Christianization of Germanic Lit

Leithart.com ^ | February 14, 2006 | Pastor Peter J. Leithart

[AlbionGirl]

Beowulf reflects the tensions between the Christian culture spreading throughout Northern Europe and the pagan cultures into which it came into conflict. The poem has its place within this clash of civilizations in the first 500 years AD. It is a product of the history of missions. The Germanic presence in Northern Europe posed a significant challenge to Christian missionaries, writers, and poets, and this challenge had several dimensions to this challenge, which are well described by Peter Brown at the end of his Rise of Western Christendom.

On the one hand, there was the intellectual challenge. Christianity originally arose within the Greco-Roman sphere, and even though it was Jewish, the Judaism in which Jesus and Paul operated was nestled within the Roman Empire, and had taken much of its character from conflicts with various Gentile powers over several centuries. It was fairly easy to make sense of Christianity within a Greco-Roman context, and there was even biblical warrant for seeing the empire as a Providential context for the rise of the church (Daniel 2, 7, eg).

But the Germans posed a new problem: how could the Germanic peoples who were invading and taking over the civilization of the classical world be fit into a Christian account of history? What role did they play? Some Christian writers attempted to show that the Lord had raised up the Germanic tribes to discipline and punish a degenerate Roman empire. But once the Northern tribes convert, how does one make sense of the German past? Was it on par with Greco-Roman civilization as a preparation for the gospel?

[AlbionGirl]

More from the piece:

There was also a political dimension to this problem. As Brown points out, the Northern European kings who promoted Christianity and protected the church depended on genealogy for their legitimacy. Their pagan past gave them legitimacy in the Christian present. As a result, the pagan past could not merely be rejected without undermining their present basis of power. Further, the pagan past, expressed in oral legends and poems – very little was written – provided the "rule book" for aristocracy, embodying the ethos of the ruling class, which was shaped by these poems and sagas and legends and epics. As Brown puts it, "They knew very well what it was to be noble. They grew up in an overwhelmingly oral culture which was awash with stories and maxims. These told them how to behave as noble men and noble women. To be noble was to stand out. It was to live well and to be seen by others to live well. It was to foster with gusto the memory of a past which lay on the edge of the Christian present. This was a past which was always a little larger than life. It was a past where human glory, human tragedy, and the working out of human obligations were so much more vivid and so much more clear-cut, so much more brimming over with magnificent lack of measure, than was the grey, Christian present. To be noble was to toast one's companions with great drinking-horns that carried as much liquor as a present-day bottle of Moselle; to engage in high talk and loud laughter; to listen to the ancient sound of the harpist."

Thus, Germanic rulers especially had a vested interest in maintaining the stories and legends that supported their power and their way of life. Charlemagne, for instance, saw himself as "Roman." Yet according to Einhard he had "the unwritten laws of all the tribes that came under his rule to be compiled and reduced to writing. He also directed that the age-old, non-Latin poems in which were celebrated the warlike deeds of the kings of ancient times should be written out and preserved" (Brown, 477).

This preservation included not only the exploits of ancient kings and warriors but the exploits and characters of the pagan gods. In contrast to the Mediterranean world, where Christian apologists hammered the pagan gods of Greece and Rome, the gods of the North were treated as part of a solemn past. Peter Brown says: "They were seen as part of a glorious past. The past still gave a charge to the present. Hence the gods remained. Solemn figures even in their decline, they were like an ancient dynasty which had once ruled the earth until forced to abdicate in favor of the Christ of modern times. Without a touch of the gods ‘in the blood,' as it were, modern kings could not be great. And if they could not be great, they could not act as effective defenders of the Church."

[vladimir998]

I have had a copy of the Heliand for more about 15 years now. I encourage you to get a copy. It's fascinating.

[AlbionGirl]

Thanks for the tip.