The Cambridge Old English Reader

‘What page, what word in that divine authority, the Old and the New Testament, is not a most proper standard of human life?’ So runs the rhetorical question asked in ch. 73 of the Rule of St Benedict, the guide to daily life drawn up (c. 540) by Benedict of Nursia for the monks of Monte Cassino in Italy and followed, with regional variations, in most of the monasteries of late Anglo-Saxon England. But it was not just monks and nuns for whom the Bible provided a framework for everyday existence. It had a pervasive influence on all medieval life and thought, informing not only the spiritual dimension but the political and historical too.

For the Christian, history was not the cyclical process conceived of in the classical and heroic worlds – involving the perpetual rise and fall of people and nations under the influence of blind fate or fickle gods – but a linear progression from a known beginning to a clearly anticipated end, the whole process operating within the all-embracing knowledge and will of a single, eternal God. The prelude to human history was Creation, whose paradisal promise was wrecked by Adam's and Eve's disobedience at the prompting of Satan (whose pride, in some accounts, had earlier lost him his position as God's brightest angel). It was their fall which brought pain and struggle into the world, and human history evolved under the burden of their ‘original sin’ until the moment when a merciful God presented humankind with the gift of his son, Christ. His sacrifice on the cross would offer the possibility of redemption and salvation. The end of history, in the Christian scheme of things, will be Doomsday (OE dōmes dæg, ‘day of judgement’), when everyone will be assessed in relation to their conduct on earth, and only those found deserving will enjoy an eternity of bliss in heaven.