Between earth and heaven: Liminality and the Ascension of Christ in Anglo-Saxon literature

By Johanna Kramer

Between earth and heaven examines the teaching of the theology of Christ’s ascension in Anglo-Saxon literature, offering the only comprehensive examination of how patristic ascension theology is transmitted, adapted and taught to Anglo-Saxon audiences. This book argues that Anglo-Saxon authors recognise the Ascension as fundamentally liminal in nature, as concerned with crossing boundaries and inhabiting dual states. In their teaching, authors convert abstract theology into concrete motifs reflecting this liminality, such as the gates of heaven and Christ’s footprints.

By examining a range of liminal imagery, Between earth and heaven demonstrates the consistent sophistication and unity of Ascension theology in such diverse sources as Latin and Old English homilies, religious poetry, liturgical practices, and lay popular beliefs and rituals. This study not only refines our evaluation of Anglo-Saxon authors’ knowledge of patristic theology and their process of source adaptation, but also offers a new understanding of the methods of religious instruction and uses of religious texts in Anglo-Saxon England, capturing their lived significance to contemporary audiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526110602

Book preview

Introduction

et cum haec dixisset videntibus illis elevatus est et nubes suscepit eum ab oculis eorum (Acts 1:9)

þy dæge eode seo eorðe on heofon, þæt is se mon ofer engla þrym (Old English Martyrology)

According to tradition, Christ’s Ascension took place forty days after Easter and is part of the divine economy of salvation. It completes Christ’s glorification in heaven, implied by his Resurrection, and his larger redemptive act begun at the Incarnation. An essential event in Christ’s life and of the cycle of the Christian year, the Ascension holds theological, liturgical, and ecclesiastical significance.¹ Nonetheless, other Christological events have been given more attention, for example, the Harrowing of Hell, perhaps because this event makes for a more spectacular narrative.² While the Harrowing is certainly important to salvation history, it does not provide the most useful model for imitatio Christi from the perspective of the individual Christian. A chief teaching of the Ascension is that Christians should imitate Christ and follow him to heaven by faithful living; they are encouraged to imitate his life, his mission, and his Ascension. Examining the literature and religious culture of Anglo-Saxon England, Between Earth and Heaven aims to show that the Ascension plays a central role in salvation history and in the individual Christian’s understanding of how to gain salvation, since it teaches the complete story of salvation history and what it means to be Christian. Patristic authors, foremost among them Augustine of Hippo, recognized the Ascension as a key event without which salvation would be impossible. If Christ had not crossed the threshold into heaven in his dual nature, thus opening heaven to humanity and giving the promise of redemption to all, humans would never have gained the possibility of salvation. In this way, the Ascension symbolically summarizes the entire salvific career of the incarnate Christ. Anglo-Saxon authors of homilies, poetry, and hymns recognize not only that this occasion makes redemption possible, but also that, in explaining its liturgical significance, they can lucidly teach essential Christian doctrines.

In contrast to other liturgical occasions, there is no formulaic way of preaching the Ascension in Anglo-Saxon England; there are no stock topoi.³ Authors instead adjust the content of their narratives and their exegesis to their own needs, expectations, and frames of reference. Some retell the biblical events, and some describe the physical features of the place of Ascension; some focus on Christ’s arrival in heaven, and others express metaphorically the patristic teachings of this important Christological event. My study draws on the diverse corpus of Anglo-Saxon Ascension materials to trace the reception of patristic Ascension theology throughout the Anglo-Saxon period and examine how authors respond to both the theology and the liturgical occasion. Such an examination refines our evaluation of Anglo-Saxon authors’ knowledge of patristic literature, familiarity with theology and doctrine, and process of source adaptation, and it sharpens the contours of the early medieval teaching programme for the Ascension.

This book offers readers a new understanding of the methods of religious instruction and the uses of religious texts in Anglo-Saxon England, capturing the lived significance of these texts to contemporary audiences, an aspect of early medieval literary culture that often proves elusive. At the same time, the treatment of the Ascension here can be taken as a kind of case study that models how one might explore the reception and transmission of patristic theology through teaching about other topics. In this way, this study also contributes to a greater understanding of how Anglo-Saxon culture responds to Christian-Latin culture. In the case of the Ascension, Anglo-Saxons convert transmitted patristic teachings into imagery focused on boundaries, borders, and barriers to allude to the pivotal moment of the Ascension: Christ’s Entry into heaven.

Between Earth and Heaven investigates the teaching of the theology of Christ’s Ascension in Anglo-Saxon literature. How can different sources take on such diverse forms and yet concern the same religious occasion? What unifies them? What makes them all valid representations of the Ascension and appropriate expressions of its theological meaning? This book answers these questions, arguing that Anglo-Saxon authors recognize the Ascension and its theology as essentially liminal in nature, that is, as concerned with boundaries and dual states and dwelling in dual places. In their teaching about the Ascension, authors convert abstract patristic theology into various concrete narrative strategies, images, motifs, and themes that reflect this liminality, which permeates the understanding of the Ascension on each interpretive level. Most immediately, the Ascension is liminal because it takes place across boundaries as Christ ascends from the earth and crosses into heaven. Each central Ascension doctrine also describes a liminal condition: Christ in his nature as God and man is a dual entity – and so is the totus Christus (the Pauline concept of Christ as the Head and Christians as the Body); Christ opens heaven to humanity by crossing the boundary into heaven; after his Ascension, Christ is both present and absent on earth, inhabiting two spaces at once. Finally, the literary images, preaching motifs, and spatial practices performed in association with the Ascension correspond to the liminality of the doctrines they teach and express this theological content in a concretely material way.

The concept of liminality

In considering an inclusive range of texts and their interactions with the patristic tradition, authors’ didactic goals, and religious practices, I draw on cultural anthropologist Victor Turner’s treatment of social practices as symbolic acts and on his elaboration of the concept of ‘liminality’ as it applies to social rituals. Turner builds on the work of Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep on the rite de passage, that is, the ‘passage from one culturally defined state or status to another’.⁴ Van Gennep divides a rite of passage into three distinct phases: separation, liminality or margin (or limen), and (re)aggregation.⁵ In a separate but corresponding set of terms, van Gennep describes spatial transitions as having pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal phases, ‘indicat[ing] his basic concern with units of space and time’.⁶ Extending van Gennep’s work, Turner dedicates much of his attention especially to the theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the liminal phase. He defines ‘liminality’ as a ‘betwixt-and-between condition often involving seclusion from the everyday scene’,⁷ or, more broadly, as ‘any condition outside or on the peripheries of everyday life’.⁸ Relying on Turner’s definition of the liminal phase as a ‘betwixt-and-between condition’, I assert that such ‘in between-ness’ marks the core doctrines of the Ascension, especially Christ’s dual nature and the totus Christus.

Turner views liminality both as a phase and a state, an important characterization that points to liminality not only as a ritual process, but also as an event that profoundly changes and defines the nature of those participating in it.⁹ The Ascension is one such process, which marks a time of exception and of profound transformation for all Christians, as it gains for them the opportunity to reach heaven. Liminality does not only apply to the ritual itself, but also to those participating in it, for those undergoing the ritual’s middle phase (the ‘liminal entities’ or ‘liminal personae’, as Turner calls them) inhabit multiple states: ‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.’¹⁰ These liminal personae ‘evade ordinary cognitive classification, too, for they are neither-this-nor-that, here-nor-there, one-thing-not-theother’.¹¹ This defiance of classification strikingly applies to the liminal entity who undergoes the ritual of the Ascension: Christ is both God and man, both present and absent, both humbled and glorified. Significantly in the context of the Ascension, ‘the most characteristic midliminal symbolism is that of paradox, or being both this and that’.¹² In other words, a liminal entity cannot be unambiguously classified as belonging to a single category but always belongs to more than one category or exists in a dual state. Consequently, liminality shares with Ascension doctrines the essential characteristic of being paradoxical.¹³

Liminality marks a time and a condition apart from normative rules, established hierarchies, and accepted behaviours and provides an opportunity to examine basic assumptions and roles in social groups. In The Ritual Process, Turner states, ‘if liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it can be seen as potentially a period of scrutinization of the central values and axioms of the culture in which it occurs’.¹⁴ The levelling or reversal of social hierarchies during the liminal phase has an important social consequence in that it leads to the creation of communitas,¹⁵ that is, a ‘society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders’.¹⁶ In a communitas, ‘concrete idiosyncratic individuals, … though differing in physical and mental endowment, are nevertheless regarded as equal in terms of shared humanity’.¹⁷ Liminality has an equalizing and socializing force that emphasizes the similarities and shared characteristics of the members of the communitas rather than their differences and allows them to identify more fully with this newly forged community. Turner also defines this anti-hierarchical force in terms of structure and anti-structure, with communitas having an anti-structural effect: ‘Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority.’¹⁸ As a levelling and anti-structural force, the liminal phase allows for the creation of new social roles.¹⁹ As I discuss below, the Ascension has exactly such a levelling force and creates a communitas of Christians who all equally belong to the Body of Christ.

In its ability to form new social identities, the liminal phase offers the extraordinary potential of exploring alternative possibilities to established norms, a potential also provided by the Ascension and expressed in Anglo-Saxon Ascension narratives. Turner casts this idea in grammatical terms, associating liminality with ‘subjunctivity’ and viewing it as the ‘subjunctive mood’ of a society:

Liminal phenomena are centrally integrated into the total social process, forming with all its other aspects a complete whole, and in its specific essence representing the ‘negativity’ and ‘subjunctivity’ of that total process, rather than its ‘positivity’ and ‘indicativeness’; its possibility rather than its actuality, its ‘may be’ and ‘might have been’ rather than its ‘is’, ‘was’, and ‘will be’, or even a via negativa entered by everyone, not just by mystics.²⁰

In an essay that employs Turner’s concepts of liminality and structure/anti-structure to read marginal drawings in illuminated medieval manuscripts, Kathleen Ashley explains, ‘the liminal or antistructural is in the subjunctive mode, the mode of what if. It is a fantasy mode, capable of exploring or performing possibilities other than those conventionally authorized.’²¹ Liminality opens up possibilities for an alternative, radically new life, one that could not have been imagined before entering the liminal phase. In its subjunctive mood, liminality makes it possible for the communitas to see what can be; it lays all possible paths open and, at times, these alternative paths are taken.²² The Ascension, as a liminal event, operates in the subjunctive mood and creates the opportunity for an alternative future, in this case, the possibility for redemption, a promise made by Christ to all humans in ascending and entering heaven.

Given the definition of ritual liminality and the conditions that it describes, this anthropological concept can usefully be applied to the study of texts and, in particular, to a combined study of the theological, literary, visual, and liturgical formulations of the Ascension as well as to cultural practices associated with its feast day. The Ascension, I contend, is a liminal ritual, which functions by the same principles and has the same effects on those participating as the social rituals described by Turner. He has been criticized for his overly universal application of liminality to social and other phenomena.²³ I, however, apply his ideas to culturally specific content in terms that emerge from the Anglo-Saxon corpus itself. I neither explore liminality in all of its possible meanings and forms (such as boundaries of landscapes, bodies, or other narrative spaces), nor do I apply it to the larger Old English poetic corpus. Applied to Anglo-Saxon religious culture, liminality as an analytic tool usefully bridges theology, literature, and praxis and thus allows moving between such diverse cultural expressions as a Latin hymn, vernacular homilies, spatial rituals prescribed in a charm, and Rogationtide processions, all of which are articulations of the theological and communal meanings of the Ascension. The liminal approach uncovers connections between diverse texts, which remain invisible when they are secluded into traditional generic or other fixed categories, such as heroic verse, vernacular religious poetry, anonymous homilies, or post-Benedictine Reform preaching, a practice still prevalent in the study of early medieval English literature. My anthropologically informed approach to the liturgical and homiletic source materials in which this study is grounded reveals the function of religious texts and practices both as theological instruction and in their social and historical settings. The value of applying anthropology to medieval texts, including Anglo-Saxon literature, has been amply demonstrated, but such readings of Old English texts have typically focused heavily on poetry, especially secular, heroic poetry.²⁴ A goal of this book is to demonstrate the value that an anthropologically informed approach can have in relation to religious practices and to Anglo-Saxon texts with non-heroic subject matter, yielding a more accurate understanding of the role of the Ascension in Anglo-Saxon religious literature and culture.

The liminal theology of the Ascension

Liminality is not only a useful concept through which to read Anglo-Saxon texts and images; the Ascension is itself liminal at its very core as an event that takes place between earth and heaven, as the two epigraphs to this chapter make clear. Its theological teachings are also liminal in both concrete and symbolic senses and, as I explain in this section, they share specific features with social rituals. The Ascension is liminal in a concretely spatial sense: the ascending Christ crosses the boundary between earth and heaven, and his actions thus straddle two spaces. This is important for Ascension texts for two reasons. First, this means that the Ascension is not an instantaneous event but a process – an extended journey – and this journey from earth to heaven can be narrated and dramatized. Second, the crossing of the threshold, the limen, to heaven is a moment that becomes a narrative focal point because it can encapsulate the significance of the Ascension from a theological perspective. Two Anglo-Saxon texts that seize on this opportunity are Bede’s hymn for the Ascension and Trinity Homily 19, both of which focus closely on Christ’s crossing into heaven.

The central figure of the Ascension, Christ, is liminal in several aspects that are important to the theology of this event: in his dual nature, as the totus Christus, and through his simultaneous presence and absence after ascending. In his dual nature as Deus-Homo, Christ mediates between the immaterial divine and his material humanity, inhabiting a both/and condition. His very person is permanently betwixt-and-between. Corresponding to his paradoxical nature, he can both fall between categories and belong to several categories at once. Similarly, as the totus Christus – Christ as Head and Christians as his Body – he is liminal because, after ascending, he is present both in heaven and on earth and dwells in two places at once. As Head, he has ascended from earth but his Mystical Body is not yet fully in heaven. Christ also dwells spiritually in two places, following his promise to the disciples that he will remain with them, even after having physically ascended (Matt. 28:20). This continued spiritual presence and simultaneous physical absence also represent a both/and state. It is important to remember that all of these basic Christological doctrines encompass at their core a contradiction, a paradox, which Turner calls the ‘most characteristic midliminal symbolism’.²⁵ In other words, Christ’s most central characteristics are liminal.

The Ascension is, in Turner’s term, a ritual of status elevation, in which ‘the ritual subject or novice is being conveyed irreversibly from a lower to a higher position’.²⁶ During the Ascension, Christians experience such a status elevation. The crux here is, of course, that Christians do not actually undergo the biblical Ascension; Christ does. If the Ascension is a ritual, as I claim it is, then Christ is the ritual subject, the liminal persona undergoing the ritual of the Ascension and crossing the limen. He is the one who makes the transition from earth to heaven, even when only imagined in a narrative. Consequently, Christ, as the liminary, should be the one who is changed by the process; but he does not, of course, change states or status. The situation is further complicated in that Christ is a liminal figure to begin with. He is both God and man. As God, he is eternal and immutable and a change in status or state would be wholly anathema to a correct understanding of his divine nature. However, in his dual nature also lies the key to recognizing the Ascension as a ritual of status elevation, for it is not entirely true that nothing changes: Christ’s human nature does become elevated, both literally and in status. When he introduces his human nature into heaven, he exalts humanity, granting it a status not previously experienced by any human. This important doctrinal idea of glorified humanity is an essential part of Ascension teaching and is, as will be discussed in Chapter 1, most succinctly expressed by Gregory the Great in his Gospel Homily 29 in the phrase humanitas exaltata (‘exalted humanity’). Furthermore, when Christ enters heaven, he not only exalts humanity in the form of his own human nature, but also acts as part of the totus Christus. When the Head enters heaven while the Body remains on earth, the Ascension has occurred yet remains incomplete. The fundamental change is that redemption is now made possible, with Christ’s border-crossing move profoundly affecting all those who belong to his Body. In this way, Christ (the Head) acts on behalf of all Christians (his Body); he acts as a proxy for his human members, and through his liminal move, they change. The ones that undergo the transition, then, are Christians (via the human nature of Christ), but the change in state, which they so desire, depends entirely on Christ crossing the boundary into heaven. In this capacity, the Ascension is a ritual of status elevation for Christ’s human substance and for all Christians.

The totus Christus, in which Christians become subsumed into the Body of Christ, also reflects the anti-structural force of the Ascension in that it levels distinctions between humans and makes them all equal Christians, the joint adherents of a single faith, who all believe in one God in three persons and who now all equally have the opportunity to ascend to heaven. As all Christians are equal brothers and sisters in Christ, a communitas is forged. This aspect of the liminal state – the equality of all Christians before God – is, in fact, a basic tenet of faith. At the same time, in the Ascension, structure and anti-structure are played against each other. As Kathleen Ashley says about anti-structure and its relationship to structure, ‘Even more important than its contrast to the structural, however, is the interplay between them. Structure and anti-structure exist in a dialectic, in which the antistructural provides a realm for playing upon or with the elements of the structural.’²⁷ This interplay becomes apparent with the Ascension when we consider that it both creates a permanent communitas and affirms an eternal hierarchy. A hierarchical Christian structure is established and confirmed at the conclusion of the Ascension with Christ’s arrival in heaven and his enthronement and glorification as celestial king. There is no doubt about who the eternal ruler is. Consequently, there is both a dissolution of hierarchy (equality of all Christians; all are redeemed and can enter heaven) and a confirmation of hierarchy (Christ is king and all humans are his subjects). As Turner also states, some aspects of liminal states can become permanent and this applies here.²⁸ The effect of the Ascension is that all Christians belong permanently to a communitas at the same time as Christ is eternally king over all Christians in a fixed hierarchy. Owing to the dialectic between structure and anti-structure, therefore, liminal rituals can incorporate contradictions.²⁹ Hierarchy and unity can coexist and, in a way, lose their contradictory character, as is the case with the Ascension. We may also look at the contradictions resulting from the Ascension in conjunction with other paradoxes at the heart of Christianity, for example, an omnipotent God who allows himself to be killed or a God who dies and still lives, and recognize that much of Christianity is betwixt-and-between, neither/nor, both/and. This is precisely the state that one expects to result from a liminal ritual.

As a consequence of the complex effects of the Ascension, individual Christians also find themselves in a liminal state in several respects. Most immediately, Christians are affected because they are part of the totus Christus. While Christ the Head has crossed the boundary into heaven and has made possible the redemption of humankind, the actual fate of individual Christians still hangs in the balance and is decided by how they live their lives. That is why Christ’s Ascension only promises redemption but does not guarantee it. Therefore, because they are both already safe in heaven and still have to work for their personal salvation, Christians remain in a liminal state in life. This ambiguity between safety and peril is, for example, the dominant theme in the final section of Cynewulf’s Christ II (lines 850–66), which depicts life as a sea journey with the goal of sailing into the safe harbour of heaven. As part of the totus Christus, the Head has already safely reached heaven, but the Body has yet to follow and remains in danger of not succeeding. Consequently, human existence unfolds in a state of liminality, which is not solved until Judgement Day when the effects of the redemptive promise, the opening of heaven, and the rewards of faithful living will come to final fruition. Given all this, when all Christians annually celebrate the Ascension, listen to homilies, and walk in processions during Ascension week, they witness both the eternal events of Christ’s Ascension and the as-of-yet undecided moment of their own ascension and salvation. This means that much is at stake for them in the Ascension. It represents both a risk and an opportunity.

The liminal state of the Ascension between risk and opportunity is precisely the subjunctive mood posited by Turner, and, therefore, I assert that the Ascension operates in the subjunctive mood. It is the ‘What if?’ moment, in which all possibilities are open: it can have a positive or a negative outcome, and it falls on all Christians to ensure a successful conclusion. Patristic sources develop the perception of the Ascension as an opportunity for redemption, particularly Augustine in the concept of the totus Christus, about which more will be said in Chapter 1. Augustine clearly sees in the Ascension the potential of what can be. As Christ the Head reaches heaven, he shows Christians what and where they ought to be also. The Body will follow the Head, but until then, the Ascension remains incomplete and believers have to contribute to its eventual completion through virtuous living. If Christians contribute to this goal successfully by living faithfully and without sin, then the promise of ‘what might be’ – redemption – will be turned into a permanent state. The Ascension is therefore the liminal moment that lays open the ultimate structure that ought to be reached. Collectively, these are the core principles that the Ascension stamps on believers, of which they are reminded and which they have to affirm each year at the celebration of this feast day.³⁰

The temporarily undecided outcome of the Ascension is an additional consequence of the subjunctive mood. This uncertainty grants Christians a certain amount of agency, since it gives individuals choices about how to live. Most importantly, however, it imposes on them the kind of personal responsibility for fulfilling the redemptive promise that Augustine speaks of in his sermons, when he says that, if we are to celebrate the Ascension in the right way, we must ascend with Christ. In order to gain salvation, Christians do not, of course, have a choice, but they must follow Christ; they must complete their own ascension and affirm the hierarchical structure that acknowledges Christ as Head and king and saviour and all Christians as Body, as subjects, and as the saved.

I mentioned above that in the annual celebrations of the Ascension, Christians both witness Christ’s Ascension and anticipate their own. This conflating of time is an important aspect of many liturgical celebrations, which take place in the present to commemorate past events and anticipate future ones. The annual liturgical celebrations of the Ascension, and the narratives and homilies that tell of it, all visualize, make present, and re-enact the Ascension, thus collapsing biblical, present, and eternal time. The Ascension reminds participants of the ‘drama’ that is unfolding in front of them in scriptural readings, a hymn, or a homily, and this is physically enacted in processions for Rogationtide, which end at the church entrance in imitation of Christ’s arrival at the doors of heaven. The Ascension links past, present, and eternal time and prompts participants to ponder the biblical event and their own role in it. This kind of temporal ambiguity is typical for liminal phenomena in general, for ‘We are presented, in such rites, with a moment in and out of time, and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties.’³¹ Given all this, I view the Ascension as taking place on the threshold, the limen, between biblical history, salvation history, the annual liturgical cycle, and individual faith.³² In the Ascension, historical time and divine time intersect, both at the moment of the biblical event, as the incarnated God withdraws from his earthly mission, and in the annual celebration of the Ascension in remembrance of the events of larger salvation history.

Ultimately, the liminal moment of the Ascension serves the creation of a (new) normative state for Christians, one that becomes the guiding principle and the ultimate goal in life: to work towards the fulfilment of the redemptive promise, to follow the Head to heaven, to dwell eternally with Christ. The radically new thing about the Ascension as a liminal ritual is that, while it affirms a hierarchical structure of the members of its ‘society’, it does not establish a previously extant structure but a wholly new order. In this new order, Christianity distinguishes itself historically from Judaism and the Christian Church is founded. In this new order, Christ has entered heaven as the Messiah and has eternally accepted his dual nature. In this new order, heaven is opened to humanity, and Christians are redeemed and can participate in the Ascension through their own actions in order to dwell with Christ in eternal glory.

In larger theological terms, the Ascension as liminal reflects the fundamental transition from Old Testament to New Testament thinking.³³ While in Old Testament thinking, birth and death mark the outer limits of human life, Christianity dictates that life itself is liminal, that it is a transitory phase that leads to resurrection and an eternal afterlife. This reflects a radical redefinition of the human condition and of thinking about the significance of this life on earth versus what lies beyond it. The idea of life as a liminal, transitory phase and the liminality of the Ascension as depicted in Anglo-Saxon texts express this new notion of humanity. This book’s main concern is to examine the different ways in which Anglo-Saxon authors (and artists) choose to teach Ascension theology as liminal in the terms just laid out.

The concept of liminality functions as a means through which to read the Ascension from a theological as well as from a literary critical perspective. It helps us analyse the doctrines that authors teach and the rhetorical strategies used to teach them.³⁴ Liminality is a particularly fruitful way to read texts because it allows us to discuss jointly and on equal footing vernacular poetry, Latin and Old English homilies, theology, liturgical rituals, popular religious lay rituals, and art by uncovering the formal and conceptual parallels between abstract theology and the concrete images chosen to teach it, between the spatial rituals of the liturgy and the doctrinal messages of the Ascension. Thus, it brings out the theological essence of the Ascension and, especially, the diverse ways in which Anglo-Saxon poets, homilists, theologians, and artists express this essence deliberately and forcefully in a multiplicity of voices.

Between Earth and Heaven contends that Anglo-Saxon Ascension literature draws on material imagery, established social practices, and the concept of liminality to teach complex theology to mixed lay and religious audiences. Employing literal aspects of the Ascension (such as Christ’s footprints, the gates of heaven, or a re-enacted journey towards heaven), authors make the abstract dimensions of a more strictly intellectual (and less visual) theology concrete through imagery and symbol. This method of teaching Ascension theology through material images and tangible aspects of the Ascension is ultimately modelled on Christ’s teaching through his post-Resurrection physical manifestations in the gospels. The abstract – and liminal – tenets of patristic Ascension theology are taught in Anglo-Saxon writings and art both as theology and through concrete, spatial imagery in texts (Christ’s footprints and the gates of heaven), in visual sources (Christ’s feet), and in the practices performed in association with the Ascension (Rogationtide processions). At the same time, sermons instructed participants (lay and religious) in prayers and rituals that commemorate and re-enact the Ascension, representing their own salvation. In these ways, Anglo-Saxon writings reformulate the abstract ideas of patristic Ascension theology to link faith and practice. The examination of material imagery, the use of patristic teachings, and liminality demonstrate the sophistication and unity of Ascension theology in the diverse sources that make up the Anglo-Saxon Ascension corpus.

The Ascension in Anglo-Saxon literature

Anglo-Saxon authors had a fondness for the Ascension, as evinced by the notable range of texts that survive for this occasion, forming a sub-corpus that spans genres and the entire Anglo-Saxon period and that was intended for widely differing audiences and settings. The sources at the centre of this study either depict the place of the Ascension or directly narrate the biblical Ascension story or events closely linked to it.³⁵ In the Old English Martyrology and Blickling Homily 11, the focus of Chapter 2, the footprints of Christ at the place of Ascension function as a material symbol for