The Aesthetics of Resurrection: Goldwork, The Soul, and The Deus Aurifex in The Phoenix

摘要

The Old English poem, The Phoenix participates in an ancient tradition that associated the bird with rebirth in general, and in Christian writing, with the resurrection of the body and soul at the Last Judgment. While previous scholarship has elucidated the connections between the Old English poem and its probable sources what has not yet been fully explored is the way in which the poet’s interest in resurrection is tied to his representation of the phoenix as a work of art, in the vein of Germanic metalwork and insular manuscript decoration. Specifically, the poet’s ‘crafting’ of the phoenix cannot be divorced from two other concepts of the poem: first, the image of the craftsman-God (Deus artifex) as the shaper of creation and the human body, and the goldsmith-God (Deus aurifex) whose cleansing fires at the end of time reshape and reforge the world and the individual. The reworking and interpolation of traditions surrounding the phoenix, God-as-craftsman, and the resurrection allows the poet to explore theories of bodily and spiritual resurrection, and permits him to explicate how God, as the craftsman of the human soul, has not only framed and composed the soul but also will bring it to perfection through purging it of impurities at the end of time.