By Faryn Thomas, Jennifer Morse, Joseph Marques, and Robert Carhuayo God’s divine goodness and beauty are often mentioned in the same breath. But there are other things that are somewhat surprisingly portrayed as beautiful, for example, Sodom. “The people’s settlements there were beautiful — the men without honor, hateful to their creator” (137) The Sodomites are obviously without any sort of goodness or grace, and…
Drenched in blood and covered in gore, there is no shortage of violence in Prudentius’ Psychomachia — a gruesome battle between Vices and Virtues for control of the human soul. However, despite all the blood in the poem, and the fact that the Virtues do not always clearly have the upper hand, it is striking that the Virtues only actually bleed once: Discord had entered our ranks wearing the counterfeit…
Because the Old English poems Genesis A & B do more than just regurgitate they key aspects of their source material, telling the stories from the book of Genesis in a way that bears little formal resemblance to any Bible, we ought not to think of them as mere translations, but rather as poems in their own right, with their own agenda, and their own stories to tell. In one pertinent example, Genesis…
The author of Genesis A/B, an Old English verse interpretation of the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Genesis, expands considerably upon certain aspects and details of the creation story. The elaboration most relevant to this entry is the additional details given to the creation of Adam and Eve, the Biblical first humans. The original Genesis story is sparse, limiting the narrative to the creation of the bodies of the humans: Adam…
Why must we obey God? Is it because we want to, or because we need to? For those of us who were raised Christian, or at least influenced by Christian tradition, we were taught to obey God, that God is all-loving, that he has a plan for each of us, and that he knows best. However, in revisiting Genesis, not much is offered by the text regarding God’s loving nature…
(Group 6) Reading Genesis A and B in light of the conversation we had on Tuesday, we were quite interested in the idea of Angel’s being fallible and capable of evil, and the way that the text uses light and dark so heavily to contrast good vs. bad, life vs death, and God’s sight vs what is not being seen. Particularly because angels are often conceived of as being more…
By Faryn Thomas, Jennifer Morse, Joseph Marques, and Robert Carhuayo One of the aspects of the Psychomachia that our group found particularly interesting was the fact that the virtues and vices are all presented as women. This is an initially surprising choice, as the virtues and vices are all warriors engaging in battle, and this is obviously not a role traditionally inhabited by women. This choice isn’t merely accidental, as…
How does the reasoning in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, written in 524, hold up to the scrutiny of 21st-century college students? Perhaps there is a fundamental difference between him, the writer, and us, the readers, as a result of the time difference, that leads us to question certain rhetorical choices. Nonetheless, there are possible discrepancies in his arguments that we feel are constructive to discuss. Lady Philosophy deems the wealth…
Something that continues to strike me about the two texts that we’ve read thus far, is the issue that the characters have with forgetfulness liked with vision. In the Psychomachia, Sobriety is regathering the troops when she says “Have you forgotten, then, the thirst in the desert, the spring that was given to split the stone and brought water leaping from its top? … Stand, I pray you. Remember who…
Lady Philosophy may be understood to have addressed Boethius’s immediate concerns about the loss of his fortunate position in life in Books I and II through her explanation of the nature of Fortune. This explanation appears to partially succeed in consoling Boethius, as he tells her once she is finished, “You do revive me, so that I am no longer absolutely devastated by the blows of fortune but seem at…
