Homo contemplans: The Order of the World, Gregorian Contemplative Anthropology, and Old English Poetics

Abstract

This essay considers Old English poetics through the lens of Gregory the Great’s contemplative anthropology, which understands the experience of contemplation as intrinsic to being a human person and so also a reader. Such a perspective on reading depends upon its situation within a particular community and common knowledge base, and it relies upon poets’ disciplined sharing of their knowledge as well as readers’disciplined reception of texts. I relate this account of the function of vernacular religious poetry to the specific context of Anglo-Saxon England through a new reading of the Old English poem The Order of the World, and I draw on both scholars of literature and contemporary monastics for my interpretive framework. The perspective on the situation of poetics in the Anglo-Saxon ecclesial community developed here brings into greater focus the utility and reason for so much of the extant Old English religious poetry through an acknowledgement of its social and religious functions within the Christia...