Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England: Divina in Laude Voluntas by Patrick McBrine (review)

It has been long established that there is a discernible line of influence in English poetry, starting with Chaucer, and passing through Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, up through to the present. One cannot long talk about any Anglophone poet of the last two centuries without at least one of those names coming up as an influence, whether positive or negative. Harold Bloom, for one, has made a career out of talking about how such established lines of influence cause deep anxiety in each new generation of poets. But what of the oldest extant English poetry, that which came before Chaucer and his middle English contemporaries? What of the Anglo-Saxon poets, beginning in the seventh century with near-mythic figures like Caedmon, and continuing on through the anonymous writers of Beowulf, the Dream of the Rood, Genesis A and B, and the like? We do not think of the Anglo-Saxon poets as having comparable figures to Shakespeare or Wordsworth looking over their shoulders and creating their literary contexts. If anything, these poets can seem nearly new-sprung from the earth, as fresh and original in their language and narratives as Homer himself.

In his Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England, Patrick McBrine suggests that these Anglo-Saxon poets did indeed have strong precursors for their work. These, as McBrine's title suggests, were the narrative poets of Late Antique Christianity. Perhaps one of the chief reasons poems like Beowulf seem so fresh, is that they feel untouched by the august stateliness of classical verse. There are no whiffs of Virgilian allusion or ponderous references to the fall to Troy in early Anglo-Saxon verse. But, McBrine shows, these poems were influenced by the Christian inheritors of the classical poetic tradition, chief among them five poets and their biblical verse narratives: Juvencus, Cyprianus, Sedulius, Avitus, and Arator.

These five poets make up an almost forgotten era of western poetry, from the fourth through the sixth centuries, when Christian poets used pagan epic forms to retell narratives from the Bible. Juvencus began this tradition with his Evangeliorum Libri (c. 330), the first complete retelling of the Christian Gospels in Latin verse. Jerome was the first major commentator on Juvencus, and saddled him with the reputation of merely paraphrasing the gospels paene ad verbum (nearly to the word). McBrine resuscitates Juvencus from this arguably undeserved reputation, and shows him to be a careful poet, inventive in his phrasings, with an occasional flare for the dramatic. McBrine points especially to Juvencus's vivid depiction of the storm on the Sea of Galilee as proof that Juvencus is a poet of great skill, who rewards the careful reader.

McBrine is a careful reader. As he makes his way through Juvencus's fifith and sixth century inheritors, Cyprianus, Sedulius, Avitus, and Arator, McBrine shows how each learns from and diverges from one another. Cyprianus, in his early fifth century Heptateuch, does for the first few books of the Old Testament what Juvencus does for the Gospels. Sedulius diverges from the relatively literal approach of Juvencus and Cyprianus by presenting, in his fifth century Carmen Paschale, a gospel narrative filled with allegorical digressions, exegetical exhortations, and flashbacks to the Old Testament. Avitus carries on Sedulius's penchant for interpretive asides, but focuses on Genesis and Exodus, even filling out the creation and fall narratives with new scenes and speeches for both Satan and Adam. Avitus also, as McBrine shows, amplifies the Red Sea scenes from Exodus into passages of heroic grandeur, giving Pharaoh speeches—and Pharaoh's men violent deaths—fit for Greek tragedy. Arator, the sixth-century capstone of Biblical epics, turns his attention to Acts of the Apostles, also adopting the freer narrative style of Sedulius. In each of his thorough investigations of these poets, McBrine shows how they loved...