Aesthetics and the Incarnation is the rewarding result of a professed commitment to thinking about Insular art, literature, and theology as deeply entwined--a goal that many espouse but that few are equipped to pursue. (In this context, Insular designates “the mixed influences of Irish, British, English, Latin, Norse, and other cultures and traditions that coexisted on the island” of Britain [5].) Such a project requires a certain amount of gumption, and Beechy gamely crosses several disciplinary lines to elucidate her topic: the many strands of Christian belief that animated British cultural production, especially relating to the Incarnation, between 600 and 1100.
Theological and literary-critical readings are often at their best when they come together, and they do here. Beechy brings a poetic sensibility to the central themes of Christianity, focusing on the Incarnation, the physical embodiment of the divine Word, when God became man. She begins by observing, rightly, that patristic (orthodox) doctrine cannot account for several features of Insular devotional culture, and that these features deserve our attention. As she notes, the very idea of the body of Christ raised several thorny questions for medieval believers, from the most fundamental thinking on the Incarnation itself to recurring waves of Eucharistic controversy. Can humans sense God, and, if so, how? From the broader philosophical perspective that necessarily underpins these investigations, how do abstract concepts relate to the sensible or the felt world? And more troublingly for medieval theologians, “where do you draw a line, contain divinity, once it has been brought into the world” (xiv)?
In a particularly deft sleight of hand that frames the project as a whole, Beechy observes, drawing on the work of Leslie Lockett, that medievalists often assume that Augustinian transcendentalism prevailed uniformly, but in fact, non-Mediterranean converts to Christianity frequently persisted in alternative, materialist epistemologies, which shaped their understanding of divine presence in the world. Beechy cannily links this belief in the capacity of human representation to Insular art and literature. She argues that complicated literary styles, in both Hisperic and Anglo-Latin as well as in Old English, could do real theological work--in part, because the early medieval English did not generally pattern their work after Augustine so much as after thinkers like Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, and stylists in the Irish poetic tradition. As a result, their aesthetic projects--both those that we think of as interested in formal “aesthetics” and those relating to the Greek root aisthesis, or what can be sensed--could encode thinking about the Incarnation, not in an attempt to reduce or to explain it so much as to demonstrate its mystery.
Resisting the authoritative edicts of figures like Ælfric, Alcuin, and the aforementioned (and refreshingly sidelined) Augustine, while nonetheless returning frequently to Bede, Beechy teases out a more nuanced and, ultimately, more interesting story about Incarnational theology in early medieval Britain, related through close formal attention to understudied texts and manuscripts like the Book of Kells (to be sure, well studied, but not in English circles); theSolomon and Saturn dialogues; and the layered margins of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41. Bringing these books into readers’ own hands, Aesthetics and the Incarnation includes a real wealth of images (54 in all, including 8 in color).
A robust preface and introduction lay out the central assumptions and methods that shape the book as a whole: foremost among them careful attention to form and a willingness to read and look against the grain. These sections adopt a more accessible style than the following chapters and are well suited for course readings, often pointedly raising questions or making productive observations about the contours of the field. As she observes of her chosen methodology, “A historical-materialist thin description allows us to be gentle with our often isolated, fragmented, anonymous sources. It allows us not simply to extend the ideology of more forthcoming and well-attested sources to everything, not to readSolomon and Saturn in light of Augustinian or Ælfrician orthodoxy, for instance” (22).
Chapter One introduces a more technical and theoretical vocabulary into the discussion, articulating a theory of Incarnational “supereffability” (a term adopted from Cristina Maria Cervone) or expressive excess in Insular art and literature in contrast to Augustinian ineffability or inexpressibility. To explore this tension, Beechy examines the relationship between the divine Word and poetic words, especially in Aldhelm of Malmesbury’s Carmen de virginitate, Bede’s account of Cædmon’s poetic inspiration, and Cynewulf’s Christ II. These texts, Beechy argues, reveal an interest in Christ’s sacramental humanity and imagine the Word as revealed in human phenomena other than in Christ’s physical body, even invoking the Word in human words, like Aldhelm’s own song. Insular poetry thus closes the semiotic gap that separates human from divine speech and knowledge in Augustine’s Neoplatonic thinking.
Richly illustrated with thirty-eight figures, some in color, Chapter Two then turns to visual art in order to explore ambiguous depictions of the hypostatic union, or the joining of Christ’s two separate natures as simultaneously God and man, visible and invisible, particularly in the Book of Kells, with brief recourse to Pangur Ban and the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses. As Beechy argues, these artistic representations of the Word made flesh invite a kind of “double vision” that allows for ambiguity and doubleness in Christ’s dual nature. The youthful and bearded Christs in the Durham Ritual are particularly fascinating here (discussed at 62-3, with images at 64-5).
Chapter Three next develops the phenomenology and topography of Incarnational matter, beginning with an epigraph from Blickling Homily 1 that imagines Christ’s flesh as a kind of cloak (a recurring image in the book, where it reinforces the theme of covering and uncovering, visible and invisible). Here, Beechy argues that the Incarnation was sensible in early medieval British material and even underpins the depiction of the senses in the Fuller Brooch. This argument draws on a sometimes-dizzying array of sources and theorists, including the Blickling and Vercelli Homilies, the surface reading of Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, the baroque aesthetics of Gilles Deleuze, and Adomnán of Iona’s De locis sanctis, which is reproduced in part in the chapter’s appendix.
The final two interlinked chapters consider the ways in which strategic concealment could actually reveal Incarnational mysteries, precisely because the Incarnation remained fundamentally enigmatic. Beechy turns first to notoriously difficult texts like Virgilius Maro Grammaticus’s Epitomae and Epistolae, Aldhelm of Malmesbury’s Enigmata, and the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn in Chapter Four, and then to the densely layered margins of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41 in Chapter Five. While CCCC MS 41 is nominally an eleventh-century copy of the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, Beechy’s interest is not in the OE Bede but in the seemingly unrelated texts that accrete around it, all in the hand of a single near-contemporary to the original scribes, who, she argues, develops a “shadow manuscript” of Insular Incarnationalism. A final, brief Conclusion suggests that this was not an arbitrary assemblage around the Old English Bede so much as “commentary and gloss upon the Incarnational logic that inhered in the main text and in the physical manuscript,” so that “The margins incorporate elements of Insular learning, themselves marginalized by orthodoxy, and afford them space alongside--literally--the authority of Bede” (254).
This attention to the margins and edges of “official,” “authorized” doctrine characterizes the book as a whole. Throughout, Beechy is to be applauded for resisting, where possible, “the polemics of named authors” (256) and for seeking to attend to broader theological contexts rather than accepting the familiar siphoning of Insular Christianity into the now largely distinct disciplines of Celtic and “Anglo-Saxon” studies. (Knowing that I am addressing a specialized readership of medievalists, I invoke the latter advisedly here, because as Beechy herself notes, Latin, so central to this discussion, too often disappears within “early medieval English studies.”) Such a disciplinary separation between Celtic and “English,” Beechy argues, leads scholars in the latter camp to rely too heavily on Carolingian precepts that do not always apply, assuming the uniform imposition of Roman authority when local practices were far more variable. I imagine that this observation may feel obvious to scholars of Irish influence on early medieval England. It may also disclose Beechy’s core audience of scholars interested in England specifically, some of whom have already been working to nuance thinking about Carolingian influence.
There is a certain inescapable slippage in projects of this kind between thinking holistically about Britain and focusing on England as a discrete space. The analysis of Irish backgrounds sometimes feels a little thin, and Norse and British presence do not factor into the discussion. As Beechy notes, however, a certain amount of slippage and attenuation is to be expected in setting up a study like this one, not only because of real gaps in the archive but also because modern disciplinary boundaries make comparative work, especially between “national” literatures and languages, challenging. Moreover, it would be a strange impulse to fault a scholar for using previous scholarship and translation, especially to enable comparisons that may not otherwise arise, and Beechy’s approach pays off. It is a testament to the fact that we should welcome rather than spurn new readers of old archives. These fascinating texts and objects deserve more attention, and I am delighted that Beechy’s book will encourage further work.
Early medieval Christianity is still too often uncritically assumed to be monolithic, and Aesthetics and the Incarnation offers a valuable reminder of its eclecticism and hybridity in practice. Its insights will be of interest to scholars working broadly on art, literature, and the disparate religious beliefs--some “orthodox,” some entirely non-Christian--that are almost always somewhere, somehow in the background of the books that have come down to us from the period.