Ælfric, the Maccabees, and the Problem of Christian Heroism

Much of the biblical story of judas Machabeus in the first book of the Maccabees reads like heroic literature. Like the poets of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, the writer celebrates deeds of martial prowess, praises heroic virtue, and narrates the rise and fall of a great man in a direct, vivid style, which is far removed from the elliptical narrative of the early books of the Old Testament and the gnomic passages of the synoptic Gospels. The text offers scenes of judas arming himself, accounts of venerable swords, clarion battle speeches, and stirring descriptions of combat. Like Beowulf and Byrhtnoth, the hero sacrifices himself to protect his people. The writer's meaning is never obscure, and never does the text seem to invite subtle, exegetical interpretation. Indeed, at times it recalls the clarity of Tacitus more than the mystery of Genesis. Like Beowulf, the text never introduces a doctrine of the salvation or the immortality of the soul. Upon the death of judas, the story offers no immortality for him other than the remembrance of his deeds. The writer even avoids mentioning God altogether and instead concentrates on the Law.

The biblical narrative of the Maccabees does not seem to fall easily into Erich Auerbach's stylistic paradigm that he outlines in Mimesis, which imagines the history of Western literature as the dichotomy and eventually the synthesis of two opposing styles: the classical and the biblical. ¹ In the classical style, "never is there a form left fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of unplumbed depths." ² Conversely, in biblical narrative "thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains 'fraught with background.'" ³ The latter style allows exegetical interpretation to a much greater extent than the former because its meanings are more obscure and because this obscurity suggests to the careful, initiated reader profound and mysterious significance for the faithful.

If we accept Auerbach's premise, then first Maccabees presents problems for the Christian exegete. The writer leaves nothing veiled or mysterious and suggests no profound truths beyond the heroic fight for a righteous cause. Such a text does not fit easily into a pattern of what Auerbach calls "figural interpretation" or as a part of a universal history that anticipates and is fulfilled by Christ. Such an interpretive problem would have been especially difficult for Ælfric, writing at the turn of the eleventh century, who had to contend also with native English ideas of heroism that such a text might have invoked and encouraged. The uneducated reader might take lessons from such a text that would have been unacceptable for Ælfric, lessons that valorize martial prowess and pride over the Christian virtues.

In his version of the story of the Maccabees, Ælfric responds to this potential misreading by reshaping the narrative to fit his interpretive agenda through a range of stylistic and rhetorical strategies. first, he transforms the story through abbreviatio by using a condensed style that elides much of the martial material and allows him to incorporate proper interpretation within the narrative itself. furthermore, he invokes the native sense of heroism in order to redefine it according to Christian ethics; specifically, he implies a Christian sense of the classical virtue pietas, along with the expected heroic virtues of sapientia and fortitudo. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, he emphasizes the difference between the old Jewish law and the new Christian law; this difference allows him to claim the "figural interpretation" that the physical war described in the narrative prefigures the spiritual war that Christians must now fight. Before I analyze these aspects of the text in detail, I will briefly describe the hagiographical tradition within which Ælfric is writing and survey his use of sources for the Maccabees and the place of the story in tenth- and eleventh-century literature. This contextualization will clarify the singularity of Ælfric's treatment of the narrative...