Beowulf as a Philosophical Poem

Abstract

Criticism has treated Beowulf as a heroic epic with some Christian colouring or as a Christian parable thinly cloaked in heroic dress to indicate the extremes of interpretation, but Beowulf can be read as a philosophical poem grappling with problems inherent in the heroic and Christian faiths. These are, first, the problem of evil troubling Christian thought and, secondly, the less frequently discussed problem of oblivion challenging the heroic world view. The poem implies, rather than states, the two philosophical problems it embodies in the narrative and in the contrasting tonalities of the hero’s three great, or mythical, combat. Orthodox Christian faith holds that one all-powerful, all-knowing, and morally perfect God created the world (in the largest sense: the universe) — which immediately raises the problem of evil. Michael Tooley acknowledges that “when one conceives of God as unlimited with respect to power, knowledge, and moral goodness, the existence of evil quickly gives rise to potentially serious arguments against the existence of God.” The hero and the poem explicitly recognize God’s power and clearly imply his uniqueness, though his perfect goodness is not explicitly asserted and sometimes seems erratic or contingent. Orthodox Christianity can hardly accept a morally ambiguous God, despite the physicist and wide-ranging intellectual Freeman J. Dyson’s belief that God is evolving towards that perfection which orthodox theology attributes to him.3 Readers cannot assume, a priori, that because the Beowulf poet flourished in the Christian era, the poem’s theodicy was completely sound.