Elfric of Eynsham
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Elfric of Eynsham’
Abbot Elfric expounds a Palm Sunday text to explain how Christianity combines orderly behaviour with intelligent and genuine liberty.
In a sermon for Palm Sunday, Abbot Elfric (955-1010) of the monastery in Eynsham in Oxfordshire drew on the Biblical account of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem to show that Christianity tames the wildness of man not by the bridle of coercion and law, but by the wisdom of reason and freewill.
For Jesus Christ to step down alive from his cross would have been a mighty miracle, but not the mightiest.
In a sermon for Easter Day, Abbot Elfric (955-1010) reminded his congregation that the people of Jerusalem thought it would be a miracle worthy of God for Jesus to step down alive from his cross. A miracle, yes; but not so worthy of God as the one he then performed.
Elfric, the tenth-century English abbot, suggests a practical way of thinking about the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.
Where ancient Judaism favoured the close regulation of society and individual actions by the state, Christianity emphasises individual responsibility, a major influence on the Britain’s famously liberal constitution. Elfric, Abbot of Eynsham in the reign of Æthelred the Unready, gave a rather clever example of how this works in a sermon for Candlemas, kept each year on February 2nd.
The Victorian practice of hanging sugared nuts on a Christmas tree was bursting with Biblical symbolism.
Victorian Christmas celebrations included hanging nuts, typically sugared almonds, on the tree. This symbolic gesture goes back to a Christian interpretation of a passage from Numbers, which was known in England as long ago as the 10th century.
Roman Emperor Julian was ready to destroy an entire Christian community over his wounded pride.
This story was told to his congregation by Elfric of Eynsham (955-1010) on the Feast of the Dormition of Mary. It is quite true that in 363, Julian the Apostate, pagan Emperor of Rome and cruel persecutor of Christians, was mortally wounded by an unknown assailant wielding a spear.
Elfric imagines how the Virgin Mary went to her eternal home.
When Elfric, Abbot of Eynsham near Oxford during the reign of Ethelred the Unready (r. 978-1916), came to preach on August 15th, the Feast of the Repose of Mary, he was unusually tightlipped. Some of what was passed around he regarded as legend, but he was sure of one thing: that Mary did not go home to heaven all on her own.