Extracts from Christian Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Christian Literature’
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Christian Literature’
When the angels rebelled against their Maker, they demanded a kingdom of their own in a land without him — and he gave them what they wanted.
In the Anglo-Saxon poem Genesis, we have heard how God created angels to serve him in glory, and how one — dearly beloved, and the mightiest — roused others to bring war against their Maker, craving thrones and servants of their own. The rebels were thrust forth from heaven, but worse awaited them: for a weak and inferior creature called Man was to take their place.
St Bede examines the connection between Passover and Easter, and shows how the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ complete a pattern.
‘Easter’ is a peculiarly English name for the annual feast elsewhere called Pascha, the Greek word for Passover. As eighth-century English monk St Bede explains here, Pascha takes the Israelites’ memorial of their escape from slavery in Egypt and turns it into a memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection, by which he broke the sceptre not of one earthly king, but of the dark powers lording it over all mankind.
Will Langland tells how after the crucifixion, the soul of Christ went down to Hades to fetch Piers the Ploughman and the rest of hopeless humanity.
In William Langland’s dream-narrative ‘The Book of Piers the Ploughman’, we have seen Jesus Christ enter Jerusalem, and seen him crucified. But Lucifer and his devils are anxious. From their fastness in Hades, surrounded by the souls of the dead, they see a distant light; they double-bar the doors and plug every chink in the mortar but closer and closer it comes, until it stands before the very gates.
In ‘Do-bet,’ the sequel to his popular ‘Vision of Piers the Ploughman,’ Will Langland dreams about the trial of Jesus Christ before Pontius Pilate, and what followed.
In William Langland’s dream-narrative ‘The Book of Piers the Ploughman’, we have seen Jesus Christ enter Jerusalem riding on an ass, but looking more to Will’s eyes like a knight entering the lists to joust on behalf of mankind. Now the Tournament begins in earnest, with Roman Governor Pontius Pilate sitting in the umpire’s chair.
Will Langland, a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, dreams he is looking for his old friend Piers the Ploughman in Jerusalem just when Christ rides in on a donkey.
William Langland’s ‘Book of Piers the Ploughman’ is a late fourteenth-century dream sequence that tumbles together Christian reflection with social commentary much as John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ would later do. In Passus 18, Will has fallen asleep during Lent, and his dream takes him confusedly to Palm Sunday, a week before Easter.
Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf reminds us that God’s gifts to men are many and varied, and nobody ever gets them all.
‘Now there are diversities of gifts,’ St Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 12, ‘but the same Spirit.’ Cynewulf (possibly the eighth-century bishop Cynewulf of Lindisfarne) confirms that the gifts given by God to mankind are many and different, and also explains why it is that no one should expect to be good at everything.