Denial of God, Mental Disorder, and Exile: The Rex iniquus in Daniel and Juliana

The Old English poems now known as Daniel and Juliana¹ have long been of interest for the ways in which they depart from their putative sources, and the thematic or didactic purposes their authors may have had in executing such changes.² Unlike the scriptural source on which it draws, Daniel is manifestly more interested in the mental life of its reformed Babylonian villain Nebuchadnezzar. The editorial title attached to Daniel belongs to a poem that "has an emphasis so divergent from its source that its modern title is hardly appropriate,"³ given the poem's overriding preoccupation with Nebuchadnezzar's transgression, humiliation, and education rather than Daniel's abilities as judge and prophet; where the Vulgate spends only two verses on the onset and end of Nebuchadnezzar's madness (Dan. 4:30-31), the Old English dilates its description to twenty-three lines (ll. 612-35), much of it rearticulating and reinforcing the king's madness and estrangement from society. Similarly, Cynewulf's Juliana turns the rather lukewarm, possibly redeemable prefect of Nicomedia, Elesius, into a hardened and unrepentant sinner who finishes his career, as Cynewulf says with some relish, "in þam þystran ham" with thirty of his followers (l. 683b) after a disastrous shipwreck. Unlike his Latin antecedent, the Old English Elesius never once considers the possibility of conversion; instead, he remains from beginning to end a resolute heathen who erupts in rage at Juliana's repeated stonewalling of his attempts to sway her from Christianity and chastity. Such psychologically oriented transformations, in which the mental state of the king or ruler comes to share (or, in Nebuchadnezzar's case, dominate) the narrative, suggest that the poets of Daniel and Juliana were interested not only in the exploits of their holy protagonists but in the mentalities of those bad rulers who set themselves in opposition to the elect: Daniel's extended description of Nebuchadnezzar's physical and mental exile and Juliana's transformation of Elesius into a wrath-fueled wanderer condemned to hell both indicate the poems' marked interest in the life of the disordered mind, in addition to the life of the prophet or saint who must contend with the ruler's cruelty and irrationality.

The metamorphoses of Nebuchadnezzar and Elesius participate in two intimately related discourses: Christian understandings of the soul and mind and the role of the king or ruler, which was deeply inflected by the doctrines shaping the spiritual ramifications of sin and its contravention of divine order. The theological foundation of the patristic doctrine of sin is the equation of disobedience with alienation from God, and this alienation was understood in multiple senses: as loss of the soul's likeness to God, as estrangement from the nature with which God has endowed the human soul, and as absence from the divine presence.⁴ Otherness and distance provide the controlling images of postlapsarian human experience in general and sin in particular, which were depicted as exile and wandering, slavery or captivity, and corporeal metamorphosis, and the disordering of the rational mind. Losing affinity with God entailed violations of the divinely instituted order that provided the laws by which political and social lives and identities were governed; in turn, such violations provided the basis for censure of kings who, subjugated by sin, strayed from the set of behaviors that ecclesiasts saw as constituting the earthly likeness of the rex aeternus. Molded in the image of God as the patient, loving, generous ruler of his creation, the earthly king—whose rule was, of course, ratified by God and the church—was charged with similar responsibilities to his subjects: to advance prosperity, listen to good counsel, support the poor and disenfranchised, defend the nation, and defend the church. On the other hand, a king who was mastered by his sinful impulses exalted wrongdoers and debased the virtuous, gave unfair judgments, and led the country into general calamity.

Consequently, problems of self-misrule are compounded in royal figures: whereas the ideal king, the rex pacificus, is one of the most perfect creations,⁵ the...