Memory, Sight and Love in Cynewulf’sElene

Abstract

It is conventionally assumed that Cynewulf is not interested in depicting any psychological realism in his characters, only figural truths, and that Elene is structured around a binary opposition such as that between the letter and the spirit. In fact, Cynewulf does create characters whose actions are psychologically plausible on a literal level, if we accept that psychology is influenced by culture. Cynewulf does not depict a spiritual development that is oppositional, or which adheres to ideas of hierarchies of cognition, but one which is holistic and tripartite, and which resembles Augustine’s trinity of the soul. Each character encounters the Cross through learning, experience and the grace of rewarded receptivity. They can gain each of these three modes of understanding in any order, but it is only when they have united all three that they receive affective wisdom from the Holy Ghost.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.