THE CROSS AS SYMBOLIC BODY: AN ANGLO-LATIN LITURGICAL ANALOGUE TO THE DREAM OF THE ROOD

The process of searching out and defining even quite remote analogues for such secular texts as The Canterbury Tales or Beowulf is a well estab- lished and a very useful mode of literary scholarship. The results of this scholarly process have been codified in such handbooks as W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster's Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canter- bury Tales or G. N. Garmonsway's Beowulf and its Analogues. In the study of Old and Middle English religious literature, however, it is less custom- ary for critics or scholars to bother to cite analogues for religious texts unless the correspondence is very close indeed. Old and Middle English religious literature is so much better preserved than the secular material and medieval Christian Latin literature is so abundant that it is generally not necessary to cite anything except either sources or very close anal- ogues. Indeed, medieval Christian literature is so well preserved that if one cannot find sources and analogues for a medieval religious text, it may reasonably be argued that in this specific instance a given author was being original and had broken with convention and precedent.

Some years ago Rosemary Woolf argued for a symbolic interpretation of The Dream of the Rood. 1 It had longbeen noted that in that famous Old English poem, Christ is depicted as a fearless young warrior who hastens to the crucifixion and "ascends" the Cross without hesitation. It is the "reordberend .... voice-bearing" Cross at the center of the poet's vision who speaks of wounds, suffering, and anguish. Woolfpointed out that in terms of the Christian understanding of Christ as the Deus-Homo, Jesus as man, as the son of Mary, suffers and dies upon the Cross, but the divine Son is impassible and immortal.

The Passion narratives in the gospels thus reflect a deeply paradoxical event. The suffering and death of Jesus is an apparent defeat, and yet His passion is the ultimate goal of His incarnation and ministry and it culmi- nates in His triumph over Satan and death. Woolf argued that the poet who composed The Dream of the Rood as it is preserved in The Vercelli Book solved the narrative problem of how to present an event which is simultaneously a passion and a triumph by depicting Christ in the poem as a heroic, fearless, and willing young warrior choosing his death, and by depicting the speaking Cross as suffering and grieving. The character "Christ" in the poem thus represents the divine aspect of the incarnate Deus-Homo, whereas the Cross represents the human, particularly the corporeal aspect of His being. The "reordberend," "speaking" Cross in this poem thus represents the "body" of Christ.

This interpretation of the poem has been frequently cited and widely accepted and is in my judgment a persuasive one. A question which Woolf did not discuss, however, concerns the literary history of this way of

Neophilologus 77: 297-301, 1993. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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presenting the passion. In this poem, the speaking Cross dramatically represents the human, suffering body of the incarnate Christ, so the ques- tion arises as to why the poet might have chosen to dramatise the two-fold nature o f the passion of Jesus in this part icular way. Where did the Anglo- Saxon poet find this part icular symbolic pat tern or did he invent it ex nihiIo?

To the best o f my knowledge this question has not received much attention. Rosemary Woolf , in the same article in which she proposed this interpretation, pointed out that the early Anglo-Saxon Church repeatedly condemned the opposing heresies of Monarch i sm (Sabellianism) and Arianism, heresies which repectively overemphasized the divine and the h u m a n aspect of Christ. W o o l f implied that the prominence o f these concerns in the definition o f dogma in the Church is in effect the "source" o f this poetic passion narrative in which both aspects of the being of Christ receive appropr ia te emphasis. John Fleming, however, in his paper on the monast ic background of The Dream o f the Rood cogently ques- t ioned the assumption " tha t the statement of o r thodoxy is invariably a rebuttal to heresy ''2 and thus the conclusion that the poem was directly influenced by these doctr inal debates. In any case these doctrinal argu- ments could only have provided the concept ion that it is impor tant to distinguish clearly between Christ 's suffering, human, nature and His divine, impassible, being. The question, then, o f how the poet hit on this part icular symbolic pat terning has not been resolved, and I would like to call a t tent ion to a symbolic analogue, an essentially similar symbolic pat tern in an interesting quasi-dramatic Anglo-Saxon liturgical custom.

A well-known Anglo-Lat in text, the Regularis Concordia, describes a liturgical ceremony in which the Cross on the altar is "deposi ted" for the three days f rom G o o d Fr iday to the dawn of Easter Sunday in a receptacle which represents the tomb of Christ. I quote f rom the relevant por t ion o f the Regularis Concordia:

Nam, quia ea die depositionem corporis Salvatoris nostri celebramus, usum quorundam religiosorum, imitabilem ad fidem indocti uulgi ac neophytorum corroborandam, ae- quiperando sequi si ita cui uisum fuerit uel sibi taliter placuerit, hoc modo decreuimus: sit autem in una parte altaris, qua uacuum fuerit, quaedam assimilatio sepulchri uelamenque quoddam in gyro tensum quo, dum sancta crux adorata fuerit, deponatur hoc ordine. Veniant diaconi qui prius portauerunt earn et inuoluant earn sindone in loco ubi adorata est; tunc reportent eam canentes antiphonas In pace in idipsum, alia: Habitabit; item Caro mea requiescet in spe, donec ueniant ad locum monumenti; depositaque cruce, ac si Domini Nostri Ihesu Christi corpore sepulto, dicant antiphonam Sepulto Domino, signatum est monumenturn, ponentes milites qui custodirent eum. In eodem loco sancta crux cure omni reuerentia custodiatur usque dominicam noctem Resurrectionis. 3

Now since on that day we solemnize the burial of the Body of our Savior, if anyone should care or think fit to follow in a becoming manner certain religious men in a practice worthy to be imitated for the strengthening of the faith of unlearned common persons and neophytes, we have decreed this only: on that part of the altar where there is space for it there shall be a representation as it were of a sepulchre, hung about with a curtain, in which the holy Cross, when it has been venerated, shall be placed in the following manner: the deacons who carried the Cross before shall come forward and, having wrapped the Cross in a napkin there where

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it was venerated, they shall bear it thence, singing the antiphons In pace in idipsum. Ha- bitabit, and Caro mea requieseet in spe, to the place of the sepulchre. When they have laid the cross within, in imitation as it were of the burial of the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, they shall sing the antiphon Sepulto Domino, signature est monumentum, ponentes milites qui custodirent eum. In that same place the holy Cross shalI be guarded with all reverence until the night of the Lord's Resurrection.

Some interpretive points must be observed at the outset. The first is that the object is deposited on the altar is specifically identified as a Cross, not a Crucifix. The distinction was known to the Anglo-Saxons since it is implicit in the Latin word "crucifixus" and Anglo-Saxon Crosses, par- ticularly high Crosses, were an important part of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiasti- cal symbolism. 4 The second point which must be emphasized is that it is impossible to discern on the basis of this text how widely and where this "custom" was practiced. It might have been done for centuries or it might be a relatively recent innovation. Finally, it should be noted that the "custom" is preformed for the sake of a relatively unlearned audience, for the "indocti vulgi," who are nonetheless interested enough to be moved and affected by ecclesiastical ritual. Such "indocti uulgi" after all are also part of the audience for a religious poem in the vernacular which draws heavily on the oral traditions of Germanic heroic poetry.

The "custom" of symbolically burying and then resurrecting the Cross has been the subject of considerable attention from historians of medieval drama who see the ceremony as one of the earliest "dramatic" rites of the church and a forerunner of the later more developed liturgical plays. 5 What concerns me here, however, is that in this ceremony the Cross represents the physical body and by implication the human nature of Ch r i s t - as does the reordberend Cross in the Dream of the Rood. One might argue that this symbolism is fortuitous, that to enact this ceremony the monks had to put some object in the " tomb" from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, and that the Cross was chosen simply because of its accessibility and its more general symbolic associations as the sign of Christ. But it must be emphasized that the author of the Regularis Concor- dia specifically identifies the Cross in this ceremony as a symbol of the body of J e sus , - "depositaque cruce, ac si Domini Nostri Ihesu Christi corpore sepulto."

Since neither The Dream of the Roodnor the "custom" recorded in the Regularis Concordia can be precisely dated, I am citing this custom not as a source but as an analogue to the poem. I would suggest, however, that the poet who wrote The Dream of the Rood and the originator of this particular custom faced essentially similar artistic problems and hit upon strikingly similar responses. In both the poem and the proto-dramatic rite it was necessary to find a symbol to represent the human body of the incarnate Christ. During the passion, Christ as man suffered and died. The divine Son, however, could neither suffer nor die, and after Christ 's

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death on the Cross, while Christ's body rested in the tomb, His human soul and divine person harrowed Hell, and freed Adam, Eve, and the patriarchs. This disjunction raised a variety of problems for theologians and exegetes, 6 and is, indeed, difficult to conceptualise as anything other than a profound Christian mystery. The "indocti uulgi" had reason to be puzzled since their more learned teachers found themselves in disagree- ment on this issue. The central point here, though, is that the Cross bears essentially similar symbolic significance in both the Old English poem and in the custom discribed in the Regularis Concordia.

Rosemary Woolf has written that while The Dream o f the Rood is almost certainly an original poem, "all literary and historical probability is against the supposition that nothing but the poet's personal inspiration lies between the gospel narrative and the Dream o f the Rood. ''7 The Dream o f the Rood certainly seems to be an extraordinarily original and imaginat- ive poem, but the poetic and theological sophistication of the poet suggests that the poet had read (or listened), widely and thought deeply about the central themes of Christian history. One can speculate that the poet had witnessed or participated in a ceremony similar to the one discribed in the Regularis Concordia, that he was struck by the symbolic association implicit in the ritual, and that a source of the symbolic pattern at the center of the poem was thus some version of this quasi-dramatic ritual. 8 Critics have long commented on the dramatic qualities of The Dream o f the Rood', the poet's vision, whether real or imagined, is a powerfully dramatic one. The "source" for this aspect of the poem may well be that the poet had seen the role of the Cross as body of Christ enacted before, as it were, in one of the earliest dramatic rituals in the English speaking world.

Cornell University THOMAS D. HILL

Notes

1. Rosemary Woolf, "Doctrinal Influences on the Dream of the Rood," in Art and Doctrine: Essays on Medieval Literature ed. Heather O'Donoghue (London and Ron- ceverte: The Hambleton Press, 1986) p. 29-48. The original essay was published in Medium /Evum, 27(1958), 137-53.

2. John Fleming, "'The Dream of the Rood' and Anglo-Saxon Monasticism," Traditio, 22 (1966), 43-72. Fleming (p. 59) comments on the potential relevance of the depositio ceremony in the Regularis Concordia to The Dream of the Rood, but does not discuss the congruent symbolism in the two texts. See also Julia Bolton Holloway, '"The Dream of the Rood' and Liturgical Drama," Comparative Drama, 17 (1983-84), 29. Holloway comments that the "poem's identification of the cross with Christ" has been associated with the depostion ceremony (p. 30) citing Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1933) I, 164-67. But neither Holloway nor Young discuss the symbolic association of the Cross - not simply with Christ - but with the body of Christ in both texts.

3. Regularis Concordia: The Monastic Agreement, trans. Dom Thomas Symons, Medi- eval Classics (London, etc: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953), pp. 44-45 (cap. 47).

4. For a somewhat outdated, but still useful discussion of Anglo-Saxon liturgy and literature pertaining to the Cross see William O. Stevens The Cross in the Life and Literature

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of the Anglo-Saxons, Yale Studies in English 22 (New York: Holt, 1922). This volume was reprinted as part of The Anglo-Saxon Cross (Hampdon: The Shoestring Press, 1977).

5. See the discussion and edition of the Regularis Concord& "Depositio Crucis" as a dramatic text by David Bevington in MedievalDrama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 16.

6. Thus see Peter Abailard, Sic et Non, ed. Blanche B. Boyer and Richard McKeon (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1976-77), pp. 296-98, '°Quaestio LXXXI": "Quod in morte Christi separatio divinitatis et humanitatis et non." See also Peter Lombard (Petrus Lombardus), Sententice in IV Libris Distinctae [no editors cited], Spicilegium Bonaventurianum 4 (Grottaferrata: Editiones. Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971) III, Distinctio 1,9: "Si in Christo divisio in morte fuit anime vel carnis a Verbo."

7. WoolE p. 29. 8. The alternative possibility that the originator of the custom was influenced by the

poem is less probable, since the dramatic logic of the custom is clear and the symbolic pattern in the poem otherwise unparalleled.