an action which is good and which leads it to

salvation. Working backwards from this passage, and forwards from the doctrine made

explicit in Ad Simplicianum, it becomes clear that the active will is that will which has

been energized by God’s grace. Passivity—to do or will nothing—is the consequence of

Original Sin. Thus it is Augustine’s own will that is doing the willing in his description

of the ascent, but that will has been augmented by God’s grace. The theological meta

narrative again acts to confer retroactive meaning on the narrative itself.


86 In Augustine’s case, the will is divided between the sensual and the spiritual. He is unable to conquer his “baser instincts” and give up a life of sexual promiscuity in order to find spiritual peace. The analogies between this and a limited degree of biological determinism are obvious.



79

The issue of the divided will is central to Book 8 and Augustine’s final conversion

to Catholicism, which he—and countless scholars after him—reads as an integration of

his will. While the integration of the will in Book 8 is presented as a temporal process, it

is, as I have already indicated, a process which finds its completion only when the eternal

God makes use of temporal agents to issue the final call. At the beginning of Book 8,

Augustine’s will is still divided:

voluntas autem nova quae mihi esse coeperat, ut te gratis colerem fruique te vellem, deus, sola certa iucunditas, nondum erat idonea ad superandam priorem vetustate roboratam. ita duae voluntates meae, una vetus, alia nova, ilia camalis, ilia spiritalis, confligebant inter se atque discordando dissipabant animam meam.

[The new will, which was beginning to be within me a will to serve you freely and to enjoy you, God, the only sure source of pleasure, was not yet strong enough to conquer my older will, which had the strength of old habit. So my two wills, one old, the other new, one carnal, the other spiritual, were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of all concentration.]88

What operates on this divided will is a series of stories of conversion, each of which

provides Augustine with both impetus and model for his own eventual conversion; it is

this aspect of Augustine’s conversion that makes Brian Stock’s reading so persuasive and

that has led to the autobiographical agent reading of the Confessions.

These stories, however, are not enough. Even after all the stories have been told,

and Augustine has been left in the garden to meditate on these lives which have so

strongly affected his psyche, he remains divided in his will:

quibus sententiarum verberibus non flagellavi animam meam, ut sequeretur me conantem post te ire? et renitebatur, recusat, et non se excusabat.. . . nam non solum ire verum etiam pervenire illuc nihil erat aliud quam velle ire, sed velle fortiter et integre, non semisauciam hac atque hac versare et iactare voluntatem parte adsurgente cum alia parte cadente luctantem.

88 Confessions, 8.5.( 10).


80

[With what verbal rods did I not scourge my soul so that it would follow me in my attempt to go after you! But my soul hung back. It refused, and had no excuse to offer.. . . The one necessary condition, which meant not only going but at once arriving there, was to have the will to go— provided only that the will was strong and unqualified, not the turning and twisting first this way, then that, of a will half-wounded, struggling with one part rising up and the other part falling down.89

He can anticipate having such a will, and he can rationally understand what having such a

will would mean, but he cannot summon it up: “ibi enim facultas ea, quae voluntas, et

ipsum velle iam facere erat. [For as soon as I had the will, I would have had a

wholehearted will. At this point the power to act is identical with the will. The willing

itself was performative of the action.]”90 That this divided will is indicative of a divided

self is made clear a few paragraphs later: “In my own case, as I deliberated about serving

my Lord God (Jer. 30:9) which I had long been disposed to do, the self which willed to

serve was identical with the self which was unwilling.”91 Augustine uses here the Latin

word ego to express the concept of self, which Innes has said “was only used as a term of

emphasis to indicate contrast or distinction between individuals.” If so, then

Augustine’s use of the word ego in this context can be understood as distinguishing

between two individual selves. Thus we gain another piece of the puzzle in constructing

the Augustinian self: the self is divided until it is integrated in God.

It is only the call from God—the intervention of God into history through the

agency of the children playing in the yard—that can heal Augustine’s severed self and




92 Robert Innes, “Integrating the Self through the Desire of God,” Augustinian Studies 28:1 (1997):69.


81

bring his actions into alignment with his will.93 As he sits in silent agony, he feels his

past “to have a grip” on him, and it is broken only by the strange calls of “tolle, lege.”

This passage does not need extensive commentary. The process which Augustine

wishes to narrate is quite clear, and whether or not this is precisely the way events

occurred in a d 386 is quite beside the point. What we are meant to understand by this

narrative is that Augustine was incapable of making the necessary turn to God without

God’s grace. He has been led by divine intervention to read a particular passage from St.

Paul, the divinely inspired word of Scripture which constitutes his individual call.

Moments later, Alypius is called in the same manner, but through reading a different

passage; the individual nature of God’s call, stressed at the end of the second response to

Simplicianus, is stressed here in Book 8 of the Confessions.

But there is another difference between the ascent in Book 7 and the final

conversion in Book 8 that becomes increasingly important both to Augustine’s

Christology and to the centrality that the resurrection of the body will take on in De

civitate dei. Augustine tells us,

cum te primum cognovi, tu adsumpsisti me ut viderem esse quod viderem, et nondum me esse qui viderem. et reverberasti infirmitatem aspectus mei, radians in me vehementer, et contremui amore et horrore. et iveni longe me esse a te in regione dissimilitudinis, tamquam audirem vocem tuam de excelso: “cibus sum grandium: cresce et menducabis me. nec tu me in te mutabis sicut cibum camis tuae, sed tu mutaberis in me.”

[When I first came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being. And you gave a shock to the weakness of my sight by the strong radiance of your rays, and I trembled with love and awe. And I found myself far from you “in the region of dissimilarity,” and heard as it were your voice from on high:“I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.”]94

93 God’s interventions into human history—those other than the Incarnation—are the subject of Books III and IV of De trinitate. Augustine appears to be describing a similar intervention here.



82

James Wetzel says of this passage, “By the time Augustine would have had his fill of

God, there would be no Augustine left, but only God. The direct route to God seems

paradoxically to express a choice of non-being, a desire to be consumed.”95

This provides the reader with an interesting problem. A number of recent studies

of self in Augustine have sought to locate the expression of that self in Book 7, in the

Platonic ascent. One of the most recent examples of this school of thought is Philip

Cary’s Augustine’s Invention o f the Inner Self: The Legacy o f a Christian Platonist,

which examines the Augustinian turn inward in light of its origins in Platonism,

particularly Plotinus. For Cary, the philosophical aspects of the Augustinian canon take

precedence, and he focuses the bulk of his attention on Books 7 and 10 of Confessions.

He finds in Book 7 both the first mature statement of Augustine’s Christian Platonism

and the origin of what will eventually become the modem self:

Et inde admonitus redire ad memet ipsum, intravi in intima mea duce te, et potui, quoniam factus es adiutor meus. intravi et vidi qualicumque oculo animae meae supra eundem oculum animae meae, supra mentem meam, lucem incommutabilem, non hanc vulgarem et conspicuam omni cami, nec quasi ex eodem genere grandior erat, tamquam si ista multo multoque clarius claresceret totumque occuparet magnitudine. non hoc ilia erat sed aliud, aliud valde ab istis omnibus, nec ita erat supra mentem meam, sicut oleum super aquam nec sicut caelum super terram, sed superior, quia ipsa fecit me, et ego inferior, quia factus ab ea.

[By the Platonic books I was admonished to return to myself. With you as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel, and was given power to do so because you had become my helper (Ps. 29: 11). I entered and with my soul’s eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind—not the light of every day, obvious to anyone, nor a larger version of the same kind which would, as it were, have given out a much brighter light and filled everything with its magnitude. It transcended my mind, not in the way that oil floats on

95 James Wetzel, “Will and Interiority in Augustine: Travels in an Unlikely Place,” Augustinian Studies 33:2 (2002): 152.


83

water, nor as heaven is above earth. It was superior because it made me, and I was inferior because I was made by it.]9

Cary stresses the importance of this passage, and explains that “In the interval between

the turning in and looking up one finds oneself in a new place, never before conceived:

an inner space proper to the soul, different from the intelligible world in the Mind of God.

The soul becomes, as it were, its own dimension—a whole realm of being waiting to be07entered and explored.” Cary argues that this is unlike Plotnius, as

For Augustine . . . the inner space of the self is not divine—in Christian theological terms, it is created rather than uncreated, creature rather than Creator—and precisely so it is the soul’s own inner space in a way that Plotinus’s inner space was not: it is the first version of what we in the West now call “the inner self.”98

This differentiation from Plotinus is crucial for Cary’s argument, because he

wishes to counter those who would see the Augustinian turn as one away from

individuality, precisely as Wetzel describes it. Yet the inward turn, which is followed in

Cary’s formulation by an upward turn towards God, does appear to have precisely this

effect on individuality. The passage in which God speaks to the ascending Augustine

appears only two sentences after the passage on which Cary directs his attention; Cary’s

desire to find the birth of the inner self is made highly problematic by the possibility of

that self being subsumed into the infinity o f God.

The differentiation from Plotinus may also be inaccurate. John Kenney has

pointed out that

The intelligible soul [in Plotinus] is indeed part of the noetic cosmos and deeply rooted there, but as a part within a larger whole, an individual within an aggregate. The contemplative self is thus not lost or absorbed when it engages in noesis, and, when it is united to the core of all things in nous, it does not lose its identity, but rather recovers its true identity in


97 Philip Cary, Augustine's Invention o f the Inner Self: The Legacy o f a Christian Platonist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 39.

98 Cary, 63-64.


84

association with all other real beings.. . . [Cary] has constructed an account of the inner self that assumes that there is no individuality to be found there in the higher or intelligible world. But Plotinus is acutely aware throughout the Enneads that the foundation of our grosser, embodied self lies in the intelligible self, whose individuation is realized in a different fashion."

From this reading, it would appear that the Platonic ascent in Plotinus actually allows for

more retention of individuality than the Augustine’s Platonic ascent in Book 7, the

successful completion of which appears to allow for no individuality.

It is this stress on the Platonic elements of the Confessions that have caused so

many readers to understand the dictum that we align our will to God’s as somehow

replacing the individual will with a “collective” will shared by all, and one which serves

to remove individual agency and individual selfhood. In Confessions 7.16, Augustine

reiterates the nature of sin as he described it in Book 2, and makes it quite clear that it is

not just desire for transient goods that constitutes sin, but the concurrent turning of the

will away from God: “et quaesivi quid esset iniquitas et non inveni substantiam, sed a

summa substantia, te deo, detortae in infima voluntatis perversitatem, proicientis intima

sua et tumescentis foras. [I inquired what wickedness is; and I did not find a substance

but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance, you O God, towards

inferior things, rejecting its own inner life (Ecclus. 10:10) and swelling with external

matter.]”100 It is clear that what Augustine is suggesting in Book 7 is not just that one

must align one’s will to God’s in order to be saved, but that such an alignment is also

following our own true will, unencumbered by the things of the material world that serve

to distract it. The prolonged discussion of the divided will in Book 8 makes this clear,

and it is unfortunate that so many studies of the Augustinian self concentrate their

attention on Book 7 without moving on to study the ramifications of the material included

in Book 8.

99 John Peter Kenney, “Augustine’s Inner Self,” Augustinian Studies 33:1 (2002): 85-86.

100 Confessions 7.16.(22).


85

Simply put, the Platonic ascent—the ascent that Augustine attempts before he is

called to grace in Book 8—does not work. Augustine is afforded only a temporary vision

of the Godhead, and this method of his ascent appears to require that upon arrival he lose

his individuality. There is no point of contact between the vast eternity of God and the

material being who is Augustine. The gap between the two must be mediated. This is

the second focus of the conversion scene in Book 8. The scene in the garden at Milan is

the depiction of the predestined call of God, to be certain, and it reveals the necessity of

God’s gift of grace to softened the hardened heart, but it also reveals the necessity of

Christ as mediator between God and humanity. Book 8 is a crucial part of Augustine’s

Christology. The embodied Christ is the sole path to God that allows the individual to

retain his or her individuality and which maintains the distinction between humanity and

God. As Gerald Bonner has pointed out, “The foundation of Augustine’s teaching of the

glorification of the image of God in man in Jesus Christ. Without His incarnation, death

and resurrection there could be no healing of diseased humanity.”101 Bonner quotes from

Sermon 27 to support his argument:

Deformitas Christi te format. Ille enim si deformis esse noluisset, tu formam quam perdidisti non recepisses. Pendebat ergo in cruce deformis; sed deformitas illius pulchritudo nostra erat. In hac ergo vita deformem Christum teneamus. Quid est, deformem Christus? Absit mihi gloriari nisi in cruce domini nostri Iesu Christi, per quern mihi mundus crucifixus est, et ego mundo. Heac est deformitas Christi.

[Let the deformity of Christ form you, for if He had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost.He, therefore, hung upon the cross, deformed; but His deformity was our beauty. In this life, therefore, let us hold the deformed Christ. What is the deformed Christ? Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me and I

1 (Y Junto the world. This is the deformity of Christ.]

101 Gerald Bonner, “Augustine’s Doctrine of Man: Image of God and Sinner,” Augustinianum 24 (1984): 509.

102 Sermon 27.6.6. Qtd, in Bonner, “Augustine’s Doctrine of Man,” 509. The translation is presumably Bonner’s own.


86

Two crucial things have occurred in the shift from the Platonic ascent of Book 7 to the

call of grace in Book 8. The first of these is that the multiple paths to the Truth appear to

have disappeared; the correction in the Retractationes of the passage in the Soliloquia

referring to multiple paths finds earlier expression in Book 8 of the Confessions. We are

called individually, each according to our own strengths and weaknesses, but the singular

path we are called to take is through the mediation of Christ. The second crucial aspect

of the shift from Book 7 to Book 8 is a drastic weakening of the dichotomy between soul

and body. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection in the flesh is our model for salvation; the

flesh is not something to be abjured, but an essential part of who we are.

The text of Paul’s Letter to the Romans that effects the conversion reads: “Non in

comessationibus et ebrietatibus, non in cubilibus et impludicitiis, non in contentione et

aemulatione, sed induite dominum Iesum Christum et camis providentiam ne feceritis in

concupiscentiis. [Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in

strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the fleshI n o

and its lusts.” Wetzel comments that

It is common to read Augustine’s conversion to Christ in book VIII as the corrective to his experience of the immaterial God in book VII. I think that this reading misses much of what is going on in book VII, but especially it misses the redemptive offering in Augustine’s descent from God to the flesh. Life in the flesh is part of the picture of divine beauty and not just a diversion from it, if the humanity of God is fully human.Augustine gives us more cause to question whether the diversion from God is really flesh-oriented. His will to sin, in its capacity to evacuate interpersonal connections of their motive power, seems as much a fleeing from flesh as it is a fleeing from God.104

Wetzel’s reading of the contrast between Book 7 and Book 8 serves to temper the

distinction made by Bonner, but it does not eliminate it. Christ as mediator in Book 8

may not be the “corrective” to the Platonic ascent of Book 7, but Augustine’s

103 Confessions 8.12.(29), quoting Romans 13: 13-14.

104 Wetzel, “Will and Inferiority,” 155.


87

understanding of Christ as mediator reveals that he had forgotten the key step on the path

to God. As Augustine himself points out in Book 7,

Et quaerebam viam comparandi roboris quod esset idoneum ad fruendum te, nec inveniebam donee amplectere mediatorem dei et hominum, hominem Christum Iesum, qui est super omnia deus benedictus in saecula, vocantem et dicentem, “ego sum via et veritas et vita,” et cibum, cui capiendo invalidus eram, miscentem cami, quoniam verbum caro factum est ut infantiae nostrae lactesceret sapientia tua, per quam creasti omnia.

[I sought a way to obtain strength enough to enjoy you; but I did not find it until I embraced “the mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5), “who is above all things, God blessed and for ever” (Rom. 9:5). He called and said “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6). The food which I was too weak to accept he mingled with the flesh, in that “The Word was made flesh” (John 1:14), so that our infant condition might come to suck milk from your wisdom by which you created all things.]105

Even before Book 8, Augustine has begun to stress the necessity of a “fleshly

intercessor,” one that can feed us without subsuming us. Wetzel is correct to call for a

more nuanced reading of the differences between Book 7 and Book 8, but it should not be

a reading so nuanced that it hides the essential difference between the immateriality of

the Platonic ascent and the essential materiality of God’s gift of grace through the human

Christ.

What does all this have to do with the Augustinian conception of self? Quite

simply this: the Augustinian self has emerged from the Confessions even more clearly as

an embodied soul. The stress on the need for Christ as mediator because he is both

immaterial God and material human being makes it quite clear that materiality is a

fundamental fact of human existence. This becomes even clearer in De civitate dei, in

Augustine’s discussion of the nature of the resurrected body. The Platonic ascent fails

precisely because the human self is, in part, a material self. The self that is called to

grace by God, the self that is predestined by God to either salvation or damnation, is a

material self. This represents a fundamental break between Augustianian Christianity



88

and the dualism that informs many of the Platonic philosophies that were so influential

upon him. The predestined, embodied soul is at the core of the concept of the self

Augustine bequeaths to the Middle Ages. But it is not the only self represented in the

Confessions.

ii. The Self as Autobiographical Agent

It is a common assertion amongst Augustine scholars that the Confessions is not

autobiography in the modem sense of the word. This observation is, I think, indisputable.

The Confessions is as much a work of theology as it is a work of autobiography;

Augustine’s life story acts as Christian exemplum, not merely illustrating the doctrine of

predestination in action, but, paradoxically, also to show those who are leading similarly

dissolute lives how to cleave to God’s will and find salvation and truth. Certainly the

exegetical material in Books 11-13 would not be found in a modem autobiography, even

that of a religious figure.

Yet I think that scholarship misses the mark when it moves from this indisputable

fact to readings of Confessions that ignore many of the autobiographical elements of the

text. Modem autobiography—and biography, for that matter—seeks to integrate an

individual life, generally through the use of a teleological principle, just as we see in the

Confessions. The autobiography of a politician, for example, generally focuses on those

incidents in the writer’s life that led to political office. The writer’s political ideology is

likely to take center stage in the autobiography as well, and the life presented therein acts

as an exemplum demonstrating the efficacy of the ideology in question. Though

generally secular in emphasis, the methodology used in modem autobiography is

certainly analogous to the methodology being used by Augustine. The Confessions is not

so poor a fit into the genre as has been argued.

We accept when reading a modem autobiography that authorial discretion has

been exercised in choosing which events to recount and which to leave out. Sometimes

we even condemn writers for picking and choosing those events that most contribute to a


89

positive view of themselves. What we are recognizing is the authority the author is

exercising over his or her own life—we are recognizing the autobiographical agent.

We should not, of course, take this understanding of the Confessions too far; as I

have already indicated, Augustine would not understand himself as exercising agency

over his own narrative so much as he would understand himself as recognizing the path

God had chosen for him and his part in the larger story of Creation, a story “written” by

God. But, as I have also remarked, God’s ultimate agency is the theory behind the

narrative; what Augustine is doing in the Confessions, as Brian Stock points out, is

rereading the events of his life. From the standpoint of AD 401, he can look back at the

years AD 351-387 and understand how events from those years led him to Roman

Catholicism and the bishopric of Hippo. He can actively reinterpret his past through the

lens of the present, just as he is actively reinterpreting his past (and present) through

Scripture, the Life of Anthony, and doctrine.

That Augustine has some understanding of this activity is evidenced first by the

existence of Books 10-13 of the Confessions, which serve to place Augustine’s narrative

within the greater narrative of Creation itself and provide a reading of Augustine’s life

through the events chronicled in Genesis. It is also evidenced by the Retractationes, a

work devoted to reestablishing control over his past writings through their

reinterpretation, as we have seen in the example of De libero arbitrio, which is reread in

the Retractationes so that it is more in keeping with Augustine’s later theory of free will

and predestination. Stock comments that

In the preface to the Retractions—the “confessions” of his later years—he critically reassessed the entire corpus. The chronology of his publications offered him a retrospective view on his literary achievements and failures, complementing the account of his intellectual progress in Confessions 1-9 and the “philosophical dialogues.” The book is also a self-defence, since, as early as 412, he planned for a “collected edition” of his doctrinal and polemical works in order to eliminate misconceptions among his readers.106

106 Stock, 11.


90

Augustine uses the Retractationes in much the same way that he uses the Confessions: to

make his past self continuous with his present self. In the Confessions, he does so

teleologically, creating a mostly seamless narrative that leads from one phase of his life

to the next, always on an inevitable collision course with the present. In the

Retractationes, he exercises present control over past writings to construct a corpus that

coincides philosophically and theologically with who he is in a d 427-428, when the

Retractationes are being written.

But does this exercising of control allow us to posit an autobiographical agent

writing the Confessions? Does Augustine’s own teleological reading of his past life

equal the exercise of agency, or is it more plausible to maintain that because Augustine, if

pressed for an answer, would see the Confessions as a result of God’s agency, there is no

exercising of individual agency in the text? These questions strike at the heart of the

larger question of the medieval self; if we accept agency as a necessary component of the

self—and I would argue that we do—establishing the exercise of agency in the

Confessions is a necessary step in forwarding the argument that there were selves in the

late antique and medieval periods.

It seems reasonable to assume that Augustine was aware of his own actions.

Those actions included the reinterpretation of his life in the Confessions, and the

reinterpretation of passages from his earlier writings in the Retractationes. That he was

able to accurately engage in such reinterpretation only through the gift of God’s grace is

less important in this reading of Confessions than in a reading which seeks to stress the

importance of the doctrine of predestination to the narrative told in the text. This is not to

negate the importance of predestination in the Confessions', we must remain aware of the

centrality of this doctrine, lest our desire for a contemporaneous Augustine get the better

of us. But passages I have discussed above can lead the reader to assume that Augustine

understands his lived life—which includes his life as a writer—in terms of an agent

acting in the world. Such an understanding would make sense to any reader, as the reader

shares the same sense of agency.


91

A passage in Book 10 is perhaps most revealing of Augustine’s conception of his

own agency. The Latin reads, “Ego certe, domine, laboro hie et laboro in me ipso.1 f17Factus sum mihi terra difficultatis et sudoris nimii.” Chadwick translates this passage

as “I, at least, Lord, have difficulty at this point, and I find my own self hard to grasp. I

have become for myself a soil which is a cause of difficulty and much sweat (Gen.

3:17f.).”108 R. S. Pine-Coffm translates this passage as “O Lord, I am working hard in

this field, and the field of my labours is my own self. I have become a problem to

myself, like land which a farmer works only with difficulty and at the cost of much

sweat.”109 Both translations capture the essence of the passage, though the Pine-Coffin is

more direct: understanding the self is a project to be worked upon by the self. If this does

not constitute an exercising of agency and an awareness that agency is being exercised,

I’m not sure exactly what would. Whether God has granted Augustine grace or not, he

must act as if He has.

When combined with other passages that disrupt a smooth reading of the

Confessions as a demonstration of predestination and grace, it is reasonable to conclude

that there is an autobiographical agent behind the Confessions. Yet we must be cautious

in how far we take this conclusion. Peter Brown has warned us that

It is alarming, and at times a source of obscure anger, that people can be so different from ourselves, and ourselves so different from what we would like to think. Our sense of the gap, therefore, is frequently smothered by the need to tailor ourselves, and our awareness of others, to the comfortable proportions of the common stereotypes.110

In finding an autobiographical agent at the heart of the Confessions, I do not want to be

found guilty of “smothering the gap.” When I focus my attention on the passages of the

107 Confessions, 10.16.(25).

108 Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 193.

109 Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 222-223.

110 Peter Brown, “Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine,” in Religion and Society in the Age o f St. Augustine (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 20.


92

Confessions that indicate agency, what I find is an author who, through a long and

painstaking process, has found in Christianity a system of belief and inwardness that

reflects his own deepest convictions. I base this on Augustine’s own retelling of his life’s

story. An explanation of Augustine’s conversion given by Paula Fredriksen coincides

with my own understanding of what is happening in the Confessions. Fredriksen points

out that

the theological (or intellectual or ideological) content of conversion does not lie in the clear moment of radical change that the classic literature presents to us. That moment exists only retrospectively, when the convert, examining his life, attempts to interpret his present in light of his past (“How did I get here?”). But he comes to his past only through his present, and it is from this vantage point that the convert constructs a narrative that renders past and present continuous, intelligible, and coherent (“This is how I got here”). To see a content-filled moment of conversion is to have constructed a narrative whereby that moment emerges retrospectively as the origin of (and justification for) one’s present.111

I accept Fredriksen’s contention that the Confessions is a reconstruction o f the past. My

own reading of the process of conversion in the Confessions sees Augustine finding his

own deeper, philosophical desires mirrored in the text of the Hortensius, mirrored in the

writings of the Neoplatonists, and mirrored in the injunction against materiality he reads

in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, regardless of how artificially constructed the scene in the

Milanese garden might seem to some readers. To put it another way, Augustine is

locating his good in these texts, and he depicts himself in the process of defining his

ultimate good in the Confessions as he journeys through these texts, each of which

contain part of the truth—which he considers synonymous with the good.

Such a reading has the advantage of bridging—and lessening—the gap between

Augustine and the present, while continuing to acknowledge that the gap does indeed

exist. The definition of self through the good(s) one has chosen to pursue is, as I pointed

in out chapter one, quite compatible with most conceptions of the self, ancient and

111 Paula Fredriksen, “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self,” Journal o f Theological Studies 17 (1986): 33.


93

modem; it is a philosophical theory of the self that is open-ended enough to encompass

all human beings, as indeed any theory that claims to be a theory of the human self must.

Even Alfred’s translation of the Soliloquies, which places a higher value on the city of

man than Augustine does in works Alfred would likely have had access to, still defines

the self through a good—in this case, society and companionship.

But, as attractive as such a reading is, we cannot forget that Augustine also sees

all of these actions as predestined, whereas modem selves—outside of theory—are often

seen willfully to choose what goods they define themselves through. Augustine’s

theological writings suggest that he would respond to the concept of the autobiographical

agent by pointing out the fact that each exercise of human agency I have identified in

Confessions was possible only through the gift of God’s grace, which made it possible for

Augustine to direct his will toward God in the first place. We cannot forget the facts of

Augustine’s theology in any reading of his work. However, if the question is what

conception of self Augustine bequeaths to readers in the Middle Ages—indeed, to all

readers in any age—the autobiographical agent of Confessions outweighs the heightened

emphasis on predestination. I argue this for two reasons. The first is the innate sense of

agency felt by all readers as a natural result of the cognitive process. We are the

protagonists of our own narratives, and while we may create narratives that serve to deny

us agency—such as those narratives which seek to place the social determinants of

identity before the biological fact of consciousness, which must obviously precede social

identity—the reader cannot help but recognize in Augustine’s narrative the agent who

writes it, the consciousness through which the story is being told. If Augustine’s

narrative seeks to deny human agency through the imposition of predestination, it is only

partly successful in its attempt, and it bequeaths to its readers a sense of interior agency

that finds its way into subsequent medieval texts.

The second reason I argue that the autobiographical agent wins out over

predestination is that predestination is, after all, a paradox—at least for those of us living

within time—and the later medieval period is able to smooth this paradox out somewhat

through the use of Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae, with its introduction of the


94

distinction between God’s foreknowledge of events and God’s predestination of events.

While the Augustinian position was adopted by the Church at the Synod of Orange and

Semi-Pelagianism “eliminated,” the re-introduction of Boethius into the theological

equation during the Carolingian period has a definite effect on the doctrine of

predestination; this is particularly true in Anglo-Saxon England, where Pelagianism may11 '}

not have been completely eliminated in the first place.

There is, then, an historical reason to question whether or not readers of

Augustine in Anglo-Saxon England would have seen in his writings the same level of

predestination that the modem reader, with access to a far wider range of Augustinian

texts and a fuller understanding of the history o f Christian doctrine, does. There also

remains the question of the reader’s innate sense of agency, a sense that certainly comes

through in the Alfredian translations; while he makes changes and additions to the

Soliloquia to make them more orthodox in their Christianity, he does not alter the text in

such a way as to replace Augustine’s early emphasis on free will with an emphasis on

predestination.

We are not certain what texts of Augustine Alfred had access to, so we cannot

know what additional works of Augustine contribute to Alfred’s expansion of the

Soliloquia, beyond his use of De videndo deo, identified as a source within Alfred’s

actual text. What we do know is that De civitate dei enjoyed more popularity in Anglo-

Saxon England than any other Augustinian text. Ogilvy tells us that it “was one of the

most popular, if not the most popular, of Augustine’s works among the English. It is1 1 >2

continually cited and quoted without citation.” It is also an important conclusion to a

study of the Augustinian self, dealing as it does with the integration of human and divine

history and the embodied nature of human life after death.

112 See J.N.L. Myres, “Pelagius and the End of Roman Rule in Britain,” Journal o f Roman Studies 50 (1960): 21-36; W. Liebeschuetz, “Did the Pelagian Movement Have Social Aims?” Historia 12 (1963): 227-41; and R.A. Markus, “Pelagianism: Britain and the Continent,” Journal o f Ecclesiastical History 37 (1986): 191-204.

113 J. D. A. Ogilvy, Books Known to the English, 597-1066 (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1967), 82.


95

C h a p t e r T h r e e

A T a le of T w o C it ie s :

F ro m D e c ivitate d e i t o A l f r e d ’s K in g d o m o f t h e A n g lo - S a x o n s

I. F r o m A u g u s t in e t o A l f r e d

Reception of the thought of Saint Augustine into Anglo-Saxon England can be traced by

a variety of methods. We can comb through the surviving body of Anglo-Saxon sermons

in search of quotations from Augustine’s works, or an obvious case of theological

influence, or engage in an Augustinian reading through the De doctrina Christiana, as

Bernard Huppe does in Doctrine and Poetry} Yet the path between Augustine and the

medieval period is not as direct as some studies tacitly suggest. In some ways, Alfred’s

translation of the Soliloquia provides the strongest argument for the impossibility of a

direct path. Though Alfred obviously had the Soliloquia in front of him while

constructing the Soliloquies, we can identify a number of textual and intellectual detours

that must be taken to get from Augustine to Alfred.2

There are a number of important distinctions between the Augustinian conception

of the self and the Alfredian, and so that I may deal with Alfred on his own terms in the

chapter to follow, I will deal with some of those distinctions here, leaving the remainder

until the end of this chapter. To be certain, some parts of Augustine’s conception come

through the process of translation unscathed, but Alfred makes many crucial changes to

Augustine, a fair percentage of which can be concluded reasonably to voice the concerns

1 Bernard F. Huppe, Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine’s Influence on Old English Poetry (New York: State University of New York Press, 1959).

2 For the sake of both brevity and clarity, 1 will refer to Augustine’s work as the Soliloquia, and Alfred’s translation as the Soliloquies.


96

of Alfred the man and Alfred the monarch.3 In what constitutes one of the largest

philosophical departures in Alfred’s translation, the king evinces a far greater concern

with the material world than Augustine, both in his recurrent concern with the

immortality of the soul versus the transience of the body (something which Augustine

never resolves in the Soliloquia) and in his concerns with the material needs that

accompany the governing of a successful and stable kingdom.

Alfred’s translations—and indeed his translation program itself—reveal a deep

concern with the “city of man,” and because of this concern it is necessary to look briefly

at Augustine’s De civitate dei to fully understand the differences—and the similarities—

between Augustine’s and Alfred’s views of earthly kingdoms and their effects on the self.

For the most part, De civitate dei does not alter the Augustinian conception of self

presented in chapter two so much as it adds elements to it. There are, however, troubling

indications that the degree of self-knowledge Confessions seems to make possible has

been curtailed somewhat in De civitate dei; the concept of the division of humanity into

two distinct cities and the inability of the individual to know to which city he or she has

been assigned citizenship would seem to indicate that an important part of the self s

identity has been locked away. Yet the self still possesses the interiority that marks the

Confessions, and passages from De civitate dei have even been quoted in support of the

argument that Augustine conceptualized a pre-Cartesean proto-cogito, particularly this

sentence from Book 11: “sed sine ulla phantasiarum uel phantasmatum imaginatione

ludificatoria mihi esse me idque nosse et amare certissimum est. [It is, however, without

any delusive representation of images or phantasms that I am wholly certain that I exist,

and that I know this fact and love it.]”4

3 At times, Alfred makes it tempting to invoke the concept o f the king’s two bodies as it was formulated in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. While such an affinity can be mentioned in passing, however, it is a loose affinity, and its application would require a far more intense examination of early medieval concepts of kingship than I intend to engage in here.

4 De civitate dei 11.26.15-17, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. 47 and 48, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb (Tumhout: Brepols, 1955). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from The City o f God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) unless otherwise indicated.


97

This is not to argue that the self—Cartesean or otherwise—is the primary focus of

De civitate dei, though it emerges as an issue, as in all of Augustine’s works. Augustine

wrote De civitate dei between the years AD 413 and AD 426, largely in response to the

sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths, and in order to refute the opinion of some

Romans that Rome’s fall had come as a result of its conversion to Christianity—the old

gods had become angered, and abandoned Rome to its enemies. A large portion of De

civitate dei is devoted to debunking this assumption, primarily through a survey of the

history of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, though Augustine brings his

polemic to bear on the pagan religion of the Romans as well as on pagan philosophers,

including the Platonists to whom he owes a great deal of his own Christian philosophical

position. This means that De civitate dei in many ways covers the whole of human

knowledge circa AD 426, or at least the whole of human knowledge as filtered through

Augustine and his philosophical perspective.

What is important to a discussion of the self in the history that Augustine recounts

is his conception of the two cities. One’s citizenship in either the City of God or the City

of Man becomes a key component of the self: the identity provided by citizenship in one

of the two cities serves to define the self as well. Charles Taylor’s conception of the self

provides a particularly useful parallel once again, as one’s citizenship is dependent upon

where one invests one’s desire, what one chooses to define as “the good.” As R. W.

Dyson explains in the introduction to his translation, “Augustine speaks of these two

cities or communities as deriving their respective identities, their cohesion, from their

members’ allegiance to a common object of love.”5 In Augustine’s own words, “in

quibus praecessit hac amor Dei, hac amor sui. [In the one city, love of God has been

given pride of place, and, in the other, love of self.]”6 The doctrine of use and enjoyment

so central to De d o c tr in a C h ristian a is taken to a new level, and the identity of the

5 R. W. Dyson, Introduction to The City o f God against the Pagans by Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xix.

6 De civitate dei, 14.13.53-54.


98

individual becomes so closely intertwined with the individual’s object (or objects) of

desire as to make them almost inseparable.

This “split” in the human race is also made to mirror the split in the human will

that occupies much of Augustine’s writing on the self; in some ways, his focus on the two

cities has allowed him more clearly and more forcefully to describe and explain the split

in the will that occurred with Adam’s Fall:

Nam quae hominis est alia miseria nisi aduersus eum ipsum inoboedientia eius ipsius, ut, quoniam noluit quod potuit, quod non potest uelit? In paradiso enim etiamsi non omnia poterat ante peccatum, quidquid tamen non poterat, non uolebat, et ideo poterat omnia quae uolebat; nunc uero sicut in eius stirpe cognoscimus et diuina scriptura testatur, homo uanitati similis factus est. Quis enim enumerat, quam multa quae non potest uelit, dum sibi ipse, id est uoluntati eius ipse animus eius eoque inferior caro eius, non obtemperat? Ipso namque inuito et animus plerumque turbatur et caro dolet et ueterescit et moritur, et quidquid aliud patimur, quod non pateremur inuiti, si uoluntati nostrae nostra natura omni modo atque ex omnibus partibus oboediret. At enim aliquid caro patitur, quo seruire non sinitur. Quid interest unde, dum tamen per iustitiam dominantis Dei, cui subditi seruire noluimus, caro nostra nobis, quae subdita fuerat, non seruiendo molesta sit, quamuis nos Deo non seruiendo molesti nobis potuerimus esse, non illi?

[For what is man’s misery if not simply his own disobedience to himself, so that, because he would not do what he could, he now cannot do what he would? For although, in Paradise, before his sin, man could not do everything, he did not at that time wish to do anything that he could not do, and therefore he could do all that he wished. Now, however, as we observe in the offspring of the first man, and as the Bible attests, “Man is like to vanity.” For who can count the many things a man wishes to do but cannot? For he is disobedient to himself: that is, his very mind, and even his lower part, his flesh, do not obey his will. Even against his will his mind is often troubled; and his flesh endures pain, grows old, and dies, and suffers all manner of things which we should not suffer against our will if our nature were in every way and in all its parts obedient to our will.]7



99

The split in the human will is the cause of the split in the human race, and the key to

understanding the history of the City of Man and to understanding the dangers of

attempting “dual citizenship”—which it becomes clear is an impossibility.

It also becomes clear that the war in the human will between the call of the two

cities is a major cause of the “fragmented” nature of the self described by Augustine. As

Patricia MacKinnon describes it, “The aspects of the human soul itself became

fragmented, divided against itself; the soul’s lower powers rebelled against the higher,o

reduplicating within the soul the original act of disobedience against God.” It can be

argued, then, that in De civitate dei the split will can become the source of a split in

identity.

Yet it can become the cause of a lack of identity as well. Carol Harrison observes

that “part of man’s suffering is his uncertainty as to which city he will ultimately find

himself to be a member, for the identity of the predestined elect of the city of God is

unknown in this life.”9 This indicates a crucial lack of self-knowledge on the part of all

individuals. Acquiring self-knowledge is, as the previous chapters have proven, one of

the primary goals of Augustine’s philosophical program, and this goal is passed along to

those working within the Augustinian tradition: as we will see, this is the process

depicted in The Wanderer and The Seafarer.

Yet all of these efforts must ultimately be in vain, as one’s citizenship cannot be

known this side of the grave. We can see, then, how a sense of alienation from one’s self

begins to creep into De civitate dei, and this sense of alienation certainly finds its way

into Anglo-Saxon England. It is not precisely the sort of existential anxiety that

characterizes much Old English literature, but it is close to it in many respects.

8 Patricia L. MacKinnon, “Augustine’s City o f God. The Divided Self/The Divided Civitas,” in The City of God: A Collection o f Critical Essays, ed. Dorothy F. Donnelly (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 330. See also Carol Harrison, Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

9 Harrison, 211. Presumably Harrison means that Augustine will find himself to be a member of the City of God after death, though this is not completely clear in the context of the quotation.


100

But, before moving away from Augustine, there is one last aspect of De civitate

dei that should inform a reading of Alfred’s translations, and that is Augustine’s

argument that because the City of Man is composed of those who have chosen to follow

the material desires of their fallen wills, and because all societies on earth are composed

of a mixture of citizens from the two cities, no City of Man on earth can be a truly just

society. Augustine states that

Quapropter ubi non est ista iustitia, ut secundum suam gratiam ciuitati oboedientibus Deo animus etiam corpori atque ratio uitiis ordine legitimo fideliter imperet; ut, quern ad modum iustus unus, ita coetus populusque iustorum uiuat ex fide, quae operatur per dilectionem, qua homo diligit Deum, sicut diligendus est Deus, et proximum sicut semet ipsum, — ubi ergo non est ista iustitia, profecto non est coetus hominum iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus. Quod si non est, utique populus non est, si uera est haec populi definitio. Ergo nec res publica est, quia res populi non est, ubi ipse populus non est.

justice is found where the one supreme God rules an obedient City according to His grade, so that it sacrifices to none but Him; and where, in consequence, the soul rules the body in all men who belong to that City and obey God, and the reason faithfully rules the vices in lawful order. In that City, both the individual just man and the community and people of the just live by faith, which works by love; by that love with which a man loves God as God ought to be loved, and his neighbour as himself. But where there is not this justice, there certainly is no association of men united by a common agreement as to what is right and by a community of interest. And so there is no commonwealth; for where there is no “people,” there is no “property o f a people.”10

Augustine’s opinion on the efficacy o f cities of men has—or should have—enormous

ramifications for the types of programs envisioned by monarchs such as Alfred and

Charlemagne, but they choose to make the effort to create a just, learned, and wise

society nonetheless. As the examination of Alfred’s Soliloquies will show, Augustine’s

lack of concern with the material world, while appropriate to his position as Bishop of

Hippo, is inappropriate to a sitting monarch and detrimental to the survival of an earthly

kingdom.

10 De civitate dei, 19.23.190-203.


101

L Alcuirt’s “De ratione animae”

Yet as Malcolm Godden has pointed out, this particular difference between Augustine

and Alfred is not solely attributable to the king’s concerns as king. Godden cites

Alcuin’s De ratione animae as one of the crucial detours along the path from Augustine

to Alfred, a path which, he argues, when extended to include yElfric of Eynsham, shows

“the gradual development of a unitary concept of the inner self, identifying the

intellectual mind with the immortal soul and life-spirit.”11 Alcuin’s conception of the self

and its level of engagement with the material world differs from Augustine’s in two

important respects. First, there is the blurring of the distinction between the soul and the

mind, “[taking] the soul as more or less identical with the conscious, rational mind.”12

Godden illustrates this through two similar passages from Augustine’s De trinitate and

Alcuin’s De ratione animae:

Haec igitur tria, memoria, intelligentia, voluntas, quoniam non sunt tres vitae sed una vita, nec tres mentes sed una mens, consequenter utique nec tres substantiae sunt sed una substantia. Memoria quippe quod vita et mens et substantia dicitur ad se ipsam dicitur; quod vero memoria dicitur ad aliquid relative dicitur.

These three then, memory, understanding, and will, are not three lives but one life, nor three minds but one mind. So it follows of course that they are not three substances but one substance. When memory is called life, and mind, and substance, it is called so in reference to itself; but when it is called memory it is called so with reference to another.13

Una est enim anima quae mens dicitur una vita et una substantia, quae haec tria habet in se: sed haec tria non sunt tres vitae, sed una vita; nec tres mentes, sed una mens; nec tres substantiae sunt, sed una substantia. Quod vero anima vel mens, vel vita, vel substantia dicitur, ad seipsam dicitur;

11 Malcolm Godden, “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 271.

12 Godden, 272.

13 De trinitate 15.11, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. L, ed. W. J. Mountain (Tumhout: Brepols, 1968). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from The Trinity, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991) unless otherwise indicated.


102

quod vero memoria vel intelligentia vel voluntas dicitur, ad aliquid relative dicitur.

[For there is one soul, which we call mind, one life, and one substance, which contains these three within itself. Yet there three are not three lives, but one life; nor are they three minds, but one mind; so it follows that they are not three substances, but one substance. Indeed what we call the soul, mind, life, or substance we call so in an absolute sense; what we call memory, understanding, or will we call so in relation to something else.]14

The conflation of mens and anima is, of course, important to a study of medieval

psychology, but what Godden points out regarding the consequences of this change

demonstrate why the conflation of mens and anima in this text are so crucial to the

evolution of the conception of self:

Alcuin’s interest is particularly in the way that the soul’s mental activity mirrors God, as a testimony to its spiritual nature and high status: the soul, he says, “is ennobled with the image and likeness of the Creator in its principal part, which is called the mens.” The interrelationships of memory, understanding and will mirror the divine Trinity. The mind’s ability to conjure up images of things both known and unknown mimics God’s work as creator. Its ability to be mentally present in an instant at any point in the world or in time imitates the divine ability to be everywhere at all times. What is striking about this view of the soul’s mental powers is Alcuin’s insistence that the soul’s likeness to God resides in its engagement with the real material world.15

The self has taken a large step into the material world, and, more importantly, has been

conceptualized in such a way as to make engagement with the material world an essential

part of human nature, both that which impels us towards the divine and that which impels

us towards the mundane. In Taylor’s terminology, engagement in the material world has

become a “good.” This is quite unlike Augustine, for whom “the imagination is a

dubious faculty, and the mind resembles God only in so far as it contemplates eternal

truths rather than ‘the handling of temporal things’; engagement with the senses belongs

14 Alcuin, “De ratione animae A Text with Introduction, Critical Apparatus, and Translation, ed. James Joseph Mark Curry (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1966), 47.6-14.

15 Godden, 273.


103

to an inferior part of the soul. For Alcuin, it is the mind’s power to remember or imagine

people and places that shows its God-like quality.”16

Perhaps even more importantly, however, is how this new understanding of the

anima affects the concept of free will:

There is for [Alcuin] no essential conflict between the activity of the rational mind and the realms of imagination or sensation. Similarly, the Platonic and Augustinian notion of a war within the soul between reason, desire and passion finds some reflection in Alcuin’s account, but he primarily sees the latter powers as spiritual forces, designed for the needs of the soul rather than the body. Vicious or irrational behavior in man is not simply the victory of the lower elements of the soul over reason, but reflects the free will of the conscious mind to choose good or evil.17

We have traveled far, then, from Augustine’s conception of predestination as first

formulated in Ad Simplicanum, and the conception of self which emerges from Alcuin’s

changes resembles more the autobiographical agent model forwarded in Confessions than

the predestined self that seems to result from Augustine’s teleological understanding of

the events of his life. In modem critical terms, Alcuin moves us several steps away from

a self constructed by outside forces—society, in our case, God in Augustine’s—and

towards the self as agent.

If the influence of Alcuin’s text on Alfred is as pronounced as Godden suggests—

and his evidence is more than sufficient to demonstrate that it is—then we have further

evidence o f the movement not only towards individuality but towards an emphasis on

individual agency as we proceed from Augustine into Anglo-Saxon England. That more

than one reader of Alfred’s Boethius has identified in that work a deep anxiety about

human freedom reveals the extent to which the Augustinian position on predestination

changed in the centuries between the Bishop of Hippo and King Alfred.18

16 Godden, 273, quoting and paraphrasing De trinitate 10.7, 11.5, and 12.7.

17 Godden, 273-274.

18 See particularly F. Anne Payne and Katherine Proppe, whose arguments are dealt with in detailbelow.


104

ii. Fate Versus Free Will and the Concept o f “Wyrd”

The question of free will versus predestination in Anglo-Saxon literature is further

complicated by the controversy surrounding the meaning of the word wyrd, which was at

one time held to indicate the survival of a pagan concept of fate: an external agency

which predestines the affairs of humanity, akin perhaps to the Three Parcae of Greco-

Roman mythology. This conception of wyrd was contemporary with those readings of

Old English literature that sought to separate out the “original,” pagan, Germanic texts

from the Christian interpolations: “When fate is in competition with God, the text has

been ‘contaminated,’ usually by a ‘pious interpolator,’ whose ‘spurious’ additions

obscured the underlying Germanic heroic fatalism (never clearly defined or exemplified

in any extant text).”19 This reading of wyrd appears to have been largely abandoned

along with those readings looking for “monkish interpolation,” and meanings of the word

other than “fate” have been proposed as potential glosses for some of its appearances in

the literature:

the word used for fate can mean simply “event,” “what happens,” and though there are passages where some degree of personification is present, such as “the creation of the fates changes the world under the heavens” or “woven by the decree of fate,” I doubt if these are more than figures of speech by the time the poems were composed. If they are inherited from the heathen past, they may indicate that men then believed in a goddess who wove their destiny, but the poet who says “to him the Lord granted the webs of victory” is unconscious of a heathen implication in his phrase.20

While Whitelock’s comments are well-taken, she may be guilty of moving too far

in a direction away from the earlier pagan versus Christian model of reading Old English

19 Joseph B. Trahem, Jr., “Fatalism and the Millenium,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 160.

20 Dorothy Whitelock, The Beginnings o f English Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952), 27-28.


105

0 1literature. Certainly there are occurrences of the word wyrd which must be glossed as

“fate” in order to make sense within their context, and there are times when wyrd appears

definitely to be personified, such as at line 100 of The Wanderer where the poet refers to

wyrd seo mcere, “Wyrd the mighty (or famous).” It is not necessary, however, to move

back to a model of Christian tampering with an original pagan work in order to explain

these occurrences, nor do I think it logical to assume that these were verbal survivals

only, and that those speaking them had no real awareness of the import of their words.

Trahem compares wyrd seo mcere to a modem phrase like “thank your lucky

stars,” and argues that “we ‘thank our lucky stars’ with little thought of medieval

astrology.” I am not convinced, however, that Trahem is correct in his assumptions

regarding our usage of what he calls “the linguistic remains of outmoded ideas.” We may

well use the phrase without any real knowledge of medieval astrology, but we do

understand the concept behind the phrase, that the position of the stars has something to

do with fate and with luck, and we likely bring a rudimentary knowledge of astrology as

well.

The most logical assumption we can make regarding wyrd—and we can only

proceed on the basis of assumption in so much of what we say about Old English

literature—is that it is indeed a holdover from Germanic paganism, tempered by

Christianity so that the concept is more in keeping with God’s omnipotence. I would

think that the multiple meanings of the word and the original concept underlying it would

have been particularly on the minds of those poets who used it; poets in any age are far

more conscious in their use of language than those who use language solely for the

purposes of communication, and the Beowulf-poet in particular was obviously both

familiar with and attracted to some aspects of the warrior culture he describes.

21 See, for example, Mary C. Wilson Tietjen, “God, Fate, and the Hero o f Beowulf]” for a critique of the tendency of Old English scholars to understand the Christian and pagan implications wyrd in an either/or fashion.

22 Trahem, 163.


106

The desire of critics to master this concept is fated to remain unfulfilled. The

concept is far too complex and the actual philosophical discussions o f it far too infrequent

in the surviving corpus to allow us to do more than draw conclusions about its use by

individual authors in individual works. Even when it is being used in a context in which

it clearly means “fate,” the range of conceptions of fate—the point on which each author

places human existence on the continuum between free will and predestination—differs

enough in each work to make a general pronouncement regarding the precise concept

underlying wyrd impossible.

For our purpose, The Wanderer provides the best example of this ambiguity in

meaning. Beyond the use of the word in line 100—wyrd seo mcere (“fate the famous”)—

it appears in the oft quoted line 5, Wyrd bid fu l arced, generally translated as “Fate is fully

determined (or inexorable).” Yet wyrd appears again ten lines later at line 15, Ne mceg

werigmod wyrde widstondan (“Nor may the weary mind fate withstand”), which seems to

pull back somewhat from the “fully determined” reading of wyrd in line 5, or at least

provides an opportunity for the individual to find ways to operate within what fate has

determined. Bosworth-Toller glosses wipstandan

I. of opposition to force or compulsion, to withstand, resist; II. to stand against, succeed in opposing, to be a match for, refute', III. to stand in the way, be a hindrance, obstruct, prevent, be a preventive', IV. to stand o ff (c.f. wijD in wij)-faran), keep away, be absent,24

Though the modem translation of wipstandan is generally “to withstand,” the

sense of “to withstand” as “to endure” is not suggested by any of the glosses

provided by Bosworth-Toller, including number two, which is where they place

the example of The Wanderer, line 15. Does this line suggest a level of free will

23 See Mark Griffiths, “Does wyrd bid fu l arced mean ‘fate is wholly inexorable,” in Studies in English Language and Literature: “Doubt Wisely": Papers in Honour o f E.G. Stanley, ed. M.J. Toswell and E.M. Tyler (London: Routledge, 1996), 133-156. Griffiths questions to the standard translations, but in the end he offers up a thesis that does not drastically change the meaning behind the words.

24 Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898); Supplement by T. Northcote Toller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda by Alastair Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)(hereafter BT and BTS respectively).


107

capable of defeating fate? It is impossible to make a determination one way or

another, particularly with the appearance of wyrd seo mcere in line 100. Then, in

line 107, we encounter the phrase onwended wyrda gesceaft weoruld under

heofonum (“the creation of fate turns, the world under the heavens”), and the

understanding of fate as predetermined appears to re-enter the poem. We are left

with a reading of wyrd that indicates predestination, but an appeal to the end of

the poem does not answer the questions raised by line 15.

Critics looking to resolve some of this ambiguity often turn to Boethius’s

distinction between providence and fate in the Consolation o f Philosophy, and, given

Alfred’s translation of that work and the alterations he makes to some of Boethius’s

discussion of Fate and Fortune, it seems clear that at least part of our understand of what

wyrd means should come from both the Consolation and Alfred’s translation of it. The

difference between providence and fate in Boethius’s work is one of perspective: “For

Boethius, the world was created by a divine and immutable mind which governs all

things: when the government is joined to the foresight of the divine mind, it is

providentia; when it is viewed in relation to the things governed (that is, temporally), it is

fatum.” This is, of course, similar to Boethius’s distinction between God’s

foreknowledge of events and predestination—again, it is a matter of perspective, God’s

perspective being eternal and ours temporal.

What is perhaps most interesting about Alfred’s translation of Boethius is that his

formulation of wyrd (which he uses to gloss both fatum and fortuna, though not

exclusively) places wyrd under God’s control:

Sumu Jiing fionne on jiisse weorulde sint underdied jjaere wyrde, sume hire nanwuht underSied ne sint; ac sio wyrd ond eall 5a Jiing J>e hire underSied sint, sint under6ied 5aem godcundan for^once.

[Some things, therefore, on this world are subject to fate, some are not subject to her not at all; but that fate and all the things that are subject to her, are subject to that divine forethought.]26

25 Trahem, 164.

26 W. J. Sedgefield, King Alfred’s Old English Version o f Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1899), 129.9-12. Translation is my own.


108

Yet Alfred is careful to use the word forponce here, so while wyrd may be under God’s

control, we have not necessarily come to an understanding of wyrd that makes it fu l arced.

Instead, Alfred seems able to make the same distinctions that Boethius does, and, as I will

argue more fully in the next chapter, the portrait of human existence and the nature of

predestination that we find in his translations certainly differs from that found in the later

Augustine.

The problem with this explanation, however, is that we must not attempt to

understand wyrd strictly from a Christian point of view, even if we are filtering it through

first Boethius and then Alfred’s translation of Boethius. In fact, we cannot even fully

understand Alfred’s translation of Boethius without recourse to traditional Anglo-Saxon

culture, which, as I will deal with more fully in the chapter to follow, determines a

number of the changes Alfred makes to his original sources.

The concept of wyrd and the individual’s attitude towards wyrd—the relationship

he envisions between himself and wyrd—emerge an important components of the Anglo-

Saxon self in the heroic tradition. This is the aspect of wyrd that is perhaps most difficult

to explain, because it appears at times that human beings are capable of changing their

wyrd, though at others it seems that what is actually happening is that the “wise man”

will choose the proper time to act within the course that wyrd has already determined. It

has been said of Beowulf that “His task is to transform the uncertainties of fate and

fortune (which are never clearly distinguished from each other in Germanic tradition) into

good fortune, fame, and enduring glory for himself,”27 and it is generally argued that

Beowulf is able to do so, at least until his fated end fighting the dragon, when wyrd

“catches up” with him. Wyrd, analogous to the Greek goddess Atropos, is apparently

immune to human interference. Wyrd and death have, at times, significant semantic

overlap.

27 Anthony J. Gilbert, “The Ambiguity of Fate and Narrative Form in Some Germanic Poetry,” The Yearbook o f English Studies 22 (1992): 1.


109

Yet while it appears impossible to avoid one’s final wyrd, one can bend events to

one’s will, as Beowulf does in his fights with Grendel and Grendel’s mother. In

Beowulf s fight with Grendel’s mother in the mere,

The way the episode is presented, in two apparently conflicting but reconcilable versions, suggests the ambiguity of fate: the way the same event has within it the potential for good or ill fortune.. . . The rhetorical focus here shows Beowulf as a hero because he can reverse an event that

7 o

is almost a foregone conclusion for ordinary mortals.

Beowulf does not possess—or is not possessed by—a werigmod, so he mceg wyrde

widstondan. This reading is similar to one which has been made regarding the nature of

wyrd in the Exeter Book:

Man’s judgment will be determined by his ability to recognize this movement of wyrd, to anticipate the confrontation between present and future which wyrd continually engenders, and to cease to be fooled by the artificial limitations of the present by ‘thinking well,’ in the words of the Judgment Day I poet.29

The key to “withstanding” wyrd appears to be a proper frame of mind combined with an

attentiveness to the events by which one is surrounded. While it is not clear that this

combination guarantees one the ability to withstand fate, it does emerge as the only

viable method by which the attempt may be made.

The degree to which this understanding of wyrd differs with the concept presented

in Alfred’s Boethius—an appropriate place at which to end this discussion in order to

move into an examination of the king’s translations—is difficult to discern. The passage

from Alfred’s Boethius above, in which he makes the Boethian distinction between

predestination and foreknowledge, serves to introduce a lengthy analogy that is quite

altered from Boethius’s original work. Alfred describes wyrd as a great wheel on which

human beings are caught, with the wicked nearest the outer edge of the wheel and the

pious nearest its axle: “swa bio6 J>a midmestan men onmiddan Jjam spacan, and J>a betran

28 Gilbert, 2.

29 Karma Lochrie, “ Wyrd and the Limits of Human Understanding: A Thematic Sequence in the Exeter Book," Journal o f English and Germanic Philology 85:3 (July 1986): 327.


110

near J)aere nafe, and {3a maetran near 3asm felgum. [So are the midmost men at the middle

of the spokes, and the better [men] nearer the nave, and the baser near the rim] ”30 F.

Anne Payne comments,

The wheel of Wyrd joins all men in a common brotherhood, where the worst men depend on the average and the average on the best, and all depend for their existence on God (130.5 ff). Men’s freedom to escape from the whirling of Wyrd consists only in their being able to move nearer the nave, but no man crosses to the axle, to the complete understanding of God.31

The importance of Payne’s reading of wyrd in Alfred’s Boethius is her emphasis on

human freedom; as we will see in the next chapter, Payne’s reading of Boethius, hotly

contested in Alfred studies, focuses a great deal of attention upon human freedom and

upon the existential themes that arise in Alfred’s translation as a result of his emphasis on

human freedom. I do not wish to enter into existentialism and human freedom until the

next chapter, but her conception of wyrd should be briefly discussed.

Payne argues that Alfred sees wyrd as “the work that God does every day,” work

made necessary because of human freedom: “Wyrd is the balance that keeps the free

choices of men from sending the universe astray. The universe must operate in terms of

an order o f its own and if men’s choices threaten it, deliberately evil or merely humanly'X'yinadequate, Wyrd comes against them.” In Payne’s reading, the freedom we exercise

while on the great wheel of wyrd is the ability to choose how close to the axle we will

position ourselves. And, as she points out, this decision can have ramifications for our

fellow human beings:

Because the wheel of Wyrd binds all men together, the acts of one man can engage consequences that involve others besides himself. Wyrd surrounds men at all times, as they live their lives according to their lights, whether they are conscious of it or not. They succeed in finding God, in

30 Sedgefield, 130.1-3.

31 F. Anne Payne, “Three Aspects of Wyrd in Beowulf," in Old English Studies in Honour o f John C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin, Edward B. Irving, Jr., and Marie BorofF (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 16.

32 Payne, “Three Aspects of Wyrd in Beowulf,” 18.


I l l

avoiding in some measure the whirling of the wheel as the universe moves relentlessly onward, only to the degree that they lift themselves from their stationary position and move inward toward the axle on the spoke allotted to them.33

Yet while Payne reads Alfred’s image of the wheel as placing certain limitations on

human freedom, she also claims that Alfred’s conception of wyrd is that it is a force made

necessary by human freedom: “Man, in his right to choose, to dislocate the texture of

things because he lacks omniscience, performs acts which require the direct attention of

God.”34

Wyrd, for Payne, appears to be synonymous with this necessary, direct attention

of God, and her reading of Alfred’s Boethius is largely predicated on the notion that the

Alfredian text is characterized by a deep existential anxiety regarding human freedom.

Having examined some of the important developments in the history of the conception of

the self between Augustine and Alfred, then, we are ready to proceed to a detailed

examination of the Alfred’s translation of Augustine’s Soliloquia and the influence upon

it of his translation of Boethius’s Consolation o f Philosophy.

II. T r a n s f o r m in g A u g u s t in ia n I n t e r i o r i t y in A l f r e d ’s S o l il o q u ia

Little is known about King Alfred’s translation program, save for the references in the

prefaces to his translations and in Asser’s Life; even less is known regarding Alfred’s

translation of Augustine’s Soliloquia. Arguments have been forwarded that the

Soliloquies were perhaps the last work Alfred undertook to translate, because of the

work’s preoccupation with the immortality of the soul, but these have since been

dismissed as pure speculation.35 That the work was undertaken around the same time that

33 Payne, “Three Aspects of Wyrd in Beowulf,” 16-17.

34 Payne, “Three Aspects of Wyrd in Beowulf,” 18.

35 Allen Frantzen, King Alfred (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986), 67.


112

Alfred translated Boethius’s Consolation o f Philosophy seems likely, given the great

number of parallels between the passages Alfred adds to each text, as well as the fact that

his understanding of Boethius seems to be informing his understanding of Augustine, and

his understanding of Augustine informing his understanding of Boethius, as we have seen“X (\in his depiction of wyrd. The single surviving manuscript of the Soliloquies provides

no helpful evidence. Contained in British Library Cotton Vitellius A.xv, the section

containing the Soliloquies—the Southwick Codex—dates from the mid-twelfth century,

and thus provides no clues as to the translation’s ninth-century origins. The Old English

translation of the prayer that opens Book I also appears in Cotton Vittelius A.iii, but as

this MS dates from the eleventh century, it also provides no dating information.

Nevertheless, the Soliloquies are generally accepted as a genuine Alfredian

translation. Though a number of arguments have been forwarded as to why the work is

Alfred’s, the strongest argument for Alfredian authorship is based on word choice and

syntax. In both of these areas, the Soliloquies closely corresponds to the Consolation o f

Philosophy and the Pastoral Care, “works whose ascription to Alfred has rarely if ever

been questioned.”37 Most if not all of the critical work on the Soliloquies proceeds upon

the assumption that the work is Alfred’s, freely referencing the other works generally

agreed to comprise the definitive Alfredian canon: the Consolation o f Philosophy, the

Pastoral Care, and the Paris Psalter.

The critical importance of Alfred’s translation of the Soliloquia appears to be

universally agreed upon: the work’s value and interest lie primarily in the additions

Alfred makes to the Augustinian original. There are two types of additions: the first are

additions whose source can be found in another theological work. Camicelli’s edition

lists eight sources (in addition to the Soliloquia): Boethius’s Consolation o f Philosophy,

36 Camicelli provides a side-by-side list of corresponding passages in the Soliloquies and the Boethius in his edition, King Alfred’s Version o f St. Augustine’s Soliloquies, ed. Thomas A. Camicelli (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 29-37. Camicelli’s list relies upon an earlier study by Frank Hubbard, “The Relation of the ‘Blooms of King Alfred’ to the Anglo-Saxon Translation of Boethius,” Modern Language Notes 9 (June 1894): 161-171.

37 Frantzen, 69.


113

Augustine’s De videndo deo (Epistle 147); Gregory’s Dialogues, Homily on Luke 16.19-

31, Pastoral Care, and Morals', and Jerome’s Vulgate and Commentary on Luke. In

addition, some work has been done towards finding parallels between the Soliloquies and

other works of Old English literature, but the speculative nature of these studies leaves

unresolved any question of one work being influenced by another.

It is the second type of addition that has most interested critics: the additions that

appear to be the work of Alfred himself. There is a great deal of debate regarding these

additions, and some critics are of the opinion that the source of many may lie in the

marginalia of the manuscripts from which Alfred was translating, or other manuscripts

which he would have had access to. Others postulate that the additions—particularly

those of a theological nature—may come from the group of clergymen Alfred had

retained to assist him with the translation project. Barring further manuscript evidence

regarding the Soliloquies, neither of these hypotheses can be proved or disproved. For

the purposes of my own argument, I am going to proceed on the assumption that those

additions to the Soliloquia which reflect the concerns of a secular monarch are Alfred’s

own words. As for the hypothesis that some of the additions are the result of a

collaborative effort, given the internal consistency between the Soliloquies, the

Consolation, and the Pastoral Care, the evidence is overwhelming that at some point the

collaborative effort has been filtered through a single mind. The evidence that that mind

is Alfred’s is also overwhelming. This raises, of course, the issue of auctoritas, which

has been—in part—the subject of studies by Frantzen (1986), Gatch (1986), Waterhouse

(1986), and Hitch (1986 & 1988).

In his edition of the Soliloquies, Hargrove answered the auctoritas question by

claiming that in the first book of the Soliloquies, Alfred acts as translator. In the second,

38 A new edition of Alfred’s Boethius, edited by Malcolm Godden, is due to be published by Oxford University Press in 2007. In a presentation at the Thirty-Ninth International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, MI, May 2004), Godden’s team is working closely with a group of manuscripts believed to contain the same marginalia as the manuscript Alfred used in his translation of the Consolation. The results of this study may increase our knowledge of the origins of some of Alfred’s additions to the Soliloquies as well.


114

he is an adapter, and in the third he is the author.39 As Frantzen points out, this model has

been adopted—with minor variations—in most subsequent studies. While Hargrove’s

division makes sense—Alfred makes greater changes in Book II than in Book I, and

Augustine never wrote a third book to his Soliloquia—I would quarrel with his division

only because there are some very important additions to Book I that reveal Alfred to be

more than just a translator here, even using a medieval understanding of translation. In

some ways, the additions made where Alfred is the most faithful to his original are those

which emerge as most important, as they serve better to reveal the specific changes

Alfred wishes to make to Augustine, conjoined as they are with specific passages

translated from the original.

The perception among critics of precisely what Alfred is doing in altering sections

of the Soliloquies—and the Boethius—has divided itself into two main camps. The first

of these camps, of which Milton McC. Gatch provides a representative example, believes

that Alfred’s alterations are primarily the result of a lack of understanding of the works

he has chosen to translate.40 Gatch appears reluctant to attribute individuality and

originality to Alfred. Because the rather scanty textual record of the centuries

surrounding Alfred provides no evidence of the sort of philosophical, dialectical thinking

evinced in Augustine’s original, Gatch’s reading of the Soliloquies proceeds on the

assumption that such a philosophical endeavor is beyond Alfred’s capacity. He reads

most of Alfred’s additions to Augustine’s text as simple appeals to the authority of

Scripture or the Church Fathers, appeals made in order to prove points that Augustine

proves through philosophizing. Gatch does not consider the fact that Augustine himself,

in the Retractationes, admits that his philosophical proof for the immortality of the

soul—rhetorically graceful though Gatch may find its beginnings at the end of Book I—

is no proof at all. It is precisely because Augustine cannot prove the soul’s immortality

39 Henry L. Hargrove, ed., King Alfred’s Old English Version o f St. Augustine’s Soliloquies (New York, 1902), xxx, xi.

40 Milton McC. Gatch, “King Alfred’s Version of the Soliloquia. Some Suggestions on its Rationale and Unity,” in Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 17-45.


115

through the use of reason that he abandons the Soliloquia. If Alfred is appealing to the

authority of Scripture on this point, even to the point of cutting short Augustine’s

arguments regarding the difference between the specific instance of immortality in the

individual soul versus the general principle of immortality itself, it seems far more likely

that he is doing this because Augustine himself fails on this point. Scriptural authority is

the only possible “proof’ of immortality; it is a point of doctrine that must be accepted on

faith, and cannot be proven by reason. Augustine recognizes this in the midst of his

fourth-century endeavor. Far from being unable to understand the subtleties of

Augustine’s argument because of the limitations of ninth-century philosophical thought,

Alfred appears to understand all too well that Augustine’s argument fails. This

explanation for the complete turn Alfred’s Soliloquies takes in Books II and III is more

plausible than arguing that it really doesn’t take that great a turn at all.

The second camp of critics shares my more charitable reading of Alfred’s

abilities, some granting the king more, some less philosophical understanding of the texts

he is translating. F. Anne Payne’s influential study of Alfred’s Boethius, though roundly

criticized by a number of Anglo-Saxonists, continues to have some influence over current

readings of the Alfredian canon, whether that influence consists of complete

disagreement with or a tempering of Payne’s somewhat radical position. Payne’s book

makes two central claims. The first is that, unlike Boethius, whom Payne argues sees a

human misunderstanding of the universal order as being the cause o f evil, Alfred

identifies the cause of evil as human freedom, given to human beings by God to use or

misuse as we will, as we have seen in Payne’s account of wyrd in Alfred’s Boethius. The

second claim Payne makes is that Alfred systematically removes the concept of eternity

from the Boethian original, instead placing everything—including God—within time and

space. The second claim has been thoroughly refuted by many Anglo-Saxonists who

have pointed out multiple passages in Alfred’s Boethius which do deal with the concept

of eternity. Critics are generally in agreement, however, that Alfred’s Boethius, like the

Soliloquies, is far more interested in the material world than its source is, tracing it either


116

through the Alcuinian influence identified by Godden, to Alfred’s concerns as monarch,

or to both.

Though Payne’s book is flawed by too selective a reading of Alfred’s Boethius, a

modified version of her argument can not only yield important insights into this

translation, but can also reveal important interplay between the Boethius and the

Soliloquies. An emphasis on free will over predestination in Alfred’s Boethius might

possibly be attributed to the Soliloquia, which, as the early work of an Augustine still

refuting Manicheism and its brand of predestination, takes a rather strong stance in favor

of free will. If these two works were being translated simultaneously, as some critics

have suggested, this is precisely the sort of philosophical modification we might expect to

have taken place. Payne also suggests that the emphasis on free will comes from Alfred’s

own understanding of the desires of a king—whether an earthly king or an eternal one:

Men have natural freedom because God is king and no king will be servedby slaves:

hast wasre uncynlicre, gif God nasfde on eallum his rice nane frige gesceaft under his anwalde. ForQasm he gesceop twa gesceadwisa gesceafta freo, englas and men. (142.6-9)

[That would be unkingly, if God in all his kingdom had no free creature under his power. Therefore, he created two reasonable creatures free, angels and men.]41

Payne is correct in suggesting that Alfred introduces an interesting personal element into

the translation of Boethius, one which, like many of the additions to the Soliloquia,

reflects Alfred’s propensity for understanding the nature of the world through his social

position as king.

Payne also points out the ethical problems Alfred has with the doctrine of

predestination. She cites the following passage in Alfred’s Boethius to demonstrate that

what Alfred believes is that “What God predestines is not a will to good or evil in men,

41 F. Anne Payne, King Alfred and Boethius: An Analysis o f the Old English Version o f the Consolation of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 44, quoting W. J. Sedgefield, King Alfred’s Old English Version o f Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1899), 142.6-9. The translation is Payne’s.


117

but opportunity for all men to act in freedom during their lives, and in death an

irrevocable judgment on what they have willed.”42

Hit is ym 5a Godes foretiohhunge; forSaem we geheraS hwilum secgan baet hit scyle eall swa geweorQan swa swa God aet fruman getiohhad haefde, baet hit ne masge nan mon onwenden. Nu 5inc5 me baet he do woh, bonne he ara5 ba goddan, and each bonne he witnaQ \>a yflan, gif baet so5 is b^ t hit him swa gesceapan waes baet hi ne mosten elles don.

[It is about the predestination of God; for we hear said at times that all must come to pass as God had ordained it at the beginning, that no man is able to change it. Now it seems to me that he does wrong, when he honors the good, and also when he punishes the evil, if it is true that it was thus created for them that they could do nothing else.]43

Alfred’s sense of justice contrasts greatly with this doctrine of predestination, a doctrine

highly reminiscent of that expressed in Augustine’s Ad Simplicianum. While Payne is

incorrect in stating that Alfred removes the concept of eternity from his translation,

Alfred’s concept o f predestination does seem grounded in the temporal world. The

Boethian distinction between predestination in a temporal sense and predestination in the

sense that God knows what will happen because the nature of eternity means that God

takes in all of creation at once, becomes lost in Alfred’s reading of predestination through

the eyes of a monarch concerned with temporal justice.

Alfred’s interest in the implications of Christian doctrine for human agency are

not completely anomalous in Old English. His concerns parallel those of the Genesis B

poet, who appears to have some difficulties coming to terms with the doctrine of the Fall

and the fact of its predestination. The narrator of the poem cannot understand why God

would allow Adam and Eve to be duped so easily by Satan’s servant:

baet is micel wundor baet hit ece god asfre wolde, beoden, bolian psct wurde begn swa monig forlasdd be bam lygenum be f°r b31*1 larum com.

42 Payne, King Alfred and Boethius, 48.

43 King Alfred’s Old English Version o f Boethius, 142.25-31. The translation is Payne’s.


118

That is a great wonder that eternal God was ever willing to suffer so many thanes to that word, tricked by those lies, who came for his counsel.44

Anglo-Saxon society (and the continental Saxon society from which Genesis B

originates) appears to be far more concerned with the question of human agency than

many studies of the period might indicate. While it is true that the sense of social identity

was strong, it is equally true that there are passages such as these which indicate that the

act of serving a lord—temporal or eternal—is one that is entered into willingly, and that it

is the free act of the will on the part of the thane that makes the act of fealty so valuable.

If that act is mandatory, its value is diminished. For Alfred, it would seem, it is all but

valueless.

These modifications to the Augustinian concept of predestination—possibly due

to the Boethian “filter” through which Alfred reads Augustine—have obvious

ramifications for the concept of self being presented by Alfred, as they serve to grant that

self more free will, more agency. That Alfred makes this change should hardly be

surprising. As Antonina Harbus has pointed out, Old English includes several terms for

free will, including selfwill, meaning “self-will” or “free-will,” selfwendlice, “under one’s

own direction,” selfwildlice, “under one’s own control,” and even selflic, “of one’s own

accord.”45 In contrast to Harbus’s argument, however, is John Vickrey’s 1965 essay

“Selfsceaft in Genesis B,” which focuses on the hapax legomenon selfsceaft which occurs

in line 523 of the poem 46 Vickrey’s reading of selfsceaft begins with a summary of the

definitions of the word that have gone before, most of them dealing in some way with the

fact that Adam is not bom of woman, and translating the second part of the compound,

sceaft, as “created.” Vickrey offers an interesting alternative: sceaft might also be

44 The Saxon Genesis: An Edition o f the West Saxon Genesis B and the Old Saxon Vatican Genesis, ed. A. N. Doane (Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 1991), 595b-598. Translation is my own.

45 Antonina Harbus, “The Medieval Concept of the Self in Anglo-Saxon England,” Self and Identity 1 (2002): 83.

46 John F. Vickrey, “Selfsceaft in Genesis B," Anglia 83 (1965): 154-171.


119

translated as “fated”; the Old English gesceaft, he explains, is often glossed “fated,” so it

is possible that the sceaft of selfsceaft be read similarly. If this is the case, Vickrey

argues, then Adam is “self-fated”; of all human beings, he alone is allowed the choice

between mortality and immortality, and between good and evil. Because of the doctrine

of original sin, all of humanity after him is denied this primary choice. Vickrey’s reading

of Genesis B runs counter to the emphasis on free will Harbus reads in the poetic record,

further complicating the issue of free will and agency as it existed in Anglo-Saxon

England.

Though Payne does not discuss agency as such, the existential concept of human

freedom is central to her analysis of Alfred’s Boethius, and her discussion of human

freedom makes it clear that she is using the concept in such a way as to suggest the now

fashionable term agency. Payne argues that Alfred’s emphasis on human freedom

introduces into the text an existential anxiety regarding that freedom. Though her

argument for the existential element is based primarily on her claim that Alfred has

eliminated Boethius’s references to eternity, the existential element can be found in

Alfred nonetheless. Katherine Proppe’s essay “King Alfred’s Consolation o f

P h ilo so p h y is generally regarded as one of the most systematic criticisms of Payne’s

book, and her analysis of Alfred’s translation repeats Payne’s claims for a certain degree

of Christian existentialism in Alfred’s Boethius. Unlike Payne, however, she grounds her

argument in a more accurate reading of the work:

I agree that for long stretches of his version it seems as if there is only the struggle of this present life, but then there are also very definite pictures of eternity as a state beyond this life, and only by equivocation can one argue that Alfred does not present the vision of an orderly realm above the storms of this earth as well as the eternity of the second death.47

The problem Proppe reveals in Payne’s use of existentialism in reading Alfred’s

translation is one of degree. While there is an existential mood to Alfred’s Boethius—

and evidence of existential anxiety in the Soliloquies—it remains a theistic existentialism,

47 Katherine Proppe, “King Alfred’s Consolation o f Philosophy,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 74 (1973): 636.


120

more in the vein of Kierkegaard than Camus. Despite arguments that suggest the

contrary, it is possible for doubt and faith to coexist in the same mind; I would argue, in

fact, that such a coexistence is an inevitable consequence of living in the transient world

and subscribing to a belief in the transcendent, a condition that is the focus of so many

passages in Old English poetry. But instead of looking for the rich complexity that

results when faith and doubt and the transient and the transcendent are set side-by-side,

many critics fall into the “either/or trap,” and tackle the question of Christian and pagan

(or existential) elements in Old English literature as if an author, a poem, or a speaker

must be either one or the other. Given Gregory’s advice to Augustine of Canterbury,

such a position would seem untenable.

This sort of either/or thinking might actually be the product of the prominence in

Anglo-Saxon studies of the parable of the sparrow in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History,

which provides a possible explanation for the readings of Anglo-Saxon existentialism

that have appeared thus far. Expressions of existential doubt in Old English are often

read through the parable, and proceed on the assumption that such doubt indicates the

uncertainty about the afterlife which, according to Bede, pre-existed Christianity amongst

the Northumbrians. Because it is presented by Bede as an either/or proposition—

Edwin’s unnamed counselor moves from existential uncertainty about the nature of the

afterlife to the certainty offered by Christianity with no apparent doubt regarding this new

faith—it is common for readers of Old English literature to assume that its poetic

speakers and the characters being depicted are Christian, and that signs of doubt or

spiritual despair place them outside the faith. I will take up a refutation of such

arguments in the chapter to follow; for now, let it suffice to say that existential doubt is a

common theme in Anglo-Saxon literature, and that the human freedom—the agency—

introduced along with this doubt is an important component of the Anglo-Saxon self.48

48 That Boethius’s Consolation can also be read as expressing existential themes is an argument that needs to be made; outside of a single work examining Kierkegaard’s reading of the Consolation, Arild Christensen, Om Kierkegaards Lcensing a f Boethius (Kobenhavn: G. Torv’s Antikvariat, 1965), currently available only in Danish, the connection between Boethius and existentialism appears never to have been studied.


121

Let us finish examining the spectrum of opinion on the question of Alfred’s

philosophical understanding of the material he is translating. Proppe differs from critics

such as Gatch as she does not question Alfred’s understanding of the material that he is

translating. Proppe argues that “Alfred is conscious of both the erratic, transitory world

of nature and the rational order ordained for the creation by God dwelling in eternity,”

and explains that Alfred understands that “Victory may be granted by Dryhten, and there

may be prayers to Him, but there is no access of understanding the world through Him.”49

Her reading of Alfred’s theology informs her reading of his additions to the Consolation

regarding the necessity of material goods: she argues that “It appears that Alfred is trying

to reject these [material] things in favor of wisdom, and yet one has to use them.”50 She

concludes that “Alfred must be constantly swinging from despising them [material

things] as ends in themselves and needing them as means, to despising them altogether

because they interfere with the pursuit of wisdom and God.”51 As for the influence of

Anglo-Saxon culture upon Alfred’s translation, Proppe concludes that “The desire for

glory in this world persists even while humility and the life of the mind are being urged.

In a sense, Alfred is using the old vocabulary of eagerness for fame and pride to exhort

his people to study.” In the end, Proppe presents a tempered version of Payne’s

argument, one which retains Alfred’s exercise of auctoritas over the text while making

the existential argument fall in line with those passages of the Boethius which undercut

Payne’s reading.

Susan Hitch, in her work on Alfred’s Soliloquies, also insists that Alfred

understands the philosophical positions of those whom he is translating, and argues for an

even higher level of auctoritas in the Soliloquies than in the Consolation, a reasonable

49 Proppe, 642.

50 Proppe, 646.

51 Proppe, 647.

52 Proppe, 648.


122

position given that the Soliloquies are altered to a far greater extent than the Consolation.

Hitch argues that

The status of authority changes as Augustinus increasingly speaks in a first person “I” which is recognizable as the voice of Alfred the king, subordinate to but commenting on the assertions of Reason with reference to his own experience; that experience is increasingly admitted at least in support of the authority of Reason.. . . This progression roughly parallels Alfred’s movement away from Augustine’s text, away from dependence on its authority and towards a textual authority of his own.53

Hitch’s schema for reading the Soliloquies is really not that different from the one

proposed by Hargrove almost a century earlier; the gradual progression away from

Augustine’s original as Alfred moves from Book I to Book III remains, but Hitch is

willing to speak of Alfred’s translation in terms of the king’s personal exercize of

authority over Augustine’s text, something most earlier studies were content to leave

unaddressed.

Hitch is also interested in the personal nature of the imagery Alfred adds to the

translation, particularly those metaphors and examples appropriate to his personal and

political situation. Because Hitch grants Alfred a great deal more philosophical

knowledge than more conservative critics, she argues that “most of Alfred’s substantial

changes to the Soliloquies are made at points where Augustine himself was having

difficulty.”54 Instead of making alterations to correct his misunderstanding of Augustine,

Hitch argues, Alfred is actually trying to succeed where Augustine has failed.

Locating those passages containing “fissures” where Alfred emerges in the text is

a necessary component of any study of his translations, and these fissures provide further

evidence for reconstructing the conception of self being presented in the Alfredian

translations. Much of what Alfred adds to the Augustinian conception of self is added

when Alfred inhabits the role of Ic in the dialogue, displacing the Augustine who is the

53 Susan Hitch, “Alfred’s Craeft: Imagery in Alfred’s Version of Augustine’s Soliloquies,” Journal o f the Department o f English, University o f Calcutta 22 (1986-1987): 130.

54 Susan Hitch, “Alfred’s Reading of Augustine’s Soliloquies,” in Sentences: Essays Presented to Alan Weard on the Occasion o f His Retirement from Wadham College, Oxford, ed. D. M. Reeks (Southampton: Bosphoros, 1988), 22.


123

sole inhabitant of the role in the Latin original. Both in these passages and in others, the

changes Alfred makes to the Soliloquia prove to have a profound effect on Augustine’s

conception of the self. To put it succinctly, the Alffedian self becomes enmeshed in a

web of social ties and obligations that necessitate its active involvement in the City of

Man; these ties and obligations serve to add layers of social identity to the “core” self

described in Augustine’s texts. That this self should demonstrate a greater concern with

the material world and its ephemeral nature should come as no surprise. Alfred’s

translations—and this cannot be repeated often enough—are the translations of a king.

They are not the writings of a bishop, a Roman Senator and philosopher, or a pope, but of

a sitting monarch whose reign was devoted to the consolidation of his kingdom, and who

was besieged for most of his reign by Viking raiders seeking to destroy his

accomplishments and the accomplishments of his ancestors.

They are also, as Alfred himself points out in his Preface to the Pastoral Care, the

translations of a king who deeply desires that both he and his kingdom recover the level

of learning the island had once been famous for. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill sees this

motivation as the key to understanding the reasons behind the rather eclectic list of works

Alfred chose to include in his program:

Alfred did not select his books for translation with the intention of testing his ideas of kingship; but it was a king who translated, thinking a king’s thoughts as he did so; it is a king, in these translations, who reflects on the past and the present; and he thinks through the medium of these books best calculated to reveal what interests him. Why did he choose them and not other books? The answer is, as any acquaintance with ninth-century manuscripts will confirm, that they were obvious books for his purpose of self-instruction in the social role of Christianity.55

While Alfred may not be “testing his ideas of kingship” in his translations, he is engaged

in the process of reconciling the role of the king—and the material needs associated with

kingship—with an Augustinian position that is unconcerned with earthly kingdoms and

hostile to an inordinate desire for earthly goods.

55 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1971), 142.


124

The result is that the Augustinian self is strongly shifted towards the material

world; Alfred must be more willing than Augustine to accept the things of this world as

necessary “goods” through which an individual can define himself. Not only is wealth

needed to maintain and protect a kingdom, but citizenship in an earthly city is a far

greater determinant of individual identity than is allowed for in a work like De Civitate

Dei. As Richard Abel has pointed out, “Whatever the image he chose to project in his

writings and translations, Alfred in practice was a traditional West Saxon king, motivated

by thoughts of earthly glory as much as hope of heaven.”56

Alfred’s translation program should not, however, be read as constituting some

form of nationalistic propaganda. As Janet Nelson has argued, these translations “were

not, in any narrow sense, propaganda; but they inculcated some general principles,

especially that of obedience to a divinely established authority.”57 Rather than

propaganda, it seems more likely that the purpose of Alfred’s translation program—

besides those stated in the Prefaces to the Pastoral Care and the Soliloquies—is not the

accrual of royal power for its own sake, but the desire to build a well-governed,

integrated kingdom capable of withstanding the Viking assault. Alfred is attempting to

build the best civitas possible, and to craft a national identity that will allow the Anglo-

Saxon people to stand together as one.

It is important to note that Alfred does not simply craft this new identity out of the

writings of the Fathers and his own mind. When Alfred embarked on his program, Janet

Nelson reminds us, “The aristocracy already shared a tradition.”58 This tradition, as it has

been pointed out time and again, is the same tradition that Alfred encountered in the book

of poetry given to him by his mother as a reward for learning its contents: a tradition

56 Richard Abels, Alfred the King: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London: Longman, 1998), 270.

57 Janet Nelson, “Wealth and Wisdom: The Politics of Alfred the Great,” in Kings and Kingship, ed. J. Rosenthal, Acta 11 (1986 for 1984): 44.

58 Nelson, “Wealth and Wisdom,” 45.


125

which advocates a particular type of heroism, a way of ordering society, and a desire for

immortality through earthly fame.59 As G. N. Garmonsway has said of Beowulf,

taken as a whole, the story with its episodes and digressions does form a kind of eighth-century Mirror for Magistrates or Book named the Governor, wherein those in authority might have seen pictured their obligations and responsibilities, and from which they could have gleaned political wisdom had they so desired, and learned some useful lessons about current moral sanctions governing behavior in general, and heroic conduct in particular.60

Given that the history of literature is replete with examples of works written with an

intent to provide models of behavior, it does not seem unreasonable to assume that the

poetry to which Alfred had been exposed would have provided him with just such

examples. Such works are, of course, one way in which society attempts to formulate

identities for its individual members, and Alfred appears to pass on what he has learned

from these examples in his own translations. Eugene Green concurs, and further

emphasizes the importance of society in the formation of the self; he argues that both the

Soliloquies and the Boethius “seek to examine its [the self s] place in the community and

in the eternity of God’s creation,” and that the Soliloquies in particular “has the

personified Reason help the self to discover that its identity, both mortal and eternal, is

communal.”61 Green concludes his essay with the statement, “if a great aim of Alfred’s

was to establish a Christian kingdom of selves joined in a common identity, hisfi-y

Soliloquies enunciates in method and purpose his enabling vision.”

59 The story of Alfred and the book of poetry can be found in the twenty-third chapter of Asser’s Life o f Alfred.

60 G. N. Garmonsway, “Anglo-Saxon Heroic Attitudes,” in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor o f Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr, ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. and Robert P. Creed (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 139.

61 Eugene Green, “Speech Acts and the Question of the Self in Alfred’s Soliloquies,” in Interdigitations: Essays for Irmengard Rauch, ed. Gerald F. Carr, Wayne Herbert, and Lihua Zhang (New York: Peter Land, 1999), 211.

62 Green, 216.


126

As I have already stated, this aim is achieved primarily through the periodic

conflation of Augustine and Alfred in the Ic who speaks in the text. This periodic

conflation should be beyond debate. From almost the very beginning of the text, we can

see added passages that quite clearly refer to Alfred’s individual situation, and to the very

project he is undertaking. Obviously, the famous Preface, in which Alfred uses the

metaphor of gathering wood to describe the gathering of texts—either to be translated as

part of the program, or the gathering of texts he uses to create his adaptation of the

Soliloquia (a likely theory given that the authors named are the same authors whose

works he uses in the Soliloquies)—comes from the mind and experience of the king

himself.

One need only proceed only a few lines into the actual translation before finding

the first of many additions to the text which obviously reflect the situation of Alfred, not

Augustine. Gesceadwisnes instructs Augustine to write down the content of their

dialogue, in much the same manner as Ratio does in the Soliloquia, but an important

element is added:

befasste hit t>onne bocstafum and awrit hit. Ac me JrincS jjath fjeah, jjaet [>u si to unhal J)ast 6u ne mage hit asall awritan; andpeah ceall hal were, Jm bejjorftest fcaet 5u haefdest digele stoge and asmanne aelces oSres fringes, andfceawa cude men and creftige midpe, de nan wiht anydran, ac fultmoden to pinum crefte.

[Make it fast in letters then and write it. But it seems to me, however, that you are so unhealthy that you may not write it all; and even i f you were completely healthy, you need to have a secret place and solitude from every other thing, and a few known and crafty men with you, who nothing hinder, but give aid to your craft. ]63

As we know from Asser, the king was surrounded with fceawa cude men and creftige who

assisted him in carrying out his translation program both through consultation over those

63 King Alfred’s Version o f St. Augustine's Soliloquies (hereafter referred to as Soliloquies), ed. Thomas A. Camicellli (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 49.17-21. Passages in italics are Alfred’s additions to Augustine’s original, based on King Alfred’s Old English Version o f St. Augustine’s Soliloquies, ed. and trans. Henry Lee Hargrove (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1904). All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.


127

works which were translated by the king himself, and through the translation of other

works included in the Alfredian program, such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and the

Orosius. Arguments have been made that Alfred actually makes this addition to refer to

Augustine’s philosophical retreat at Cassiciacum, which, given Alfred’s penchant for

adding historical details to his translations, is certainly a plausible explanation for this

addition. However, even if this were part of the motivation for the addition of this

passage, it seems likely that Alfred also appreciated the similarities between Augustine’s

intentions at Cassiciacum and his own, and these similarities may, in part, provide an

explanation for the king’s attraction to what was and remains a rather obscure

Augustinian text.

A second, extremely important addition indicative of the king’s concerns comes

when Reason asks Augustine to what extent he would know his friend, Alypius.

Augustine’s version reads

R[atio]. Quid? Ilium familiarem tuum, quern te adhuc ignorare dixisti, sensu vis nosse an intellectu?A[ugustinus]. Sensu quidem quod in eo novi, si tamen sensu aliquid noscitur, et vile est et satis est. Illam vero partem, qua mihi amicus est, id est ipsum animum, intellectu adsequi cupio.

[Reason: What about that friend of yours, whom you say you still do not know, do you wish to know him by sense or by intellect?Augustine: What I know of him by sense, if indeed anything can be known by sense, is worthless, and I have had enough of it. But that part of him that makes him my friend, that is to say his soul, I want to grasp by the intellect.]64

This inability to know the inner self—the soul—of another is, of course, important to the

concept of the self, as it stresses not only the self s individuality but its alienation from

others, an alienation that is so pervasive a part of Anglo-Saxon literature. This desire to

know the mind of another and the inability to do so are translated into Alfred’s

64 Soliloquia 1.3.(8), in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vol. 89, ed. Wolfgangus Hormann (Wien: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1986). All Latin quotations are taken from this edition. English translations are taken from Soliloquies: Augustine’s Inner Dialogue, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., trans. Kim Paffenroth (Brooklyn: New City Press, 2000) unless otherwise indicated.


128

Soliloquies without any substantial change. It is what Alfred adds to Augustine’s stated

desire to know the mind of another that reflects his role as king, and voices the concept

that not only holds Anglo-Saxon society together, but serves to give identity to its

members:

ha cwasb heo: h(w)as3er woldest ]>u Sonne Jjinne cniht f>e we ere aembe sprecon cun(n)an, J)e mid Sam utram gewitum, ]>e miS J)am inran?Da cwasS ic: ic hine can nu swa ic hine of Sam uttram gewitum cunnan masge. Ac ic wilnode J>aet ic cuSe hys inge]>anc of minum inge^ance.Donne wiste ic hwilce treowda he hcefde wid me.

[Then he said: By which would you rather then know your disciple whom we were speaking about before, with the outer senses, or with the inner?Then said I: I know him now as I may know him with the outer senses.But I would that I knew his thoughts with my thoughts. Then I would know what troth he has with we.]65

The presence in this passage of the Old English word treowda, which I have deliberately

translated with the archaic “troth,” captures the core of what Alfred is adding to

Augustine’s conception of the self, voicing the concern of a lord toward his thegns.

Alfred’s addition states that the Ic of the text would know what “truth” his cniht has with

him. We have come some distance from the qua mihi amicus est, “that by which

[Alypius] is my friend,” of Augustine’s original text. If we accept the argument that Ic,

on occasion, signifies both Augustine and Alfred (or the even stronger argument that

sometimes Augustine is completely removed from the Ic, leaving only Alfred), we have a

statement that not only reflects the concern of a king for the loyalty of his followers, but

which serves to place the individual self into a system of hierarchical relationships, each

requiring an individual to pledge troth to his immediate superior, and as a result

providing the individual with a sense of social identity. As Richard Abels has

commented,

Lordship for Alfred . . . was the force that held together the political world and through a hierarchy of authority connected the temporal world with the spiritual. Its centrality was such that Alfred decreed that men could fight for their lords without incurring vendettas and that no man could

65 Soliloquies, 59.10-14.


129

fight against his lord, even on behalf of a kinsman. At the apex of the chain of lordship stood God and below him the king. Just as the king was responsible to God for justice being meted out to his men, so the king laid the charge upon those under his lordship to oversee the men who had sworn obedience to them. In practical terms, someone was responsible and answerable for the behavior of every man, whether free or slave.66

The inner self that Augustine speaks of is still acknowledged in this passage, as Alfred

retains the notion that one inner self can never really know another inner self. Yet his

concern is not only epistemological, but socio-political. The inability to know the inner

self of another may have dire consequences in the material world.

The multivalence of the Middle English word trothe has been widely explored,

but these studies often ignore the fact that the Old English form of the word shares this

multivalence.67 According to Bosworth-Toller, the Old English treow can mean:

I. truth to a promise or engagement, faith, troth,II. truth to a person, fidelity, fealty, loyalty,III. the truth of the stronger to the weaker, grace, favour, help-,IV. an assurance o f faith or truth, word (in to give or pledge one’s word),

a promise, an engagement, a covenant, league',V. faith in something, belief, trust, confidence68

The social aspect of one’s identity is formed by one’s troth-pledge, and, as Alfred is well-

aware, the truth of that troth-pledge. The concept of social identity is brought to the fore

in Alfred’s translation almost immediately, and in many of the remaining additions

dealing with the self and self-knowledge, this element continues to provide an important

deviation from Augustine.

Alfred’s translation takes another strong turn toward the material, social world

with the additions he makes to Augustine’s discussion of the multiple paths to wisdom. I

argued in Chapter Four that Augustine’s Soliloquia contains a strong statement of the

66 Abels, 275-276.

67 One exception is Richard Firth Green’s Crisis o f Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), which deals with the Old English concept on pages 10-13.

68 BT, 1013.


130

individual nature of the self when Reason, speaking of the path to Divine Truth, tells

Augustine, “Sed non ad earn una via pervenitur. Quippe pro sua quisque sanitate ac

firmitate comprehendit illud singulare ac verissimum bonum. [But there is not just one

way to her. Indeed, each one seizes that unique and truest good, according to his or her

own strength.]”69 Augustine means that there are multiple paths to God, as his

commentary in the Retractationes illustrates.

Alfred does not remove what Augustine sees as a potentially heterodox reference

to the individual paths to Divine Truth; on the contrary, this passage is given far greater

emphasis in his translation through the introduction of a long and elaborate analogy,

comparing the multiple paths to Divine Wisdom to the multiple paths one might take to

reach the cynges ham:

Gedenc nu hweder awhit mani mann cynges ham sece per deer he dome on tune byd, odde hys gemot, odde hys fyrd, odde hweder de dince poet hi cealle on anne weig peder cumen. Ic wene peah dcet hi cumen on swide manige we gas: sume cumad swide earfodderne; sume habbad swide langne and swide rihtne and swide godne. Sume habbad swide scortne, and peah wone and nearone and fuulne; sume habbad scordne and smedne and rihtne; and peah cumad cealle to anum hlaforde, sume ced, sume uned. nader ne hi peder gelice eade cumad, ne hi per gelice eade ne beod. Sume beod on maran are and on maran ednesse ponne sume, sume on leessan, sume fu l neah buton, buton pcet and poet he lufad. swa hit bid ceac be pam wisdome: celc para pe hys wilnad andpe hys geornful byt, he hym mceg cuman to and on hys hyrede wunian and be lybbam, peah hi hym sum ncer sian, sume fyer. swa swa celces cynges hama beod sume on bure, sume on healle, sume on odene, sume on carcerne, and lybbad peah cealle be anes hlafordes are, swa swa cealle men lybbad under anre sunnan and beo hyre leohte geseod pcet pcet hy geseod. Sume swide scearpe and swide swotele lociad. Sume unceade awhit geseod. Sume beod stcereblinde and nyttiad peah pare sunnan. Ac swa swa peos gesewe sunne ures lichaman ceagan onleoht, swa onliht se wisdom ures modes ceagan, pcet ys, ure angyt; and swa swa pees lichaman ceagan halren beod, swa hy mare gefod pees leohtes pcere sunna, swa hyt by& aeac be f>3£s modes aeagan, Jjast is, andgit. Swa swa J>aet halre byS, swa hyt mare geseon maeg [>aere aeccan sunnan, J>ast is, wisdom.



131

[Think now whether at all many men seek there the king’s home when he is in town, or at his assembly, or with his army, or whether you think that they all come hither by one path. I believe, however, that they come on very many paths: some come with great difficulty; some have paths which are very long and very straight and very good. Some have very short ways, and yet narrow and foul; some have ways which are short and smooth and right; and yet all come to one lord, some more easily, some uneasily. Neither do they come thither with like ease, nor are they there likewise at ease. Some are in more honor and in more ease than others, some in less, some just about without, except that one which he loves. So it is also concerning wisdom; each o f them who wills it and is eager for it, he may come to him and dwell in his household and live by him, although some are nearer him, some farther. So is the home o f each king, some in cottages, some in halls, some on the threshing-floor, some in prison, and all live there by the favor o f one lord, just as all men live under one sun and by her light see what they see. Some look very sharply and very clearly. Some see with unease. Some are stark blind yet use the sun. But just as the visible sun lights the eyes o f our body, so wisdom lights the eyes o f our mind, that is, our reason; and just as the eyes o f the body are more whole as they receive more o f the light o f the sun, so it is also concerning the eyes of the mind, that is, reason. Just as what is healthier, as it may see more that eternal sun, that is, wisdom.]70

The sheer length of the addition, one of the longer passages added to the less altered

Book I of the Soliloquies, is enough to attract the attention of a reader familiar with

Augustine’s original work. Alfred has obviously taken great care not only in making the

analogy, but in drawing it out and providing very specific cultural details. As in

Augustine, the sanitate ac firmitate [health and strength] of the individual are of primary

importance to his or her ability to come to wisdom, and are the primary determinants of

the individual’s proximity to Divine Truth. Yet this addition of a social dimension to

Augustine’s discussion of the individual paths to Divine Truth focuses the reader’s

attention on the fact of the socially divergent paths each of us takes while we are on

pilgrimage in the material world.

If we examine the details of the analogy, we immediately become aware of the

common trope of using the word hlaford to mean both an individual’s earthy lord as well

70 Soliloquies, 77.5-78.8. I have consulted Hargrove’s 1904 translation for a few o f the more difficult constructions.


132

as meaning the Lord God. Given the prominence of this usage in Anglo-Saxon literature,

we can expect that Alfred’s readers would understand the analogy without needing much

explanation. The blending of Anglo-Saxon social structure and Christian theology is well

attested to in any number of works— Dream o f the Rood, Genesis, Andreas', God is

consistently envisioned as an earthly lord, and Christ as his atheling.

Yet if the analogy is a common one, why did Alfred feel the need to expound

upon it at such length? The most logical explanation, given the character of his other

additions, is that once again Alfred is adding a crucial social dimension to Augustine’s

concept of the multiple paths. First, the various homes of the king serve to define his

major social functions in Anglo-Saxon society—he might be in town, in his assembly, or

with his army, suggesting his civic, legislative, and military functions. The various paths

suggest little in the way of a specific social context, but stating that those traveling to the

king differ in terms of their ar—their honor—certainly suggests the notion of social class,

possibly adding social relevance to the various paths, as those who are in most honor

would have the straightest, easiest road to the king, and would be nearest him once

received into his presence.

The addition of the passage concerning the various places an individual might live

under the lord’s favor supports such a reading. We are told that some individuals will

live in halls, some in cottages, and even some in prison. This addition cannot be anything

but a reference to social class, and hammers home to the reader not only the fact that the

proximity of each individual to God will vary, but that the social structure of Anglo-

Saxon England reflects the divinely ordained structure of eternity. If there is a place

where Alfred’s Soliloquies verge on propaganda, it is in this passage. Alfred is not just

making Augustine’s theological point clear; he is asserting the “correctness” of Anglo-

Saxon social structure within the wider scheme of Creation.

This would also suggest that Alfred is placing a far greater emphasis on good

works than Augustine does. The doctrine of grace Augustine comes to formulate in the

decades after writing the Soliloquia seems at odds with Alfred’s notion that those who


133

possess the greatest ar will be those with the easiest path to the Lord and those who will

take up a place in closest proximity to the Lord. Yet this is what the analogy says,

indicating yet another way in which Alfred moves the discussion of the nature of the self

into the material realm. It is also, I would argue, another addition reflecting Alfred’s

position as monarch. While Augustine may be able to divorce an individual’s salvation

from the performance of good works, Alfred cannot. In order for his kingdom to survive

and thrive, he needs his people to perform good works, to earn ar both in their fight

against the Viking aggressors and in their troth-pledges to their social superiors. Without

these good works, Alfred’s kingdom will likely be either conquered or will self-destruct.

Yet because Alfred is making use of an extended analogy, it is possible that the ar

he speaks of also refers to God’s grace or mercy, as in line 1 of The Wanderer. God’s

mercy is, of course, the gift of grace that allows us to attain salvation. It is not

unreasonable, then, to argue that ar takes on the same dual meaning in Alfred’s

translation as it does in The Wanderer, while ar is something that is earned in this world,

it is, according to orthodox belief, something that is granted to the individual by God.

Grace and good works become conflated in a single word.

This systematic conflation of divine with secular rule may well read like

propaganda to the modem reader, but to accuse Alfred of rhetorical manipulation for the

sake of power is to misunderstand the nature of kingship being articulated in this passage.

As Richard Abels, speaking of the translation program as a whole, has argued,

This was not a cynical use of religion to manipulate his subjects into obedience, but an intrinsic element in Alfred’s world-view. He believed, as did other kings in ninth-century England and Francia, that God had entmsted him with the spiritual as well as physical welfare of his people.If the Christian faith fell into ruin in his kingdom, if the clergy were too ignorant to understand the Latin words they butchered in their offices and liturgies, if the ancient monasteries and collegiate churches lay deserted out of indifference, he was answerable before God, as Josiah had been.Alfred’s ultimate responsibility was the pastoral care of his people.71

71 Abels, 221.


134

A more charitable reading of this passage, based in part on the Anglo-Saxon conception

of kingship presented by Abels, is that Alfred wants to make his kingdom the best

possible earthly kingdom—that is, to forge a kingdom that reflects the heavenly kingdom

to the greatest degree possible in the City of Man.

Such a reading agrees with what we know of the conception of sacral kingship in

ninth-century Anglo-Saxon society, though what we can and do know is the topic of

much debate. William Chaney’s 1970 study, The Cult o f Kingship in Anglo-Saxon

England, received with much controversy when it first appeared, makes a compelling

argument for at least a vestigial pagan conception of kingship that is imported into

Christianity in the seventh-century conversion of England, metamorphosing into a

somewhat different and weaker concept in the process. When we take into account the

arguments of Janet Nelson and Richard Abels against reading Alfred’s translation

program as propaganda, but rather as a means by which to represent an older Anglo-

Saxon tradition and to revive and highlight the spiritual function of the office of king, it

seems unwise to completely discount Chaney’s argument.

This is particularly so in the case of the evidence Chaney presents for the

Germanic conception of the king as an intermediary between the people and the gods.

Chaney explains that “The relation of the divine and the tribal is primarily one of action,

of ‘doing,’ and to assure the favourable actions of the gods toward the tribe the king

‘does’ his office as mediator between them, sacrificing for victory, for good crops and for7 7peace, ‘making’ the year.” He goes on to describe the relationship in more general

terms, commenting that “In a world in which the kingdoms of men depend upon the

realm of the divine, the earthly king moves in the vital strand which binds them

together.”73

To argue that a remnant of this belief, filtered through Christianity, is not an

integral part of the concept of kingship held by Alfred would seem to ignore a great deal

72 William A. Chaney, The Cult o f Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), 12.

73 Chaney, 12.


135

of evidence. The translation program embarked upon by Alfred does place the king in a

position as intermediary between God and the Anglo-Saxon people, or at least between

God’s Church and the Anglo-Saxon people. In what is likely Alfred’s first translation,

Gregory’s Pastoral Care, the sacral authority of the king and his position as linguistic

intermediary is highlighted in the close to Alfred’s Preface'.

Ond ic bibiode on Godes noman |)2et nan mon 9one aestel from Jiaere bee ne doe, ne £>a boc from Jsaem mynstre: uncu5 hu longe Jiaer swae gelaerede biscopas sien, swae swae nu Gode 5onc well hwaer sindon; forby ic wolde Qaette hie ealneg aet Qaere stowe waeren, buton se biscep hie mid him habban wille o55e hio hwaer to lame sie, o95e hwa o5re biwrite.

[And I command in God’s name that no man take the asstel from the book, nor the book from the minster: it is unknown how long there will be such learned bishops, such as now God be thanked there are everywhere; therefore I wish that they always remain in their place, unless the bishop would have them with him or lend them somewhere, or someone is copying it.]74

Chaney’s theory would seem to be supported by Alfred’s own words. He is asserting

authority over the Church in his kingdom, not only in commanding that the translation in

question remain in each minster to which it has been sent, but in making the decision as

to which works are to be translated: “some books which are useful for all men to know.”

And, in choosing to personally translate works such as Gregory’s Pastoral Care,

Augustine’s Soliloquia, Boethius’s Consolation, and the Psalms, Alfred “inhabits” the

roles of Pope, Church father, philosopher, Roman senator, and Hebrew king. This last is

perhaps the most important of all, if Alfred were consciously crafting a parallel between

himself and King David, finding in the Hebrew Bible a model for sacral kingship not

unlike the model he received from his Germanic heritage.

Examining the sacral model of kingship in Alfred’s translations reveals Alfred’s

conception of self. As I have already argued, Alfred’s program serves to resurrect and

reformulate the Germanic past of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, and, in so doing, invests

74 King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version o f Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. Henry Sweet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1871; reprint, Millwood N.Y.: Kraus Reprint Company, 1978), 8.1-6 (Cotton MS). Translations are my own.


136

individuals with a sense of social and national identity. Alfred is following the advice

given by Gregory in converting the Anglo-Saxon people to “convert” kingship from a

Germanic model into a Christian model, and presenting himself as a individual capable of

assuming this new kingly role. Such an act on Alfred’s part provides the king with

greater agency, as he is responsible for crafting the very role he must play. But it also

limits his freedom, as the role he creates for himself is greatly determined by the need to

craft it within a preexisting tradition.

In addition to the Germanic tradition, Alfred is also working within the

typological tradition. While Alfred’s use of typology in crafting a portrait of himself as

monarch is certainly not as complex as the one presented in Confessions, he can still be

seen as clearly drawing on Biblical figures such as David and Solomon to present a king

who is interested in wisdom and the arts. Also, if we accept Asser’s account as genuine,

then we are provided with further evidence of an attempt to link Alfred not only with

David and Solomon, but with Joseph as well, as is suggested by Asser’s remark that

TEthelwulf loved Alfred more than his other sons, eo quod ilium plus ceteris filiis

diligebat,15 suggestive of Genesis 37:3 Israhel autem diligebat Ioseph super omnes fdios

suos. The Alfredian self, like the Augustinian self, exists in the larger history of

Creation, and within the divine plan of God.

One additional aspect of the Alfredian self still warrants discussion, though it has

more to do with the “core” self than the social self. At the end of Book II of the

Soliloquia, Augustine abandons his discussion o f the immortality of the soul, apparently

having come to the conclusion that he cannot prove the soul’s immortality through the

use of reason alone. Alfred’s translation does not end there, however. As I discussed at

the beginning of this chapter, Alfred adds an entire book to his Soliloquies, some of it

taken from Augustine’s Epistle 147, which has come to be called De Videndo Deo.

Alfred also abandons Augustine’s attempt to prove the immortality of the soul through

the use of reason, and instead builds his argument through the use of authority, both

75 Asser’s Life o f King A Ifred, Together with the Annals o f Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, ed. William Henry Stevenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 11.


137

scriptural and patristic. I should also point out that Gesceadwisnes's advice makes it

possible to argue that the Ic of the text becomes completely Alfred at this point, as Ic is

told by Gesceadwisnes to consult Augustine’s De videndo deo to find the answers to his

questions regarding the soul. If Ic is still meant to represent Augustine at this point, it is

curious that he has been told to consult his own work to find the answers to his questions.

This question of the soul’s immortality is important to the question of the

Alfredian self, because the main question Ic would like answered is whether or not the

individual soul is immortal. Ic begins this line of questioning at the end of Book II: “Nu

ic gehyre J>aet min sawel is ascu and a lifad, and eall bast min mod and min

gescadwisnesse goodra crefta gegadrad, baet mot ba simle habban. and ic gehere sac baet

min gewit is see. [Now I hear that my soul is eternal and always lives, and all that my

mind and my reason gathered of good crafts, that it might always have. And I hear that

my mind is eternal.]”76 Gesceadwisnes tells Augustine/Alfred that he must look in De

videndo deo for the answers, and what Alfred has chosen to translate from this epistle and

what he adds to his translation of it would seem to indicate that the individual soul does

remain individual beyond death. Gesceadwisnes tells Ic, “Ne sceal beah nan man wenan

baet salla ba be on helle beoQ habban gelic wite; ne ealle ba b® on heofenum beod habbad

gelic wuldor. Ac s ic hef5 be hys geamunga, swa wite, swa wuldor, swaeder he on byd.

[Nor should any man think that all those who are in hell have like punishments; nor all

those who are in heaven have like glory. But each has by his merits, either punishment or

glory, wherever he be.]”77 Such a vision of the afterlife coincides, o f course, with

Alfred’s earlier analogy between the various paths to wisdom and the various paths to the

cynges ham.

Book Three of the Soliloquies also argues that the individual nature of the self

persists after death, an argument well justified by Augustine’s descriptions in Book XXII

of De civitate dei. Of the resurrection of the body, Augustine states,

76 Soliloquies, 91.21 -24.

77 Soliloquies, 94.6-8.


138

Quibus omnibus pro nostro modulo consideratis atque tractatis haec summa conficitur, ut in resurrectione camis in aetemum eas mensuras habeat corporum magnitudo, quas habebat perficiendae siue perfectae cuiusque indita corpori ratio iuuentutis, in membrorum quoque omnium modulis congruo decore seruato. Quod decus ut seruetur, si aliquid demptum fuerit indecenti alicui granditati in parte aliqua constitutae, quod per totum spargatur, ut neque id pereat et congruentia partium ubique teneatur.

[Thus, having considered and discussed all these things within the small compass available to us, we reach the following conclusion: that at the resurrection of the flesh to eternity, the body will have that size which it either attained in the prime of its life or would have attained had it achieved the pattern implanted in it; and it will also have the beauty which arises from preserving the appropriate arrangement of all its parts.]78

Each individual will remain in his or her individual body, albeit with the flesh perfected

and the soul cleansed. Augustine even goes so far as to claim that the exact matter that

made up each individual’s body will be recovered by God and used to form the perfected

body, further emphasizing the individual nature of humanity: only that matter which we

are made from in this life can be used to recreate us in the next.

Yet the individual nature of the soul will be lessened to a certain degree, as the

barriers between individuals will be lessened. Augustine explains that

Patebunt etiam cogitationes nostrae inuicem nobis. Time enim implebitur, quod apostolus, cum dixisset: Nolite ante tempus iudicare quicquam, mox addidit: Donee ueniat Dominus, et inluminabit abscondita tenebrarum et manifestabit cogitationes cordis, et tunc laus erit unicuique a Deo.

[The thoughts of each of us will then also be made manifest to all; for then shall be fulfilled the words of the apostle, who said: ‘Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, Who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the thoughts of the heart, and then shall every one have praise of God.]79

While such a state will certainly solve the problem both Augustine and Alfred have in not

knowing the content of another person’s mind, it is not being claimed here that the


79 De civitate dei, 22.29.207-212.


139

lowering of barriers between individuals will result in the loss of individuality; such state

would seem to preclude alienation, however.

The communal aspects of the afterlife are also highlighted in Augustine’s

discussion of the perfected will: “Erit ergo illius ciutatis et una in omnibus et

inseparabilis in singulis uoluntas libera. [In the Heavenly City, then, there will beO A

freedom of will: one freedom for all, and indivisible in each.]” Augustine is careful in

this sentence to make it absolutely clear that though humanity as it exists in eternity will

share a will, the soul will remain individual. Yet his formulation is not without its

problems for discerning exactly what sort of existence he is positing. Of the individual

souls, he also states that “Nec ideo liberum arbitrium non habebunt, quia peccata eos

delectare non poterunt. Magis quippe erit liberum a delectatione peccandi usque ad

delectationem non peccandi indeclinabilem liberatum. [they will no longer be able to

take delight in sin. This does not mean, however, that they will have no free will. On the

contrary, it will be all the more free, because set free from delight in sinning to take a81constant delight in not sinning.]” If this passage were read by someone of Alfred’s

mind, it is understandable how the paradoxical nature of free will expressed in this

passage (and in many similar passages, both in De civitate dei and other works of the

Church Fathers Alfred may have had access to) might lead him to the conclusion that the

core self has somehow been altered from what it was in the material world. Furthermore,

Augustine argues that “Secundum hanc obliuionem, quam posteriore loco posui, non

erunt memores sancti praeteritorum malorum. [According to the second kind of89forgetfulness, the saints will have no memory of past evils.]” Certainly, this would

seem a loss of self, for if memory can be said to be a constitutive part of the self, the

removal of the memory of any and all sins, both those perpetrated by the self and those

perpetrated on the self, would equal the removal of part of the self. Hence the Alfred





140

who translates the Soililoquies would not be the same Alfred who would exist in heaven,

by virtue of the fact that a portion of his memories would be gone.

We cannot say with any certainty, of course, that Alfred knew De civitate dei, but

we can assume that Alfred was familiar enough with Augustine to undertake the

translation of one of his works and that in both the translation of the Soliloquies and the

Consolation, Alfred did make changes to the text that served to bring them closer in line

with what was considered orthodox in the late ninth century. This, combined with the

theological and doctrinal knowledge that must have been brought to the entire translation

program by his group of advisors, makes it more than likely that Alfred is engaging with

notions of the afterlife influenced by Augustine. De civitate dei was, after all, one of the

most popular of Augustine’s works throughout the medieval period. That we can see

Alfred struggling to find authoritative proof for the immortality of the individual soul

reveals him to be an active participant in the debate. The circumstantial evidence, which

is all we have to work with, appears overwhelming.

If Alfred did know Book XXII of De civitate dei, however, it appears that he

disagreed with those aspects of Augustine’s claim that removed the individual soul’s

memory of the ills of this life. Alfred states,

and aeft ]>a rihtwisan, sy65an hy of fnsse weorulde beoS, hy gemunan swiQe oft aegQer ge 3as godes ge J)aes yfeles f)e hy on 5isse weorulde hae(f)don, and fageniad swi6e swidlice Joaet (hy) ne forletan heora drihnes willan, naw5er ne on edum Jhngum ne on renum, \>a hwile J)e hi on Jjisse weorulde weron.

[And afterwards the righteous, since they are of this world, they will remember very often both the good and the evil that they had in this world, and rejoice very strongly that they did not forsake their lord’s will, neither in easy things nor in difficult, while they were in this world.]

Unlike Augustine, Alfred insists that the soul retains a complete memory o f this life in

the Heavenly City. Part of his reasoning, it appears, is based on the assumption that in

order for the soul to appreciate the absolute good which is heaven, it is necessary that the

8j Soliloquies, 96.19-23.


141

soul remember the evils of the world. Interestingly, Alfred appears to believe that it is

necessary to understand the concept of evil in order to understand the concept of good, an

understanding seemingly shared by the author of Christ III, who shows us that one of the

joys of heaven is an awareness of the torments of the damned.

With this concern to assert the survival of individual identity into the eternal

world, we are brought back to the existential anxiety which Payne and others have argued

permeates Alfred’s translations. What Alfred is arguing for in this passage is the survival

of an essential self that transcends the material world and the social forces which have

shaped it, yet appears to bring along with it all of those elements of its identity which

social and material forces contributed in constructing. Simply put, Alfred is arguing that

he will continue to be Alfred after death and for all eternity, because the complete

memories of who and what we were will provide that constancy in identity. Existential

anxiety is conquered by complete faith in an afterlife that makes the existential concern

moot.

In many ways, this is the self that permeates the Anglo-Saxon poetic record, and

in particular the elegies and those passages of other poems which strike the modem ear as

having been written in an elegiac mode. Most of these poems begin with a lament on the

transience of human existence, whether it is actual anxiety about human mortality, a

lament for the passing of a favorable personal situation, or both. The journey is generally

one from existential anxiety to faith in God and the afterlife; from concerns about

transience to faith in the eternal.

An examination of the two most famous Old English elegies, The Wanderer and

The Seafarer, will help to flesh out the Alfredian portrait of the self and its existential

journey and allow us to make some very general conclusions about the concept of the self

in Anglo-Saxon culture, and to determine the extent to which Alfred influenced its

conceptualization and to what extent he was himself influenced by his own culture.


142

C h a pt e r F o u r

Th e E x isten tia l N a t u r e of th e Self in O ld En g l is h L it er a tu r e

I. S e l v e s a n d M in d s

In a recent study, The Life o f the Mind in Old English Poetry (2002), Antonina Harbus

argues that “The Old English poetic corpus contains many explicit references to the life

of the mind, sufficiently numerous and prominently situated to suggest that psychology

constitutes a definite thematic concern of these texts,” and that “the speakers frequently

represent a particular psychological position (e.g., misery in exile, enlightened hope, or

unshakable valour). . . presented as unique subjectivities with a sense of their own

interiority.”1 Harbus does not forward this argument in a scholarly vacuum; the influence

of the seminal studies of Clemoes (1969, 1995) and Godden (1985), have not allowed the

emphasis on the mind and the self in Old English poetry—and prose—to go unnoticed.2

The scope and depth of Harbus’s study make it impossible to duplicate her

findings here without a lengthy digression from the argument I am forwarding,

particularly her arguments regarding the Old English vocabulary of the mind. Harbus

separates out words whose meanings she feels have too often been conflated, such as

mod,ferhd, hyge, heorte, and sefa, and attempts to understand the nuances of each word

through an examination of where and how each word is used, particularly in those

1 Antonina Harbus, The Life o f the Mind in Old English Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodophi, 2002), 3.

2 Peter Clemoes, “Mens absentia cogitans in The Seafarer and The Wanderer,” in Medieval Literature and Civilization: Studies in Memory o f G.N. Garmonsway, ed. D.A. Pearsall and R.A. Waldron (London: Athlone Press, 1969), 62-77. Many of the ideas in this article are expanded to encompass the whole of Old English Poetry in Peter Clemoes, Interactions o f Thought and Language in Old English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The Malcolm Godden article is “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind,” in Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 271 -298. For a prdcis of the Godden article, see Chapter Seven, above.


143

instances where it seems likely that the alliteration of a line was based on the “mind

word,” indicating that that word was chosen specifically for the special meaning it had

rather than for the purposes of alliterating with other words in the line. O f particular

importance to my own study is the fact that Harbus almost completely separates the terms

mod and sefa. The interrelation between the mind and the self is crucial to an

understanding of the two poems that will be the focus of this last chapter, The Wanderer

and The Seafarer, and, of course, to an understanding of the Anglo-Saxon concept of self

in general.

But perhaps most important for both this study of the concept of the self in Anglo-

Saxon England and for future studies is that “The Medieval Concept of the Self in Anglo-

Saxon England” (2002), the article which spawned Harbus’s book-length study, lays to

rest the arguments of Greenblatt and the New Historicists that modem notions of the self

do not come into existence until the Early Modem period, as well as the arguments of

scholars like Morris and Zink, who see the modem self as growing out of Scholasticism

and the twelfth century Renaissance. Harbus simply uses the poetry itself to debunk the

notion of a “self-less” Anglo-Saxon England. Her reading of The Wife’s Lament is

particularly effective, and the conclusions she draws are equally applicable to the poetic

record as a whole. Her translation of lines 32b—41 reads:

Very often the departure of my lord has cruelly taken hold of me here.There are friends on earth, dear ones living, occupying a bed, while I walk alone in the dawn under the oak-tree throughout these caves. There I can sit for a summer-long day, there I can weep for my miseries, for many hardships. Therefore I can never rest from my anxieties of mind, nor from all this longing which this life has begotten for me.4

She comments,

3 Colin Morris, The Discovery o f the Individual, 1050-1200 (London: S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1972); Michel Zink, The Invention o f Literary Subjectivity, trans. David Sices (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

4 Antonina Harbus, “The Medieval Concept of the Self in Anglo-Saxon England,” Self and Identity 1 (2002): 85.


144

Here is a woman who is not only experiencing inescapable inner struggles, but calmly acknowledging them and their effect upon her psyche. These lines imply an independent construction of the self, where the self is perceived to be separate from others and created by personal experience, not a sense of collective identity understood to have existed in “less complex” earlier societies.. . . She also admits the necessity of concealing her inner reality from the world and putting on a good face (a recurrent theme throughout Old English elegies . . . ) when she imagines the mental dilemmas of her lover.5

The wife’s “inner struggles” and her desire to construct a persona with which to face the

world reveal precisely the type of “self-fashioning” Greenblatt claims did not exist prior

to the sixteenth century. This dichotomy between inner and outer self, and the necessity

of constructing an outer self that is socially acceptable, finds itself spoken again and

again in the poetic records, in poems as diverse as Beowulf and The Wanderer.

Harbus concludes her initial essay by stating that

There is an awareness of the self with an interest in self-reform; a former self can be read as a text influencing the current version of the self; the self is a source of agency; and the self is a thinking, remembering entity involved in mental reorientation. Within this schema of temporal development of the self, the literature enacts a psychological process whereby the present circumstances are reinterpreted by memory. The verse presents an energetic scrutiny of inner life as effective introspection, and a self requiring renegotiation.. . . The poetry is present as a process, not so much of self-discovery, but of mental realignment through a revisitation of the past and an acknowledgment of the role of the mind in the construction of the future.6

This view of the Anglo-Saxon self, which Harbus examines at length in her two studies,

is much the same as my own, and is essentially the same concept of the self we encounter

in Augustine’s Confessions.

The conclusion to The Life o f the Mind in Old English Poetry is somewhat

different in focus than that of the essay (presumably because the latter was written for the

5 Harbus, “Medieval Concept of the Self,” 85-86.

6 Harbus, “Medieval Concept of the Self,” 93.


145

journal Self and Identity and the former directed at the Anglo-Saxon specialist). In the

first of these conclusions, Harbus states that

the discourse of [Old English] poetry is structured on the mental registration of emotional and spiritual reactions, rather than on social interactions, material culture, customs, physical love, or other topics which have interested later poets. The focus is on the inner person, on conscious mental control, and on self-development rather than on social interaction or life in the world.7

The decrease in importance accorded to social factors in Harbus’s conclusion is welcome,

as it paves the way for more concentrated studies of the individual voices—both those of

the poets and their speakers—without fashionable notions of what were and were not

possible thoughts entertained by native Anglo-Saxons.

Yet this is not the only conclusion Harbus comes to in Life o f the Mind, and it is

my disagreement with her second conclusion—and with the historical assumptions on

which it is predicated—that prompts much of the argument in this chapter. Harbus

questions the degree to which we can ever truly understand the Anglo-Saxon concepts of

mind and self, because she believes that “It seems very likely that both the character of

Old English poems and the writers of these texts inhabit a different mental world from

the one/s we are used to and this fact must bring with it interpretive ramifications.”8

There is, of course, a certain amount of truth to what Harbus is saying. Modem, secular,

academic culture and medieval, Christian, monastic culture are separated by some very

important assumptions that must necessarily affect the conception of the mind and the

self in both systems of thought. The advances of modem science in understanding the

human brain also contribute to the gulf between these first millennium texts and their

third millennium readers. However, the knowledge gained in cognitive psychology and

neurology gives us “permission” to bridge this gulf and to proceed upon certain basic

assumptions about human nature in reconstructing the “mental worlds” of these Old

English poets. Harbus’s conclusion ignores the fact that because Old English poetry—

7 Harbus, The Life o f the Mind, 187.

8 Harbus, The Life o f the Mind, 189-190.


146

according to her own argument—deals with what is essentially human, it manages to

bridge the cultural and historical gap which separates the modem reader from the

medieval text and its author.

Harbus’s conclusion appears to be predicated on her disagreement with the use of

modem philosophical positions as lenses through which to read Old English literature.

She sites Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s “lucid exploration of the ‘psychology of

reading,’ which complements Walter Ong’s well-known ‘psychodynamics of orality,”’

Nicholas Howe and Malcolm Parkes’s examination of the “linguistic evidence for what it

meant to read in Anglo-Saxon England” (based on a cultural construction model), and

Pauline Head’s “exploitation” of “Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutics in an effort to

understand Anglo-Saxon reading practices,”9 as examples of fascinating but ultimately

misleading readings of Old English literature. In each case, she argues, the weakness in

the methodology used “is the projection of modem reasoning onto the Anglo-Saxon

literary imagination,” and she asks, “Can we rightly assume, even with the assistance of

contextual support, that our own psychological schemas may be applied appropriately to

a far distant culture?”10 Though she does not engage in an extended study of any of these

methodologies, Harbus’s answer to this question is a definite “no.”

Yet while I agree with Harbus that there are ways in which the aforementioned

critics and methodologies obscure the Anglo-Saxon text(s) in an attempt to assert their

own paradigm for reading it, the discussion of King Alfred and existentialism in the

previous chapter should indicate that I am not convinced we should completely discount

modem philosophy as a means for understanding Old English (or any other historical)

texts. The question which must be asked is to what degree the philosophical system in

question is historically situated. Granted, all philosophical systems are historically

situated, but some of them attempt to transcend their historical situatedness—to access

universal truths about human existence—while the origins of others can be found in

9 Harbus, Life o f the Mind, 1.

10 Harbus, Life o f the Mind, 1 -2.


147

specific historical events and/or political movements whose precepts can be traced to

specific historical events.

I have already discussed the universal applicability of existentialism in chapter

one, and expressed my agreement with those philosophers who feel that existentialism

transcends the historical and cultural traditions which are commonly believed to have

produced it, and addresses basic, human experiences and ways of understanding the

world that have applicability in all historical periods. As we have seen, studies of

Alfred’s translations of both Boethius and the Soliloquies reveal an existential concern in

Anglo-Saxon philosophy and theology. Walter Kaufmann is correct in asserting that

“Existentialism is a timeless sensibility that can be discerned here and there in the past;

but it is only in recent times that it has hardened into a sustained protest and

preoccupation.”11 As a philosophical impulse, existentialism is larger than the narrow

definitions that are often provided—definitions which are generally too grounded in the

writings of one or two existentialists—and its major tenets are so rooted in the universal

human experience that they find their way into all but the most de-humanizing of

philosophical schools:

To describe existentialism as an expression of an age, moreover, is to suggest that its claims could be only temporally and locally valid. But if the accounts of the distinctiveness of human existence, of the interdependence of mind and world, out of existential freedom, and so on, are true at all, they are true of human beings at all times and in all places.These accounts, furthermore, stem from reflections on the perennial condition of human beings, and not the particular situation obtaining in post-war Europe.12

The existential element common to Old English literature is most evident to

readers of those poems and passages which modem readers have chosen to call “elegiac.”

I do not use this term without full awareness of the difficulties attendant with its use. It

was originally intended to describe a well-defined genre in classical Latin poetry and its

II Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Expanded Edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1956/1975), 12.

12 David Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 13.


148

imitators. It is only a convenient shorthand for the critic who wishes to discuss the

affinities between these seven (sometimes eight) poems: The Wanderer, The Seafarer,

Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife’s Lament, The Husband’s Message, The Ruin, and

occasionally Resignation, as well as those passages like the Old Father’s lament in

Beowulf (11.2443-2459) which appear to be written in the same mode.13 While the word

probably would have struck our unknown Anglo-Saxon poets as inaccurate, we use it to

describe the subject matter and the effects of these poems and passages. They are

lamentations for things which have or are destined to pass away, and the poems

themselves provide a therapy of sorts for the reader looking to reconcile him or herself to

the ephemeral nature of human existence. As Anne Klinck comments in her edition of

the Old English elegies,

The Old English poems do have a kinship with the later English elegies of a broader kind, for example Gray’s Elegy, which treats themes of death and transience in a general way, and even with Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which, though far longer than the Old English poems, resembles them in consisting of rather various reflections prompted by the need to come to terms with a sense of loss.14

A alternate term for Old English literature written in this vein—as well as other

poems not considered elegiac—has been proposed, perhaps most famously by T.A.

Shippey, both in Old English Verse (1972) and later in “The Wanderer and The Seafarer

as Wisdom Poetry” (1994). Shippey argues that the elegiac mode constitutes only a part

of what we find when we read these poems, and he suggests we call them “wisdom

poetry.” He explains that “a definite corpus exists within the larger corpus of Old

English verse as a whole, for which no better title has been found than ‘wisdom poetry.’

But no two critics agree on exactly how that corpus or genre should be defined.”15

13 For an extended discussion on the use of the term elegy to describe this group of poems, see Marid Josd Mora, “The Invention of the Old English Elegy,” English Studies 76 (1995): 129-139.

14 Anne Klinck, The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1992), 11.

15 T.A. Shippey, “The Wanderer and The Seafarer as Wisdom Poetry,” in Companion to Old English Poetry, ed. Henk Aertsen and Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Amsterdam: Vrije University Press, 1994), 146.


149

Shippey’s own corpus excludes poems like Christ I, II, and III, Genesis A and B,

Beowulf, Guthlac A and B, and “the historical poems, the liturgical poems, the poems

associated with King Alfred’s translations, the items attached to Bede, Caedmon or

Aldhelm, miscellaneous items like the poem on Durham,” and he argues that it is

a body of surprisingly homogenous poetry, appearing in a number of manuscripts, and so not just a personal taste, but nevertheless a body without accepted label or definition. At its core, one might say, is the image of the Ancient Sage, the fiction of an old, wise man talking.16

Shippey does not, however, abandon the category of elegy in favor of wisdom

poetry so much as see them as complementary strands running throughout much of the

extant corpus. In fact, Shippey’s discussion of elegy is of particular importance to a

study of the Anglo-Saxon conception of self:

All the “elegies” depend on some similar alternation of involvement and detachment, and share as a basic theme the ability of the mind to control itself and its surroundings. The group as a whole exemplifies the great strength of a traditional literature—the ability to use common thoughts and images as a springboard, so that poets need only small additions to create great effects without baffling their audiences.17

Control over the mind—se/fcontrol, if we conflate the terms as in everyday usage—

generally means learning to live with the transient nature of existence in this world; it is,

in a very real sense, learning to overcome existential anxiety and live successfully in a

world governed by death or entropy. It is also, as we have seen in chapter three, learning

to live within one’s wyrd.

But what Shippey is discussing in the passage above is not really “elegiac.” The

handbook definition, “a sustained and formal poem setting forth meditations on death or1 Ranother solemn theme,” is as good and general a definition as any, and it reveals the

elements of the elegies of most interest to Shippey (and Harbus and myself), the

16 Shippey, “The Wanderer and The Seafarer,” 145.

17 T.A. Shippey, Old English Verse (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1972), 78-79.

18 William Harmon & C. Hugh Holman, “Elegy,” in A Handbook to Literature, eighth edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 178.


150

meditative elements. If an elegy is a meditation on a “solemn theme,” then the Anglo-

Saxon elegies attempt to assuage the troubled soul through the use of gnomic wisdom,

which provides answers and guidance to the mod of both speaker and reader alike. In

wisdom literature, “Ideas must be fastened in the mind which itself must be actively

restrained by self-regulation.”19 Gnomic wisdom—whether pagan or Christian—

provides those ideas which allow the self to control the mind, as when the eardstapa’’s

exercising of self-control results in his becoming snottor on mode at the end of The

Wanderer, or Deor’s constant reminder to himself that “this, too, shall pass.” As Maxims

I advises, “Gleawe men sceolon gieddum wrixlan. [Wise must should exchange precepts

(or perhaps “poems”?)].”20

As Harbus has observed, what genre a poem belongs to depends on the way the

predominant psychological themes are dealt with. In wisdom literature, for example, she

argues that “the mind is primarily the faculty whereby experience is ordered, controlled,

and recorded. It is not only a storehouse of useful pieces of information, but also the

processing unit which interprets that knowledge and applies it to a spiritual programme of91self-reform.” What we see in wisdom literature, then, is the incorporation of cultural

knowledge into the individual mind, the coming of the individual to the wisdom collected

and passed down by his or her culture. The “wise self’—the desired self—is one who

has successfully incorporated cultural truths, truths which in Old English literature are

generally truths regarding the transitory nature of human existence. From this point of

view, those poems which we assign to the category of elegy belong equally to the

category of wisdom literature. In The Wanderer, we are presented with the depiction of

the eardstapa making this journey to wisdom, and in The Seafarer, with a man who has

already completed this inner journey and come to a new understanding of his life—past,


20 Maxims /, in The Exeter Book: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records III, ed George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). All Old English quotations are taken from this edition. Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.



151

present, and future—in light of this wisdom. Careful readings which posit the essential

unity of both poems reveal this existential journey to the self.

II. Th e Wa n d e r e r

Any argument which seeks to present a unified reading of The Wanderer is necessarily

embroiled in controversy. Generally speaking, this involves making a determination as to

how many speakers there are in The Wanderer, which lines to assign to which speaker,

and then demonstrating how that assignation of lines provides for the poem’s thematic

unity. While this task is substantially easier for The Wanderer than it is for The Seafarer,

this is a highly contested subject, and has been at the center of debate surrounding the

poem since Thorpe’s first edition of The Exeter Book in 1842. Greenfield and Calder

assume that the question has been answered—assigning lines 8— 110 to the Wanderer,

and 1—7 and 111— 115 to the poet—but the fact that critics continue to question these

“answers” is proof enough that the controversy is still alive and well. Briefly, Lumiansky

(1950), Leslie (1966), Richman (1982), and Hollowell (1983) see the poem as having a

single speaker, with the poet breaking in to comment at lines 6—7 and 111. Richman

forwards the thesis that swa cwced (1.6) can be used to refer both forwards and

backwards; this allows for the phrase to act as an interruption in the speech rather than an

introductory or concluding signal. Rumble (1958) and Greenfield (1969) also subscribe

to the single-speaker theory, though they assign the lines of the poem somewhat

differently, with Rumble appearing to propose that the entirety of the poem is to be

assigned to a single speaker delivering a soliloquy. Huppe (1943), Pope (1963), and

Green (1976) give lines 1— 7 and 110— 115 to the poet, with lines 8— 110 being divided

between the eardstapa and the snottor; Huppe and Green maintain that there are

definitely two separate speakers here, while Pope saw the wise man as a hypothetical

construction, inaugurating the speaker-within-a-speaker tradition. Pope (1974) then

recanted and claimed a single speaker. Pasternack (1992), concerned with the various

pronoun shifts and determined to enact a poststructural reading on the poem, attempts to


152

completely explode the poem’s unity, and posits a polyphony of voices rather than the

traditional one or two speakers.

A reading which seeks to examine the concept of self being presented in the poem

should proceed from the conviction of the poem’s essential unity, a unity which can be

found by tracing the growth of a single speaker as he moves from a level of investment in

this world that can only disappoint, to a realization that the only proper object in which to

invest his desire and love is the eternal God. In Augustinian terms, the Wanderer, exiled

from the City of Man, comes to understand his true status as a citizen of the City of God.

Thus the unity with which I am concerned—both the unity of the poem and the unity of

the poem’s speaker—is a theological unity. As a review of the scholarship reveals, this

argument is not new; what makes it different is that I am bringing a somewhat different

set of concerns to the poem than previous scholars have brought.

I would like to begin with a brief reading of the poem itself, using Lumiansky’s

breakdown as a general guide. Then I will reconcile what recent critics regard as the

eardstapa's existential tone with what I see as his Christian epiphany; like Augustine in

his Confessions, and, as we will see, like the Seafarer, the Wanderer is engaged in the

process of exercising teleological control over his life, though not to the same extent as

the Seafarer. Along the way, I will examine the eardstapa's spiritual growth in terms of

Augustine’s doctrine of use and enjoyment, which makes his “conversion” at the poem’s

end understandable in both a Christian and an existential context. Finally, I will point out

some of the false difficulties scholars have raised in examining the poem and reconcile

them.

The main obstacle to unity in many readings of The Wanderer—in both the earlier

and later attempts to unify the poem—is that they make the common mistake of

beginning with the assumption that an individual speaker must be either Christian or

pagan. Proceeding from this assumption, critics then divide up the lines according to

which religious sentiment seems most prevalent. In recent criticism, this generally results

in the first half of the poem being assigned to a pagan (sometimes existentialist) anhaga


153

or eardstapa, and the last half to a Christian snottor on mode?2 Or, in readings which

hearken back to the early days of Old English criticism—which found evidence of

“monkish interpolation” in what were “originally” pagan works—both the eardstapa and

the snottor are considered pagan (either two separate pagan speakers or a single pagan

speaker), with the only Christian perspective being provided by the poetic narrator, to

whom the first and last five lines are usually assigned. It is only through this “frame”

such arguments conclude, that the Wanderer’s words can be seen in a Christian context.

I intend to follow the assignment of lines proposed by Lumiansky, who argues

that the eardstapa is the speaker in all lines save 6-7 and 111. Lumiansky breaks down

the structure of the poem as follows:

1. Introductory statement by the “eardstapa”: In spite of hardships allottedto him, many an exile looks forward to God’s mercy. (1-5)

2. Expository comment by the poet. (6-7)3. The “eardstapa’s” account of his past losses as representative of

universal hardships. (8-62a)a. I am all alone. (8-1 la)b. I know that the noble custom is for an earl not to give

voice to his grief. (1 lb-18)c. Thus I had to contain my grief when, in the past, my lord

died and I had to wander in search of anotherprotector. (19-29a)

d. Anyone who has experienced them knows the sorrows ofexile. (29b-57)

e. In view of these sorrows, I do not know why I am notsaddened. (58-62a)

4. The “eardstapa’s” definition of wisdom in the face of hardship. (62b- 110)

a. A wise man should be patient and moderate, and shouldunderstand the transitory nature of earthly things.(62b-87)

b. The man who has attained wisdom speaks as follows:(88-91)

22 The common translation of snottor on mode—wise in mind—is more than a little problematic. As several critics have pointed out, on mode may actually be an adverbial phrase attached to cwced, and as such the phrase might be better translated “the wise man spoke in his mind,” indicating an interior monologue. But, however one chooses to translate the passage, it remains a question as to whether the snottor and the eardstapa are one and the same.


154

c. The ubi sunt passage. All earthly things are transitory.(92-110)

5. Expository comment by the poet. ( I l l )6. The “eardstapa’s” conclusion: Keep faith and trust in God. (112-115)23

Though there are specifics in Lumiansky’s analysis that need further examination, I agree

with his assessment of the poem as “an artistically unified dramatic monologue in which

a single speaker, the ‘eardstapa,’ using his own past experiences as a case in point,

examines the two lines of reasoning open to an individual who suffers misfortune, and

reports on his attainment of peace of mind despite his misfortunes.”24 One important

point Lumiansky does not address is that making the choice between the two lines of

reasoning necessarily entails the adoption of a particular way of looking at both the world

and the self, and necessitates a “re-reading” of one’s past life, including the desires that

motivated that past life. Though it appears that the Wanderer is taking us through this

process of choosing in the poem itself—as opposed to the Seafarer, who has already

made these choices in the present of the poem—there is a degree to which the poem’s

conflation of an earthly lord’s grace/mercy and God’s grace/mercy reveals that in the

present tense of speaking the poem, the speaker has already made this choice.

Lumiansky argues that the eardstapa is Christian throughout the poem, and turns

to a Boethian model in order to explain the Wanderer’s Christianity and his movement

from despair to joy. He is joined in this Boethian reading by other critics who read The

Wanderer as, at least in part, a consolatio. The arguments for the author’s access to

Boethius, whether in Latin or in Alfred’s West Saxon translation, are strong. Richard

North’s comparison of Lady Philosophy’s advice to Boethius and the Wanderer’s images

are persuasive, and given Boethius’s initial investment in this world and the mutability of

fortune, an overall comparison is warranted.25 The Boethian connection, not just with

23 R.M. Lumiansky, “The Dramatic Structure of the Old English Wanderer,” Neophilologus 34 (1950): 107.

24 Lumiansky, 105.

25 Richard North, “Boethius and the Mercenary in The Wanderer,” in Pagans and Christians: The Interplay between Christian Latin and Traditional Germanic Cultures in Early Medieval Europe: Proceedings o f the Second Germania Latina Conference held at the University o f Groningen, May 1992,


155

The Wanderer but with many works we would classify as elegy, wisdom literature, or

both, makes sense. However, we are still faced with the existential nature of the

Wanderer’s doubt before he achieves understanding and acceptance of the transient

nature of the world. If we accept Payne’s view of Alfred’s Boethius as an existential

work—in light of Katherine Proppe and other critics of Payne’s study—it seems likely

that the arguments in favor of a Boethian reading of The Wanderer are correct, but that

the first step in constructing such a reading is to examine the changes made by Alfred in

making his translation. This is not necessarily to argue that The Wanderer-poet (or the

composers of any of the elegies, for that matter) had access to a manuscript of Alfred’s

translation. But if we accept that the changes Alfred makes are consonant with the

cultural milieu in which the translation was being made—a milieu which includes

commentary traditions Alfred had access to or influenced through his translation—then it

seems reasonable to conclude that The Wander er-pozCs existential leanings and the

theological/philosophical methods he uses to extricate himself from anxiety and despair

are common in Anglo-Saxon England. The vernacular record supports such a conclusion,

and I am proceeding upon the assumption that the manuscript record reflects this cultural

milieu.

As for the question of the Wanderer’s Christianity, I hesitate to read him as truly

understanding the Christian concept of higher reality—eternal and transcendent—until

the second half of the poem, at line 62b. Those who argue that the poem depicts the

anhaga or eardstapa as being Christian from line 1—and I am one of them—do so

primarily on the basis of the word are, generally translated as “mercy,” in the poem’s

first line, “Oft him anhaga are gebideS,” commonly translated as “Often the solitary onea /

experiences (or awaits) mercy.” However, Charles Abbott Conway has pointed out that

the word ar is ambiguous, and can be translated as honor, dignitas, gloria, magnificentia,

ed. Tette Hofstra, L.A.J.R. Houwen, and Alastair A. MacDonald (Groningen, 1995), 71-98. I would argue that North goes too far, however, in deciding that the Wise Man of lines 88-110 is Boethius.

26 The Wanderer in The Exeter Book: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records III, ed George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936). All Old English quotations are taken from this edition. Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.


156

honestas, reverentia, bona, possessiones,fundus, and beneficium, in addition to “mercy.”

These translations of ar all convey the same notion of favor that mercy does—Conway

points out that “the essential concept is of a process by which a benign power is used to

raise one to a higher state”27—but they suggest that the favor being granted or asked for

is a material, earthly favor rather than a spiritual gift from God. Conway argues that the

Wanderer is, after all, in exile, and as such does not enjoy the favor of an earthly lord; the

poem through line 62b indicates that this material favor is what the anhaga often

“awaits.”

Such a translation of ar nicely supports those readings of the poem which see it as

chronicling a transition from earthly to heavenly concerns, as the speaker traces his

progress from anhaga/eardstapa to snottor, the struggle of his sylfio gain control over

his “wandering” mod. Conway’s own argument is that The Wanderer “gives an extended

meditation on the secular and courtly aspects of ar, finally coming to the conclusion that

because of the effects of time ar is best sought from God.”28 He explains that the word

ar itself progresses from its secular meaning in line 1 to its sacred meaning in line 114.

Consequently, gebided should be translated as “awaits” (or some word denoting

expectation), because we know that the Wanderer does not at any point during his speech

enjoy the favor of an earthly lord. But desire for the favor of an earthly lord should not

be taken to suggest that the Wanderer is not Christian before his epiphany in the poem’s

second half. The only conclusion to be drawn from the poem itself is that his desire was

previously centered on this world—a sin, perhaps, but not one that precludes a belief in

Christianity.

As neat a reading of the poem as Conway provides, however, there is a problem

with his recommendation regarding the use of ar in line 1, and that is the occurrence of

the phrase metudes miltse in line 2, which appears in apposition to are. Conway explains

the use of miltse through numerous references to its use in secular contexts; it is often

27 Charles Abbott Conway, “Honor, Mercy, and the Wanderer’s Problem: Some Thoughts on ‘ar,’” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 93:3-4 (1992): 276.

28 Conway, 276.


157

used in much the same fashion as ar is. However, the Dictionary of Old English reveals

the possibility that metudes miltse is a formula used in poetry (and once in prose) to mean

“the Lord’s mercy.”29 The phrase occurs eight times in the surviving corpus, and with

the exception of its use in The Wanderer, the phrase is always used in a clearly religiousO A

nature, in contexts which demand that the meaning of the phrase be “the Lord’s mercy.”

Individually, however, the words have additional, secular meanings which may

allow them to act in a secular, rather than sacred, fashion in The Wanderer. Bosworth-

Toller states that the word metod appears only in poetry, and that “the earlier meaning of11

the word in heathen times may have been fate, destiny, [or] death.” The word is likely

formed from the verb metan, which Bosworth-Toller glosses as “mete,” “measure,” and'XO“measure out,” all secular translations of the word. Given the secular meanings for

miltse already attested to in Conway’s essay, it is a likely hypothesis that metodes miltse

might have meant something like “the favor of fate” to an earlier, pre-Christian audience.

This is not to claim, however, that either ar or metudes miltse need take on a

pagan meaning in The Wanderer. Conway argues that the secular meaning of the word

ar survives into this text to allow the poet to represent the Wanderer’s progression, and I

would argue that the same might be happening with metudes miltse—it is retaining an

older, secular meaning that the surviving corpus reflects in the words’ individual uses

elsewhere.

29 Complete Corpus of Old English in Electronic Form. Dictionary of Old English Project, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, edited by Antonette di Paolo Healey.

30 The phrase and its variants occur at line 526 of Exodus as metodes miltsa, at line 333 of Daniel as metodes miltse, at line 1 of The Wanderer as metudes miltse, at line 490 (DOE standard numbering) of Solomon and Saturn as metodes miltse, at line 435 of Christ and Satan as meotod miltse, at line 1252 of Christ as miltse meotudes (the only reversal of the words, quite probably for metrical reasons), again at line 1365 of Christ as meotude miltse, and at line 49 of Azarias as meotudes miltse.

31 Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898); Supplement by T. Northcote Toller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda by Alastair Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972) (hereafter BT and BTS respectively), 682.

32 BT, 681.


158

There is another explanation for the use of metudes miltse here, one that allows it

to keep its status as a formula denoting “the Lord’s mercy.” Metudes miltse can remain a

formula for “the Lord’s mercy” and retain its sacred connotations even in this passage

because the anhaga, whose desire is invested in the things of this world instead of

properly directing his desire towards the next, might naturally believe that the favor o f an

earthly lord and all the worldly joys such favor would bring are signs of the Lord’s favor.

As the snottor tells his story from the position of present wisdom, it is clear that he once

misunderstood the nature of existence. It stands to reason that before his epiphany he

may have believed that God’s mercy would be shown by removing him from exile.

It is only at the poem’s end, where ar appears in conjunction with Feeder on

heofonum, that the anhaga, now snottor, shares with us what he has learned—that the

Lord’s favor is not to be found in transient things but in the eternal, where us eal seo

fcestnung stonded. He has found God’s favor, but it is not the temporal favor he expected

it to be. Instead, it comes in the form of a deeper wisdom that he would never have found

while distracted by the things of this world—his exile has provided him with a level of

spiritual growth that he has come to value far more than those things that will pass away.

In fact, the wisdom that he comes to receive from his experience may well lead to his

salvation.

Such a reading is more realistic than those that instead choose to assign lines 1—7

and 111— 115 to a Christian speaker who comments upon the lament of the pagan

Wanderer. These readings tend to proceed upon the assumption that since a medieval

Christian could not possibly have the sorts of existential doubts being voiced by the

eardstapa, the eardstapa could not possibly be Christian, at least not in the first half of

the poem. Yet it is precisely the Christian eardstapa’s existential doubts that make the

poem so very powerful and provide it with its structure and content: the depiction of a

man moving from a state of existential despair to faith and authentic existence, the

depiction of a sylf which has gained control over a mod once mired in despair.

Previous existential readings of the poem have made twentieth-century, atheistic

versions of existentialism their basis of comparison. Dennis Chase invokes Camus, and


159

compares the eardstapa’s reluctance to share his thoughts and feelings with Sisyphus

“stoically resigning] himself to the task fate has dealt him.”33 He concludes that the

eardstapa “is also an existentialist figure, like Camus’ absurd man who comes to grips

with ‘a burning and frigid .. . universe.’”34 Just as the mythological figure must perform

“repetitive labors,” so must the Wanderer perform the repetitive (and doomed) labor of

trying to find a new comitatus. If we confine ourselves to the first half of the poem, then

Chase is right enough in these observations.

But Chase goes on to conclude, drawing on Camus’s essay “Absurd Freedom,”

that the Wanderer’s “attitude is that of the absurd man, who ‘ decide [s] to accept such a

universe and draw[s] from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence

of a life without consolation.’”35 His rationale for this conclusion is that “most critics see

the opening and closing lines, not as part of the original poem, but as the additions of a

later Christian copyist.”36 This opinion was several decades out of fashion when Chase’s

essay appeared in 1987, but seems to support his reading of the poem as being

existentialist in an atheistic sense. His reading disallows the Wanderer’s Christianity and

allows the character of the Wanderer to be read as exemplifying the atheistic form of

existentialism twentieth- and twenty-first century readers are most familiar with, that of

Sartre, Camus, and Beckett. Chase seems to rely most heavily on Camus, yet there are

serious questions regarding Camus’s position as an existentialist:

One reason for excluding Camus is th a t. . . it is not at all his aim to reduce or overcome a sense of alienation or separateness from the world. In the attitude of Meursault, The Outsider, for example, we find a defiant pleasure taken in our alienated condition. Sisyphus, the “absurd hero,” feels a “silent joy” in living in a world where “man feels an alien, a stranger. . . his exile . . . without remedy.’”37

33 Dennis Chase, “Existentialist Attitudes in the Old English ‘W a n d e r e r Language Quarterly 26: 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1987): 18.

34 Chase, 18.

35 Chase, 18.

36 Chase, 18.

37 Cooper, 8-9.


1 6 0

Such an attitude obviously separates the thinking of Camus from that of the eardstapa

turned snottor, and from his own contemporaries— Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers, and

Marcel—as well. As for comparisons to Beckett, in Waiting for Godot, Godot never

arrives, but in The Wanderer it is obvious that the speaker undergoes some sort of

religious epiphany that allows him to transcend this world and its concerns and align

himself with the eternal.

We cannot, then, rule out an existentialist reading of The Wanderer. A thoughtful

existentialist reading of the poem reveals the spiritual crisis at its center, the You who

speaks to the reader, and the poem’s thematic and structural integrity. As William Barrett

points out—rather forcefully—in his study of existentialism, Irrational Man, “Jean-Paul

Sartre is not Existentialism—it still seems necessary to make this point to American

readers; he does not even represent. . . the deepest impulse of this philosophy.”38

Though Sartre can shed some light on the existentialist “impulse” in Anglo-Saxon poetry,

we need to turn to religious existentialists to find solid parallels for the existential despair

and the religious responses to that despair we find in The Wanderer, and, as we shall see,

in The Seafarer.

III . Th e Wa n d e r e r a n d K ie r k e g a a r d

The existentialist whose writings are both chronologically and philosophically closest to

the poets of both poems is Soren Kierkegaard. To begin, there are some striking

similarities in methodology to warrant the comparison. Kierkegaard makes it common

practice to use “an individual person . . . [as] the point of departure and the basis for a

concrete exposition of a specific existential position,” which enables him “to avoid a

purely abstract treatment of the problems of existence and is also the condition for

38 William Barrett, Irrational Man (New York: Anchor Books, 1958), 11.


161

“X Qaccentuating clearly the significance of the ethical and freedom in concrete life.”

Kierkegaard does this primarily through his use of a number of personas through which

he works out various philosophical positions, personas for whom he creates fictional life

experiences appropriate to the philosophical position each advocates. Given that both

The Wanderer and The Seafarer consist of a fictional speaker who moves from his own

specific life experiences to a statement of philosophical truths, we can see that the

methodological comparison is warranted. Furthermore, there appear to be some

methodological points of comparison between Kierkegaard and Boethius, a philosopher

with whom Kierkegaard was familiar. In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard presents

his approach to guiding the reader in terms that call to mind Lady Philosophy’s early

words to Boethius: “Everything essentially Christian must have in its presentation a

resemblance to the way a physician speaks at the sickbed; even if only medical experts

understand it, it must never be forgotten that the situation is the bedside of a sick

person.”40 Though the analogy between the philosopher/theologian and the medical

doctor is not an unusual one, the fact that Kierkegaard had read Boethius and that his

aims and procedures parallel Boethius’s are certainly worthy of brief consideration,

particularly as both The Wanderer and The Seafarer have been critically compared to the

Consolation o f Philosophy41 That such a three-way comparison can be drawn makes

turning to Kierkegaard for an understanding of what modem readers perceive as

existential themes in these poems a logical move.

The poems’ themes of anxiety and despair are what cause most readers to make

the existentialist comparisons, not the methodological similarities, so I will quickly turn

my attention to these thematic parallels. In Fear and Trembling, for example,

Kierkegaard ponders the nature of human existence in an empty, meaningless universe,

39 Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Concept o f Existence, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003), 23.

40 Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 5.

41 For an analysis of Kierkegaard’s reading of Boethius, see Arild Christensen, Om Kierkegaards Lcesning a f Boethius (Kobenhavn: G. Torv's Antikvariat, 1964).


162

presenting the voice of religious doubt while at the same time suggesting its answer. He

writes,

If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? If such were the situation, if there were no sacred bond that knit humankind together, if one generation emerged after another like forest foliage, if one generation succeeded another like the singing of birds in the forest, if a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it—how empty and devoid of consolation life would be!42

Kierkegaard’s imagery should immediately call to the Anglo-Saxonist’s mind Bede’s

parable of the sparrow; the general mood of the passage reflects the feeling of the elegies,

and the first half of The Wanderer in particular. The mingling of hopeful dreams with

harsh reality as the Wanderer awakens from visions of his past life comes close to

“summing up” the theme of despair:

bonne beo5 J)y hefigran heortan benne, sare aefter swassne. Sorg bib geniwad,{jonne maga gemynd mod geondhweorfed; greted gliwstafum, geome geondsceawad secga geseldan. Swimmad eft on weg!Fleotendra fred no J aer fela bringedcudra cwidegiedda. Cearo bid geniwad £>am J)e sendan sceal swijie geneahheofer wajiema gebind werigne sefan.

[Then are heavier wounds in his heart, sore after his beloved. Sorrow is renewed.Then remembrance of kin pervades the mindgreets gleefully, surveys eagerlymen companions; they swim again away.The spirit of seafarers does not bring there many familiar spoken sentences. Care is renewed

42 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) 15.


163

to him who must send very often over the binding of waves weary heart.]43

The Wanderer also tells us that this is how the world should be understood by all

who pass through it:

Ongietan sceal gleaw haele hu gaestlic bid bonne ealre Jusse worulde wela weste stonded swa nu missenlice geond pisne middangeard winde biwaune weallas stondab hrime bihrorene, hrydge \>a ederas.Woriad \>a winsalo, waldend licgad dreame bidrorene, dugaj) eal gecrong, wlonc bi wealle.

[The wise warrior must perceive how ghastly it will be, when all the riches of the world stand waste, just as now manifold through this middle-earth walls blown upon by the wind remain, frost covered, the buildings snow-swept.The hall decays, lords lie dead of joy deprived, troops all fallen proud by the wall.]44

Kierkegaard also sees such doubt and its accompanying anxiety as universal. In The

Sickness Unto Death he writes,

Just as a physician might say that there very likely is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that, just as the physician speaks of going around with an illness in the body, he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot explain. In any case, no human being ever lived and no one lives outside of Christendom who has

43 The Wanderer, 49-57.

44 The Wanderer, 73-80a.


164

not despaired, and no one in Christendom if he is not a true Christian, and insofar as he is not wholly that, he still is to some extent in despair.45

Kierkegaard does not see doubt and despair as incompatible with Christianity.

Like theologians of the medieval period, he sees despair as a sin, but a sin which

everyone falls into time and again while living in this transient world, and, like all sins,

ultimately forgivable, so long as one finds a way out of despair and seeks forgiveness. It

seems reasonable to ascribe a similar state of mind to the Wanderer as he moves through

the decaying landscape, bereft of companionship.

Two things are necessary for the Wanderer to emerge from the anxiety and

despair that characterize the first half of the poem. The first is that he arrive at a stronger,

more authentic sense of self. A passage from The Sickness Unto Death best explains the

dilemma of the self we see in the beginning of the poem:

An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to be rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is “Either Caesar or nothing” does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear himself.. . . In a deeper sense, it is not his failure to become Caesar that is intolerable, but it is this self that did not become Caesar that is intolerable; or, to put it even more accurately, what is intolerable to him is that he cannot get rid of himself.46

This is the Wanderer’s state of mind through at least line 58; he still wants to be that

which he can no longer be—a retainer for a great lord, and part of a community of

warriors. That portion of his life has passed away, and with it the identity he had worn as

if it were his true self, rather than a social position which he assumed. The Wanderer is

thus faced with a choice: he can remain in despair over the loss of who and what he had

been, or he can try to reconcile himself to the fact that his continued existence,

meaningless though it may seem to him at present, is more than the identity he once

45 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 22.



165

possessed. Yes, his crisis is a spiritual crisis, but this spiritual crisis is inextricably linked

to a crisis of self. Kierkegaard argues that “to be unaware of being defined as spirit is

precisely what despair is.”47 Simply put, the Wanderer has forgotten his true nature, and

it is this which drives him into this state of despair.

In order for the Wanderer to overcome this crisis of self, he must complete two

“processes.” First, continuing to follow Kierkegaard’s line of reasoning, he must work

through this state of despair to find God. Kierkegaard tells us that

There is so much talk about human distress and wretchedness . . . there is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as self, or, what amounts to the same thing, never became aware and in the deepest sense never gained the impression that there is a God and that “he,” he himself, his self, exists before this God—an infinite benefaction that is never

48gained except through despair.

By these criteria, the Wanderer’s life appears not to have been wasted. As he sits

sundor cet rune at the poem’s end, we come to realize that he has become

“decisively and eternally conscious as spirit.” And now, rather than “awaiting”

the mercy of the creator—as I think gebided is best translated here—the Wanderer

had learned that “Wei bi5 jiam J»e him are seceQ, / frofre to Faeder on heofonum,

J>aer us eal seo faestnung stondeb. [Well it is for the one who seeks mercy for

himself, consolation from the Father in heaven; there the permanence stands for

us all].”49 The Wanderer now consciously “exists before God.”

But it is more than just inwardness and awareness of self as spirit that allows the

Wanderer to attain this sense of peace at the end of the poem. We have a turning point in

line 58, and various theories have been forwarded in an attempt to explain this shift in

perspective, including the notion that the poem has changed speakers. Pope (1965)


48 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 26-27.

49 The Wanderer, 114b-l 15.


1 6 6

famously suggested that the poem’s speaker shifts at this point from the anhaga to the

snottor on mode, and I would say that he is correct, in a certain sense, as line 58 appears

to mark the beginnings of the internal shift in the Wanderer. Comparing The Wanderer

to the other elegies (and to The Seafarer in particular), Harbus states that only The

Wanderer

dramatically portrays a change of outlook within the narrative.. . . The subjective mind presented in The Wanderer is one struggling for control of itself and ultimately reorienting itself according to Christian principles of divine knowledge.. . . The elegies seem to be concerned with the development of the right state of mind for a change to occur, and it is specifically the memory process which effects this mental adjustment.. . . Wisdom, then, is available through an active interpretation of experience via memory.50

The Wanderer itself is this active interpretation of experience via memory, in a sense

presenting a fictionalized autobiographical presentation of self like Augustine’s

Confessions. As in Augustine’s work, a change in outlook—a change in mod—provides

the speaker in the poem with a retroactive understanding of his life and of his Wyrd.

But not all the determinants of this new self are internal. The gnomic wisdom

which makes up the middle of the poem—the section which depicts the transition—is

essentially a collection of received wisdom, traditional sayings which we can find in

works such as the Maxims, whose main purpose appears to be imparting traditional

wisdom to the reader. There is a sense in which The Wanderer can also be read as

depicting the incorporation of gnomic wisdom into the individual mind of the anhaga,

and that he sits snottor on mode at the poem’s end because he has successfully

incorporated his culture’s traditional wisdom.

Yet this gnomic wisdom is itself existential in nature, grounded as it is in the

essential human experience of living. While certain gnomic passages are certainly

cultural in nature—“Geongne aejjeling sceolan gode gesiSas / byldan to beaduwe and to

beahgife [A young prince must encourage a good companion to battle and to the giving

50 Harbus, Life o f the Mind, 151-152.


167

of rings]”51 (Maxims I I 14-15)—those which find their way outside of poems like

Maxims and into the larger poetic record are more concerned with the universal aspects of

human existence, those things which we leam through the simple act of living. There is

another parallel to be drawn here between the formation of the self of the snottor on mode

and Augustine. In Confessions, Augustine does not emerge as a textually constructed

self, but rather we see Augustine finding his own deeper, philosophical desires mirrored

in the text of the Hortensius, mirrored in the writings of the Platonists, and mirrored in

the passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans which provokes his final conversion. This

same process is depicted in The Wanderer, as the anhaga recognizes in the gnomic

wisdom he quotes those truths which his own experience has led him to. “For])on ne

ma3g weorj)an wis wer aer he age / wintra dael in woruldrice,” he tells us. “No man may

be wise before he has lived his share o f winters in the world.” Yet we might also say that

this passage, read in the context of the entire poem, is saying is that the man who has

lived long enough in the world—the man who has reached a “critical mass” of

experience—will find that his understanding of the world and the understanding so

gracefully stated in the traditional wisdom that he has probably heard quoted all his life

will suddenly be found to coincide. What are the Maxims, after all, but wisdom gained

by other human beings who have reached that critical mass of experience? The truth of

this wisdom—whether the traditional wisdom of the poet of the Maxims or the

philosophical wisdom of Cicero—is recognized, not received. The journey to the self is

never taken alone. Even Heidegger recognized this fact in his discussion of Da Man, the

“They” so frequently cited by existentialists as imposing itself on the individual and

preventing the living of an authentic life.

51 Maxims II in The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records VI, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 11.14-15. All Old English quotations are taken from this edition. Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.


1 6 8

IV. The Seafarer

As with The Wanderer, any reading of The Seafarer that does not limit itself to the

examination of a short passage or two must begin with the question of the poem’s unity.

The controversy surrounding The Seafarer is even greater than that surrounding The

Wanderer, though the problems themselves are similar. Critics have debated endlessly

about how many speakers are in the poem, who is speaking when, whether or not the

poem contains a speech within a speech—as Dream o f the Rood does—and, of course, to

what extent the speaker or speakers in the poem can be labeled Christian or traditionally

pagan/Germanic. Additionally, a great deal of controversy has surrounded whether or not

the seafaring passages of the poem are to be read realistically or allegorically.

To compose a brief survey of critical opinion on The Seafarer is an almost

impossible task, as so many different theories have been put forward, and there have been

so many variances—large and small—in arguments as to how the poem is to be read—

whether literally or allegorically—and how, if at all, it is to be divided up. There are,

however, a number of “key” readings of the poem which have served to steer most later

commentators on the poem in one direction of another. The dramatic dialogue reading

was first offered by Max Rieger (1869), who read the poem as a conversation between an

old seafarer who was no longer attracted to the perils of the sea and a younger man who

longed to make sea voyages. Rieger assigned lines l-33a, 39-47, 53-57, and 72-124 to

the old seafarer, and lines 33b-38, 48-52, and 58-71 to the young man. Friedrich Kluge

(1883) also argued that the poem contained a dialogue, but argued that it was split into

two parts, lines l-33a and 33b-66a. He was the first to forward the argument that lines

66b— 124 were a homiletic addition to the poem. The dramatic dialogue interpretation

was questioned by W.W. Lawrence (1902), who argued for the essential unity of the

poem, but only up to 64a, revelatory of the difficulty scholars have had in reconciling the

homiletic tone of the second half of the poem with the realism of the first half. Perhaps

the most famous of the dramatic dialogue arguments was the one forwarded by Pope


169

(1965), but later retracted in favor of a single-speaker thesis. I will discuss the two Pope

articles, and the responses of Greenfield, in further detail below.

Recent readings of the poem have been more inclined to see the poem as unified,

and the dialogue theory has been all but dismissed, particularly in the wake of Pope’s

retraction. I.L. Gordon’s influential edition of the poem (1960) argues that

though there is an apparently abrupt change of thought at line 64, where the real seafaring theme ends and a not very obviously connected moralizing begins, the two parts are closely linked grammatically and metrically, and the difference of style between them is no greater than the difference of subject matter warrants.52

She also adds in the footnote that “the transition [at line 64] occurs within a sentence, and

there is no break in the metre.”53 Gordon’s arguments appear to have been persuasive, as

few critics have returned to the idea that the second half of the poem is actually a separate

work.

However, the strongest and most influential argument for the poem’s unity stems

from the literal/allegorical debate surrounding the poem. Dorothy Whitelock (1950) sees

the poem’s unity as residing in the theme of the peregrinatio pro amore Dei. Rather than

seeing 64b ff. as irreconcilable with 1— 64a, Whitelock tells us that at 64b, “for the first

time the poet states unequivocally what it is that makes his restless spirit eager to

embrace again the hardships he has described so forcefully,” and explains that “these

lines are the central lines of the poem, and all that follows is an elaboration of their

theme.”54 She offers as proof a number of excerpts from the written record of the seventh

through the tenth centuries showing that becoming a peregrinus in the way that the

Seafarer describes was common during these centuries; that heading to sea was a

common method of pilgrimage, whether it be an “official” pilgrimage to a recognized

52 Gordon, I.L., ed. The Seafarer (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960/66), 2.

53 Gordon, ed., The Seafarer, 2.

54 Dorothy Whitelock, “The Interpretation of The Seafarer,” in The Early Cultures o f North-West Europe, ed. Fox and Bruce Dickins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 261-272; reprint in Old English Literature: Twenty-two Analytical Essays, ed. Martin Stevens and Jerome Mandel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 204 (page citations are to the reprint edition).


170

shrine or a pilgrimage to a place of solitude, as seems to be the case with the Seafarer.

Her argument obviously rejects allegorical readings of the poem, which generally see the

Seafarer’s journey as representing the soul’s pilgrimage to its heavenly home. While

Whitelock’s essay has not gone uncontested—either in whole or in parts—it has served

as a touchstone for many of the non-allegorical readings that followed, including the one

I am about to embark on.

The Seafarer is, whether deliberately or not, a thematic sequel to The Wanderer.

In arguing this, I am in no way asserting that these poems were written by the same

person, or even that one poet had knowledge of the other poet’s work. Rather, both

poems are reflective of what the poetic record reveals to be common concerns amongst

writers of the Anglo-Saxon period, and Whitelock’s argument for the Seafarer as

peregrinus is more than tenable from an historical perspective.

The Wanderer ends with its speaker sitting sundor cet rune, contemplating the

traditional wisdom he has just spoken and having moved himself apart from his past and

apart from his need for the trappings of society. Given the shift in the Wanderer’s tone as

the poem proceeds, and the fact that we are presented with a speech that appears to be

spoken all at once and on a single occasion, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the

Wanderer has just now come to this position; we are witness to him taking the first step

towards investing himself and his desire in the eternal.

Yet that is as far as the first poem takes us. With The Seafarer, however, we are

presented with a speaker who has already taken that first step and now wishes to move

further along the path away from the transient and towards the eternal. Unlike the

Wanderer, the Seafarer does not appear to have been forcibly exiled from his community,

though his very occupation as a seafarer has served to separate him from the larger

community on land. As with the Wanderer, this separation and the hardships that ensued

have provided him with a new perspective on the life he once knew, partly as the result of

distance, partly as the result of the despair he has felt.


171

The Seafarer opens in line 1 with the poem’s single speaker telling us that he will

sing a sodgied (lay of truth, 1.1) of the travels he has already taken, the bitre breostceare

(1.4) he has endured as a wrcecca (exile or wanderer, 1.15) on the iscealdne see (1.14).

Through line 26, the Seafarer provides a catalogue of the hardships faced at sea, with a

particular emphasis on the loneliness of seafaring. He tells us that he was winemcegum

bidroren (deprived of beloved kinsmen, 1.16) and that

Hwilum ylfete song dyde ic me to gomene, ganetes hleojjor and huilpan sweg fore hleahtor wera, maew singende fore medodrince.

[At times the song of swans I had as entertainment, the cry of a gannet, and the cry of a curlew were in place of laughter, a seagull singing in place of mead-drinking.]55

This sense of loneliness and alienation—an alienation which extends to the world around

him, which he actually describes as having geprungen (oppressed, 1.8) him—is pervasive

throughout his description of his travels. The answer to this alienation would seem to be

a return to land, if we take lines 19b—22 above as any indication, but with the fo r pon

shift at line 27, we see that the Seafarer is now just as alienated on land, his time and

experiences at sea having built a wall of separation between him and his former society:

Forj)on him gelyfeS lyt, se J>e ah lifes wyn gebiden in burgum, bealosi[>a hwon, wlonc and wingal, hu ic werig oft in brimlade bidan sceolde.

[Therefore he who has life’s pleasures little believes lives in the town, free from hardship, proud and flushed with wine, how I, weary, often on the sea-way must remain.]56

55 The Seafarer in The Exeter Book: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records III, ed George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 11.19b-22. All Old English quotations are taken from this edition. Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.

56 The Seafarer, 11.27-30


172

The man who lives on land, safe from the hardships of the sea and wlonc and wingal (a

phrase which has generated some controversy but which I think must contain a measure

of reprobation and mean “proud and flushed with wine”) cannot possibly understand the

Seafarer, and in this sense his exile, though metaphorical, is altogether too real.

The subject matters of these lines, through the troublesome second forpon at 33b,

is spoken of in the past tense; with 33b the verbs move into the present or present future

tense, and as in The Wanderer, we are now privy to the Seafarer’s thoughts in the present

of the poem. It is here that we begin to see how The Seafarer can be read as a thematic

sequel to The Wanderer. The Seafarer’s description of his past life, leading up to his

inability to live a normal life on land because of his experiences as a wrcecca have

brought him to the same place, emotionally and philosophically, as the Wanderer at the

end of that poem.

Kierkegaard would of course describe the life of the hypothetical man on land as

mired in despair, a despair he would argue characterizes any individual who had not

come to an epiphany as the Wanderer and the Seafarer have. In The Sickness Unto

Death, he explains that “Because a man is in this kind of despair, he can very well live on

in temporality, indeed, actually all the better, can appear to be a man, be publicly

acclaimed, honored, and esteemed, be absorbed in all the temporal goals.”57

The Seafarer has conquered this despair, and, like the Wanderer, now “exists

before God.” As a result, he is no longer able to live in the world of temporality and

materiality; like some who have come to this point in their lives—those whose stories are

offered by Whitelock as proof for her argument that the Seafarer is a peregrinus—the

Seafarer has chosen to return to the sea, this time for spiritual reasons.

This brings us to perhaps the most debated word in the poem, the word sylf at line

35b, a word whose exact meaning is of paramount importance in a reading of The

Seafarer examining the poem’s conception of self. The most well-known controversy

surrounding the word is recorded in four separate essays written by two preeminent

57 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 35


173eg

Anglo-Saxonists over the course of fifteen years. Briefly, Pope (1965) asserted that the

word sylf must be taken as an indication of a shift in speakers; that a second speaker is

responding to the words of the Seafarer (11.1—33a) and saying that “I, m yself’ must now

make a sea-voyage, just as the Seafarer has, though the “I” of lines 33b-102 will be

making this journey from spiritual motivations. Stanley B. Greenfield (1969) proposed

an alternative translation of sylf, citing Bosworth-Toller’s translation from the Blickling

Homilies: “Donne wearp seo eorj)e hit sona sylf (o f its own accord) of hire [Then warps

the earth of its own accord],” as well as occurrences of the word in Beowulf894-95a and

2146b-47 and lines 70 ff. of Resignation which appear also to be using the word in the

sense of “of my own accord.” In his famous retraction of the 1965 essay, Pope (1974)

abandons the idea that there are two speakers in The Seafarer, but argues against

Greenfield’s translation of sylf as “of my own accord,” suggesting instead that the word

should be translated as meaning “by myself’ or “alone.” His main point of contention

against Greenfield’s argument is that there is no indication in lines 1—33a that the

Seafarer had made his earlier voyages under duress. Both critics seem to share the

assumption that all sea voyaging in the poem is penitential, and the fact that there is no

indication that the Seafarer made these earlier voyages as assigned penance is evidence to

Pope that they were not involuntary. In the final essay in this interchange, Greenfield

(1980) counters Pope’s argument with persuasive evidence that sy/fcannot mean “by

myself,” mustering not only evidence that the Old English word does not appear to be

used to mean “alone” in any other context, but also explaining that “ana is the normal

Old English word for “alone, unaccompanied.”59 The poet “could have used the atolypa

gewealc formula he had already used in 6a as the alliterating a verse to an accompanying

58 John C. Pope, “Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer,” in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honour o f Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. and Robert P. Creed (New York: New York University, 1965), 164-193; Stanley B. Greenfield, “Min, Sylf, and ‘Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer,”' Journal o f English and Germanic Philology 68 (1969): 212-220; John C. Pope, “Second Thoughts on the Interpretation of The Seafarer,” Anglo-Saxon England 3 (1974): 75-86; and Stanley B. Greenfield, “Sylf, Seasons, Structure and Genre in The Seafarer Anglo-Saxon England 9(1980): 199-211.

59 Greenfield, “‘Sylf,’ Seasons, Structure and Genre,” 203.


174

b verse of ana cunige.”60 Greenfield does not, however, reassert his original translation

of sylf as “of my own accord,” but now argues for the translation “for myself,” primarily

in answer to Pope’s objections that the sea voyages of lines 1—33a do not appear to have

been coerced.

There is one key problem in the whole interchange which, when addressed, clears

up much of the controversy surrounding this word, and that is the assumption that all sea-

voyages are necessarily penitential acts. Though both critics are responding—more or

less favorably—to the peregrinatio pro amore Dei theme suggested by Whitelock,

agreeing that the sea voyage suggested at line 33b is a voyage of pilgrimage and

penitence, there is nothing in Whitelock’s essay—or in text of The Seafarer—to suggest

that the sea voyages of lines 1—33a need also be read as voyages of pilgrimage and

penitence. If we accept Greenfield’s original reading of sylfm. line 35b as meaning “of

my own accord,” it seems far more logical to understand the earlier voyages not as

having “been imposed by his confessor as a penance for some deadly sin,”61 but as being

taken out of necessity, most likely economic necessity. Line 3 makes it clear that the

Seafarer has often gone to sea, and it seems likely that the Seafarer makes his living by

the sea; he is probably attached to a trading vessel in some capacity.

Such a reading also supports Greenfield’s second translation of sy lf “for myself,”

because the voyage contemplated by the Seafarer is, in contrast to those taken of

economic necessity. It is taken “for himself,” meaning that it is taken of his own free

will, or, in modem parlance, by his own agency. Furthermore, it is a decision that comes

as the result of his own personal experience. It is also a penitential voyage, being taken

for self-improvement in the sense of improvement of the soul. As many critics have

suggested, the shift at 35b could be read as a shift from the literal to the allegorical, but

the sort of Augustinian voyage to the self and the self s true home in God needn’t

preclude a literal voyage away from the temptations provided by human society. As

Greenfield comments,

60 Greenfield, “‘Sylf,’ Seasons, Structure and Genre,” 203.

61 Pope, “Second Thoughts,” 76.


175

For The Seafarer, sylfm 35b as personal recognition and acceptance by and for the speaker’s self fits beautifully into the larger meaning and pattern of the poem. In speaking of his earlier voyages, whether voluntary or not, the persona relates the sodgied about his experience of life’s hardships on the sea (as opposed to the easy living of the prosperous land dweller), experiences whose rigours, at least, he had to endure (bidan sceolde, 30b).62

Greenfield sees lines 31—33a as providing the same basic transition as appears in The

Wanderer, the transition from the specific life experiences of the speaker to the shared

life experience of humanity in general:

Nap nihtscua, nor])an sniwde,hrim hrusan bond, haegl feol on eorjjan,coma caldast.

[The shade of night grew dark, snow from the north, rime bound the ground, hail fell on the earth, coldest of corns.]

He comments that “This short passage . . . suggests a movement outward and away from

the personal situation of the speaker’s involuntary experience at sea to the whole world,

itself involuntarily bound by the elements, frozen and infertile.”64 What has been

realized, perhaps, is that the world around him does not seek to “oppress” him, but rather

than all of Creation is in the same basic plight as the Seafarer. He is not so alienated after

all. As Greenfield explains,

At this moment for the speaker there is nothing happy about the way of the world for even the fortunate non-sea-voyager; and it is precisely (dare I use that word again?) this sudden shift in perspective from himself and the sea to the earth as a whole that allows the seafarer to recognize for himself (in the dual sense) the real meaning of his past experiences: that all life is transient and ultimately sterile, and that he himself is inextricably part of that transience and sterility—a perception he will clarify later in the poem.65

62 Greenfield, “ ‘Sylf,’ Seasons, Structure and Genre,” 206.

63 The Seafarer, 11.31-3 3 a.

64 Greenfield, “Dramatic Voices,” 219.

65 Greenfield, ‘“ Sylf,” Seasons, Structure and Genre,” 206-207.


176

Yet even in his decision to embark on this pilgrimage “of his own accord” or “for

himself,” the Seafarer stresses the hardships he will have to endure. We come to another

forpon transition at line 39, where the speaker introduces yet another hypothetical and

“universal” man, who though he has gone to sea, cannot completely rid himself of his

past life on land or of his fear for his own safety:

Forjjon nis J)aes modwlonc mon ofer eorj^an,ne his gifena j)ass god, ne in geoguJ>e to J aes hwaet,ne in his daedum to Jiass deor, ne him his dryhten to ])aes hold,fiaet he a his sasfore sorge naebbeto hwon hine dryhten gedon wille.Ne bij> him to hearpan hyge ne to hring^ege, ne to wife wyn ne to worulde hyht, ne ymbe dwiht elles, nefhe ymb y8a gewealc, ac a hafad longunge se Jje on lagu fundaQ.

[Therefore there is no man on earth so proud of spirit, nor of his gifts so good, nor in youthfulness so vigorous, nor in his deeds so bold, nor to him his lord so gracious, that he does not ever have sorrow for his sea-voyage for what his lord will bring.Nor is in his mind the harp nor the receiving of rings, nor delight in a wife nor worldly joy, nor of anything else, except of the rolling of waves, but he always has longings; he is eager to go to sea.]66

Presumably, the Seafarer includes himself in the phrase “no man in this world”; I do not

think this calls into question the authenticity of his epiphany, however, as what we are

being told here is that this anxiety and what would appear to be, at least in the case of the

Seafarer, the occasional desire for some of the accouterments of life on land as well the

difficulties inherent in existing before God (fears regarding what the Lord might will,

11.43— 44) are simply part of being human.

Lines 48— 49 serve essentially the same function as lines 31—33a, again serving

to move the focus of the poem away from the individual speaker and towards the earth as

a whole: “Bearwas blostmum nima5, byrig faegria8, / wongas wlitigiad, woruld onetted.

66 The Seafarer, 11.39-47.


177

[Groves take blossom, boroughs become fair, / meadows brighten, the world hastens

on.]”67 Just as the Seafarer has shifted his perspective from the temporal to the eternal, so

the world is rushing from temporality into eternity, the sixth age coming to a close. This

provides not only a philosophical consolatio, but for the Seafarer acts as a spur to action;

lines 50— 55a present a second statement of the Seafarer’s intent to go on his sea

pilgrimage, this time explicitly stating the cause and effect relationship between his

“perception of transience” and the voyage:

ealle j)a gemoniaQ modes fusne sefan to sif>e {jam j)e swa fenced on flodwegas feor gewitan.Swylce geac monaQ geomran reorde, singeQ sumeres weard, sorge beode3 bittre in breosthord.

[All of these remind the eager of mind the heart to journey he who thus thinks to know, far away on flood ways.Such as the cuckoo reminds with melancholy voice, sings the warder of summer, sorrow forebodes

/ obitter in breast hoard.]

From here we return to the hypothetical man on land—or perhaps more accurately, in

society—though it is unclear whether or not this is the same hypothetical man, as this

second presentation is more positive in tone:

haet se beom ne wat, sefteadig secg. hwaet ]ra sume dreoga3 J>e \>a wrasclastas widost lecgaQ.

[That the warrior does not know, the man blessed with comfort—what those endure who the tracks of exile lay the farthest.]69

67 The Seafarer, 11. 48—49.

68 The Seafarer, 11. 50— 55a.

69 The Seafarer, 11. 55b—57.


178

But though this depiction is more positive than the earlier one, the Seafarer is still unable

to relate to this man, and though he is physically in the same place as the hypothetical

man on land, with line 58 we move into the highly debated passage in which the

Seafarer’s mind “leaves” the confines of his body and travels over the sea only to return

to his body and issue the call of the pilgrimage. Allegorical readings of this passage are

certainly justified, and I have no wish to debate them here. Yet alongside the allegory, as

is so often the case in both The Wanderer and The Seafarer, there is a literal level that I

would champion, invoking Occam’s razor. Simply put, the Seafarer’s mind is no longer

where he is in the present. In his mind, he has already begun the sea voyage he will soon

be setting out upon. Such “mental journeying” is a common phenomenon, and we

unnecessarily complicate this passage by insisting that it must have some meaning

beyond the obvious one. Granted, given the nature of medieval literature, we should

pursue possible allegorical readings whenever they arise, but as I argued in chapter one,

pushing an allegorical reading onto a text often has the result of silencing the text. The

Seafarer presents a man who views his immediate future with great anticipation, who

looks forward to the pilgrimage he has chosen to embark upon. Perhaps more than any

other passage, the journey of his mind reveals the extent to which an inner change has

taken place in the Seafarer’s mind. In many ways, he is reminiscent of Augustine just

after his conversion in the garden but before he is able to give up his position as rhetor.

The mind has already begun the journey that the body cannot yet take, and the division in

the self is as apparent here as it is in Confessions.

The forpon transition at 64b begins what has often been called the “sermon”

section, and with this transition we see the same emphasis on the incorporation into the

self of traditional wisdom, as we did at the end of The Wanderer. As Whitelock points

out, the initial transition provides an explanation for the Seafarer’s decision to embark on

his voyage of pilgrimage; while lines 31—33a and 48— 49 point towards these reasons,

64b—71 make this reason explicit:

Forj>on me hatran sind dryhtnes dreamas j>onne Jus deade life, laene on londe. Ic gelyfe no


179

J?ast him eorQwelan ece stondaQ.Simle {jreora sum J)inga gehwylce, aer his tid aga, to tweon weorJjeS; adl oJjJje yldo oj^e ecghete faegum fromweardum feorh o5J)ringe5.

[Because to me are warmer the delights of the lord than this dead life, leased on land. I do not believethat for him the wealth of this earth will stand until eternity.Always one of three things in all circumstances, before his final hour becomes uncertain; sickness or age or sword-hatred

7ftdoomed to die, life wrested away.]

This passage provides the most direct statement of what The Seafarer—and the

Seafarer—is trying to impart to the reader, the nature of the Seafarer’s epiphany. Yet

unlike the Wanderer, the Seafarer also makes a statement of action here. This is not just

the statement that he is going to embark upon this sea pilgrimage to the soul, but that “me

hatran sind / dryhtnes dreams bonne bis deade life, / laene on londe.” The crucial action

taken by the Seafarer is not the sea voyage itself, but the act of mental realignment that

proceeds his decision to take a sea voyage.

From a Kierkegaardian point of view, however, after this mental realignment has

taken place, concrete action becomes necessary: “Concrete repentance . . . signifies that a

person is already looking at his former life from an ethical point of view, which also,

after the choice, confronts him with concrete tasks and shows how they are to be71accomplished.”

From here the poem moves into what can only be described as a long series of

gnomic statements, which, taken together, certainly justify the characterization of the last

70 The Seafarer, 11. 64b—70. In the ASPR, Krapp and Dobbie emend manuscript line 69, tide ge, to tide aga, while Gordon prefers the emendation tiddege, also found in Mitchell and Robinson, meaning “span of life.” While I have retained the ASPR emendation, I have followed the common practice of translating tid aga as “final hour.”

71 Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Concept o f Existence, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003), 33.


1 8 0

half of the poem as a sermon of sorts. The end of The Seafarer should be read in much

the same way as the middle, gnomic section of The Wanderer. Like the anhaga, the

Seafarer has arrived at that stage of his life when he recognizes in gnomic wisdom his

own experience of life. His truth and the truth of gnomic wisdom have become one and

the same. He has spent his “fair share of winters on this world,” and the wisdom he

recites is the same wisdom that we find in The Wanderer and Maxims, focused as it is

upon the transience of earthly existence.

We can see that the Seafarer has come to the same understanding of the world and

his place in it as the Wanderer has, through the examination of a few select lines from the

“sermon” which ends the poem. In lines 70—71, the Seafarer tells us that we are doomed

to die, whether by “adl oJ)J>e yido o ^ e ecghete / faegum ffomweardum feorh o5J)ringed6.

[sickness or age or sword-hatred / doomed to die, life wrested away.]” Here he expresses

the same understanding of the myriad of ways in which human life can come to an end as

The Wanderer does in lines 80—84 of that poem. In lines 80b— 85, the Seafarer

articulates his understanding of the transient nature of Creation as a whole

Dagas sind gewitene, ealle onmedlan eorjjan rices; naeron nu cyningas ne caseras ne goldgiefan swylce iu waeron,]x>nne hi maest mid him maerjja gefremedon ond on dryhtlicestum dome lifdon.

[Days have departed, all magnificence in the kingdom of the earth; kings are not now, nor caesars nor goldgivers such as were of old, when they performed the most glorious deeds and lived among them in lordly glory.]

This understanding is mirrored in lines 92-110 of The W an derer.

72 The Seafarer, 11. 81a—85.


181

The Seafarer also speaks of the need to control one’s self, to exert control over the

self and bring it into line with what is socially acceptable and with what is acceptable in

the eyes of God:

Stieran mon sceal strongum mode, and J aet on stajjelum healdan,and gewis werum, wisum clasne,scyle monna gehwylc mid gamete healdanwij) leofna and wid lafme

[A man must steer a strong mind, and must keep that in place, and trustworthy to men, clean in manner, should each man hold with mirth with friends and with foes]

Yet even taking up this proper attitude is not enough to change the fate that God has in

store for him, as the Seafarer acknowledges:

Wyrd bi]) swif>re, meotud meahtigra Jionne asnges monnes gehygd.

[Fate is stronger, the measurer mightier than any thought of man.]74

Leslie says of this passage, “In the terse gnomic statements of lines 115b— 16, we have

an assessment of the twin powers of the universe, which are stronger than any man can

conceive. They include not only God but fate, the traditional Germanic concept of the

course of events.” Yet that fate is controlled by God is unquestionable in this instance,

as wyrd and meotod meahtigra have been placed in apposition to one another, indicating

their synonymity.

Finally, we are left in The Seafarer with a final passage which has been called a

sermon in and of itself:

73 The Seafarer, 11. 109— 112a.

74 The Seafarer, 11. 115a— 116.

75 Roy F. Leslie, “The Meaning and Structure of The Seafarer, in The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research, ed. Martin Green (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 117.


182

Uton we hycgan hwasr we ham agen and ]3onne gejjencan hu we Jrider cumen, and we Jjonne each tilien J)aet we to moten in J>a ecan eadignesse, f>ear is lif gelong in lufan dryhtnes, hyht in heofonum. hass sy J>am halgan }?onc J5aet he usic geweorfcade, wuldres ealdor, ece dryhten, in ealle tid. Amen.

[Let us think where we have our home and then think how we thither come, and let us also labor so that we are allowed into eternal bliss,where life belongs in the love of the lord, joy in heaven. So let the holy one be thanked that he exalted us, prince of glory, eternal lord, in all eternity. Amen.]76

The sentiment here is the same as in The Wanderer. Given the equal weighting of the

“sermon” with the opening section detailing the incidents of the Seafarer’s individual life

and the fact that The Seafarer speaks of his “conversion” as having taken place in the past

tense of the poem itself—he is now ready to take action based on his new

understanding—it is reasonable to argue that The Seafarer presents a thematic sequel to

The Wanderer. Each poem presents the same basic process of coming to an

understanding of the self in the world, coming to a wisdom that can only be gained, not

received. The Seafarer simply presents a speaker who is further along in that process.

V . T h e A n g l o -S a x o n S e l f

As I stated at the end of Part I, the purpose of this study is not to develop an overarching

theory about the medieval sense of self, something that cannot be done without recourse

to some sort of Procrustean bed on which to lay these works and their authors. Even the

somewhat more narrowly defined Anglo-Saxon sense of self is multiple and incapable of

76 The Seafarer, 11. 117— 124.


183

being theorized without leveling the differences between individual authors. However, in

examining Alfred’s translations of Augustine and Boethius, The Wanderer and The

Seafarer, and the other Old English works I have touched upon briefly in the last two

chapters, three common elements emerge in terms of their conceptualization of the self.

The first is an emphasis on the social nature of the self, an aspect largely ignored

in the Augustinian conception. This is, of course, reflected more in Alfred’s translations

than in the either The Wanderer or The Seafarer, as the speakers in these poems, like

Augustine, seek to divest themselves of the things of this world and to find their true

selves in the eternal. In both, the social self is relegated to the background, as the

speakers have chosen to leave their social selves behind. We are afforded only glimpses

of these selves, ghosts from the past which occasionally come to “haunt” the speakers.

Beyond that, we also have the gnomic passages in each poem, which, while they do

represent cultural wisdom, can only be said to constitute a socially constructed self if we

ignore the fact that a large number of the gnomic passages contain wisdom regarding the

human condition. Such wisdom is not the product of culture, but of existence. Other

poems, like Beowulf, which it has been argued provides a model of kingship in this

world, present a self that is more socially determined. We have, perhaps, turned too often

to poems such as Beowulf and a somewhat narrow reading of Alfred’s translations in

constructing a model of the Anglo-Saxon self which is almost completely social in

nature, providing critics like Greenblatt with further “evidence” that his description of the

medieval self is an accurate one.

The second common element is the presentation of the self as an agent, and often

as an autobiographical agent, as in Augustine’s Confessions. This presentation emerges

from the questions Anglo-Saxon literature asks regarding free will and human freedom,

first given voice in Alfred’s translations of Boethius and the Soliloquies, but which find

their way into the poetry through the poets’ wrestling with the concepts of free will,

predestination, wyrd, and providence. In the context of current critical debates regarding

agency and social construction, the importance of the medieval debate regarding free will

and predestination to our understanding of precisely what sorts of selves these works are


184

presenting becomes clear. While the Augustinian concept of predestination from Ad

simplicianum constituted Church doctrine during the Anglo-Saxon period, the Germanic

concept of wyrd appears to have provided the Anglo-Saxons a certain latitude in their

understanding of that doctrine. If wyrd is the necessary result of our exercise of human

freedom, as Payne argues is the case in Alfred’s Boethius, then human freedom exists

prior to wyrd. In a unique and not always immediately apparent way, the Anglo-Saxon

self emerges as no less an agent than the modem self.

The third common element is the expression of an existential philosophy in many

of the surviving works, an expression which belies the notion that the Anglo-Saxon self is

wholly social in nature. While the existentialism itself is not necessarily a component of

this self, the resultant anxiety surrounding the immortality of the soul and the desire on

the part of these writers to define the self as both a material and a transcendental entity

reveals an important component of the Anglo-Saxon concept. It is also important to note

that the adoption of such an understanding of the self and of the transience of the material

world appear to be the main components of wisdom; it is seen as a True understanding of

the nature of the self and the world.

Because of this dual emphasis on the transient and the transcendent, the

Kierkegaardian philosophy that I have brought to bear on the elegies is useful for creating

a dialogue between past and present. The Kierkegaardian self certainly exhibits affinities

to the self we observe in Old English literature—particularly the elegies. A separate

study of Old English literature and its affinities to Kierkegaard is warranted. Such a

study would consist mainly of a further catalog of parallels, such as those I have pointed

out in The Wanderer and The Seafarer. It would also have to more closely examine those

poems which depict their characters as more socially constructed, such as Beowulf, but

which are no less existential in their concerns. In the end, however, Kierkegaard

provides us with a point of contact with Anglo-Saxon thought, but that is as far as we can

go without “colonizing” the Old English texts being studied. Still, the existence of such a

point of contact is useful in and of itself, in that it points towards certain universals in


185

human existence, allowing the reader a deeper, personal understanding of the Anglo-

Saxon mind.

A thorough study of Kierkegaard and Old English literature is only one of three

tasks that remain to be done, however. The second of these tasks, admittedly a gap in this

study, is a study of the existential elements in Boethius’s Consolation o f Philosophy. As

I have indicated here and there throughout this study, those existential elements are there,

and few have argued with this assertion. However, barring a single study of

Kierkegaard’s reading of the Consolation, there appear to be no studies of Boethius and

existentialism. The fruits of such a study would certain be a welcome addition not only

to the study of Boethius, but to the account of the centuries-long divide between

Augustine and Alfred discussed in chapter seven.

The third task is to integrate the findings of Antonina Harbus regarding the

Anglo-Saxon concept of the mind with what is currently being discovered in cognitive

neuroscience. Such a study will, I think, reveal that the Anglo-Saxons were far more

intuitive about the workings of the human mind than they have perhaps been given credit

for. However, before such a study can be undertaken, certain changes in the way the

subject of the self is approached in the humanities and the social sciences must be made.


1 8 6

C onclusion

Towards Consilience

The Kierkegaardian focus of the last chapter leads me to begin this conclusion with a

sentiment from the Danish philosopher: there can be no system for human existence.

Drawing an overarching conclusion regarding the concept of the self in the Middle Ages

is to try and do just that: systematize human existence. Such a theory is often presented

at the conclusion of a study such as this one, and it would be “tidy” were I able to come

up with a satisfactory theory of the medieval self or even of the more limited category of

medieval subjectivity. But to create such a theory is to level the differences between

eras, regions, cultures, and, perhaps most importantly, individual human beings.

This is not to argue that a theoretical model of selfhood is something that we

should avoid pursuing; what it means to be a human being is a question that humanity has

been trying to answer since works as old as Gilgamesh, and most o f our foundational

myths attempt to answer just this question. Certainly the first chapters of Genesis are just

as much about what it means to be human as they are about how we came to be here.

The answers we have come up with thus far, however, have been partial and

tentative, even if they have not always been acknowledged as such. If we want to come

up with answers that are more complete and less tentative, we will need to make a

priority of breaking down of the rigid barriers we have constructed between those

disciplines which have made the study of the human self their focus. This is particularly

so in the case of the barriers between the humanities/social sciences and the hard

sciences, as I have argued in chapter one. Certainly our theories of narrative and

autobiography have a great deal to gain by incorporating the findings of cognitive

psychology and neurology, and the theory of the socially constructed self is in need of

extensive modifications that will allow us to take into account those aspects of the self

that are not determined by social and cultural factors. We can no longer afford to remain


187

ensconced at one end of the nature versus nurture debate if we have any desire at all to

develop accurate models of the self.

Yet the advantage of remaining at one of the poles of the debate is that it allows a

scholar to come up with definite, absolute answers at the end of a study such as this one.

Theory is tidy in that it allows the literary scholar to tie up several disparate works into a

single framework and to draw conclusions at the end of a study, something I am well-

aware has not and cannot be done in a study which consciously avoids theorizing.

Certainly it would be possible to take an Athusserian definition of subjectivity and to then

comb through Augustine, Alfred, and the Old English elegies and locate passages where

an Athusserian subject can be located. This is particularly true of Augustine and Alfred,

both of whom are writing to “subjects,” Augustine as bishop and Alfred as king. But

those passages in each work which lend themselves to a discussion of subjectivity

constitute only a small part of what is going on in the works of each author, and to

transform these works into “ruling-class propaganda” is to miss most of what is going on

inside of them. It is also to foist upon these works an understanding of the world that

been proven time and again to be problematic at best, terminally flawed at worst. It is

also ahistorical, as Marxism and the Marxist-derived theories which underlie today’s

identity politics are grounded in a philosophical system that arose from a particular

historical situation, and examines particular historically situated social systems rather

than the selves who inhabit them.

I do not wish this conclusion to become polemical, though I am well aware that

my call to jettison the concept of subjectivity as it is currently formulated in humanities

and social sciences departments may be regarded as polemical. My suggestion that we

allow the findings of the sciences to inform and in some cases determine our approaches

to the self—and thus to literature—may be construed as an attack and a call to allow the

sciences to completely determine our methodology, akin to Eagleton’s understanding of

how and why the New Criticism came to dominate literary studies in the early part of the

twentieth century.


1 8 8

I am not, however, arguing that the sciences should completely determine our

methodology. What I am arguing is that the humanities and the social sciences need a

strong infusion of empiricism, if these disciplines expect to survive into the twenty-first

century.

Edmund O. Wilson, most famous—or perhaps infamous—for his “invention” of

sociobiology in the 1970s, has recently championed the concept of “consilience,” the

notion that the world is an orderly one and can be explained by natural laws, natural laws

that should provide the foundation and the governing principles for all disciplines.

Wilson explains that “People expect from the social sciences—anthropology, sociology,

economics, and political science—the knowledge to understand their lives and control

their future. They want the power to predict, not the preordained unfolding of events,

which does not exist, but what will happen if society selects one course o f action over

another.”1 Wilson argues that the social sciences largely fail in their attempts to make

such predictions, however, because their attempts are made on their own, “without

linkage to the natural sciences.”2

Wilson is brutal in his assessment of the social sciences (and those branches of the

arts—such as the study of literature—which have allowed themselves to be governed by

a social science approach to their subject matter). Yet his perspective as an outsider to

the humanities and the social sciences is jarringly enlightening. It reveals the extent to

which we have allowed ourselves to be fenced off from the pursuit of knowledge in fields

other than our own. Wilson’s critique is best presented in his own words, in this

somewhat lengthy passage from Consilience: The Unity o f Knowledge:

Social scientists by and large spurn the idea of the hierarchical ordering of knowledge that unites and drives the natural sciences. Split into independent cadres, they stress precision in words within their specialty but seldom speak the same technical language from one specialty to the next. A great many even enjoy the resulting overall atmosphere of chaos, mistaking it for creative ferment. Some favor partisan activism, directing

1 Edmund O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity o f Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998),181.

2 Wilson, 181.


189

theory into the service of their personal political philosophies. In past decades, social scientists have endorsed Marxism-Leninism, or—as much as the misguided biologists who usually receive the blame—the worst excesses of Social Darwinism. Today various factions favor ideological positions ranging from laissez-faire capitalism to radical socialism, while a few promote versions of postmodernist relativism that question the very idea of objective knowledge itself.

They are easily shackled by tribal loyalty. Much of what passes for social theory is still in thrall to the original grand masters—a bad sign, given the principle that progress in a scientific discipline can be measured by how quickly its founders are forgotten. Simon Blackburn, in The Oxford Dictionary o f Philosophy, provides an instructive example: “The tradition of semiotics that follows Saussure is sometimes referred to as semiology. Confusingly, in the work of Kristeva, the term is appropriated for the nonrational effluxes of the infantile part of the self.” And so on through the byways of critical theory, functionalism, historicism, antihistoricism, structuralism, poststructuralism, and—if the mind is not steeled to resist—thence into the pits of Marxism and psychoanalytic theory where so much of academia disappeared in the twentieth century.

Each of these enterprises has contributed something to understanding the human condition. The best of the insights, if pieced together, explain the broad sweep of social behavior, at least in the same elementary sense that preliterate creation myths explain the universe, that is, with conviction and a certain internal consistency. But never—I do not think that too strong a word—have social scientists been able to embed their narratives in the physical realities of human biology and psychology, even though it is surely there and not some astral plan from which culture has arisen.3

Wilson identifies the difficulty inherent in any discussion of the human self, and that is

the fact that we are only just now making attempts at consilience in this area. He is also

correct in pointing out that such attempts have been branded heretical by those in the

humanities and the social sciences who wish to keep things as they are and perpetuate the

current theoretical models—flawed or not—into the next generation of scholars.

The brush with which Wilson paints the humanities and social sciences can be a

bit broad at times, though, and while he acknowledges that work in these fields has

contributed insight into the human condition, he is perhaps too quick to dismiss the

3 Wilson, 182-183.


190

importance of these insights. Even if Wilson’s critique is almost entirely correct, the

humanities and the social sciences can—when not being used in the service of a political

program—at the very least provide existential and phenomenological descriptions of the

human condition. These descriptions may not accurately describe what is actually

happening as we are going through the process of living, but they do describe the way we

experience that process, and such a description is as important to coming to an

understanding of the human condition as the scientific approach. Ideally, the two would

exist side-by-side, complementing one another and, perhaps most importantly,

acknowledging the veracity of each other’s claims—when those claims are bom out by

empirical evidence, of course.

Such a step is the next logical one which a study such as the one I have embarked

upon here must take. It requires, however, that the work I have described above be done

first, and it is work that cannot be done by a lone scholar in the humanities.

The work that has been done of the neurology of narrative, which has helped to

inform my readings of Augustine and the elegies, is one important step in the right

direction. In terms of medieval studies, future work might include closely examining the

Augustinian and Anglo-Saxon conceptions of the workings of the human mind in light of

what cognitive psychology and neurology have discovered; while the model of the mind

Augustine and the Anglo-Saxons describe is certainly a product of what has been dubbed

“folk psychology,” the methods by which each breaks the mind—and the self—down

into distinct components bears a striking resemblance to the model of the mind we see

coming out of the sciences. A thorough comparison of the medieval and modem models

of the mind seems likely to provide us with a greater understanding of the medieval

conception of the self. It is a curious fact that the brain itself can be divided into a trinity

of sorts: the hindbrain and the midbrain (which together make up the brain stem) and the

forebrain. It has been said—accurately, if somewhat tongue-in-cheek—that the functions

of these three sections of the brain “can be neatly summarized in this sequence:

heartbeat, heartstrings, and heartless.”4 Approaching the Augustinian schema from this

4 Wilson, 107.


191

direction might have the advantage of making it less distant and alien from our own

conception, again creating that deep cross-cultural, cross-temporal communication that

the humanities is supposed to provide. As Wilson points out, “the ordinary and

conventional conceptions—what some philosophers call folk psychology—are necessary

if we are to make better sense of thousands of years of literate history, and thereby join

cultures of the past with those of the future.”5

Such work would have to be done, however, in close collaboration with scholars

working in cognitive neuroscience. The level of specialized knowledge required to

accurately bring these two fields to bear on our own readings of literature—medieval and

otherwise—is far too great to allow anything produced solely from our side of the divide

to be other than dilettantish.

Simply put, the self is far too complex a thing for any one discipline or group of

like disciplines to contain and define adequately. If we are going to develop an even

somewhat tenable understanding of the self, we need to proceed not just in an

interdisciplinary fashion but in a multidisciplinary fashion, taking care to cross the

boundaries between the traditional “schools” on a university campus. Any theory of the

self that focuses on sociological and cultural determinants of the self to the exclusion of

biological determinants of the self is necessarily incomplete. The life expectancy of such

theories is limited at best. The life expectancy of those fields that continue to champion

these theories, despite the overwhelming evidence of their inadequacy, is equally limited.

The humanities cannot afford to ignore this growing pool of knowledge being amassed in

the sciences regarding their own subject of study: humanity.

5 Wilson, 115.


192

B ib l io g r a p h y

Primary Sources

Alcuin, “De ratione animae A Text with Introduction, Critical Apparatus, andTranslation. Ed. James Joseph Mark Curry. Ph.D. diss., Cornell University,1966.

The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record, in six volumes. Ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-1953.

Asser ’s Life o f King Alfred, Together with the Annals o f Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser. Edited by William Henry Stevenson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Augustine. Against the Academicians and The Teacher. Ed. and trans. Peter King. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1995.

________ . The City o f God against the Pagans. Ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

________ . Confessions. Three volumes. Ed. J.J. O’Donnell. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992.

________ . Confessions. Ed. and trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1991.

________ . Contra academicos. In Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. XXIX.Ed. W.M. Green. Turnhout: Brepols, 1970.

________ . De civitate dei. In Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vols. XLVII &XLVIII. Ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb. Turnhout: Brepols, 1955.

________ . De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum. In Corpus Christianorum SeriesLatina, Vol. XLIV. Ed. Almut Mutzenbecher. Turnhout: Brepols, 1970.

________ . De libero arbitrio. In Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. XXIX. Ed.W.M. Green. Turnhout: Brepols, 1970.


193

________ . De trinitate. In Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vols. 50 & 50A. Ed.W.J. Mountain. Turnhout, Brepols, 1968.

________ . On Free Choice o f the Will. Ed. and trans. Thomas Williams. Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing Company, 1993.

________ . Retractationes. In Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Vol. LVII. Ed.Almut Mutzenbecher. Turnhout: Brepols, 1984.

________ . Retractations. Ed. and trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan. Washington, D.C.:Catholic University of America Press, 1968.

________ . Soliloquia. In Corpus Christianorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vol.LXXXIX. Ed. Wolfgangus Hormann. Wien: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1986.

________ . Soliloquies: Augustine’s Inner Dialogue. Ed. John E. Rotelle. Trans. KimPaffenroth. Brooklyn: New City Press, 2000.

________ . The Trinity. Ed. John E. Rotelle. Trans. Edmund Hill. Brooklyn: New CityPress, 1991.

________ . To Simplician—On Various Questions, Book I. In Augustine: EarlierWritings. Ed. and trans. John H.S. Burleigh. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1953.

Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatem versionem. Edited by Bonifatio Fischer, et. al. Stuttgart: Wiirttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1969.

King Alfred’s Old English Version o f Boethius. Edited by Walter John Sedgefield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1899.

King Alfred’s Old English Version o f St. Augustine’s "Soliloquies”. Edited andtranslated by Henry Lee Hargrove. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1904.

King Alfred’s Version o f St. Augustine’s "Soliloquies ’’. Edited by Thomas A. Camicelli. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969.

King Alfred’s Version o f the Consolations o f Boethius. Edited and translated by Walter John Sedgefield. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1900.

King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version o f Gregory’s "Pastoral Care ”. Edited and translated by Henry Sweet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1871.


194

The Legal Code o f Alfred the Great. Edited by Milton Haight Turk. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1893.

The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. Edited by Anne L. Klinck. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

The Saxon Genesis: An Edition o f the West Saxon “Genesis B ” and the Old SaxonVatican Genesis. Edited by A.N. Doane. Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1991.

The Seafarer. Edited by I. L. Gordon. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1960

Secondary Sources

Abels, Richard. Alfred the King: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England. London: Longman, 1998.

Aers, David. “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections of LiteraryCritics Writing the ‘History of the Subject.”’ In Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writings, ed. David Aers, 177- 202. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin andPhilosopy, ed. and trans. Ben Brewster, 127-186. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Babcock, William S. “Patterns of Roman Selfhood: Marcus Aurelius and Augustine of Hippo.” The Perkins School o f Theology Journal 29 (Winter 1976): 1-19.

Barrett, William. Irrational Man. New York: Anchor Books, 1958.

Bately, Janet M. The Literary Prose o f King Alfred’s Reign: Translation orTransformation? Binghamton, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.

________ . “Old English Prose Before and During the Reign of King Alfred.” Anglo-Saxon England 17 (1988): 93-138.

________ . “Those Books That Are Most Necessary for All Men to Know: The Classicsand Late Ninth-Century England, a Reappraisal.” In The Classics o f the Middle Ages: Papers o f the Twentieth Annual Conference o f the Center fo r Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin, 45-78. Binghamton, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.


195

Bhattacharya, Prodosh. “An Analogue, and Probable Source, for a Metaphor in Alfred’s Preface to the Old English Translation of Augustine’s So lilo q u iesN o tes and Queries 45:2 (June 1988): 161-163.

Bjork, Robert E. “Sundor TEt Rune: The Voluntary Exile of The Wanderer.” Neophilologus 73 (1989): 119-129.

Bolton, Diane K. “The Study of the Consolation o f Philosophy in Anglo-SaxonEngland.” Archives d ’histoire doctrinale et litteraire du moyen age 44 (1977):

33-78.

Bolton, W.F. “Boethius, Alfred, and Deor Again.” Modern Philology 69 (1972): 222- 227.

________ . “The Dimensions of The Wanderer.” Leeds Studies in English 3 (1969): 7-34.

________ . “How Boethian is Alfred’s Boethius!” In Studies in Earlier Old EnglishProse, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, 153-168. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986.

Bonner, Gerald. “Anglo-Saxon Culture and Spirituality.” Sobernost 6:8 (1973): 533- 550.

________ . “Augustine and Pelagianism.” Augustinian Studies 24 (1993): 27-47.

________ . “Augustine’s Doctrine of Man: Image of God and Sinner.” Augustinianum24 (1984): 495-514.

________ . “Bede and His Legacy.” The Durham University Journal 78:2 (NS 47:2):219-230.

________ . “Bede and Medieval Civilization.” Anglo-Saxon England 2 (1973): 71-90.

________ . “The Christian Life in the Thought of the Venerable Bede.” The DurhamUniversity Journal 63:1 (NS 32:1): 39-55.

________ . “Libido and concupiscentia in St Augustine.” In Studia Patristica VI, ed.F. L. Cross, 303-314. Berlin: Akadamie-Verlag, 1962.

________ . “Pelagianism and Augustine.” Augustinian Studies 23 (1992): 33-51.

________ . “Quid imperatori cum ecclesia? St Augustine on History and Society.”Augustinian Studies 2 (1971): 231-251.


196

________ . St Augustine o f Hippo: Life and Controversies, 3rd ed. Norwich, U.K.:Canterbury Press, 2002.

________ . “ Vera lux ilia est quae illuminaf. The Christian Humanism of Augustine.” InReform and Renewal in the Church (Studies in Church History, vol. 13), ed. D. Baker, 1-22. Oxford, 1977.

Booth, Edward. Saint Augustine and the Western Tradition o f Self-Knowing. Villanova, Penn.: Villanova University Press, 1989.

Bosworth, Joseph, and T. Northcote Toller. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1898. Supplement by T. Northcote Toller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921. Enlarged Addenda and Corrigenda by Alasair Campbell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Bragg, Lois. The Lyric Speakers o f Old English Poetry. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1991.

Brown, Donald E. Human Universals. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991.

Brown, Peter. Augustine o f Hippo: A Biography: A New Edition with an Epilogue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

________ . Religion and Society in the Age o f St. Augustine. New York: Harper & Row,1972.

Brown, William H., Jr. “Method and Style in the Old English Pastoral Care.” Journal o f English and Germanic Philology 68 (1969): 666-684.

Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization o f the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S.G.C. Middlemore. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Burrow, John. ‘“The Wanderer’: Lines 73-87.” Notes and Queries 12 (1965): 166-168.

Byrne, Lawrence. “Writing God’s Story: Self and Narrative Structure in Augustine’s Confessions.” Christianity and Literature 38:3 (Summer 1989): 15-31.

Calder, Daniel. “Setting and Mode in The Seafarer and The Wanderer.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 72 (1971): 264-275.

Campbell, Alastair. Old English Grammar. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1959.

Campbell, A. P. “The Seafarer. Wanderlust and Our Heavenly Home.” Revue de I ’Universite d ’Ottawa/University o f Ottawa Quarterly 43 (1973): 235-247.


197

Cary, Phillip. Augustine’s Invention o f the Inner Self: The Legacy o f a Christian Platonist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Champion, Margret Gunnarsdottir. “From Plaint to Praise: Language as Cure in ‘The Wanderer.’” Studia Neophilologica 69 (1998): 187-202.

Chaney, William A. The Cult o f Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England: The Transition from Paganism to Christianity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970.

Chase, Dennis. “Existential Attitudes in the Old English ‘Wanderer.’” Language Quarterly 26:1-2 (Fall-Winter 1987): 17-19.

Chemiss, Michael. “The Meaning of The Seafarer, Lines 97-102.” Modern Philology 66(1968): 146-149.

Christensen, Arild. Om Kierkegaards Lcesning a f Boethius. Kobenhavn: G. Torv’s Antikvariat, 1964.

Clark, Mary T. “Interpretation and the Tradition: Augustine’s Mirror of Persons.”Proceedings o f the American Catholic Philosophical Association 62 (1988): 18- 28.

Claussen, M.A. “‘Peregrinatio’ and ‘Peregrini’ in Augustine’s ‘City of God.’” Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion 46 (1991): 33-75.

Clemoes, Peter. Interactions o f Thought and Language in Old English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

________ . uMens absentia cogitans in The Seafarer and The Wanderer. ” In MedievalLiterature and Civilization: Studies in Memory o f G.N. Garmonsway, ed. D.A. Pearsall and R.A. Waldron, 62-77. London: Athlone Press, 1969.

Conway, Charles Abbott. “Honor, Mercy, and the Wanderer’s Problem: Some Thoughts on ‘ar.’” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 93:3-4 (1992): 275-285.

Cook, Albert S. “Alfred’s Soliloquies and Cynewulfs Christ.” Modern Language Notes 17(1902): 110.

Cook, Kimberly K. “Philosophy’s Metamorphosis into Wisdom: An Explanation of King Alfred’s Re-Creation of the Central Symbol in The Consolation o f Philosophy." Journal o f Evolutionary Psychology 17 (1996): 177-185.

Cook, Patrick. “WoriaQ ha Winsalo: The Bonds of Exile in ‘The Wanderer.’” Neophilologus 80 (1996): 127-137.


198

Cooper, David E. Existentialism: A Reconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Crabbe, Anna. “Literary Design in the De Consolatione PhilosophiaeP In Boethius:His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson, 237-274. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981.

Cross, Janies E. “On the Allegory in The Seafarer. Illustrative Notes.” Medium JEvum 28 (1959): 104-106.

Crouse, Robert. uPaucis mutatis verbis: St Augustine’s Platonism.” In Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour o f Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 37-50. London: Routledge, 2000.

Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling o f What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making o f Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999.

Davis, Kathleen. “The Performance of Translation Theory in King Alfred’s National Literary Program.” In Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays in Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor o f Whitney F. Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis, 149-170. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000.

de Lacy, Paul. “Thematic and Structural Affinities: The Wanderer and Ecclesiastes.” Neophilologus 82 (1998): 125-137

Derrida, Jacques. “Circumfession: Fifty Nine Periods and Periphrases Written in a Sort of Internal Margin, between Geoffrey Bennington’s Book and Work in Preparation (January 1989-Aprill990).” In Jacques Derrida, ed. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, 3-315. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Diekstra, F.N.M. “77ze Seafarer 58-66a: The Flight of the Soul to Its Fatherland.” Neophilologus 55 (1971): 433-446.

________ . “The Wanderer 65b-72: The Passions of the Mind and the Cardinal Virtues.”Neophilologus 55 (1971): 73-88.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Discenza, Nicole Guenther. “Power, Skill and Virtue in the Old English Boethius.” Anglo-Saxon England 26 (1997): 81-108.


199

________ . “Wealth and Wisdom: Symbolic Capital and the Ruler in the TransnationalProgram of Alfred the Great.” Exemplaria: A Journal o f Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13:2 (Fall 2001): 433-467.

Dixon, Sandra Lee. Augustine: The Scattered and Gathered Self. St. Louis: Chalace Press, 1999.

Dodaro, Robert. “Augustine’s Secular City.” In Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour o f Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 231-259. London: Routledge, 2000.

Donaghey, Brian S. “The Sources of King Alfred’s Translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae.” Anglia 82 (1964): 23-57.

Doubleday, James F. “The Limits of Philosophy: A Reading of The Wanderer.” The Notre Dame English Journal 7:2 (Spring 1972): 14-22.

________ . “The Three Faculties of the Soul in The Wanderer.” Neophilologus 53(1969): 189-194.

Dougherty, Richard J. “Creation, the Fall, and the Role of the Will in St. Augustine’s De civitate dei, Books XI-XIY.” University o f Dayton Review 22:3 (Summer 1994): 89-115.

Drobner, Hubertus R. “Studying Augustine: A Brief Overview of Recent Research.” In Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour o f Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 18-34. London: Routledge, 2000.

Duckett, Eleanor Shipley. Alfred the Great: The King and His England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.

/Dyas, Dee. “Land and Sea in the Pilgrim Life: The Seafarer and the Old English

Exodus.” English Language Notes 35:2 (Dec. 1997): 1-9.

Elliot, R.W.V. “The Wanderer’s Conscience.” English Studies 39 (1958): 193-200.

Frantzen, Allen. King Alfred. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986.

Fredriksen, Paula. “Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions, and the Retrospective Self.” Journal o f Theological Studies 17 (1986): 3-34.

Frey, Leonard H. “Exile and Elegy in Anglo-Saxon Christian Epic Poetry.” Journal o f English and Germanic Philology 62 (1963): 293-302.


200

Gameson, Fiona and Richard. “ Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife’s Lament, and the Discovery of the Individual in Old English Verse.” In Studies in English Language and Literature: “Doubt Wisely”: Papers in Honour ofE. G. Stanley, ed. M. J. Toswell and E. M. Tyler, 457-474. London: Routledge, 1996.

Garmonsway, G.N. “Anglo-Saxon Heroic Attitudes.” In Francipeligius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor o f Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. and Robert P. Creed, 139-146. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

Gatch, Milton McC. “The Anglo-Saxon Tradition.” In The Study o f Sprduality, ed. C. Jones, G. Wainwright and E. Yamold, 225-234. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

________ . “King Alfred’s Version of Augustine’s Soliloquia: Some Suggestions on itsRationale and Unity.” In Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, 17-45. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986.

Gilbert, Anthony J. “The Ambiguity of Fate and Narrative Form in Some Germanic Poetry.” The Yearbook o f English Studies 22 (1992): 1-16.

Godden, Malcolm. “Anglo-Saxons on the Mind.” In Learning and Literature in Anglo- Saxon England, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss, 271-298. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

________ . “King Alfred’s Boethius.” In Boethius: His Life, Thought, and Influence, ed.Margaret Gibson, 419-424. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981.

________ . “The Player King: Identification and Self-Representation in King Alfred’sWrtings.” In Alfred the Great, ed. Timothy Reuter, 137-150. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003.

________ . “Wasrferth and King Alfred: The Fate of the Old English Dialogues.” InAlfred the Wise: Studies in Honour o f Janet Bately on the Occasion o f Her Sixty- Fifth Birthday, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet L. Nelson with Malcolm Godden, 35- 51. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997.

Goff, Robert. “The Language of Self-Transformation in Plato and Augustine.” Man and World A (November 1971): 413-435.

Goldman, Stephen H. “The Use of Christian Belief in Old English Poems of Exile.” Res Publica Litterarum: Studies in the Classical Tradition 2 (1979): 69-80.


201

Gordon, I.L. “Traditional Themes in The Wanderer and The Seafarer.” Review o f English Studies 5:17 (Jan. 1954): 1-13.

Green, Brian K. “Spes Viva: Structure and Meaning in The Seafarer.” In An English Miscellany Presented to W.S. Mackie, ed. Brian S. Lee, 28-45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

________ . “The Twilight Kingdom: Structure and Meaning in The Wanderer.”Neophilologus 60 (1976): 442-451.

Green, Eugene. “Speech Acts and the Question of Self in Alfred’s Soliloquies.” InInterdigitations: Essays for Irmengard Rauch, ed. Gerald F. Carr, Wayne Herbert, and Lihua Zhang, 211-218. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

Green, Richard Firth. Crisis o f Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Greenfield, Stanley B. “Attitudes and Values in The Seafarer.” Studies in Philology 51 (1954): 15-20.

________ . “Beowulf and the Judgement of the Righteous.” In Learning and Literaturein Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion o f His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss, 393-408. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

________ . “Mm, Sylf and ‘Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer.’”Journal o f English and Germanic Philology 68 (1969): 212-220.

. “Sylf, Seasons, Structure and Genre in The Seafarer.” Anglo-Saxon England 9(1980): 199-211.

Griffiths, Mark. “Does wyrd bid fu l arced mean ‘fate is wholly exorable?” In Studies in English Language and Literature: “Doubt Wisely ”: Papers in Honour o f E. G. Stanley, ed. M.J. Toswell and E.M. Tyler, 133-156. London: Routledge, 1996.

Hait, Elizabeth. “The Wanderer’s Lingering Regret: A Study of Patterns of Imagery.” Neophilologus 68 (1984): 212-226.

Hankey, Wayne. “Between and Beyond Augustine and Descartes: More than a Source of the Self.” Augustinian Studies 32:1 (2001): 65-88.


202

________ . “Self-Knowledge and God as Other in Augustine: Problems for a PostmodernRetrieval.” Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch fur Antike und Mittelater 5 (1999): 83-123.

Harbus, Antonina. “Deceptive Dreams in The Wanderer.” Studies in Philology 93:2 (Spring 1996): 164-179.

. The Life o f the Mind in Old English Poetry. Amsterdam: Editions Rodolpi, 2002 .

________ . “The Medieval Concept of the Self in Anglo-Saxon England.” Self andIdentity 1 (2002): 77-97.

Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature, 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Harris, Stephen J. “The Alfredian World History and Anglo-Saxon Identity.” Journal o f English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001): 482-510.

Harrison, Carol. Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Head, Pauline E. Representation and Design: Tracing a Hermeneutics o f Old English Poetry. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Hermann, John P. “77te Wanderer, 45-48.” Explicator 37:3 (Spring 1979): 22-23.

Higley, Sarah Lynn. “Storm and Mind in Anglo-Saxon Poetry: A Hard Lesson.” In Geardagum: Essays in Old and Middle English Language and Literature 9 (1988): 23-39.

Hitch, Susan. “Alfred’s Crasft: Imagery in Alfred’s Version of Augustine’s Soliloquies.” Journal o f the Department o f English, University o f Calcutta 22 (1986-1987): 130-147.

________ . “Alfred’s Reading of Augustine’s Soliloquies.” In Sentences: EssaysPresented to Alan Weard on the Occasion o f His Retirement from Wadham College, Oxford, ed. D.M. Reeks, 21-29. Southampton: Bosphoros, 1988.

Hollowell, Ida Masters. “On the Identity of the Wanderer.” In Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research, ed. Martin Green, 82-95. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1983.


203

Horgan, A. D. “The Wanderer—A Boethian Poem?” Review o f English Studies 38 (1987): 40-46.

Howlitt, D. R. “The Structures o f ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer.’” Studia Neophilologica 47 (1975): 313-317.

Hubbard, Frank. “The Relation of the ‘Blooms of King Alfred’ to the Anglo-Saxon Tradition of Boethius.” Modern Language Notes 9 (June 1894): 161-171.

Hultin, Neil. “The External Soul in ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘The Wanderer.’” Folklore 88 (1977): 39-45.

Hundert, E.J. “Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self.” Political Theory 20:1 (Fall 1992): 86-104.

Huppe, Bernard F. “Alfred and TElfric: A Study in Two Prefaces.” In The Old English Homily and Its Backgrounds, ed. Paul E. Szarmach and Bernard F. Huppe, 119- 137. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978.

________ . Doctrine and Poetry: Augustine’s Influence on Old English Poetry. Albany:State University of New York Press, 1959.

Innes, Robert. “Integrating the Self through the Desire of God.” Augustinian Studies 28:1 (1997): 67-109.

Isaacs, Neil D. “The Seafarer 109-115a.” English Studies 48 (1967): 416-419.

________ . Structural Principles in Old English Poetry. Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1968.

Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, expanded edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1956/1975.

Kenney, John Peter. “Augustine’s Inner Self.” Augustinian Studies 33:1 (2002): 79-90.

Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

________ . The Sickness Unto Death. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Kiernan, Kevin S. uDeor: The Consolations of an Anglo-Saxon Boethius.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 79 (1978): 333-340.


204

Lawless, George. “Peter Brown’s Retractationes.” Augustinian Studies 33:1 (2002): 91- 98.

Lee, Alvin A. The Guest-Hall o f Eden: Four Essays on the Design o f Old English Poetry. New Have: Yale University Press, 1972.

________ . “Old English Poetry, Mediaeval Exegesis, and Modem Criticism.” InTypology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh Keenan, 43-70. New York: AMS Press, 1992.

Leslie, Roy F. “The Meaning and Structure of The Seafarer.” In The Old English Elegies: New Essays in Criticism and Research, ed. Martin Green, 96-122. Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983.

Liebeschuetz, W. “Did the Pelagian Movement Have Social Aims?” Historia 12 (1963): 227-41.

Liggins, Elizabeth M. “The Authorship of the Alfredian Canon.” AustralasianUniversities Language and Literature Association: Proceedings and Papers o f

the Thirteenth Congress Held at Monash University, 12-18 August 1970 (1971): 23-24.

Lochrie, Karma. “Wyrd and the Limits of Human Understanding: A Thematic Sequence in the Exeter Book,.'” Journal o f English and Germanic Philology 85:3 (July 1986): 323-331.

Lumiansky, R. M. “The Dramatic Structure of the Old English Wanderer.” Neophilologus 34 (1950): 104-112.

MacKinnon, Patricia L. “Augustine’s City o f God: The Divided Self/The DividedCivitas.” In “The City o f God”: A Collection o f Critical Essays, ed. Dorothy F. Donnelly, 319-352. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.

Malantschuk, Gregor. Kierkegaard’s Concept o f Existence. Ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003.

Malone, Kemp. “On Seafarer 111-116.” Medium AEvum 6 (1937): 214-215.

Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories o f the Self from Freud to Harraway. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Marion, Jean-Luc. “The Essential Incoherence of Descartes’ Definition of Divinity.” In Essays on Descartes ’ Meditations, ed. A. O. Rorty, 297-337. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.


205

________ . God without Being: Hors-texte. Trans. T.A. Carlson. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1991.

Markland, Murray F. “Boethius, Alfred, and DeorC Modern Philology 66 (1968): 1-4.

Markus, Robert A. “Pelagianism: Britain and the Continent.” Journal o f Ecclesiastical History 37 (1986): 191-204

________ . “‘Tempora Christiana’ Revisited.” In Augustine and His Critics: Essays inHonour o f Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 201-213. London: Routledge, 2000.

Matthews, Gareth B. Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Matto, Michael. “The Old English Soul and Body I and Soul and Body IT. Ending the Rivalry.” In Geardagum 18 (1997): 39-58.

Meagher, Robert. Augustine: An Introduction. New York: New York University, 1978.

Menn, Stephen. Descartes and Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Mennel, Susan. “Augustine’s ‘I’: The ‘Knowing Subject’ and the Self.” Journal o f Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 291-324.

Millbank, John. “‘Postmodern Critical Augustinianism’: A Short Summa in Forty Two Responses to Unasked Questions.” Modern Theology 7 (1991): 225-237.

________ . “Sacred Triads: Augustine and the Indo-European Soul.” Modern Theology13 (1997): 451-474.

Mora, Maria Jose. “The Invention of the Old English Elegy.” English Studies 76 (1995): 129-139.

Morgan, Gwendolyn. “Essential Loss: Christianity and Alienation in the Anglo-Saxon Elegies.” In Geardagum: Essays in Old and Middle English Language and Literature 11 (1990): 13-33.

Morris, Colin. The Discovery o f the Individual, 1050-1200. London: S.P.C.K. for the Church Historical Society, 1972.

Myres, J. N. L. “Pelagius and the End of Roman Rule in Britain.” Journal o f Roman Studies 50 (1960): 21-36.


206

North, Richard. “Boethius and the Mercenary in The Wanderer.” In Pagans andChristians: The Interplay between Christian Latin and Traditional Germanic Cultures in Early Medieval Europe: Proceedings o f the Second Germania Latina Conference held at the University o f Groningen, May 1992, ed. Tette Hofstra, L.A.J.R. Houwen, and Alastair A. MacDonald, 71-98. Groningen, 1995.

O’Connell, Robert J. St. Augustine’s “Confessions”: The Odyssey o f Soul. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969.

________ . St. Augustine’s Early Theory o f Man, A.D. 386-391. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1968.

Ogilvy, J.D.A. “Beowulf, Alfred, and Christianity.” In Saints, Scholars, and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honor o f Charles W Jones, Vol. 1: The Anglo- Saxon Heritage, ed. Margot H. King and Wesley M. Stevens, 59-66.Collegeville, Minn.: Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, Saint John’s Abbey and University, 1979.

________ . Books Known to the English, 597-1066. Cambridge, Mass.: MediaevalAcademy of America, 1967.

Orton, Peter. “The Form and Structure of The Seafarer.” Studia Neophilologica 63:1 (1991): 37-55.

________ . “King Alfred’s Prose Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care, 11.30-41.”Peritia: Journal o f the Medieval Academy o f Ireland 2 (1983): 140-148.

________ . “The Seafarer 6b-10a and 18-22.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 83 (1982):255-259.

Payne, F. Anne. King Alfred and Boethius: An Analysis o f the Old English Version o f the “Consolation o f Philosophy”. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968.

________ . “Three Aspects of Wyrd in Beowulf” In Old English Studies in Honour o fJohn C. Pope, ed. Robert B. Burlin, Edward B. Irving, Jr., and Marie Boroff, 15-35. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.

Peddle, David. “Re-Sourcing Charles Taylor’s Augustine.” Augustinian Studies 32:2 (2001): 207-217.

Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial o f Human Nature. New York: Penguin, 2002.


207

Pope, John C. “Dramatic Voices in The Wanderer and The Seafarer.” In Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honor o f Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr., ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. and Robert P. Creed, 164-193. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

________ . “Second Thoughts on the Interpretation of The Seafarer.” Anglo-SaxonEngland 3 (1974): 75-86.

Powell, Timothy. “The ‘Three Orders’ of Society in Anglo-Saxon England.” Anglo- Saxon England 23 (1994): 103-132.

Prins, A.A. “77ze Wanderer (and The Seafarer).” Neophilologus 48 (1964): 237-251.

Proppe, Katherine. “King Alfred’s Consolation o f Philosophy.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 74 (1973): 635-648.

Richardson, John. “The Hero at the Wall in The Wanderer.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 89 (1988): 180-185.

Richman, Gerald. “Speaker and Speech Boundaries in The Wanderer.” Journal o f English and Germanic Philology 81:4 (Oct. 1982): 469-479.

Rohrberger, Mary. “A Psychoanalytical Reading of ‘The Wanderer.’” Cimarron Review 1 (1967): 70-74.

Roper, Alan H. “Boethius and the Three Fates of Beowulf.” Philological Quarterly 41 (1962): 386-400.

Rosier, James. “The Literal-Figurative Identity of The Wanderer.” PMLA 79:4 (Sept. 1964): 366-369.

Ross, Sheila. “Theology as Hermeneutical Stance: Gadamer and Self-Composure in St. Augustine’s Confessions.” Comitatus 27 (1996): 1-13.

Rumble, Rhomas C. “From Eardstapa to Snottor on Mode: The Structural Principle of ‘The Wanderer.’” Modern Language Quarterly 19 (1958): 225-230.

Salmon, Vivian. “‘The Wanderer,’ and ‘The Seafarer,’ and the Old English Conception of the Soul.” Modern Language Review 55:1 (Jan. 1960): 1-10.

Schank, Roger. Tell Me a Story. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990.


208

Scott, Jamie. “From Literal Self-Sacrifice to Literary Self-Sacrifice: Augustine’s Confessions and the Rhetoric of Testimony.” In Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, ed. Joanne Me William, Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1992.

Selzer, John L. “The Wanderer and the Meditative Tradition.” Studies in Philology 80:3 (Summer 1983): 227-237.

Shields, John C. “The Seafarer as a Meditation Studia Mystica 3 (1980): 29-41.

Shippey, T.A. Old English Verse. London: Hutchinson & Company, 1972.

________ . “The Wanderer and The Seafarer as Wisdom Poetry.” In Companion to OldEnglish Poetry, ed. Henk Aertsen and Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, 145-158.Amsterdam: Vrije University Press, 1994.

Smith, Jeremy J. “Alfred and TElfric: Wisdom and Poetry in Anglo-Saxon Education.” Revista canaria de estudios ingleses 16 (Apr. 1988): 9-20.

Smith, John E. “Self and World as Starting Points in Theology.” International Journal fo r Philosophy and Religion 1 (Summer 1970): 97-111.

Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Smyth, Alfred P. King Alfred the Great. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Stanley, E. G. “ The Judgement o f the Damned (from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 and other manuscripts), and the Definition of Old English Verse.” In Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion o f His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael Lapidge and Helmut Gneuss, 363-392. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

________ . “On the Laws of King Alfred: The End of the Preface and the Beginning ofthe Laws.” In Alfred the Wise: Studies in Honour o f Janet Bately on the Occasion o f Her Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet L. Nelson with Malcolm Godden, 211-221. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997.

Stock, Brian. After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

________ . Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics o fInterpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.


209

Strohm, Paul. Theory and the Premodern Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Szarmach, Paul E. “Alfred, Alcuin, and the Soul.” In Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays in Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor o f Whitney F. Bolton, ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis, 127-148. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000.

________ . “Alfred’s Boethius and the Four Cardinal Virtues.” In Alfred the Wise:Studies in Honour o f Janet Bately on the Occasion o f Her Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet L. Nelson with Malcolm Godden, 223-235.Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997.

________ . “The Meaning of Alfred’s Preface to the Pastoral Care.” Medicevalia: AJournal o f Mediceval Studies 6 (1980): 57-86.

Taylor, Charles. Sources o f the Self: The Making o f Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

TeSelle, Eugene. “Theses on O’Connell: The Origin and ‘Proper Life’ of the Soul in Augustine’s Thought.” Augustinian Studies 27:2 (1996): 7-19.

Trahem, Joseph B., Jr. “Fatalism and the Millenium.” In The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge, 160-171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Thompson, George B. “The Emerging Tension Between Self and Society as Exemplified in Augustine.” Listening 25 (Fall 1990): 267-280.

Thomas, P.G. “Alfred and the Old English Prose of His Reign.” Chapter 6 of The Cambridge History o f English Literature, Vol. 1, ed. A.W. Ward and A.R.Walter, 88-107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932.

Thomas, Rebecca. “The Binding Force of Friendship in King Alfred’s Consolation and Soliloquies.” Ball State University Forum 29 (1988): 5-20.

Van Fleteren, Frederick. “Augustine’s Ascent of the Soul in Book VII of the Confessions'. A Reconsideration.” Augustinian Studies 5 (1974): 29-72.

________ . “Authority and Reason, Faith and Understanding in the Thought of St.Augustine.” Augustinian Studies 4 (1973): 33-71.

Vickrey, John F. “The Seafarer 12-17, 25-30, 55-57: Dives and the Fictive Speaker.” Studia Neophilologica 61 (1989): 145-156.


210

________ . “The Seafarer 111-15: Dives and the Ultimate Futility.” Papers on Languageand Literature 28:3 (Summer 1992): 227-241.

________ . uSelfsceaft in Genesis BP Anglia 83 (1965): 154-171.

Wallace, Charles Harrison. “The Central Crux of The Seafarer. Studia Neophilologica 68 (1996): 177-184.

Wallace, D.P. “King Alfred’s Version of St. Augustine’s Soliloquies, III 23-26, The Vision o f the Damned.” Notes and Queries 235:37 (1990): 141-143.

Wallace-Hadrill, J.M. Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1971.

Waterhouse, Ruth. “Tone in Alfred’s Version of Augustine’s Soliloquies.” In Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. Paul E. Szarmach, 47-85. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986.

Wetzel, James. “Snares of Truth: Augustine on Free Will and Predestination.” In Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour o f Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 124-141. London: Routledge, 2000.

________ . “Will and Interiority in Augustine: Travels in an Unlikely Place.”Augustinian Studies 33:2 (2002): 139-160.

Whitelock, Dorothy. The Beginnings o f English Society. Harmonds worth: Penguin,1952.

________ . “The Interpretation of The Seafarer.” In The Early Cultures o f North-WestEurope, ed. Fox and Bruce Dickins, 261-272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950. Reprint in Old English Literature: Twenty-two Analytical Essays, ed. Martin Stevens and Jerome Mandel, ??-??. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968.

________ . “The Prose of Alfred’s Reign.” In Continuations and Beginnings: Studies inOld English Literature, ed. Eric Gerald Stanley, 67-103. London: Nelson, 1966.

Williams, Rowan. “The Paradoxes of Self-Knowledge in De TrinitateP In Collectanea Augustiniana: Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum, ed. J.T. Lienhard, 121-124. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993.

________ . “Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De TrinitateP Augustiniana 40(1990):


211

Wilson, Edmund O. Consilience: The Unity o f Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Wilson Tietjen, Mary C. “God, Fate, and the Hero of Beowulf,7 Journal o f English and Germanic Philology 1A (1975): 159-171.

Wittig, Joseph S. “King Alfred’s Boethius and Its Latin Sources: A Reconsideration.” Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983): 157-198.

Woolf, Rosemary. “The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and the Genre of Planctus.” In Anglo- Saxon Poetry: Essays in Appreciation for John C. McGalliard, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson and Dolores Warwick Frese, 192-207. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.

Wormald, Patrick. “Engla Lond: the Making of an Allegiance.” Journal o f Historical Sociology 7:1 (March 1994): 1-24.

Young, Kay, and Jeffery L. Saver. “The Neurology of Narrative.” SubStance 94/95 (2001): 72-84.

Zahavi, Dan. “Phenomenology of Self.” In The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. Tito Kircher and Anthony David, 56-75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Zink, Michel. The Invention o f Literary Subjectivity. Trans. David Sices. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.


spdf

Documents