“one of the major advantages which Christianity appeared to offer the heathen Anglo-Saxons was a coherent account of the world’s beginning” (2).
“The practice of interpreting Old Testament narratives as allegories probably goes back to pre-Christian Jewish tradition, but it was soon adopted by Christian theologians such as Origen and absorbed into the main stream of Christian tradition. Allegory was used to make the Old Testament safe for Christian readers or to make it consonant with the New Testament by discovering Christian doctrines such as the Trinity hidden within it” (2-3).
“allegorical interpretation soon became a way of using the Old Testament, and the New Testament as well, as a vast store-book of imagery, a source of riddling metaphors and imaginative parallels. The impetus here is not to save the Old Testament for Christianity but to invite the reader to see imaginative parallels between moral truths and physical actuality, or between spiritual experience and historical events” (3).
“Ælfric calls Genesis the gecyndboc or ‘book of beginnings’, and it was indeed the story of origins that particularly appealed to Anglo-Saxon writers” (4).
“Lucifer becomes a kind of tragic figure like Prometheus or Macbeth, a powerful spirit fully aware of his act but also acutely sensitive to his failure, and still struggling to resist while chained in hell” (7).
“For Ælfric it is an exemplary story of human free will. Because Adam and Eve’s submission to the divine will would have had no value or meaning if they had no choice, God placed an arbitrary prohibition on one tree in Paradise:
Why would God forbid them so small a thing, when he had entrusted other great things to them? Truly, how could Adam know what he was, unless he was obedient in some thing to his Lord? .. . It was not shaped for him by God [that he should fall], nor was he compelled to break God’s commandment, but God left him free and gave him his own choice.
{Catholic Homilies, ed. Thorpe I, 14-18)” (7).
“Both allegorically and literally, the Anglo-Saxon church saw itself in continuity with the priesthood of the Hebrews similarly faced with reconciling a rebellious people to God” (9-10).
“The sense of continuity is the characteristic note of Anglo-Saxon literary treatments of the Old Testament. For the Anglo-Saxons the Old Testament was a veiled way of talking about their own situation. Sometimes it was a matter of explaining how things came to be as they are in the world. Sometimes it provided a figurative framework for analysing the church and the clergy. But most often the Old Testament offered them a means of considering and articulating the ways in which kingship, politics and warfare related to the rule of God. Despite Ælfric’s insistence that the old law had been replaced by the new, at least in its literal sense, in many ways the old retained its power for the Anglo-Saxons, and gave them a way of thinking about themelves as nations” (19).