At Sea

Many advocates of climate justice, Christian and otherwise, have looked to the Middle Ages to figure out what went wrong and how to set things right.

On the one hand, the medieval period is famous for its epic hierarchies, especially the “great chain of being” that divided divine from human and human from animal. Since the early environmental movement of the 1960s, scholars and activists have blamed Christian inaction on this theological legacy.

On the other hand, the Middle Ages have been seen by some as a resource for challenging contemporary hierarchies of industrialization and exploitation. In place of the modern, disenchanted, Protestant attitude toward creation, this story goes, medieval thought offers a sacramental view of the material world.

Or, in another common story, the Middle Ages (especially in the British Isles) are seen as a kind of escape hatch from Christianity’s toxic hierarchies—a land of thin places and enchanted wells, still in touch with a nature-loving pre-Christian past. Either way, the implication is that medieval “resources” can help us see beyond today’s confusions and deceits.

One example of this kind of resource is the tenth-century Old English poem The Seafarer. Found in the Exeter Book alongside a host of other poems and riddles, it is one of a handful of Old English elegies—moody poems about loss, loneliness, and the ravages of time. 

In the first half of the poem, an exiled mariner sails across an icy sea, braving the brutal wind, waves, and hail alone. At first, he can hear nothing but “the roaring sea / [and] the ice-cold wave.” Then, when birds start to call, they remind him of the human company he’s lacking (he enjoys the “singing seagull instead of mead”) while also blending in with the noisy weather (the “icy-feathered tern / answer[s]” the sound of the storm). But rather than closing him off, this cold cacophony “urge[s] [his mind] on a journey”—it opens him up to the world around him.

This blurring of distinctions is intensified in the poem’s most famous passage, where the mariner seems to become something like a bird himself. His mind flies “over the domain of the whale,” returns “ravenous and greedy,” and cries out across the empty sea. No longer a beleaguered observer, the mariner blends into his surroundings; like the birds, he’s become part of the sea.

Traditionally, this part of the poem is read allegorically, with the sea’s harsh elements standing in for the trials of Christian life. By learning to cope with this cold, windy world, we are prepared for a warm, cozy home in heaven, where our clothes will be dried, our ships repaired, and all distinctions restored.

More recently, though, ecocritics have downplayed this soteriological interpretation and focused instead on the literal interactions between humans and non-humans in the poem. For Courtney Catherine Barajas, for example, The Seafarer encourages “linguistic and emotional identification with the other-than-human.” Eileen A. Joy takes this further, suggesting that the poem depicts humans and other creatures “being blue together”—that is, sharing a sense of “feeling weighted down” in a kind of interspecies “sad solidarity.” 

The blending of human and non-human feeling in the poem, therefore, is not something to overcome, but something to welcome. It is in feeling one with the world around us that we become vulnerable to its pain and sorrow. By showing us at sea, the poem challenges the ways we separate, protect, and excuse ourselves from the life of creation today. From there, the ethical and political possibilities abound.

But there’s still half a poem left!

For the remaining sixty lines, the poet abandons the maritime scene and turns to theological reflection about transcending the mortal world. The pivot comes when the narrator says, “And so for me hotter / are the joys of the Lord than this dead life, / fleeting on land.” Instead of the songs of birds and the crashing of waves, we start to hear the uniquely human sounds of spoken words, verbal pledges, and pious sermons. In the poem’s final note of hope, the current world is something to leave behind in pursuit of heaven: “Let us think where we have our home / … [and] strive that we may proceed there.” We’re souls, gosh darn it, not birds.

Some ecocritics ignore this passage, while others try to read it as a fulfillment of the poem’s ecological vision. I think both approaches are too optimistic. We have to recognize two conflicting visions within the poem: one seeking solidarity with creation, the other rejecting it. As soon as the first half plunges us into nature’s noisy vulnerability, the second half asserts a theology in which the non-human world falls silent and human hope is found only in heaven.

Why this drastic turn? It’s impossible to know the answer on a historical level, of course—maybe another poet took over halfway through, maybe a later pious reader decided to change the ending, maybe the poet drank too much salt water and disavowed the sea forever after vomiting it back up.

But in the poem as we have it today, I think the first half’s possibilities have to be abandoned because they directly threaten the orthodoxies expressed in the second half. The first half challenges human autonomy, immortality, rationality, and individuality—all of which are demanded by the second half’s theology of salvation. To restabilize the official view of what it means to be human and Christian, the poem has to silence creation’s chaos.

This conflict within The Seafarer doesn’t mean that we can’t read the poem as a text of hope and ecological possibility. But it does mean that, even a millennium ago, those possibilities provoked struggle and suppression. Within the Christian tradition, solidarity with creation has always cost something, and sometimes that cost has been orthodoxy.

When we look to the past to figure out how to live today, we shouldn’t expect to find clear answers. There’s no great historical list of dos and don’ts. There are only complex records of complex negotiations with complex values, and we have to make equally complex choices about what to be faithful to and how. 

As theologian Marika Rose puts it, we’re always “being faithful to some aspects [of the Christian tradition] and betraying other aspects.” Studying the past doesn’t tell us which aspects to choose, but it does connect us to others who have faced the same difficult choices. The past, in other words, is a better tool for solidarity than orthodoxy.

Note: Quotations from The Seafarer are from Robert Bjork’s translation in Old English Shorter Poems: Volume II: Wisdom and Lyric (Harvard University Press, 2014).