Emotional Disturbance in the Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn adapt the classical dialectical method in order to show how individual mentality can be reshaped through dialogue. The first section demonstrates that Saturn seeks healing for his afflicted mentality through the reconciliatory powers of dialogue. In the second section, I turn to the contrasting treatment of anger in Solomon and Saturn I and Solomon and Saturn II as manifestations of divine vengeance and sinful vice, respectively. Ultimately, the two poems in dialogue with one another demonstrate how an individual’s emotional state is open to moderation and improvement through discursive practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Old English
• poetry
• emotion
• mentality
• dialectics

Introduction

There is something essentially oxymoronic about applying the arts of disputation to matters of human emotion. On the one hand, rational debate or dialectic reasoning might be seen to valorise a dispassionate mode of engagement; on the other hand, the use of rhetorical style and emotive appeal in real-world debates (distinct from dialectical method) speaks to the power of emotion to persuade, and even the power of debate to stir up affective response.¹ The use of dialectic method in modern psychological talking-therapy speaks to an essential suitability (at least in modern-day culture) of balance and synthesis in the management of emotional response.² In this article, I will uncover the use of dialectic method to model mental and emotional change in the poetic Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, a set of Old English texts composed between the late ninth century and the third decade of the tenth century.³ Moreover, I will suggest that while these poems take up the essential spirit of dialectic—movement towards a concrete truth through interlocutory exchange and the balancing of opposed positions—they adapt the literary methods by which this is achieved, moving away from the syllogistic style of formal logics, established in classical philosophy, and working instead with an array of techniques more familiar to an early medieval audience: riddles, exempla and maxims. This approach is in line with recent work in Alfredian literature by Nicole Guenther Discenza, which posits that the philosophical texts translated in this milieu have been altered to meet the needs of an audience not trained in formal logic.⁴ This article will, accordingly, begin in the Alfredian period, looking to Boethius’ Consolatione philosophiae and its translation into Old English as a model for the ideal of dispassion in human emotion. It will then move to consider the place of emotion in the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, whose author or authors were certainly aware of and probably working with Boethius’ text.⁵ I will address the manner in which these poems adopt and adapt traditional dialectical method, before exploring two aspects of emotion: Saturn’s search for emotional satisfaction as a model for dialectic closure; and the apparent tension between the designation of anger as either sinful vice or divine tool across Solomon and Saturn I and Solomon and Saturn II, respectively.

While the powerful emotions of the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn have frequently been commented upon in scholarship, they have not generally been approached as the major cohesive vantage point onto these texts. A rare exception is Daniel Anlezark’s recent article on “The Vasa Mortis and Misery in Solomon and Saturn II”, which also links the Old English Solomon and Saturn tradition with Boethian literature. Where Anlezark’s chapter uncovers the “ideational unity” of ideal mental behaviour which emerges from the two speakers’ intricate exchange in Solomon and Saturn II, the present article will focus more on the mechanisms of that exchange, and the model this seems to offer for correcting one’s mode of thinking. Ultimately, these two approaches are highly complementary. The present article also diverges from previous forays into the discursive aspect of the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, notably that of Tiffany Beechy,⁶ by arguing that the texts move towards a concrete ethical resolution in the mode of dialectic, rather than a dialogic opening-up of meaning. Ultimately, it will be shown that in the experimental and highly learned context of tenth-century monastic scholarship, the dialectic method was adapted and deployed in order to show the power of discursive activity to moderate emotion.

The Boethian Emotive Context

Falsehoods cause emotional disturbance, which in turn obscure the mind’s discernment of truth; this is the teaching of Lady Philosophy in Book I.vi–vii of the Consolatione philosophiae (On the Consolation of Philosophy) of Boethius (c. 520).⁷ She illustrates this disturbance and obscurity through a series of environmental metaphors: clouds hide the light of the stars; wind stirs up the calm sea and muddies it with silt; fallen rocks obstruct flowing water. In all of these images, the undisturbed mind is the status naturae, the original and natural course of things. Lady Philosophy calls for the rejection of four kinds of emotion which keep the mind thus cloudy (nubila) and fettered (vincta): joys, fear, hope and sorrow (gaudia, timor, spes and dolor).⁸ These emotions correspond with the arrangement of four emotional disturbances (perturbationes) which St Jerome (d. 420) (building on Stoic tradition, but more directly upon the writings of Cicero, d. 43 BCE) connects with the four animal faces of the cherubim in Ezekiel 10.4: joy, grief, desire and fear.⁹ For Jerome, who rejected the Evagrian concept of monastic apatheia (or “dispassion”, a method of “quelling of passions that disturb the soul”),¹⁰ the opposing of four perturbationes with four corresponding virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, moderation; prudentia, iustitia, fortitude, temperantia) offers a means of achieving spiritual balance.¹¹ Boethius is working from a knowledge of Cicero,¹² but for an early medieval English audience—who were not likely to have encountered the Tusculan Disputations¹³—this quadripartite model of emotional disturbance has a well-established place in patristic theology.

The Consolatione was translated into Old English sometime between c. 892 and c. 930, during or shortly after the reign of King Alfred, first as a prose adaptation (B-text) of the original prosimetric Latin, and later with a back-translation of the Old English prose-metres into Old English verse-metres (C-text).¹⁴ The B-text translator reproduces closely the discussion of emotional disturbance at the end of I.vi and through I.vii (Chapters 5 and 6 of the Old English B-text), although it is the figure of Wisdom/Gesceadwisnes (wisdom and reason), rather than Lady Philosophy, who speaks.¹⁵ The most significant alteration is to the second half of I.vii/Chapter 6, where the Old English translator goes to some effort to expound more clearly Wisdom’s rejection of the four emotions. Following the environmental metaphors of the Latin text, he introduces a line which has no parallel in the original: Swa doð nu ða þeostro þinre gedrefednesse wiðstandan minum leohtum larum (“So now does the darkness of your distress hold out against my bright teachings”).¹⁶ He then expands on the four commands of the Latin text (Gaudia pelle, / Pelle timorem / Spemque fugato / Nec dolor adsit; “Banish joy, banish fear, and chase away hope, nor may sorrow be present”) as follows:

afyr fram þe ða yfelan sælþa and þa unnettan, and eac ða unnettan ungesælþa and þone yflan ege þisse worulde; þæt is þæt þu þe ne anhebbe on ofermetto on þinre gesundfulnesse and on ðinre orsorgnesse, ne eft þe ne geortrywe nanes godes on nanre wiðerweardnesse

[expel from yourself those evil and those useless prosperities, and also those useless misfortunes and the evil fear of this world; that is, that you should not lift yourself up in pride on account of your good fortune or tranquillity, nor again do not despair of all good in any adversity]

The translator alters the four emotions of the Latin text to “these two” (þissa twega), pride (or haughtiness, from ofermetto, which in its connection to “prosperities” seems to correspond with the gaudia of the Latin) and fear (ege). This reduction of Jerome’s fourfold set of emotive binaries (positive/negative; present/future) participates in a wider effort to make this section more instructive and accessible.¹⁷ In the same vein, the clause beginning þæt is offers more concretised suggestions of how to “expel” both prosperities and misfortune. The prosimetric back-translation (C-text) offers a close verse-rendering of the adaptation found in the B-text, adding further support to a reading of two emotions (rather than four) by introducing a duality to one of the environmental metaphors: when fallen rocks obstruct flowing water, it “then becomes divided in two” (Metre 5, ll. 17b–18a, on tu siððan / tosceaden wyrð).

These meditations in Old English verse and prose on the emotionally disturbing effects of falsehood, and the concomitant obscurity created in the mind, are vital teachings for Lady Philosophy/Wisdom, because the rejection of emotion is a structural requirement which Boethius/Mod needs to engage with before he can accept the range of “bright teachings” which he is offered. The fall from joy to tears is the opening motif of the Consolatione, both in Latin and Old English (B-text, Chapter 2: Ða lioð þe ic wrecca geo lustbærlice song, ic sceal nu heofiende singan; “Those songs which I, exile, formerly sang with delight, I must now sing lamenting”).¹⁸ Emotion, in all its excess, is the condition of the Mind; temperance and moderation is the condition of Wisdom. The dialogic engagement between these interlocutors is not simply a process of passing truth from Wisdom to Mind, but rather the use of that truth to reconfigure the emotional identity of the Mind and its mode of engaging with the world. In this way, the human mind and its emotional states are subject to a dialectic process of enlightenment.¹⁹

The perturbationes of Jerome have been linked to another set of broadly contemporary Old English texts with a profound interest in emotion and in the power of dialogue to model the mind: the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn.²⁰ This fragmentary collection in verse and prose shares the premise of a wisdom debate between the biblical King Solomon and a learned pagan traveller, Saturn. It is likely that the author(s) had some kind of awareness—however directly or indirectly—of a pre-existing tradition of “Solomonic dialogue literature”, in which Solomon debates with a figure named Marcolfus.²¹ While no such dialogues pre-dating the Old English Solomon and Saturn have lasted to the present day, Daniel Anlezark notes that later survivals from this tradition pose Marcolfus as a “frivolous” and contrarian character, in contrast with the Old English Saturn, who is defined by his sincerity.²² Taking affect as a vantage-point onto the Old English dialogues, then, an appropriate set of comparanda is found in Boethius’ Consolatione and in the contemporary Alfredian tradition of Latin dialogue translation more broadly.²³ These patristic dialogues pair a rational and dispassionate wisdom-figure with a sincere interlocutor: in the case of the Consolatione and its Old English translation, this is Lady Philosophy/Gesceadwisnes in conversation with Boethius/Mod; in Augustine’s Soliloquia, also translated in the same period (and probably by the same author as the OE Boethius), this is Reason/Gesceadwisnes in conversation with Augustine/Mod. Augustine’s Mind-figure is not highly emotional, and engages in an often balanced debate with the voice of reason, while the Consolatione offers a model of dispassion and subservient emotion that has a close counterpart in both Solomon and Saturn I (SolSatI) and Solomon and Saturn II (SolSatII).²⁴ In scripture, King Solomon is the earthly representation of wisdom, granted sapientia et scientia (“wisdom and knowledge”) by God in 2 Chronicles 1.10.²⁵ Solomon, then, is the Wisdom/Gesceadwisnes figure of the two poems, while Saturn, as we shall see, represents the human and the emotive, in all its limitation and variety.²⁶ As with Mod in the Old English Boethius, Saturn’s ability to learn is hampered by his deeply emotional characterisation, and this emotionality forms a critical part of both his self-presentation and his intellectual concern through the poetic Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn.

As we shall see below, the poems SolSatI, SolSatII and SolSatFrag together enact a dialectic approach to emotion and mentality. The deliberate erosion of formal dialectical logics between the Old English Boethius and its Latin source (addressed below) is enacted yet further in The Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, producing a vernacular dialectics concerned with the emergence of truth from disputation, but loosed from the structures of syllogism and inference passed down by Aristotle and Boethius and revived in ninth-century Continental scholarship.²⁷ This corresponds with Daniel Anlezark’s recent assessment of misery in SolSatII, which highlights processes of “exchange” and an ultimate “ideational unity” in the poem.²⁸ In the next section, I will examine two aspects of this dialectics of mentality: the first is Saturn’s own mental state, and his search for a “resolution” to his emotional anxiety. The second is an apparent oppositionality in the treatment of anger: the tensions between anger as a vice, and anger as a divinely ordained tool of retribution, which are explored in Francis Leneghan’s article in this special edition, will be shown to inform a distinction between SolSatI and SolSatII.²⁹ When these poems are themselves brought into dialogue, a resolution can be reached through which vice (and sin) can be seen as existing in subservience to God.

The Dialectical Method in the OE Boethius and The Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn

Emerging within contexts of public intellectual debate, the dialectic models formulated by various classical philosophers seek to construct logical routes towards truth or knowledge, within a disputational framework (i.e. debates and dialogues, which may be internal).³⁰ Dmitri Nikulin addresses the distinction between dialectic and dialogue as one of a “finalized” and “univocally defined system” (dialectic) against something open and plural which preserves the otherness of its speakers (dialogue).³¹ The enactment of dialectic method within dialogue is (for many philosophers) about the movement towards a fixed sense of being. In Boethius’ writings, dialectics comes to be understood as a syllogistic “method of enquiry” and “the study of argumentative forms”; an entry-point to philosophical understanding.³² The resurgence of interest in dialectic method at the court of Charlemagne offers a context for early medieval definitions of dialectic, such as that offered by Alcuin in De dialectica:³³

Dialectica est disciplina rationalis quaerendi, diffiniendi et disserendi, etiam et vera a falsis discernendi potens […] Dicta est dialectica, quia in ea de dictis disputatur.³⁴

[Dialectics is the rational discipline of seeking, defining and disputing, and is able to discern truth from falsehood […] It is called dialecta, because within it what has been said is debated.]

Following his sources, Alcuin lays out syllogism (from συλλογισμός, a “deductive argument”) as an essential construct of dialectic, and he demonstrates the model of premise and deduction with a simple example:³⁵ Omnis virtus utilis est; castitas autem virtus est: castitas igitur utilis est (“All virtue is useful; and purity is a virtue; and accordingly [purity] is useful”). Alcuin’s approach, indebted to treatises by both Aristotle and Boethius, established the viability of a “dialectical approach to theology” in the period.³⁶ Nevertheless, as Nicole Guenther Discenza observes, the formal complexity of dialectic reasoning found in the Latin Consolatione is diminished in the Old English Boethius; syllogism is deconstructed and altered in favour of arguments more accessible to an audience untrained in logics, ultimately producing “a hybrid of late antique logic rendered in Old English and less formal reasoning”.³⁷ The Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn are even less interested in the formal construction of inference according to dialectical models: Solomon does not lead Saturn through a structured or syllogistic set of arguments towards truth, preferring to answer his questions through riddles, exempla and gnomic statements. An example of this occurs at a moment of the text’s particular interest in debate, and engagement with a topic of great interest in Boethius’ Consolatione: Saturn’s question on the relationship between fate (wyrd) and foresight (warnung).

In the Latin Consolatione (Book IV, Prose 6), Lady Philosophy offers a syllogistic account of the relationship between fate and providence, formed of two premises centred on the shared theme of “things to be done”, and two inferences on their interrelationship:

immobilem simplicemque gerendarum formam rerum esse providentiam, fatum vero eorum quae divina simplicitas gerenda disposuit mobilem nexum atque ordinem temporalem. Quo fit ut omnia quae fato subsunt providentiae quoque subiecta sint cui ipsum etiam subiacet fatum, quaedam vero quae sub providentia locata sunt fati seriem superent.

[the unmoving and simple form of the way things are done is providence, and fate is the movable interlacing and temporal ordering of those things which the divine simplicity has disposed to be done. So it is that all things that are under fate are also subject to providence, to which even fate itself is subordinate; but that some things, which are placed under providence, are above the course of fate.]³⁸

In the OE Boethius (Prose 29, C-Text) the translator has pared away the procedure of premise and inference in favour of definitions which give providence and fate distinct identities: providence is God’s foresight, fate is what humans call this once it is effected. The same hierarchy is created between fate and providence, but not via the more complex syllogistic methods of the Latin original: wyrd cymð of ðæm gewitte and of ðæm foreþonce þæs ælmihtigan Godes; “fate comes from the knowledge and from the providence of the almighty God”. This corresponds with Discenza’s thesis on the adaptation of argumentation in the OE Boethius: the text makes the same (or similar) arguments, but by a structural means more intuitive to an early medieval audience uninstructed in syllogism. The discussion of fate and providence in SolSatII takes the form of a question posed by Saturn, and a response from Solomon:

Saturnus cwæð:

Full oft ic frode menn  fyrn gehyrde

secggan ond swerian  ymb sume wisan,

hwæðer wære twegra  butan tweon strengra,

wyrd ðe warnung,  ðonne hie winnað oft

mid hira ðreamedlan,  hwæðerne aðreoteð ær.

Ic to soðon wat  – sægdon me geara

Filistina witan,  ðonne we on geflitum sæton,

bocum tobræddon  ond on bearm legdon,

meðelcwidas mengdon,  moniges fengon –

ðæt nære nænig manna  middangeardes

ðæt meahte ðara twega  tuion aspyrian.

Salomon cwæð:

Wyrd bið wended hearde,  wealleð swiðe geneahhe;

heo wop weceð,  heo wean hladeð,

heo gast scyð,  heo ger byreð;

ond hwæðre him mæg wissefa  wyrda gehwylce

gemetigian,  gif he bið modes gleaw

ond to his freondum wile  fultum secan,

ðehhwæðre godcundes  gæstes brucan.³⁹

[Saturn said: “Very often in the past I heard wise men speak and talk about a certain matter, whether without doubt one of two things were the stronger, fate or foresight, when they strive often with their oppressions, which of them wearies first. I know it as a truth—wise men of the Philistines related it to me formerly, when we sat in disputation, spread out through books and lay [them] on laps, mingled assembly-speeches, seized many [things]—that there was no man of middle-earth who might explain the ambiguities of those two.”

Solomon said: Fate is turned with difficulty, it wells up strongly enough; it rouses weeping, loads up woe, it injures the spirit, it bears years; and yet, the wise-minded one may moderate every fate for himself, if he be prudent in mind and desires to seek support from his friends, and moreover make use of God’s spirit.]

(SolSatII, ll. 247–64)

The use of warnung in l. 125a (here translated as “foresight”, but more literally meaning “caution”, following Bosworth-Toller) rather than the OE term foreþonc (“foresight” or “providence”, as used in the OE Boethius) exploits the features of Old English alliterative form to embed a dialogic process at the level of prosody. The double alliteration of wyrd and warnung in l. 250a, combined with that of the head stave, winnað (“strive”) in l. 250b, makes aural the sense of binary conflict between the two concepts. The language of debate and discourse is deployed in abundance: seccgan, swerian, sægdon, geflitum, meðelcwidas. Anlezark translates l. 255a as “exchanged speeches”, but this suggests an orderly and even cumulative process, overlooking the sense of multiplicity that arises from the remembered conversations of Saturn and his Philistine colleagues. The element meðel- relates to assemblies, and mengan (from which, gemengdon) means “to mix”, with the possibility of “to disturb”; indeed, it is in the sense of disturbance that this verb appears in SolSatI, l. 59a as an element of geondmengeð (“mixes”), when Saturn describes the negative effects of intellectual curiosity on his own mentality. The passage above is concerned with the struggle between apparently conflicting ideas: the alliteration of the (orthographically variant) words twegra/twega (“of two”) and tweon/tuion (“doubt”/“ambiguities”) creates an envelope-pattern pattern between ll. 149 and 257, between which the activities of debate (outlined above) and struggle (strengra, winnað, aðreoteð) take place. But there is no dialectical satisfaction, for with the final clause and even the final word of the passage—the point at which a resolution ought to be reached—we learn that nænig manna (“no man”) was able to produce an explanation (aspyrian). Saturn and his compatriots are invested in discursive learning, disputations and oppositions in a manner that evokes dialectical reasoning, but they fail to achieve the “univocal” outcome which Nikulin identifies as the role of dialectic.

Solomon does not seek to rectify Saturn’s failures through syllogistic reasoning, like Lady Philosophy; nor does he modify these received ideas into a new model of distinction and hierarchy, like Gesceadwisnes. Instead, he offers practical advice: fate causes distress, and people can moderate its effects through their behaviours. The passage turns not on a feat of logic, but on a contrast and a conditional (hwæðre … gif; “nevertheless … if”, ll. 261a, 262b), which together establish ideals for human behaviour: being wise-minded, seeking support from friends, and making use of God’s spirit. Instead of gradually reaching truths through logical structures of inference, Saturn reinforces his lesson through a gnomic register and maximic lists linked by parallelism: repeated bið at ll. 258a and 262b expresses universal and conditional states; heo + inflectional end-rhyme in each half-line of ll. 259–60 chain-links the adversarial characterisations of fate; the methods for the moderation of fate feature off-verses consisting of verbs with inflectional end-rhyme preceded by the objects of that verb (fultum secan; gæstes brucan).

We will return to Solomon’s comments on mentality and emotion in due course; here it is sufficient to note the distinctive structural mode of handling the topic of fate’s distinction from foresight. If the Old English Boethius alters logical complexity to meet the needs of an audience of a particular educational background, the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn seem further to acculturate both the themes of this dialectical text, and indeed the idea of dialectic itself, into forms of rhetorical persuasion more commonly found in Old English verse: gnomes, maxims, riddles and exempla.⁴⁰ Although Saturn’s defeat in SolSatFrag is suggestive of a “dialectic resolution”, Tiffany Beechy argues that the collection resists “closure” in favour of a capacious “dialogic plurality”, based on the cooperation of its interlocutors, and ambiguous forms of wisdom-sharing (such as the use of riddles).⁴¹ Given this departure from dialectic logic as conceived by Boethius’ classical sources, and Beechy’s suggestion of a “capacious” rather than “closed” conclusion to the dialogues, can the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn be said to engage meaningfully with dialectic method?

It is vital here to note that this collection contains the only surviving verse dialogues with named interlocutors originally composed in Old English.⁴² The Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn adopt certain key trappings of traditional classic dialectic literature—the dialogue format, the interest in argumentation, and a thematic concern with oppositional concepts—and they engage with philosophical issues core to Boethius’ Consolatione, the most important and prevalent dialectical text of the period. The open-endedness of riddles should not be mistaken for dialogic plurality in the Bakhtinian sense, which resists the predetermined route to truth of Platonic dialogue as “monologic”.⁴³ For although riddles offer essential mental training in finding multiple readings within texts, this is closely tied with the influential contemporary practices of scriptural sense, in which multiple layers of reading may be elicited from the Bible. Such multiplicity cannot be thought of as plurality in Bakhtin’s mode, for, as Augustine declares, all such readings find resolution in the hegemonic truth of God’s Word: “peace reigns in the scriptures, everything is in agreement; there are no contradictions at all”.⁴⁴ The Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, as we will see further below, do not do away with dialectics; rather, they enact an essential aspect of its spirit—the movement, through disputation, towards truth—in a structure loosed from the formal requirements of Aristotelian and Boethian logic. In particular, as I will argue in the remainder of this article, SolSatI and SolSatII enact a dialectal approach to mentality which therapeutically enables Saturn to benefit from Solomon’s teachings. This therapeutic process is entangled with the broader theological disputations of the text in an essential co-dependency—the mind must improve in order to understand the teachings; the teachings guide the improvement of the mind.

Remodelling Saturn’s Mentality

Saturn’s persona in both SolSatI and SolSatII is characterised by emotional disturbance; in SolSatI, his references to awe, sadness and anxiety are all self-referential.⁴⁵ Solomon, on the other hand, remains distinctly emotionless as a character, deploying images of unhappiness and anger in SolSatI to construct guidance for his visitor. Here, Saturn has come to ask Solomon to give him an account of the Pater Noster prayer, and, as Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe notes, his desire is not simply for knowledge of the prayer but for “experience” of it.⁴⁶ Specifically, he offers Solomon reward:

gif þu mec gebringest   þæt ic si gebrydded

ðurh þæs cantices cwyde,  Cristes linan,

gesemesð mec mid soðe,  and ic mec gesund ferie,

wende mec on willan on  wæteres hrigc

ofer Coferflod  Caldeas secan.

[if you bring it about for me, that I am terrified/inspired/overawed through recitation of the canticle, Christ’s line, satisfy me with truth, and I will myself depart unhurt, turn myself with desire onto the circuit of waters to seek the Chaldeans over the Chobar.]⁴⁷

(SolSatI, ll. 16–20)

This is Saturn’s first reference to his own internal life, and he pairs two desired mental states through the repeated use of mec (“me”, underlined above); these states are represented by the words gebrydded and gesemesð. The definition of gebrydded (attested in this form only once in the OE corpus) has offered a challenge to translators: some early editions (e.g. Menner, Poetical Dialogues; Dobbie, Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems) opt for non-violent interpretations (“inspired”, “overawed”); O’Brien O’Keeffe, on the other hand, sees “struggle” and “violence” as “symptomatic of oral culture”, and so follows the “common definition” of gebryddan as “to terrify” (established by Holthausen).⁴⁸ A commonly-accepted framework in the cognitive sciences poses two dimensions for the modelling of emotion: valence (how positive or negative an emotion is) and arousal (how intense an emotion is).⁴⁹ The valence of the emotional state implied by gebrydded is opaque—terror is a negative state of feeling (and is evoked as such elsewhere in SolSatI),⁵⁰ but awe and inspiration offer both ambiguous and positive possibilities. More transparent is the high-level arousal of the emotion, with all possible translations of the word implying an intensity of feeling, one which exceeds the immediate grasp of the mind.

Whether gesemesð implies an emotion, something akin to Modern English “satisfaction”, is a more ambiguous matter. Anlezark identifies the use of this word as a pun, based on Isidore of Seville’s description of Saturn as saturetur (“sated”) in the Etymologiae.⁵¹ The primary meaning of this word in Old English (and of related seman) relates to the arbitration of dispute, or the reconciliation of difficulty between multiple parties;⁵² in both verse and prose texts, it is used to describe processes related to resolution and exchange. In Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care, also translated under the Alfredian programme, the verb appears as part of a command for supplicants to be at peace with their neighbours before offering gifts to God (following the words of Matthew 5, Læt inc geseman ær ðu ðin lac bringe, “Let the two of you be reconciled before you bring your gift”); in the Old English Orosius, another product of the Alfredian translation drive, geseman appears in contexts of binary struggle, to indicate the reconciliation achieved (or not) in times of war; in his translation of Genesis (late tenth century), Ælfric introduces the idea of reconciliation to his biblical source material on Joseph’s gifts to his father and estranged brothers (þa wæron gesemede mid feo & mid rægle & mid egyptum welum, “they were reconciled with money and with clothing and with the wealth of Egypt”).⁵³ These aspects of meeting, exchange and resolution speak to the dialectic framework of the dialogue-poem, and the arbitration of questions which Saturn expects to be resolved through conversation. The double alliteration of l. 18a binds gesemesð with soðe (“truth”), and this idea of reaching a truthful resolution through a dualistic discourse further voices the spirit of dialectic.

The key to understanding the role played by this word in the emotional topography of the text is, I believe, in the headstave gesund (“unhurt”, “healthy”, or “safe”, l. 18b) which alliterates with both gesemesð and soðe.⁵⁴ It is not immediately obvious why Saturn would place emphasis on his returning home unharmed—despite the cultural distance between the interlocutors, he has not been threatened by Solomon, and his entreaty is for help rather than confrontation. But Saturn’s second reference to his mental state in the poem speaks to an essential emotional unhealthiness, a grappling with anxiety:

Ac hulic is se organ  ingemyndum

to begonganne  ðam ðe his gast wile

meltan wið morðre,  mergan of sorge,

asceadan of scyldigum?  Huru him Scippend geaf

wuldorlicne wlite.  Mec ðæs on worolde full oft

fyrwit frineð,  fus gewiteð,

mod gemengeð.  Nænig manna wat,

hæleða under hefenum,  hu min hige dreoseð,

bysig æfter bocum.  Hwilum me bryne stigeð,

hige heortan neah  hædre wealleð.

[But how is the song to be exercised through the memory by he who desires to melt his soul against murder, to purify it of sorrow, to separate it from crime? Indeed the Creator gave to him a wondrous aspect. Curiosity asks me that full often in the world, eagerly moves about, mixes the mind. No man knows, of heroes under the heavens, how my mind drips away, busy in the pursuit of books. Sometimes burning rises up within me, the mind near the heart wells anxiously/oppressively]

(SolSatI, ll. 53–62)

Leslie Lockett cites this passage as an example of “mind–body distress” within the hydraulic model of emotion; Saturn’s experience of anxiety is embodied as a heat that is felt to rise internally, the mind itself raising the physical pressure in the space of the body near to the heart.⁵⁵ Through a series of verbs derived from practices of metallurgy, he voices a need to rid his gast (“soul”) of impurities, including the emotional state of sorge (“sorrow”).⁵⁶ The emotional state registered here corresponds both with a strongly negative valence, and with a high state of embodied arousal. Saturn’s initially abstract question about “one who” (ðam ðe) wishes to use the Pater Noster is made self-referential both by his own keenness to learn about the prayer at the poem’s start, and by the movement into a discussion of his personal curiosity and anxiety from line 57. He is not, crucially, sund on arrival at Solomon’s court, and the cross-continental pursuit of learning which he outlines in an emotionally neutral fashion in SolSatI, ll. 1–4 is soon shown to be a component part of his mental distress. Just as the knowledge of the Pater Noster is presented as the culmination to these travels (ll. 5–12), so Saturn expects the prayer to provide a more personal and cognitive “satisfaction” or “resolution” by healing his anxiety. He is seeking the high-arousal experience of being gebrydded (“terrified”; “overawed”; “inspired”) as an antidote to the intensely negative feelings he has experienced hitherto. In other words, he is chasing emotional intensity. He makes a similarly framed observation about the relationship between his fyrwet (“curiosity”), his tortured mental state, and his need for satisfaction in SolSatII:

An wise is on  woroldrice

ymb ða me fyrwet bræc  . L . wintra

dæges ond niehtes  ðurh deop gesceaft:

geomrende gast.  Deð nu gena swa,

ærðon me geunne  ece dryhten

ðæt me geseme  snoterra monn.

[There is one condition in the worldly kingdom about which curiosity has pressed me day and night for fifty years, through deep fate: a sorrowing spirit. Yet now it still does so, until the eternal Lord grant to me that a wiser man should satisfy me.]

(SolSat II, ll. 69–74)

Once again, the idea of satisfaction or reconciliation through dualistic exchange is bound up procedurally and alliteratively with wisdom (geseme / snoterra). Saturn’s concern here with the geomrende gast is not explicitly self-referential, but the parallels between this passage and SolSatI, ll. 53–62 suggest that the “condition” (wise) which has plagued him is indeed his own.⁵⁷ Solomon responds with a discursus on the Vasa mortis, a captured bird which experiences strong emotions of “fear, grief and desire”, which Anlezark links with the texts’ broader interest in Jerome’s perturbations as discussed at the start of this article.⁵⁸ Saturn continues to act out his oppressive curiosity through the text, repeatedly returning to questions and statements about sorrow; these are not made personal to himself, with the exception of his final invocation of wyrd as weana wyrtwela, wopes heafod (“plant-root of woe, head (source) of weeping”), which he couches in terms of what fate does to us (“us”).⁵⁹

Returning to the affective model established above within Boethius’ Consolatione and its Old English adaptations, the dialectical mode of the dialogue-poem indeed offers the potential for cognitive remodelling to its supplicant characters—but not, as Saturn imagines, through engagement with more intense emotional experience. Where Lady Philosophy/Gesceadwisnes make explicit the directive to dispense with emotions of both positive and negative valence, all of which perturb the mind, Solomon does not. Rather, he models a kind of apatheia for Saturn through his own addresses to emotion, and critiques only emotions of negative valence, leaving open the possibility for engagement with joy.⁶⁰ This is in keeping with what we have already noted about the poem’s approach to intellectual revelation more broadly: although many Boethian cruces are touched upon in the course of SolSatI and SolSatII, Solomon (unlike Lady Philosophy/Gesceadwisnes) does not lead his interlocutor through rational disputation, preferring to dispense wisdom through (often oblique) riddles, maxims and exempla. Solomon’s references to emotion in SolSatI are never personal to himself, and those with negative valence (unhappiness and woe) are directed solely at figures doomed to damnation: the man who does not know the Pater Noster (Unlæde bið on eorþan […] se þurh ðone cantic ne can Crist geherian, “Unhappy on earth is he who cannot praise Christ through the canticle”), and the devil himself when under attack by the prayer (Huru him bið æt heartan wa, “Indeed there will be woe for him at heart”).⁶¹ In SolSatII, Solomon responds to Saturn’s queries with wisdom on sadness, which he delivers in the form of exempla (on the Vasa mortis, ll. 75–103, and on the grieving mother of an exiled son, ll.153–208) and through gnomic statements.⁶²

In the discussion above regarding SolSatII’s construction of a vernacular dialectics, we observed that Solomon’s response to the debate on wyrd (“fate”) and warnung (“foresight”) revolves not around formal logics (as in Boethius’ Consolatione) but the dispensation of gnomic wisdom on how to “moderate” fate, which is characterised by its negative emotional impact (ll. 258–64). The behaviours which allow fate to be thus moderated are exactly those which have emerged from the interlocutory engagement between Saturn and Solomon: mental wisdom, support from friends, and (particularly in the Pater Noster teachings of SolSatI) the use of God’s spirit. The act of conversation is itself a therapeutic means of countering the emotional effects of changes in personal fortune, and the alliterative link between freondum and fultum in l. 263 underscores the role that a community of wisdom can play in making the troubled soul whole, or sund. Solomon does not speak to the failure of Saturn’s disputation among the Philistines, or why this particular discursive setup failed to provide an answer to the question of fate and foresight; the implication is that the only wisdom which can lead one towards conclusive truth is one informed by Christian knowledge.⁶³ It may even be that despite the text’s evident engagement in the spirit of dialectic, it retains a scepticism about the legitimacy of applying dialectical methods to theological questions (as addressed above, a scepticism expressed in early Anglo-Latin literature by such writers as Aldhelm and Bede).

The “sound” mind, purified from sorrow, does make an appearance in the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, though not in SolSatI or SolSatII, neither of which travel with their endings.⁶⁴ SolSatFrag appears to be a nine-line conclusion to a debate between the two interlocutors; whether it was originally envisioned as the ending of one or other of the major poems is a matter of debate.⁶⁵ The fragment’s very final lines, and indeed its final word, present Saturn in a state of exultation; he has been defeated in debate by Solomon, and it brings him happiness:

Hæfde ða se snotra  sunu Dauides

forcumen ond forcyðed  Caldea eorl.

Hwæðre was on sælum  se ðe of siðe cwom

feorran gefered.  Næfre ær his ferhð ahlog.

[The wise son of David had then overcome and surpassed in knowledge the Chaldean nobleman. However, he was happy, he who had come on a journey, travelled from afar. Never before had his heart laughed.]

(SolSatFrag, ll. 6–9)

Whether Saturn’s laughter is a moment of closure, or of failure to close, is debated. Anlezark suggests that the laughter reflects Saturn’s recognition of Solomon’s advice: “a happy outlook is wisdom itself”.⁶⁶ Beechy observes that this episode of laughter suggests “resolution” to Saturn’s troubled mentality, identifying him as a “virtuous pagan”; but she also sees the laughter as ambiguous, resisting assimilation into a fixed conclusion and transcending the “dialectal confines” of defeat.⁶⁷ This overlooks a parallel between SolSatFrag’s joyful conclusion, and the conclusion of another dialogic text: Augustine’s Soliloquia, which was translated into Old English around the same period as the composition of the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn.⁶⁸ Patrick P. O’Neill suggests that Saturn’s “magnanimous rejoicing” corresponds with the conclusion to the Soliloquia, where Mod admits both defeat and happiness at the nature of the defeat. Laughter is also a matter of interest in Alcuin’s De dialectica; in his efforts to explain various structural aspects of logic, Alcuin offers an example of a characteristic (proprium) which distinguishes humankind from other species: they alone laugh (Ut solius hominis proprietas est, risibilis). This principle is returned to four times in the De dialectica, becoming emblematic not only of humanity as distinct from other created life, but also of the processes of logical reasoning.⁶⁹ The idea that laughter is unique to mankind is not Alcuin’s innovation, but if the SolSatFrag poet had knowledge of it, then the “symbolic” value of Solomon’s laughter could be extended beyond the resolution of his mental state to identification with a core and essential aspect of humanity, a return to the status naturae envisioned by the environmental metaphors of water and stars in Boethius’ Consolatione, as well as identification with the successful workings of a dialectical process.⁷⁰ Even if the correspondence with Alcuin’s De dialectica is merely fortuitous, the parallel with the Soliloquia, and the emotional aspect of “relief” that Beechy identifies in the phrasing of l. 9b, together show Saturn’s emotional recovery emerging in symbiosis with his engagement in the progress of debate and his own conclusive defeat at the hands of wisdom. This is the resolution, the satisfaction which he has desired, achieved through a vernacularisation of disputative dialogue.

Anger: Oppositions of Vice and Divinity

Unhappiness and anxiety are emotive states which effect introspection and self-analysis for Saturn in both poems. Anger, on the other hand, is repeatedly weaponised by Solomon, and receives quite differentiated treatment between SolSatI and SolSatII. In his article in this special edition, Francis Leneghan argues that in Beowulf, the hero partakes of a “righteous indignation” derived from God, rather than indulging in sinful anger as has more generally been believed. There is broad agreement amongst the church fathers on the dangers of anger as an emotion that leads one to sin; this is in line with certain classical approaches to anger as a vice.⁷¹ For the early medieval English, this was passed down in the work of such influential patristic authors as Gregory the Great (d. 604 CE), who cites anger as one of seven deadly sins in his Morals on the Book of Job (XXXI.xlv) and John Cassian (d. 435 CE), who cites the biblical teachings of Solomon:⁷²

We ought then to restrain every movement of anger and moderate it under the direction of discretion, that we may not by blind rage be hurried into that which is condemned by Solomon: “The wicked man expends all his anger, but the wise man dispenses it bit by bit”.

(Conferences, Part II, Conference 16, Chapter 27)

Human anger, as Barbara H. Rosenwein notes, is the subject of “censure” in Hebrew scripture, but divine anger provokes complexity, for nothing that is divine can be sinful; moreover, the Psalms, in which God’s wrath is so prominent (e.g. “Rise up, O Lord, in thy anger”, Psalm 7.7) are the foundation of monastic life.⁷³ Patristic literature offers different rationalisations for expressions of God’s anger in the Bible: among later writers we find the (at least somewhat opposed) positions that (a) God directs justified anger against sin, and (b) that God’s anger is “an emotion which is produced in the [faithful, human] soul” (Augustine, Enarrationes in psalmos 2.4) when it witnesses sin; in other words, that God’s anger is not something that he experiences, but is rather a matter of human perception.⁷⁴ The complication of just and unjust anger exists for human subjects too; noteworthy is Gregory’s warning that while vices inspire one another, they may also be inspired by virtue: “anger proceeds from zeal”; and so even the individual inflamed with righteous fervour must practice moderation to avoid sin (Morals on the Book of Job, XXXI.xliv–xlv).

In SolSatI, anger appears in only one context: Solomon’s description of the Pater Noster battle. This episode anthropomorphises the abstract process by which the faithful recitation of the Lord’s Prayer is believed to counter the person of the devil.⁷⁵ The singing of the Pater Noster is envisaged as a “bringing down” of each of its letters, which, warrior-like, attack the devil bodily (SolSatI, ll. 84–148). The very first of these letters, P, is described as ierne (l. 88b, “the angry one”); the letter R is next to be described emotively, seeking the devil ieorrenga (l. 98b, “angrily”); C is yrra (l. 123b, “angry”), the adjective probably positioned to alliterate with the letter I in the on-verse; two letters referred to as lifgetwinnan (l. 154b, “life-twins”) deliver gartorn (l. 145a, “spear-rage”) upon the devil. With the exception of the -torn compound, these words are all orthographic and grammatical variants on OE irre; this variation on a repeated lemma saturates the battle-passage with a clear vision of the prayer’s rage. Within the battle episode, the devil is primarily represented as an increasingly broken body, with assaults centring upon the head—throat, tongue, teeth, cheeks and hair—and his bone (ban), veins (ædran) and shanks (sconcan) also coming into view. His emotional response to the assault is also registered, though he is never the performer of emotional action. After the initial attacks of the five letters of PATER, the devil wishes to flee:

Wendeð he hiene ðonne under wolcnum,  wigsteall seceð,

heolstre behelmed.  Huru him bið æt heartan wa

ðonne he hangiende  helle wisceð

ðæs ęngestan eðelrices.

[He then turns under the clouds, seeks a fortress, covered by shadow. Indeed, there will be woe for him at heart when he, hanging, wishes for hell, the most constrained of home-kingdoms]

(SolSatI, ll. 103–106)

The echo between this passage of SolSatI and the episode of Beowulf in which Grendel desires to flee the hero’s grip has not previously been noted, to the best of my knowledge:

       He on mode wearð

forht on ferhðe;  no þy ær fram meahte.

Hyge wæs him hinfus,  wolde on heolster fleon,

secan deofla gedræg⁷⁶

[In his mind and spirit he became afraid; his heart was eager to be off, he wanted to flee into shadow, to seek the dwelling of devils]

(Beowulf, ll. 753a–56a)

More striking than the few lexical echoes is the parallel programme of events in each episode: the creature under attack (Grendel or the devil) experiences some variation on fear (Beo, forhte) or despair (SolSatI, wa) in its heart (Beo, hyge; SolSatI, heartan); it turns to seek (Beo, secan; SolSatI, seceð) a place of safety, variously configured as the home of devils (Beo) or a defensive position (SolSatI).⁷⁷ The formulaic phrase under wolcnum (“beneath the clouds”), in SolSatI related to the retreat of the devil, is associated in Beowulf with the demonic spirit Grendel; not, in fact, in his desire to flee, but in his much-awaited arrival into Heorot (ll. 651, 714a). Daniel Anlezark notes a number of images in SolSatI which find some kind of comparison with the early part of Beowulf, notably here the hair-pulling carried out by both the letter R upon the devil (99b–100a) and by Beowulf upon Grendel’s mother.⁷⁸ The correspondence between these two passages does not demonstrate that the SolSatI-poet had access to the text of Beowulf, but it possibly suggests that they had heard the poem, or this section of the poem.⁷⁹ Anger and its theological weight provides a possible explanation for the echo of Beowulf at this point in SolSatI. Grendel, as described in Leneghan’s article, bears the weight of Godes yrre (“God’s anger”, Beo, l. 711b) through the inherited sin of Cain, and Beowulf’s own anger is therefore that of a righteous avenger appointed by God. In SolSatI the setup is the same but heightened: the Pater Noster is a yet more divine avenger, being Christ’s own words (Cristes linan, “Christ’s line”, l. 17b) while the devil is a yet more ultimate figure of sin than the kin of Cain. The trope of heroic divine anger evidently commands sufficient power and currency (at least amongst the monastic circle thought to have authored Solomon and Saturn) to be deployed as part of a complex metaphor for the effects of prayer. Certainly, the two passages mutually confirm one another’s approach to affect.

In SolSatII, anger is the preserve of the unrighteous, but the focus on divine anger remains current. As in SolSatI, it is an emotion invoked only by Solomon, not in relation to his personal state but as a descriptor for others: Saturn, his people the Chaldeans, Lucifer himself, and the human victim of devilish temptation. In this second poem, anger is distinctly a vice, but one that is nevertheless harnessed by God as part of the manifestation of his providence.

Saturn self-identifies as a Chaldean when he promises to return ofer Coferflod (“over the Chobar”) in SolSatI (ll. 18b–20)⁸⁰ and is described as such again in a parallel passage by Solomon in SolSatI (ll. 26–30); in SolSatFrag, he receives the epithet Caldea eorl (l. 7b, “nobleman of Chaldeans”).⁸¹ The Chaldeans were a people who settled in the region of Babylon, and their identity eventually became synonymous with that of the Babylonians.⁸² Anlezark notes that their reputation as “instruments of God’s wrath” reached the English (finding expression in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica), particularly in the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple by Nebuchadnezzar (a Babylonian king of the Chaldean dynasty).⁸³ The prophet Ezekiel represents the destruction of the temple as an act of divine vengeance against a sinful people (Ezekiel 9.7):

Et dixit ad eos: Contaminate domum, et implete atria interfectis; egredimini. Et egressi sunt, et percutiebant eos qui erant in civitate.

[He [God] said to them, “Dishonor the temple! Fill its courtyards with dead people, and then leave.” So they went out and killed the people in the city.]

The later account of the prophet Ezra is yet more explicit about both God’s anger, and his use of the Chaldeans (Ezra 5.12):

Postquam autem ad iracundiam provocaverunt patres nostri Deum cæli, tradidit eos in manus Nabuchodonosor regis Babylonis Chaldæi, domum quoque hanc destruxit, et populum ejus transtulit in Babylonem.

[But after that our fathers had provoked the God of heaven to wrath, he delivered them into the hands of Nabuchodonosor the king of Babylon the Chaldean: and he destroyed this house, and carried away the people to Babylon.]

Nor is this God’s first use of the Chaldeans for the violent exertion of his will; in the Book of Job, they are one of the marauding forces through which God tests the faith of his servant (Job 1.17):

Sed et illo adhuc loquente, venit alius, et dixit: Chaldæi fecerunt tres turmas, et invaserunt camelos, et tulerunt eos, necnon et pueros percusserunt gladio: et ego fugi solus, ut nuntiarem tibi.

[And while he also was yet speaking, there came another, and said: The Chaldeans made three troops, and have fallen upon the camels, and taken them, moreover they have slain the servants with the sword, and I alone have escaped to tell thee.]

There is a particular irony to Solomon’s citation of the Chaldeans as an “angry great-people” (eorre eormenstrynde, l. 153a) with a “malicious nature” (inwitgecyndo, l. 153b), for the “same temple” (ilcan temple, SolSatProse, l. 115) in which he sits debating with Saturn, and which he and his father collectively built, is that which the Chaldeans will eventually destroy as part of God’s rage against Judea. Perhaps curiously, Solomon does not encourage Saturn to envisage himself as part of this instrument of divine vengeance, but rather as having agency over his emotive state:⁸⁴

Swa bið ðonne ðissum modgum monnum,  ðam ðe her nu mid mane lengest

lifiað on ðisse lænan gesceafte.  Ieo ðæt ðine leode gecyðdon,

wunnon hie wið Dryhtnes miehtum,  forðon hie ðæt worc ne gedegdon.

Ne sceall ic ðe hwæðre broðor abelgan;  ðu eart swiðe bittres cynnes,

eorre eormenstrynde.  Ne beyrn ðu in ða inwitgecyndo!

[So it will be then for these proud men, those who here now with wickedness live in this loaned creation. In times past your people made that known, they struggled against the might of the Lord, therefore they did not complete that work. Nor however must I anger you, brother; you are of a very bitter kindred, an angry great-people. Do not run with that malicious nature!]

(SolSatII, ll. 149–53)

The incomplete work which Saturn refers to is the tower of Babel.⁸⁵ Pride, rather than anger, is the vice associated with the attempt in Genesis to build a tower that reaches heaven, and pride is associated with the Chaldeans more generally through the person of Nebuchadnezzar.⁸⁶ In a syllogistic passage from The City of God, Book XII, Chapter 3, Augustine argues that vice is not intrinsic to any creature’s nature—even where “by the force of habit and long continuance [it] has become a second nature”—but is adopted by the will; and moreover, that nothing can be solely evil, given that the initial nature (however damaged by vice) is good. The idea of vice as adopted freely may explain how Solomon can attribute anger to the Chaldeans, and yet encourage Saturn to avoid adopting this inwitgecyndo (“malicious nature”).

The penultimate invocation of anger in SolSatII is also bound up with the sin of pride, relating to the rebellion and fall of Lucifer (ll. 273–78a).⁸⁷ Lucifer’s desire to overthrow heaven is presented as a strategy by which he intends to give an end to his anger (his tornes geuðe / ende, l. 277b–78a).⁸⁸ This iteration of anger is not only vice, but part of the Ur-vice which leads to sin in the world more broadly; it also inspires the only moment in the poem where God himself is credited with an emotional response—he is gedrefed (“troubled”, “disturbed”) by Lucifer’s gehygdo (“thoughts”) (l. 279a). Punishment for the devil is immediate and absolute, as God incarcerates him in Hell; but Solomon notes that the very existence of the feondas (“enemies”, l. 281a) from Hell results in witena gehwam wopes eaca (“an increase of woe for each of the wise”, l. 282). Even though the threat of the devil is within God’s power to constrain, it is experienced as emotional disturbance, apparently by both God and mankind. For the hapless individual who gives way to sin, it is not sorrow but anger which will be felt, after following the delusions of evil (ll. 303–19).⁸⁹

The differential presentation of anger in SolSatI and SolSatII leads the two dialogue-poems to engage in their own conversation, levelling the divine and just anger of the Pater Noster prayer in SolSatI against the anger of heathens and devils in SolSatII. This poses a set of premises and problems which we can express dialectically: vice is sinful, and anger is a vice, so anger is a sin; however, anger can be used in the service of God. It then follows that neither sin nor vice sit beyond the bounds of God’s providence, a conclusion which plays back into many of Saturn’s questions about fairness, justice and evil.

Conclusions

The dialectic approach to mentality worked out in the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn is one that requires its different fragmentary texts to be brought into dialogue with one another. Questions of manuscript organisation, damage and possible displacement obscure a complete vision of how this was intended to work, but the resolutions to pressing emotional questions which arise from the bringing together of SolSatI and SolSatII point to a metatextual dialecticism which urges conversation between texts as a route to knowledge. This is very much in keeping with the extremely learned and allusive quality of all of the texts in the collection, in which different sources of knowledge—scriptural, patristic, homiletic and scientific—rub shoulders to produce meaning.⁹⁰ The English vernacular dialectics in play may appear to pin down meaning less concretely than the dense syllogism of classical and late antique forerunners in the dialogic tradition, but this is only a matter of presentation. The texts’ deep concern with contradictions in the emotional sphere of human life (such as the contrast of weeping and laughter; the problem of anger as sinful or divine), and Saturn’s determination to achieve resolution of his own mental troubles through discursive exchange are answered through a combination of on the one hand, finalised statements of wisdom (maxims), and on the other, riddles and exempla which invite the interpretative ingenuity of readers. In contrast with previous analysis of this poem, I conclude that this reconfiguring of the art of disputation does not suggest an unlimited plurality of acceptable responses to ambiguous questions; Saturn’s own personage makes it very clear how anxious intellectual readers might be to discover the singular truth of God’s providence. It does, however, suggest an appeal to a readership more accustomed to (and perhaps, interested in) puzzling out questions than following strings of logical sequiturs. In the matter of mentality this dialectic is paramount, for it shows how an individual’s emotional state is open to moderation and improvement through discursive practice. It also demonstrates through the inter-textual dialogue of SolSatI and SolSatII that, as with all things, nothing in the emotive sphere lies beyond God’s providential oversight.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Carone, “Socratic Rhetoric in the ‘Gorgias’,” 221, on the typical contrast between intellectual debate and emotive rhetoric in Socratic scholarship.

2 Chapman, “Dialectical Behavior Therapy,” see esp. 62, 67.

3 And probably in Glastonbury during the reign of King Athelstan, according to Anlezark, Dialogues, 49–57, placing the poem within a monastic context befitting its learnedness. For arguments in favour of an Alfredian period of composition, see O’Neill, “On the Date, Provenance and Relationship of the 'Solomon and Saturn' Dialogues”; Wade, “Language, Letters, and Augustinian Origins in the Old English Poetic Solomon and Saturn I”.

4 Discenza, The King’s English.

5 See, for example, Anlezark, “Drawing Alfredian Waters”.

6 Beechy, “Wisdom and the Poetics of Laughter in the Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn.”

7 Consolatione I.vi, et eam mentium constat esse naturam, ut quotiens abiecerint veras falsis opinionibus induantur ex quibus orta perturbationum caligo verum illum confundit intuitum (“and it is well-known that it is the nature of minds that whenever they may cast away truths, they may be dressed in false opinions, from which the fog of perturbationes (disturbances) confounds that true vision/contemplation”). In this article, I will refer to the Latin Consolatione philosophiae as the Consolatione, and to the Old English translation as the OE Boethius. Latin text is from Boethius, Theological Tractates: The Consolation of Philosophy; translations are the authors own, having consulted the Loeb translation.

8 Consolatione I.vii.

9 Commentarii in Ezechielem (CPL 0587; CCSL 75), I.i.271: audisse me memini quattuor perturbationes, de quibus plenissime cicero in tusculanis disputat: gaudii, aegritudinis, cupidinis et timoris, quorum duo praesentia, duo futura sunt, per quattuor significari animalia (“I remember hearing the four perturbationes (disturbances), concerning which Cicero most completely treats in the Tusculans: joy, grief, desire and fear, of which two are present, two are future, signified through four animals”). On Jerome’s connection of these four emotions with Ezekiel 10.4, and on the derivation of these affective foci from Cicero and the Stoics, see Anlezark, The Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, 124.

10 Konstantinovsky, “apatheia”.

11 On these four virtues in Jerome, see Anlezark, Dialogues, 127.

12 On Boethius’ debt to the Tusculan Disputations, and the position of these texts within the early western history of dialogic writing, see Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue.

13 This text is not among the few of Cicero’s to have survived in English manuscripts from the period c.600–1100 (Gneuss and Lapidge, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, 903), nor does Michael Lapidge list it among the classical works known in early medieval England (The Anglo-Saxon Library, 297).

14 Godden and Irvine, The Old English Boethius, Vol. 1, 8. Godden and Irvine place the composition of both texts between 885 and the mid-tenth century.

15 On the shift from Lady Philosophy to Wisdom, see further Discenza, “The Old English Boethius”.

16 Old English text of the OE Boethius (B- and C-texts) from Godden and Irvine, The Old English Boethius, vol. 1. Translations are the author’s own, having consulted the translations in Godden and Irvine, The Old English Boethius, vol. 2.

17 On the tendency towards clarification and accessibility in Alfredian translations, see Bately, The Literary Prose of King Alfred’s Reign: Translation or Transformation?; Whitelock, “The Prose of Alfred’s Reign”.

18 See also Magennis, “Tearas Feollon: Tears and Weeping in Old English Literature”.

19 For a complementary approach, which emphasises a similar trajectory from dialogic dispute to resolution, see Brooks, “Intimacy, Interdependence, and Interiority in the Old English Prose Boethius,” who argues that “the Old English Boethius transforms the Socratic dialogue of its main Latin source, Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, into an interdependent dialogue focused on the inner life” (525; see also esp. 541).

20 Anlezark links the perturbationes with three episodes in the Old English Solomon and Saturn II: that of the four-headed Vasa mortis (ll. 85–95), the four ropes (ll. 154–55), and one of Saturn’s questions about emotion (ll. 170–4), and argues that the poet had knowledge of Jerome’s writings (Dialogues, 124–25, 127, 130). In “The Vasa mortis and Misery”, he draws a connection between the treatment of sorrow in the Consolatione and Solomon and Saturn II (133–34).

21 O’Neill, “Date and Provenance,” 142–43; Anlezark, Dialogues, 12–13.

22 Anlezark, Dialogues, 13.

23 Such a comparison is made by O’Neill (“Date and Provenance,” 154–57), who points to affinities of structure (including dialogism), theme and focus between the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, and the Old English Boethius and Soliloquies. Daniel Anlezark has recently argued that not only does the learnedness of the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn suggest “an educated circle in which Alfredian works were known and studied”, but that the author of SolSatII read and borrowed elements from the Old English Boethius (“Drawing Alfredian Waters”, 242).

24 See also Alice Jorgensen’s article in this special edition, which notes the relationship between description of emotion in the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn with that of the later Alfredian canon. The dispassion of Solomon and the emotion of Solomon is also noted by Anlezark, “The Vasa Mortis and Misery in Solomon and Saturn II”. In this article, SolSatI and SolSatII will be referred to through these abbreviations; the prose dialogue will be referred to as SolSatProse, and the fragmentary piece of verse as SolSatFrag. The collection of dialogues as a whole will be referred to as the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn. On the common authorship of the Old English Boethius and Soliloquies, see Godden and Irvine, The Old English Boethius, I, 135–36.

25 All biblical quotations are from Weber and Gryson, Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem; biblical translations are from the Douay-Rheims Bible.

26 The correspondence of Gesceadwisnes with Solomon and Saturn with Mod, with reference to Saturn’s sincerity, has been noted by Pedersen (“‘Wyrd ðe Warnung’ . . . or God: The Question of Absolute Sovereignty in ‘Solomon and Saturn II’,” 719–20), while Larrington has pointed to the same correspondence of Lady Philosophy with Solomon and Boethius with Saturn (A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Wisdom in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry, 156). Both Pedersen and Larrington are concerned with the concepts of wyrd (fate) and warning (foresight), rather than with the emotional characterisation of these various figures.

27 Cf. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “syllogism”, “An argument expressed or claimed to be expressible in the form of two propositions called the premisses, containing a common or middle term, with a third proposition called the conclusion, resulting necessarily from the other two. Example: Omne animal est substantia, omnis homo est animal, ergo omnis homo est substantia”; (“Every animal is material, every man is an animal, therefore every man is material”, author’s translation).

28 Anlezark, “The Vasa Mortis and Misery in Solomon and Saturn II”, see for example 126.

29 Leneghan, “Beowulf, the Wrath of God and the Fall of the Angels”.

30 On the essentially dialogic aspect of classical dialectics, see Fink, The Development of Dialectic from Plato to Aristotle, Part I: Dialectic as Interpersonal Activity, and Part II: Form and Content in the Philosophical Dialogue; and on contemporary contexts of public debate, see Smith, “Aristotle’s Logic” (8.3 The Uses of Dialectic and Dialectical Argument). On discursivity and reason in relation to dialectics see Nikulin (Dialectic and Dialogue 41–3. Nikulin defines Platonic dialectic as “a refined and sophisticated way of accessing the “what” of a thing or notion through definition by means of certain forms of reasoning. The dialectician shows and demonstrates what each thing is through a discursive, step-by-step process— not an act— of investigation that involves posing the appropriate (possibly unambiguous) questions and providing the correct answers, a process that originally occurs in dialogue with the other” (38). Approaches to dialectics are not homogenous among classical writers; see, for example, on Cicero’s reception of the dialogue form and adaptation of the dialectic method from Aristotle and Plato, Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue, 34–8.

31 Nikulin, Dialectic and Dialogues, 153–4.

32 Lerer, Boethius and Dialogue, 6, 95, 99.

33 On anxieties around the use of dialectic method in early medieval England, see Discenza, The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius, 178 n. 56; Contreni, “The Carolingian Renaissance: Education and Literary Culture,” 727. In the prose De virginitate, Aldhelm tells the story of Chrysanthus, who successfully turns a pagan woman away from the study of dialectics (the “argument of deception”) and towards “canonical writings and exegetical commentaries” (Lapidge and Herren, Aldhelm: The Prose Works, 97–8). On the Charlemagnian interest in dialectic method, see Renswoude “The Art of Disputation: Dialogue, Dialectic and Debate around 800”; Contreni, “The Carolingian Renaissance”; Marenbon, From the Circle of Alcuin to the School of Auxerre Logic, Theology and Philosophy in the Early Middle Ages.

34 Source text Migne, Patrologia Latina, CI; translation is the author’s own.

35 On Aristotle’s development of syllogistic inference, see Smith, “Aristotle’s Logic” (3. The Subject of Logic: “Syllogisms”; 5. The Syllogistic). On Boethius’ broader definition of syllogism in the De topicis differentiis, a text well-known to Alcuin, see Stump, Boethius’s De topicis differentiis, 110–11. Liddell–Scott–Jones, s.v. “συλλογισμός”.

36 Contreni, “The Carolingian Renaissance,” quotation from 738.

37 Discenza, The King’s English, especially 67–69, and also 70–77.

38 Text and translation here from Boethius, Theological Tractates. The Consolation of Philosophy, 360–61.

39 Quotations from the Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn are from Anlezark, Dialogues. Translations are the author’s own, with reference to the translation provided by Anlezark.

40 Anlezark suggests that the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn display a “deliberate reduction of the complexity of philosophical problems for a more general audience” (Dialogues, 49).

41 Beechy, “Wisdom and the Poetics of Laughter,” throughout; she also notes the essentially dialectic structure of the transformation battle in SolSatProse, not discussed here (136).

42 The short poem of the Exeter Book, Pharoah, presents a single question-and-response between unnamed speakers. In prose texts, named interlocutors are found in the Solomon and Saturn dialogue of the Southwick Codex and the Dialogue of Adrian and Ritheus in Cotton Julius A ii.

43 See Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, for example, 103. Note, however, that Bakhtin states that “the idealism of Plato is not purely monologic”, on which see Boyarin, Socrates, 39 footnote 13.

44 Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, 340. On the riddle-genre as facilitating multiple readings within a Christian framework, see for example Burns, “Spirits and Skins: The Sceapheord of Exeter Book Riddle 13 and Holy Labour”.

45 Anlezark describes Saturn as being “led by affect, with troubled emotion presented as the underlying reason for his quest” (“The Vasa mortis and Misery,” 129).

46 O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse, 49; O’Brien O’Keeffe points here to Saturn’s repeated use of mec (“me”), as underlined in the extract below.

47 Following Anlezark, Dialogues, 61, on the translation of Coferflod and Caldeas.

48 For an overview of these various approaches, see O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song, 49–50; and Anlezark, Dialogues, 100. The Dictionary of Old English holds up all three translations provided above (in bold) as possibilities.

49 Accounts of this model can be found in, for example, Kensinger, “Remembering Emotional Experiences,” 141; and Citron et al., “Emotional Valence and Arousal Affect Reading in an Interactive Way: Neuroimaging Evidence for an Approach-Withdrawal Framework,” 79–80.

50 Cf. references to the terror inflicted upon the devil by the Pater Noster at ll. 124b–125a and 131a; the emotion is a negative one for its subject (the devil), even while it is desirable for the Christian forces of the prayer and its reciter. This is discussed further in the section on anger in SolSatI and SolSatII, below.

51 Anlezark, Dialogues, 101.

52 B-T, s.v. “geseman”, “To compose, settle, make peace with, reconcile, satisfy”; seman, “to bring to an agreement those who have a dispute” and “to satisfy a person in a matter of doubt or difficulty”.

53 Examples identified via the DOEC. Sweet, King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, vol. 2, 349; Crawford, The Old English Version of the Heptateuch, 198. Translations are the author’s own, with reference to the translations in each edition.

54 In Old English metrical structure, the head stave is the first stressed syllable of the off-verse; in classical metre it always takes alliteration, and it “sets off the most emphatic word in that half-line” (Marsden, The Cambridge Old English Reader, xxii).

55 Lockett, Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions, 64.

56 The trope of the “unhappy man” in the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn is discussed by Anlezark in Dialogues, see esp. 49, 56, and also in “The Vasa Mortis and Misery,” 139–41, where he addresses human will; he further identifies the “sorrowing spirit” as “the central concern” of SolSatII in “The Vasa Mortis and Misery,” 129.

57 On lexical parallels between these two passages, see Anlezark, Dialogues, 123.

58 Anlezark, Dialogues, 124–5.

59 L. 135a, sorg bið swarost byrðen (“sorrow is the heaviest burden”); ll. 170–71, Ac forhwan beoð ða gesiðas somod ætgædre, / wop ond hleahtor? (“But why are those companions at once together, weeping and laughter?”); l. 191b, the fate of the twin who does poorly in life, ond ðonne eft mid sorgum gewiteð (“and then again departs with sorrow”); l. 267, fate (wyrd) as the weana wyrtwela, wopes heafod (“plant-root of woe, head (source) of weeping”).

60 SolSatII, ll. 173–74: Unlæde bið ond ormod se ðe a wile / geomrian on gihðe; se bið Gode fracoðast (“He is unhappy and hopeless, he who wishes always to be sad in misery; he is most contemptible to God”). Anlezark argues that in SolSatII, “the pursuit of wisdom is identified fully with the pursuit of happiness” (“The Vasa Mortis and Misery,” 147).

61 Anger, which Solomon addresses several times, is a more ambiguous emotion in terms of valence, and will be addressed below.

62 Ll. 173–74a, Unlæde bið ond ormod se ðe a wile / geomrian on gihðe (“He is unhappy and despairing who always desires to lament in sorrow”); ll. 206–08, Forðan nah seo modor geweald, ðonne heo magan cenneð, / bearnes blædes, ac sceall on gebyrd faran / an æfter anum. Ðæt is eald gesceaft (“Therefore the mother does not control the prosperity of a child, when she gives birth to a son, but in lineage one follows another. That is ancient fate”).

63 On the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn as promoting a Christian, English wisdom against pagan and foreign knowledge, see Powell, “Orientalist Fantasy in the Poetic Dialogues of ‘Solomon and Saturn’”.

64 SolSatI is attested in two manuscripts: Cambridge, Corpus Christ MS 42 contains the first 94 lines of the text only; in Cambridge, Corpus Christ MS 422, SolSatI is abruptly followed in the manuscript by SolSatProse, midline, without graphic indication of a change in text. It is not possible to tell whether an ending to one or both of these texts followed SolSatProse, because of damage to the manuscript. On this, see Anlezark, Dialogues, 1–6. SolSatII is apparently unfinished, though Anlezark has argued that SolSatFrag may be a displaced copy of the conclusion of this poem (see “The Stray Ending in The Solomonic Anthology in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 422”).

65 On this, see also Beechy, “Wisdom and the Poetics of Laughter,” 147 n 46.

66 Anlezark, Dialogues, 5.

67 Beechy, “Wisdom and the Poetics of Laughter,” 147–49, 152–54.

68 O’Neill, “On the Date, Provenance,” 154.

69 For example, Alcuin uses the principle of mankind’s unique engagement with laughter to illustrate the identification of equal statements: aequales aequaliter circumverti possunt, hoc modo: quidquid homo est, risibile est; et quidquid risibile est, homo est; “equals may be equally turned about, in this way: whatever is human, is capable of laughing, and whatever is capable of laughing, is human”.

70 Kries argues that laughter in Old English literature is generally symbolic rather than realistic (“Laughter and Social Stability in Anglo-Saxon and Norse Literature”); see also Beechy, “Wisdom and the Poetics of Laughter,” 149–50.

71 See, for example, Clarke, ed. Sayings of the Fathers of the Church: The Seven Deadly Sins, Chapter 4. On the classical inheritance, see Rosenwein, Anger: The Conflicted History of an Emotion, 98.

72 Gregory is here concerned with the way vices beget both one another and further sin.

73 Rosenwein, Anger, 98.

74 Though note that the question of God’s own experience of anger was fraught, with Augustine arguing on both sides at different times. Information here, including the quotation of Augustine, from Gavrilyuk, “Three Patristic Views of Divine Anger Management in the Old Testament”.

75 In De institutis coenobiorum, a text which survives in two Canterbury manuscripts of the second half of the tenth century, Cassian recommends prayer as a means of defence against the devil (Dumitrescu, The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature, 56); for MS details see Gneuss and Lapidge, nos 152, 528.

76 Old English text of Beowulf from Dobbie, Beowulf and Judith, 25. Translation is the author’s own.

77 For connections between Beowulf’s fight with Grendel and a saint combatting the devil in Gregory’s Dialogues see, Leneghan, “The Haunting of Heorot: Gregory’s Dialogi and Beowulf’s Fight with Grendel”. Other parallels between Beowulf and the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn have been drawn, some of which complement the speculative identification here through focus on Grendel; see, for example, Anlezark, "Poisoned Places", 105–109; Beechy, “Wisdom and the Poetics of Laughter”, 149–54; Dendle "Demonological Landscape", 290 n. 28; Marshall, Wolves in Beowulf, esp. 201–02; Wiersma, "Words Referring to Monsters", e.g. 463.

78 He notes these and other parallels and lexical connections in Dialogues, 108, 110, 119, 121, 122, 123, 137.

79 Anlezark discusses a “literary association” between Beowulf and SolSatII in “The Fall of the Angels in Solomon and Saturn II”, esp. 131–33.

80 As noted by O’Neill, “On the Date, Provenance,” 150.

81 On the identification of Saturn with Chaldea in the Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn, see Anlezark, Dialogues, 31–33, 126.

82 Beaulieu, “Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon as World Capital,” 6.

83 Anlezark, Dialogues, 32.

84 Solomon’s indication that Saturn has choice is also discussed by Anlezark, “The Vasa Mortis and Misery,” 137.

85 As identified by O’Neill and others; for which, see “On the Date, Provenance,” 148–50. On the interest in Babel expressed in both SolSatI and SolSatII, see Major, “Saturn’s First Riddle in Solomon and Saturn II: An Orientalist Conflation”. On the connection made by the Old English Boethius between the mythology of Saturn and Jupiter, and the story of Babel, see Anlezark, Dialogues, 32.

86 Anlezark, Dialogues, on pride and Babel, 120; on pride and Nebuchadnezzar, 101, 118–19.

87 On Lucifer’s pride, see Anlezark, Dialogues, 25, 136.

88 On this episode in SolSatII, and its relationship to the Book of Enoch, see Anlezark, “The Fall of the Angels in Solomon and Saturn II”.

89 On the link between deluded wanderings and sin in this section, see Burns, “The Wanderings of Saturn: Psychogeography, Psalms, and Solomon and Saturn”.

90 On a range of the different sources and influences present in these texts, see Anlezark, Dialogues, 12–28