Anglo-Saxon Literature
Anglo-Saxon Literature
Book Excerpt
form with Christian
writers, and more than one cause may be assigned for it. Already there
was, in the taste of the age when the Christian literature arose, a
tendency to symbolism, which is seen outside the pale of Christianity.
Moreover, the long time in which the profession of Christianity was
dangerous, favoured the growth of symbolism as a covert means of mutual
intelligence. Then Christian thought had in its own nature something
which invited allegory, partly by its own hidden sympathies with Nature,
and partly by its very immensity, for which all direct speech was felt
to be inadequate. But what doubtless supplied this taste with continual
nutriment was that all-pervading and unspeakable sweetness of Christ's
teaching by parables. The Phoenix was used upon Roman coins to express
the aspiration for renewed vitality in the empire; it was used by early
Christian writers[5] as an emblem of the Resurrection; and in the
Anglo-Saxon poem the allegory is avowed.
To Lactantius also has been ascribed another
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