Orpheus: The Song of Life by Wroe Ann

Author:Wroe, Ann [Wroe, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: HIS000000, HIS002010, HIS002000, REL047000, SOC011000
ISBN: 9781468301816
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-05-23T16:00:00+00:00

Medieval theologians followed Orpheus into a lower world already licked by fire. As an enlightened soul – as Intellect itself – he had no business to be there, among small long-toothed devils and the crowds of the naked dead. He went only to rescue Eurydice, his lower self, with her blithe indifference to things divine. He went to redeem her from the darkness as he had once released her spirit from the tree, uniting her with him in the gold-rayed splendour of the endless love of God.

To the monk Beausire, writing in the fourteenth century, Orpheus was explicitly Christ. He went to harrow Hell to save Eurydice, who was all sinful humankind. Tenderly, He ripped her from the arms of the ruler of Hell; and as He led her to the upper world He sang out, in the words of Solomon, ‘Arise my love, my fair one, and come away!’

Yet the journey was not so simple. Many medieval observers found Orpheus’s motives more confused. Boethius, in his sixth-century Consolations of Philosophy, saw him tangled as he went in the snakes and briars of material longing, just as Eurydice had been. He could not free himself from earthly love, or from the body. He was still weighed down by the bonds of earth. That was why he ventured at all, on this so-called rescue; and that was why he could not hope to redeem a lower self still preening and flirting at the warm edge of Hell.

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