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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:03.93)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Tiffany Beachy, professor and specialist in medieval poetics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. And we're here today to talk about her book, Aesthetics and the Incarnation in Early Medieval Britain, Materiality and the Flesh of the Word. Dr. Beachy, wonderful to have you on today.
Tiffany Beechy (00:25.614)
Thank you for having me on.
PJ Wehry (00:28.282)
So just as a starting question, why this book?
Tiffany Beechy (00:33.358)
Why this book? So I came to this project interested in aesthetics in this strange period, which is roughly from 600 to 1100 in England and Britain, I should say. And it's long been kind of this head scratcher that a lot of the most interesting artifacts
including texts and stone sculpture, all sorts of things, are hard to account for using classical models, classical theory. And the conundrum is that these people, especially when it comes to vernacular writing and sort of very complex native products in terms of visual art, they don't have treatises.
accompanying them the way that Greece and Rome do. And so the default has been for scholarship to sort of impose or supplement the early medieval archive using those more ample meta materials from the classical world. And for me, that was not so satisfactory because some of the very, very interesting, intricate
aspects of form, which I see as readable because I my background is in formalism, not in the sense of formal meters, but in the sense of reading the surface. I'm committed to readability and to accounting for the intricacies of the formal surface itself. And so I wanted to write a book that did justice to
the actual formal properties, the actual existence as object of these materials. And so this book arises from that. And inevitably, because these things were created at a time when Christianity was infusing the culture, theology is involved. And so I had to also develop an account.
PJ Wehry (02:55.278)
Yes.
Tiffany Beechy (02:59.532)
of the implicit theology that you see embodied in these objects.
PJ Wehry (03:07.838)
Can you talk a little bit, and I feel like I'm jumping to the end of your book here, but I think it's a natural question. Why does hetero, glosia and oral tradition matter? And you've kind of touched on a little bit there, these alternate sources as themselves, can you talk a little bit more about why that matters?
Tiffany Beechy (03:30.747)
Those strike me as perhaps two separate questions. So alternate sources versus heteroglossia and an orality. Could you say more about how you see them as related?
PJ Wehry (03:33.356)
Okay, sure.
PJ Wehry (03:45.38)
So when you're talking about the statues and you're talking about the oral traditions, we're talking about taking it from the primary sources, often in the vernacular, often in the different tongues. whereas generally, from what I understand in your field, there's been an emphasis on those meta materials, but reading things as coming from just like, what is their own reading of themselves? Cause of course reading it through someone else's lens is different. Is that?
Am I on the right track there or am I making a fundamental error? That's totally okay.
Tiffany Beechy (04:18.314)
No, no, it's okay. just, I would see orality and, and a sort of like,
Tiffany Beechy (04:27.062)
the contact situation in terms of the multiple languages on the island at play with their varying levels of authority, let's say vis-a-vis Christianity, those are kind of like the conditioning factors or they form the sort of like discursive milieu of, in which, out of which these artifacts arise, right? And so for me, it was important to countenance the sort of
contact situation in Britain at the time as a way to then render readable the complexity that was there in, for instance, the Ruthwell Cross, which uses multiple scripts and multiple even traditions of visual representation in proclaiming a particularly insular Christian truth.
And there are multiple other examples of just play with different scripts, play with different languages in a way that is sort of pregnant with theological meaning.
PJ Wehry (05:36.948)
and I want to make sure that I understand you here correctly, but I think I'm, I think this is a question that makes sense. The, so the oral traditions and the heteroglossia do hint at or provide the conditions for kind of people often with less authority, but still speaking to, maybe you could talk about the histories involved, maybe that, that particular situation.
Tiffany Beechy (06:03.736)
Sure.
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (06:06.21)
For instance, that we talk about, you you talk about the myth of Anglo-Saxon, but also like, you know, I mean, I G.A. Henty as a kid, read the Battle of Hastings, right? Like it was a historical fiction novel because, you know, parents are like, it's edutainment, it's great. But the so there's a very particular story of the Battle of Hastings. It's like you have English and you have French. And it seems like that's maybe not maybe that's a little bit of an oversimplification. So
Can you talk a little bit, maybe, just maybe. So could you speak to what was from 600 to 1100, you're talking about multiple tongues involved. What does that look like?
Tiffany Beechy (06:38.766)
you
Tiffany Beechy (06:44.974)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it's so much complexity. it's, you know, I try to like set the stage in my Old English class, for instance, with this prehistory and my students' eyes, like I have this like stress memory of my students' eyes glazing over because like they think Old English is Shakespeare, you know what I mean? So it's just like the thought of like where to begin is always there in my mind. But to think about early Britain.
PJ Wehry (07:07.48)
Yeah.
Tiffany Beechy (07:18.528)
Right. And to think about how the Irish convert early in a specific situation, know, St. Patrick comes over, comes back from his enslavement in Ireland, you know, and he's he's a Briton and he comes back and he proselytizes, you know, among the Irish. so they developed their sort of own form of practice.
PJ Wehry (07:26.98)
Mm-hmm.
Tiffany Beechy (07:47.246)
and it's ascetic and contemplative. They established actually this system of free education once the Germanic speaking peoples arrive over in Britain. And they offer free education to all comers, essentially. And so once they start their mission work in Northumbria,
English speaking learners are sort of doing this itinerant tour, you know, working with different teachers to acquire this new learning. So you have this sort of heavy Irish influence that then becomes problematic once Gregory the Great sends in the early seventh century, a Roman mission to Britain to the south. And so you
It instantiates this kind of power conflict between Roman Christianity and what people used to call Celtic Christianity, right? And.
You know, there was, there were a lot of polemics on both sides and, and Bede is really caught in the middle of that as someone who is deeply learned and understands the enormous debt that the English owe to their Irish teachers. But then he also values the Roman authority and the sort of importance of belonging to a continental Christendom.
you know, the sort of political power that will come from those associations. So there's a decades long, if not more, you know, struggle between those kind of two main factions. And I mean, I kind of make light of it in my book. I feel a little bit bad about starting the book with like the controversies over the tonsure at being like an issue of hairstyle. But really, there were two like central points that
PJ Wehry (09:31.407)
Mm.
PJ Wehry (09:55.758)
Yeah
Tiffany Beechy (10:00.49)
of conflicts that get mentioned again and again. mean, really the issue is who has authority, but the two central points in that conflict are, you know, how monks are going to wear their hair. And then also how you, how do you calculate Easter when it falls? And I mean, the issue of who gets to say when a major holiday occurs, that's authority over, you know, the cosmos essentially, right? It's authority over the governance of time.
so the landscape, I mean, I'm going pretty far afield here, but okay. But the landscape then in early Britain is one of the meeting of peoples. You have Irish speakers, you have English speakers, you have, what we now call Welsh speakers. You have Latin speakers, you know, coming from, the Gregorian mission. you all. Well.
PJ Wehry (10:34.948)
That was great.
PJ Wehry (10:57.924)
Do have Germanic in there or is that the English? Okay, yeah, okay.
Tiffany Beechy (11:00.04)
English is Germanic, right? So Old English is a West Germanic language and it was spoken in several dialects by the different tribes that came over in the vacuum of power left when Rome fell, essentially, abandoned the island. So we call it Old English, but then there are these various dialects and disparate peoples.
there in Britain and they're jostling with their Celtic speaking neighbors the whole time and intermarrying with them. The archaeological record has shown.
PJ Wehry (11:33.218)
Of course. Real quick, as an example, because I think
just to kind of reinforce this because I talk my background in like hermeneutics and often delves into these questions of authority. And the example I've often used when teaching about this is in America, red means stop, yellow means slow down, green means go, but in some countries, blue means go. Now, which color it is doesn't really matter, but we do understand that if, like, if you had two competing,
Tiffany Beechy (11:51.128)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (12:12.548)
political power systems and what like if people like wait, so do we put blue or do you put green up there? It is something people would get angry about because it's not about the color. It's so it's not about the hairstyle. It's about who gets to make the decision about traffic laws, which is actually Pretty important, right? It's like it's it's also a question about many other things So just relating to the the cosmos, know, I mean you think you did a good job explaining it But to put it in modern-day terms, I don't know if that's that's helpful at all
Tiffany Beechy (12:41.802)
No, it's completely helpful. you know, whereas we would see, I mean, that's a particularly utilitarian materialist, you know, example, right, because people will get in car crashes. But if you are within the theological framework, right, of early medieval belief, then at issue, it's not trivial when you celebrate Easter. The stakes, as I tell my students,
PJ Wehry (12:49.434)
Yeah, creative.
Tiffany Beechy (13:10.912)
the stakes of error are not just like, no, I was wrong and now I can change my mind. It's being wrong means you're a heretic and I tell them that it's shoots and ladders to help fire. the stakes, it's not as though it's a trivial superficial question for these people.
PJ Wehry (13:20.898)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (13:24.698)
Hahaha
PJ Wehry (13:34.596)
I just love this idea of like shoots and ladders, like, Hey, I know that I stole something and you're like a good person, but I got Easter, right? So, you know, it's like, that's like, you know, that's often there was, there was a guy who definitely thought that who said that sort of thing. man. it's
Tiffany Beechy (13:43.182)
Yeah.
Tiffany Beechy (13:50.324)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, important scholarship has emphasized how important obedience and orthodoxy were for especially some key players in this theological landscape and political landscape. And, you know, there are people who travel with these sort of paramilitary entourages as Wilfred comes to mind in the period.
who's an important early bishop and I don't want to talk about him very much, but he was complicit in what amounts to ethnic cleansing at one point because he cared about orthodoxy and setting up the right authority structures.
Yeah, so that that, you know that, you're a naturally good person. So you have more points, you know, that's seen as a vast error in in medieval thinking. It's something that later thinkers like Abelard, you know, think through very, in a troubled way, right, that natural philosophy seems so much more reasonable in some respects, you know, to countenance the good person who happens to get things wrong. But
At this time, especially the literate, educated types who are trying to think through this new belief system, they get really hung up on these matters.
PJ Wehry (15:25.338)
So we've referenced it a couple of times and you've talked about it used to be called, you know, Celtic. How do you see the labels changing and why is it, you know, why is it important that they're changing when we talk about Anglo-Saxon and Celtic? Not that we have to dwell on this, but it is, it's an important part of the book, I feel like.
Tiffany Beechy (15:43.429)
Yeah. You'll draw a very interesting cohort from the internet, the dark web, to hear a podcast with some of this. So I'll try to be brief so that that doesn't happen. I think a lot of the groupings that have been used and are now seen as problematic, they arise from a kind of 18th and 19th century and early 20th century.
PJ Wehry (15:54.869)
no.
Tiffany Beechy (16:12.11)
concept of ethno-nationalism, right? That just, I mean, it never really was accurate and it reflected the aspirations, you know, of some scholars as well as some people in, you know, the periods we study. so for instance, seeing Celtic all as one sort of lumpy group, then...
PJ Wehry (16:14.874)
Mm.
Tiffany Beechy (16:39.79)
particularly English scholars could look at the Celtic and say, look at the sort of exuberant and childish and uncontrolled bent of thoughts of these people, like how silly, right? Which is a sort of continuation of the colonial mentality, right? It's a kind of like, they're so other, they're so crazy and understandable and they don't get it.
PJ Wehry (17:07.386)
As an an epithet, but like, you Savage is one of those terms that gets thrown out a lot, right? You have the civilized Romans and because of course the Romans were so civilized, right? But yeah, so I mean this yes, this has come up. mean there's any time we have a historical Episode this comes up. Yeah
Tiffany Beechy (17:11.797)
yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Tiffany Beechy (17:20.887)
Mm-hmm.
Tiffany Beechy (17:30.594)
And so, you know, the Celtic is one example. And then the Anglo-Saxon is another really, you know, layered example. in its naive or innocent sense, it has meant just these peoples who spoke old English, you know, and where they were disparate, a jumble of people, peoples.
PJ Wehry (17:33.402)
Hmm.
Tiffany Beechy (17:58.894)
But then to be able to refer to them together, right, before England was a thing in terms of a polity, it was convenient to talk about the Anglo-Saxons, right? And yet, as has now been amply pointed out, even in the period, for instance, with Alfred the Great, there were aspirational senses
our intentions, right, in the use of Anglo-Saxon that sought to create a sense of us versus them, a sense of unity where there wasn't any yet, right, but people were seeking to create some. And so, Alfred wanted to create a kind of coherent civilized
empire that could match the Carolingians, you know, and sort of be as good as, and also define itself against, you know, the Viking pagans who had been plaguing England, and all of Britain and Ireland for a long time. And then, you know, so a sense of Englishness, right, it was important to him and he used something like as a Latin version of Anglo-Saxon in that way. But then, you know, for
the Elizabethans, the Protestant reformers, they started looking back to this Anglo-Saxon past to try to create and assert a sense that there was an ancestral, originary Anglo-Saxon Christianity, right, that they could say we're just going back to, you know, this reformer sort of impulse to say we're reclaiming and it's unique to our
national identity. And then of course, Thomas Jefferson, you know, establishing the University of Virginia and seeing he wanted to put Hengiston Horsa on the US seal. And it was important to him then to sort of claim an Anglo-Saxon past that was explicitly racialized, right? And nobody thinks that's cool. Well, people do think it's cool, unfortunately, but responsibles. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (20:17.316)
Point taken. Point taken.
Tiffany Beechy (20:18.902)
Responsible scholars don't think that's cool anymore. so I think some of the conflict, now for people, the term itself has just become so toxic that it's not worth using anymore and it's not worth trying to carve out that kind of.
usage that I called innocent or naive, right? We're just talking about I have the right to just talk about it in this innocent sense without all the baggage. I mean, the point that a lot of people are seeing is that there is no without all the baggage, you know, and we are responsible for the ways that you know, our archive and the period we study have been used and continued. Like if you ask students in an undergraduate classroom, you're just like,
What are the connotations? Tell me what Anglo-Saxon means. You know what they say? They say white.
PJ Wehry (21:17.562)
Yeah. and that would make sense. I, I, just finished the faithful executioner by Joel Harrington. And just to show how this stuff like continues. And he was talking about, the towns executioner Nuremberg and he just at the end of it. And this just really struck me as you're talking about national identity and the way that we read it back in, of course, I'm
I'm telling my daughter about this and she's like, so in Germany, you know, I was like, well, like it's Nuremberg. It's not Germany at that point, right? It's the 1500s, right? And then at the end, so it was Nuremberg and then Bavaria took over it. And then German, obviously there was that German, like exactly that whole story, that whole history that's told. And apparently to this day, Joel Harrington went, he's more of a popular historian, but he went
Tiffany Beechy (21:54.254)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (22:11.514)
to Nuremberg and said, it's still a joke there today. They call it the Bavarian occupation, which it's now it's funny, right? But there's still that history in that memory of like, we were independent and then they took over, right? It's like, if it lasted that long at the time, people definitely did not see themselves as Bavarians. And there was just always this like ancestral thing that we're all like part of, we're all Germanic. It's like, no, we're Nuremberg and you like.
You have aggressive like you invaded. And so just I think as another example, maybe I don't know, maybe that's maybe that'll draw out more of the the dark webs. if I made it worse, I feel like I feel like people care less about Nuremberg. No, I yes, I know. I was like, read the whole time. I was like, yeah, anyways. But yeah, so but similar. I mean, we see this, you know, it's like people saying Italian.
Tiffany Beechy (22:43.628)
Mm-hmm.
Tiffany Beechy (22:56.989)
dear. Nuremberg has some other connotations actually.
PJ Wehry (23:10.712)
You know, and it's like, I mean, 100 years ago, well, 150 years ago, that was just becoming a thing. Right. And you sit, you still see them fight over food, which does seem like a very, I get it because the food's good. but. so not to dwell on that too long. know I'd love to hear more about the aesthetics side of your book. So I appreciate you walking, walking me through that. particularly you.
Tiffany Beechy (23:24.782)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (23:39.972)
kind of mentioned at beginning the formalism studying the surface. How does Deleuze's Baroque aesthetics, his phenomenology of the surface, inform your work?
Tiffany Beechy (23:53.471)
Yeah, it, I wouldn't say that Duluth's is like the foundation of my analysis, but it informs my treatment, it's kind of in the heart of the book of surface as surface. So there's this really, you know, interesting way that
Christ's incarnation as it was sort of bodied forth, I guess, by these works is often imagined as, and this is in visual art, but also in literature, it's envisioned as the invisible becoming visible, right? And you can even say the ineffable taking on effability. And as I argue in the book, and I draw on another scholar, Christina Maria Cervone for this,
It's actually a mysterious superfability that the incarnation instantiates, right? That it's permuted in these new forms that themselves are sacramental. So actually the surface manifestations of the word that was made flesh in the world, they, I think, were seen as sacramental at this time. There was not this kind of like anxiety about
idolatry or falseness or an obsession with the transcendence of the word in a way that occurred on the continent with the iconoclastic controversy. in the book, I'm thinking about the ways that the manifest, the articulate can body forth the incarnation and can be an instance of the incarnation.
And this was often figured, as I said, as a kind of cloak or covering, right? When the ineffable becomes articulable, it becomes a kind of surface, a manifest surface in the world. And it's thought of as like, well, it's like this invisibility taking on a cloak of the flesh. And it's really interesting that the word in Old English for body is lichama.
Tiffany Beechy (26:10.54)
which is flesh cloak. Right? And that's interesting too, in the way that the sort of pre-Christian, Germanic world countenance things like shape-shifting. So you have something like the berserker as somebody who takes on the bear shirt, you know? So the cloak is the appearance, right? And...
PJ Wehry (26:12.602)
Mm.
Tiffany Beechy (26:35.128)
So Christ's incarnation again and again is sort of referred to, and it's not clear if it's a metaphor or if it's literal, but it's as a kind of taking on of this cloak of the body. And so I really dive deep in that chapter where I used to lose trying to imagine then trying to understand the dynamics of the incarnation as this sort of visible surface.
as a chiasm, as a two-way interface that's non-dual, right? That's where Deleuze is so fascinating and the concept of Baroque both expression and perception. So this non-dual phenomenology is so helpful. And I think just like act for these phenomena of perception, the incarnational sacramental procession, because
in the act of perceiving the surface, which is an act, it's not a thing. That's like where the incarnate moment is. That is because it's like Gregory's chiasm, which I also talk about in the book. It's divinitas humiliata humanitas exaltata. So God comes down and is humbled.
because he meets us in the middle, right? And we as humanity, we come up, we're exalted, we come up and the meeting of divinity and humanity is in that moment of sacramental perception. And that's what the Delusian fold is all about. And it's about moments of signification as...
endless folds in the surface of reality, which is a conscious reality. if I could talk, contrast it for instance with Doritian signification, which is so anti-logos, right? It's so like there is nothing transcendent that exists behind the sign that the sign is pointing to, right? Derrida is all about the endless deferral of meaning.
Tiffany Beechy (28:55.072)
Right? So there's an articulation and then meaning poof, it like defers and it slips and there's only the trace of it. And it's just endless traces that you're always chasing. Right? And it's this sort of kind of obnoxious exposition of the endless like ping, ping, ping, ping. There it goes. And you know, to me, I mean, I've, I've used Dairy Dot extensively, especially in my first book. But there's a kind of like obsession with the absence of
PJ Wehry (29:08.622)
Ha ha ha!
Tiffany Beechy (29:24.49)
of meaning, right? So it's still dual. It's still dualistic. Like, no, it's just, it's, it's escaped from me, and I'd still love to chase it. Whereas in this sort of Baroque model,
there is no transcendental signified as Derrida identified it to chase after. That transcendental signified would be the like pre-incarnate logos, right? The logos as the wisdom, you know, of the divine existing in the divine realm outside time ineffable. But the incarnation created this possibility.
of
perceiving, right? The inextricable union, the hypostatic union between divine and created, right? Which is Christ, which is the incarnation. And so that happens anytime there is a moment of articulation, right? That happens and it is both
perceiver and perceived. It's that moment of the chiasm where the two touch and we participate in that moment.
Tiffany Beechy (30:48.834)
Did that make any sort of sense? Yeah.
PJ Wehry (30:48.846)
Because it's an act. Yeah, it cuts. It's an act, not a thing. So it's, it's in the, in the moment. What, when Deleuze says Baroque, what does he mean by Baroque?
Tiffany Beechy (31:02.283)
He identifies this kind of fractal complexity, this kind of infinite capacity for...
for folding and folding and folding, right? That creates an infinitely dense texture.
PJ Wehry (31:23.53)
So is it in reference to kind of like Baroque style in the way that it is super intricate?
Tiffany Beechy (31:28.588)
Yeah, I mean, on one level, yes, but he of course, like takes it to a mathematical level because his, his basis is liveness and calculus, you know, so there's a kind of like abstract and mathematical aspect to it as well.
PJ Wehry (31:31.597)
Okay.
PJ Wehry (31:46.778)
I've just never heard of Baroque inside a mathematical side of that. So I was trying to find the connection there. I understand in terms of complexity and design. is that in the right? Okay.
Tiffany Beechy (31:52.267)
Yeah, yeah.
Tiffany Beechy (31:57.358)
No, absolutely. And I mean, I'm like kind of freakish in drawing, you know, Deleuze's Baroque aesthetics together, you know, with early medieval concepts of the phenomenology of the incarnation. But again, it was simply a mercenary act. it was useful to me in thinking about how can
PJ Wehry (32:09.814)
Hahaha!
Tiffany Beechy (32:24.064)
you know, this abstraction of the incarnate surface, the manifestation of a visible, you know, divinity. How does it act in the world? And what is the sort of theology? What's the physics and metaphysics of our interface, you know, with it? And so it was just useful in articulating and charting that territory for me.
PJ Wehry (32:51.77)
Sorry, and I was trying to pay attention. I got really caught up in you saying a mercenary act. then I had like, I had images of you like accidentally like using a letter opener and like slicing your finger and looking at your class and being like, I ain't got time to bleed. You know, that's, me. So, but yeah, I take your point. I think I understand.
Tiffany Beechy (33:02.062)
you
Tiffany Beechy (33:10.293)
You
PJ Wehry (33:19.514)
One, it does make a lot of sense, right? I do think...
PJ Wehry (33:27.374)
Hmm. I, without trying to just throw a massive curve ball at you, cause I've read John of Damascus, defense of the divine images. And I know that from what I understand, but I've read, I have not read in depth and I'm sure I've read some horrible oversimplifications of Celtic Christianity. Right. So now I'm like, I'm talking to an expert. Probably don't just want to assume things, but, that.
Tiffany Beechy (33:37.198)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (33:58.116)
Greek was what was spoken in Ireland in terms of how they received theology? Or is that later on?
Tiffany Beechy (34:10.544)
PJ Wehry (34:12.474)
Let me act like before we get into that question. I was like, what is there? Is it, was it parallel thinking with John of Damascus and the way that he was defending incarnation? Or is it more like kind of, was there any crossover? Because that's about 500s, right? When he's writing.
Tiffany Beechy (34:30.636)
Okay. So.
PJ Wehry (34:32.665)
It's okay if you don't want to answer that question. That might be like that. That might be a terrible question. That's totally fair.
Tiffany Beechy (34:36.91)
No, it's just that it's very difficult to navigate the theological treatises of this time. And actually, I am not an expert in early Celtic Christianity. And I'm not an expert in Celtic. I'm a, and this is part of what makes me sort of like ruthless and I mean,
Tiffany Beechy (35:04.034)
I could accuse myself of dilettantism in multiple ways because of my interdisciplinarity, right? And my willingness to just say, well, this is the really complex landscape here. I happen to be a specialist in old English and poetics and linguistics. And yet, because of the nature of the question I've set for myself, I have to draw on these other disciplines. So I am not properly qualified.
to fully expound upon Irish theology in the sixth century. What I will say is that there is a link that has been sometimes underappreciated between Eastern thought and the Byzantine thought and not just Ireland, but especially Ireland.
And again, this has to do with these controversies between Roman Christianity and Celtic Christianity in Britain. there, know, some of the sources deliberately obscure the lineages of thought that were operative at the time. What's been important though for me in at least the argument I make in the book is that the so-called iconoclastic controversies that raged
on the continent, right? And we're so important in people then staking out this territory, vis-a-vis images. And by images, you can talk about actual literal, like visual images, but it also then, you know, concerns representation itself of many kinds, right? Those controversies that so raged, they don't have purchase.
PJ Wehry (36:35.087)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (36:49.859)
Yes.
Tiffany Beechy (37:01.78)
in Britain in the sort of complex mix that I call insular in the materials that I look at. So, and this is something that it's not just me, you know, arguing this.
Tiffany Beechy (37:17.378)
There's a book on art and incarnation that was done before me that, you know, found that there was just no problem with material representation, with representation itself, vis-a-vis the incarnation and the divine in among the especially English speaking groups in Britain. So the, what used to be called Anglo-Saxon church, there wasn't that anxiety.
in terms of representation. The one figure who really gets concerned about the sort of native materiality as I've identified it, right? And so this is the core that there's a kind of materialist ontology in among the English. And of course, they draw some of their theology from the Irish, but especially among English, the English speakers, these Germanic peoples.
There's a thorough going materialist ontology by which that which we see is what is real. And so the one figure in this cultural mix who really does become really concerned about it is Alfred. He is a highly, highly learned, highly orthodox thinker in the late 10th and early 11th century. He's an explicit reformer and he
he deplores, you know, a lot of the apocryphal writing and thinking that he finds among his countrymen. And so he has what Leslie Lockett has called a sort of war against his native materiality. He just mounts a campaign, you know, to sort of assert transcendence as the thing that matters. And so that is the this is a long way of just asserting that what I, you know,
What I map out in terms of the question of iconoclasm and its relationship to the controversies on the continent is that in this bubble of time in Britain, by and large outside of a thinker like Alfred, it didn't matter. And there's a kind of hardcore iconophilia at work in the devotional practices and the relationship to representation.
Tiffany Beechy (39:41.034)
and that it had, it shows an implicit way of relating to the incarnation. And it has these principles of superfability, for instance, that the incarnate divine can be made visible, it has a particular relationship to words, words can permute and express the divine in these increasingly complex ways, in ways related to poetic obscurantism, that paradoxically then in their very obscurantism,
they manifest the mystery of the divine word. And that all of that just becomes not possible under the standardizing auspices of continental orthodoxy as it eventually coalesces. And so what you could see and what I state sort of early on in the book is that what starts at least among
Germanic speaking peoples, you know, as this expansive view of the incarnate divine in the world, you know, the possibilities for it, it shrinks into that disc of the Eucharist under the pressure of orthodoxy and the sort of consolidation of power, you could call it, in the Carolingian Empire.
PJ Wehry (41:02.5)
Thank you. I knew that was kind of a wild question, so I appreciate your graciousness with it. And I think the answer then is, if I'm reading John of Damascus, who is emphasizing Christ's incarnation as like valuable and in defense of art and in defense of images,
Tiffany Beechy (41:18.561)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (41:22.872)
You could probably draw, like they're drawing from certain streams, probably for Irish theology, because like they would have shared, like Patrick would have been coming from there. But the real answer is John Damascus isn't writing for, obviously he's not writing for Ireland, but like he's writing in the middle of the iconoclast controversies that aren't happening in England. So the answer, like the fact that you even have to have a defense of divine images is,
You know, it, that's, it's not even a thing that's, it's a, which is, it was so fundamental, right? Like, I mean, that's, that's a lot of the Greek Orthodox Roman Catholic split is over, not entirely, but a little bit. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.
Tiffany Beechy (41:57.496)
And that's, think.
Tiffany Beechy (42:03.564)
Yes. And it has to do also with eventually with Muslim conquest, right? So when you have this ideology that is so against images, then you have this pressure for Christianity to defend itself, right? It's really interesting to start seeing these fights as occurring in this
larger dynamic of theological conflict. so, you know, the Byzantine Empire, you know, is is right up against that pressure, and then is engaged in relating as well to the Western Church. So it's sort of caught between these two and the controversies arise from those sets of pressures. And so
in the North Sea in these islands where a native materiality was kind of raining. You you just don't have that pressure. You can see it in sort of physical terms like that. Is there that pressure or isn't there? I just, people again have so mapped the intellectual world of the continent and of the classical world onto what, onto the culture of Britain that we haven't really
seen what's there for its own dynamics.
PJ Wehry (43:41.018)
So one, you've been very gracious. Thank you. Similar, well, not a similar question. Moving in a slightly different direction in your book, we've talked about fold. What role does opacity play in the wisdom tradition? And what is the wisdom tradition? What does that mean in this insular context?
Tiffany Beechy (44:01.41)
Mm hmm. So I mean, the wisdom texts are some of the least well studied because they're so strange. insular, they were sort of created often for and among this in crowd, you know, of literati, both among Irish scholars and then among English speaking scholars and at the time.
But they range from things like the works of this Irish scholar called Virgilius Morrow Grammaticus, who wrote these treatises on grammar. But it's not real grammar. It's like fake Latin grammar. According to him, there are 12 Latins and all these made up words that he brings in from various languages. And Vivian Law, a scholar more active in the
late 20th century found that sort of the core mode of Virgilius and its underlying ethos was multiplicity, that there are multiple paths to a divine truth. But she was working really hard to find that kind of method in the madness, And Michael Heron has talked about this sort of convoluted, hysteric Latin tradition as the history of the scholarship of it.
as fluctuating between, what does he say? Madness and despair, something like that. Like the history of scholarship on those works. So things like Virgilius, things like this set of dialogues that I studied extensively called the dialogues of Solomon and Saturn. There are these poems in Old English that like staged these battles between the Paternoster and the devil, for instance, and the individual letters of the Paternoster, like,
whoop up on the devil, you know, in these really interesting ways. And it seems really crazy until you understand that the individual letters of the Paternoster are actually little incarnational particles. They're sacramental because the Paternoster is the prayer that Christ in an embodied form spoke on the Sermon on the Mount, right? The Our Father, it's the words of the Word.
Tiffany Beechy (46:25.494)
And so they're permuting endlessly, they're meditating on this concept of the word that was made flesh. And so you can take these individual letters and you can like envision them as little action figures, right? Or little superheroes that can go and can battle the devil on their own. And why can they do that? Because they actually are Christ. You know, and there are these various ways that poetically in those dialogues, it
the equation is made between the prayer and Christ himself. Sorry, go ahead.
PJ Wehry (46:57.464)
at the
PJ Wehry (47:01.018)
No, the word of God is alive and powerful, right? Kind of that. Yeah, yeah. mean, which in it's so interesting to see the different ways that scripture, you know, just by focusing on specific passages, like you get different, whereas in like the the kind of Latin tradition and certain Greek traditions, you see more that emphasis on like, like, it's it's divisive, you know, or it's discerning and it cuts.
Tiffany Beechy (47:04.938)
Absolutely, yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (47:29.56)
And then you see other ones where it's like alive and material and both of those are there in the Bible, but then like that they're using, right? But it's showing up very differently. That's it's fascinating. Sorry, I just wanted like, yeah.
Tiffany Beechy (47:43.597)
Yeah.
No, absolutely. then, and then the last text I treat a lot, you know, in talking about the wisdom tradition is the Old English Riddles. Well, actually, I don't talk about the Old English Riddles as much in that chapter. talk about an Englishman's Latin riddles that then inspire the Old English Riddles. I'll tell him he has these riddles called the Enigmata, and it's actually a series of a hundred enigmas that particularize
aspects of the creation. So each one is a different sort of like natural thing in the manifest world of reality that is sort of defamiliarized. So the title is the object. And then the riddle itself is this like wacky way of seeing it. It's rendering obscure what we thought we knew. And then by the end, the last riddle is creatura, creation itself. So it's like all those hundred riddles or all those 99 went
and are embodied in that last one. And then the last line of it is say what my name is or what name do I make? And it's obvious because the title was Creatura, but I think it's actually gesturing towards the word, right? That what name do I make? I think it's the divine name, ultimately. So the wisdom tradition texts are these texts that meditate on language and its relationship to the word itself.
right? And it's divinity, essentially. And they're wild and really interesting and hard to treat in sort of Orthodox ways, both Orthodox in terms of in Christian terms, and in terms of scholarship. And they have this like interesting literary debt, I think, to the older Irish tradition that even predates Irish Christianity, which is what John Kerry has called mantic obscurantism. So
Tiffany Beechy (49:42.496)
even pre-Christian druidic culture had this very, very active sort of poet-priest aspect to it, whereby ever more elaborate obscurations in language, I'm finally answering your question, actually, ever more elaborate ways of scrambling reality in language that is dense and opaque.
PJ Wehry (50:01.761)
great
Tiffany Beechy (50:12.054)
paradoxically, reveal the nature of the divine mystery of reality, right? So when you are most confused, you know, when reality is the densest in its representation and language, that's when you're actually seeing something about God. And that is something that
You know, again, I said it was a sort of pre-Christian thing, a mantic obscurantism, but it makes its way into the Christian tradition. And it makes its way, I argue, into the work of foundational figures like Aldhelm and, you know, eventually into the Old English Riddles of the Exeter book as well.
PJ Wehry (50:55.866)
Uh, Dr. Beachy, it's been absolutely awesome to have you on today. Uh, I want to be respectful of your time. So if I could ask you one more question besides reading your excellent book, what, well, my, yes, I, I'm happy to say that, um, though I full disclosure, my day job is, uh, is digital marketing. So, uh, maybe like, you know, that's.
Tiffany Beechy (51:09.998)
Thanks for calling it excellent. Appreciate that.
PJ Wehry (51:25.454)
think your book is excellent though. The besides reading your excellent book.
What is something that you would tell someone who's listened this whole podcast to either do or think over the next week after having listened to this was something they should kind of meditate on or something that they should go and do.
Tiffany Beechy (52:00.46)
The first thing I would say.
acknowledging I have no authority to tell people what to do with their time would be to put down their device and just go select a book and open it and just spend time with it. And even if it's unfamiliar to them or seemingly beyond their level to have some faith that as
a thinking, perceiving person, they can meet it where they are, and that it will be of value to them because they will be bringing the contents of their own mind and experience to bear in that sort of sacred space of with its own temporality, that is reading physical books.
And also secondly, I would say, and this I think does draw a little bit on some of the commitments of the book and of the material that the book is concerned with. I would say to be open to the liveliness that is out in the world of their experience that
PJ Wehry (53:26.596)
Hmm.
Tiffany Beechy (53:33.824)
we have a way of putting our minds into conceptual tracks as we go through the day. pausing that process and allowing ourselves to be surprised is a kind of magical way of existing in the world.
PJ Wehry (53:58.306)
Appreciate the opacity. Yeah. Yeah. A beautiful answer. Thank you, Dr. Beachy. It's been a tremendous pleasure having you on today.